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> No rational company is going to create useless projects just to retain expensive engineers. What's the point in retaining engineers if you're just going to pa

> No rational company is going to create useless projects just to retain expensive engineers. What's the point in retaining engineers if you're just going to pay them to work on something without expected ROI? (Short) story time! Windows on ARM was a solo pet project of a high level engineer at Microsoft! There are some engineers who are so valuable that letting them spend non-trivial amounts of time on whatever they want is a very good use of company resources. Sometimes just not letting the competition have them is valuable! I've worked with a few 10x-20x engineers, if someone is that productive, they can spend 2 years off on another non-ROI project, come back, and spend 2 years on a project with ROI, and the company still comes out ahead. Most company's aren't smart enough to figure this out, then again determining who these people are is also a problem. That latter part is funny (ironic?), because on the ground floor everyone who encounters a world class engineer is pretty darn sure of it.

gman83 6y ago
I don't think it's fair to call Windows on ARM an "engineer retention project". They actually released Windows RT and tried very hard to make it work. They still have it going with the Surface Pro X, and they just announced an emulation layer to get x64 applications working on ARM, which if it works well would solve RT's biggest problem, a lack of legacy applications: https://www.neowin.net/news/it039s-official-x64-emulation-is-coming-to-windows-on-arm https://www.neowin.net/news/it039s-official-x64-emulation-is...
- anp 6y ago
  My possibly incorrect read of GP is that it started as effectively a retention project until someone realized they really wanted it.
  - com2kid 6y ago
    That is correct. It was a one man show for a long time (I don't think it was his only job, just a side project), then when tablets happened a full team was ramped up behind it.

gman83 6y ago

I don't think it's fair to call Windows on ARM an "engineer retention project". They actually released Windows RT and tried very hard to make it work. They still have it going with the Surface Pro X, and they just announced an emulation layer to get x64 applications working on ARM, which if it works well would solve RT's biggest problem, a lack of legacy applications: https://www.neowin.net/news/it039s-official-x64-emulation-is-coming-to-windows-on-arm https://www.neowin.net/news/it039s-official-x64-emulation-is...

anp 6y ago
My possibly incorrect read of GP is that it started as effectively a retention project until someone realized they really wanted it.
- com2kid 6y ago
  That is correct. It was a one man show for a long time (I don't think it was his only job, just a side project), then when tablets happened a full team was ramped up behind it.