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In that era we're talking about people like Hejlsberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg) -- architect
by spolsky 15y ago
In that era we're talking about people like Hejlsberg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Hejlsberg) -- architect of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C# and .NET. Almost certainly worth $1,000,000 -- I hope his signing bonus was a lot more than that. Clearly not paid to sit on his thumbs. Nothing monopolistic about paying top $ to hire people away from the competition.
- to_jon 15y agoIt's hard to understand why you're going to such lengths to defend Microsoft in this case. Hejlsberg and a few other Borlanders received justifiably high bonuses, but the absurdly rich enticements were extended much further down the line. As an ex-Borlander at the time, I heard all kinds of inside stories about the Microsoft offers. For a compiler engineer, the bonus represented a life-altering financial event that Borland didn't have the resources to match. Many never had their heart in the move to Redmond and left Microsoft after a few years. If you understood how Borland's culture of software craftsmanship compared to the churn of second-rate engineering packaged and sold by Microsoft on a regular basis, it's no surprise that the flight of talent wasn't driven by the dream of working on Microsoft products or exposure to Microsoft's business culture. On a brighter note, Borland may have lost but silicon valley ultimately won when Google's incredibly fast growth prevented Microsoft from pulling a Borland on Google's search engine team.