It&#x27;s sad that such otherwise smart people choose to stay at Microsoft. Microsoft doesn&#x27;t yet realize it, but the would really would be a better place if it were to die. They did a lot of interesting things over the years, but their view of the world is so fundamentally out of touch with what the world is today, that they can&#x27;t help but lose mindshare. They&#x27;re still quite strong, as there&#x27;s no alternative to them on the desktop (for most people), but they never quite gained dominance on the server (and continue to further fuck it up by introducing more and more bizarre licensing arrangements), their development environments and APIs look like a bad joke, and most decent engineers would rather have their balls&#x2F;ovaries removed than code for the Microsoft platform. Nearly a decade ago, when I actually did develop for Windows, I asked a fellow engineer who coded for Linux why he refused to admit how superior C# was to Java. He basically said that he is not interested in chaining himself to any given platform. In the years that followed, I saw just how right he was.<p>So my message to Joe and other solid folks like him: there are tons of opportunities outside MS campus. I know large companies tend to make you believe it&#x27;s a barren desert out there, but it&#x27;s simply not true, and it&#x27;s especially not true now, when job market is starved for good talent. Go out there, make the world a better place. Let Microsoft ride into the sunset.