Will Flash devs at Yahoo become castaways?
I wasn’t a big fan of Microsoft before I worked for them as a contractor for the Xbox/Zune division. After working for them I found even more reasons to dislike them.
That’s how I feel about MS as a whole but I loved working with the team at Xbox/Zune and got to do some really cool things. But we were purposefully located off campus and so didn’t have to drink as much cool-aid.
Note: I always spit mine out when no one was looking. :-)
I was told point blank by my direct manager that I would never be a Microsoft employee as long as I was an Actionscript developer. I was given the option to migrate into User eXperience design work, like he did, and become an employee. But as long as I wrote Actionscript I would be a second class citizen at Microsoft.
If Microsoft does buy Yahoo then I wonder how all the Actionscript devs there will be treated. Certainly better than an Actionscript dev at Microsoft but how long will it be before they are getting visits from the Silverlight team?
Silverlight instructor says: Hey look, you like to write code, right? Well with Silverlight you can do the same things that you can with Flash in 10x the amount of code. That’s right. You get to write more code. Just what you’ve always wanted!
And not just Flash devs. Think about PHP. From what I understand Yahoo is PHP. They have contributed a great deal to the language over the years. Are they eventually going to migrate to .NET? I’m sure that would go over like a lead brick.
All I can say is that if I worked for Yahoo I’d be updating my resume just in case the deal goes through. Or come to the freelance world where there is more work than you can shake a stick at.
Note to Keith Peters: you were right. :-)
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Keith Peters
