Rob Conery's Blog

The Hard Thing

I’m in the middle of a 26 hour travel day, on my way to NDC 2011. On the plane to New Jersey (red eye from Hawaii) my daughter and I watched Harry Potter - The Goblet of Fire. There was a scene towards the end where Dumbledore told the students that one of their own had died - and he told them how. Defying the Ministries orders to remain quiet:

Soon we must make a choice between what is right, and what is easy

Which perfectly summed up why I jumped all over Pete Brown yesterday about the Windows 8/Silverlight craziness.

Full Disclosure

I’m not very good with “messaging” and spinning of stories. There’s an “Easy Way” feel to it - tell people what they want to hear, don’t step out of line, and everything will be fine.

It’s an issue of mine, and it stems from my time at Microsoft (and before). I get pretty riled up when I see the development community “handled” - as if we’re cattle that will get lost in the woods without barbed wire.

I think I probably overreact to this. Let’s call it a soft spot, a big ass button - whatever. Pete found himself pushing that button yesterday and some words were exchanged.

I really don’t care about Silverlight vs. HTML5/js. You put your eggs in one basket - well that’s what you get. You can’t afford to be one-dimensional as a dev. That said - you do deserve to be told *something* other than “wait and see”. 

Don’t you think?

Fixing vs. Handling

Many were quick to jump to Pete’s defense and tell me I was out of line - mostly Pete himself. “You’re shooting the messenger” and “Pete’s a great guy doing more than you know - lay off”.

I see this two ways - on the one hand I know Pete’s pretty fearless, a dad, and a genuinely nice guy. 

Or he has a crap job - depending on your point of view. He has to interface with the dev world and most of the time that’s a good thing. Writing posts, going to conferences, tutorials, etc. Sometimes the shit hits the fan, however, and you get to feel the sharp end of the job.

This is where I shrug:

You applied for it. It’s not always roses, and it’s not always easy. To borrow a quote from Super Chicken: You knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

I called Pete out because he did the easy thing. He “stayed on message” because he feared reprisal. Understandable - but it comes at the expense of the community he’s there to serve.

Which puts a pretty fine point on the issue here. Does he serve the community, or does he manage/handle them? Right now it’s the latter, and unfortunately these developers who are “being handled” have placed a bet on something Microsoft sold them and they fear it’s going away.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Nobody seems to know, except the guys that *do* know aren’t saying anything but “wait and see”.

Is that serving the community? 

What To Do?

A few have asked me:

What the hell do you expect the guy to do?

And here we have it. For me there isn’t much of a choice - in fact it’s one of the reasons I don’t wear a blue badge anymore: I’m not willing to “handle” the community. I tend to tell it straight, and that tended to get me in trouble.

Do I expect Pete to drop Microsoft secrets? No. In fact I’m fairly certain he doesn’t know the plans either (in truth I don’t think anyone knows - I think someone just decided to go off and say whatever was on the top of their head at the moment. Just my musings… who knows).

What would be nice is if Pete said something to the effect of:

I’m just as surprised as you by this. In fact I’m more than surprised - and I’ll go ahead and say it - I’m a bit frustrated. I’m doing my best to ring the bells up the leadership chain but for someone my level, that’s not exactly easy. The good thing about Microsoft is they’re willing to listen if the community and their PMs have questions. It’s why I’m here - stay tuned.

I made that up just now - off the top of my head - but it would be exactly what I would have written were I in Pete’s shoes, right now. And I would get a phone call in short order, I’m sure. And then I would forward the forum thread and say “this problem’s not mine”.

I figure I owed Pete a bit more detail on my crankiness yesterday - and this is it. I also would like the groupies out there trying to frame this as “poor Pete getting picked on” to consider that you’re choosing drama over the careers of thousands of developers.

Do the right thing. Give them something other than “wait”. You’ll sleep better.