Germany won the World Cup, Götze’s extra-time volley an actual work of art, and the German engineer wore the jersey to the new jersey office for a week straight. Month-long global fever: broken. I now permanently care about soccer. Add it to the pile.
Heavier news: Microsoft announced 18,000 layoffs, the biggest in its history, mostly from the Nokia deal. Eighteen thousand. My delivery unit is thirty people. Somewhere in that number are thousands of engineers who did nothing wrong except work for a strategy that changed. Filing this under “loyalty is a two-way contract with asymmetric terms,” the darkest entry in the Proverbs file so far.
Silicon Valley palate cleanser: an app called Yo, which literally just sends the word “Yo,” raised a million dollars. A million dollars. It has one button. I’ve written more complex code for our 404 page. VCs contain multitudes.
TIL: blameless applies to layoffs too. The senior folks say don’t judge engineers by their company’s stock price. The market is not a code review.