Lessons Learned

[Christopher Blizzard]

On Wed, 2007-03-21 at 09:13 -0500, Mike McGrath wrote:
> > Sometimes the paid Doers have to accomplish things that are Boring But 
> > Must Be Done -- and the great advantage of unpaid Doers is that they 
> > can frequently focus on the interesting/innovative work, because a 
> > manager isn't breathing down their neck.
> That is true, though I think I lost a lot of street cred when I got 
> hired.  Even those in the know I think don't totally trust RH's actions 
> but I'm not quite sure why.

http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/01/21/red-hats-mindshare-and-my-summer-internship/

Note about the conflict of interest.

And on that note, Miguel made this really interesting point once about
the Mono project.  He said that Novell paid people to work on all the
really boring stuff because then the community could be build around
building all the interesting stuff.  Not sure if he was kidding or not,
but it was an interesting idea.

But in Mike's case I think it was "Mike's doing great work.  I'll bet if
we hire him he will do even more great work because then he doesn't have
any distractions."  I think it's as simple as that.  A chance to do more
of what you were doing before.

--Chris