Many years back I worked full time at Microsoft on one of the many projects related to Vista (or what was then called Longhorn). Last December I was visiting friends in the Redmond area when one of the jokingly observed how the code I had written for Microsoft still hadn't seen light of day, while two and a half years later, I had moved on and completed my Masters and had started on my PhD.

This wasn't a sort of accidental slip, but I remember we were told at that time that if we had any ideas to suggest for Vista, they better be ideas that will be new and interesting 3-4 years later when the OS actually ships. This is a tall order for any sort of idea, much less for the volatile world of "software project" ideas.

While this seemed like very ironic humor at that time, over the past month or so, once in a while I thought about what that meant. After all, I had spent a year writing all that code. A very busy year at that - I had spent 15+ hours a day, I daresay, that was my average day, struggling with the turmoil of the massive engineering effort that was Vista.

I wasn't a *great* programmer by many standards, but I'd like to think that I was better than many I had encountered. 15+ hours of my time for about a year, took a lot of out of my life and it didn't seem to have amounted to anything! Sure I was being paid a handsomely, but one one like to think that one's efforts contribute to the world in some way as well. After all that year was full of deadlines and things being rushed to be completed and such. What came of all of it? If it came to nothing, what a waste of life that was...

A few weeks back, I got a call from Steve who works with Google (who has a fascinating blog btw), about coming back and working with them on some stuff. I casually asked what happened about the last thing I had worked on, when I was there last summer. I had made some extensions to the Rhino compiler, the largest part of which was adding the yield control operator to it. Steve said that they were using it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I said "What?!".

Maybe my programming has matured over the years. Maybe the ~6 hrs a day I spent in office as an intern produced production quality code. I somehow assumed that it wouldn't see any real world use. Was it really that special that it was ready for real world use? Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad code. But it was code that only written, not "baked" for years.

Maybe there was another reason. Maybe, it wasn't a property of the code at all, but of the fact that there was something radically different about the outlooks of both these companies. There are many thing one can say about this "difference in outlook", positive and negative things things about both. But a shift that causes developers to feel effective by default as opposed to feeling ineffective by default, is an empowering thought. "If I build it for you, what will become of it?"

Maybe mine was an isolated case of wasted engineering effort and this is nitpicking. If that's so, I'll be happy for it.