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Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by brown9-2 on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @09:05AM (#703586)
This article is filled with some ... interesting statements:

Lucovsky has been an integral part of Google’s APIs, including the all-important Search APIs.

Would anyone characterize them as all-important? Also, this:

Lucovsky was also the architect of Microsoft’s Hailstorm project to port older Microsoft products into .NET. It’s a project that’s be named as a precursor to the current open web movement.

Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by aarongough on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @11:47AM (#703907)
It's possible that they were referring to the Search APIs for internal use, which I would assume could be called "all-important".
Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by adharmad on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @10:02AM (#703679)
So that's the source of all those Ballmer+chair jokes on slashdot.
Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by philwelch on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @11:57AM (#703936)
"Just tell me it’s not Google," Ballmer reportedly said according to court documents (for a case surrounding another Google ex-Microsoft hire). When Lucovsky said it was Google, Ballmer allegedly picked up a chair and threw it across the room.

What he apparently said next, will live on forever in Internet history.

"Fucking Eric Schmidt is a fucking pussy. I’m going to fucking bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to fucking kill Google."

Anyone else remember the old TNT made-for-TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley? This kind of melodrama always reminds me of it.

Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by andeka on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @07:41PM (#704848)
That movie is great. I own it and show it to friends who do not know the epic saga.
Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by edw519 on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @09:09AM (#703591)
“I wrote most of the kernel executive, kernel32, and the Windows API,..."

A quote like this gives hope to all of us.

No matter how complex or massive the software, it's surprising to find out it was written by one or two people.

I see this all the time. I once implemented an ERP package in a $100 million company. I called customer support and got one of the 2 guys who wrote the package! I couldn't believe it.

Believing that one or two people can code something large and awesome is often the first step to doing it yourself.

Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by felipe on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @10:12AM (#703699)
I don't want to minimize their achievements, but it never takes one or two people to build something that large. There is an entire organization to support their efforts -- sales, customer support, QA, etc... There is a tendency to "hero"-ize developers in big companies, but at the end of the day it is an organization-wide effort.
Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by edw519 on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @10:20AM (#703711)
I was referring to the actual programming only. Sorry if I inferred otherwise.
Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by nostrademons on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @02:10PM (#704240)
Even so, that usually applies only up to a certain point in time. Once the company is big enough, they'll hire an army of maintenance programmers to continue improving the software.

For example, Tom Proulx wrote the first version of Quicken basically singlehandedly, but it's probably a whole department inside Intuit working on it now. Paul Buchheit is normally associated with GMail, but the GMail team is huge. Linus Torvalds wrote the first version of Linux, but hundreds if not thousands of people have contributed patches.

Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by jonursenbach on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @12:05PM (#703953)
Well at least he didn't leave for Twitter like everyone else has been, I'm sure that would have caused Eric Schmidt to pull a Ballmer.
Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by balding_n_tired on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @02:39PM (#704320)
I thought Dave Cutler was the principle architect on NT?
Re:Google Loses Engineering Director Who Once Caused Steve B... by zandorg on Tuesday July 14, 2009 @02:41PM (#704324)
Chicago (Win95) came after NT.