The Day AppGet Died

I too have been in a similar situation (being interviewed at a startup and being clearly not super enthusiastic about the position being offered) but they decided to go with somebody else they gave me a courtesy call letting me know about it. I think it's the right thing to do.

The problem is people have short memories and are driven by convenience so will conveniently forget how evil a company is when they show another side. Or sometimes they can continue being evil and people still just do nothing because it's so convenient (see Amazon).

There is not enough direct experience of the evil for our monkey brains to make sense of it. If you see someone kill a baby with their own two hands you will never trade with that person again, they are dead to you full stop. If a company knowingly kills babies by proxy and extorts mothers you get mad for an afternoon then you forget. We need to evolve as a species or find some way to make it more real.

MSFT is treating open source communities and free F/OSS code contributions the way they might have treated blogging and IT forums in a prior era.

It's "developer community" and "power user" engagement. It's a hybrid product management and marketing function.

In this particular scenario, the winget product manager views the appget author as a "Windows enthusiast" of sorts, not a competitor, a peer, or a colleague. Just a "power user persona" of the Microsoft userbase.

So, when you understand this, reading the PM's email to him ahead of winget's launch makes more sense.

> We give appget a call out in our blog post too since we believe there will be space for different package managers on windows. You will see our package manager is based on GitHub too but obviously with our own implementation etc. our package manager will be open source too so obviously we would welcome any contribution from you.

Specifically: it's like getting called out explicitly by a forum mod, or being a frequent blog commenter who is mentioned by name in a blogger's main post.

It's "an honor" to have appget explicitly mentioned in an "official" Microsoft announcement. And to have your community work "inspire" so much of winget's design! So when the PM wrote the email, he probably wasn't even thinking it would feel like trolling. He was probably thinking, "isn't it cool we are doing this 'F/OSS collaboration thing' together? How 'New Microsoft' of us!"

And I can't say I blame him. Microsoft is just less smooth about their appropriation of F/OSS for marketing purposes. Other companies manage to do it without the developers noticing.

And then, I didn’t hear anything back from anyone at Microsoft for six months.

For what it's worth – and I'm not really sure whether it's helpful to say this, or whether it's even true – this situation often means "you didn't pass the interview."

The reason I mention it, is that it took an embarrassingly long time for me to understand this. Maybe it's common knowledge. But an identical situation happened to me at Magic Leap. I hesitate to mention their name, lest it sound like I'm calling them out or something, but I'm not. And in general I no longer feel negatively towards companies that end up doing that, so I don't think any particular stigma should be attached to Magic Leap for doing that.

I'm trying (and possibly failing) to share a personal experience of "I used to feel awful in situations like this; now I realize it's just business, and the decision of pass/fail has extraordinarily little to do with the skill of the programmer being interviewed, so don't take it as a sign of anything."

None of this is to undermine your overall point that it's generally not cool to ghost a candidate (to put it mildly), and that it's a doubly not-cool move to then clone the product of the candidate in question. But, it happens, and I just wanted to reassure you that yes, it does happen. It would've helped me to hear that at one point, so here it is, just in case.