After my conversations with Marty Fouts it was pretty clear that he was not at all happy at PalmSource. There can be a lot of reasons for a software engineer to be unhappy in a job, many of which are not the fault of the company (even if the engineer thinks they are). But on a hunch I went out today to look at the job openings at PalmSource. There are a lot of them right now: 28, including several senior and lead developer positions.
There are a few ways you could interpret this. One seemingly obvious one is that PalmSource is working against a tough deadline to deliver Palm OS for Linux in the next several months and wants to make sure they've got the bandwidth to do it. There are some places where the intuitive myth that you can increase the velocity of a software project by throwing more developers on the team persists, but it's a little hard for me to believe that this fallacy is hanging on in the heart of Silicon Valley where there has been so much evidence to the contrary. Fred Brooks exploded this myth 20 years ago in one of the most enduring classics of software development literature, The Mythical Man-Month.
Another possibility is that there have been mass firings, but I think that's very unlikely for similar reasons. Replacing a large number of team members on a project as complex as building a modern operating system is a bad idea under normal circumstances, monumentally stupid when there is as much at stake as there is now for PalmSource. It's a good way to put a project way off schedule. Something tells me that the engineering managers at PalmSource are not this stupid.
Which brings me back to Marty Fouts. If his resignation from PalmSource last month is any indication, what we have are large numbers of Palm OS engineers quitting the program in Sunnyvale. Why that would be is difficult to say, but it's an ominous sign. I for one welcome our new ACCESS overlords who seem to be pretty good at retaining talent and getting a steady stream of great software out the door. Hopefully, they will soon take the reins, whip things into shape and make PalmSource a great place to be a software engineer again.
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