I'm leaving my position as IE platform Group Program Manager…

  • Article

…HA!  Gotcha!

I’ve been juggling multiple roles on the IE team for a while.  With the release of IE7, I decided (with my management’s support, of course) to focus my energy on the design of the IE web developer platform as the lead platform architect, rather than managing the platform program management team as group program manager.  This means I won’t have anyone reporting to me, but will oversee the design of the entire IE platform from the perspective of web developers.

Obviously (since I chose it) I’m excited by this opportunity; I’ll have more time to focus on the big picture of our platform and how the pieces fit together.  I’m going to be sad not to manage people for a while, since I really enjoy helping my teammates develop their careers (though of course I will continue to do this through mentoring).  However, I’m very pleased that my cohort Doug Stamper will be taking over the management of the core of the IE platform program management.  Doug and I have worked together for a couple of years now, and there’s no one I could be more comfortable working with or to whom I would be more confident handing over my people management responsibilities.

Note that this is a bit different job than the usual Microsoft “Software Architect” position – I'm focusing on designing the platform that web devs use on IE, not designing our own codebase.  I will remain in the Program Management team, and though I expect I’ll be poking my nose in the code more often to understand some things better, I won’t be directly responsible for coding duties – we have a couple of great Software Architects and a great dev team who are much better at that than I am.  I’m still working out exactly what this position will mean, of course.  (For the curious, this isn't a promotion or a demotion - in fact, I don't know (or much care) if my official title will change or not, either.)

So rest assured – this doesn’t mean you’ll see less of me, or that I will have less of an effect on the IE team as a whole – likely quite the opposite.  I will continue to speak publicly, and hopefully will get to blog more often, etc.

-Chris

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2006
    "I won’t have anyone reporting to me" This is a very understandable response to being dunked in the fountain by your current reports:-)

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2006
    Oh, I imagine I'm going in the fountain next time too.  In fact, given the lack of managerial threats to hold over people, I expect I'm going in multiple times.  :)

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 25, 2006
    That's actually spot-on, yes.

  • Anonymous
    October 25, 2006
    So, will you be able to share anything about what the FF team hinted at - moving the JScript under the .net runtime engine? Also, how about using all or part of WPF as the rendering and layout manager to replace Trident.   Do you think ie has gotten to the stage where the code base has an agility problem?  Especially if you need to retain backward compatibility with multiple versions.

  • Anonymous
    October 26, 2006
    Instead of spending tons of time and energy bringing the rendering engine up to standards, would it be an option to embed a 3rd party engine such as gecko or opera and base IE-next on that?

  • Anonymous
    October 26, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 28, 2006
    While the Microsoft-sanctioned name of the next version of Internet Explorer (IE) is IE "Next", it seems it will likely be christened IE 8.0. That's according to Chris Wilson, the new platform architect for IE. (IE-team veteran Wilson, until a few days

  • Anonymous
    November 01, 2006
    I tried to email you a couple times (I even used the email form on this site), but it gets rejected every time. Any ideas? Here's what I get when I try...

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification. Delivery to the following recipients failed. ******@microsoft.com

  • Anonymous
    November 02, 2006
    Saw your correction on Chris Messina's blog. Curious if MS has any involvment in the Semantic Web Initiative.

  • Anonymous
    November 02, 2006
    Cwilso@microsoft.com is my email address.

  • Anonymous
    January 06, 2007
    What is a person supposed to do about existing applications that break when IE 7 is installed? Please read http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/mwherman2000/archive/2007/01/06/183736.aspx Not impressed ...tabs is not a good trade-off for broken backward compatbility

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2007
    I have the same question as Ed, what would be MS' stance re: moving off of the current IE rendering engine and on to something like Gecko?

  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2007
    Hi! Very nice content. Interesting how can you do all that? I'm trying to build my site, but have no success for now((.

  • Anonymous
    May 09, 2007
    I'm starting with my own site too. Great content. Thank You.

  • Anonymous
    January 10, 2008
    I tried to email you a couple times (I even used the email form on this site), but it gets rejected every time. Any ideas?

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2008
    I have the same question as Ed and Bill, what would be MS' stance re: moving off of the current IE rendering engine and on to something like Gecko?

  • Anonymous
    January 20, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    May 16, 2009
    I have the same question as Ed, what would be MS' stance re: moving off of the current IE rendering engine and on to something like Gecko?