Brent Simmons: My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers:

Before I went to work for Audible (five years ago now — time flies!) I had a bias about engineers that worked for large corporations. I assumed that they weren’t as good as indies and engineers at small companies, or else they’d actually be indies or work at small shops like Omni.

…

And so I learned very quickly when I started at Audible that I was very wrong. I was impressed, and grew more impressed as time went on, by my fellow engineers’ rigor, talent, professionalism, care, and, especially, ability to work with other people toward common goals.

Not long after Brent joined Audible, I clearly remember him telling me that there were really smart people there who were amazing coders. And he was completely shocked by this. The look on Brent's face was just pure amazement, and he was so happy about it!

I laughed and laughed at him. Of course there's talented people there! Only crazy people are willing to put up with having to file business taxes, mess with social security, find healthcare, deal with all the stuff you have to handle to be indie. And you don't even have to be a particularly good programmer. You just have to be persistent.

Sometimes I really miss working with other folks, so I'm especially happy for Brent that his exit to retirement was working with a great group of people, in a giant ass company. Everyone should experience that at least once.

And now Brent is retiring! I've known this for a while as well, because he's insanely excited and absolutely won't shut up about it (in a good way). I bet he's even counting down the number of meetings he has left at this point.

Pure freedom to work on what you want, for the rest of your life. And of course he's going to be coding, because Brent is a developer, and I don't think you could stop him anyway.

Congrats, Brent.