Does anyone but me think it is strange that Microsoft has not named very many new distinguished engineers over the last few years? They have lost a few to retirement/leaving for other companies and a few to promotion up the leadership chain. Sometimes as a shareholder I wonder if they just do not have any top people to call distinguished engineers (I hear that internally they might be calling them "technical fellows" now). Maybe Robert Scoble is a better person to investigate this question as to why there are no replacements in the ranks??
I found the orginal press release from June of 2000 which named the following:
Dave Cutler
Mark Lucovsky — No longer at MSFT
Wael Bahaa-El-Din
Anders Hejlsberg
Antoine Leblond — Promoted to Corporate VP.
Suryanarayanan Raman — No longer at MSFT
Charles Thacker
Butler Lampson
Jim Gray
Darryl Rubin
Brad Lovering
Lou Perazzoli — No longer at MSFT
Michael Toutonghi — No longer at MSFT
Peter Spiro
Mohsen Al-Ghosein — No longer at MSFT
Charles Simonyi — No longer at MSFT
In January 2001 Amitabh Srivastava was named but he has since been promoted to a Corporate VP.
Dr. Gray Flake was hired in June of 2005 as the first to be hired from outside of the company. As far as I could tell he was the first since 2001 to be named at all.
In 2000 they had 16 distinguished engineers and in 2005 there are only 10! This seems like they are going in the wrong direction.
A digital recording of my life 