There’s No Free Lunch
In light of Hammet’s recent resignation from the MEF team, I decided to finish up this post discussing other self-indulgent monologues that have been floating through the net. There was a recent post (well not so recent anymore, I first started writing this a few months ago) where someone decided to publicly reject his MVP award. I think he’s gotten enough traffic from the fact that he was linked from a popular newsletter so I’m not going to add to it here. Let’s put aside the fact that he could have told his lead during his review period that he wasn’t interested in renewing. What I have issues with is his overgeneralization of the program and it’s participants. Let’s look at some of the fallacies in his self-indulgent gibberish.
I’m No Expert, So MVPs Aren’t Experts
Expertise is a relative term. Case in point when I was invited to become moderator on the MSDN Forums, I didn’t feel at the time that I had contributed significantly. I was told by the Program Manager that fewer than 2% of the visitors answer more than two questions that are accepted (I had about 20 within a month). The MVP program has around 4000 awardees worldwide. Their criteria in selection is like KFC’s secret formula, but I’m pretty sure somewhere in there is “shows deeper knowledge than the average user of the product.”
Also the award is given strictly for your community participation during the year leading up to your award. It doesn’t say anything about what you do after receiving it. Strictly speaking the MVP program recognizes people who are enthusiastic about Microsoft products and voluntarily share their enthusiasm with the community. That’s all there is to the program. On average, an MVP will be a good person to ask for a quick “how do I…” question in their field of Technical Expertise (what they were given the award for). Because it’s likely they have come across the answer.
Also, different teams have different criteria for acceptance. I had written a lot of blog posts; was a moderator in the forums, answering a good number of questions; and spoke at several user groups and regional conferences for two and a half years before I was given an MVP award. So while YOU may not consider yourself an expert, don’t imply that your own incompetence applies to the rest.
The Product Teams/Microsoft Don’t Listen
First of all, from what I read, this guy was an MVP in Developer Security. As I understand it, there is no product team attached to that specific expertise (I could be mistaken). Most MVP areas are attached to a product team (for instance my award is in Client App Development which is attached to the WPF team). Through the program there are opportunities to engage with the team (in addition by the time I was awarded, I had already been engaging team members) both at the MVP summit and through occasional teleconferences. They listen…they may not move as fast as you want them to but they listen.
It’s funny that he brought up the EF vote of no confidence. The V1 of EF was not equal to NHibernate. Of course NHibernate has been in development since 2003 and started as a port of Java Hibernate which had been around for a few years itself. So expecting a V1 to be on par with an 8 year old product is a bit over the top. The team focused on features that would cover 80% of the usage scenarios. Those scenarios were enabled by a convenience layer (the EDM Designer, the ObjectContext Generator are not the Framework itself). Looking at the core framework, it was apparent that a future release could provide a convenience layer to enable the scenarios they were clamoring for (pure POCO entities). The next release, took a step closer to that goal and 4.1 supports it fully. Now it’s up to NH to catch up with EF in terms of LINQ support.
What people seem to forget is that Microsoft is a product company and they need to support a wide array of developers. Like it or not, for better or worse, the majority of .NET developers are not immersed in the world of advance patterns, TDD, SoC, etc. The majority have a database and want to quickly have a working application that uses it. What they also forget is that even though it SEEMS Microsoft has unlimited resources. They really don’t. Even if they did, we all know how the mythical man month works by now. No matter how much money is thrown at a project, only so much can get delivered within a given time frame. The team had to prioritize which features had to be in V1 and which could wait until a later delivery. It’s not a matter of not listening. It’s a matter of how much can be done in a given amount of time.
I’ve had experiences where I felt the team has listened to my feedback…I’ve also had experiences where I felt that because of my expertise, my feedback was marked as outside of the target zone. It was only after pushing back that no, this isn’t just for me this is my customer who is very much in your target zone speaking, did I get my opinion listened to. The FixWPF.com website is similar to the EFVoNC except it’s less political posturing and more of a request to address known issues within the framework.
Of particular note is his comment about the response to telling his lead that he didn’t want the award anymore:
The most surprising thing to me was when I told my MVP lead that I was not interested in participating in the program. The response was: “No problem. Thanks for letting me know Dave. Good luck in the future”. I expected maybe a bit more of a “Why?” response but I am not surprised that MS does not care about what other people think. Maybe, because I have become harder on MS that they are happy to be rid of me. Who knows.
Seriously, what did he expect them to do crawl on their knees begging him to stay? Again, he could have let them know BEFORE he was awarded so that his seat could be given to someone who deserved it.
Beside the Free MSDN Subscription, There’s No Value
I’ve got to give a full quote here because I can’t believe I saw this in writing:
Unfortunately it costs a lot of time and money to contribute to the community. If I give a talk I have spent 40 to 200 hours preparing (yes 200 hours on a 1 hour talk) plus the costs to travel to another city, food, and accommodation. MS’s reward is a MSDN subscription and half of a hotel room if I attend the summit (there used to be more benefits but they have been rolled back to save costs). It would probably be more affordable for me to purchase an MSDN subscription on my own and stop speaking entirely. I have gained no additional work from the MVP program, no additional speaking gigs, and have not made relatively few connections to others because of the MVP program.
There are a number of benefits outside of the MSDN Subscription that come with the MVP Award. No one is going to come pounding on your door to make you take advantage of them. I don’t want to go into too much detail here but suffice it to say that as much value as I receive from the MSDN Subscription (and believe me I wouldn’t give that up for the world), I wouldn’t even put it as the 5th most valuable benefit I get from the program. If the Subscription is the most valuable benefit you receive from the MVP program, you’re doing it wrong.
Also spending 200 hours prepping a talk for a presentation is sad. I think I would quit speaking too if it took me that long. The fact that he says spending that time and effort just for an MVP award isn’t worth it is sadder. While it’s nice to get the recognition, the award is not why I do what I do. And I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I’ve gained additional work through the program and connections made there, I’ve been invited to submit to more conferences (and not just the open call for Mix), and I’ve networked my butt off with the program. How could you go to the summit and NOT make new connections unless you’re a social leper?
Fin
It seems to me this is just a pure misunderstanding of what the award entails. Dave obviously felt that the award would come with keys to the kingdom and his word should be the rule of the land. The reality is that the door has been slightly opened for you, it’s up to you to barge in and take advantage of the opportunities.