The Wall Street Journal has an interesting story today about what Steve Ballmer is willing to give to prospective employees when courting outside talent. For instance, the story says that Ballmer granted former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews, (a sales/marketing dude by background) a role in engineering to get him to agree to take on the job of a managing Microsoft's ad serving technology. Makes sense that McAndrews would need a say over engineering if he is going to be responsible for the technology. We'll have to assume that Ballmer knows what he's doing to put an ad salesperson in charge of a technology unit, though.
See also Microsoft pays $2 million to relocate a single employee
Plus, recent Microsoft Subnet posts ...
Testers try, and like, SQL Server 2008
OpenOffice.org bug targets Linux, but Macs and Windows not safe either
Visit Microsoft Subnet for more news, blogs, opinion from around the Web