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12:00 PM – Blaise Agüera y Arcas, now a former engineer at Microsoft has left the company to join Google for his future work. He has quite the name at Microsoft and will surely be missed. Blaise Agüera y Arcas originally joined Microsoft in 2006 when his startup company Seadragon was bought.
Blaise Agüera y Arcas helped develop several key things at Microsoft such as Bing Maps service and newly launched image-stitching Photosynth software. According to a report from New York Times, the former-Microsoft engineer will continue his career at Google and will help the search giant on machine learning. This is another area that Microsoft has been focusing heavily in recent months. Losing a key engineer at this time is unfortunate for Microsoft, however, Google can rejoice as it has won over a very important individual.
In Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s blog post, he says that “it’s painful to leave behind so many wonderful ongoing projects, and even more so to leave behind such a great team.” He continues on to say that leaving Microsoft was “the hardest decision of my life.” This isn’t a surprise seeing as he has spend quite a number of years at Microsoft. After all, if you work at a place for many year, you tend to develop a bond not only with the coworkers, but also with the company.
Employee poaching is very common amongst big companies. There have been agreements made between companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple, however at times, the agreement is broken. Perhaps this is one of those times. Nonetheless, Google has gained a key engineer that help with its future successes.
