Group Managers? I thought that was a level above.

Eric Rudder was the leader of the group that developed VFP 3.0. I don't know what his exact title was. I like it when I see him mentioned as the potential next CEO of Microsoft. If you want to play the name dropping game, I sat next to him for a day at a developer confab before VFP 3 was released. (Or even named that; it was still FoxPro 3.0). He gave the intro and then sat in the back rows with the likes of me. Mostly he played Minesweeper. Very adeptly, I must say. The only time he became animated was when Tom Rettig, rest his soul, got up on a stump after Cameron Mhyrvold's (sp.?) presentation and ranted that Microsoft was not doing a good job of marketing FoxPro. And even then Eric held it in. "Is FoxPro marketing Cameron's department?" I asked. "Nope," he said. You could tell he was irritated at the whole scene but he wasn't going to say another word. He went back to Minesweeper.


>Nope. The developers did not report to the Program Manager. They have reported to the Group Manager, at least in the VFP group. Different groups are organized differently and use the same title to mean different things. For example, Beth Massi recently joined the VB team as a Program Manager, but she doesn't write specs nor is she a project manager.
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>Ricardo was never the VFP Product Manager. He was the Group Manager, meaning had overall responsibility for VFP. The Product Manager before Ken was Robert Green.
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>Randy also reported to the Group Manager (Ricardo, YAG, etc) and not to Calvin.
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>I'm not sure what title Eric Rudder had when he was on the Fox team.
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>>Unless I am completely uninformed, which is always possible, we are talking about two entirely different positions. There were Product Managers like Ken and Ricardo who were responsible for marketing. And then there were Program Managers like Randy and Eric Rudder before him who managed the development group. Tech Leads, i.e. Calvin, report to Program Managers.
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>>If you're right that Randy reported to Calvin and not the other way around, I really did miss the boat.