I was reading an article at The Register today about more yahoo executives quitting, specifically Joshua Schachter, the founder of delicious. The article includes a note about Jeremy Zawodny, who left Yahoo recently to sign on at craigstlist:

He said in a blog post yesterday: “Over the course of about three seconds, something clicked in my little brain, and I realised that Craigslist is a pretty unique combination of things: a small company with a solid financial base, a great service that I use myself, a focused group of people who really care about doing things well, and an open source-friendly environment.”

I’ve added the emphasis there. I was talking to a friend last night about how at lot of IT people, especially ones I know, are much more connected to the technology they use and communities around them than the actual product of their companies. I think I tend to keep that to myself as I feel most of the non technical people I work with are apt to confuse that as not caring about the company. Well, perhaps, but we care immensely about what we do, and you hired us to do what we do. How many 20% projects have turned into products? Executives of the world, are you listening?