Cincom Smalltalk Stuff

As most people following these things already know, I'm sure, both Eliot Miranda and Vassili Bykov have recently left Cincom to join a project at Cadence with Gilad Bracha. Both of them will be very sorely missed. Eliot seems to me to have been with VisualWorks forever, but is actually more of a second-generation ParcPlacer. He's been extremely important in the history of the product, and served as almost the sole voice of engineering through some of its dark times. His passion and commitment to the product have always been an inspiration. Alas, while Cincom has brought a lot more stability, and a lot more voices, we're now losing one of our longest-serving voices to the charms of cool new projects. With his departure, John Sarkela will take over the role of virtual machine lead. John has done a great many things in his career, but among them he was a VM engineer at Digitalk. Most recently he's been leading a major overhaul of the VisualWorks Mac OSX VM. We're also bringing on a new person to the VM team, but I'm not sure if it's final, so I probably shouldn't say who it is yet.

Vassili Bykov is someone I've known and worked with for a very long time. He was with The Object People back in the old days. When they were bought by a combination of the now-defunct WebGain and BEA, I joined cincom, and so did Vassili and Martin Kobetic. Vassili has been the face of the tools group, and his brilliance in UI design and his thoughtful approach have led to very significant improvements in the VisualWorks toolset. He's someone who's always been a pleasure to work with, and it will be a shame not to have him with us.

With Vassili's departure, we now have an opening in the Smalltalk Tools team. It's been been posted on the Cincom site, although it seems a bit tricky to find. It's also gone through the HR process of adding peculiar requirements - like 6 years of SQL Server and Oracle experience, and a requirement to reside in the Southwest Ohio area. Ignore those, we'll get that changed in the posting shortly. And although we're primarily looking in the Tools area, we're always interested in high-quality candidates even if experience doesn't precisely match the area we're looking for. And we're a very geographically distributed team - being anywhere in North America is probably fine.

I also note that we have an opening for a Smalltalk support position in North America. Similar caveats apply about the geographic location and specific experience required.