Cutting out for Cloudera just in time
The timing was coincidental, he insisted. In a blog post he heaped fulsome praise on Yahoo and said that at Cloudera he will be "well-positioned to help it mature," it meaning Hadoop.
It's a well-considered, mature move from a well-considered, mature man. Cutting has been involved in search technology for over two decades, since long before the Web was spun. He was a whiz kid. Now he's a wise man.
As a wise man who needs to feed a family Cutting moves from position-to-position carefully. Like a great actor he moves for the work, not the money. During his career he has worked at Apple, he once worked at Excite, he even worked for Xerox PARC!
The move to Cloudera is, in some ways, his riskiest move yet.
Cloudera is, technically, still a start-up with just 20 employees. Bad things can happen at good start-ups. Cutting is moving in part because Hadoop co-founder Mike Cafarella is already on-board there, but as Cloudera's own blog notes, Cafarella will take a full-time position at the University of Michigan in December.
I've been calling programming a young man's game since I was a young man. I'm not young any longer. So seeing Doug Cutting at Cloudera also makes me smile. I hope it makes you smile as well.
It's time for the grown-ups to show what they can do.