In the mid nineties, Anders, at Borland, developed a positively excellent alternative (if you can stomach Pascal, that is — although, compared to VB there is no contest) to Microsoft's then main developer tool, Visual Basic.
Microsoft hired him away with a $1.5 million signing bonus, a base salary of up to $200,000, and options to buy 75,000 shares of Microsoft stock. At Microsoft, he went on to lead the development of J++, a futile attempt by MS to derail Java (which deserved derailing, but by something better, not Microsoft).
>>Microsoft hired him away with a $1.5 million signing bonus
Correctomundo. MS couldn’t produce anything better than VB, so they had to pirate the competition’s talent.
"Since 2000, he has been the lead architect of the team developing the language C#."