4 ms·

For a moment I confused this gentleman's name with that of the character in Arrested Development (the "never nude" Tobias Fünke?) But why or how on Earth would

by rmk 6y ago

For a moment I confused this gentleman's name with that of the character in Arrested Development (the "never nude" Tobias Fünke?) But why or how on Earth would a person like Tobias Lutke find the time to do this? Are there other people who run multibillion dollar public companies who poke around in the codebase?

rock_hard 6y ago
Zuck shipped code all the way until 2010 I heard
- ajfjrbfbf 6y ago
  He said people not reptiles.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't do this here. Perhaps you don't owe Zuckerberg better (though why not?), but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
mmahemoff 6y ago
Bill Gates was famously coding as a public company CEO and revising a lot of code he was unsatisfied with. I recall rumours he was politely urged to stop it. "Ultimately he had to force himself to stop revising and perfecting his peers’ work. “I had to say to myself, ‘Ok, we’re going to ship code that I didn’t edit,’” he said. “And that was hard for me, but I kinda got over that.”" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/bill-gates-quit-this-bad-habit-to-get-microsoft-off-the-ground.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/bill-gates-quit-this-bad-hab... One source suggests he last created production code in 1989, three years after MS went public (https://www.quora.com/When-did-Bill-Gates-last-write-code-for-products-that-shipped#:~:text=Originally%20Answered%3A%20When%20did%20Bill,so%20that'd%20be%201989 https://www.quora.com/When-did-Bill-Gates-last-write-code-fo....)
- rmk 6y ago
  To be honest, creating an Operating System, the ecosystem surrounding it, etc. is technologically much more complicated than a lot of the stuff that web-based companies are doing nowadays. Besides, Microsoft was definitely a much more technical company that sold a purely technical product, so it is not entirely inconceivable that founders were deeply technical in a way that today's founders aren't. I also imagine that there was much less 'adult supervision' of Microsoft. They probably did not take (any?) VC money, did they? The scene today is very different, so I wonder how such a thing happens in modern-day startups. As an investor, I would be alarmed at such egregious misallocation of valuable founder/C-suite time and brainpower. EDIT: I have read many an anecdote (from Joel Spolsky, for example), wherein Bill Gates was said to have pored over the minutest specification in documents spanning hundreds of pages and understood all the subtlety involved. Once again, how on Earth did Bill find the time?
  - schoen 6y ago
    I heard an anecdote where he received a technical briefing from a security team about a product in about 2003 and asked them meaningful, challenging technical questions in reply.

by rmk 6y ago

rock_hard 6y ago

Zuck shipped code all the way until 2010 I heard

ajfjrbfbf 6y ago
He said people not reptiles.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't do this here. Perhaps you don't owe Zuckerberg better (though why not?), but you definitely owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

mmahemoff 6y ago

Bill Gates was famously coding as a public company CEO and revising a lot of code he was unsatisfied with. I recall rumours he was politely urged to stop it. "Ultimately he had to force himself to stop revising and perfecting his peers’ work. “I had to say to myself, ‘Ok, we’re going to ship code that I didn’t edit,’” he said. “And that was hard for me, but I kinda got over that.”" https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/bill-gates-quit-this-bad-habit-to-get-microsoft-off-the-ground.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/10/bill-gates-quit-this-bad-hab... One source suggests he last created production code in 1989, three years after MS went public (https://www.quora.com/When-did-Bill-Gates-last-write-code-for-products-that-shipped#:~:text=Originally%20Answered%3A%20When%20did%20Bill,so%20that'd%20be%201989 https://www.quora.com/When-did-Bill-Gates-last-write-code-fo....)

rmk 6y ago
To be honest, creating an Operating System, the ecosystem surrounding it, etc. is technologically much more complicated than a lot of the stuff that web-based companies are doing nowadays. Besides, Microsoft was definitely a much more technical company that sold a purely technical product, so it is not entirely inconceivable that founders were deeply technical in a way that today's founders aren't. I also imagine that there was much less 'adult supervision' of Microsoft. They probably did not take (any?) VC money, did they? The scene today is very different, so I wonder how such a thing happens in modern-day startups. As an investor, I would be alarmed at such egregious misallocation of valuable founder/C-suite time and brainpower. EDIT: I have read many an anecdote (from Joel Spolsky, for example), wherein Bill Gates was said to have pored over the minutest specification in documents spanning hundreds of pages and understood all the subtlety involved. Once again, how on Earth did Bill find the time?
- schoen 6y ago
  I heard an anecdote where he received a technical briefing from a security team about a product in about 2003 and asked them meaningful, challenging technical questions in reply.