13 ms·

My First BillG Review (2006)

217 points by mtmail 4y ago

lukasb 4y ago
“Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before." It depresses me that the people considered the best in our industry are such assholes. Bill just wanted to yell at everyone because it was the only way he knew how to motivate?
- logifail 4y ago
  > It depresses me that the people considered the best in our industry are such assholes. Bill just wanted to yell at everyone because it was the only way he knew how to motivate? A professor at my university took exactly this approach to interviewing prospective undergraduates (EDIT: minus the yelling!) He would ask a question, and if the unfortunate candidate started to give the right answer, he would (politely) cut them off, and ask a different/harder question. He was interested in how candidates answered questions they hadn't already got the answers for. At the time I regarded this as pure brutality, but looking back on it with a few decades of experience, I can see why he thought his approach was valid. We often think the edge cases are where the interesting stuff is. Q: Given a (fairly short) time to interview someone, how would you attempt to find the boundaries of their knowledge, and how they handle stuff at the boundaries?
  - lukasb 4y ago
    I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with yelling at people as your primary method of motivating them. Which, according to Joel's story, was Bill's default method in every review.
    - jononomo 4y ago
  - LanceH 4y ago
    If you ask a question, you shouldn't be cutting someone off as they answer it (unless they are rambling). The interviewer should have the courtesy to at least listen to the answer to the question they asked. If limited time is a problem, schedule more time. During my interviews, if someone answers the question and keeps going, I'll tell them, "I was only looking for xyz, and you got it."
    - logifail 4y ago
      > If limited time is a problem, schedule more time. I'm not sure how realistic that suggestion is. The pool of university applicants is large, the academics' time is short. If you're going to have multiple interviews over multiple days that just throws up even more barriers to entry to those whose parents can't afford travel and accomodation for that. At a broader level, if one can't distinguish between "good" and "not good" in one interview, perhaps one isn't asking the right questions?
  - makr17 4y ago
    I used to know a HS Maths teacher whose approach to testing was similarly brutal. Essentially, in his view, if a student is able to answer every question on an exam correctly, then we haven't fully assessed the depths of their understanding. So every exam was crafted with the express aim of 100% being infeasible.
    - logifail 4y ago
      > So every exam was crafted with the express aim of 100% being infeasible Isn't the goal of any (every?) exam to attempt to distinguish between how good the candidates are?
      - candiodari 4y ago
        Not really. The goal of most exams is to have a predetermined number of people pass. For example, entrance exams. There is a, known beforehand, number of spots to hand out. The goal of the exam is to be exactly difficult enough to get all the spots filled but no more. This even applies to medical doctor residences. Only artificial, meaningless exams like olympiads are really meant to asses how good someone is. https://www.imo-official.org/ https://www.imo-official.org/ Of course the easy and common way to do it is to make the exam way too hard to realistically fill up the spots, and then cheat. In the best case, this is done by having a "translation table". Usually, we're talking a combination of nepotism/racism/... You can pass fairly. It's just that if you aren't part of the right group you need to score something like 20-40% better. And before you say this is unfair, I like the alternative even less: way too easy exams where making 1 spelling error in an IT exam will effectively disqualify you (like the EU commission exams). There are limited number of spots in that exam too, and you have zero chance to start a career in the commission if you have a "low" score. Unfortunately 90% is "low". Hell, that's very low. 98% is the real "pass grade", and 99% is not a luxury. And if they don't do this themselves, like has happened with medical exams, the "people upstairs" will find ways to give responsibilities to people who don't pass, who may not have got the required training to be responsible about them. There is a level of incompetence that will get you kicked out, but it's pretty extreme, and usually what I'd call "callousness" (what you might call a tendency to proceed after being warned) is a required part. Mere stupidity won't do it.
- myle 4y ago
  As a teenager that grew up hating Bill Gates, because I liked Linux, I want to agree with you. As an adult, I believe we should be able to see past the surface of behavior that other people exhibit and understand their motives. It is nowadays in fashion to cancel someone based on today's norms, but if we want to be fair, we should put things in context that we don't have. If Bill Gates was so toxic that was unbearable, Microsoft would have failed.
  - lukasb 4y ago
    Criticizing is not cancelling.
  - tricky777 4y ago
    not necesarily. Slave using countries survived for centuries. (business can be successful even if it makes people miserable)
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Microsoft had a monopoly. It could not fail.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Shouting isn't great but to be honest I'd much rather have a very detailed if slightly macho technical discussion than some nonsense HR-gremlin driven "motivation" session.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    What Bill Gates should have done is hired a diversity and equity consultant to make sure Excel centered underprivileged minorities.
- jononomo 4y ago
  I honestly miss the old days when smart people would just yell at you. It's frankly more efficient and the people who can't handle it just aren't smart themselves. I'm not talking about unwarranted abuse, but I did like the confidence that top notch programmers felt free to express back in the 90s.
  - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
    > the people who can't handle it just aren't smart themselves. Don't dismiss everyone who won't put up with that kind of environment as "just not smart". It's a completely unwarranted assumption. Just a hypothetical: Being verbally abused as a child might make that impossible to take as an adult. That doesn't make you any less smart. But it doesn't even have to be abuse. There are people who are plenty smart, whose reaction to being yelled at by their boss would be "why should I put up with this?" In fact being smarter might even make that response more likely.
    - jononomo 4y ago
      You yell back and explain why you're right. Or, if you're not right, you go fix the problem.
      - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
        Or you go somewhere else where you get to work with grownups and non-sociopaths.
        jononomo 4y ago
        You wouldn't have cut it working at Microsoft, but that's okay since there were many lesser companies around during that era, as well as opportunities in child care.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        Or do neither. I'm not going to have technical discussions where whoever is louder wins.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
> (how many billions of dollars has Microsoft lost, in R&D, legal fees, and damage to reputation, because they decided that not only do they have to make a web browser, but they have to give it away free?) Joel is super smart, and I loved this particular story. However, I'm surprised he underestimates how crucial was to give away IE to kill Netscape, and keep dominating the desktop market. See this exhibit [0]. It's a rare gem of a find, I believe. Try to guess from this [1] when was IE introduced as free and default. (I'm pretty sure I am right on dates - please correct me for inaccuracies) [0]: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/03/03/11.pdf https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/... [1]: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/03/03/9.pdf https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/...
- civilized 4y ago
  Why was it important for Microsoft to kill Netscape? What did this have to do with continuing to dominate the desktop market? Bill should have thought harder about these questions before going after Netscape by giving away IE for free - the most transparent act of monopolistic predatory pricing we've seen since Benjamin Harrison signed the Sherman Antitrust Act into US law.
  - jonny_eh 4y ago
    It delayed by a decade (or two) browser innovation. This meant that desktop apps weren't replaced with cross-platform web apps over that period. Note how now we no longer need Windows for most professional desktop applications. As much as we like to complain about JavaScript and Electron, they're largely the reason that we no longer depends on Windows for productivity.
    - mananaysiempre 4y ago
      From contemporary technical documentation, it doesn’t really look like Microsoft had exactly planned to just sit on IE once it had won. That first Web push gave us XMLHttpRequest, it gave us IDispatchEx and Windows Scripting (where JScript stagnated only after the Sun settlement, enough for a next-generation version in the form of JScript.NET to get developed and consequently die[1]), it gave us HTAs (“Electron as a Windows platform feature”), DHTML (a non-standard abomination, yes, but so was <IMG>) not only implemented in IE but supported in FrontPage and Word, Active Desktop with its channels (OK, one might argue those count as a negative amount of features, but they were serious about it), the Web Publishing Wizard and the Personal Web Server (bundled with an end-user product!). This does not look like the work of people who were planning to do just enough to win and then stop—it looks like they were really into it (and they were really into a lot of things at the time, simultaneously), then came the “oh shit” realization that helping the Web eat the platform lunch is maybe not exactly in your interest[2] when that lunch is firmly yours at the moment. (Java’s attempt at same they were very consciously thwarting—can’t find that Gates memo now—but then Java was pretty explicit and deliberate about that attempt, while the Web just kind of happened to be the only leak when a lot of people started feeling around the dam for a lot of different reasons.) [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-net/ https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-net/ [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
marcodiego 4y ago
> Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done. > we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier > THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS. Even considering my historic dislike for microsoft, I must admit how a dedicated person Bill Gates was. The fact that even after being highly successful he was still apt and willing to review projects, maybe even code, to this level of detail is impressive and not a thing I've seen much. It is hard to say he didn't earn it.
- helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  Not to downplay Bill Gates dedication, but given how important basic was to Microsoft’s initial success and how much of his own coding went into it, he was perhaps likely to take more technical interest in it than other products.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- com2kid 4y ago
  I've been witness to something similar. tl;dr Team member goes to present optical HR tech to BillG. He read up the academic and research literature and after seeing our demo, says we are obviously BSing him[1] and that the tech was barely ready for prime time[2]. Completely outside his normal area of expertise, he had obviously researched and become, if not an expert, really knowledgeable in the space. Unrelated, he also heavily advocated for Tablets back in the early 2000s. Indeed, IMHO BillG's problem is that he is often too early on seeing technology advances. Microsoft tried to make Smart TVs back before broadband internet had a large penetration! Smart infotainment in cars way before anyone else! Being too ahead of the curve can be a disadvantage. [1] Not a direct quote, but he was right. Optical HR wearables use some trickery to make the numbers look good, basically unfiltered, swinging your arm around will make the numbers jump up suddenly due to how the tech works, so you have to basically detect this and cover it up, accelerometers help here. There are plenty of other problems with optical HR that get paved over through clever presentation to the user. [2] It is better now, but circa 2014 optical HR sucks, and wrist based still sucks for a lot of types of motion, but they great for running and biking. Anything with regular motions it is great for. HIIT strength training workouts where you are frequently switching exercises? No, just no. Though again now days the tech has advanced to the point it is kind of accurate, but someone who knows the industry can still purposefully confuse most sensors.
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
> The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. This has been the bane of my corporate life for almost 30 years now. The ED's just don't feel they have to understand the technical details of what's happening underneath them, which leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's: the middle managers run around creating little fiefdoms, and fighting over their share of the department's budget. In my current company's onboard training, I counted 5 dimensions of cross-functional reporting. Also, there are at least 4 major IT departments. Who's responsible for what? Who knows! It's impossible to know! But they're fighting about it, and every group has a new policy or layer to add, every couple of months, to justify their existence. Meanwhile, people are just trying to do their jobs in the face of impossible deadlines due to workflow congestion caused by 40-year-old mainframe constraints.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  Social media is now littered with lifestyle-consultants who sell this grand idea of becoming an "analyst" or consultant of some kind, raking in loads of money while going to the onsite gym and eating smoothie bowls. No knowledge of the domain, or statical training required. Good for them, but if you hire these kinds of people in your business you deserve to go bankrupt.
- int0x2e 4y ago
  I suspect it will never happen, but I would love to work at a company that has front-line managers and recognized "thought leaders", and nothing else at all, most of all - no middle managers, little to no concept of "promo work", etc. Once you remove the incentive for managers to grow their org (because there's a point where managing more people directly becomes infeasible, or at the very least - painful), you'll have little to no politics, no more constant re-orgs, etc. Wishful thinking, I know...
- hintymad 4y ago
  > which leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's: I feel this is the same problem as an online community faces: the density of talent gets diluted over time as the community grows larger. When you only 1000 members in Quora, you get detailed and nuanced answers that open your eyes and expand your mind. When you have 100M users in quora, most of the answers are meh. Similarly, when a company grows rapidly with only few hundreds of people, you get amazing talent as described in the book Show Stopper. When the company grows to north of $1T with hundreds of thousands of people, well, you get current-day Microsoft and eventually IBM
Selfcommit 4y ago
I had my “first Joel review” while applying to work at Stack. Joel still did the final interviews for all applicants back then. After 4-5 back to back on site interviews, I was spent. Somehow we ended up talking about old AutoIT scripts I’d written - many of which include apologies to future readers in the comments. Joel was a great interviewer… that conversation turned into a game as Joel picked apart various ways he over compromise the script and asked how I’d respond in the next iteration.
localhost 4y ago
I had my first and only BillG review a few years ago. It was about a technology that I and everyone else _assumed_ that Bill had a lot of familiarity with. It is a technology that I'm sure is being used at his foundation. It is a technology that other CVPs at the company had presented to Bill in the past. And during the review, it was pretty clear that at least at that moment, this was the first time that he thought he had seen this technology. This taught me an important lesson. Our leaders, despite the legendary status that is sometimes bestowed upon them, are human. And fallable. They selectively remember things, and if you want them to remember certain things you'll need to tell them over and over and over again.
cookingrobot 4y ago
In my first BillG review when I was a PM on the Windows team, he called me a “dirty liar”. It’s was awesome. I think he said “dirty” because he was making an effort to be nicer and say “fuck” less, and I think he caught himself mid-sentence and replaced “fucking liar” with the more PG rated “dirty liar”. He was calling me a liar because he thought he caught me saying something wrong. We were reviewing an approximately 80 page spec I’d written on changes we were planning to make to the Windows desktop, and I’d said essentially “all the visible changes apps will be able to make to the desktop will contained within the new Sidebar”. He thought I forgot about QuickLaunch icons. But in our plan we were going to move the QuickLaunch into the Sidebar too, so I was correct. Overall it was an amazing meeting - he was prepared, friendly, intelligent, on topic, and ready to go deep. I didn’t take any offense at his comment, he was really just having a conversation about the topic.
ncmncm 4y ago
I was not able to Spot the Howler in this one. Either this one was unusually good, or The Howler in this one was too subtle for my weak brain.
- evouga 4y ago
  What do you mean? Joel puts easter eggs in his posts?
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    No, he is just very often egregiously wrong, but in ways that we have become desensitized enough to find often hard to tease out. Usually the Howler may be traced via his inclination to treat whatever he did while at Microsoft as inherently above reproach, and not, as it often was, totally bonkers. But thinking it over, his apologetics for Lotus is the Howler, here. If Lotus really had engaged in the reasoning he suggests, they could trivially have chosen 1901 for their epoch with no compromise to accuracy.
jonathanoliver 4y ago
My favorite quote from the article: > Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > non-programmers trying to run software companies You mean everybody who runs software companies then?
  - gjm11 4y ago
    Bill Gates was a programmer and used to run Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg was a programmer and still runs Meta/Facebook. Larry Ellison was a programmer and still runs Oracle. Maybe you're just pointing out that if you're running a company (beyond a certain size) you are probably spending all your time running the company and therefore aren't really a programmer any more. But isn't it obvious that Spolsky doesn't mean "person whose main activity is writing software" but "person who knows how to write software and has done a substantial amount of that"? Gates, Zuckerberg and Ellison are all programmers in that sense.
    - areyousure 4y ago
      Is Google/Alphabet a software company? Sundar does not know how to program.
      - VirusNewbie 4y ago
        He seems lost as well though.
      - myle 4y ago
        I don't understand this criticism. Sundar has technical background and great product vision. How many other people have been involved in so successful projects that define the industry like Chrome and Android? Indeed, Google has hired a lot of people with business background lately to operate large parts of it's business. We should, though, acknowledge that Google operates in many now mature markets where innovation plays secondary role to focusing on existing customer needs.
tomrod 4y ago
Interesting read. One point that sticks out: if you are an executive over a function, you need to have enough depth in the function to know when you're being fed a line versus receiving competency from your reports. One concept that can be a two-edged sword here is being "managed up" -- which many treat as an adversarial/cloak-and-dagger relationship with execs with a positive spin. In my thought, keeping this under control requires domain competency.
- lazide 4y ago
  It is essentially impossible to manage something if the person doesn’t understand the thing being managed - and by understand, I mean ‘knows how it works to to the point they can know when it’s bullshit, and when it’s real’. It doesn’t require being GOOD at the thing they are managing (anymore than it requires being a fast linebacker to be able to make someone fast and teach them how to be a good linebacker), but being decent sure helps. Sometimes being really good at the thing can make it nearly impossible to be a manager of others doing it, because while they’re good at the skill they don’t actually understand it. It comes naturally to them, so they never had to figure it out. Just like someone who is a fast linebacker may just be and is unable to explain to anyone how they do it. A VP/Executive is a level above managing it, as they need to be managing managers, ensuring decision making and prioritization is occurring in a way that produces the desired results, and setting the overall culture within an organization. Many times where problems occur is when someone gets promoted to a level where they are now over people who are doing things they don’t understand, or when skill sets and day to day work shifts out from under them and they lose that competency. ‘Managing up’ can be a cynical ploy for a middle manager to get what they want while not actually doing what the execs want. It can also be the process of ensuring the important details the executive needs are there, and they aren’t having their time wasted if a bunch of fluff that doesn’t matter to them. Which one it is depends a lot on the culture and how good the executive/VP and middle manager are.
  - snowwrestler 4y ago
    This is a popular idea among many people with domain expertise (in this case, developers), but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in every aspect of running their business, which as a business scales becomes impossible. Businesses are collections of people and need to succeed as such. The whole point of hiring people is to grow the skills available to the business. If you know enough to micro-manage all your staff, you’re either not very senior or you hired poorly (or both). Management is more complicated than just fact-checking and BS-detection. In fact if you’re significantly worried about detecting BS by your staff, you already have a management problem.
segfaultbuserr 4y ago
> In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (you had to store values in cells on a worksheet), without locals, without subroutine calls: in short it was almost completely unmaintainable. It had advanced features like “Goto” but the labels were actually physically invisible. [...] I was supposed to come up with a solution to this problem. The implication was that the solution would have something to do with the Basic programming language. Basic? Yech! Take a look at this 4-minute video: Excel Magic. This engineer demonstrated the implementation of many sophisticated simulations, entirely in Excel, including flight simulators, orbital mechanics, digital signal processing, ray-tracing, heat transfer, chemical reaction dynamics, and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9PLmtQZwmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9PLmtQZwmY I don't know what to say... On one hand, I clearly understand that, due to the programmability with macros and VBA, the express power of Excel is as powerful as any "real" programming language, and in fact, a lot of real-world engineering calculations are indeed performed in Excel, the prevalence of Excel in engineering is almost terrifying. Imagine solving differential equations numerically using 10,000 cells in Excel, yes, it has been done! I respect their skills and achievements. On the other hand, it just looks painful to me, and feels like constructing a skyscraper using a toothpick.
- buescher 4y ago
  > Imagine solving differential equations numerically using 10,000 cells in Excel, yes, it has been done! There's a nice treatment of how to do this for simple heat transfer problems in Tony Kordyban's Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks. You will amaze and frustrate your co-workers. Excel is 100% the poor man's simulation package. I like Matlab and Simulink a lot better, and if I were 25 again I'd be a fool for Julia, but nothing beats it for sharing a simulation or other analysis with someone that doesn't have the same software you do on his or her computer.
  - segfaultbuserr 4y ago
    > Tony Kordyban's Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks It was a fun book, I don't remember the Excel modeling part though... I do remember seeing something similar on Microwaves101.com by The Unknown Editor... > The spreadsheet has 96 distance steps and 2000 time steps, or almost 100,000 cells. In the old days it would bring a computer to its knees when you changed a variable. Now it's almost instantaneous, however, it still measures 10MB. We will offer a zipped version of it in the download area, soon. https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/fourier-s-law https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/fourier-s-law
white_dragon88 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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ThePadawan 4y ago
Reminds me of one of the best technical interviews I had. This was for a C# position, and my future boss did this top-down approach with questions about Entity Framework. How do you write a query? What happens when you run that code (lazily vs. eagerly)? Why is the return type Like That? What are the advantages and disadvantages of that approach? Until we got into quite obscure questions about how the framework would interact with different database runtimes. (That interview was the most fun I had in that position)
- timmyboop 4y ago
  What do you have to do where you're in a position where you can answer questions at that level of detail?
  - ThePadawan 4y ago
    Write code? No seriously, this was just a body leasing shop where I ended up working for a bank. So I sat around a lot and sometimes committed code for a CRUD C#/Angular web app.
tzs 4y ago
Speaking of excel, for casual Excel users, the video "You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky" [1] is worth a watch. My casual Excel use probably got an order of magnitude easier from it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
- nerdponx 4y ago
  I love this. Is there something like this for Word? And/or for the LibreOffice equivalents, which in many cases are a better user experience than the MS originals.
  - dan-robertson 4y ago
    Excel is, in some sense, a programming language for (mostly) purely functional incremental computations with built in debugger that shows you most intermediate values. Word is not very much like that so the contents of such a thing would surely be different. I think the first tip is probably something like ‘create named styles instead of mutating the formatting of regions ad-hoc’.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      And the “copy formatting” tool and you’re basically done.
  - duncans 4y ago
    Probably Scott Hanselman’s ‘How to REALLY use Microsoft Word’
gadders 4y ago
>> Over the years, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and some shady ethical decisions.. Those innocent times when we thought the worst ethical decisions that Bill G would make was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...
- gjm11 4y ago
  What that article says about Bill Gates is that on multiple occasions he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. Do you in fact think that that is ethically worse than using a huge company's monopoly power to stifle competition? It seems to me that the latter harmed a lot more people than the former, and in more concrete ways. For the avoidance of doubt: Jeffrey Epstein harmed some people very severely. But It looks to me as if he would have done pretty much the exact same harms if he had never met Bill Gates at all, and I don't see that Gates is significantly culpable for the harm that Epstein did. I think there is something badly wrong with any conception of morality according to which it is more important to cut off all contact with certain kinds of Bad People than it is not to do things that do actual substantial harm.
  - gadders 4y ago
    I think the implication is that Jeffrey Epstein made available to his "friends" the services of under-age girls that were sex-trafficed. Is there concrete evidence that Bill Gates had relations with these girls? No. However, if he did then I would say that is worse than bundling two bits of software together, yes. If he didn't then, your view could be correct however I note that it is unlikely he was completely unaware of what was happening.
    - gjm11 4y ago
      From "Bill Gates had some meetings with Jeffrey Epstein" to "Bill Gates had sex with underage girls trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein" is ... quite a leap, no? I mean, enough of a leap that I don't see why anyone would make it. (In the absence of further evidence, that is. E.g., someone mentioned that allegedly Gates's acquaintanceship with Epstein was one reason for his divorce. Maybe that's nudge-nudge-wink-wink for "his wife divorced him because he was having sex with underage girls", since otherwise it seems like insufficient grounds for wanting a divorce. But this is all speculation founded on hearsay, and in any case the thing you originally linked to says no more than that Gates met with Epstein a few times.)
paxys 4y ago
As a developer, having a product manager and executive leadership with this level of technical depth is a dream.
- endtime 4y ago
  I recently joined Roblox, and the CEO will occasionally send emails with questions about caching strategy or API design or whatever. I found it a bit odd, coming from a much bigger company, but if that's what sounds good to you, we're hiring. :)
malthaus 4y ago
My take-away is that any of the other 4 hierarchy levels between joel and bill should have challenged & asked those questions already. When you already have 6 levels of hierarchy, is it really the job of the CEO to dig that deep on technical issues?
- nearbuy 4y ago
  Spot checking for important projects is a good way of making sure those other 4 hierarchy levels are doing their job well.
- fasteo 4y ago
  >>> is it really the job of the CEO to dig that deep on technical issues? From the post: >>> Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control ...
- justsomehnguy 4y ago
  > other 4 hierarchy levels between joel and bill should have challenged & asked those questions already. Congratulations, you invented bureucracy. Because those 4 levels wouldn't (and most of the time - couldn't) answer those questions, so what they would do? Demand the lower level to answer it.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This results in Joel being told to review his own spec.
- Tangurena2 4y ago
  In far too many organizations, there is something called "the thermocline of truth". > A thermocline is a distinct temperature barrier between a surface layer of warmer water and the colder, deeper water underneath. It can exist in both lakes and oceans. A thermocline can prevent dissolved oxygen from getting to the lower layer and vital nutrients from getting to the upper layer. > In many large or even medium-sized IT projects, there exists a thermocline of truth, a line drawn across the organizational chart that represents a barrier to accurate information regarding the project’s progress. Those below this level tend to know how well the project is actually going; those above it tend to have a more optimistic (if unrealistic) view. In the more Machiavellian companies that I have worked for, this would be a layer on the org chart where truth stops flowing upwards. It may also affect downwards flow of information as well. The brass at the top don't know what is going on because they can't depend on the layers of management between the CxO tier and where work actually gets done. > is it really the job of the CEO to dig that deep on technical issues No. You - as CEO - should be able to trust the people in those layers. Maybe BillG didn't trust them. Or he didn't know how to. He was technically excellent enough to be able to do this sort of sanity check for himself. Perhaps, as CEO, you only need to do this sort of "quality control" check occasionally. Any organization that has been parasitized by narcissists is guaranteed to have at least one, and more likely several, layer(s) where truth must stop flowing in order to (1) protect the narcissists' egos and (2) to protect the organization from their anger & retaliation. [0] - https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...
geoelkh 4y ago
Like a good movie, every time I ready this, I enjoy reading it :)

217 points by mtmail 4y ago

“Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before." It depresses me that the people considered the best in our industry are such assholes. Bill just wanted to yell at everyone because it was the only way he knew how to motivate?

logifail 4y ago
> It depresses me that the people considered the best in our industry are such assholes. Bill just wanted to yell at everyone because it was the only way he knew how to motivate? A professor at my university took exactly this approach to interviewing prospective undergraduates (EDIT: minus the yelling!) He would ask a question, and if the unfortunate candidate started to give the right answer, he would (politely) cut them off, and ask a different/harder question. He was interested in how candidates answered questions they hadn't already got the answers for. At the time I regarded this as pure brutality, but looking back on it with a few decades of experience, I can see why he thought his approach was valid. We often think the edge cases are where the interesting stuff is. Q: Given a (fairly short) time to interview someone, how would you attempt to find the boundaries of their knowledge, and how they handle stuff at the boundaries?
- lukasb 4y ago
  I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with yelling at people as your primary method of motivating them. Which, according to Joel's story, was Bill's default method in every review.
  - jononomo 4y ago
- LanceH 4y ago
  If you ask a question, you shouldn't be cutting someone off as they answer it (unless they are rambling). The interviewer should have the courtesy to at least listen to the answer to the question they asked. If limited time is a problem, schedule more time. During my interviews, if someone answers the question and keeps going, I'll tell them, "I was only looking for xyz, and you got it."
  - logifail 4y ago
    > If limited time is a problem, schedule more time. I'm not sure how realistic that suggestion is. The pool of university applicants is large, the academics' time is short. If you're going to have multiple interviews over multiple days that just throws up even more barriers to entry to those whose parents can't afford travel and accomodation for that. At a broader level, if one can't distinguish between "good" and "not good" in one interview, perhaps one isn't asking the right questions?
- makr17 4y ago
  I used to know a HS Maths teacher whose approach to testing was similarly brutal. Essentially, in his view, if a student is able to answer every question on an exam correctly, then we haven't fully assessed the depths of their understanding. So every exam was crafted with the express aim of 100% being infeasible.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > So every exam was crafted with the express aim of 100% being infeasible Isn't the goal of any (every?) exam to attempt to distinguish between how good the candidates are?
    - candiodari 4y ago
      Not really. The goal of most exams is to have a predetermined number of people pass. For example, entrance exams. There is a, known beforehand, number of spots to hand out. The goal of the exam is to be exactly difficult enough to get all the spots filled but no more. This even applies to medical doctor residences. Only artificial, meaningless exams like olympiads are really meant to asses how good someone is. https://www.imo-official.org/ https://www.imo-official.org/ Of course the easy and common way to do it is to make the exam way too hard to realistically fill up the spots, and then cheat. In the best case, this is done by having a "translation table". Usually, we're talking a combination of nepotism/racism/... You can pass fairly. It's just that if you aren't part of the right group you need to score something like 20-40% better. And before you say this is unfair, I like the alternative even less: way too easy exams where making 1 spelling error in an IT exam will effectively disqualify you (like the EU commission exams). There are limited number of spots in that exam too, and you have zero chance to start a career in the commission if you have a "low" score. Unfortunately 90% is "low". Hell, that's very low. 98% is the real "pass grade", and 99% is not a luxury. And if they don't do this themselves, like has happened with medical exams, the "people upstairs" will find ways to give responsibilities to people who don't pass, who may not have got the required training to be responsible about them. There is a level of incompetence that will get you kicked out, but it's pretty extreme, and usually what I'd call "callousness" (what you might call a tendency to proceed after being warned) is a required part. Mere stupidity won't do it.
myle 4y ago
As a teenager that grew up hating Bill Gates, because I liked Linux, I want to agree with you. As an adult, I believe we should be able to see past the surface of behavior that other people exhibit and understand their motives. It is nowadays in fashion to cancel someone based on today's norms, but if we want to be fair, we should put things in context that we don't have. If Bill Gates was so toxic that was unbearable, Microsoft would have failed.
- lukasb 4y ago
  Criticizing is not cancelling.
- tricky777 4y ago
  not necesarily. Slave using countries survived for centuries. (business can be successful even if it makes people miserable)
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Microsoft had a monopoly. It could not fail.
mhh__ 4y ago
Shouting isn't great but to be honest I'd much rather have a very detailed if slightly macho technical discussion than some nonsense HR-gremlin driven "motivation" session.
- jononomo 4y ago
  What Bill Gates should have done is hired a diversity and equity consultant to make sure Excel centered underprivileged minorities.
jononomo 4y ago
I honestly miss the old days when smart people would just yell at you. It's frankly more efficient and the people who can't handle it just aren't smart themselves. I'm not talking about unwarranted abuse, but I did like the confidence that top notch programmers felt free to express back in the 90s.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago
  > the people who can't handle it just aren't smart themselves. Don't dismiss everyone who won't put up with that kind of environment as "just not smart". It's a completely unwarranted assumption. Just a hypothetical: Being verbally abused as a child might make that impossible to take as an adult. That doesn't make you any less smart. But it doesn't even have to be abuse. There are people who are plenty smart, whose reaction to being yelled at by their boss would be "why should I put up with this?" In fact being smarter might even make that response more likely.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    You yell back and explain why you're right. Or, if you're not right, you go fix the problem.
    - AnimalMuppet 4y ago
      Or you go somewhere else where you get to work with grownups and non-sociopaths.
      - jononomo 4y ago
        You wouldn't have cut it working at Microsoft, but that's okay since there were many lesser companies around during that era, as well as opportunities in child care.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      Or do neither. I'm not going to have technical discussions where whoever is louder wins.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

> (how many billions of dollars has Microsoft lost, in R&D, legal fees, and damage to reputation, because they decided that not only do they have to make a web browser, but they have to give it away free?) Joel is super smart, and I loved this particular story. However, I'm surprised he underestimates how crucial was to give away IE to kill Netscape, and keep dominating the desktop market. See this exhibit [0]. It's a rare gem of a find, I believe. Try to guess from this [1] when was IE introduced as free and default. (I'm pretty sure I am right on dates - please correct me for inaccuracies) [0]: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/03/03/11.pdf https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/... [1]: https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/03/03/9.pdf https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/...

civilized 4y ago
Why was it important for Microsoft to kill Netscape? What did this have to do with continuing to dominate the desktop market? Bill should have thought harder about these questions before going after Netscape by giving away IE for free - the most transparent act of monopolistic predatory pricing we've seen since Benjamin Harrison signed the Sherman Antitrust Act into US law.
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  It delayed by a decade (or two) browser innovation. This meant that desktop apps weren't replaced with cross-platform web apps over that period. Note how now we no longer need Windows for most professional desktop applications. As much as we like to complain about JavaScript and Electron, they're largely the reason that we no longer depends on Windows for productivity.
  - mananaysiempre 4y ago
    From contemporary technical documentation, it doesn’t really look like Microsoft had exactly planned to just sit on IE once it had won. That first Web push gave us XMLHttpRequest, it gave us IDispatchEx and Windows Scripting (where JScript stagnated only after the Sun settlement, enough for a next-generation version in the form of JScript.NET to get developed and consequently die[1]), it gave us HTAs (“Electron as a Windows platform feature”), DHTML (a non-standard abomination, yes, but so was <IMG>) not only implemented in IE but supported in FrontPage and Word, Active Desktop with its channels (OK, one might argue those count as a negative amount of features, but they were serious about it), the Web Publishing Wizard and the Personal Web Server (bundled with an end-user product!). This does not look like the work of people who were planning to do just enough to win and then stop—it looks like they were really into it (and they were really into a lot of things at the time, simultaneously), then came the “oh shit” realization that helping the Web eat the platform lunch is maybe not exactly in your interest[2] when that lunch is firmly yours at the moment. (Java’s attempt at same they were very consciously thwarting—can’t find that Gates memo now—but then Java was pretty explicit and deliberate about that attempt, while the Web just kind of happened to be the only leak when a lot of people started feeling around the dam for a lot of different reasons.) [1] https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-net/ https://ericlippert.com/2003/10/14/designing-jscript-net/ [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

marcodiego 4y ago

> Then I sat down to write the Excel Basic spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of pages. I think it was 500 pages by the time it was done. > we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier > THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS. Even considering my historic dislike for microsoft, I must admit how a dedicated person Bill Gates was. The fact that even after being highly successful he was still apt and willing to review projects, maybe even code, to this level of detail is impressive and not a thing I've seen much. It is hard to say he didn't earn it.

helsinkiandrew 4y ago
Not to downplay Bill Gates dedication, but given how important basic was to Microsoft’s initial success and how much of his own coding went into it, he was perhaps likely to take more technical interest in it than other products.
deleted 4y ago
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com2kid 4y ago
I've been witness to something similar. tl;dr Team member goes to present optical HR tech to BillG. He read up the academic and research literature and after seeing our demo, says we are obviously BSing him[1] and that the tech was barely ready for prime time[2]. Completely outside his normal area of expertise, he had obviously researched and become, if not an expert, really knowledgeable in the space. Unrelated, he also heavily advocated for Tablets back in the early 2000s. Indeed, IMHO BillG's problem is that he is often too early on seeing technology advances. Microsoft tried to make Smart TVs back before broadband internet had a large penetration! Smart infotainment in cars way before anyone else! Being too ahead of the curve can be a disadvantage. [1] Not a direct quote, but he was right. Optical HR wearables use some trickery to make the numbers look good, basically unfiltered, swinging your arm around will make the numbers jump up suddenly due to how the tech works, so you have to basically detect this and cover it up, accelerometers help here. There are plenty of other problems with optical HR that get paved over through clever presentation to the user. [2] It is better now, but circa 2014 optical HR sucks, and wrist based still sucks for a lot of types of motion, but they great for running and biking. Anything with regular motions it is great for. HIIT strength training workouts where you are frequently switching exercises? No, just no. Though again now days the tech has advanced to the point it is kind of accurate, but someone who knows the industry can still purposefully confuse most sensors.

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

> The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand. This has been the bane of my corporate life for almost 30 years now. The ED's just don't feel they have to understand the technical details of what's happening underneath them, which leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's: the middle managers run around creating little fiefdoms, and fighting over their share of the department's budget. In my current company's onboard training, I counted 5 dimensions of cross-functional reporting. Also, there are at least 4 major IT departments. Who's responsible for what? Who knows! It's impossible to know! But they're fighting about it, and every group has a new policy or layer to add, every couple of months, to justify their existence. Meanwhile, people are just trying to do their jobs in the face of impossible deadlines due to workflow congestion caused by 40-year-old mainframe constraints.

mhh__ 4y ago
Social media is now littered with lifestyle-consultants who sell this grand idea of becoming an "analyst" or consultant of some kind, raking in loads of money while going to the onsite gym and eating smoothie bowls. No knowledge of the domain, or statical training required. Good for them, but if you hire these kinds of people in your business you deserve to go bankrupt.
int0x2e 4y ago
I suspect it will never happen, but I would love to work at a company that has front-line managers and recognized "thought leaders", and nothing else at all, most of all - no middle managers, little to no concept of "promo work", etc. Once you remove the incentive for managers to grow their org (because there's a point where managing more people directly becomes infeasible, or at the very least - painful), you'll have little to no politics, no more constant re-orgs, etc. Wishful thinking, I know...
hintymad 4y ago
> which leads to the pervasive culture in all Fortune 1000's: I feel this is the same problem as an online community faces: the density of talent gets diluted over time as the community grows larger. When you only 1000 members in Quora, you get detailed and nuanced answers that open your eyes and expand your mind. When you have 100M users in quora, most of the answers are meh. Similarly, when a company grows rapidly with only few hundreds of people, you get amazing talent as described in the book Show Stopper. When the company grows to north of $1T with hundreds of thousands of people, well, you get current-day Microsoft and eventually IBM

Selfcommit 4y ago

I had my “first Joel review” while applying to work at Stack. Joel still did the final interviews for all applicants back then. After 4-5 back to back on site interviews, I was spent. Somehow we ended up talking about old AutoIT scripts I’d written - many of which include apologies to future readers in the comments. Joel was a great interviewer… that conversation turned into a game as Joel picked apart various ways he over compromise the script and asked how I’d respond in the next iteration.

localhost 4y ago

I had my first and only BillG review a few years ago. It was about a technology that I and everyone else _assumed_ that Bill had a lot of familiarity with. It is a technology that I'm sure is being used at his foundation. It is a technology that other CVPs at the company had presented to Bill in the past. And during the review, it was pretty clear that at least at that moment, this was the first time that he thought he had seen this technology. This taught me an important lesson. Our leaders, despite the legendary status that is sometimes bestowed upon them, are human. And fallable. They selectively remember things, and if you want them to remember certain things you'll need to tell them over and over and over again.

cookingrobot 4y ago

In my first BillG review when I was a PM on the Windows team, he called me a “dirty liar”. It’s was awesome. I think he said “dirty” because he was making an effort to be nicer and say “fuck” less, and I think he caught himself mid-sentence and replaced “fucking liar” with the more PG rated “dirty liar”. He was calling me a liar because he thought he caught me saying something wrong. We were reviewing an approximately 80 page spec I’d written on changes we were planning to make to the Windows desktop, and I’d said essentially “all the visible changes apps will be able to make to the desktop will contained within the new Sidebar”. He thought I forgot about QuickLaunch icons. But in our plan we were going to move the QuickLaunch into the Sidebar too, so I was correct. Overall it was an amazing meeting - he was prepared, friendly, intelligent, on topic, and ready to go deep. I didn’t take any offense at his comment, he was really just having a conversation about the topic.

ncmncm 4y ago

I was not able to Spot the Howler in this one. Either this one was unusually good, or The Howler in this one was too subtle for my weak brain.

evouga 4y ago
What do you mean? Joel puts easter eggs in his posts?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  No, he is just very often egregiously wrong, but in ways that we have become desensitized enough to find often hard to tease out. Usually the Howler may be traced via his inclination to treat whatever he did while at Microsoft as inherently above reproach, and not, as it often was, totally bonkers. But thinking it over, his apologetics for Lotus is the Howler, here. If Lotus really had engaged in the reasoning he suggests, they could trivially have chosen 1901 for their epoch with no compromise to accuracy.

jonathanoliver 4y ago

My favorite quote from the article: > Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn’t know how to surf trying to surf.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> non-programmers trying to run software companies You mean everybody who runs software companies then?
- gjm11 4y ago
  Bill Gates was a programmer and used to run Microsoft. Mark Zuckerberg was a programmer and still runs Meta/Facebook. Larry Ellison was a programmer and still runs Oracle. Maybe you're just pointing out that if you're running a company (beyond a certain size) you are probably spending all your time running the company and therefore aren't really a programmer any more. But isn't it obvious that Spolsky doesn't mean "person whose main activity is writing software" but "person who knows how to write software and has done a substantial amount of that"? Gates, Zuckerberg and Ellison are all programmers in that sense.
  - areyousure 4y ago
    Is Google/Alphabet a software company? Sundar does not know how to program.
    - VirusNewbie 4y ago
      He seems lost as well though.
    - myle 4y ago
      I don't understand this criticism. Sundar has technical background and great product vision. How many other people have been involved in so successful projects that define the industry like Chrome and Android? Indeed, Google has hired a lot of people with business background lately to operate large parts of it's business. We should, though, acknowledge that Google operates in many now mature markets where innovation plays secondary role to focusing on existing customer needs.

tomrod 4y ago

Interesting read. One point that sticks out: if you are an executive over a function, you need to have enough depth in the function to know when you're being fed a line versus receiving competency from your reports. One concept that can be a two-edged sword here is being "managed up" -- which many treat as an adversarial/cloak-and-dagger relationship with execs with a positive spin. In my thought, keeping this under control requires domain competency.

lazide 4y ago
It is essentially impossible to manage something if the person doesn’t understand the thing being managed - and by understand, I mean ‘knows how it works to to the point they can know when it’s bullshit, and when it’s real’. It doesn’t require being GOOD at the thing they are managing (anymore than it requires being a fast linebacker to be able to make someone fast and teach them how to be a good linebacker), but being decent sure helps. Sometimes being really good at the thing can make it nearly impossible to be a manager of others doing it, because while they’re good at the skill they don’t actually understand it. It comes naturally to them, so they never had to figure it out. Just like someone who is a fast linebacker may just be and is unable to explain to anyone how they do it. A VP/Executive is a level above managing it, as they need to be managing managers, ensuring decision making and prioritization is occurring in a way that produces the desired results, and setting the overall culture within an organization. Many times where problems occur is when someone gets promoted to a level where they are now over people who are doing things they don’t understand, or when skill sets and day to day work shifts out from under them and they lose that competency. ‘Managing up’ can be a cynical ploy for a middle manager to get what they want while not actually doing what the execs want. It can also be the process of ensuring the important details the executive needs are there, and they aren’t having their time wasted if a bunch of fluff that doesn’t matter to them. Which one it is depends a lot on the culture and how good the executive/VP and middle manager are.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  This is a popular idea among many people with domain expertise (in this case, developers), but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. By this standard, a CEO would need decent expertise in every aspect of running their business, which as a business scales becomes impossible. Businesses are collections of people and need to succeed as such. The whole point of hiring people is to grow the skills available to the business. If you know enough to micro-manage all your staff, you’re either not very senior or you hired poorly (or both). Management is more complicated than just fact-checking and BS-detection. In fact if you’re significantly worried about detecting BS by your staff, you already have a management problem.

segfaultbuserr 4y ago

> In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (you had to store values in cells on a worksheet), without locals, without subroutine calls: in short it was almost completely unmaintainable. It had advanced features like “Goto” but the labels were actually physically invisible. [...] I was supposed to come up with a solution to this problem. The implication was that the solution would have something to do with the Basic programming language. Basic? Yech! Take a look at this 4-minute video: Excel Magic. This engineer demonstrated the implementation of many sophisticated simulations, entirely in Excel, including flight simulators, orbital mechanics, digital signal processing, ray-tracing, heat transfer, chemical reaction dynamics, and more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9PLmtQZwmY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9PLmtQZwmY I don't know what to say... On one hand, I clearly understand that, due to the programmability with macros and VBA, the express power of Excel is as powerful as any "real" programming language, and in fact, a lot of real-world engineering calculations are indeed performed in Excel, the prevalence of Excel in engineering is almost terrifying. Imagine solving differential equations numerically using 10,000 cells in Excel, yes, it has been done! I respect their skills and achievements. On the other hand, it just looks painful to me, and feels like constructing a skyscraper using a toothpick.

buescher 4y ago
> Imagine solving differential equations numerically using 10,000 cells in Excel, yes, it has been done! There's a nice treatment of how to do this for simple heat transfer problems in Tony Kordyban's Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks. You will amaze and frustrate your co-workers. Excel is 100% the poor man's simulation package. I like Matlab and Simulink a lot better, and if I were 25 again I'd be a fool for Julia, but nothing beats it for sharing a simulation or other analysis with someone that doesn't have the same software you do on his or her computer.
- segfaultbuserr 4y ago
  > Tony Kordyban's Hot Air Rises and Heat Sinks It was a fun book, I don't remember the Excel modeling part though... I do remember seeing something similar on Microwaves101.com by The Unknown Editor... > The spreadsheet has 96 distance steps and 2000 time steps, or almost 100,000 cells. In the old days it would bring a computer to its knees when you changed a variable. Now it's almost instantaneous, however, it still measures 10MB. We will offer a zipped version of it in the download area, soon. https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/fourier-s-law https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/fourier-s-law

white_dragon88 4y ago

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deleted 4y ago

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ThePadawan 4y ago

Reminds me of one of the best technical interviews I had. This was for a C# position, and my future boss did this top-down approach with questions about Entity Framework. How do you write a query? What happens when you run that code (lazily vs. eagerly)? Why is the return type Like That? What are the advantages and disadvantages of that approach? Until we got into quite obscure questions about how the framework would interact with different database runtimes. (That interview was the most fun I had in that position)

timmyboop 4y ago
What do you have to do where you're in a position where you can answer questions at that level of detail?
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  Write code? No seriously, this was just a body leasing shop where I ended up working for a bank. So I sat around a lot and sometimes committed code for a CRUD C#/Angular web app.

tzs 4y ago

Speaking of excel, for casual Excel users, the video "You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky" [1] is worth a watch. My casual Excel use probably got an order of magnitude easier from it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

nerdponx 4y ago
I love this. Is there something like this for Word? And/or for the LibreOffice equivalents, which in many cases are a better user experience than the MS originals.
- dan-robertson 4y ago
  Excel is, in some sense, a programming language for (mostly) purely functional incremental computations with built in debugger that shows you most intermediate values. Word is not very much like that so the contents of such a thing would surely be different. I think the first tip is probably something like ‘create named styles instead of mutating the formatting of regions ad-hoc’.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    And the “copy formatting” tool and you’re basically done.
- duncans 4y ago
  Probably Scott Hanselman’s ‘How to REALLY use Microsoft Word’

gadders 4y ago

>> Over the years, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and some shady ethical decisions.. Those innocent times when we thought the worst ethical decisions that Bill G would make was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-bill-gates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/business/jeffrey-epstein-...

gjm11 4y ago
What that article says about Bill Gates is that on multiple occasions he had meetings with Jeffrey Epstein. Do you in fact think that that is ethically worse than using a huge company's monopoly power to stifle competition? It seems to me that the latter harmed a lot more people than the former, and in more concrete ways. For the avoidance of doubt: Jeffrey Epstein harmed some people very severely. But It looks to me as if he would have done pretty much the exact same harms if he had never met Bill Gates at all, and I don't see that Gates is significantly culpable for the harm that Epstein did. I think there is something badly wrong with any conception of morality according to which it is more important to cut off all contact with certain kinds of Bad People than it is not to do things that do actual substantial harm.
- gadders 4y ago
  I think the implication is that Jeffrey Epstein made available to his "friends" the services of under-age girls that were sex-trafficed. Is there concrete evidence that Bill Gates had relations with these girls? No. However, if he did then I would say that is worse than bundling two bits of software together, yes. If he didn't then, your view could be correct however I note that it is unlikely he was completely unaware of what was happening.
  - gjm11 4y ago
    From "Bill Gates had some meetings with Jeffrey Epstein" to "Bill Gates had sex with underage girls trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein" is ... quite a leap, no? I mean, enough of a leap that I don't see why anyone would make it. (In the absence of further evidence, that is. E.g., someone mentioned that allegedly Gates's acquaintanceship with Epstein was one reason for his divorce. Maybe that's nudge-nudge-wink-wink for "his wife divorced him because he was having sex with underage girls", since otherwise it seems like insufficient grounds for wanting a divorce. But this is all speculation founded on hearsay, and in any case the thing you originally linked to says no more than that Gates met with Epstein a few times.)

paxys 4y ago

As a developer, having a product manager and executive leadership with this level of technical depth is a dream.

endtime 4y ago
I recently joined Roblox, and the CEO will occasionally send emails with questions about caching strategy or API design or whatever. I found it a bit odd, coming from a much bigger company, but if that's what sounds good to you, we're hiring. :)

malthaus 4y ago

My take-away is that any of the other 4 hierarchy levels between joel and bill should have challenged & asked those questions already. When you already have 6 levels of hierarchy, is it really the job of the CEO to dig that deep on technical issues?

nearbuy 4y ago
Spot checking for important projects is a good way of making sure those other 4 hierarchy levels are doing their job well.
fasteo 4y ago
>>> is it really the job of the CEO to dig that deep on technical issues? From the post: >>> Later I had it explained to me. “Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control ...
justsomehnguy 4y ago
> other 4 hierarchy levels between joel and bill should have challenged & asked those questions already. Congratulations, you invented bureucracy. Because those 4 levels wouldn't (and most of the time - couldn't) answer those questions, so what they would do? Demand the lower level to answer it.
- bombcar 4y ago
  This results in Joel being told to review his own spec.
Tangurena2 4y ago
In far too many organizations, there is something called "the thermocline of truth". > A thermocline is a distinct temperature barrier between a surface layer of warmer water and the colder, deeper water underneath. It can exist in both lakes and oceans. A thermocline can prevent dissolved oxygen from getting to the lower layer and vital nutrients from getting to the upper layer. > In many large or even medium-sized IT projects, there exists a thermocline of truth, a line drawn across the organizational chart that represents a barrier to accurate information regarding the project’s progress. Those below this level tend to know how well the project is actually going; those above it tend to have a more optimistic (if unrealistic) view. In the more Machiavellian companies that I have worked for, this would be a layer on the org chart where truth stops flowing upwards. It may also affect downwards flow of information as well. The brass at the top don't know what is going on because they can't depend on the layers of management between the CxO tier and where work actually gets done. > is it really the job of the CEO to dig that deep on technical issues No. You - as CEO - should be able to trust the people in those layers. Maybe BillG didn't trust them. Or he didn't know how to. He was technically excellent enough to be able to do this sort of sanity check for himself. Perhaps, as CEO, you only need to do this sort of "quality control" check occasionally. Any organization that has been parasitized by narcissists is guaranteed to have at least one, and more likely several, layer(s) where truth must stop flowing in order to (1) protect the narcissists' egos and (2) to protect the organization from their anger & retaliation. [0] - https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...

geoelkh 4y ago

Like a good movie, every time I ready this, I enjoy reading it :)