7 ms·

This reminds me of my experience with Microsoft very early in my career. Way back when MS was working on Windows 1.0, I was working for a start up company and w

This reminds me of my experience with Microsoft very early in my career. Way back when MS was working on Windows 1.0, I was working for a start up company and we were developing network management software for SNA Networks and Mainframes. It was very advanced for the day and used a GUI but was done on Mainframe computers and terminals. The company sold out to IBM and I chose to take the money and run. A friend of mine referred me to MS because they needed people with graphics experience. So I met with one of the team leaders and went over and talked with them. At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me. They offered me a job but it was less money in terms of salary than another offer I had from a Fortune 500 company, but at the time MS had a great stock option plan, but I felt that was worthless based on my brilliant analysis of their prospects. So I took the safe bet. I tell this story occasionally to younger people who are trying to decide about what to do in terms of career choices. Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Just my view from the cheap seats.

AceJohnny2 12y ago
> Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. It's really just dumb luck. One thinks one can extract a lesson from this hindsight, but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it? > Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Absolutely.
- TheAnimus 12y ago
  >but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it? Sometimes I think people look at where a company is, rather than it's direction, it's velocity.
- zw123456 12y ago
  True true. But if it is all dumb luck, then what the F, do want you want. I guess that was my point.
  - TheSOB888 12y ago
    Did you want the MS job? I mean, I could figure out how to make things overlap without repainting, and I'm a 4-year-old child.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      Could you draw overlapping things without repainting using 1985 technology? That is, an IBM PC running at 4.77 MHz; with 128 KB of ram (or 640 KB if you're lucky). The OS would have been dos at something like version 2.x Some people[1] used Wordstar as their text editor. You had limited multitasking -- TSRs maybe. I'm not sure what programming language they used but possibly Microsoft C and assembly. [1] http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/windows1/ http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/windows1/
      - csixty4 12y ago
        To add a little more color to this, you had to be able to quickly repaint just a region of a window. And you don't have a bitmap of the window's current contents because that takes up RAM and you'd need CPU time to update a copy every time the window updates (slowing down any animations). I don't know how it's handled these days, but when I was first playing around with Win32, you'd receive events telling you a region of your window was invalidated. You were expected to figure out what controls and images belonged in that region and just repaint those items because of the CPU load.
        lilred 12y ago
        I'm pretty sure Java's Swing uses a similar approach.
        wmf 12y ago
vram22 12y ago
This reminds of me of an image I used to have as my desktop computer background. Lost it later and the closest I found was this, so I added the same motto (that the image had) at the bottom of my post: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/11/alley-in-park-bucharest-romania.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/11/alley-in-park-bucharest-ro...
- veb 12y ago
  This is a variant of the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" if you didn't know! :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Taking_the_road_less_traveled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Taking_the_road_less_...
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Apparently this poem is not meant to encourage taking that less traveled road. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken#Analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken#Analysis Also, reminds me of my favourite variant of this quote: "Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less traveled, and had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me." ( from http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ )
    - rquantz 12y ago
      This. I wish I were not someone who had pet peeves, but this is one of them. People quoting maxims from great literature that are meant ironically. Robert Frost seems particularly prone to it. See also "good fences make good neighbors." And Shakespeare of course - this applies to everything Polonius said, for instance: "neither a barrower not a lender be," and that old favorite, "to thine own self be true."
      - phaemon 12y ago
        In what way is "neither a borrower nor a lender be" ironic?
npsimons 12y ago
Maybe I'm too conservative, but just looking at it from a "cool thing to work on perspective" I would have turned it down as well. I mean, seriously, you tell me a story about how a company offers you a job reinventing a wheel from a previous job, and that company later turns out to be the one in a million that made it on dumb luck and marketing, and you expect the takeaway to be "work for a technologically backwards company for low pay because, hey, they might be successful someday!"? It sounds like you did exactly what excites you: you passed up repeating work from a previous job.
- zw123456 12y ago
  That was an aspect of it, one of the things that I had started at NSI and got cut short when they sold out to Big Blue (and PG would love this) was AI Expert System for Network diagnostics using a Symbolics computer using OPS5. I was convinced at the time that would be the next thing after the GUI. But if I had to be completely honest, a huge part of it (80%) is I just thought they had no chance of making it.
bch 12y ago
> the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path... @AceJohnny2 started to touch on this, but them seemed to retreat(?), but: I can't find "wisdom" anywhere in that scenario -- some seem to think that making a mistake is -- making a mistake -- which is hilarious because people cheer for articles or philosophies of plowing through the business landscape making mistakes and pivoting until something "sticks". With the information you had, you made the best decision you could. The lesson is "sometimes people are wrong", or "I had a near-miss w/ success/failure", or "there's no way anybody could have predicted X, and I witnessed part of it." Your experience (I don't mean to diminish anything) is an anecdote.
- zw123456 12y ago
  I agree completely. I do not view it as a mistake (although it seems like everyone else does). It was just the path I took. And I went on and got to work on a lot of other very cool projects and did very well for myself as a result, just not "early MS money" well.
dsugarman 12y ago
I think what is really interesting in your story is that you directly had a lot of the knowledge and tools to fix the part that you felt was severely lacking in Microsoft's product. Was that the only reason you felt MS was doomed? I would definitely recommend to anyone who feels they can be the missing piece to be that missing piece.
- marktangotango 12y ago
  My thoughts on this are: The op's perception could've been that they weren't very capable (since they didn't have solution to a fundamental problem (dirty rectangles?)) and, going in somewhere and being a savior is not something I'd want to do, that's large burden to bear.
PhasmaFelis 12y ago
I think this sort of illustrates the flaw in the reasoning of the original post. No one could have looked at Altair BASIC and seen Microsoft, because Microsoft didn't grow out of Altair BASIC. They grew out of canny marketing and business decisions and dumb luck. Their shitty software had nothing to do with it. If someone can proverbially sell ice to Eskimos, it's not because ice is great stuff.
maxxxxx 12y ago
I took the risky choice twice and it didn't work out. I think it's just a gamble especially if you are an employee. As a founder you have more influence.
- wanderingstan 12y ago
  Whenever I get to berating myself for missed opportunities (probably biggest was turning town a job at FB in 2007) I try to also think of the right gambles I've avoided: turned town early positions at 2 failed search engines, turned down job at Yahoo in 2005, etc... I find those smart choices don't come to mind as easily as the missed big opportunity choices, so I have to work to keep them in mind too.
  - vezzy-fnord 12y ago
    Out of curiosity, why would you characterize avoiding Yahoo! as a right gamble? Were they in a really tumultuous period at the time? While not particularly hip, they're still probably the hugest company to survive the dot-com bubble.
  - onejoe 12y ago
    Whenever I entertain the "employee #N" daydream, I fantasize that I might have negatively altered the trajectory of the company: butterfly effect and all that. By hiring me, they might have missed out on hiring engineer X, who sneezed one day at lunch and gave designer Y a cold, who became inspired to doodle a graphic while out sick, which subconsciously cheered up a key customer prospect because of something his daughter said that day, which leans him towards signing a big contract, and that made all the difference. Or perhaps it was a more direct action or inaction of mine that changed the course of history. Is the success of an endeavor highly sensitive to small perturbations in the timeline? I'm guessing most of us don't buy into the mythology of the all-powerful Idea and Founders. Every employee and action matters. The details matter. If I could go back in time and swap in for employee #8 at MS, it would probably no longer be the MS we know. Or perhaps we wouldn't know of it at all. Perhaps best not to sweat these missed opportunities, and instead keep making whatever we're doing right now the next MS, or whatever you define as outrageous success.
trhway 12y ago
>At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me. while it feels somewhat paradoxical, reinvention of the wheel has been an extremely efficient way to move the industry forward. Probably because it is an effective way to subterfuge the incumbents, and incumbents are the most significant obstacle on the way forward.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
One thing that took me the longest to figure out was the value of half-assed work. It's actually possible to build things of value with enough half-assed work. I think that's one of the ideas behind the "worse is better" philosophy. Sure, it will take orders of magnitude more man-hours, and sure the end-result won't be nearly as elegant and perhaps not as robust as if something else created by a super talented team. But not everything needs to be created by "rockstars", sometimes you just need stuff that works well enough after a sufficient application of development effort.
- holri 12y ago
  Maybe, but that is not what makes a good engineer happy. And if happiness is the goal of live instead of richness in money "worse is better" is the wrong philosophy.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    That aspect of "worse is better", certainly. But work isn't about just being happy all the time, it's about doing work to acquire skills and experience as well as income. There is a range of acceptable levels of enjoyment at work and there's often a tradeoff with other factors. Grueling work might still be enjoyable if you have a great boss, great coworkers, and the work forces you to better yourself and provides useful experience or great, positive value to end users. Looking at a company in the early stages while they are flailing around a lot and half-assing things a lot and forming a distinctly negative opinion can sometimes be erroneous. Sometimes it's worthwhile to join an endeavor like that precisely because you'll have the opportunity to improve things so much. And perhaps there might be a lot of money to be made along the way as well. There is a degree of unpleasantness in some jobs which is so poisonous that one should escape as rapidly as possible no matter the financial opportunity cost (personally I walked away from a 6 figure income plus nearly 6 figures in bonuses and stock just to get out of such a job) but there are also many jobs that, while challenging and at times excruciatingly stressful, are still worth it for the RoI. There are tons and tons of folks who put in 5 or 10 years at Microsoft during the chaotic early years and then got rich enough to be able to go off and not only retire but indulge their interests, start new companies, etc. Let us remember that we are here chatting on HN because PG sold his company to the quintessential collection of half-assers in tech history: Yahoo.
8ig8 12y ago
Great comment and awesome HN bio. Instantly made me feel good after a tough stretch. Thanks. > A 58 year old hacker. 5 failed start ups, now work for a really really big company. eh, oh well.

AceJohnny2 12y ago

> Sometimes the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path. It is no guarantee of success, but neither is taking the safe choice. It's really just dumb luck. One thinks one can extract a lesson from this hindsight, but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it? > Do what excites you and put your energy into that. Absolutely.

TheAnimus 12y ago
>but how was the situation that led to your decision any different than the 99 other startups that were just as lame but didn't make it? Sometimes I think people look at where a company is, rather than it's direction, it's velocity.
zw123456 12y ago
True true. But if it is all dumb luck, then what the F, do want you want. I guess that was my point.
- TheSOB888 12y ago
  Did you want the MS job? I mean, I could figure out how to make things overlap without repainting, and I'm a 4-year-old child.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    Could you draw overlapping things without repainting using 1985 technology? That is, an IBM PC running at 4.77 MHz; with 128 KB of ram (or 640 KB if you're lucky). The OS would have been dos at something like version 2.x Some people[1] used Wordstar as their text editor. You had limited multitasking -- TSRs maybe. I'm not sure what programming language they used but possibly Microsoft C and assembly. [1] http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/windows1/ http://www.charlespetzold.com/etc/windows1/
    - csixty4 12y ago
      To add a little more color to this, you had to be able to quickly repaint just a region of a window. And you don't have a bitmap of the window's current contents because that takes up RAM and you'd need CPU time to update a copy every time the window updates (slowing down any animations). I don't know how it's handled these days, but when I was first playing around with Win32, you'd receive events telling you a region of your window was invalidated. You were expected to figure out what controls and images belonged in that region and just repaint those items because of the CPU load.
      - lilred 12y ago
        I'm pretty sure Java's Swing uses a similar approach.
        wmf 12y ago

vram22 12y ago

This reminds of me of an image I used to have as my desktop computer background. Lost it later and the closest I found was this, so I added the same motto (that the image had) at the bottom of my post: http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/11/alley-in-park-bucharest-romania.html http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2014/11/alley-in-park-bucharest-ro...

veb 12y ago
This is a variant of the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken" if you didn't know! :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Taking_the_road_less_traveled http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Taking_the_road_less_...
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Apparently this poem is not meant to encourage taking that less traveled road. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken#Analysis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken#Analysis Also, reminds me of my favourite variant of this quote: "Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less traveled, and had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me." ( from http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/xm/building_weirdtopia/ )
  - rquantz 12y ago
    This. I wish I were not someone who had pet peeves, but this is one of them. People quoting maxims from great literature that are meant ironically. Robert Frost seems particularly prone to it. See also "good fences make good neighbors." And Shakespeare of course - this applies to everything Polonius said, for instance: "neither a barrower not a lender be," and that old favorite, "to thine own self be true."
    - phaemon 12y ago
      In what way is "neither a borrower nor a lender be" ironic?

npsimons 12y ago

Maybe I'm too conservative, but just looking at it from a "cool thing to work on perspective" I would have turned it down as well. I mean, seriously, you tell me a story about how a company offers you a job reinventing a wheel from a previous job, and that company later turns out to be the one in a million that made it on dumb luck and marketing, and you expect the takeaway to be "work for a technologically backwards company for low pay because, hey, they might be successful someday!"? It sounds like you did exactly what excites you: you passed up repeating work from a previous job.

zw123456 12y ago
That was an aspect of it, one of the things that I had started at NSI and got cut short when they sold out to Big Blue (and PG would love this) was AI Expert System for Network diagnostics using a Symbolics computer using OPS5. I was convinced at the time that would be the next thing after the GUI. But if I had to be completely honest, a huge part of it (80%) is I just thought they had no chance of making it.

bch 12y ago

> the wiser choice is to take the risk and follow the more exciting path... @AceJohnny2 started to touch on this, but them seemed to retreat(?), but: I can't find "wisdom" anywhere in that scenario -- some seem to think that making a mistake is -- making a mistake -- which is hilarious because people cheer for articles or philosophies of plowing through the business landscape making mistakes and pivoting until something "sticks". With the information you had, you made the best decision you could. The lesson is "sometimes people are wrong", or "I had a near-miss w/ success/failure", or "there's no way anybody could have predicted X, and I witnessed part of it." Your experience (I don't mean to diminish anything) is an anecdote.

zw123456 12y ago
I agree completely. I do not view it as a mistake (although it seems like everyone else does). It was just the path I took. And I went on and got to work on a lot of other very cool projects and did very well for myself as a result, just not "early MS money" well.

dsugarman 12y ago

I think what is really interesting in your story is that you directly had a lot of the knowledge and tools to fix the part that you felt was severely lacking in Microsoft's product. Was that the only reason you felt MS was doomed? I would definitely recommend to anyone who feels they can be the missing piece to be that missing piece.

marktangotango 12y ago
My thoughts on this are: The op's perception could've been that they weren't very capable (since they didn't have solution to a fundamental problem (dirty rectangles?)) and, going in somewhere and being a savior is not something I'd want to do, that's large burden to bear.

PhasmaFelis 12y ago

I think this sort of illustrates the flaw in the reasoning of the original post. No one could have looked at Altair BASIC and seen Microsoft, because Microsoft didn't grow out of Altair BASIC. They grew out of canny marketing and business decisions and dumb luck. Their shitty software had nothing to do with it. If someone can proverbially sell ice to Eskimos, it's not because ice is great stuff.

maxxxxx 12y ago

I took the risky choice twice and it didn't work out. I think it's just a gamble especially if you are an employee. As a founder you have more influence.

wanderingstan 12y ago
Whenever I get to berating myself for missed opportunities (probably biggest was turning town a job at FB in 2007) I try to also think of the right gambles I've avoided: turned town early positions at 2 failed search engines, turned down job at Yahoo in 2005, etc... I find those smart choices don't come to mind as easily as the missed big opportunity choices, so I have to work to keep them in mind too.
- vezzy-fnord 12y ago
  Out of curiosity, why would you characterize avoiding Yahoo! as a right gamble? Were they in a really tumultuous period at the time? While not particularly hip, they're still probably the hugest company to survive the dot-com bubble.
- onejoe 12y ago
  Whenever I entertain the "employee #N" daydream, I fantasize that I might have negatively altered the trajectory of the company: butterfly effect and all that. By hiring me, they might have missed out on hiring engineer X, who sneezed one day at lunch and gave designer Y a cold, who became inspired to doodle a graphic while out sick, which subconsciously cheered up a key customer prospect because of something his daughter said that day, which leans him towards signing a big contract, and that made all the difference. Or perhaps it was a more direct action or inaction of mine that changed the course of history. Is the success of an endeavor highly sensitive to small perturbations in the timeline? I'm guessing most of us don't buy into the mythology of the all-powerful Idea and Founders. Every employee and action matters. The details matter. If I could go back in time and swap in for employee #8 at MS, it would probably no longer be the MS we know. Or perhaps we wouldn't know of it at all. Perhaps best not to sweat these missed opportunities, and instead keep making whatever we're doing right now the next MS, or whatever you define as outrageous success.

trhway 12y ago

>At the time, Windows was very very primitive, they had not yet figured out how to make the windows overlap and re-paint (which we had figured out a long time before that). I actually felt sorry for them at the time because I just could not imagine how they would ever catch up with Apple, the Mac was just so much more advanced. It seemed to me like there was no doubt that they would be out of business in a few years completely replaced by Apple, it was just so obvious at the time to me. while it feels somewhat paradoxical, reinvention of the wheel has been an extremely efficient way to move the industry forward. Probably because it is an effective way to subterfuge the incumbents, and incumbents are the most significant obstacle on the way forward.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

One thing that took me the longest to figure out was the value of half-assed work. It's actually possible to build things of value with enough half-assed work. I think that's one of the ideas behind the "worse is better" philosophy. Sure, it will take orders of magnitude more man-hours, and sure the end-result won't be nearly as elegant and perhaps not as robust as if something else created by a super talented team. But not everything needs to be created by "rockstars", sometimes you just need stuff that works well enough after a sufficient application of development effort.

holri 12y ago
Maybe, but that is not what makes a good engineer happy. And if happiness is the goal of live instead of richness in money "worse is better" is the wrong philosophy.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  That aspect of "worse is better", certainly. But work isn't about just being happy all the time, it's about doing work to acquire skills and experience as well as income. There is a range of acceptable levels of enjoyment at work and there's often a tradeoff with other factors. Grueling work might still be enjoyable if you have a great boss, great coworkers, and the work forces you to better yourself and provides useful experience or great, positive value to end users. Looking at a company in the early stages while they are flailing around a lot and half-assing things a lot and forming a distinctly negative opinion can sometimes be erroneous. Sometimes it's worthwhile to join an endeavor like that precisely because you'll have the opportunity to improve things so much. And perhaps there might be a lot of money to be made along the way as well. There is a degree of unpleasantness in some jobs which is so poisonous that one should escape as rapidly as possible no matter the financial opportunity cost (personally I walked away from a 6 figure income plus nearly 6 figures in bonuses and stock just to get out of such a job) but there are also many jobs that, while challenging and at times excruciatingly stressful, are still worth it for the RoI. There are tons and tons of folks who put in 5 or 10 years at Microsoft during the chaotic early years and then got rich enough to be able to go off and not only retire but indulge their interests, start new companies, etc. Let us remember that we are here chatting on HN because PG sold his company to the quintessential collection of half-assers in tech history: Yahoo.

8ig8 12y ago

Great comment and awesome HN bio. Instantly made me feel good after a tough stretch. Thanks. > A 58 year old hacker. 5 failed start ups, now work for a really really big company. eh, oh well.