Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates' Management Style
replicant108 wrote in to give us Tom Evslin's fascinating account of working for Microsoft in the early 90s. "So you're in there presenting your product plan to billg, steveb, and mikemap. Billg typically has his eyes closed and he's rocking back and forth. He could be asleep; he could be thinking about something else; he could be listening intently to everything you're saying. The trouble is all are possible and you don't know which. Obviously, you have to present as if he were listening intently even though you know he isn't looking at the PowerPoint slides you spent so much time on.
At some point in your presentation billg will say "that's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." He looks like he means it. However, since you knew he was going to say this, you can't really let it faze you. Moreover, you can't afford to look fazed; remember: he's a bully."
The most important thing to have for any project is a CHAMPION. So if you aren't ready to champion your own idea then you are wasting everybody's time.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
No wonder he's ####ing good at poker.
Oh, go see 'Pirates of Silicon Valley'. You'll enjoy it.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
This is usually the problem within any organization - people with good ideas but bad presentation skills can either develop the ideas and ask forgiveness later or forget about the whole idea unless they can get the idea to someone that's a good presenter.
It will be far better management style to actually give constructive criticism, but that is also a lot harder.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Maybe you should've spent less time on the PowerPoint slides and more time thinking about how your idea was going to (figuratively) grab Billg around the throat and shake him until he said, "That's the best idea I've ever heard since I've been here at Microsoft."
I mean, shit, do you really think you're going to impress the CEO of Microsoft with a PowerPoint presentation, of all things?
I've worked with bosses like that. Presuming you could impress them, they'd never let you know it. They still tell you your idea sucks and that you suck and that they don't understand why they hired you in the first place. They wish you were dead, sock you in the gut, etc. They're bullies. That's the point of the article, I think.In general, however, I don't know if this story is an example of 'billg' so much as it is an example of asshole bosses, of which there are legions.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
msshill: "So Bill, this world wide web thing is really starting to take off in the academic world. I think it's time we started making our own browser and include it with all installs of Windows."
billg: "That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft."
Yep, sounds about right...
This guy's the limit!
Sounds like he handled it like a teenage girl meeting her pop idol.
Only, being naive and not realising this was just challenge #101, I left, joined a small company which just grew and grew, then left after a difference of opinion with the CEO, then joined a startup which just grew and grew. Interestingly, our CEO is able to motivate people without a single swearword.
It's nice for Microsoft that it is so big and all, but (as Scott Adams notes somewhere, I think) all the really smart people prefer to live in Switzerland as compared to the US, i.e. to live somewhere where even politics is truly local and individualism is valued versus somewhere where the driving forces in society are completely out of your control and individualism is just having a different alignment of ballpoints in the pocket protector.
It must have been really exciting and creative to work for Microsoft - once. Perhaps some of the pent up anger in the founders, if it is reported accurately, is simply because, even for them, it's no fun anymore.
Pining for the fjords
That story of the Flood-fill rewrite makes Billg sound like a great manager. So does being the richest guy in the world...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Some people use this as a way to gauge the competency of the presenter.
Or he could just be an asshole.
....is not an interesting problem to solve.
It's hard to argue that Gates' persistent bullying was anything but good for shareholders for at least the first 13 years of public trading. Even though the stock price has been relatively stagnant for the past few years, revenue and profit growth are proof that the company still has healthy numbers.
However, anyone considering working there needs to ask themselves what they really want to accomplish in life. Looking back, it can't be very fulfilling to say "I helped make that company successful. I fit in, by emulating the bullying, belittling style of my bosses all the way to the top, and now look what we've created!"
There are plenty of companies out there (*cough* [1]) who are trying to be successful while actually also having the kind of environment where you look forward to seeing the people you work with. Having hippy-dippy ideals creates plenty of problems, but they are way more interesting problems than the problems you find at a company like Microsoft.
1. Shameless plug
>> Exchange Server did more to make email a reality for corporates than any other product.
Not at all.
Many companies had unix-based email WAAY before Exchange even came out. Then when it did, some non-technical higher-up usually decides the company should 'upgrade' to Microsoft exchange.
I've been at several companies where exactly this happened and exactly the same result too: Before the upgrade, we had an email system that just worked, and never needed any maintenance. After we switched, we needed to hire a whole office of support staff to deal with the day-to-day issues of ongoing Exchange problems.
I'm always surprised how long its taken them to come round to moving back to Unix/Linux solutions, but they all did in the end.
This isn't comparable to what Gates is doing in the article. According to that Gates would tell everyone that their idea was "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." and didn't really mean it. He was saying it simply to make the presenter defend their idea, not saying "you're wrong and we're not going to do it that way". In both of the above quotes Linus is seems to be saying that he's right and that they will be doing it his way.
Linus could certainly be more tactful with how he worded those things, but I do note a distinct lack of cussing and (at the least) less drastic hyperbole. And how about some context to those quotes? On the second one at least I found you left off a bit before that that makes the whole thing much less worse than it sounds: "In short, at least give the penguin a fair viewing. If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." I don't think it's unreasonable for Linus to be taking that attitude about the mascot that will define the OS that he created. He was apparently listening to input on it anyway, more than you can say for most people in that situation.
I think it's because many people who reach a high management position within a company didn't get there by placing the needs of the company before their own career. At that level it's more about politics and self-promotion than it is about performance. I'm sure that these difficult bosses are considered great guys by the people whose asses are being kissed.