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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."
Linux?
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
...And we can be sure he gets to hear a lot of dumb ideas.
But why greenlight them, bill?
you had me at #!
I wouldn't last very long at Microsoft, by the sounds of it.
"that's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft."
And 'Clippy' was a great idea?
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?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
After a State Dept. staffer turned in their first report to the big boss, it would frequently come back with a scrawled note indicating it was totally unacceptable, slipshod work, etc. The staffer would go back and spend the next couple weeks furiously researching and revising before submitting a completely rewritten draft. Back would come the comment that it was "not good enough -- should be much more thorough". After another three weeks of research, the staffer would add a cover letter to the latest rewrite begging the boss to specify where the report fell short, since the staffer had now spent practically all of their waking hours over the past two months working on it, etc.
"In that case", Kissinger would say, "I'll read it".
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!
Reminded me of Joel on Software's first BillG review and how he handled it.
"And Bill Gates isn't even the CEO of Microsoft anymore. He is the chairman."
I thought steve ("I'll fucking bury them") is the "chair-man" ...
Bill Gates' dad is a lawyer. He came from a family where "cross-examination" in a legal sense probably went on from time to time (i.e. questioning a hostile witness). It sounds like he was inculcated with the culture.
Also, when dealing with judges, particularly when the witnesses or jury are out of the room, lawyers can face something that can be pretty similar to what was described here. So, ok, it's hard on the computer scientists, but welcome to what lawyers get to deal with all the time. It's an accepted practice.
Long and short of it--make sure your thinking is done BEFORE you present. Otherwise, as is to be expected, you're toast, whether the "toasting" is done by the CEO or a judge.
True enough. Though if you found this article interesting, you should try reading Barbarians Led by Bill Gates. It's an insider's perspective on the going-ons inside of Microsoft in the early days. It's especially freaky to learn that they started coding much of Windows in BASIC. (Which I suppose comes as no surprise given that the Microsoft of the time was known as "the BASIC company".) Just like in this article, Gates was described as the King of the Hill with whom very few of the developers wanted to tangle.
:-P
A particularly amusing anecdote was when the author was working on a clock application for Windows. He found the BASIC flood-fill routine to be buggy and quite poor, and set about to rewrite it. He then headed for Gates' office to tell him that he wanted to replace the existing flood-fill routine "because it was crap". (Or something to that effect.) Some of his coworkers tried to warn him off, but he headed straight in and showed off his work to Gates. After forcefully championing his work to Gates, Gates agreed to allow the fix. As he came out of Gates' office beaming, one of the coworkers said to him, "You know who wrote the original flood-fill routine, don't you?"
Yep, it was Gates. And the author had just told him that his code was crap to his face. Doh!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
There's a distinct difference between expecting someone to champion their project and being a bully and abusing them verbally. Telling every person that their project idea is "the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft." is just being downright mean. Especially when you just glare at them coldly after they defend themselves (as the article points out).
And then you get people who'll imitate the behavior without the smarts to back it up, so it becomes nothing BUT abuse. (Middle management for example.) I think Bill's management technique explains a lot about Microsoft's behavior over the years and why they're so disliked in the technical community. In fact looking back at how MS acted during their two biggest trials (the US anti-trust and EU anti-trust) you can see this "bullying" all over the place. Acting like a bully when you're the defendant in court is not a good idea. It'll just piss the judge (and possibly the jury) off, and they're the ones passing judgment on you.
Besides, it's not like this technique has worked incredibly well for MS, especially in areas like security. MS has also put out some really lousy stuff over the years, like MS Bob, that were apparently "championed" all the way to release, then bombed. Maybe if Bill had developed a culture less focused on bullying they could have avoided some of those things, and saved money. When you force every one of your employees to defend their projects in such a manner then how many are going to be willing to listen when people point out problems with them? You can't have any second doubts if you have to defend your projects constantly, so people will stop listening to any criticism, leading to lower quality all around.
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." --Bertrand Russell
It was a test. And you failed. All of us.
Like I was telling my daughter yesterday, the appropriate thing to do when you meet such a person is to drill them in the nose with your knuckles as hard as you can, unless they outweigh you by a significant margin, in which case you should hit them with a chair until they crumple to the ground.
This is how you deal with bullies.
You certainly don't turn yourself one after another into his bitch and make him rich as reward for his antisocial behavior.
I bet Bill wears an "Everything I needed to take over the world, I learned from the bully in kindergarten" T-shirt to bed as a nightie.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Don't let me get in the way of everyone's dogmatic Gates-hate, but Linus Torvalds operates in a similar way.
"I'm always right. This time I'm just even more right than usual." Torvalds, Linus (2005-07-14). Message to linux-kernel mailing list. Retrieved on 2006-08-28.
"If you still don't like it, that's ok: that's why I'm boss. I simply know better than you do." Torvalds, Linus (1996-07-22). Post to comp.os.linux.advocacy newsgroup. Retrieved on 2006-08-28.
That's all, return to your ranting.
billg: "that's the dumbest fucking idea i've heard..."
presenter: "this is madness!"
billg: "THIS IS MICROSOFT!!!" *looks at steveb and points to a chair*
Some people use this as a way to gauge the competency of the presenter.
Or he could just be an asshole.
This parable illustrates how personal defects get in the way of quality. If the code is crap, the code is crap, no matter who wrote it. If politics or sensitive egos block improvements, quality suffers. Compare EgolessProgramming.
This "my code is perfect" attitude is alive and well. A friend of mine started a new job recently and found that his boss:
you had me at #!
When billg says, "That's the dumbest fucking idea I've heard since I've been at Microsoft," what you should reply is, "Bullshit, how could it be any dumber than a talking paper clip?"
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
Forget it. The chair would get to within a foot of Bill's nose before being parried by Darth Balmer's lighting counterstrike. Bill would then begin a wide gaped laughing as their pair of you batter each other back and forth across the meeting room to a backdrop of animated powerpoint slides and starfield screensavers.
Two important facts stand against you
1) Balmer is not related to you
2) There are no impossibly deep shafts nearby.
Even if your friends managed to get the firewalls down, how are they going to get all the way into the heart of Redmond campus to save your fallen ass? You gave into your anger. Such is the reward of the dark side.
May the Maths Be with you!
"French" and "Fries" worked together? Who knew?