My review with Bill Gates
An awesome firsthand account of a review with Bill G:
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. 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.""Can you imagine if Jim Manzi had been in that meeting?" someone asked. "'What's a date function?' Manzi would have asked."
Jim Manzi was the MBA-type running Lotus into the ground.
It was a good point. Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn't meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn't bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer.
Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching someone who doesn't know how to surf trying to surf.
"It's ok! I have great advisors standing on the shore telling me what to do!" they say, and then fall off the board, again and again. The standard cry of the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don't understand.
You know, in the same way, I wonder how the guys that run, really run, Monster and HotJobs and CareerBuilder can run those organizations without really and truly understanding the customer. Reading the customer email. Responding to customers. Watching the interactions on the site between recruiters and job-seekers.
Because without truly understanding the guts of what you produce -- whether it be software design, or productive recruiting interactions -- it's impossible to make it better.
Thanks to Kocher for the link.
