My First BillG Review (2006)
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My First BillG Review (2006)
1–10 of 14 posts
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#2Looks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett share another thing in common: voracious reading habits
http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000251628
Seems like 500 pages/week is the magic number
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#3Looks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett share another thing in common: voracious reading habits http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000251628 Seems like 500 pages/week is the magic number
any ideas what point in their career they started this?
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#4Ex Excel PM here. Funny enough that spec still exists and it's kind of cool to be able to review them. Over the years my experience was that PM got less and less technical which was frustrating. The Excel team somehow had remained one of the more technical teams in Office (probablly across Microsoft) but definitely saw a tendency to hire less technical and more product management (marketing) style folks. The devs, specially the old school ones who had been on the team for 15+ years kept the tradition of ripping specs to shreds (in a good way). I used to tell new hires it's a shark tank you will be fine unless somebody smells blood.
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#5""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."
I hope nobody is reading this as sage management advice. It is in fact a management anti-pattern.
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#6""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." I hope nobody is reading this as sage management advice. It is in fact a management anti-pattern.
Given the evidence, I wouldn't be so quick to judge. Sure it wouldn't be fun to work for someone like that, but look at the results.
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#7Note to mods: there should be a year label in the title (2006).
(Is there a more formal way of requesting this?)
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#8Excel was always special, I heard they even wrote their own C compiler.
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#9""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." I hope nobody is reading this as sage management advice. It is in fact a management anti-pattern.
It sounds a lot like the 'brown M&Ms' heuristic translated to a management style. A strategy grown organically out of a chaotic environment, born out of the need to operate effectively with incomplete information and the inability to properly delegate.
It's not something you can abstract and make into a general management principle because it's effectively a hack. The culture of Microsoft allowed Bill to do this, whereas anyone else in any other organization would have not been able to employ it effectively.
Re: My First BillG Review (2006)
#10Excel was always special, I heard they even wrote their own C compiler.
Joel mentions that fact in another article, "Find the dependencies - and eliminate them" : http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html