The Day I Played Bill Gates and Satya at Ping-Pong | Hacker News Reader

The Day I Played Bill Gates and Satya at Ping-Pong

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95 pointsyinso27 comments

"Leadership is a privilege that can easily be taken away. The talented people who work for me have a plenty of options and can leave at any moment. I therefore treat them like unpaid volunteers"

Interesting perspective.

I don't really understand what he means by this. Just beacuse you're choosing to have a certain job, or because you can leave, it doesn't mean you're not entitled to compensation. If that were true, anyone with any choice of job wouldn't receive a wage in exchange for his labour power.

Of course the people under him get paid (perhaps not by Satya himself), so what does he mean? That the leadership is unpaid? One would expect that leadership means a higher paid position, because leaders are applying a more specialised labour.

Am I looking at this the wrong way round, or being obtuse?

I think what he means is you need to be thankful for their contribution and try to make it fun for them.

In the sense that when you run a volunteer organisation you want to keep people coming back

Satya Is says that he wants to make his employees jobs fulfilling enough that people would want to do it. He's not really discussing pay at all. Of course he's getting paid and they are getting paid.

So I've worked near corporate people who obviously hated their jobs. Being in a team with such people is not a good thing for you or the project.

Similarly I was part of a volunteer team that formed ad-hoc to save a huge programing contest. Every person was there because they wanted to be there. It was a whole lot of fun and an effective team.

I think it means "treat them as well as you'd treat a volunteer doing the same job". The contrapositive (which I've actually had thrown at me in a past job) is "your employees get paid to do their job, they deserve no thanks beyond that".

It means Satya has a privilege to be the leader, but that can be denied by his people if they leave, because there are plenty of opportunities, so that's why he treats them with extra respect - un unpaid volunteer is a way of saying the people are doing him a favor.

Satya was also more accessible than his predecessor and would meet with anyone in his division for 10 minutes on Fridays.

I imagine Satya no longer has this policy as CEO. Are there any division head level or higher execs in Microsoft which copied this policy? I imagine it works best as a mid-level manager where there are at least 50-100 people below you but not 10's of thousands.

This generally works out well no matter how big the number or reports.

People realize that there's x people reporting to you, and tend to be very careful about deciding to bring something to you. If someone wastes his time it looks bad on them.

> We were cautioned beforehand not to embarrass him

I would hope Bill Gates doesn't have such a delicate ego that he couldn't handle losing a game a ping pong

Seems odd, given that he played Magnus Carlson at speed Chess on live TV with a time handicap, and seemed pretty unsurprised and self deprecating when he lost in like 7 moves.

It probably is more fun for everyone if you make it look interesting for a few minutes.

Here's the game - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0QdI0rVoHA

My old boss low-key used to be on the Indian national ping pong team. So when some local businesses had a charity tournament (with betting system as well). Over 100 contenders signed up. I put all my money on him and watched as he played 100% defensively, relying on unforced errors to advance, always returning playable balls - not slamming them. He made it all the way to the finals and beat his worthy opponent handily, again via unforced errors only. No one was embarrassed!

How much did you make? :D

I just played against my housemate who used to be a junior-national level player, he did the same just replying 100% of my returns but not slamming them.

I asked him to play 100% and he won every point first return or serve.

You know someone's good when they win every game. You know someone's REALLY good when they just don't lose and let you play until you mess up.

This was also the Eric Sink approach to running his business:

The principle

The thing I find most interesting about Ping Pong is that you can often win without doing anything fancy or aggressive. A lot of players think the way to win is to slam the ball really hard. The problem with this strategy is that a slam is a high-risk/high-reward shot. If you do it right, you almost certainly score a point when your opponent fails to return the ball. If you do it wrong, you give your opponent a point.

Modesty aside, I consider myself a "pretty good" Ping Pong player. I can slam the ball when necessary, but I hardly ever do. I can beat most other players by simply returning every shot with a little backspin. Hitting the ball hard simply isn't necessary. All I need to do is wait for the other player to make 21 mistakes.

How software is similar

You can beat a lot of competitors by simply not beating yourself. Most companies go out of business because of their own stupid mistakes, not because of the brilliance or strength of their competitor. Stay conservative, and stay in business. Watch the years go by, and you'll be surprised how many of your competitors come and go.

http://ericsink.com/articles/Game_Afoot.html

It doesn't say that the warning came at Gates's request. Could've been a mid-level manager acting on their own.

I am a ping-pong enthusiast myself and spend endless time playing it. So, I loved reading this article. Was this competition for entire MS or just some small division. I am wondering where the chinese players are :-) We have some in our office who love to show off their pen-hold. Curiously, the best player in my office is a dutch...

I used to use penhold because I thought it was cool and my serves were good. Then I learned from a competitive player (~1600 rating in whatever US rating system they had iirc; not too high), switched to shakehand and never looked back!

The op here. There were Chinese players in the tournament but fortunately for us, of only average skill. I entered the GeekWire ping-pong tournament in Seattle earlier in the year and got destroyed by some highly skilled Chinese 'Asian Tigers'.

May I humbly ask what was so enjoyable about this article?

It's fairly short and as far as i can tell almost entirely devoid of content (the moral seems to be that Satya is a nice & humble manager?)

The article may appeal to a ping pong player as it describes a moment when the abstract, specific niche skill finally counts on the big stage of life :)

The actual Microsoft corporate subculture is bizarre to behold, when contrasted with the perceived subculture of the Microsoft user, operator, systems administrator, penetration tester, et c.

There's no single Microsoft subculture. The company is too big, made of too many parts, and 4-dimensional. The culture of Windows in the 90's would be absolutely alien to the culture of (for example) Skype in the 201*'s.

Could either of them apply topspin or return it?

Frankly I don't remember. But Bill was decent as he had worked on his game and got coaching for sometime. Apparently, when Microsoft was entering the China market he had to engage in ping-pong diplomacy. It is a practice that dates back to president Nixon's time that is explained in the book Guanxi: The Art of Relationships (Microsoft, China, and Bill Gates's Plan to Win the Road Ahead)

https://www.amazon.com/Guanxi-Art-Relationships-Microsoft-Ga...

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