Gates Still Working Behind the Scenes at Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

Gates Still Working Behind the Scenes at Microsoft

redmondmag.com

186 pointsmyinnerbanjo53 comments

The primary advantage is not any kind of architectural wisdom or specific knowledge, although that may be the case in some instances.

1) Having the 'magic of the founder' in place is worth a lot. Imagine young Engineers getting to sit on meetings with 'the World's Once Richest Man', world renowned, influential, 'powerful', and the 'creator' of their initiative. It's like a celebrity who is paying attention to you and is meaningfully participating in something you are doing. You'd never forget that meeting. It's exciting and inspiring, and adds meaning or resonance to what you do. It's like being a little bit a party of mythology and gives emotional impetus to the original 'raison d'etre' of the company.

2) Satya can use Bill (I don't mean negatively) to move the needle in areas where Satya couldn't alone. CEO's, surprisingly, don't always have a lot of power. They are like nervous feudal lords, always worried about popular revolts, public opinion, antagonism from the nobles (i.e. other execs). So having someone with the tremendous power of 'authenticity' is like gold. If Satya and Bill agree 'we need to move the company in this direction' ... Satya alone would have a lot of convincing ... but if 'Bill says it' and starts propagating this idea in all-hands and in meetings, then it's a done deal. It will happen for better or worse. Having the 'founders word' is such an amazing thing if it works in a situation.

3) Maybe he was always doing this, but having his 'extra organizational outreach' is powerful. Calling up big CEO's of customers, politicians, lobbyists, governmental people etc.. Who's going to turn down a call from Bill Gates? Nobody really :). So it's a big thing to have him create connections and pave the road ahead socially.

The CTO of Schlumberger once completely ghosted Satya. His son works for Google and they had a big push for GCP and Satya called on him to discuss options and such and ... Crickets.

This was when Satya was a bit more of an unknown but still, ignoring the CEO of one of the largest companies in the world is stone cold.

Let me just leave this here if there are some people who have missed this jewel: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

Coincidentally, I only just read this entertaining anecdote earlier today because I have to support a VBA application and thought I′d check out https://stackoverflow.com/tags/vba/info for good resources to get up to speed on it (coming from a Unix background). This was the last link on that page and knowing Joel’s a great writer, I read it first. I particularly liked this summation:

> 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.

That was a nice read, thank you

Anyone else cringe? The absolute worship of rich people in American culture.

I mean, I don’t think you’re getting the full picture here. The guy who wrote that is pretty damn successful himself now (he helped create stackoverflow and his company has had some huge successes with software like Trello) and probably owes some part of that success to the stuff that BG invented. So while I think your sentiment in general might be true (Americans certainly do have a disgusting idolization of rich people) I think in this case it’s a bit misguided.

Not much to that article, but Gates does seem like one of those guys who even if not directly in the mix has more than enough experience and would still be relevant to talk to to get some perspective / advice now and then. I imagine some ex executives might be stuck in the mud, Bill seems like he would still be very relevant.

There is something magical about people who have so much experience and developed wisdom that they can issue practical, useful advice even though they haven't been in the trenches in years, and in your specific trenches ever.

I've noticed this is more common than I expected and seems to happen when two conditions are present: (1) the person is an outsider so can ask "dumb" questions that make you think through the foundational assumptions of your work. (2) they've experienced many failures themselves so they know what questions really matter.

i.e. perhaps it's not so much that Gates is a genius (he is) as much as the above conditions are present.

The corollary for me, as a startup founder, has been that I should be asking these basic questions of myself regularly (a good marketing person helps) and I've got to be careful with cash burn so I have time to learn from failures.

I've heard multiple Microsoft Research researchers describe that they'd interacted with Gates, and he was able to discuss quite technical aspects of their fields and their work.

I have heard that too from some guys in the Munich office where he visited. He joined a conversation and the guys were really impressed how much he knew about the low-level details they were working on. He seems to have an incredible memory.

Ever talked with someone with 30-40 years of professional dev experience? This has been my experience with them - even if they don't know exactly what you're doing or the particulars of a specific technology, they have a vast amount of accumulated knowledge and experience that is often useful. And of course, they can probably school you in C.

I think the previous comment may have been referring to Bill Gates having photographic memory.

He may, but even if he doesn't having as much technical experience as he does, or anyone else who's been around the block as much as he has, is going to give you a shortcut to insight into most situations.

He said incredible memory. But I suppose my point is that it's easier to remember things when you've encountered them many times in your career and been developing so long (over 45 years!).

The way I was told the story it was more about him knowing EXACTLY what they were doing. They suspected that he is reading a ton of E-mails and remembers all the details.

I am not surprised that people with amazing memories end up being in senior positions for a variety of reasons (and not just technical).

I am WAY more fascinated by the people who end up in those roles who do NOT have amazing memories. Partly because my memory is by no means "amazing" so I'm curious how they work around not being able to recall everything on command.

I think the higher up you get the more you need memory capacity to quickly switch between tasks. When I look at my VP he has to do a complete context switch between completely different issues almost every hour and remember what was discussed weeks before.

I was listening to a radio interview with an (American) football coach (Sean McVay), who has risen up the ranks very quickly. The guy can instantly recall details about past football plays and outcomes like a walking encyclopedia, and apply them situationally during games. Hyper focused. The interviewer asked him of this recall and focus translated to other aspects of his life, and the coach said that it was limited to football, and that he's essentially an unbalanced mess with anything non-football related. So, for these people that seem to have super recall and deep, broad expertise in their professional environments, does it often come at the expense of being equally unbalanced in other areas of their life?

Reminds me of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNVJFRl6f6s

Some people are just on a whole other level.

can confirm

I only ever met one executive who was like that. It was amazing.

Dude was basically on a guided tour and like many before stopped to ask me what I was up to. I mentioned some high level stuff and then he asked some questions that shocked me ... in the sense that they were good questions that really indicated he knew what I did. I answered cautiously, he asked some more along the lines of "oh so" and we went back and forth and I realized dude just "got it" as far as how we worked, what we were doing, challenges, and etc.

It was great, and maybe a bit sad that was the one time.

Dude in question was too good for the company at that time and moved on. The company didn't really want someone who knew what was going on because inevitably that meant some push back / organization / shifting momentum here or there. So he moved on and we got a yes man who had no clue.

I’ve met one or two “executive level” people like this and it’s pretty shocking. You’re used to having to dumb down what you say, to a 6-year-old’s understanding, in order to talk to these guys, and all of a sudden you meet one who knows the details of CDMA technology or is an expert on spatial indexes or something. “Mind blown” moment! Sadly, like your example they don’t seem to last, and get replaced with more political yes-men.

I worked with an MCS guy years ago who carried a picture in his wallet of him and Bill. I guess they went through some difficult solution to a problem and walked away making a bunch of well-thought out and necessary changes after about 10 minutes.

He went to harvard and got 1590. He is probably on the very very high end of intelligence curve. He also reads a ton and has a lot of experience. Its not surprising he can have technical conversations with researchers.

I think there's a difference between people who study lightly and score high, and people who grind it out and then score high. I'd guess that the majority of high scorers fall into the latter, while he falls into the former.

> "Even to this day I do some architecture things on the various products," Gates said during the segment.

I really wonder what that looks like.

VMS -> WNT

that was all Cutler, not Gates

I hope the hell its yelling at the Windows team for it not working properly. That was what he used to do I understand.

The 10 minute video referenced in the article. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzUUghxDhYM

isn't he a board member? why would that be surprising?

"Gates continues to serve on Microsoft’s board of directors and as an advisor on key development projects." https://news.microsoft.com/exec/bill-gates/

For a period in the Ballmer era it was said that Gates had entirely disconnected to focus 100% on the charity work. There is some surprise that Gates seems to be more involved in the Nadella era given how strict Gates was said to be hands-off during Ballmer's tenure, though certainly it is still no surprise that the charity work is still Gates' focus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Personal_life

> They have three children: Jennifer Katharine (b. 1996), Rory John (b. 1999), and Phoebe Adele (b. 2002).

Probably has something to do with it. His youngest is close to college age now.

That doesn't really make a lot of since though. Why all of a sudden for the younger one? He spend most of those years in command for Microsoft, before focusing on charity work from 2008 and up. (His children would have been roughly 12, 9, and 6 at that time.) So, that may be a part of it but probably not a major part.

He basically stepped down from active management with the birth of his second child. (Ballmer became CEO in Jan 2000).

Ah, I was under the impression that he had stepped down in 2008. But that was probably from any activity at Microsoft and 2000 was when he relinquished the CEO title. Thank you for clarifying that. It does sound like that may be more closely related than I thought.

Purely speculation on my part, but that makes a lot of sense. During the Ballmer era, he would have wanted to send a clear and unambiguous signal that he was no longer calling the shots, so he would have made a greater effort to step away. Also important was that, while Ballmer wasn’t technically a cofounder, he had been around since the early days. With Ballmer gone and Gates having demonstrated that his foundation is by far his #1 focus, there’s less reason for him to give Microsoft some distance and more reason for him to occasionally show up and, among other things, serve as a living connection to their early history.

He probably got involved again because Ballmer made such a big hash of things.

> There is some surprise that Gates seems to be more involved in the Nadella era

Nadella had asked Gates to step up and be more involved when he accepted CEO position

They announced he would start getting involved again when Nadella became CEO.

lol, so this article is based on a throwaway line in a YouTube video that can be interpreted in a multitude of ways.... yeah, great reporting

A non-article if there ever was one.

Bill is the man.

I assume he's on the forced upgrades and data loss teams

Change Management and Loss Prevention are their official team names. /s

Ministry of Truth?

Why do you assume that?

Hopefully, he can steer MS away from projects like the Zune.

You take that back, the Zune was the best portable media player ever made

I believe he is the Visual Basic product champion.

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