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Comment by lukasb | Hacker News Reader

“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."

It depresses me that the people considered the best in our industry are such assholes. Bill just wanted to yell at everyone because it was the only way he knew how to motivate?

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As a teenager that grew up hating Bill Gates, because I liked Linux, I want to agree with you. As an adult, I believe we should be able to see past the surface of behavior that other people exhibit and understand their motives.

It is nowadays in fashion to cancel someone based on today's norms, but if we want to be fair, we should put things in context that we don't have. If Bill Gates was so toxic that was unbearable, Microsoft would have failed.

Criticizing is not cancelling.

not necesarily. Slave using countries survived for centuries. (business can be successful even if it makes people miserable)

Microsoft had a monopoly. It could not fail.

> It depresses me that the people considered the best in our industry are such assholes. Bill just wanted to yell at everyone because it was the only way he knew how to motivate?

A professor at my university took exactly this approach to interviewing prospective undergraduates (EDIT: minus the yelling!) He would ask a question, and if the unfortunate candidate started to give the right answer, he would (politely) cut them off, and ask a different/harder question.

He was interested in how candidates answered questions they hadn't already got the answers for.

At the time I regarded this as pure brutality, but looking back on it with a few decades of experience, I can see why he thought his approach was valid. We often think the edge cases are where the interesting stuff is.

Q: Given a (fairly short) time to interview someone, how would you attempt to find the boundaries of their knowledge, and how they handle stuff at the boundaries?

I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with yelling at people as your primary method of motivating them. Which, according to Joel's story, was Bill's default method in every review.

If you ask a question, you shouldn't be cutting someone off as they answer it (unless they are rambling). The interviewer should have the courtesy to at least listen to the answer to the question they asked.

If limited time is a problem, schedule more time.

During my interviews, if someone answers the question and keeps going, I'll tell them, "I was only looking for xyz, and you got it."

> If limited time is a problem, schedule more time.

I'm not sure how realistic that suggestion is. The pool of university applicants is large, the academics' time is short. If you're going to have multiple interviews over multiple days that just throws up even more barriers to entry to those whose parents can't afford travel and accomodation for that.

At a broader level, if one can't distinguish between "good" and "not good" in one interview, perhaps one isn't asking the right questions?

I used to know a HS Maths teacher whose approach to testing was similarly brutal. Essentially, in his view, if a student is able to answer every question on an exam correctly, then we haven't fully assessed the depths of their understanding. So every exam was crafted with the express aim of 100% being infeasible.

> So every exam was crafted with the express aim of 100% being infeasible

Isn't the goal of any (every?) exam to attempt to distinguish between how good the candidates are?

Not really. The goal of most exams is to have a predetermined number of people pass. For example, entrance exams. There is a, known beforehand, number of spots to hand out. The goal of the exam is to be exactly difficult enough to get all the spots filled but no more. This even applies to medical doctor residences.

Only artificial, meaningless exams like olympiads are really meant to asses how good someone is.

https://www.imo-official.org/

Of course the easy and common way to do it is to make the exam way too hard to realistically fill up the spots, and then cheat. In the best case, this is done by having a "translation table". Usually, we're talking a combination of nepotism/racism/... You can pass fairly. It's just that if you aren't part of the right group you need to score something like 20-40% better. And before you say this is unfair, I like the alternative even less: way too easy exams where making 1 spelling error in an IT exam will effectively disqualify you (like the EU commission exams). There are limited number of spots in that exam too, and you have zero chance to start a career in the commission if you have a "low" score. Unfortunately 90% is "low". Hell, that's very low. 98% is the real "pass grade", and 99% is not a luxury.

And if they don't do this themselves, like has happened with medical exams, the "people upstairs" will find ways to give responsibilities to people who don't pass, who may not have got the required training to be responsible about them.

There is a level of incompetence that will get you kicked out, but it's pretty extreme, and usually what I'd call "callousness" (what you might call a tendency to proceed after being warned) is a required part. Mere stupidity won't do it.

> Only artificial, meaningless exams like olympiads are really meant to asses how good someone is.

> https://www.imo-official.org/

Most tests are artificial so I'll grant you that, but I don't think it's right to categorize the olympiads as an "exam", even less so a "meaningless" one.

Olympiads are contests, and it's not like contestants participate in them for the same reasons people take exams. It's more of an excuse for skilled students to challenge themselves (and each other) with the hardest problems that the brightest minds (at that age) could be expected to solve.

It's definitely not for everyone, but then, not everyone gets to participate. For those who have a chance to participate officially, I doubt anyone would think it is "meaningless" to do so. I'm not a "competitive" type of person, but I still consider it a valuable experience if only as a chance to test one's limit at a subject one is reasonably good at. I also like to think that the experience significantly influence one's future life choices too. (FWIW: after that I basically decided to avoid dealing with brain teasers and advanced algorithms wherever possible, and got a degree in law instead of CS. Not the typical outcome, but impactful nonetheless. I work as a software engineer now, because as we all know, 99% of software jobs don't need that stuff 99% of the time.)

If you thought olympiads were an "exam" to show off to others how good you are at the subject, then I'd agree it's not meaningful in that aspect. Though this is HN, it's still a very small minority who actually run around flaunting their olympiad medals or Putnams.

Disclaimer: I was a contestant in IOI many years ago. Was so average that I basically quit the game as described above. (In case anyone wonders, no I did not win the Putnam.)

Back in the 1980s in India if you scored 80% on a medical school entrance exam then you were suspected of having cheated because of how ridiculously high that score was. (Source: my parents who were professors at a medical school in India during the 1980s)

Shouting isn't great but to be honest I'd much rather have a very detailed if slightly macho technical discussion than some nonsense HR-gremlin driven "motivation" session.

What Bill Gates should have done is hired a diversity and equity consultant to make sure Excel centered underprivileged minorities.

I honestly miss the old days when smart people would just yell at you. It's frankly more efficient and the people who can't handle it just aren't smart themselves. I'm not talking about unwarranted abuse, but I did like the confidence that top notch programmers felt free to express back in the 90s.

> the people who can't handle it just aren't smart themselves.

Don't dismiss everyone who won't put up with that kind of environment as "just not smart". It's a completely unwarranted assumption.

Just a hypothetical: Being verbally abused as a child might make that impossible to take as an adult. That doesn't make you any less smart.

But it doesn't even have to be abuse. There are people who are plenty smart, whose reaction to being yelled at by their boss would be "why should I put up with this?" In fact being smarter might even make that response more likely.

You yell back and explain why you're right. Or, if you're not right, you go fix the problem.

Or you go somewhere else where you get to work with grownups and non-sociopaths.

You wouldn't have cut it working at Microsoft, but that's okay since there were many lesser companies around during that era, as well as opportunities in child care.

Or do neither. I'm not going to have technical discussions where whoever is louder wins.

If you've ever met one of these super-smart engineer types you'll know that nothing shuts them up and gains their respect faster than having the right answer. It's not about "whoever is louder" it's about having deep and impassioned understanding of technical issues.

Yup, at a previous company I managed the IT department and reported to the CFO. In a 1:1 meeting he said "I want employees I can yell at and not be worried that they'll quit". He was referring to accounting staff when he said it, but it was the final straw that got me looking for other opportunities. I gave notice a few weeks later.

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