Programmers At Work: Bill Gates (1986)
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In fact, my pops did the illustrations for the entire series. Microsoft Press was one of his favorite clients back in the day. Growing up, he'd tell me stories of disorganized secretaries at Microsoft sending him awful reference photos, so he'd look up the execs in the phonebook and call them at home. Sometimes he'd get their wives/husbands on the phone, and he'd nicely explain that he was an artist, and would they mind if he borrowed the family photo album? Many fine stories from those cases, too.
Somewhat ironically, my dad never learned how to do art on a computer. Now he's a commercial construction inspector in Seattle.
And --
"I still think that one of the finest tests of programming ability is to hand the programmer about 30 pages of code and see how quickly he can read through and understand it."
Does any company run "code comprehension" tests for hiring? Any thoughts?
On the other hand, if the job requires a lot of algos and low level code, this will be a good test to gauge an engineer's thought process and mental capability.
We tried sending the sample to them the day before, but there wasn't a strong correlation between doing that and good responses from the candidates. Basically, if they got it, they got it. And if they didn't, they didn't.
Interestingly this is why I believe VCs let founders of start-ups get do partial cashing out in later rounds. In the later rounds when you are shooting to build a billion dollar business, it's not optimal for the company if you as CEO is thinking about your everyday finances or paying past debt.
Apart from the usual brain-teaser and whiteboard coding, we gave candidates 20 minutes to browse through a small database project in eclipse. Afterwards, I checked whether they could explain the data structure of that database.
The outcome of this test was a much better predictor for competence than any other technical test. I can whole-heartedly recommend it.
Sometimes you realise that was a mistake :)
The really interesting thing about the quote is that it is from 1986 but could have been stated the same way in 1996, 2006 and likely in 2016 with the same "10 year back" qualifier and nobody would bat an eyelash. Systems are way more powerful but we're also pushing a LOT more data (in terms of depth of the data, breadth of the data, and types of data).
To be fair though, these days a lot of people see "spin up 25 more AWS instances" as a perfectly valid way of solving a bottleneck when compared to months of developer time whereas back in 1986 the decision would be a no-brainer in the other direction given that the equivalent of spinning up 25 AWS instances today would be economically infeasible back then for almost any commercial entity (even if you scaled back the amount of processing needed to fit in the context of that era).
Do you really think developers these days are just as good at optimizing for limited system resources as they were in 1986?
"We still run into..." Who? Maybe you - but most developers aren't running into map/reduce problems every day. And when they do, they certainly aren't coding a solution from scratch.
Yes boxes are faster and easier to spin up. The 'downside' to that is that many website on the internet are blazingly fast: Google, Amazon, Dropbox, etc. Because they are so fast (or perceptibly fast via tricks), the rest of the web is held to that higher standard. Twenty years ago, things taking a long time on a computer screen with no updates was acceptable. Today it really isn't because there are N other websites that are selling your exact product or experience.
Have you ever programmed a embedded system? Every worked on a 8-bit micro controller?
There are hard, very hard problems that come up which have to solved in with really limited resources.
My point is that those problems aren't any harder. They're just different. (in many cases it's because the toolchains stink by modern standards--embedded systems tend to just crash with no helpful debugging information) BG and co stood on the shoulders of the guys who made their chips 'just work' just as we stand on their shoulders. To complain about how 'kids have it so easy these days' just makes you sound crotchety.
Not really. The problems are made a lot harder by finite memory being more in play. Even with a good tool-chain when you actually have more data then you have RAM then you'll run into problems that are completely unique to an embedded world.
Code shrinks are very hard.
Which is the whole point if the quote. And the "back in my day" is 100% true in the field of programming. Ever heard of Moore's law? Ever tried to program with 8K RAM?
>We still run into performance issues with things like bulk updates and computation times (MapReduce / distributed computing) quite frequently.
Yes, we still run into "performance issues". But with MILLION times the data they ran into performance issues with.
Heck, we can now do a whole computer of the time interpreted in a web browser in Javascript and still get acceptable speed to play games in it.
Perspective man.
You've just fully booted linux in your browser. That Linux sees 16 MB RAM for itself. If you are a web programmer, do you even try to see how much memory the browser spent for this, or any other page you click to?
edit: but yes, it's amazing.
I know, technically they can cheat and google API calls or show it to their friends, but I bet with a little prying in the interview you could uncover that.
Every time I opened Management Studio for SQL Server 2005+, it took forever and caused massive disk churning, compared to the Win32 version for SQL Server 2000 and before, which didn't engage in abstract disk churn and memory gobbling.
I wonder if something went wrong with the native image generation during setup? It may be trying to JIT it every time on startup. That could be quite slow and result in a lot of disk activity.
int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, LPSTR lpszCmdLine, int nCmdShow);
Of course in Win32, instances of a program are their own processes with their own address spaces, so you can't do the kinds of clever tricks you could in Win16 to save time and memory. And hPrevInstance is always NULL. Win16 programming is full of hacks like this that made sense in their day, but are counterproductive now, though their vestiges remain on in Win32.
mysql_query('
INSERT INTO `products` (`name`, `descriptions`, `price`)
VALUES ( '.$_GET["name"].', '.$_GET["description"].', '.$_GET["price"].');
');
I don't know if you can use this kind of test on fresh-out-of-college hires, because a lot of professors don't teach security, and there may be plenty of other bad habits to break anyway.
But on any experienced hire -- even someone one year out of school -- it's perfect for screening out the codemonkeys.
"The hardest part is deciding what the algorithms are, and then simplifying them as much as you can. It’s difficult to get things down to their simplest forms. You have to simulate in your mind how the program’s going to work, and you have to have a complete grasp of how the various pieces of the program work together. The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree."
This line alone demonstrates he was a good coder.
The definition of 'useful' and 'beautiful' varies based on circumstances.
So here's a question - given his understanding of team management, product design etc, how the hell did Microsoft go so wrong and end up today with constantly-rebranded products that does not appear to have one unified direction, but rather feel like it's been split to a billion different directions?
Did teams in MS get bigger? He did mention that it was important that in a team there were a few people that truly and fully understand the codebase. I wonder if that is even possible in any of MS products nowadays
Edit:
Some really great choice quotes:
>I like to think the whole program through at a design level before I sit down and write any of the code. And once I write the code, I like to go back and rewrite it entirely one time.The most important part of writing a program is designing the data structures. The second most important part is breaking the various code pieces down. Until you really get in there and write it out, you don’t have the keenest sense of what the common subroutines should be. The really great programs I’ve written have all been ones that I have thought about for a huge amount of time before I ever wrote them
Bill is One of Us! I don't think I've ever read about him hacking before
> That refers to a program that molds itself to the user’s needs and the user’s interests over time. There are going to be more great word processors and spreadsheets, and we’ll use networking and graphics and new architectures
> Programmers just starting out today never had to squeeze, so it’s a little harder for them to get the right religion because they always think of resources as being immediately available. Ten years ago every programmer ran into resource limitations, so the older programmers are always thinking about those things.
I think we're still saying that today.
The interview was done in 1986, and he was talking about CDROMs which took off roughly 8 to 10 years after this interview (end of 3.1 and beginning of win95). They really did pursue the multimedia strategy well
> Bill is One of Us!
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/11/19/podcasts-a...
Seems he picked it up from Bill.
Oh, you didn't hear about that time he implemented BASIC in 4k? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/05/15/could_bill_gates_wri...
What I've never read about before was his attitude to hacking
He left before all that started to happen
> Bill is One of Us! I don't think I've ever read about him hacking before
I believe Gates even "made fun" of Jobs saying that Steve Jobs didn't know how to program.
Well, at some point the software becomes too big for one person to understand, or even a small team of wicked smart architects to understand.
Think about how complex Windows 8 is compared to MS-DOS. How much more it does, how much more hardware it supports. It's many orders of magnitude more complicated.
When a high-quality software program gets beyond a certain size, you by necessity start to lose the uniformly high quality that marked its earlier days.
In the autumn of 1980, Bill's unfamiliarity with his new purchase [of QDOS] didn't stop him proposing, in a story told by Stanford's John Wharton who was Intel's second point man for negotiations, a three way carve up of the market between IBM, Intel and Microsoft - then a company with 30 employees. If historians are to conclude that Bill "thought big", they'll be correct - but they may also conclude that he didn't always "think legally". Market carve ups are a violation of antitrust laws.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/17/saint_bill/
That said: Gates's comment that core programming teams are generally 4-5 devs suggests a pretty strong constant through the industry. It's rare for any specific module to grow much beyond that -- where you do see more people working on a particular piece of code, it's typically either highly modularized (and module contributors are working on sub-pieces), or the architecture is already highly refined, and the process is largely one of providing bugfixes or additional features to an established base.
Allow me to properly word it: market carve-ups, that cause consumer harm, and that the government chooses to prosecute and in which the government manages to prove consumer harm - are a violation of anti-trust laws.
If three companies carve up a market, benefit consumers, and the government chooses not to pursue - that is not a violation of anti-trust laws in any way shape or form. To make this point clearly, if the DOJ chose not to pursue Apple with anti-trust law regarding the ebook situation, what Apple did would not be considered a violation of anti-trust laws. Anti-trust laws are inherently very subjective, they're up to heavy interpretation on the government's side (and then further, what the government can demonstrate when it comes to harm).
One of the reasons Intel refused the offer was that Andy Grove had established a goal: that the company would seek a monopoly position, but would do so by legal means. It's a philosophy which didn't entirely survive his departure from the company as you may recall Intel reached a settlement with the DoJ over anticompetitive monopolistic practices (though in fairness: the company did settle and fairly quickly).
The conspiracy and means Gates proposed, along with many, many other actions of Microsoft, did in fact constitute illegal monopolization, as Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's findings of fact established: http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f3800/msjudgex.htm
As George Hoar, one of the authors of the Sherman Antitrust Act stated: "... [a person] who merely by superior skill and intelligence...got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could was not a monopolist..(but was if) it involved something like the use of means which made it impossible for other persons to engage in fair competition."
And in particular, the statute itself states: "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal."
So, while your hypothetical has certain merits, in the particulars of this situation, it rather markedly fails to apply, as established by both the relevant statute and legal findings.
If I pursue a monopoly intentionally, the government can choose not to care about that fact at all. We can see the real nature of this subjectivism at play in how the Bush White House and the Clinton White House each dealt with Microsoft (and also in how IBM was dealt with across different presidencies). Selective enforcement, and selective consequences.
Ultimately a violation is what the government says it is, even with the case history. The ground rules for all of this have been constantly shifting for a century. They'll change from one DOJ to the next. What constitutes conspiracy? Ask the next DOJ, they'll have a different opinion than the last one.
You've asserted that twice. To the extent that a law not prosecuted is a law that doesn't exist, you're correct, however I've provided the statutory citation which states that "every" contract, etc., in restraint of trade, "is declared to be illegal".
I'm afraid the burden rests on you to provide some level of documentary proof of your assertions, which at present, stand on nothing.
http://blog.garrytan.com/grahams-hierarchy-of-disagreement-h...
Laws are not interpreted de novo, to mean whatever you think they mean. In our common-law system, laws are interpreted by the courts, over a long period of jurisprudence. In the case of the Sherman Act, we have over a hundred years of case history to guide us.
The courts say that it must be an "unreasonable" restraint of trade. After all, every contract is a restraint of trade! If a grocery store signs a contract with a farm to buy all of their lettuce, then the grocery store isn't going to the central produce market, where everyone has a chance to compete. If Apple signs an agreement with Samsung to source its ARM CPUs, that means that Nvidia doesn't get a chance to compete for the duration of the contract.
But that's completely ridiculous, right? They got the chance to compete for the contract. And that's exactly why it's not an antitrust violation. It's a restraint of trade, but it's very much reasonable.
Note that the word "unreasonable" doesn't actually appear in the Sherman Act. It just says "restraint of trade." The Courts added this test because they felt it would be counterproductive to interpret the Sherman Act literally. As you're doing.
I'm not contesting that. Nor was I born yesterday.
I've asked you to provide references. You haven't.
Google.
I even gave you the phrase to Google for: "unreasonable restraint of trade." In fact, add the term "every contract," and you'll find thousands of relevant hits, including Supreme Court cases going back a century.
If you don't like Googling, then I recommend picking up a good textbook on antitrust law -- "unreasonable" will be in the index. It's just such a fundamental concept to antitrust law. Rivers of ink have been spilled debating what kind of behavior is reasonable and what is unreasonable.
What you've just done is the antitrust equivalent of demanding a citation for the sky being blue. I give up. There's no way I can have a productive conversation about antitrust law with someone who aggressively demands citations for even the most basic of concepts. It shows that the primary motive is not to understand the topic at hand, but simply to argue.
P.S. Since you like to accuse people of violating the rules of debate, this isn't an "appeal to authority." It's a suggestion that you get a better background in antitrust law before arguing with people about it.
Sure, I can Google. But if you're not talking out of your ass, then you've got specific legal gloss, case history, and decisions you can point to. You're not. Lazy or intellectually dishonest? Hard to tell.
It was legal for Microsoft to single-source the CPU for the Surface from Nvidia. And it would have been similarly legal for IBM to single-source the OS for the PC from Microsoft.
What's more, Microsoft had 0% share of the OS market -- thus, no market power. And it had already agreed to produce BASIC for the IBM PC -- thus, no tying. Ipso facto, Microsoft could not possibly have been guilty of an antitrust violation in 1980 for offering to single-source DOS to IBM.
Only the Register could come up with such an illogical conclusion like that. But then, the Register is so virulently anti-Microsoft that they could probably criticize Altair BASIC on antitrust grounds.
Having heard Wharton's story directly from him, I can assure you that was being proposed as told by Wharton was in fact a three-way market carve-up.
• IBM would get business.
• Intel would get embedded devices (Wharton's own work was largely on an embedded controller that's used in automobiles, more units of it have been created than there are humans on Earth).
• Microsoft would get the hobbyist market ("home computing").
Your ad hominem on The Register (El Rag as I like to call it) doesn't address the fact that the source of the story is in fact John Wharton, and he has IIRC publicly discussed it elsewhere. I've got my own beefs with the Register (its irrational opposition to anthropogenic global warming comes to mind). And while long critical of Microsoft, that stance seems to have softened markedly in recent years. The stance of the site is pretty aggressively confrontational -- it's not "biting the hand that feeds IT" for nothing.
You need market power in order to restrain trade. Otherwise, you're just fantasizing about seizing control of a market without actually having the power to do so. For example, if you and I get together and divided the smartphone market 50/50 between the two of us, that would simply be laughable, not anti-competitive.
But if you do have market power, then your actions could actually be anti-competitive. If IBM had reached an agreement with, say, DEC to split the mainframe and minicomputer market between them, then that would have been an "unreasonable restraint of trade."
But Microsoft held 0% of the operating system market in 1980. In fact, in 1980, Microsoft had market power only in BASIC interpreters. As long as Microsoft didn't try to tie BASIC interpreters to some other product, it would've been very hard for Microsoft to violate antitrust law, even if it tried.
> Your ad hominem on The Register (El Rag as I like to call it) doesn't address the fact that the source of the story is in fact John Wharton, and he has IIRC publicly discussed it elsewhere.
An ad hominem is when someone claims that an argument is false simply because it originated from a certain source. That's not what I did. I attacked the Register after addressing the argument directly. That's not an ad hominem, that's just an attack on the Register.
P.S. Since the information came from John Wharton, it would be best if we could see what he actually said. Right now, Googling for "John Wharton IBM Microsoft Intel" gives only three relevant hits: two articles in the Register, and your original comment.
First off: that's not what the statute says. And again you've failed to provide any documentation for your claims (as adventured has also failed to do).
So I'll leave it there.
As for Wharton's making statements elsewhere: it's my recollection that he had. I haven't looked for them ... and no, don't see anything that's a specific match, though you can certainly place Wharton at Intel and having met with Gates while there.
As I've already stated, it doesn't matter what the statute says. It matters what the courts have interpreted. See other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188995
As for sources, see any textbook in antitrust law. Or just Google for the words "market power" and "restraint of trade. " These are not controversial concepts in antitrust law. You don't need a citation to say that the sky is blue.
There are such things are per se violations, but the courts have chipped away at this concept. For example, vertical segmentation used to be a per se violation, but today it is subject to the rule of reason.
> As for Wharton's making statements elsewhere: it's my recollection that he had. I haven't looked for them ... and no, don't see anything that's a specific match, though you can certainly place Wharton at Intel and having met with Gates while there.
It's certainly ironic that you don't provide a citation for this, when you're so aggressive about demanding citations from other people.
> You’ve got to have somebody who’s super smart. A great programmer thinks about the program on a constant basis, whether driving or eating. That method takes an incredible amount of mental energy.
> Before I sit down to code something, most of the instructions have already run through my head.
> Programming takes an incredible amount of energy, so most programmers are fairly young.
It may be a bit anachronistic to look at statements like these in the light of subsequent revolutions in software development such as XP and Agile. But I can't help thinking as I read this that he's doing it wrong. All the talk about using lots of mental energy to "have a complete grasp" of the program is fairly useless when faced with ever increasing complexity and code base size. Test Driven Development and clean code organization goes a long way towards breaking large problems down into easier to manager parts.
For example, if your language lacks a CopyTagedMatrix then you just write one, it gets the correct size, allocates the memory if necessary, copy the elements and return the new matrix. Now you can use it without remembering the implementation details, and it’s much clearer than the 10 lines that necessary to get the bounds and the fors to iterate over the matrix.
An extreme example is the GMP bignum library. You use each function as magic, and never read the implementation details. (Unless it’s in a very tight loop in a very hot part of the most important feature of your program, but I doubt that it’s good to use GMP in that place.)
Gates had a complete sense in his head of how his program worked at the level of machine language. But not at a lower level of CPU microcode, or transistors. So even he, even then, was not claiming to have "total" understanding in the sense I think you mean.
Likewise if the Linux kernel (or your distributed web app) is organized into a reasonable set of "chunks", then it is possible to have usefully complete sense of how it works. The implication being that if it's not organized -- or organizable -- like that, you have a problem.
This one struck me. Today the public methods of a class would check to make sure the inputs are valid. Back then the programmer would just know the location of every single caller and make sure the calls are always valid in the first place.
It's clear that the modern approach is a winner, especially with enterprise-size codebases, and really especially when developers churn every few years and nobody is around from when the code was originally written.
And of course Amazon is the ultimate success story of taking this idea to the extreme with a completely service-oriented architecture. Coding super defensively to minimal interfaces has been proven to work.
Personally, I would use the second option even today, with the caveat that there should be few, if any invalid inputs, what with type systems and OOP. If your method takes a string as a parameter, and can't handle every string that ever existed, then you really should be deserializing it into a data object of some kind, so that the compiler does the validation for you. If I'm developing some kind of API for public consumption, then I'll do input validation at the service boundary so that the consumer knows why it didn't work, but otherwise I'm a big proponent of the "just don't pass null" approach. Input validation on every function call bloats the code base, and is annoying to read through.
GATES: Our goals are very simple. We’re going to create the software that puts a computer on every desk and in every home. I don’t know if that’ll take ten years–that’s not my expertise, guessing those exact time frames. Microsoft also wants to participate in helping to make sure those machines are good machines, building the system software into them, and then doing a lot of the important applications they’ll use."
He doesn't mention anything at all about networking, which is a very true to the story of how the last 10 years of his tenure as a chief at Microsoft turned out.
Microsoft succeeded in what he stated, creating software for computers that almost every home used, indeed with software on CD-ROM. However, the applications he envisioned - catalogs, phone books, maps - actually turned out run on the Internet, not local storage. The attempts to distribute things like catalogs on CD-ROM turned out to be cumbersome and expensive, and too difficult to keep updated. He mentions the vast storage space of CDs, but the effective storage space of a computer connected to the Internet dwarfs the capabilities of any local storage.
It was a blind spot for Gates and Microsoft in the 1980s. He wasn't alone, of course. People like Marshall McCluhan had laid out a vision for it years before but Gates was really focused on software for devices and not the network. It wasn't until the late 1980s that Microsoft turned its attention to Novell which was making a killing in PC networking. (Gates recruited Jim Allchin from network company Banyan in 1990.) By the mid-1990s there wasn't much left of Novell, but Microsoft's interest and strategy there was purely driven by business and not vision. That was clear when they were clobbered again by the Internet.
Still appropriate today!
GATES: No. I think after the first three or four years, it’s pretty cast in concrete whether you’re a good programmer or not. After a few years, you may know more about managing large projects and personalities, but after three or four years, it’s clear what you’re going to be."
Out of curiosity, is there any experienced programmer that would dispute or agree with this statement?
There are university lecturers who agree that it's clear within the first couple of weeks whether someone has the aptitude to study CS. I remember a paper that was talked about a few years ago that described a "double hump" in aptitude, clearly separating the two groups. They wrote a very short test that was a good predictor of success. There's an article on Coding Horror about it: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...
I teach introductory chemistry, and for a long time, I've felt that there are students who are just incapable of making relatively simple mental models of the concepts that we discuss. To give an example, there are students who don't have a mental model of what density is.
I imagine that most people here have a good grasp of density and each of us has some mental model where the 'matter' in dense materials is "tightly packed" when compared to less dense materials. This isn't a perfect mental model, but it's reasonably accurate.
The students who don't/can't make these models view the entire course as a collection of arbitrary formulas that make absolutely no sense and require painstaking memorization. As a rule, they do poorly, unless they are exceptionally good at memorizing.
Just because this seems to be the case, I would only ask that you don't let this become a limiting belief that you project on your "incapable" students.
I only say so because I know I've taken various courses over the years (HS or college) where that sort of analogous big-picture communication you're talking about didn't really click for a few months or even years. When one is overwhelmed - or at least feeling overwhelmed - with the volume of new fundamental concepts to be grasped, it's akin to having 1,000 jigsaw pieces dumped on your coffee table. Oh and by the way, we're going to apply time pressure and grade you on your ability to figure out the big picture.
In that case, learning can turn into a fear-based "tread water because I'm drowning" activity where rote memorization is the fallback tool to get the learner to shore alive. The outcome is no longer the joy of understanding and meditating on those analogies/models to get the fundamentals to click, but trying to avoid death (err, a failing grade).
It wasn't until I revisited those certain topics later without the time-sensitive pressure of exams/grades that the broader models for understanding would "click" and all those rotely memorized fundamentals would fall into place - which is an indescribable joy.
So while your incapable students may not seem to grasp the big picture now, it's likely you are still making a difference by implanting those fundamentals which will snap together later on in life.
One of the things that I tell my students is that sometimes, if they stick around long enough, things will make sense.
That being said, I'm still at a loss on how to help the students who aren't making mental models that (to me) seem relatively fundamental. I try to use visuals and videos when applicable and when possible, but I would use other approaches if I could think of something that would be helpful.
Finally, I think/speculate there is a continuum of skill with mental model building. When I was a postdoc, I worked with people who had deep mental models of statistical mechanics that I just didn't have. So...I know what it feels like, but I don't know how to fix it.
"Two years ago we appeared to have discovered an exciting and enigmatic new predictor of success in a first programming course. We now report that after six experiments, involving more than 500 students at six institutions in three countries, the predictive effect of our test has failed to live up to that early promise."
> And even in the most encouraging of our results, we find a 50% success rate in those who don’t score C0 or CM2.
But in my 5 years of working in an office with other coders and maintaining other people's code, it seems true enough. Although it can vary by project, most salaried programmers seem to be either good because they are engaged and have made a habit of improvement, or poor-to-adequate because they are disengaged habitually disinterested to the point where experience doesn't even sink in.
But that's not what he said. He said that after 3 years it's going to be clear whether you're going to be good or not. That doesn't exclude learning.
But I don't know how fair those memories are. Presumably companies have a reason for paying more for experience...
God bless Intel Core i7 CPUs that allow me to use JIT'd, GC'd languages without a second thought.
Holy shit this is amazing
It's clear, though, he still paid attention to details:
1991: Product review for Excel Visual Basic - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html
2003: Critique of Windows usability - http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2008/06/24/full-text-an-... (the article emphasises the drama, calling it an "epic rant" and shows how Gates "isn’t immune to the frustrations of everyday computer users", but that's just some journalism bullshit. What's more interesting is that he still has a wicked attention to detail, and you still see that he's the same person that gave the interview in the original post.)
I remember seeing this memo back when it originally came out. If I recall correctly, the problem was not actually fixed after Bill Gates complained about it. The replies to his email just pointed fingers at each other.
Thus, all the talk of Microsoft needing a Steve Jobs are off the mark. Microsoft already had a Steve Jobs -- he was named Bill Gates. For whatever reason, even he couldn't polish out the flaws. There's something in the culture of the organization that prevents attention to fit-and-finish.
For example: Bill Gates complains about the C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures folder. This was in 2003. OK, so it got fixed in Vista. But why couldn't he get this fixed for XP? I doubt he was happy with it when he ran the XP betas.
My pet peeve: Explorer gives an uninformative "Try Again" dialog when I try to delete an open file. Why doesn't it tell me which program is holding the lock? Microsoft bought Sysinternals eight years ago! They just need to integrate the code from the handles utility, and add a "Switch to" or "End task" button to make it easier to close the program.
Thanks for the pointer to handle! I've got the sysinternals suite but never bothered to explore much beyond Process Monitor.
You're welcome, it's a useful tool when you just can't seem to delete a file. Although you're right -- it's called handle (singular), not handles (plural).
Actually, I think I do this all the time. I type handles, get an error message, and then think, "Maybe it's just handle." After all, multiple programs can have a file open at the same time, and the handle utility can actually list more than one program. So why isn't the name of the utility plural?!
Yet another fit-and-finish issue in a Microsoft product ...
I've always thought as the lead, you're supposed to be the most experienced programmer.
"...our present thinking is that we won’t have to increase the size of our development groups, because we’ll simply be making programs that sell in larger quantities. We can get a very large amount of software revenue and still keep the company not dramatically larger than what we have today."
Of course, 640k... I kid BillG.
The following shows his move to management: No, I don’t. I still help design algorithms and basic approaches, and sometimes I look at code. But since I worked on the IBM PC BASIC and the Model 100, I haven’t had a chance to actually create a program myself.
The following shows pre-agile thinking on development: I like to think the whole program through at a design level before I sit down and write any of the code. And once I write the code, I like to go back and rewrite it entirely one time.The most important part of writing a program is designing the data structures. The second most important part is breaking the various code pieces down. Until you really get in there and write it out, you don’t have the keenest sense of what the common subroutines should be. The really great programs I’ve written have all been ones that I have thought about for a huge amount of time before I ever wrote them. I wrote a BASIC interpreter for a minicomputer in high school. I made massive mistakes in that program, and then I got to look at some other BASIC interpreters. So by the time I sat down to do Microsoft BASIC in 1975, it wasn’t a question of whether I could write the program, but rather a question of whether I could squeeze it into 4K and make it super fast. I was on edge the whole time thinking, “Will this thing be fast enough? Will somebody come along and do it faster?”
It was a very different time!
Oh come on! When he says that "until you really get there and write it out..." shows a lot of agile thinking. Agile does not in any way exclude design before writing code! He also talks about rewriting (refactoring).
It wasn't that different of a time!
Gates and Microsoft saw the future and placed an early bet- much as they did with embedded and mobile Windows in the 1990's. In both cases, their timely early solution was made obsolescent when communication infrastructure scaled and bandwidth further commodified first over wire then over wireless.
In the first case, Microsoft underestimated their success. Computers in every home made providing cheap bandwidth profitable. With wireless, they simply had more than a decade of designs intended to minimize bandwidth consumption rather than actively encourage it. The idea of selling information about their customers [and Microsoft has always viewed users as customers rather than consumers though that could change] just wasn't consistent with their pre-goolified internet age ethics.
"No great programmer is sitting there saying, “I’m going to make a bunch of money,” or, “I’m going to sell a hundred thousand copies.” Because that kind of thought gives you no guidance about the problems."
Amen brother.
Too many times, especially here on HN, developers create something to make the big bucks. Usually they find little shortcuts for the things they want. The final product ends up sacrificing the mission as well as the quality.
I like the adage wise people give to enthusiastic people who want to "start something".
When starting something, be it a business, learning a skill, etc, make sure you're doing it for you.
Bill, I feel hit that on the head about BASIC. He saw a problem, and worked on it for himself. Others liked it and started using it. Reminds me on David Heinemeier Hansson's talk on why he built Ruby on Rails. It was a means to an end that ended up helping him and others in the process. http://bigthink.com/users/davidheinemeierhansson
I'll go and hide in the corner while all onlooking HN readers facepalm.
Kind of like today where many images try to gain cachet by referencing iPhone/smartphone (look at our web-page-as-an-App).
Also remarkable is the absence of any mention of the internet, although it was quite developed and capable already in 1986 - Microsoft famously missed the boat on this until the 'Cornell is wired' memo.
Finally, in every question about how Microsoft decides what to build, he is very vague and hardly ever talks about actual users. We now know that the main methodology employed by Microsoft was to simply rip off existing successful products and bundle them with Windows.
He became successful because he was a visionary.
He saw in 1978 that the future was in software, not in hardware (Apple went the other way and ended up in a hole for two decades because of that mistake). Then he saw the future of licensing software and bootstrapped Microsoft based on it.
Then he saw the importance of operating systems and built the company around it.
Then he saw the importance personal computing with Word and Excel.
You can say a lot of things about Bill Gates but saying he was not a visionary is absurd.
I thought for sure it was going to be DONKEY.BAS:
It is a shame.
I do honestly wonder what it is they teach in college. I've took 2 years (on and off) at a Community College and was able to do very well for myself. But, I have seen many "developers" that had impressive 4 year degrees on the resume and couldn't create an algorithm that removed duplicate records from a record set. Lol, some couldn't even tell me what their favorite text editor was ("All of them" ~Palin).
I'm not sure what to tell you, kolev.
For me, it has come to the point where asking trivial questions during interviews just doesn't work. You truly know what a dev can do when a dev develops.
In my shop, we work on classic asp, and asp.net web applications. I'm currently creating a package that will address the common building and troubleshooting scenarios pertaining to those frameworks. If the applicant cannot complete the task to satisfactory, then they don't belong here.
Good developers are out there. But you have to make a decision "Am I willing to pay a premium for them, or see if I can get just get lucky?"
Wow. This statement is epic in the context of Microsoft today. Seems like everything they put out is feature rich but overly complicated.
It sounds like a big tradeoff off to me. I'd really miss not coding.
GATES: Well, there’s no formal process, that’s for sure. At Microsoft, there’s usually a brainstorming session at night or on the weekends. Everybody has a general idea, like, we want to do the world’s best word processor. ....
=> Well now, we have found a better way and companies are internally finding great ideas by doing hackathons!
so sad: from that to... Windows
Nuff said.
Genesis of the Program Manager @MS? I didn't think it was that old!
"If you’re a great programmer, you make all the routines depend on each other, so little mistakes can really hurt you."
I know things were different back then, and Bill did not have the luxury of building on the wisdom learned over decades of experience, but 'separation of concerns' and 'loose coupling' have been central to every design decision I've made. It's hard to conceive of how one would believe that a tightly coupled, brittle design was a good one.
I'm guessing no design decision you've made has ever involved assembly language. Bill Gates obviously knows a little bit more than you on this topic.
Unix?
You know, the people he hired to write Windows NT.
"choose features to put into programs. To do that, you have to have a reasonable understanding of what’s easy and what’s not easy to do."
For those Product/UX/Tone Goons who can't actually build....
Also this gem
"and there were no what we called “technical inversions,” where a programmer works for somebody who doesn’t know how to program. "
"We still follow that philosophy: At certain levels we’ve got business managers, but we don’t have non-programmers really managing programming projects."
Bill knew it back in 86... we still do shit like that.
I think he meant "people that don't even know how to program".
In this article bill gates says in the first line that he no longer writes code. But clearly he would not classify as a "non-programmer".
Today's managers can still provide valuable input (e.g. algorithm design - like Gates did when this article was written) even if they don't code day to day.
I'm a program manager at Microsoft so I don't actually write code. That said, I majored in CS and know my stuff pretty well. I don't consider myself a "non-programmer". That said, I try and increase my credibility among "my" devs by doing projects outside of work. This also helps me keep up with the times.
Having said that, the company seemed to do alright, albeit with massive slippage on deadlines.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2092682.Programmers_at_W...
'Gates', Stephen Manes [1]
'Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft', G.P. Zachary [2]
'Microsoft in the Mirror', Karin Carter [3]
But I agree with the parent that 'Programmers At Work' is a great book.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Gates-Microsofts-Reinvented-Industry-H...
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Micr...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Mirror-Nineteen-Insiders-Exp...