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Comment by seivan | Hacker News Reader

Thanks Bill Gates for saying what I always thought...

"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.

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Today at Microsoft, not many managers actively write code. They had been doing it "back in the days" but not any more. Many don't even have Visual Studio installed in their primary work machine. I've seen tons working off of Surface with their only actively used apps being browser and Outlook. In fact, as higher up you go you are less likely to find anyone who has written any code in any reasonable period like past 2 years. It is not uncommon for a developer who is starting to feel that it's hard to keep up with coding asking for a management position aggressively. I would wager that more than 70% of the managers are ex-developers who no longer wants to deal with complexity or responsibility of writing code.

I don't think by "non-programmers" he meant "people who don't actively program".

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.

That's a good idea. I used to be under a project manager who had never written code and was not technical in the slightest, in a software company. It was a frustrating exercise, as he glazed over when you were explaining to things, and would also leave design meetings as he didn't understand what was going on. The questions were mainly "when will that be done by?" rather than trying to understand why there were difficulties.

Having said that, the company seemed to do alright, albeit with massive slippage on deadlines.

I agree but you have to remember MS was an engineering focused company. At apple it was often the other way around.

Are they still engineering focused, in the same vein as Google for example? Stories I read points to them being overheavy with middle management bureacracy.

Reading this article made me think that Bill Gates might be The Archibald Putt.

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