
What happened to the 11 employees of Microsoft in the 1978 photo - Andrew-Dufresne
http://www.snopes.com/photos/people/microsoft.asp
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jimbokun
Seems like there's an important lesson in here:

"As Bill Gates was attempting to correct this egregious error, he was
introduced to a black-haired gnome by the name of Gordon Letwin, who proceeded
to chew him out in front of a group of about fifteen people. Letwin, the
author of Heath's BASIC, felt his turf was being violated and by the purveyor
of an inferior product to boot. Bill Gates nonetheless prevailed, selling
Heath his BASIC and FORTRAN for H-DOS, a proprietary operating system Letwin
had developed for Heath. But Letwin had instinctively understood how to win
the favor of William Henry Gates: Stand up to the guy. By the end of the year
Gordon Letwin would come to work for Microsoft and begin work on a BASIC
compiler."

I read a similar anecdote about Steve Jobs at Next. He was interviewing
candidates for a finance position, I think, and would basically belittle their
previous experience and question their competence. The first guy who told
Steve off to his face was the guy he hired.

~~~
martincmartin
I'm glad I'm striving for the happiest life, rather than the most money. I
wouldn't like working for that sort of employer.

I suppose I measure success differently than many people here.

~~~
detst
I can appreciate that you don't want to work for an asshole but I think a non-
asshole employer can realize the effectiveness of this technique to find a
certain kind of employee for a certain kind of position.

~~~
redthrowaway
I think being contrarian for it's own sake is a dick move, and any benefit is
secondary. Jobs may have thought he was being clever, but he was just being a
dick. This seems to be pretty typical of his early years: Apple succeeded
because of his vision, and despite his management.

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steven
I was there for the 30-year reunion, where my photographer recreated the
original shot. (And also, despite my pleas that people wanted it as originally
posed, did a bizarre setup that confused people, too.) Then I did a group
interview. The tone was very upbeat and warm, though clearly there were some
underlying issues. But I think that the group was simply happy to look back at
an exciting time. We were all sad that Bob Wallace was missing (I knew him and
really like him--he was at the first Hacker Conference!) There was a lot of
laughter and good natured fun-poking. And at the time Miriam Lubow, the office
manager (den mother) of the group, knew she had cancer, but had come to terms
with it, and was loving the reunion. She died not long afterward. For me, it
was an amazing experience to moderate the group discussion of these people
coming together 30 years after they worked at an obscure startup, and were now
on the campus of an historically huge and powerful corporation they helped
launch.

And yes, I am under the impression that MS paid expenses for this reunion.
(But I didn't confirm that explicity.)

~~~
jeffbarr
Every time I see the original picture my heart skips a beat.

I worked with Bob Wallace before he worked at Microsoft. In his too-short
life, Bob did a lot of amazing things. In addition to his graduate work at the
University of Washington, he was the first editor of the Northwest Computer
Club's newsletter.

He was the publications manager for Seattle's Retail Computer Store (ca 1978).
He conceived of the portable computer and actually built one using a
motherboard and video card from The Digital Group. When asked to write some
accounting software in Altair Basic, he refused. And then went on to write a
preprocessor that let him use long variable names and better control
structures. And wrote the accounting software in that, instead.

Bob worked on Microsoft's first Pascal compiler (I wasn't there and have no
idea what else he did).

After leaving Microsoft he founded QuickSoft, invented the concept of
shareware, and made a comfortable living off of contributions from users of
his text editor / word processor.

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guelo
Wow, seems like Gates treated them like crap and most of them left the company
within a few years.

~~~
sriramk
Actually, apart from the issue with Marla Wood, the article says that everyone
else left in the mid-80s or 90s, ranging from 5-10/15 years after the photo
was taken. That's a very decent stint in any company.

~~~
guelo
I counted 8 people that left disenchanted, tired or in a dispute. 6 were gone
by 1983.

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unwind
It's just brilliant that Bob Greenberg allegedly now develops software for
golf courses. I love <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism>. :)

~~~
cpr
Bob was my best buddy freshman year. He's a great fellow, though I've lost
track of him lately.

He left Microsoft because he was never able to break into the tight "inner
circle" of Gates, Ballmer and Allen, even though he was classmates of all of
them.

I guess I shoulda taken his advice and joined MS as #8 way back when... ;-)

~~~
didip
Why you decided not to? There were plenty of opportunity to work on
programming languages back in those MS days, no?

~~~
cpr
I didn't have mobility, for personal reasons. (OK, I'll tell you: I had joined
a religious order, that I later left. Yes, I'm wacky. ;-)

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brown9-2
For reference, the $120 in backpay that Bill Gates was screaming about in 1980
is about the equivalent of $317.56 in 2010 dollars.

<http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm>

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
Well, he was screaming about getting nailed for shortchanging his workers and
having it in his public records. I agree that it's pretty strange he'd run
that risk with only $300 to gain in the first place.

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fourk
Is it just me, or is the inability to select or deselect text on the page kind
of obnoxious?

~~~
jimbokun
I had to "view source" to post a quote in this thread.

~~~
k3dz
or disable javascript in browser

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ck2
I love how they recreated the photo 30 years later, wow!

~~~
petsos
It is a shame the didn't match their exact positions though.

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lynx44
From this picture, I'd actually feel quite good about the team in terms of
their technical competency. I get a positive vibe from them in terms of that.

I would worry about their business acumen, however. This team does not seem to
have an immediate business type presence.

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T_S_
The title of this made me think it was the subject of the next Dan Brown
novel.

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kmfrk
Might want to revise the Paul Allen entry.

~~~
iuytryuik
It does seem to be an "official MSFT" account.

Although from interviews I've read with Allen his view seems to be - I got
lots of money, I'm enjoying writing cool code and I have a yacht the size of a
small country - who cares about the past.

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VB6_Forever
I wonder if BG paid Marla Woods' expenses for the reunion photo.

