

My First BillG Review (2006) - sahilkhosla
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

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doppenhe
Ex Excel PM here. Funny enough that spec still exists and it's kind of cool to
be able to review them. Over the years my experience was that PM got less and
less technical which was frustrating. The Excel team somehow had remained one
of the more technical teams in Office (probablly across Microsoft) but
definitely saw a tendency to hire less technical and more product management
(marketing) style folks. The devs, specially the old school ones who had been
on the team for 15+ years kept the tradition of ripping specs to shreds (in a
good way). I used to tell new hires it's a shark tank you will be fine unless
somebody smells blood.

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imranq
Looks like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett share another thing in common:
voracious reading habits

[http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000251628](http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000251628)

Seems like 500 pages/week is the magic number

~~~
alooPotato
any ideas what point in their career they started this?

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imranq
hm, in the video Todd Combs mentioned listening to Buffett say to do this in
2001. Its likely you start seeing massive benefits of this within 5 years. So
overall at least 20 years ago, but most likely started much earlier.

Also Elon Musk is mostly self-taught through reading:
[http://qr.ae/3PHgP](http://qr.ae/3PHgP)

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snorkel
""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."

I hope nobody is reading this as sage management advice. It is in fact a
management anti-pattern.

~~~
Amezarak
At least in the example given, I think it could be worse. The guy said "Bill
doesn't really want to review your spec", but he _had_ effectively reviewed
it, reading and marking up 500-something pages.

But rather than nitpicking or demanding changes be made, he simply satisfied
himself that the guy knew what he was doing and left him to it. In fact he
doesn't even give him the marked-up spec! Maybe I'm just too familiar with
uninformed (or dangerously informed) management meddling in technical issues.

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hackuser
Regarding the needed technical skills of management, note the tension between
these two comments:

1) _Watching non-programmers trying to run software companies is like watching
someone who doesn 't know how to surf trying to surf. ... The standard cry of
the MBA who believes that management is a generic function. ... The cult of
the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that
you don't understand._

And the very next sentence:

2) _Over the years, Microsoft got big, Bill got overextended, and some shady
ethical decisions made it necessary to devote way too much management
attention to fighting the US government. Steve took over the CEO role on the
theory that this would allow Bill to spend more time doing what he does best,
running the software development organization, but that didn 't seem to fix
endemic problems caused by those 11 layers of management, a culture of
perpetual, permanent meetings, a stubborn insistance on creating every
possible product no matter what, ... and a couple of decades of sloppy, rapid
hiring has ensured that the brainpower of the median Microsoft employee has
gone way down ..._

Perhaps the latter is a consequence of former, i.e., of having excellent
professional programmers and not excellent professional managers running a
large company?

Everyone naturally overestimates the value of their skills, the same way
everyone in every department in every organization naturally thinks theirs is
the most important and the others mostly get in their way. It's a very human
thing to do, to be locked into our own narrow perspectives and not grasp there
are others: 'Those other guys don't even understand what I'm talking about!'

I'd much rather have my company run by a great non-technical manager than a
great programmer but poor manager. Ideally the manager would have great
technical skills, but think how many people have those, think how many have
great management skills, and consider the odds of finding someone who has both
and is interested and availble to run your company (and not, for example,
their own).

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rattray
Note to mods: there should be a year label in the title (2006).

(Is there a more formal way of requesting this?)

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jkot
Excel was always special, I heard they even wrote their own C compiler.

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DCoder
Joel mentions that fact in another article, _" Find the dependencies - and
eliminate them"_ :
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html)

