My First BillG Review (2006)

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.

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

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000251628

Seems like 500 pages/week is the magic number

""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.

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).

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

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

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