Wow, I just read this today and it’s just an amazing insight to what _the_ Bill Gates is like, as a boss. I guess I’m relatively young and my only real recollection of Bill Gates from the media (as far as I can remember) is that he’s a really soft spoken quiet guy. And oh, rich.
Anyway, so this was an interesting read to me about how Bill Gates grilled his subordinates. Imagine a presentation to your boss that goes something like this:
Billg typically has his eyes closed and he’s rocking back and forth. He could be asleep; he could be thinking about something else; he could be listening intently to everything you’re saying. The trouble is all are possible and you don’t know which. Obviously, you have to present as if he were listening intently even though you know he isn’t looking at the PowerPoint slides you spent so much time on.
At some point in your presentation billg will say “that’s the dumbest fucking idea I’ve heard since I’ve been at Microsoft.†He looks like he means it. However, since you knew he was going to say this, you can’t really let it faze you. Moreover, you can’t afford to look fazed; remember: he’s a bully.
Pretty brutal, IMHO. But I agree with the conclusion of the blog post’s author Tom Evslin, that
Some people flourished in this trial by fire atmosphere. In fact, that is exactly what billg was doing. As smart as he is, he had no way to know most of the time whether the person presenting to him was right or wrong (unless their logic was obviously confused in which case they deserved whatever happened to them). So he tested us. Since you knew you were likely to be tested on anything, you really did think long and hard about what you were doing and what you were presenting.
As brutal as that may seem (the disadvantages of doing that aside), I do see the value in that. In fact, to generalize, that’s how open source coding works — weak inferior code are called out and corrected, all done in a public setting; so there’s no such thing as “saving face”. Public embarrassment is the punishment.
Reminds me of what they call “parental love”. Where I grew up, kids were spanked/caned/physically punished by their parents for being bad. The punishment was harsh, but it was done for the long term benefit of the kid, and the parents only want the best for their kids.