"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.
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.
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.
You're making the classic mistake of assuming that there is only one kind of asshole in the world.
Just within the limited world of software recruiting, there are a vast variety of dick moves you could make:
SIGNS THAT YOU ARE A RECRUITING ASSHOLE
Ask them about manhole covers or how many grand pianos does it take to fill an olympic size swimming pool. Although if your software makes heavy use of geometry or solves packing problems respectively, you're excused. Otherwise, here's your sign.
If your company only want PhDs, here's your sign.
If your company only wants PhDs but you'll interview someone with a Masters just to prove how egalitarian you are, here's your sign.
Ask them about their experience with trivial or unrelated technologies. If it took me 5 minutes to learn it and become productive in it, why do you care whether I have 10+ years of 'experience' with it? Here's your sign.
Ask them about their experience with tools. If you need someone to fix your enterprise server's config, that is an entirely different job. (If you're interviewing for a programming position, but you want them to do double duty as a system or network admin... here's your sign.) If you let a complexifier diddle around with your Ant build so that it no longer works, congratulations you're an asshole and I don't want to work for you (here's your sign). One IDE is much like another. If there is something especially hard and difficult about the day to day use of your IDE, why are you still using it? Here's your sign.
If you low-ball the initial salary offer on the off-chance they might accept it, here's your sign.
If you tell them they didn't get it because you want them to argue with you about why they are the best person for the job, here's your sign. (Doesn't Spolsky do this or praise it in one of his essays? Yes you want them to be keen, but don't pee in their porridge to find out if they'll still eat it)
If you don't hire women, blacks, latinos, $minority or disabled people, here's your sign.
If you don't hire people unless they love Obama, here's your sign.
If you don't hire people because of their religion or lack thereof, here's your sign. (Religious charities and similar get a free pass on this)
If you keep interviewing even after you've decided on a particular candidate, here's your sign.
If you make them fly out to you rather than do a phone interview, here's your sign.
If you don't think self-training in programming is worth something, here's your sign. (And you'll miss a lot of good candidates. Ha ha. // points and laughs )
> I'm glad I'm striving for the happiest life, rather than the most money.
I've found so far that, at least in my professional career, one of these often implies the other. It just happens that the implication is the "wrong" way around in my case. :-)
For example, moving to jobs with better working conditions and/or more interesting projects, leaving full-time work for the freedom of independent contracting, and ultimately forming my own company to build things that I hope others will enjoy or benefit from, are all moves I've made primarily for reasons other than money, but all tend to increase the money coming in as well.
I suppose I prefer to do worthwhile things with my working hours, but worthwhile things by their nature also tend to be better rewarded in a business environment.
(Edit: As a curious aside, my total amount of money coming in has actually decreased quite significantly in the past few years since I left full-time employment, but that is because while I have been earning higher rates per hour, I can now choose to spend fewer hours on the everyday pays-the-bills stuff in order to invest time in the newer ideas with better long-term potential for interesting work and/or high profitability. It had not even occurred to me before writing this post, but at some point I have stopped judging my financial position by the bottom line, and started judging it by the rate of income from different endeavours multiplied by the time I expect to spend on each of them in the future, with a footnote that the things I am doing right now still need to be above the threshold for paying the bills etc.)
I think this is most likely going to be true - especially for us in the tech industry. Rather than being the "wrong" way around, I think you've got it the right way and everyone explicitly chasing money has it the wrong way. :)
Striving for money and happiness are both selfish. Striving for the happiness of others because your own cup runneth over is true success. Providing people with jobs is a form of charity just like going to the backwoods of Africa and building schools is charity.
What an odd view. Usually, an employee creates more value for the employer than he costs, through his time, effort and expertise. If the employer receives more than he gives, why is he the one being charitable?
I think the poster was trying to say something I fundamentally agree with:
There is something noble (and important) in providing jobs. As a business owner the thing I'm most proud of is now what we make, but the families that can afford a healthy and happy life because of what we make. Over the years I've directly created more than 100 jobs by my best estimation. That's 100 people who have a steady paycheck and everything that comes with it because of what I started.
That's really cool. So while saving the rainforest or joining the peace-corp are both noble and very important, lets not forget that entrepreneurs are very often doing important things with their lives as well.
I would say you are incorrectly using the word value. Both parties are getting the best deal out of the transaction they can. Just because the things I work on may make my company more dollars than my salary a year doesn't mean the "value" is different - it's much more complex.
Here's an example: one aspect of the "value" my company provides me is risk-subsidization. If I was freelance, I would have to work on constantly finding clients. The grass is always greener...
Edit: it also REALLY depends on how you run your business. This gets into more philosophical stuff around greed and leadership (ie: how much you take, how much you share with your company etc). Providing jobs can be anything from charitable to borderline slavery.
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.)
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.
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.
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... ;-)
You mean "nominative determinism" in like, He was good at BILLing people to get money and setting up GATES to sharing of software, and a STEVE is a crown wearer who created JOBS for the creative class? Nope, nothing there...
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.
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.
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.
"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.