My First BillG Review | Hacker News Reader

My First BillG Review

joelonsoftware.com

99 pointswallflower16 comments

One note on this -- I just took a look and there are only five layers between an present day Excel PM and Steve Ballmer, rather than the 11 or 12 layers he posits.

Source?

MS internal system. Shows you a graph of who people report to.

I can validate this. I was an intern in '06 and routinely spelunked the org chart. I recall seeing up to 11 or 12 layers from bottom to top. I was 8 or 9 from Ballmer myself, if you regard my mentor as my immediate superior.

has the org been flattened in the past 4 years?

Keep in mind this was written almost 4 years ago. How many reorgs has Office been through since then?

During my time there in late 2008, there were around 10 layers to the top in Windows Live.

That sounds a bit exaggerated, even before the reorgs. There are currently ~5.

I'm a low level minion ( :-) ) and I have exactly the same number of layers between me and SteveB right now that Joel had between him and Bill back then.

I had a BillG review a few years earlier, when he came to my high school to review student work in the new math/science building that he and Paul Allen funded.

I demoed (one-on-one!) an RPG that I made in Hypercard on a Mac Plus. ;) To his credit, Bill asked some good questions and seemed to understand the Mac/Hypercard paradigm pretty well.

Joel was a fun read back then.

I suppose that's the reason he decided to stop blogging.

4 years old?

Are there really people here who don't know how to click through Spolsky's archives?

I don't understand all the down votes. This article, for instance, links from the Joel On Software home page. There's no reason to post it here.

It's an answer to the thread about Mark Zuckerberg still writing code, where TechCrunch asked if Bill Gates still coded 5 years after Microsoft was founded. That's why it was (re)posted.

Also, some of us come to know Joel a little too late. Is great to to be pointed up to these great articles and I'm amazed how relevant they seem even today.

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