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How Hard Could it Be?: Glory Days
By: Joel Spolsky
By: Joel Spolsky
As Bill Gates retires, our columnist recalls what it was like to work for the world's most successful entrepreneur
When i graduated from college, in 1991, I started working for Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) on the Excel team. My title was program manager. I was supposed to come up with a new programming system so users could automate Excel. I sat down to write a spec, a huge document that grew to hundreds of detailed pages.
In those days at the company, we used to have these things called BillG reviews, at which Bill Gates personally went over every major new feature. At the time, he was already famous and on the cusp of being named the world's richest person. The day before my BillG review, I was told to send a copy of my spec to his office. It consumed almost a full ream of laser-printed paper.
Once the spec was printed and on its way, I picked at random one of the million little details of the spec that I still had to tackle: figuring out if Excel's internal date and time functions were compatible with BASIC, the programming language we were using on the project.
The next day -- June 30, 1992 -- we gathered in a conference room. In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. Instead of the 11 or 12 layers of management the company has today, I reported to Mike Conte, who reported to Chris Graham, who reported to Pete Higgins, who reported to Mike Maples, who reported to Bill. About six layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors, with their eight layers of management.
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