Employ the Best

‘We’re very big on hiring smart people, so you’d better be comfortable working with other smart people …’ BILL GATES, 1998

Just as Gates has striven to fill his inner circle with people who share his vision and bring their own particular attributes to the party, he sought to build Microsoft on a bedrock of talented staff united in a common cause. As he said in a keynote speech at San Jose State University in 1998: ‘We like people who have got enthusiasm for the product, technology, who really believe that it can do amazing things.’

 
Those who go to work for Microsoft (variously nicknamed Microsofties, Microserfs or the more generic Propellorheads) know that they are going to be put through their paces. Eighty-hour weeks, for instance, are not at all uncommon for many employees. Indeed, Gates was quoted by Daniel Ichbiah and Susan Knepper in their 1992 book The Making of Microsoft as saying, ‘If you don’t like to work hard and be intense and do your best, this is not the place to work.’

  The demands put upon staff reflect Gates’s enduring belief that Microsoft must always give good product. ‘Microsoft is designed to write great software,’ Forbes reported him as saying in 1997. ‘We are not designed to be good at other things.’ That, it would be fair to say, includes providing employment to slackers. But for those who make the grade, the rewards are plentiful. Not only is there the prospect of significant financial remuneration (although new employees shouldn’t expect to get rich quick), there is also real scope to make your voice heard. In his 1999 book, Business @ The Speed of Thought, Gates stated: ‘Smart people anywhere in the company should have the power to drive an initiative.’

  In 2003, Gates gave an interview for the Smithsonian Institution Oral and Video Histories, which provided a unique insight into his attitude towards recruitment: Our hiring was always focused on people right out of school. We had a few key hires like Charles Simonyi who came with experience. But most of our developers, we decided that we wanted them to come with clear minds, not polluted by some other approach, to learn the way that we liked to develop software, and to put the kind of energy into it that we thought was key.

   In many ways, Gates always sought to replicate the formula that gave the company its initial successes: a workforce full of uncynical, youthful exuberance, unstinting energy and a keen eye for the potential of the latest technology. Of course, that is bad news if your work starts to lag behind the curve. Although Microsoft has pretty impressive staff retention statistics by industry standards, it has long been rumoured that the 5 per cent of lowest-achieving programmers are culled each year. As Gates wrote in The New York Times in 1996 (in words imbued with a hint of menace): ‘The flip side of rewarding performance is making sure that employees who don’t contribute are carefully managed or reassigned.’

 SLEEP IS FOR WIMPS

 ‘We didn’t even obey a 24-hour-clock; we’d come in and program for a couple of days straight.’ BILL GATES, TRIUMPH OF THE NERDS, 1996 

Although life as a Microsoftie is not to be entered into lightly, it should also be noted that Gates did not expect more of his staff than he himself was prepared to do. He has always had a phenomenal – even macho – work ethic, routinely labouring until he quite literally dropped. The early days of Microsoft were littered with legendary marathon coding sessions, fuelled by copious amounts of pizza and punctuated by high-speed drives along New Mexico’s highways. Continuing the quote above, Gates said, ‘[There were] four or five of us. It was us and our friends – those were fun days.’ Senior staff were even known to doze off during client meetings, such was the effort they expended on product development. Meanwhile, at internal meetings, Gates liked to brainstorm while reclining on the floor, a habit that also commonly resulted in unscheduled naps. 

  To Gates, sleep is essentially for wimps. He wrote for The New York Times in 1997 that he envied those people who can survive on three or four hours’ sleep a night, arguing they ‘have so much more time to work, learn and play’. There is the nub of his attitude towards rest: while the medical profession assures us that sleep is essential for physical, mental and emotional well-being and development, Gates considers it something that happens while you could be doing something more constructive. Here was a man, after all, who reportedly took just fifteen days holiday between 1978 and 1984. 

  Nonetheless, Microsoft was also at the forefront of that movement in the 1980s and 1990s that looked to provide employees with workplace leisure opportunities. Rooted in the principle that a worker able to cut loose every now and again will return to their job energized, motivated and inspired, Gates created a headquarters at Redmond (not far from Seattle) famous for its atmosphere reminiscent of a university campus. There are, for instance, extensive on-site sports facilities, including football pitches, basketball courts and running tracks, along with catering services that stay open far later than your standard factory canteen. For many years the company also organized an annual summer MicroGames (reminiscent of the mini-Olympics of Gates’s childhood vacations at Hood Canal), before staff numbers made such an enterprise too unwieldy. 

  The Redmond Campus is unlike the offices most of us encounter in our professional lives. But just because you might see the staff dressed in civvies having just shot a few hoops, don’t run away with the idea that this is a place where you can relax for too long!