I was working at Groove Networks, a tiny company in Beverly Massachusetts, when I learned that Bill Gates was dropping by. Founded by Ray Ozzie after his success with Lotus Notes, Groove had been negotiating with Microsoft to sell the company, and this was, potentially, the final step.
It was 2003, and Microsoft's next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, was not doing well. On top of that, Google and the rest of the internet natives were eating Microsoft's lunch, and many analysts expected the company to fade away, as IBM had done before.
Bill Gates, obviously, didn't want that to happen, and true to his nature, was looking for a technological solution. In many ways, Longhorn was fighting the last war: it invented a new graphical subsystem and a new storage system, at a time when modern apps were happily using HTML and SQL. Groove Networks had developed a peer-to-peer synchronization technology that blended online and offline so an app could have the best of both worlds. It was a true local-first architecture that was also internet native.
Gates arrived early in the morning with one or two assistants. In 2003 he was still the wealthiest person on the planet, but he carried himself like any normal engineer. One of my colleagues, who hadn't been told he was coming, only learned about it because they rode with him in the elevator. He introduced himself and made small talk. You can imagine their shock.
At the meeting, we presented our technology and our ideas for how we could fit into Microsoft's plans. Later I learned that this was a mini-product review, like Sinofsky talks about in the OP. I pitched him (somewhat half-baked) ideas about how Windows files folders could become collaborative, shared folders. He was very engaged, but thankfully polite--he didn't tell me it was "the stupidest thing he had ever heard." I suspect he was on his best behavior because he had already made up his mind to buy the company.
The highlight of the meeting, for me, was watching him and Ray (whom he'd known for a while) riff on everything around Windows, the internet, and technology in general. It was like improv, where every idea someone came up with was followed up with, "Yes, and then you can also...". You could tell Gates was engaged because he kept rocking in his chair, a classic tell we later learned.
Microsoft did ultimately buy Groove Networks, but not for the technology. I realized much later that Gates had bought Groove mostly to hire Ray. In 2006, Gates announced that he was retiring and appointing Ray Ozzie as Chief Software Architect.
At Microsoft, Ray spearheaded a project codenamed Red Dog, which the marketing folks later called "Azure". I'm convinced that Ray doesn't get enough credit for his contributions to turning Microsoft around.
Had Bill already planned all this when he visited us in 2003? Probably not, but seeing his mind work, it wouldn't surprise me if he had a little bit of an inkling. You never know.
Just wanted to say, I really enjoyed using Groove. It was a memory hog and a bit flaky, but I thought it had tremendous potential and was conceptually really interesting. I was sad when it disappeared
1. Sometimes we don't know what is most valuable (from the company's perspective).
2. It is easy to convince ourselves that whatever we want to do is really the most valuable thing (e.g., "Refactoring this massive subsystem will help the company in the long-term" or "Introducing this new technology (that I really like) will make it easier to recruit talent.")
In my view, the meta-advice is to understand the goals and constraints of your boss (and their boss), and work towards those goals (while adhering to the constraints).
With that perspective, we can derive some rules of thumb:
1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted. Your boss's goals get implemented (by you), freeing them to work on their boss's goals (and maybe get their own promotion).
3. The more time you spend with your boss, the better you will understand their goals, and symmetrically, the better they will understand your strengths. That means leaving a job after a year or two is not always optimal. It also means following a good boss to another company is often a good move.
4. There will be cases where the goals of your boss (and their boss) diverge from your own goals. They often want to cut costs, but you want a salary increase. There are never easy answers to this dilemma, but seeing their perspective is useful so you can find a win-win scenario. E.g., if you come up with a way to save money in other ways, such as automating an external cost, then your increased salary will be worth it.
5. In some cases, of course, there is no way to reconcile your boss's goals with your own. Realizing that is useful so you can find a different company/boss that is more aligned.
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
It's both.
You reasonably can't keep someone in the same position for 5 years when their market value has long gone past that point and they're expecting more. Even if you're not sure they won't be Peter principled out in the better paying position.
The better way if to have an internal pay scale that allows for more specialization without more responsibility, but that's IMHO rare and requires managers that can handle that.
> demonstrating performance at your boss's level
To note, it often results in advices close to "do X job for a while and we'll let you have it", which looks like a no risk move for the company but is not without downsides. I've seen people being half managers for a full year before becoming one, and boy does it kill morale.
It signals to employees they'll be literally working about their pay grade "for free" for an undefined amount of time, and it's an even worse proposition when they're effectively doing two jobs at the same time (they're still expected to excel in their current position while proving they can do the other position as well)
It's a more delicate balance than it might look at first.
And I agree that, taken to an extreme, this is abusive towards employees. But I think most (good) companies handle this pretty well.
I've seen a couple of patterns:
1. Your boss trusts that your instinct are aligned with theirs, and gives you more latitude. Maybe they allow you to design architecture your way rather than requiring detailed review. Maybe they delegate reviewing other people's code to you.
2. You understand enough about your boss's goals/constraints that you can represent them. E.g., they might trust you to represent them at a cross-functional meeting.
Either way, your name will come to their mind when promotions are available.
> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted
If you're an engineering IC, and your boss is a manager with 4 other ICs, your boss's goals are twofold: get at least 5 ICs worth of results from the team, and managing people.
So to do what you and TFA suggest literally you can either:
- Do 5 ICs worth of work
- Start managing people at the same level on your team, on your own initiative
I've seen coworkers try to manage their peers, aiming for a promotion. To say the least it harms team unity.
I only managed to do the 2nd once when I was thrown into a project with an absentee manager and doubly-booked half-committed members who were actually happy for someone to organize the work. Those sorts of situations are rare. Or maybe that's the unstated qualification.
And: Do 5x the amount of work, well...
Maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough here, but I need some examples of how this is generally achievable. Maybe this was specifically _not_ about the IC-manager divide, and more like managers and manager-managers?
What I'd more generally expect is for a manager to explicitly put you in charge of a small, short term project with one or two other people and see how it goes: can everyone contribute, did you achieve results, were you transparent, how did you interact with the other members, etc.
This is a good question. I compressed too much: instead of "performance at your boss's level" I really meant, "helping to achieve your boss's goals".
If you're an engineering IC in a team of 5, what are your boss's goals? It's usually things like: hit your deadlines, avoid production bug catastrophes, and maybe add features that make the sales people happy.
How can your boss achieve those goals? I have a few ideas:
a) Processes: Introduce or refine processes for the team to ensure high-quality code or to gain efficiencies.
b) Mentoring: Help members of the team to function at their highest level.
c) Clearing Obstacles: Coordinate with other teams so they don't slow you down. E.g., make sure teams you depend on are on schedule, and if not, adapt and adjust.
But this is just an example. I think the easiest thing to do is ask your boss what their goals are. What does success look like to them? Once you know that, you might be able to come up with ways of helping that they might not have thought of.
This sounds like advice for how to be promoted to a specific level -- the first point where awareness of things beyond yourself is required (somewhere around the Senior or Staff level for ICs, depending on your company).
Generally everyone in a team should be working towards some shared goal, there's no level at which you can be a chaos agent and not serve some higher purpose. The difference at this level transition is that you realise that for yourself -- someone doesn't need to remind you of the goal and nudge you back on course. That same realisation is not going to cut it at higher levels.
For me the general version of this advice is not something you can just tell the person who's being promoted, it's collective advice, for them, their manager, their tech lead: everyone needs to agree that this person needs to be given more rope, they need to do something useful with that (i.e. not hang themselves with it), the people around them need to watch out for when they start tying a noose and help them untie it (already regretting this analogy), and that's how you get promoted.
The rope takes different forms for different levels. I'll use the level scale I'm familiar with, starting with a newly graduated engineer at L3:
- L3 -> L4. You help decide how to build the feature.
- L4 -> L5. You help decide what features are worth building, and are trusted to maintain them.
- L5 -> L6. You help shape the work and ongoing maintenance of ~10 people's work (what products are worth building and how), over a time horizon of 6 months to a year.
- L6 -> L7. ~50 people's work, 1-2 years.
- L7 -> L8. ~200 people's work, 2-5 years.
- L8 -> L9. Things start to get fuzzy. The pattern suggests that you have a hand in ~1000 people's work, which is possible to do in the moment, but rare. There's two ways I can think of: you're either a world expert in your field, or you have set the technical strategy well for your organisation as it grew to this size.
This is just based on my experience, working largely on infrastructure teams both in big tech and in start ups as both an IC and a manager (currently an IC).
I think those are good examples. I think part of the confusion is that most of those are typical responsibilities of e.g. senior level IC work, so "performance at your boss's level" looks more or less the same as "performance at your current IC level".
I'd say it's about doing things at the next level to show you're ready for that level. So for moving from a Sr to a Staff position might involve doing more mentoring of the team, showing that you are using your knowledge to improve the efficiency of both your team and other teams, etc.
> Start managing people at the same level on your team, on your own initiative
Anecdotically, a coworken in my group started, on his own initiative, to “play manager” in out team, because he wanted to “help us all”. Of course he just wanted to ascend the ladder. That backfired instantly and spectacularly. I would never act with any authority if it was not very clearly delegated by my team, or my superior; and even then I would walk like in thin ice for the first 6 months
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
So technically, it is using your past experience to prove that you are operating at the next level
> Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.
How ridiculous the opposite sounds: You pay me at the next level for 3 years, and only then I'll know you're serious and will start working at that level. You'd get laughed out of the room. But the company has this exact deal in reverse.
> > Actually, you operate on the next level for certain amount of the time. You work with your manager to file for your promotion case. That's how the typical big corps work with promotions.
> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation. They get N years of "next level" work out of you while still being able to pay those N years in "previous level" salary. Good deal for them.
My current company used to work this way, but they moved to a "needs-based" promo process. You can be promoted to L5 if your manager can justify the need for an L5.
Which ends up making promotions significantly harder to come by. It's near impossible to justify the need for an L5 role when you already have L4s doing the work. No matter how far outside their level competencies a person works, that work becomes L4 work... because an L4 is successfully performing it.
I'm in this exact situation described in the two comments above.
I explained to my manager that the project I have been working on has developed a lot since the last two years and if he would hire a replacement he would be looking at a senior person, not a junior. He agrees but he gets rejected when he made the case to his boss. My performance reviews have been above expectations.
His boss claimed that it would not be fair to other people that stayed in the position for a similar amount of time before getting a promotion, essentially ignoring my exceptional performance.
My company, for e.g. is fairly flat, and my boss is more or less aware of everyone’s contributions in my team, he often works with them directly.
I also work with my report’s reports directly and am fairly aware of their work.
Despite this, some engineers, to my surprise, act as we have a strict hierarchy and try to reach to me through their managers.
From the sounds of your description, there are a few possibilities:
1. Your boss’s boss is aware of your work. She is also aware of others’ and she does not think that yours particularly stand out and she is willing to risk your departure. In this case, you would need to really look at this objectively. Are you really exceptional? Why does not she think so if that’s the case? Is there someone else who are also great (or giving that impression) that you are not aware?
2. She does not know you very well. If so, why is this the case? Does she not know anyone, or are you keeping your work to yourself? I’ve definitely been in this situation, despite architecting our whole core systems, years later I found nobody other than my fellow engineers knew. Was a hard-earned lesson for me, you need to start speaking about your work outside of your 1-1s, but not in a promotional way. By frequently offering your hard-earned wisdom where it is helpful.
3. She is not interested in knowing anyone. She will manage her team at a high level and she either won’t promote anyone until she is forced to (e.g. you are leaving otherwise), or when she is given a budget and asked for it, which she will then ask for recommendations, your chances than unlikely to be proportional to your work but be circumstantial. If this is the case, you should start interviewing.
One thing that I've seen implemented to prevent that is to have the pay bands for level N and N+1 overlap. So in the time that you're doing "next level" work, you're expecting to be at the top of your current pay band, and then the promotion doesn't automatically give you a big pay raise, but it unlocks a pay band that you can go up in.
This works if performing at the top of your current level equates to performing at the bottom of the next level. That said, there's a problem where sometimes a "promotion" is really a new role, meaning to perform at the next level, you have to kind of not perform well at the current level.
It's all about risk/reward tradeoffs. Once you get past the junior->senior level, each promotion is hiring you for a completely different job. As an individual, there are only a few ways to get that job:
1. Trial run at your current company (could be wasting your time, but also you have domain knowledge and relationships to help)
2. Join a smaller company and hope it grows (could rapidly accelerate growth due to needs, but could also go very poorly if the company stagnates)
3. Try to lateral to another company with a promotion (pretty difficult in general)
It's not really that juicy for the corp. If they hire (promote) you without experience, they are hiring someone without experience for a position and then have to go and hire again to replace someone else. Vs. just hiring someone with experience
> This has always struck me as a pretty juicy deal going for the corporation.
It's a good deal if you deserve the promo. Giving someone the opportunity to take on projects at the next level and having them not deliver can be enormously expensive. The higher the level, the more expensive it is.
Possibly. It's the only way it actually works though, because of the Peter Priciple.
Imagine the other way - you have peopel dong a role, and the people who do the best job at that role get promoted to the next one. Some of them will be good and the new role, some of them won't. The ones who are good will carry on getting promoted. The ones who aren't will get stuck in that role. The problem is that everyone rises to a point at which they can't do the job, and every role is filled by someone who has been promoted one step too far.
In a healthy structure, it should be a halfway house - you shouldn't have to be doing the whole job that you're trying to get promoted to, you should be doing enough bits and pieces of it that you demonstrate that you CAN do it. That way the company has information that they're not promoting you to a position of incompetence.
I suppose it balances in the end, though. If you could make more money elsewhere you'd go elsewhere, so the whole reason you are willing to accept being underpaid through the transitionary phase is because you realize that you will be overpaid afterwards.
How exactly do you suggest it should work, then? A timer starts and when it runs out you get promoted and everyone just hopes you didn't just get moved up above your level of competence?
> if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.
It can not be farther from the truth.
The best way to stay in the bottom is to work hard, to focus on work so that others have time to focus on advertising themselves, take credit of your good work and backstab you for everything else, befriend and lick the shoes strategically -even develop bed skills, for some- while you isolate yourself by sweating and believing everyone will understand or care about how you optimized that for loop.
Cynicism is a seductive drug. It makes you feel good because you don't have to do anything--the game is rigged, so why bother trying? But like all drugs it is ultimately self-sabotaging.
Careers are like love: you have to risk heartbreak or you'll never experience joy.
I don't think there's a one size fits all here. If you don't go out of your comfort zone and "do more" you may never get a promotion because you're seen as average. But it's also true that if you work hard and constantly deliver you may still never get the promotion because you're seen as critical where you are.
You might be disappointed either way. Like any recipe, there are many ingredients needed to pull it off. Delivering results, solving your boss' or boss' boss problems, doing it visibly, having support from above, doing it at the right time, etc. all contribute.
This is premised on promotions and other work rewards having any kind of rational basis or connection to the work.
It could simply be that spending time with your boss makes them know and like you more, and people tend to reward people they know and like, making up some post hoc rationalization about performance or whatever to justify it.
No one wants to think of themselves like this, though, so they would never admit, even to themselves, that this is what's going on, but I suspect for most people it's the actual reality.
> 1. Promotions are not a reward for past performance. Instead, they are a bet that you will contribute more towards those goals with a promotion than without one.
> 2. As the OP says, if you are demonstrating performance at your boss's level, that's evidence/proof that a promotion is warranted.
That's not evidence for 1. At least you haven't explained a reason why it would be.
I agree with the OP that "whoever owns the weights, owns the values". But by that criteria, Grok is an example to follow. Musk is very clear on his values, and we know what we're getting when we use Grok. Obviously, not everyone agrees with its values, but so what? We will never be able to create a useful AI that everyone agrees with.
In contrast, we don't know what values are programmed into ChatGPT, Claude, etc. What are they optimizing for? Alignment to some cabal of experts? Maximum usage? Minimum controversy? We don't entirely know.
Isn't it better to have multiple AIs with obvious values so that we can choose the most appropriate one?
Musk isn't clear at all. He trumpets "free speech" then literally censors objective fact-based criticism which annoys him.
The problem isn't Grok-on-X, it's that Grok is supposed to be a commercial product used by individuals and businesses.
Machines do not usually have values. Now we're being asked to pay for a service that not only has values which affect the quality of its output, but which is constantly being tweaked according to the capricious whims of its owner.
Today it's white supremacy, tomorrow it might be programmed criticism of competing EVs and AI projects, or promotion of narratives that support traditional corporations over threatening startups.
Do you really want to pay for a service that is trying to manipulate your values while you use it, and could potentially be used to undermine you and your work without you being consciously aware of it?
> It used to be that a well-written document was a proof-of-work that the author thought things through (or at least spent some time thinking about it).
I think you hit the nail on the head here. The problem isn't so much that people can do bad work faster than ever now, its that we can no longer rely on the same heuristics for quickly assessing a given piece of work. I dont have a great answer. But I do still think it has something to do with trust and how we build relationships with each other.
Before AI, if someone submitted a well-formatted, well-structured document, we could assume they spent a lot of time on it and probably got the substance right. It's like the document is a proof-of-work that means I can probably trust the results.
Maybe we need a different document structure--something that has verification/justification built in.
I'd like to see a conclusion up front ("We should invest $x billion on a new factory in Malaysia") followed by an interrogation dialogue with all the obvious questions answered: "Why Malaysia and not Indonesia?", "Why $x and not $y billion?", etc.
At that point, maybe I don't care if the whole thing was produced by AI. As long as I have the justification in front of me, I'm happy. And this format makes it easy to see what's missing. If there's a question I would have asked that's not in the document, then it's not ready.
Yes, I agree this is true in some (many?) cases. But it is also true that sometimes the more complex solution is better, either for performance reasons or because it makes things simpler for users/API callers.
Yes, there's a valid argument that simple code is not always best performance. Optimizing simple code usually makes it more complex.
But I think the main point stands. There's an old saying that doing a 60 minute presentation is easy, doing one in 15 minutes us hard. In other words writing "clever" (complicated) code is easy. Distilling it down to something simple is hard.
So the final result of any coding might be "complex", "simplified from complex", or "optimized from simple".
The first and third iterations are superficially similar, although likely different in quality.
I like this insight, even though I think they are pushing Kernighan's quip a little too far.
I take away two ideas:
1. Always be learning. I think everyone believes this, but we often come up with plausible reasons to stick to what we know. This is a good reminder that we should fight that impulse and put in the effort to learn.
2. Always be fearless. This, I think, is the key insight. Fear is easy. We fear the unknown, whether they be APIs or someone else's code. We fear errors, particularly when they have real-world consequences. And we fear complexity, because we think we might not be able to deal with it. But the opposite of fear isn't recklessness, it's confidence. We should be confident that we will figure it out. And even if we don't figure it out, we should be confident that we can revert the code. Face your fears and grow.
Yes, housing, education, and medical care are way more expensive now than in my era. There's no sugar-coating that. Education, you already have, don't try to buy more unless the math works out. You're young so hopefully you don't need much medical care. Housing is a big problem, I agree. If you can move to a cheaper state (Ohio? New Mexico?), that might help.
The real problem is dating and relationships. I think that's where we all need to focus. Are there any AI matchmakers yet? [Just kidding, maybe]
But don't worry about the world. The world has been broken ever since we discovered fire. My parents were born literally in the middle of World War II. Somehow it all worked out.
>If you can move to a cheaper state (Ohio? New Mexico?), that might help.
it's already hard enough finding jobs in traditionally properous states. What am I finding in New Mexico?
I also think it's a bit ironic that we need to work on relationships and meanwhile also need to move away from what's likely our existing social networks.
>The real problem is dating and relationships. I think that's where we all need to focus.
We do 1000% need to regulate dating app algorithms. We can't let tech companies exploit the human connection for money. But with all the other BS out there, meeting women seems so far down the list of priorities at the moment.
If you believe that there is no action that could improve your situation, then you're right. You're stuck. Best just learn to accept what you've got.
But that is almost certainly not true. You are playing a high-dimensional game with a few hundred degrees of freedom and imperfect information. You already know how to play this game: make a move, see the result, adjust your strategy and make another move.
Of course, it's not easy. Maybe you don't know which move to make. Maybe you don't know which moves are available. Try the following: Ask HN. Describe your current situation, describe your goals, and ask HN for advice. I guarantee there are lots of smart people here who will answer. One of those answers might even be helpful to you. You never know.
Me. Personally, no. I'm not out of moves. I'm making moves but I do have much less options than a few years prior. I'll make it through one way or another
But that's just me, as a late millennial that had some professional experience before the rug was pulled from under me. I have value to show to the few companies looking for actual labor. People a few years younger than me are absolutely thrown on a chess board with 2 pawns and told "good luck, I did these moves when I graduated... (with a bishop and Knight)". I don't know what actionable advice I can give outside of "survive until the market improves. Work on your portfolio and network if/when you can to prepare for that". But it's not great advice.
My bias is that talking about how unfair it is for Gen Z (or whomever) is the worst kind of advice because they can't do anything about it. It's not their fault.
I think advice that gives people hope (that things get better) and agency (that they can make moves on the game board) are more likely to improve the situation.
>My bias is that talking about how unfair it is for Gen Z (or whomever) is the worst kind of advice because they can't do anything about it. It's not their fault.
But that mentality is part of the issue. "they" can't do much about it. "we" as a collective can. have our representatives at the very least penalize ghost job postings and that's already a big step. And then from there we could make disincentives for outsourcing and reel in the abuse of the H1-B program. You'd be surprised how quickly things can change when politicians have a fire under their butts to do something.
But all that first requires awareness, and then empathy. Something that some of this community clearly lacks.
>I think advice that gives people hope (that things get better) and agency (that they can make moves on the game board) are more likely to improve the situation.
I feel issue #2 is that there is such thing as "toxic positivity". Giving hope instead of recognizing that things are bad only enrages those who feel bad. People don't like having their lived experienced invalidated, especially by those who haven't lived it themselves.
Advice needs to be tailored as such too. Saying "just keep interviewing" is technically realistic advice, but not one that gives much agency if the issue of burn out is applying for jobs.
Are we talking about the middle of World War II in the US? A war that resulted in exactly 6 civilian deaths in the continental US and destroyed all serious competition for US industry for decades to come? That was one of the economically most advantageous positions in history.
I think it is pretty reasonable to say that even for those in the continental US the state of the world in 1942 provided much more cause for concern than anything going on right now. At the very least, for a child born then you would be very unsure what kind of world they would end up growing up in.
True--I don't think things got better in the US until after the Korean War. And even the 60s were marred by Vietnam (far more than the impact of the War on Terror).
My parents were born in Peru in 1941/42. Peru was neutral for much of the war, but in 1942 they began deporting Japanese individuals suspected of Axis sympathies to internment camps in the US. In 1945 Peru entered the war on the Allied side. If the war hadn't ended, I'm pretty sure my dad and his family would have been interned.
And even after the war, the situation was unreal. My dad's uncle didn't believe that Japan had lost the war. He thought it was all just allied propaganda. In 1949 he sold all his possessions and took his family back to Japan--to Okinawa, in fact. When he got there, he saw the truth: the country was smashed to rubble, and he had to beg in the streets for food. My grandfather travelled to Japan, taking my 10 year-old father in tow, to bring the uncle back to Peru.
That's probably one of the tamest, least tragic stories from that time. Even in the US, 400,000 never came home and 600,000 came back wounded. That's a million families affected. Germany, Japan, Russia, France, China, Korea, and even Britain, had far worse stories.
Whatever troubles we have now (and we have plenty), they are not on the same scale as those from that time.
400,000 US soldiers/marines never came home. Another 600,000 came back wounded. That's at least a million families affected.
And by 1950, only five years after the end of the war, millions of men were sent overseas again for the Korean War.
And after that, the children of the returned WWII soldiers were sent off to Vietnam, unleashing the greatest civil unrest in the US since the Civil War.
And you think it was a great time for all because the dollar was worth a lot?
Hey there, early Gen X here. We lived with the existential dread of nuclear war (The Day After traumatized a whole generation), our parents left us on our own with just 3 channels of TV for company because they both had to work, and our sexual awakening turned into a horror movie because of fear of AIDS (a death sentence at the time).
Well, then, as a Millennial it seems like I had it the best. The ‘90s were fantastic. Then 9/11 and those wars weren’t great but didn’t affect life except in those countries. Started uni just before the GFC, only to finish grad school just as startups were picking up in the early 2010s and then when 2020 hit had lots of money already that work wasn’t critical. Then modern generative AI showed up and I have so much experience it just accelerated me.
My life rules hahaha. Only problem is that the older generations are going to parasitize my kids for disability money and shit but I’ll just move them to where humanity is growing if it comes to that.
Bizarrely my parents also feel like their generation had a great time. So who can tell. Maybe I’ll make it so that Gen Beta says the same story.
And our every moments weren't being tracked by flock cameras or a cell phones. If something embarrassing happened at school, it didn't end up on tiktok. We still thought if we got to college we could get out of that shitty town and have a real grown up job and get a house. That is increasingly out of reach. I haven't even touched on something like 25y of constant combat deployments, or politics yet. Or the environment.
I'm telling you about what Gen X had to go through, not because I think we had it worse than you--I'm sure we didn't, but to show that it gets better.
Gen X was called the Slacker Generation because we didn't think it was worth trying very hard. We didn't want the life of our parents: working all day at a job they hated just to buy stuff to impress neighbors that they didn't like. [Yes, Fight Club was about Gen X--or at least that's what we tell ourselves.]
But it got better. For me, computers were a salvation. I found that all that time I spent writing PC video games resulted in skills that companies valued. We were the first digital natives. I remember having to teach 50-something year-old CEOs how to type ("Hold down the shift key for uppercase").
I don't know what unique characteristics will save today's Gen Z. They be able to take advantage of the wrenching change that AI is about to unleash. They'll be in the thick of the changes, but still young enough to adapt. Us older generations will have a harder time.
> I'm telling you about what Gen X had to go through, not because I think we had it worse than you--I'm sure we didn't, but to show that it gets better.
Their words implied they were a member of your generation.
There is some difference between real struggles, and uncomfortable fear for things which didn't happen. Were you unable to afford a home because of fear of nuclear war? Or for fear of AIDS?
I was unable to afford a home because of fear of bouncing checks. I lived in an apartment with 3 other roommates.
And we all knew people who had died of AIDS, and I wasn't even in an at-risk community. Gay men I knew felt that they had gone through an apocalypse, like they were the survivors of a secret war that no one talked about.
Home ownership when I was growing up was around 50%. Not owning a home was extremely normal, not a sign of deprivation.
Not ever in your life being able to afford a home is the new normal, and to me it's a sign of deprivation. That's the reality younger generations are dealing with, not only temporarily renting, but renting for life.
Which isn't anything new. It's feudalism, and the way things usually are. But that's a far greater concern for those in that situation, than AIDS or nuke scares.
It was 2003, and Microsoft's next version of Windows, codenamed Longhorn, was not doing well. On top of that, Google and the rest of the internet natives were eating Microsoft's lunch, and many analysts expected the company to fade away, as IBM had done before.
Bill Gates, obviously, didn't want that to happen, and true to his nature, was looking for a technological solution. In many ways, Longhorn was fighting the last war: it invented a new graphical subsystem and a new storage system, at a time when modern apps were happily using HTML and SQL. Groove Networks had developed a peer-to-peer synchronization technology that blended online and offline so an app could have the best of both worlds. It was a true local-first architecture that was also internet native.
Gates arrived early in the morning with one or two assistants. In 2003 he was still the wealthiest person on the planet, but he carried himself like any normal engineer. One of my colleagues, who hadn't been told he was coming, only learned about it because they rode with him in the elevator. He introduced himself and made small talk. You can imagine their shock.
At the meeting, we presented our technology and our ideas for how we could fit into Microsoft's plans. Later I learned that this was a mini-product review, like Sinofsky talks about in the OP. I pitched him (somewhat half-baked) ideas about how Windows files folders could become collaborative, shared folders. He was very engaged, but thankfully polite--he didn't tell me it was "the stupidest thing he had ever heard." I suspect he was on his best behavior because he had already made up his mind to buy the company.
The highlight of the meeting, for me, was watching him and Ray (whom he'd known for a while) riff on everything around Windows, the internet, and technology in general. It was like improv, where every idea someone came up with was followed up with, "Yes, and then you can also...". You could tell Gates was engaged because he kept rocking in his chair, a classic tell we later learned.
Microsoft did ultimately buy Groove Networks, but not for the technology. I realized much later that Gates had bought Groove mostly to hire Ray. In 2006, Gates announced that he was retiring and appointing Ray Ozzie as Chief Software Architect.
At Microsoft, Ray spearheaded a project codenamed Red Dog, which the marketing folks later called "Azure". I'm convinced that Ray doesn't get enough credit for his contributions to turning Microsoft around.
Had Bill already planned all this when he visited us in 2003? Probably not, but seeing his mind work, it wouldn't surprise me if he had a little bit of an inkling. You never know.
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