> Bill Gates does code reviews, not coding.<p>That's just wrong:<p>In 1983 Microsoft had revenues of $55 million and a headcount of 500. Bill was the CEO. And yet, according to Gates talking about the Tandy TRS-100, "part of my nostalgia about this machine is this was the last machine where I wrote a very high percentage of the code in the product. I did all the design and debugging along with Jey."[1].<p>Gates was CEO of a company of 500 with revenue of $55 million, and still producing large amounts of serious code. That's impressive (or misspent time, however you want to think about it.)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.nausicaa.net/~lgreenf/bill.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.nausicaa.net/~lgreenf/bill.htm</a>
<p><pre><code> > If Donald Trump had taken the millions he inherited
> from his father and put it all into mutual funds, you'd
> never have had to suffer through one of his books. But
> he'd be just about as rich today.
</code></pre>
I made a half-hearted attempt to run the figures on that a few months ago — I'd be very grateful if anyone was sufficiently more diligent than me and ran the figures.
Articles like this are evidence that people are still surprised that capital grows faster than labour. At least in fair capitalist society the surest way to become wealthy (statistically speaking) is to understand:<p>- The total wealth of the world is expected to keep increasing
- Capital grows faster than labour
- Taxes and disasters redistribute wealth<p>This is why investing in index funds that don't pay dividends is such a good idea.
Some past appearances:<p>2 years ago 88 comments <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6546325" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6546325</a><p>6 years ago 31 comments <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553776" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553776</a>
> When Microsoft products were threatened by network computers and Web-based applications, they simply bought WebTV and Hotmail.<p>Back when WebTV was considered a good idea?
this excerpt I find striking:<p>> If you're an intelligent curious person it can be painful to run a company of more than 50 people. You spend more time than you'd like repeating yourself, sitting in boring meetings, skimming over long legal documents in which you know there are errors but aren't sure how serious, etc. The temptation is to hand over the reins to the first "professional manager" who comes along. And that's what the standard venture capitalist formula dictates. But Bill Gates didn't do that. He hired Steve Ballmer in 1980 and gave him the CEO job 20 years later. Making money in the software products business requires domain expertise and a commitment to solving problems within that domain. Great tech companies are seldom built by non-technical management or professional managers who aren't committed to anything more than their paycheck. Adobe is another good example. The two founders were PhD computer science researchers from Xerox PARC who were passionate about solving problems in the publishing and graphics world. They are still guiding operations at Adobe.
"Choose your parents carefully" has got to be one of the most pessimistic and cynical perspectives in existence.<p>Instead, you could say "treat your children well", which is basically the same thing, except a lot less selfish.