Item — HN Reader

Wait, wait, wait. Bill Gates didn't program ANYTHING (at least not anything of note). He bought DOS, which made his fortune, and it was his connections through his mother which helped him in the deal with IBM.

You /can/ be awesome with practice. But Bill Gates isn't an example. (And, yes, I know he wrote an early Basic interpreter, but he was also considered a mediocre programmer by many who knew him.)

2 comments

Sorry, he's not a mediocre programmer. I knew him in college and he was darned good. We took the same grad CS courses as undergrads together, and he did well.

you can call billg an awesome businessman, after all it takes a lot to be the richest man on earth. I haven't heard much about his programming skills, so I don't think he was a great programmer.

exactly. And he didn't spend 10,000 hours practicing business.

I'm not trying to be snarky by pointing this out; I'm trying clarify that, while we should remember that in order to be great, we require dedication, effort and patience, the example chosen of Bill Gates shows that, sadly, this is often irrelevant.

Microsoft was founded in 1975. 10k hours is 5 years of 40 hour weeks. I think it's fair to say that he was working more than 40 hour weeks, so by the time MS rose to dominance, he'd almost certainly spent over 10k hours at it.