Tomorrow we're reviewing our progress with Bill Gates in what's known (and feared/dreaded by some) as a 'BillG Review'. A BillG review usually consists of 2 hours with the top executives from various teams, e.g. Developer tools, Windows, and/or SQL Server where you get to present work that they are interested in. Usually this is either new projects or projects that affect many other teams across the company, such as caching.
[via Rob]
I'd be Shaking and excited all at once. But it seems as though Rob is living my dream job. Speaking of Reviews: When i stood up in front of our 20 developers and introduced a new version of a product my team was working on - one that affected all the other developers - I was pretty excited (and a bit scared). It was a very nice feeling. Now I just have to multiply this a few thousand times and see what it feels like.... nah, I just can't imagine it.. :)
Here's a different angle on this:
How Is BillG able to critique your work? Is he technically involved so much that he can comment on your area of knowledge to the degree that it actually gives constructive criticism, or is it just for show? I would imagine if he did know what he was talking about to the degree needed for a peer review it would be pretty amazing, since yours is probably not the only review he attends , which forces him to know in-depth the technical stuff that a dedicated team like yours is working on - only for a large number of subjects.
Is he really that knowledgeable? Is it all just for show, as if to say , "Hey, I am part of this company and i interact with my developers and I help make important decisions"? Does he just sit there and let all the other program managers do all the talking? I'd really like to know How a man of this magnitude is able to focus on such minutia (minutia to him not to us. when dealing with multi million dollar deals and lawsuits and companies and technologies and marketing - learning exactly how caching in .Net 2.0 works is minutia ).
If he is that much into it - I applaud him (And I keep my fingers crossed for you ;)