--- title: "Not Your Father's Peer Review" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/4/27/not-your-fathers-peer-review.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/4/27/not-your-fathers-peer-review.html" published: "2003-04-27T20:24:00" updated: "2003-04-27T20:24:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "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.…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Not Your Father's Peer Review By Roy Osherove April 27, 2003 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published April 27, 2003; technical details may be outdated. _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._ \[via [Rob](http://dotnetweblogs.com/RHoward/posts/5946.aspx)\] 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 ;) ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Apr 28, 2003 ### [MetaWebLog API rules](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/4/28/metaweblog-api-rules.html) - Apr 27, 2003 ### [How to convert your Windows Server 2003 to a...](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/4/27/how-to-convert-your-windows-server-2003-to-a.html) - Apr 27, 2003 ### [Windows Server 2003 Editions Compared](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/4/27/windows-server-2003-editions-compared.html) - Apr 27, 2003 ### [Document: Threats and Countermeasures for Windows Server 2003](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/4/27/document-threats-and-countermeasures-for-windows-server-2003.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/