Think your work-life balance is out of whack?
At least you weren’t working for Bill Gates during the early days of Microsoft.
“I knew everyone’s license plates so I could look out in the parking lot and see when did people come in, when were they leaving,” Gates said in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s “Desert Island Discs” program this week.
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| Building where Paul Allen and Bill Gates got their start on April 4, 1975 |
Eventually he had to “loosen up because the company got to a reasonable size.”
“I was quite fanatical about work... I worked weekends,” Gates says at about the 25-minute mark of the interview. “I didn’t really take any vacations. I had to be a little careful not to try to apply my standards to how hard (my employees) worked.”
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| Photo : Bill Gates |
Gates, who has a net worth of more than $80 billion, shared those details of early Microsoft life along with eight songs he would take with him on a desert island, in a rare personal interview.
Gates also told the BBC that he and Paul Allen, who went to the same grade and high school in Seattle and would later become a co-founder of Microsoft, altered the school’s scheduling software to ensure Gates was the only boy in classes of girls. Gates also shared some thoughts on Steve Jobs.
“For some periods, we were completely allies working together -- I wrote software for the original Apple II,” he said. “Sometimes he would be very tough on you, sometimes he’d be very encouraging. He got really great work out of people. Steve was an incredible genius, and I was more of an engineer than he was. ”
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