Bill Gates' Hiring Checklist
Posted on Jul 19, 2005 at 01:24 PM by Aaron Ricadela
Time was, talented computer jocks would knock on Microsoft's doors and wait for an audience with its hiring gatekeepers. Now, Microsoft can't hire the kind of folks it needs fast enough. Listen to chairman Bill Gates' sales pitch at the company's Faculty Summit for researchers in Redmond last week: "Microsoft is trying to hire every great college graduate who has basic computer-science skills and we think is highly talented," he said. "We've got open headcount, these are super-well-paying jobs, you can get your own office." When Bill Gates has to convince talented programmers to come work for him because they can get an office with a door that shuts, you know times are tough.
It's not just Microsoft that's feeling the pinch. The popularity of computer science as an undergraduate major among incoming freshmen fell by more than 60% between 2000 and 2004, according to a UCLA study, while the Labor Department lists data analysts, health information technicians, and software engineers among the fastest-growing jobs the next seven years. The mismatch between demand and talent is squeezing nearly all tech companies. "It really is gating the way we do things," Gates said at the conference for academic researchers. A Webcast of his conversation there with Princeton University engineering dean Maria Klawe is available on Microsoft's Web site.
According to Gates, Microsoft isn't finding enough people to hire in the United States, even as it plans to keep the vast majority of its development in Redmond. "The competition for someone who has the right background is phenomenal," Gates added. "What's going on is very troubling."
As computer-science enrollment dives, the fastest-growing college major in the country is phsy ed, Gates noted. That set him off on a mocking riff. "What is going on in that field? I mean, are they making breakthroughs like speech recognition or artificial intelligence? I'm dying to see these new games they're inventing, new rules. The poor Chinese, they don't realize this is the coming field, and 10 years from now they're going to wake up and say, 'Oh no, physical education, we completely missed that activity.' " No wonder I see all those young, eager trainers hanging around my gym, sniffing for new clients. Colleges must be minting them left and right.
So what's Bill Gates looking for in a prospective employee? Someone who has not only taken the requisite courses, he said, but who has worked on projects that show the ability to think through tough programming problems from start to finish. Microsoft also wants kids who haven't just programmed with "garbage collection" languages like Java and C# that automatically take care of managing memory and other resources for the programmer, but who've worked in lower-level languages that require them to manage the computer's resources by hand. That's not taught enough, said Gates. Finally, Microsoft wants to develop managers who know how to work with people, not just computers.
So what's the secret to landing one of those open Microsoft jobs? "Say somebody came for an interview and they said, 'Hey, I read The Art Of Computer Programming, that's all I ever read, I did all the problems,' " hypothesized Gates, who'll host 1,200 interns on his lawn this summer. "I would hire them right then," he said. "Even if they didn't do the double-star problems."
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