This was done to maintain control of the hours they spent in the office

Some time ago we saw that, in a talk that Bill Gates gave to a group of people who were graduating from a university, the former leader of Microsoft collected something that has led him to regret something that marked his life (and that of those around him) a few years ago: “You’re not lazy if you give yourself a break“.

Gates explained that when he was the age of his interlocutors at graduation, in his early 20s, “I didn’t believe in vacations. I didn’t believe in weekends. I forced everyone around me worked long hours. In the early days of Microsoft, my office overlooked the parking lot and I kept track of who left early and who stayed late.”

Even, Paul Allen even said in the past that “Microsoft had a very stressful environment due to Bill’s demands“Now let’s remember Gates’s rather toxic trick to find out how many hours each employee spent in the office and to see if they were really involved in putting in extra hours.

In a podcast series that the magnate performed with the BBC, The now philanthropist and one of the heads behind Windows, spoke about his obsession with productivity, his own and that of the Microsoft team. Although on another occasion he has reported that he considers that a company boss must be intenserecognizes that in this case it went too far.

Gates’ toxic practice as a boss

Bill Gates, as he had already said on other occasions, used to memorize the license plates of your employees’ cars to know when they arrived and left work.

“I knew everyone’s license plate, so I could look in the parking lot and see when people came in, when they left. Eventually I had to slack off, when the company reached a reasonable size“he explains.

Gates said that He worked weekends and “didn’t really believe in vacations” during his first years at the head of Microsoft. He admitted that he was “a little more intense than most people at the time, but “no more intense than Steve Jobs,” co-founder of Apple.

Paul Allen confirmed at the time that the company was surrounded by a high-stress environment with a boss obsessed with everyone spending long hours in the office (just like Elon Musk now at X, demanding everyone work long hours and very hard) and that he was like “a foreman who hung around the parking lot on weekends to see who had arrived” at the office.

Practices that are not isolated

These types of practices are not isolated. for un CEO like him it can make a lot of sense to spend many hours because was becoming a billionaireas is the case of Gates who He became the richest man in the world. For your employees, living without vacations or breaks to make another man the richest in the world may make less sense.

One has to remember that Sheryl Sandberg who, for many years was a key figure in the leadership of Facebook, now Meta, and who also worked at Google, arrived to confess that when she had her first childhe started sneaking out of the Google office early and, to hide, sometimes he would put a decoy jacket on his chair, leave the light on at his desk or he would schedule afternoon meetings in other buildings so that his colleagues would think he was doing something elsewhere in the offices and wouldn’t know he was gone.

Image | Xataka

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