- Work-life balance was a foreign concept for Bill Gates during Microsoft’s early years. “I was quite fanatical about work,” he said in a 2016 BBC interview. “I worked weekends. I didn’t really believe in vacations.”
- “I knew everybody’s license plates so I could look out in the parking lot and see when did people come in [and] when were they leaving,” Gates admitted to the BBC.
- A majority of employees say that being a micromanager is the worst trait a boss can possess, according to a recent Comparably survey of over 2,000 employees at tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.
Ruth Umoh from CNBC writes:
“Establishing work-life balance may be all the rage among employers right now, but it wasn’t a priority for Bill Gates during Microsoft’s early years.
In a 2016 interview with BBC Radio 4, Gates shared just how work-obsessed he used to be. “I was quite fanatical about work,” he said. “I worked weekends. I didn’t really believe in vacations.”
Unsurprisingly, this work ethic transferred to employees. “I had to be a little careful not to apply my standards on to how hard they worked,” he said.
However, that didn’t stop him from tracking which employees were working the longest hours. “I knew everybody’s license plates so I could look out in the parking lot and see when did people come in [and] when were they leaving,” Gates told the BBC.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen said as much in a 2011 first-person article for Vanity Fair. “Microsoft was a high-stress environment because Bill drove others as hard as he drove himself,” wrote Allen. “He was growing into the taskmaster who would prowl the parking lot on weekends to see who’d made it in…”
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Economic Left 
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