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Gates is definitely a brilliant man, but his engineering skills are debatable.
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<p>I don't think anybody is trying to say that Gates is the greatest engineer of all time.</p>
<p>What makes him impressive is that he knows far more about engineering, and specifically about software coding, than most tech CEO's do. Say what you will about his coding deficiencies, but at least he was there in the trenches, getting into the weeds, dealing with all the hairiness of writing good code. Very few other CEO's of tech companies can say the same thing. Most are just businessmen and salesmen. For example, John Chambers of Cisco is not an engineer. Neither is Sam Palmisano of IBM. Mark Hurd of HP. Scott McNealy of Sun. Terry Semel of Yahoo. Meg Whitman of Ebay. Larry Probst of Electronic Arts. </p>
<p>Even those CEO's who do have substantial software backgrounds were probably not ever as good as Bill Gates was at it. For example, while Steve Jobs of Apple and Larry Ellison of Oracle were former coders, I suspect that Bill Gates was a better one. Obviously we can never prove that, but I believe it is true. </p>
<p>About the only major tech company that I can think of whose CEO is certainly a better coder than Gates was is Google, with Dr. Eric Schmidt, PhD in computer science from UCBerkeley, and lead developer of the Java programming language while at Sun. </p>
<p>But the point is, people who are both very good at software and in running large tech companies are few and far between. Gates may not be the greatest at software, but he's clearly a lot better than most other CEO's of major tech companies are.</p>