Comment by wavemode

Comment by wavemode 2 days ago

17 replies

> CEO walking up behind my desk and pointing out that I'd done MOV AX, 0 when I could have done XOR AX, AX

Now that's what I call micromanagement.

(sorry couldn't resist)

xigoi 2 days ago

The real joke is that a CEO had actual technical knowledge instead of just being there for decoration.

jgrahamc 2 days ago

He was right though. We were memory and cycle constrained and I'd wasted both!

mkornaukhov 2 days ago

Similarly, the CEO couldn't resist the outstanding optimization of memory and execution speed!

  • 6510 2 days ago

    [flagged]

    • jgrahamc 2 days ago

      I am sad you don't believe this story. The CEO was very technical and this is exactly the sort of thing he would spot.

      • bombcar 2 days ago

        People don't realize that in the era of dinosaurs where MASM ruled and assembly walked the earth, there basically WEREN'T CEOs who didn't know the details, because all the companies doing this stuff were pretty small at the time (and the CEO may have been writing it himself a few years before).

      • OrderlyTiamat 2 days ago

        My first part time dev job as a student featured me walking in on our CEO who showed me he was recompiling his kernel to enable some features. I'm quite sure he was just doing that to impress the students, but at least he knew how to!

        • eru a day ago

          Perhaps his secretary showed him?

      • 6510 2 days ago

        Similarly, if you told people in the 80's that it would be the opposite in the future no one would believe it either.

        Not even the developers are very technical in the future!

        Woah, really? And they still manage to write good software?

        Of course not, if good software would be standing next to their bed at 4 am they would scream who are you what are you doing here? help! help! Someone, make it go away!

    • eru 2 days ago

      CEO doesn't need to mean some big boss. If you have a three person startup, the CEO might just be your co-founding buddy.

crest 2 days ago

I had to pad the code for alignment reasons. ;-)