Today I learned that Gabe got his first job at Microsoft just by visiting his brother who was working there. That's literally it, no interview, no humiliation rituals, no nothing.

>"I was visiting my brother, and I thought he and I were going to just hang out, [but I found out] that he was working on a C compiler, and so that's what he did all this time. So I just hung out with him at work, and Steve Ballmer got mad because I was distracting Dan from doing his job and said, 'If you're going to be hanging out here, you know, why don't you do something useful?' So I said 'fine, I'll do a little work.' And decided I'd take the quarter off and just work at Microsoft."
>"I kept saying 'I have to go back and finish my degree' and, 13 years later, I still hadn't gone back and finished my degree," says Newell. "So that's where I learned the profession of being a developer. And it was interesting how much faster I was learning by working at Microsoft, right?