At 18, Bill Gates received several job offers from tech companies while at Harvard, including Honeywell and General Electric. These offers boosted his confidence in programming but also made him aware that accepting them could have derailed his path to co-founding Microsoft. In his memoir, “Source Code,” Gates recounts drafting a resume to explore job opportunities, although he was not actively seeking employment. Eventually, he and Paul G. Allen decided to launch Microsoft after seeing the Altair 8800 in 1975. Gates reflects that pursuing a traditional career might have delayed their success, but the offers affirmed his belief in his potential in computing.
At just 18, Bill Gates was inundated with job offers from various tech companies, presenting him with the option to leave Harvard and embark on a career before he co-founded Microsoft, as reported by CNBC Make It .
Gates noted that the offers from firms like Honeywell and General Electric provided a significant “ego boost,” affirming his talent in computer programming. Nonetheless, he acknowledged that accepting any of these positions might have hindered his journey toward becoming a billionaire and the eventual rise of Microsoft as a $3 trillion enterprise.
This period of Gates’ life is explored in his recent memoir, Source Code, which was released earlier this month. The book chronicles his experiences from childhood through the formative years of Microsoft.
While a freshman at Harvard, Gates composed a resume to test the waters with potential tech employers. He detailed the programming projects he and his high school peers completed for tech firms in the Seattle area, including a traffic flow analysis program he created “in partnership with Paul G. Allen,” his future co-founder at Microsoft, he notes.
“I included every computer I had worked with and every significant program I had developed,” Gates recalls. He mentions that he wasn’t actively seeking employment but was curious about the opportunities that might present themselves.
At that time, Allen was facing challenges at Washington State University and contemplating dropping out to work full-time. Gates writes that Allen urged him to leave college and start a business together, yet Gates preferred to stay in school and anticipate further advancements in personal computing.
Instead, Gates proposed that Allen relocate to Boston, allowing them to brainstorm in person and possibly take tech jobs to save up for their future ventures.
“We could both find work in Boston as programmers or systems administrators—positions that would grant us computer access, income, and time to focus on side projects,” Gates writes. However, he admits that “abandoning college for the job market was a risky move.”
The first company to reply to Gates’ application was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Maynard, Massachusetts, the creator of the PDP-10 computers he had learned to program on in Seattle. DEC arranged for Gates to fly to their headquarters from Boston—his first helicopter ride, which he describes as “quite cool,” even without a job offer.
Touring DEC’s facilities and meeting the engineers behind the software he’d dedicated countless hours to was “the closest thing I had at that age to visiting Mecca,” he writes.
“At DEC, I was deeply impressed by everyone I encountered and relished the feeling of being appreciated for the skills I had long been developing,” he adds.
Despite the thrilling experience, Gates ultimately declined DEC’s “extremely flattering” job offer. He also rejected proposals from General Electric’s appliance factory in Kentucky and Honeywell’s computer division—although Allen took a programming position in Boston that summer of 1974.
A few months later, Allen burst into Gates’ dorm room at Harvard with a copy of Popular Electronics showcasing the Altair 8800—the world’s first minicomputer—on the cover. This pivotal moment convinced Gates that it was time to pause his studies and establish a software company with Allen. They officially formed Microsoft in New Mexico in April 1975.
Reflecting on this, Gates recognizes that if he had followed a conventional career path, it might have delayed or even obstructed the founding of Microsoft. However, he shares with CNBC Make It that this was never a serious consideration for him:
“We were merely enjoying the ego boost from receiving job offers, which was rather entertaining,” he states.
Ultimately, the job offers he received that year bolstered his self-confidence, reinforcing his belief that his future lay in the world of computers.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)