#287 William Adams is a Silicon Valley legend, a one man coding machine, and an ally
Resources
Highlights
William A. Adams is not just a programmer; he is a visionary who has seen the evolution of technology from its early days to its current complexities. His story begins as a 12-year-old teaching himself to code on a Commodore PET, a narrative that many programmers of his generation can resonate with. The difference with William, however, is the trajectory his life took afterward—propelled by an innate curiosity and an unwavering drive to make technology accessible and inclusive.
His early entrepreneurial endeavors, such as a newspaper route and lawn sprinkler installations, were merely a prelude to his future business acumen. The familial support he received during his childhood undoubtedly contributed to his success. It was this business savvy that led him to Microsoft during a tumultuous period marked by legal battles and economic uncertainty. This strategic move not only catapulted his career but also placed him at the center of some of the most significant technological advancements of our time.
During his two-decade tenure at Microsoft, William's contributions went beyond his technical achievements. His pride in mentoring and nurturing talent globally stands out as a testament to his belief in the transformative power of guidance and personal connections. His efforts to foster local talent in regions like India, Kenya, and Nigeria, without contributing to brain drain, reflect a strategic approach to building a truly global tech community.
As we follow William's journey, we witness his philosophical shift from being a hands-on coder to a mentor and a leader. He talks about his transition from leading dev teams amid chaos to prioritizing people management over coding. It's a transition that many developers face as they climb the corporate ladder, but William's story is unique in his conscious decision to not lose touch with coding, which he regards as a hobby akin to daily exercise for the brain.
One of the pivotal points in William's career was his realization that his personal mission was reaching beyond the walls of Microsoft. This led to his decision to leave the company and establish initiatives like LEAP and programs in Africa, aiming to empower a broader audience through technology and education. His legacy at Microsoft and beyond is not only the code he wrote or the products he helped develop but the countless individuals he inspired and equipped to forge their own paths in the tech industry.
The podcast episode concludes with William emphasizing the importance of personal branding and networking for developers. In a rapidly evolving industry where automation is becoming more prevalent, developers must continuously learn and adapt. They must also look beyond the code to consider the broader implications of technology on society. As the hiring landscape in tech changes, developers need to cultivate a diverse set of skills to remain relevant and impactful.
William A. Adams's journey is more than just a tale of coding; it is a story of the human element that is often overlooked in the world of technology. It serves as a powerful reminder that behind every line of code, there is a story, a person, and a potential to change the world. Join us on this podcast episode as we explore the life and insights of a man who has not only witnessed but also shaped the evolution of the tech industry.
Enjoyed the Podcast?
If you did, make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends!Post a review and share it! If you enjoyed tuning in, leave us a review. You can also share this podcast with your friends and family and share lessons on software development.
Become a supporter of the show. Head over to Patreon or on Buzzsprout.
Got any questions? You can connect with me, Timothée (Tim) Bourguignon, on LinkedIn, per email, or via my homepage.
Thank you for tuning in!
Transcript
⚠ The following transcript was automatically generated. ❤ Help us out, Submit a pull-request to correct potential mistakes
William Adams: 0:00
Today. As far as the skills development is concerned, I'd say learn new some AI, learn how to use the modern tools chat, gpt or whatever. Co-pilot these things. Even I use these because the first time I used co-pilot I was like, oh, this is going to make me 30 percent more productive and oh, wait a minute, in another three years I won't be typing out a keyboard at all. So, dear programmer, understand that you typing out a keyboard is not going to be the way it is in a very short amount of time and it's going to be way faster than you think.
Tim Bourguignon:
0:51
Hello and welcome to Devilburst Journey, the podcast bringing you the making of stories of successful software developers to help you on your upcoming journey. I'm your host, tim Boulgigno. On this episode, I receive William A Adams. William is an award-winning diversity and inclusion innovator and engineering trailblazer and philanthropist. After rolling out critical XML code globally in many of Microsoft's core products, he was named the first technical advisor to the CTO, kevin Scott. His career in software engineering spans over 30 years, made of entrepreneurship, innovation and well actively working toward creating more opportunities and being an ally for others. William, I'm thrilled to have you on the show today. Welcome, devjern.
William Adams:
1:45
Thank you for having me and my hello as print. Hello world, I was being Lua.
Tim Bourguignon:
1:54
He did it. He did it. He said hello in a programming language. Yeah, great, loving you. Thank you, william, but before we come to your story, I want to thank the terrific listeners who support the show. Every month you are keeping the DevJernay lights up. If you would like to join this fine crew and help me spend more time on finding phenomenal guests than editing audio tracks, please go to our website, devjourneyinfo and click on the Support Me on Patreon button. Even the smallest contributions are giant steps toward a sustainable DevJernay journey. Thank you, and now back to today's guest. So, william, as you know, the show exists to help the listeners understand what your story looked like and imagine how to shape their own future. So, as is customary on the show, let's go back to your beginnings. Where would you place the start of your DevJernay?
William Adams:
2:49
Yeah, my DevJernay is interesting and there is a difference between my DevJernay and my Dev career. But my Dev journey like when did I start writing code? It was when I was like 12 years old and I'm 59. So as 40, I can't even count that high 40 some odd years ago On a Commodore PET computer and this was right in the very beginning of when PCs were being created Commodore PET, apple One, trs-80, atari, whatever. I taught myself how to write in first machine code and then assembly language. Then there's a basic compiler or a compiler, a basic thing. That's where I started. And it started because I had an uncle who worked for the Navy and he said hey, you want this computer and, being the precocious little kid that I, was, I was like yeah, you know, and there are no other kids on my block who had computers. It was such a new thing, right? So that's where my Dev journey started. It was just self-taught. My uncle gave me this computer and I just started hacking, if you will right.
Tim Bourguignon:
4:09
There wasn't anything else to do back then with computers. You got a prompt and then you had to do it yourself.
William Adams:
4:15
Yeah, everything. And I mean this is the days where my storage medium was literally cassette tapes. Right, you stick a cassette tape in, you type up a program, you hit Save. If you made a single mistake in that whole program, you got to do it all over again. Oh yeah, you know. So yeah, cassette tapes. And I don't know how much memory that thing had. It probably had like 8K of RAM. I mean 8K. That's like you can't even spell print in 8K. So very small but very powerful.
Tim Bourguignon:
4:53
It was indeed what attracted you, or what kept you locked in on this machine At 12 years old, the only kid on your block having a computer.
William Adams:
5:02
Yeah, I mean, it was just a. I was before that. I was the kind of kid who had like erector sets. Erector set modern day would be like Legos or whatever but construction kits. I had purchased a chemistry set for myself, those electronic kits from Radio Shack, a physics kid. I was just an inventive little kid. This is all pretty young. So just to feed that desire, and I also did sports, and of course I went to school, all that sort of stuff, and I played with my friends outside. And then when I came inside and it's you're inside now, this is what I did, this was my hobby. So I was a very shy child and I just it's like, well, computers, that's something that's just me in the machine, and it tickled my brain and I could make it do what I wanted and it was just a match made in heaven, I suppose. Did you imagine at?
Tim Bourguignon:
6:04
some point or early on that this could become your kind of small common denominator of your life story.
William Adams:
6:16
Not really. I mean up until that point I was always, and I remember this distinctly because a fireman came to our elementary school one time, like in the third or fourth grade I think it was the fourth grade and he's like, he put the whole fireman's outfit on me and all this sort of stuff and he's like well, son, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I'm like I want to own an electronics company. You know it's like oh, I'll take that outfit off of you. So where I lived in this place called Placentia, which is this tiny little town in Southern California, we were surrounded by aerospace. So the kids I went to school with some of them, their parents either worked for Rockwell International or Hughes International or one of the aerospace companies down there, or their family were migrant workers or other blue collar workers or whatever. So there was this mix in our neighborhood of just regular old people and engineering people and I think I just gravitated towards the engineering stuff, even though my parents weren't engineers. My dad fixed typewriters so I got exposure to machinery and electronics and stuff. So I always thought I was going to do electronics. We didn't have computer science at that time. It wasn't a thing. Computers were not a common thing in life, so you couldn't really think I'm going to have a career in computers. It's like there is no such thing. You mean you want to be a key punch operator? I mean that's like maybe a secretary or something that's not a career for a young man like me, so that didn't exist until much later.
Tim Bourguignon:
8:14
So how did you pick which way to go to study or to start?
William Adams:
8:20
So I just did that because it was fun. And in high school a friend of mine and I, a few more people had computers. Like by then we had the TRSAD, the Apple, and I got a CommRor 64, the next computer up and there was a terminal at our school that connected to some central office mainframe as a mini computer For our school district. So we started a computer club and we would program Simple things and basic. This is all self-taught. Our teachers didn't know anything about computers. You know, we were the ones that learned about the computers and taught them. So you know, we were just messing around. And then in 1982 I went off to UC Berkeley to study Electrical engineering, computer science, and still, computer science was like We'll say the word computer science, but there's no science to computers. At that point, right, the draw was the electrical engineering and ah, you're gonna, you're gonna program those computer things. So again, I didn't really study computer. We have learned some amount of algorithms, but yet to think in those days is 1982, right, a Lot of the algorithms that we have now, some of them were already there, but a lot of stuff you take for granted today didn't exist, it was being invented. So I learned this new language called Pascal. There's actually a course taught by the guy who wrote the compiler. You know one of the earliest we had this in, called p systems. It was one of the Systems that ran stuff. There was this other language called C, you know, and you could play with that. You learned it on your own because you're doing hardware. And then you had to program the hardware chips. So you had to learn C or assembly or whatever. But that wasn't taught. You just pick that up right, we were flipping switches on PDP 10s Switches what are you talking about? So to input a number, there are literally switches that represented the bits and you had to flip them up and down for ones and zeros and then say load, you've looked this third one load. So we did that for a semester or a year, a quarter, whatever it was. And then finally we got terminals and we had a Vax machine or a PDP, whatever, and we had line printers and other sort of stuff. So those are just the earliest days of like computer science. It was just fumbling about learning some very basic stuff. This was the birth of this language now called TCL tickle. That was invented by a guy at Berkeley and later others. Things came out of Berkeley but you know, like Unix, the C programming language, just all sorts of things were happening at that time and I just kind of floated along with it. And then Silicon Valley in general was just the place, right we're. All sorts of things were being birthed. So I didn't really in college I mean, yeah, eecs, but really this was the start of my career. My brother and I decided he's a couple years older than me, I was the manager of the computer store at UC Berkeley for a while and we I was selling Macintosh's right when they came out the Macintosh computer, so that was kind of the entree like oh hey, there's this computer thing happening and I, my first job besides the manager thing was Teaching people how to use computers. So imagine TRS 80s and Apple twos. And I'm teaching Visicow or Word pro or word perfect or whatever the word, word star, whatever the word thing was. And Fourth, programming. I'm teaching this to office workers. Right, this new computer is like well, you're gonna need to learn Visicow. Visicow, one of the early, well, the first Spreadsheet spreadsheet yeah right. So I was teaching and then. So when my brother and I got the idea is like, let's start our own company, because Everyone in Silicon Valley was creating companies at that time, and at first we thought we were gonna teach Computers because that's what I knew, right, but as it turned out, there was more money to be made by doing custom software development. So we ended up I mean, we published a magazine of our own for a while, but we ended up doing custom software development For one client that we had in the building that we, our office, was in, and and then that evolved to hey Look, there's next computer. Steve Jobs left Apple to form next computers and we jumped on that. It's like let's do software around the next computer. And we were big fish in that tiny pond, had some big custom software stuff. We did off the shelf software and that, you know, that wasn't huge commercial success, but it carried us along for a few years and then eventually, in 1998, I went off to Microsoft because the jig was up with the whole next thing and I had done a couple of other things besides that, one being Telegent, which is a no one would remember that it was a joint between Apple and IBM, actually and then the B-Box, which was Jean-Louis Gasset, a guy who left Apple, created this company called B. They had a machine and I worked for them for a couple of years and then, eventually, I went to Microsoft to start XML.
Tim Bourguignon:
14:15
Wow, before we get there, I want to stick to the history of Sigmund Valles.
William Adams:
14:21
Oh, okay, yeah, it's a lot of history and I clout right through it. There's some actual inventions in there that are really interesting at that time, but yeah.
Tim Bourguignon:
14:32
No worries, what I'm interested in is you said okay. Your brother said, hey, let's, let's create a company. Yeah, you mentioned it as if it was something absolutely normal to do. Yeah, was it in your blood to really be an entrepreneur? I guess Already back then.
William Adams:
14:49
Yeah, I don't know why. I mean it probably started with my brother, actually, when we were back just little kids, so I was probably eight, nine, 10 years old, so he was probably 10, 11, 12 at most. He had a newspaper route. So delivering newspapers to houses, right, and it's a pretty brutal job for a little kid. It's like they drop a pile of newspapers at your house. You're responsible for taking each paper, rolling it up, putting the rubber band around it, sticking it in your delivery bag and doing your route, delivering them right, and sometimes I'd help him roll the papers, I'd help him deliver sometimes, sometimes I'd do the deliveries and then you had to go and collect the fees on a monthly basis. You walk around, it's like, oh, you owe me $350, and you know whatever. I think that was really the start because and I don't know why he decided that was something he could do. I don't know how he got into it really, but that was the start. He had this newspaper route and we just did it. And then we moved to a different neighborhood at some point and we had to install sprinklers in our house, water sprinklers for the lawn, right, and we did it ourselves, just me and my brother. So again, I'm like 10 or 11. He's like 12 or 13. And we did ours and it turned out all right and this was a brand new housing complex.
Tim Bourguignon:
16:23
So we went to our neighbors and said hey, can we do yours?
William Adams:
16:27
Here's the price. Here's a picture of the, not a picture. We actually walked around with a manifold, which is where all the valves are. I was like we'll install it. Here's what the manifold looks like. So we're sales we're these little teenagers and we're selling lawn sprinkler services to our neighbors and they're like yeah, ok, yeah, so I think it was just baked into us. I don't know why. It's not like my mom was an entrepreneur or my dad, but they certainly didn't discourage us from doing that stuff. My father passed away when I was seven, so he wasn't there for this stuff, but mom was there, and I guess mom just said well, as long as you're not in trouble, that sounds good to me.
Tim Bourguignon:
17:12
So that's true. It beats roaming around and doing nasty stuff.
William Adams:
17:18
Yeah, I mean, we were into sports and being little entrepreneurs and I think that's what just carried forward, because we were always entrepreneurs, so there's no reason not to think we could do it.
Tim Bourguignon:
17:34
All right, that's true and I think it really carried forward. But before we come to that part of the story, there's Microsoft in between. I hear you being your own boss, creating companies, working with Next, working with different companies and doing probably very interesting stuff, and suddenly deciding to go to this growing giant. He said 98. That was already a giant. What decided, oh, what pushed you to jump on that ship and not be your own boss for a while? Also, we probably had some companies on the side during that time.
William Adams:
18:10
But I'll shut up and let you talk. Oh, it was just a practical thing. So in 98, so I was at B and they kind of lost this battle, there was this time, this brief moment in time, a couple of meetings where Apple and you kind of had to know that Apple had kicked out Steve Jobs a few years earlier and John Scully was in the leadership and they weren't doing that great, so they went Steve Jobs back. But there was this brief time where it was like, is Apple going to buy Next or are they going to buy B? There was this actual conversation, people going back and forth, and in the end they bought Next and I think the calculus was essentially, we need Steve Jobs. The B technology was awesome, but there's no beating Steve Jobs. So they bought Next or Next bought them and the rest is history. So I was at B at that time and so we lost essentially. So our path to success was essentially cut off. It's like, well, if we don't get bought by Apple, we're going to try to make it our own. And they just didn't. So I left them because I had a child at that time who was like two or three. It's like, all right, this has been great, but these are my earning years. I'm 30-something, 33. I need to go someplace where I can actually make a lot of money, because between 30 and 40-something, those are your most productive years for earning money. So I looked at a bunch of stuff in Silicon Valley and I looked at Microsoft, because a friend of mine called me up and said hey, are you looking for a job? We're doing this XML thing up to Microsoft. Do you want to? Are you interested? And I was like I hadn't really thought about it. But OK, so I went and did an interview and I concluded that it's like well, microsoft, I mean, they're being invested by the Department of Justice, they're talking about splitting them up, monopoly, all that sort of stuff, and we're about to hit a recession and there's a whole dot-com boom is happening. And my calculus was essentially OK, microsoft, either they're going down in flames or they're going to rise like a phoenix. Either way, it's going to be a pretty good ride. So here I go.
Tim Bourguignon:
20:51
That's a good approach to life. I would say yeah.
William Adams:
20:53
And it turns out they were pretty resilient to the recession. I didn't lose my job and for 24 years I didn't lose my job and they rose like a phoenix. They didn't go down in flames and I had 24 productive years there. I recently retired in case I didn't say that I left there last year.
Tim Bourguignon:
21:18
OK, you didn't reach the 25 mark.
William Adams:
21:22
Yeah, and this was a calculus as well. It's like should I stick around for 25? If you stick around for 25, you get your name on a plaque and a wall in the conference center, exactly. And I talked to a friend of mine who's been there for like 30 years and he's like, yeah, I got my name on the wall. I've never seen it, I don't care, yeah.
Tim Bourguignon:
21:39
It's not worth waiting around for another year.
William Adams:
21:42
Maybe for the money but not really. I was done. It's like no, I got other things to do.
Tim Bourguignon:
21:47
I hear you. So when you look back over those 24 years, where are the five, six things that really stand out? We say, hey, this is really what I committed to memory and I will remember forever.
William Adams:
22:02
The number one thing is people. That's a easy one, because by the end certainly I was probably much more interested in the transformative effects of what I could do for people's lives, both inside the company and across the world. And we can get into some of that stuff. That's number one is just the transformative effect you can have on people's lives. Any bit of code that I ever wrote at Microsoft was like, ah, it's lost to history. It's like how important was it? Within five to 10 years it's gone. So now there are pieces of code that I was the dev manager for that are still in the systems systemxml, systemdata, systemlink, these are all things. That is like you write new C-sharp code. That's the first stuff that shows up. So it's like I'm proud of that and that was all killer stuff. But I think just being able to start things with people. Another one, a big one, is this thing called the LEAP program, which has to do with hiring women and minorities, at least at the time. Now they say very polished words about what it means, but at the time it was about we need to hire more women and underrepresented minorities. So I created this or co-created this program with an HR peer at the time and that really showed the way for, or silenced the mantra of, oh, we can't hire more women and minorities they don't exist, it's like really have to climb in. It's women. So that's not true and as far as underrepresented minorities are concerned, we're just not looking in the right places. So let me show you how to do it. So we cracked that code, if you will, and now it's like seven years on, eight years on, and they're still doing it, and it's a federally accredited apprenticeship program and all this sort of stuff. So those are the things I'm most proud of is just things related to people. I mean very personal things like oh, I helped this one person who was suffering with an unbearable husband but she was brilliant, a brilliant scientist and an awesome coder and just giving her encouragement so that she could go yeah. I'm actually worthwhile and I can do this thing and I'm really good at it.
Tim Bourguignon:
24:38
It's like yes you are, it's like these personal stories. Absolutely.
William Adams:
24:44
Code wise. It's just been everything. It's like okay, I've worked on XML. Plenty of people cringe and run from that. I was like, ah, I embrace it. If you look at your Word documents today, or PowerPoint or Excel, they're actually just XML in a zip file. So thank you, yeah.
Tim Bourguignon:
25:10
Yeah, it's the backbone of the internet as well and there's kind of a similar.
William Adams:
25:15
There was one of those things like Jason came along and there was like, oh, this is how much better than XML. It's like, yeah, and you're trying to make Jason look like XML now. So and of course, people before us before we did XML. There's this standard called ASN.1. And those people look at XML and say you're just trying to create ASN.1. It's a binary format of data representation that existed way before that.
Tim Bourguignon:
25:42
It's either standing on the shoulders of giants or get off my loan. It's either one.
William Adams:
25:49
Yeah, so you know me and Copa Pennants for creating the abomination that is XML. But you're welcome, you're welcome, you're welcome.
Tim Bourguignon:
25:59
No, no. So yeah, that is real true. When you look back, you really forget about all the technicalities, the project, the hardship and everything. You just see faces. You see faces of the people who really matter, the people who you matter to during their life and you're able to do something at one point that really unlocked something, and this is what sticks. This is real.
William Adams:
26:19
And let me just mention a couple more, because maybe this will be food for fodder in a little bit, Please, please. So I did the LEAP program. Before I did that, I actually lived in India for three years to help create what we call the engineering excellence. So I taught all of the engineers, all the college, all the college hire engineers for five weeks before they went into their dev teams for two and a half years, so 2006 to 2009,. I helped essentially build the India Development Center and then later in the last seven years not the last five years I did a similar thing not quite the same, but a similar thing to help us create dev centers in Kenya and Nigeria, where we didn't have them before. Those are really transformative because it's like India was already existed, but it was growing fast. Kenya and Nigeria didn't exist at all, so it was bootstrapping and I helped that process of bootstrapping those development centers. Hugely transformative when you say I'm going to bring these high paying jobs to you instead of removing your brains from your country and bringing them to the US. So, we were very explicit like this is not a brain drain strategy, this is an enhancement strategy. We want the jobs to stay here because it creates a whole ecosystem of new people and new opportunities. As opposed to oh, you need your best and brightest to help yourselves, Well, let's just steal them from you. So I'm pretty proud of that work as well.
Tim Bourguignon:
28:07
Is this something that Microsoft does a lot Really going into different countries and treating their dev centers there instead of bringing them to US?
William Adams:
28:17
No, and I would say I'm just trying to think through rapidly how our various development centers have been created. Africa was the first intentional one like that. We have other smaller development centers that come up and, like Mexico's, is starting to get a little something and whatever. But when you look at places like India, for example, well, india already had some stuff and we had plenty of Indian engineers. They went home and there was an intention and it's like I'm here. Okay, everyone's going to start hiring China. There was a very specific lab. It started with Microsoft research, so we were hiring a specific person, hiring their lab and then building up from there. But you already had an ecosystem there, right, boston, boston and the United States. We buy a company. That company has 100 employees. You build from that. Kenya, nigeria, is completely different. We didn't have anything. So we just very intentionally said we want to create here because of these following five or six reasons, one being just talent is all over the place and they're very young, very smart just no opportunities. And yeah, we had some African engineers, but they were all in the US, so we didn't have an ecosystem there at all and we didn't buy a company or anything like that. We just said I personally hired four or five people in Kenya and said you are now the nucleus of what we're going to build in Kenya right. And now I'm going to get our other teams here. There was a guy from Windows who came in as the big dog and said all right, all right, we got this, now we're going to bring everybody. And then he brought in Office and Visual Studio and now the whole company's there. Right, but it was a very intent. This was not the way Microsoft typically does it. Usually we go and buy a company or something and that's why we end up somewhere, but this was very explicitly like no, we're going to Kenya and Nigeria because we need to be there.
Tim Bourguignon:
30:33
Right, this is awesome. It was really awesome.
William Adams:
30:36
It was quite different.
Tim Bourguignon:
30:39
Indeed, indeed, it's really different from what I lived. At some point I was interested in working for Microsoft and I looked around in Germany and in Europe and there's very little development in Europe. It's really sales here and the whole marketing is here and everything. There's some advocacy as well, but that's it.
William Adams:
30:55
And I thought everything was in the US. No, I mean, there's places like Romania. There's an app posted in Romania and it was again. We bought some company and found out, wow, there's a whole bunch of programmers here. But yeah, it is strange that Europe is like we went to do AI in Cambridge because there's a bunch of AI in Cambridge. So you know, that's what I think. Yeah, we heard about that.
Tim Bourguignon:
31:22
There was something in the news a few years ago. How did you grow into being able to do this? I mean, we started your story at Microsoft, writing XML and really being hands-on programmer, I would say, although it might not be your exact title by then, but let's take it.
William Adams:
31:43
Well, when I first joined the company in 98, I was a programmer and one of the first things I worked on was this thing called XSLT, which is just a thing related to XML. But very soon because you think before that I was the VP of engineering and my own company of four people. But very soon it turns out that I was a good leader. So I pretty quickly turned into the dev manager for the group that I was in and spent a lot of years building, hiring, shaping, transforming product development, less coding, more of the just being a good engineering manager. I spent a lot of years doing that until I went off to India and then it was doing it at a large scale, the stepping stone. Some of it is just choice and some of it is just opportunity. So I chose to. When we did that first XML team, there was a lot of stress and our leader left and no one wanted to follow him because he was such a tyrant. I saw the group is like, oh, this is going to fall apart. I just stepped up and said, well, okay, I'm one of the leaders, I know how to lead, so I'm one of the leaders and here's two or three other people. We are the management leaders. That went on for a couple of years and I built a pretty good dev team that took care of lots of different things, not just XML.
Tim Bourguignon:
33:21
That's how.
William Adams:
33:22
I got into the engineering management if you will, and that shifts your responsibilities, because now you're worried about people more than code. As a manager, I did it's like. Well, you hire really smart people. Why are you still trying to write code you don't need to. They do.
Tim Bourguignon:
33:44
Did you look back while doing this transition, saying, what am I doing?
William Adams:
33:49
Why don't I just stick around in front of my keyboard and just just no, it was an interesting time because I was, as a natural person, very shy child. I grew out of the shyness a little bit, but still very much an introvert, and I forced myself to be not more of an extrovert but to be more interactive. Right, I was on a journey. I'm 40-something, I'm coming out of my personal shell. First time I'm interacting with Omega Corporation. There's a lot to learn personally in that space. At that time I didn't. By the time I got to India, when I was in India, I actually ended up writing a lot of code, because the way I would teach the students is I'd say okay, look, you need to learn this language. C-sharp here's a product. It's 80, 90 percent done. You've got to write the rest of the code. Here's the featured list of things you should do. I wrote and this was the beginning of C-sharp I wrote a ton of code related to using OpenGL, which is a 3D graphics programming thing, not DirectX. I wrote a whole shim layer for using C-sharp with OpenGL. Then we did programs using OpenGL and the GPU and all that sort of stuff. I did this multi-user network communications framework, all the stuff you do today with well, what we're doing right now recording each other across the planet. So this is in the early 2000s, so 2007, 2008. So I wrote a lot of code then. I was just a one-man coding machine. My stuff is actually on GitHub from back then. I eventually uploaded it. But, yeah, I got my coding itch satisfied in that way, Because by then I had been a manager for quite a few years and I was like, I think I can code.
Tim Bourguignon:
36:10
So I did.
William Adams:
36:10
So I went back to coding, but at the same time I pulled along this training people how to do their jobs thing. I did that again when I left Microsoft and I code today because it's just a hobby. It's like exercise. You got to do 50 push-ups, you got to write 200 lines of code, right.
Tim Bourguignon:
36:33
Yeah, amen to that. What's convinced you to leave Microsoft and say now is the time I need to do something else?
William Adams:
36:45
So 24 years and being there that long. On occasion I would give talks to various people, groups, either through LEAP or other avenues, where people would ask me either because it's well, you've been here 20 years, why have you been here so long? What would make you leave? Blah, blah, blah. And I've tell people since the beginning of the time I was there in 1998, every two years when I went in 98, I said I'll be here for two years and I'll see what's next, right? So every two years and I did this religiously every two years I would look up and go. Is this still the best thing for me to be doing? Does this satisfy my life? Is it the best deal? Is it? I didn't want to go to sleep and then wake up 30 years later and go wow, well, that was a career that was fun. What did I do? Nothing. So every two years, I ask myself the question is this the best use of my time? Is this the best bang for the buck? Is this the most impactful thing I could be doing? Right? And it's not just about code for Microsoft, it's like I'm more than just a Microsoft coder. I'm William A Adams right, what is my life Right? So every two years so in the last two years, 22 to 24, I asked that question and I was like huh, I'm not sure. And I also noticed that I was starting to repeat things. Right, it's like wait a minute teaching young programmers how to program and how to run a team. I did that 20 years ago and I'm doing it again. And I'm not wanting to climb the corporate ladder. I don't want to become a CVP because that's a bridge too far. It's like I don't want to be that invested in this thing. So I'm going to start repeating. I think I'm done and at the same time, there's a bigger mission. So I did the leap thing and that enabled lots of people and continues to enable people. Why don't I leverage and build off of that and do it for the broader world? I did the Africa thing, it's like, well, why can't I do that for more people? Now it's different when you don't work for mega corporation, but there's still plenty of value I can bring to the world and you can't do it necessarily in the confines of Microsoft. Now I can work with them, but at the end of the day, they got to make money for them. So it's like, hey, why don't we do this program that does the blah, blah, blah? It's like that's not really in line with Azure and artificial intelligence. So you run into more and more barriers and, even though they'll let you keep your job and they'll keep paying me, they didn't want me to leave. It's like why are you leaving? Why are you leaving? But it's like because what I want to do now is not in line with where you guys need to go, Right, and that's why I left. It's like, okay, and it took a while for me to actually, I would say it took me the last year to separate, because it's like I've been doing something for 24 years, Right, you don't just cut it off cold turkey. So it took me a while to get to a point where I was like, finally, it's time for me to go Right. And then I've spent the last year really working hard on my own personal mission, coding like crazy. You know. It's like who am I really without the trappings of the mega corporation. Do I still got it and does anyone care? Right?
Tim Bourguignon:
40:23
Do you want to tell us about it?
William Adams:
40:25
Oh, about what I'm doing now.
Tim Bourguignon:
40:26
Absolutely yeah.
William Adams:
40:27
Oh yeah. So what I'm doing now is, well, william A Adams, but the umbrella of things I'm doing is called Wave Studio and it's essentially what we call a venture studio, which is slightly different than a VC. A VC is a fund that has money. They throw to 100 different ventures and they see what sticks and they're looking for 100 x improvement or payout and then they move on to the next 100. Right, a venture studio is more like we're investing in people, so there might be 10 individuals. It's like well, I want to invest in you because you have some good idea, let's try that. That one didn't work out, let's do the next one. But while we're, while we've got you in the studio, let's teach you how to dance and sing and present you know. Let's teach you the skills necessary to be that entrepreneur, because otherwise where are you going to learn that? And my focus is on women and minorities, because that's where you don't have it as much. When I was growing up, I didn't have any mentor showing me how to you know be the entrepreneur. I mean, we did it anyway, but the it wasn't as natural as if you had grown up through going to Stanford or Harvard or whatever the heck, where your parents are themselves captains of industry and getting $5 million for a startup is a phone call away. It's like no, not for my people it wasn't. So let me show you what you need to do to keep ahead of the tax man not get ripped off and give you enough leeway so that you can try one idea and then try another idea, and try another idea. Right, that's what's lacking in these communities and that's what I'm trying to create space for.
Tim Bourguignon:
42:25
So that's what I'm doing now. This is this is awesome. How'd you find those people with the right ideas and this fertile earth that you can, that you can help cultivate?
William Adams:
42:38
Yeah, a lot of it is word of mouth. So what I'm doing right now? Why are we on this podcast? Because I need to build my network, I need to communicate, I need to let people know that this even exists.
Tim Bourguignon:
42:48
Right.
William Adams:
42:49
So you go from being a corporate. What Cog you go from being a corporate? When you're in corporate, no one knows who you are, unless you're one of those people that's always on stage or you're one of our big VPs or whatever. I'm just a faceless, nameless guy, even though I've done awesome stuff. You walk out of that corporation. You're nobody, right. So you have to build your brand and in building the brand and talking to people and going on stages and doing blog posts and podcasts and this is how people begin to know Right, and the black people I know I say, hey, I'm doing this thing, tell a friend, and eventually someone shows up and says, hey, I'm trying to do this thing. So it's all about just creating places where you can network Right. And then, once you get connected sometimes people just want 30 minutes or an hour worth of conversation to get validation of what they're doing is interesting. And some people are like, okay, I want to actually write this code or this program. Can you help me? You know it's like yeah, and either I have a word chest of code that I can hand you to start from or I can port you towards stuff, but either way we get into a regular conversation. It's like let's meet once a month and check in on how you're doing. So that's how it goes. It's basically word of mouth at this point. Soon enough, we'll be having events where we'll actually bring together people where it's like Okay, that person has money, that person is a customer, these people are talent. Let's get together, talk about some things and make some connections, right? So that's what this coming year is all about, that.
Tim Bourguignon:
44:35
And it sounds exciting, thrilling and really challenging at the same time.
William Adams:
44:41
Yeah, why not Right?
Tim Bourguignon:
44:43
It's like for all those years.
William Adams:
44:45
I worked my butt off for the man. It's like why can't I do the same for myself?
Tim Bourguignon:
44:51
Right, that is true, I mean I am older.
William Adams:
44:54
I'm now 59. I just turned 59. So there's an energy difference. I don't have the same energy as when I was 30. But I'm not dead.
Tim Bourguignon:
45:07
And you probably have way more contacts and way more understanding of the dynamics in industry and then to ping when, etc. Which?
William Adams:
45:18
kind of credibility and all that as well.
Tim Bourguignon:
45:20
That's true. That's true. That's the place where I have to ask for advice. We're already at the end of our time box. We're laughing about it before the show, exactly Making some cat, cat, cat signs. I'd like to come back to you. You said you created teams. You've hired a lot of people. You probably had quite a few, not junior developers, but people who have, or just over that they're starting to be, mid-level developers. What are the kinds of advice you would always tell them? The things that they need to hear and they should be hearing on the show as well.
William Adams:
45:59
That's a challenging one, because what I would have said in the past is different than what I would say today. In the past, and even the kind of people I would hire is different. I'll give you an example. In the past I would hire. So 20 years ago, let's say, I would be looking for those people who are hard core programmers. They've compiled the Linux kernel and they can write device drivers and run a debugger and all this sort of stuff. In the last five or ten years not so much the languages have changed. First of all, people don't learn C and C++. They learn Java, javascript, c-sharp, garbage collection, all that sort of stuff. The language has changed. You're not down in the kernel anymore. You're about UI and pulling libraries together. The one thing that I would say the advice I give people that is the same is be passionate about what you do and always try to master your craft. When you start, you're a novice. You're learning stuff and whatever you become a journeyman, you're pretty good, but become a master of whatever you do. That means you need to constantly learn and reinvent and whatnot. When it comes to languages, for example, there's probably ten different languages that I've learned and lost over the last 30, 40 years of programming. If I thought I could have stuck with assembly code my entire career nope.
Tim Bourguignon:
47:41
I would have missed out on a lot of opportunities.
William Adams:
47:45
I mean that would have been awesome in a certain niche, but I would have missed a lot of opportunities. Okay, as far as the skills development is concerned, I'd say learn new some AI, learn how to use the modern tools chat, gpt or whatever. Co-pilot these things. Even I use these, because the first time I used co-pilot I was like, oh, this is going to make me 30% more productive and oh wait, a minute, in another three years I won't be typing out a keyboard at all. So, dear programmer, understand that you typing out a keyboard is not going to be the way it is in a very short amount of time and it's going to be way faster than you think. So, learn how to articulate and translate requirements based on conversation, because the machine is going to do all the actual coding soon enough.
Tim Bourguignon:
48:55
This is going to be an earthquake. It's going to be interesting.
William Adams:
48:59
Yeah, and it's important to bring in things like philosophy and religion and all sorts of other things into the equations, because we're coding for humanity and we have not had to do that in the past.
Tim Bourguignon:
49:13
That is true, william. It's been a blast listening to that story. Very short story, unfortunately. I know your story has been recorded in a way longer form. Can we see it online for the Museum of Silicon Valley?
William Adams:
49:31
Yeah, so the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. You'd have to search a bit, but you'll find it. It's on my website.
Tim Bourguignon:
49:40
Well, I'll link to it. I'll find the link and link to it. William was telling me before the show that you did two days, two full days, of telling your story and you still wouldn't really done with it.
William Adams:
49:53
Yeah, that just got from early childhood up through Microsoft it was starting at. Microsoft. So yeah, there's a lot in there.
Tim Bourguignon:
50:01
So I have to do another round to get the rest of the story, but I really enjoyed those 14 minutes with you. That was fantastic. Where would be the best place to continue this discussion? Maybe tell people where they can find you and reach out if they are interested in Wave Studio?
William Adams:
50:19
Yeah, william-a-adamscom. That's my website and from there there's a media link that shows all the podcasts I've done. I think the Computer History Museum stuff is listed at the bottom of that. You can sign up for a newsletter I put out once a month. It's got links to the X feed and LinkedIn and all that other stuff, all the social medias.
Tim Bourguignon:
50:48
And I'll link to some of that or all of this in the show.
William Adams:
50:52
All of that is on the website.
Tim Bourguignon:
50:55
Just scroll down All of that and more and more. Absolutely, then you heard it. If you're interested in Wave Studio, reach out to William and chat with him. Tell him to store your ideas and he'll pick you up from there. William, thank you so much, it's been a blast.
William Adams:
51:12
Well, thank you for having me, it was fun.
Tim Bourguignon:
51:15
And this has been another episode of the First Journey. I will see each other next week Bye. Thanks a lot for tuning in. I hope you have enjoyed this week's episode. If you like the show, please share, rate and review. It helps more listeners discover those stories. You can find the links to all the platforms the show appears on on our website devjourneyinfocom. Subscribe. Talk to you soon.