Agreed, Gates was a brilliant coder for any other faults. He'd probably need to catch up on tech, but could easily then get a very senior engineering job at Microsoft or anywhere else, if he managed to escape the ageism trap.

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, partly coded a CRUD PHP app before moving on to executive stuff. He would probably not pass a Facebook interview without several years of intense preparation.

Brin and Page fall in between those two. They at least have several years of academic coding and their early Google work.

Yes, they're all very smart, but that's not enough to get into most FANG software engineering jobs.