The real joke is that a CEO had actual technical knowledge instead of just being there for decoration.
He was right though. We were memory and cycle constrained and I'd wasted both!
Re:Why xor eax, eax?
by mkornaukhov on Monday December 01, 2025 @10:51AM
(#46108821)
Similarly, the CEO couldn't resist the outstanding optimization of memory and execution speed!
No one believes this story.
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.
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).
There was a time when Bill Gates wrote code for Microsoft, and he was actually quite good at it.
Not sure why this was voted down. He was very technical, especially for the time:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/6/7/bill-gates-reuni...
He also wrote and published a paper on pancake sorting.
Re:Why xor eax, eax?
by assimpleaspossi on Monday December 01, 2025 @07:49PM
(#46115846)
In the era of dinosaurs, neither MASM nor Windows existed but we still did assembly or micro-coding (machine coding) or flipped switches.
Pre-MASM Dinos probably weren't doing xor ax, ax.
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!
Re:Why xor eax, eax?
by OrderlyTiamat on Monday December 01, 2025 @02:50PM
(#46112207)
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!
Perhaps his secretary showed him?
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.
I had to pad the code for alignment reasons. ;-)
Now that's what I call micromanagement.
(sorry couldn't resist)