At Microsoft at the time, the review scale was on a 1 to 5 basis, with 5 being the best, and 1 being terrible. And the highest realistic review score you could get would be what’s called a ‘four-five’ (4.5), and a ‘two-five’ (2.5) is one where you’d be put on a performance improvement plan. In my years at Microsoft, I maybe gave out two or three fives.
-Brad Silverberg
When the DirectX team broke up during the post-Windows 95 reorgs, many of them migrated into new roles within the company. While some ex-DRG moved over to MSN, St. John remained in DRG, now under Todd Nielson—the guy who had pulled the plug on the spaceship—and Jay Torborg. Meanwhile, Eisler and Engstrom were expecting to be promoted. Given their critical roles in the success of DirectX, they each deserved recognition and new opportunities, but their promotions, unlike St. John’s, were not a given.
Hot-headed, Arrogant Loose Cannons
In one of his performance reviews after the Judgment Day event St. John had received a very rare perfect 5.0 for his work, along with a promotion, and Eisler and Engstrom went into their review expecting to get at least 4.5s, which were extremely good. Their boss at the time was Joel Siegal, who had come over from Apple and was, according to Brad Silverberg, a great guy, but not someone able to handle personalities like Engstrom’s and Eisler’s. “They basically steamrollered Joel.”
According to St. John, “We were all considered hot-headed, arrogant loose cannons for some mysterious reason, but felt entitled to management promotion. They were even more irritated that I had been promoted above them first… But I recall that Eric killed off something like eight of his own managers by various means and told Silverberg he wouldn’t stop destroying his management tree until Silverberg stopped putting idiots on top of him.” Where Eisler simply disdained speaking to people who he saw as intellectually inferior, St. John says that Engstrom loved to engage with people so he could torment them. As effective as they were in their jobs, their behavior left a lot to be desired.
As Silverberg puts it, “You’re in the middle of an important meeting and you get a message that there’s a fire, basically a triple alarm fire that Craig and Eric caused, and you’ve got to go leave the meeting and go and try to put it out. Flashback of panic… oh jeez. I’ve got to deal with another one of these and calm them down.” Silverberg had immense respect for Eisler and Engstrom, and believed in them. “They had unbelievable potential and vision and I wanted to support that. And I’m really proud of what they’ve done. They created an industry. And the benefits they brought to Microsoft… but there was a dark side to it, too. They made my life joyous and they made my life miserable at the same time.” It was a dichotomy that required a solution, and Silverberg’s solution was to use what he calls “tough love.” “They were like children, and that’s the approach I had to take with them.”
So when review time came, Siegal came to Silverberg for advice. Both agreed that for their work on DirectX both Eisler and Engstrom deserved a 4.5, but for all the headaches and collateral damage they’d done that Siegal and Silverberg had been forced to deal with, they deserved 2.5s. Silverberg suggested that they average it and give them 3.5s, with the message that six months later, when they were up for another review, “there won’t be a middle score. You’ll either get the high score, if you learn to clean up some of your behavior, or you’ll get the low score, because with all that you’re doing it’s just too much damned trouble.”
Siegal was afraid to give them such a review, convinced that they would destroy him in their fury. “They’re going to take my head off.” But Silverberg said, “Yeah, what’s probably going to happen is that as soon as you give them the review, they’re going to come storming into my office and start screaming at me.” So Silverberg arranged his schedule so that he’d be free when the reviews were given, and, just as he had predicted, they both stormed into his office, and he said, “Hi guys. I was expecting you.”
After much ranting and raving, which Silverberg endured patiently, he finally said, “Let’s have a talk.” He explained to them how their scores were derived, telling them, “Next time, you guys get to decide. It’s up to you which one it’s going to be. I really love the work you do, and I love you guys, but you can’t break so many things and make my life miserable by your behavior… I’m doing a lot to protect you, so you’ve got to respect me a little bit more and clean up your act.”
Engstrom and Eisler left the office still raging, but whenever they came back, Silverberg remained firm, until about a month later they returned once again, but this time it was different. Silverberg remembers them saying something along the lines of, “Brad. We appreciate it. Most people don’t give us the straight story, and we really appreciate that, and we appreciate everything you’ve done to protect us and support us and be our sponsor, and we will try a lot harder to not make your life so miserable.”
“They were young and didn’t fully appreciate how many people were helping them be successful, and how many people were behind the scenes, cleaning up their messes to help them be successful,” says Silverberg. “But that’s the role of what management and leadership is: to help incredibly talented people go out and change the world.”
Under New Management
To some degree, Silverberg’s message succeeded and helped tone down Eisler and Engstrom, but they still had to convince one more person—their new manager in the internet division, John Ludwig, because even though they were moved over to Ludwig’s division, they were still left low in the hierarchy, which royally pissed them off…. again. In fact, according to St. John, they went on strike and stopped coming to work.
Ludwig doesn’t specifically remember them going on strike, but states, “Microsoft was an intense place in the 80s and 90s. It was not unusual for people to get overheated and stomp out of the office. I did it. I know others who did. Certainly I can believe that Eric and Craig did it. I just don’t have a specific memory of it.”
Silverberg had been ready to fire them around that time, but St. John recalls interceding on their behalf. “We had a very difficult time adjusting to ‘winning’. We had been running in full berserk warfare us-against-everybody mode for so long that we didn’t get the memo when Microsoft surrendered and basically said; ‘Okay Okay! You guys can be in charge. Stop killing everybody!’ That was an embarrassingly long transition period during which Ludwig got assigned the task of ‘taming us’ for management. Eric and Craig were slow to understand that Microsoft was trying to promote them. None of us knew how to take ‘yes’ for an answer; it was a completely foreign concept to us, and basically Eric couldn’t be put in charge of anything important until he showed that he could get along with anybody, and that message wasn’t well received at first. It took a while for Eric to believe that they were sincere about promoting him if he stopped being so lethal.”
In addition to St. John’s intervention on their behalf, it was very helpful that John Ludwig was probably the very first manager that Engstrom and Eisler actually respected. Under his tutelage, they reformed to the point that they were able to accept the message—that Silverberg and Ludwig actually wanted to promote them…
Working with Craig and Eric
You know, when I joined Microsoft, I was relatively young by most standards, but I was relatively old by Microsoft standards. I joined when I was 28 and I was surrounded by 25 and 26 year olds, and even younger—22 to 24 year olds—and I also had a 3 year old daughter by that time and a son soon after. I guess somewhere along there, between some combination of age and parenthood, I probably learned a lot of patience.
-John Ludwig
“I do remember those guys, when they started working for me, and they’d come storming into my office every day… everything was always a crisis and everything was always a disaster, and I just never reacted to that stuff,” says Ludwig, who would respond to their histrionics by telling them, “Nothing is truly a crisis. Nothing is a disaster. Is someone actually dying? Is there blood on the floor, and is there somebody dying, and if the answer is no, then you do not have a crisis here.”
Generally, the crisis or disaster du jour involved some spat they were having with a rival team—the NT group or Talisman or OpenGL. In other words, a political situation, but, according to Ludwig, “They would give you the 4000 technical reasons why their point of view was right…” They often came in together, although Ludwig was aware that, even when one came alone, they were talking all the time and planning what they were going to say—what games to play. For instance, they would come to Ludwig’s office and tell him that Silverberg had told them something or wanted them to do something. “They never seemed to realize that the rest of us could play that game, too. They didn’t realize that I had a really high bandwidth connection with Brad in those days. You can’t jerk that chain on me because I have a better connection with Brad than you guys do. But yeah, they did love to come in together, and it was always… entertaining.”
Ludwig remembers how Eisler and Engstrom would come into his office almost every day to tell him the ten ways he was failing as a manger (“fucking up as a manager” is how he put it). Instead of caving in or getting steamrollered, as every previous manager had done, Ludwig just listened to them tell him all the ways he was doing things wrong. “My general math on it was, of the ten things that were wrong, two of them were really good ideas, and we should talk about that and figure out how to improve there. Two of them were probably good ideas but for reasons they didn’t understand that I would patiently explain to them, it was not the right time to do those things. There were other factors outside their purview that prevented those from actually being a good idea. And then six of them they were just wrong on. And you just sit and listen to them each day, and for things they were right about, you would engage.”
In addition to the benefits of age and his experiences as a parent, Ludwig had learned from his mentors at Microsoft, such as Brad Silverberg. He learned one particularly important lesson when he and another manager, David Cole, had a major disagreement over something they both considered very important. So they took it to Silverberg. “Brad listened to us and he looked at us both. He said, ‘Well, what do you think we should do?’ And we both presented our views, and he said, ‘Well, I can solve this for both of you, but neither one of you will like my solution.’ And we looked at each other, and we realized that what he was telling us is that we need to grow up, and we need to figure out what the right thing is for the company and just fix it. Coming in here and making it his problem is not going to help us, not going to help either one of us in our careers, or in any ways. And so we kind of sheepishly left there and we figured out the answer… it’s some stupid meaningless thing, I’m sure. And I never did that again with a boss. I never once went in someone’s office and created a big fucking issue for them, because that’s not what you do. And I probably tried to pass that lesson on to these guys, that storming into my office and trying create a big issue for me is not helpful, it’s not going to work for you, it’s only going to make your life worse, so you guys are smart guys, so why do you keep doing it?”
Despite the near constant barrage of interruptions, non-crises, and attempts to undermine him, Ludwig says that he figured out how to deal with Eisler and Engstrom—Engstrom in particular. “When Eric is underutilized and under burdened, then he gets busy doing all kinds of shit that’s not very helpful,” and so Ludwig piled on the work, adding more responsibilities and more challenges. “It calms him down, because all of a sudden he’s busy. He’s got shit to get done. He doesn’t have time to stir up trouble and plot world domination.”