https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Edit: there's a tl;dr on the particular topic of Gates' engineering skills buried in the story (which I'll quote below), but I encourage everyone to read the whole damn thing because that is how you successfully lead engineers.
tl;dr
"It was a good point. Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer."
