The Windows 95 team were proud slackers

Raymond

During one of the many (many) team meetings during the course of Windows 95, there was a slide that showed something-or-other broken down by job discipline. There was a column for developers, another for quality assurance, and a third column labeled Slackers.

The presenter was one of the lead program managers and explained that the Slackers column represented program managers and other management overhead. (This is the same person who famously predicted that the project would ship by June 1993, “Otherwise, I’ll be applying for a job at McDonalds.”)

As I’ve noted a few times before, the Windows 95 team enjoyed self-deprecating humor, and it wasn’t long before the epithet Slacker was adopted through the entire team.

We even had shirts made.

Windows 95 released to manufacturing on this day 23 years ago.

Raymond Chen

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