That reminds of something written by a former Microsoft employee:
The next day was my "BillG" review.
June 30, 1992.
In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. About 6 layers from top to
bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight
layers of management or whatever it was.
In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there,
along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came
along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an
accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the
f***-count, the better.
Bill came in.
I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms,
one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being. He had my
spec in his hand. He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an
executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people
laughed. Bill turned to me. I noticed that there were comments in the
margins of my spec. He had read the first page!
Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.
He was asking questions. I was answering them. They were pretty
easy, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were, because I
couldn't stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec...... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE
SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE
MARGINS.
The questions got harder and more detailed.
They seemed a little bit random. By now I was used to thinking of
Bill as my buddy. He's a nice guy! He read my spec! He probably just
wants to ask me a few questions about the comments in the margins! I'll
open a bug in the bug tracker for each of his comments and makes sure
it gets addressed, pronto!
"OK. Well, good work," said Bill. He took his marked up copy of the spec and left.
"Four," announced the f*** counter, and everyone said, "wow, that's
the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age." He
was, you know, 36.
Later I had it explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review
your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His
standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit
that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared.
Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question
he can come up with because it's never happened before."
Just thought I should point out, I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.