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Saturday morning meeting, then worked all night, on the whim of one person, to present on Monday. Just wow. If this is what it takes to succeed in our industry
by vinhboy 8y ago
Saturday morning meeting, then worked all night, on the whim of one person, to present on Monday. Just wow.
If this is what it takes to succeed in our industry, then I accept that I will not. I just simply do not have the stamina for it.
I am not trying to be flippant. I am genuinely amaze how driven some people are.
- ec109685 8y agoAs long as this isn’t a common thing, sometimes you have to commit and go for it to get to the next level.
- justinjlynn 8y agoIt sounds like an awful place to work; a cult-like working environment controlled by an sociopathic ego maniac with no concept of the value of other people's self-worth and time. Demanding last minute changes to a design that's probably been presented and approved by you at least a dozen times in order to lie to your future customers at the cost of your engineer's weekend while telling them they ruined the whole thing. What? I mean, seriously? Who could possibly excuse that behaviour? I don't think Jobs was so much a charismatic leader as he was lucky enough to encourage trauma bonding between the right people while just barely managing to maintain control.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- icelancer 8y ago"I don't think Jobs was so much a charismatic leader as he was lucky enough to encourage trauma bonding between the right people while just barely managing to maintain control." You are ignoring the whole other side of him that made him effective and revolutionary: His vision of the future was second to none. It doesn't make Steve - or people who act like Steve - in the right. But his genius wasn't just pissing off a bunch of people to get them to "trauma bond." The iPhone didn't get made that way.
- sgift 8y ago> But his genius wasn't just pissing off a bunch of people to get them to "trauma bond." The iPhone didn't get made that way. How do you know? Were you there? With each Steve Jobs story I read he seems less of a genius (though I never was in the "Steve Jobs is a genius" camp) and more like a mad man with incredible luck.
- qplex 8y agoSo I guess it was just luck how he pulled Apple out of the dirt after John Scully almost ran the company to ground?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- evgen 8y agoApple I, Mac, Pixar, iPhone.... that guy Jobs was sure a lucky person. I wonder if there is a word for people who have that sort of consistent luck...
- justinjlynn 8y agoYes, there is: outlier.
- evgen 8y agoHow do those sour grapes taste?
- justinjlynn 8y agoGiven that I asked for them, they taste delicious.
- Drdrdrq 8y ago...and iPad, iPod, which were achievements in themselves. I agree with you it's not luck, he simply knew how to create a product that fills the needs of the market. But I also think that his managerial style was unacceptable, and had nothing to do with Apple's success. As far as Pixar is concerned, he actually kept the distance on purpose (there's a great book "Creativity Inc" by Catmull) which shows it's not his management that is worth copying.
- qplex 8y agoI think that's quite a downplay on Jobs achievements. It's well known that Jobs wasn't perfect, but he did have vision and an amazing capability to develop and sell products. I wonder what he'd say to the current MacBook team for example? Broken keyboard and problems with overheating? Apple is seriously lacking vision these days and it shows. This time Steve is not around to save them like he did after NeXT.
- Konryan 8y agoIt's not like they didn't have MacBooks with serious design flaws when Steve Jobs was around...
- rvense 8y agoMy iBook G4 got a new logic board 4 times in its 5 year lifetime. Other than that it was a fantastic computer mind..
- tobr 8y agoIt's an unreliable keyboard, but I'm not sure it's worse than e.g. the hockey puck mouse, the G4 Cube or "antennagate".
- scruffyherder 8y agoHockey puck was something people could (and did) replace. Especially if you wanted 2 mice buttons for OS X. G4 cube at least worked, although it was far too expensive. No doubt Steve was wanting another cube and it was purely "art".
- scarface74 8y agoAntennaGate was way overblown. The GSM iPhone 4 was sold for four years without a redesign. The unreliable keyboard - yeah that's a real issue.
- enitihas 8y agoWell, he would say that the users are using them wrong. Precedent: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/jun/25/iphone-reception-problems-solved https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/jun/25/ipho...
- pking 8y agoTrauma wasn't Steve's strategy; it was a side-effect of his strategy. His strategy was demanding an unreasonable level of excellence and being indifferent to how the people who worked for him might be impacted. Those that survived got to work at a company where everyone was extremely talented. People who couldn't stand the heat were free to work elsewhere. It's arrogant, but it did allow him to create a uniquely creative and effective environment. And keep in mind that if the Apple acquisition of NeXT hadn't worked out -- an acquisition that Steve was opposed to, I believe -- NeXT could have ended up in the dustbin of history, and there would be no OSX, iMac, iOS, iPod, or iPhone. So in many ways, the approach could have backfired, but in this case, it didn't.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoThat's rarely the case though, employers that are bad at this sort of thing are consistently bad.
- GoToRO 8y agoAnd not only them. Regular people are the same. If you are called to help with something, even move furniture, it's either all is smooth except one thing if the people are organized or it's more like "the car can't pull the trailer, the trailer is too small, the furniture breaks apart by itself and so on). All is bad. Most people that need help are in the latter category. It's the same for jobs. Jobs that get posted online most likely are bad jobs.
- icelancer 8y agoIt's not like the stories of Steve Jobs' escapades are rare. There are plenty of successful companies that don't have someone as insane as Jobs at the helm. But it's undeniable where Steve took his companies and the industry as a whole.
- DrScump 8y agoWhere, exactly, did he take NeXT? Also remember, Jobs was the driving force behind the AAGI wage-fixing cartel.
- psergeant 8y agoHere’s to the crazy ones
- GoToRO 8y agoIt really depends on the context. You can be very driven if you will get something out of it and if the work is sane. It's totally different when you have to work in the weekend because the managers don't do their job (no clue what they want, they don't care about technical things and so on).
- skgoa 8y ago> If this is what it takes to succeed in our industry, then I accept that I will not. I just simply do not have the stamina for it. It's a matter of what success means to you. I don't value a fancy job title or a higher number on my bank account (above the 'basic' software engineer pay grade I am at already) enough to do this kind of mentally back-breaking BS work. I do the job I was hired for and get paid for. I do that job to the best of my ability 9-5 (well, 8-4) and then I leave. For me, that constitutes having succeeded at the school, uni, job hunting and employment challenges. I expect most future successes in my live will come from my family/social live or will be personal triumphs like getting into shape and learning interesting new skills.
- SpecialistEMT 8y agoSame here. I simply cant do it, physically. I feel im much weaker than the average person. Im not depressed. Im 32 and need 9 hours of sleep or i wont feel productive. I can pull an allnighter but then i feel like shit the whole week. I get 2-day hangovers when im drinking. Did all the blood and liver tests, chest xrays everything seems fine.
- ronyfadel 8y agoWhat precisely made you do the bloodwork?
- SpecialistEMT 8y agoAfter 23-25 ive noticed my hangovers getting worse when drinking on the weekends or once every 2 weeks. I thought maybe its a liver problem. Blood tests are just a regular thing i do every year with my health insurance. I was never a heavy drinker, but like hanging out with colleagues and staying out longer once in a while.
- bartread 8y ago> I get 2-day hangovers when im drinking. You may just be getting older. These started for me at 40. And it's not just the physical symptoms: the multiple days of depression and low motivation after they've subsided are deeply unpleasant as well. Drinking to excess just isn't worth it any more, if it ever was.
- pvg 8y agoIf this is what it takes to succeed in our industry Much more onerous things happen regularly in lots of white collar jobs. People in medicine, law, finance, etc. A weekend with an all-nighter before some big deliverable? College students do this.
- pjmlp 8y agoMedicine is quite bad, good luck when being attended by someone forced to do 24h+ shift due to lack of personnel.
- Asooka 8y agoI like how you listed the three most dysfunctional industries and trailed off with etc. Reminds me of the proof that all odd numbers are prime - 3, 5, 7 are prime, so the rest should be prime as well... 1 is the exception that proves the rule!
- pvg 8y agoI'm glad you like it but I'm afraid I don't understand what your point is.
- bambataa 8y agoCollege students who didn't plan their time properly. The only reason it happens in those other white collar jobs is because it's cheaper for management to work a few people really hard than hire enough to the job with reasonable working conditions. If you work like that you're literally sacrificing your free time and health for the benefit of the company's bottom line. Maybe if you're lucky you'll get a small bonus and 'recognition'.
- pvg 8y agoIf any of this were true, it would be a very strong indication we live in a particularly naively written simulation.
- BjoernKW 8y agoNo, this isn’t what it takes to be successful in our industry. There are plenty of successful companies and opportunities where you don’t have to work crazy hours like that. Steve Jobs was a singular character, who could pull off stunts like that and succeed. Achieving results consistently in that manner probably is more of an outlier rather than the norm. If you’re not Steve Jobs chances are this might work occasionally but in the long run you’ll ruin your company. Being successful in most cases is a marathon, not a sprint.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoCase in point: NeXT didn't succeed that much and was merged into Apple, Apple only really took off years after this particular episode with the release of the imac at first, then the iphone later on. I'm sure some of the UX developed during the period described by the poster eventually made its way into the iphone, but it didn't need an overnight thing. I think. Unless the money they got from Oracle ended up saving the company and allowing them to invest in their platforms, IDK.
- pking 8y agoNeXT's "success" is definitely owed to the Apple acquisition, which almost didn't happen. DBKit was basically discarded and redesigned as EOF, which did make it into the Mac. I'm not sure EOF made it into the iPhone, but the tech lead on EOF Richard Williamson, became tech lead for the first iPhone application stack.
- adamlett 8y agoIn my limited experience, being a driven employee is quite literally that, in the sense that it’s someone else, the manager, who is doing the driving. Let me explain with an example. At a previous job, I was at one time working on a large project under a enthusiastic, but hard driving project manager (he is a karate coach in his spare time). At the beginning of the project he pulled the entire team aside and held a pep talk, talking about how important this project was for the company, how hard he himself planned to work because of it, and finally how hard he expected us to work. He was upfront about the fact that there would be many days with very long hours, and he said the company was committed to doing what it would take to make it work for us: Paying taxis to get home from the client late at night, paying for meals and doing whatever to help those who had families with children (I don’t remember the specifics, as that didn’t apply to me at the time). Because of the personality of this project manager, it worked. He got us riled up, and for many weeks the whole team worked from early morning to late in the evening. At the end of the project, we received a small bonus and were commended in front of the rest of the company. During it all, the manager did what he had said he would: He worked as hard as any of us, staying each day until the last of us left, to the point where we worried about his ability to drive himself home safely. In an environment such as this, I would expect many people who normally wouldn’t think they had it in them, would find that they also were able to perform to a level far higher than they were used to.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoI dunno, working overnight to get a standing ovation to 400 people at a very, very rich company that you can sell a very, very large amount of product to sounds worth it, especially if you're holding stock with the company you work for (or know you'll earn a big bonus with that). I don't think anyone at NeXT or Apple that worked on a successful product minded they had to work at night sometimes.
- khazhoux 8y agoBut re-read this part: > Working at NeXT was the most exciting software engineering job I ever accepted. NeXT was like graduate school, bringing together a high concentration of some of the brightest and most innovative technical minds... He loved it. Stressful as it surely was, he looks back on that weekend as a great memory. I think probably everyone here on HN enjoys hard work, the good burn at the end of a productive and worthwhile day. It's the useless slog for unclear pointless goals that brings us down. I personally love the times I'm so into what I'm doing at work, that I get up on Saturday morning and start coding away.
- raverbashing 8y agoWorking Saturdays and maybe Sundays works once or twice a year. Then you get to the next week completely unmotivated having had no rest and feeling like crap Tuning out of work is needed
- Bahamut 8y agoJust a note, not all people are wired the same - some people are very good at working long hours and 7 days a week. I've done it at times, and my brother has done it to an extreme before.
- raverbashing 8y agoTrue, though "being able to" doesn't mean you should. Also there's a frequent confusion between "working longer hours" and working more (might not be the case here)
- pking 8y agoThe work environment at NeXT was amazing because of the colleagues. That particular weekend was demoralizing and disillusioned me about Steve Jobs, not because of the criticism, but because it was so out of touch with what the market, application developers, would like. That said, Steve's intuition was right. We pushed on the impossible for a while and found a way to make the actual technology work the way he liked, by using an entity-relationship model to object-pointer mapping. And that approach later became the standard paradigm for database application building tools across the industry. Steve made unreasonable demands, but he was on the right side of history sufficiently often that top people wanted to be on his team and tolerated the craziness of it.
- a_bonobo 8y agoI've recently finished reading Bad Blood, on the hype, personality cult and fall of Theranos. Elizabeth Holmes often imitated Steve Jobs, including his insane management style. In Theranos' case this did nothing but make the company miserable and crash the whole thing.
- peteretep 8y agoSure, every wannabe wants to cargo-cult the bits of Jobs that they can because they can't replicate the genius part.
- saagarjha 8y agoThere's even an easy way to tell the difference: emulating a CEO down to the clothes they wear, while knowingly peddling a fraudulent product? Cargo cult. Working your team hard and producing multiple massively successful products? Steve Jobs.
- insertcredit 8y agoWhen I was working at Google (now retired living in Germany), I spent my first year there working insane hours and pushing myself beyond self-imposed limits. However, after dealing with burnout and having some close friends implode on the job, I soon realized that I was nothing more than a cog in a machine that would, if I let it, chew me up and spit me out. I started gradually reducing the number of hours I worked for 'real' until, a few years later, I found myself working for two hours a day, choosing to spend the rest on things that contributed to my sanity and self-development (on company time). To fill the gap, I would work on my own software projects, socialize with co-workers, do research on things I found interesting and read books. Needless to say, nobody noticed. I kept this up for a number of years and then I quit. Looking back on it now, those were some of the best, most carefree years of my life. There is nothing like getting paid a competitive six figure salary to mostly do the things you enjoy and not care one iota about corporate management structures.
- dmix 8y agoFrom one extreme to another isn't quite a good solution IMO. I'd much rather quit and work on something I really care about than pretend I care about my job and put in the bare minimum of work possible. But Ive never been comfortable just punching a clock and taking a pay cheque, being a mindless cog at a big company. So to each his own...
- insertcredit 8y agoWhy not do both? I got to work on things I really cared about and got to keep a high salaried job and all the perks that come with it (I quit on my terms, not theirs, once I had enough to retire). My employer may not have cared about the things I worked on but that's fair game. After all they hired me and they were happy to have me there for years. I don't see the 'extreme' in what I did, more like common sense or self-optimization.
- deagle50 8y agoI don't see his comment as doing the bare minimum. More like being in no man's land. If the extra effort and time cannot lead to greater rewards or will go largely unnoticed why do it? Otherwise you're risking resentment and burnout. Some people can increase their output linearly (or better) by putting in more time and some of those people are positioned to benefit from that increased output. The rest (and the company) would probably benefit from a different approach. I often wonder when management theory will start exploring this issue. As something of a workaholic I had to teach myself moderation.
- dsego 8y agoMore often than not a feature I'm working on is just a bullet point to the management/marketing. The sooner I realize that the better. Also, it's hard for them to notice how much work went into a working and polished feature. Sometimes it's better to show something half-baked, let them notice the rough edges and they are more thankful when you eventually fix it. It's basic psychology.