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But 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 hi

But 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 ago
Working 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 ago
  Just 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 ago
    True, 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 ago
The 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.

raverbashing 8y ago

Working 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 ago
Just 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 ago
  True, 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 ago

The 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.