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From Hadi Partovi's thread: "The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint,
by linguae 5y ago
From Hadi Partovi's thread:
"The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!
"Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it."
Unfortunately these extreme work hours seems to be prevalent in our industry. Steve Jobs' "90 hours a week and loving it!" T-shirt from the early 1980's is a legend, and I remember reading about the history of the Apple Newton and how the very long work hours spent on that project broke up families and even led an engineer to suicide (https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream-engineer-s-nightmare.html https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream...). When I was a graduate student, I've seen people boast about their 90-hour work weeks. Thankfully I've been fortunate to work at places where it's okay to work a normal 40-hour week, but I've heard of places where working long hours is not only the norm, it's encouraged. I understand being passionate; sometimes I stay up very late working on side projects. But when work conflicts with health and with family, something has to give.
I would love to hear stories of products that were successful and where the engineers and other people who contributed to that success were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.
- GrumpyNl 5y agoHe forgot to mention that it wasnt a "great" product, they left us frontend developers with several headaches.
- x0x0 5y agoie quickly became revolutionarily better than the alternatives at the time. My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the wall. By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us to fingerprint point releases of netscape to work around bugs.
- Firehawke 5y agoYep. IE took off not just because of Microsoft's position as the default browser, but because Netscape totally sucked on Windows. I'd switched to IE2 because the Netscape build my ISP offered was horrible and constantly crashed.
- x0x0 5y agoYeah, I've literally spent months of my life hunting the html sequences causing netscape to crash. It was viscerally loathed by my team. Particularly the fragility around tables... good thing it was hilariously fragile with css too! You can still see remnants of some of it online, eg this http://old.macedition.com/cb/nn4crashers/index.html http://old.macedition.com/cb/nn4crashers/index.html We were early to the idea of shipping professional apps via the browser, and it was a choppy beginning.
- aparsons 5y agoYou’re thinking mid-2000s IE. In the 90s, IE was far ahead of everything else. The gap between 2008 IE and Chrome was FAR smaller than the gap between 1997 IE and Netscape/Mosaic
- WalterBright 5y ago"90 hours a week" for me means writing code that doesn't work.
- hulitu 5y agoAnd they lived in a septic tank. You can work 90 hours a week for a couple of weeks. Than the ambulance comes.
- rambambram 5y agoBasecamp comes to mind. Jason Fried and David HH have been saying for years to have a regular 40 hour schedule.