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In all the startups I've worked at, there actually was one uber-hacker who worked 80 hours a week. There were also a lot of guys who spent 75 hours a week in me

In all the startups I've worked at, there actually was one uber-hacker who worked 80 hours a week. There were also a lot of guys who spent 75 hours a week in meetings and farting around on the internet, and 5 hours doing useful work. I've been both of those guys at different startups. The myth comes from back in the days when there was a lot of code to be written. Certain projects, like games, have TONS of code. Even the sharpest programmer can only type so fast, and even the fastest compiler can only compile so fast. The only way for projects like that to come to fruition in any reasonable amount of time is for people to work long hours. The nature of software startups has changed. With web apps, the code base is relatively small and simple. There usually isn't a compile cycle. What happens now, is you spend all your time on systems administration issues. Shit breaks, you need to respond to it immediately. I sort of miss the days where programming 70 hours a week was an option. Now I'm lucky to get in 20 hours of programming in between the 100 hours backlog of systems administration that needs to get done.

antirez 19y ago
> With web apps, the code base is relatively small and simple Well said, this is having enormous impacts in the economy of web 2.0 too. Not just small, but also simple as you said. This means that almost every decent programmer can write it, so most startups have success just for a matter of feeling, community, user interface and user experience in general. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing: from one side it is not very meritocratic as to be very smart with the code and design of complex systems is not the sole road to the success. On the other hand this is probably the first stage in the history where small groups of people that sometimes lack a strong programming background (in favor of other kind of background) are writing software used by a lot of users, this can be an interesting human experiment. Just a possibly stupid question: is it possible that the web 2.0 is subtracting hackers from more long-term important work because everybody is busy writing simple web apps instead of the next google or alike?
jamongkad 19y ago
Systems Admin TELL ME ABOUT IT sigh I spend so much time configuring and restarting my VPS it's...too...painful...to..do... and I find myself missing coding so much more after hours upon hours of system admin work.
- inklesspen 19y ago
  Get a better VPS, then.

antirez 19y ago

> With web apps, the code base is relatively small and simple Well said, this is having enormous impacts in the economy of web 2.0 too. Not just small, but also simple as you said. This means that almost every decent programmer can write it, so most startups have success just for a matter of feeling, community, user interface and user experience in general. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing: from one side it is not very meritocratic as to be very smart with the code and design of complex systems is not the sole road to the success. On the other hand this is probably the first stage in the history where small groups of people that sometimes lack a strong programming background (in favor of other kind of background) are writing software used by a lot of users, this can be an interesting human experiment. Just a possibly stupid question: is it possible that the web 2.0 is subtracting hackers from more long-term important work because everybody is busy writing simple web apps instead of the next google or alike?

jamongkad 19y ago

Systems Admin TELL ME ABOUT IT sigh I spend so much time configuring and restarting my VPS it's...too...painful...to..do... and I find myself missing coding so much more after hours upon hours of system admin work.

inklesspen 19y ago
Get a better VPS, then.