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It's interesting and heartwarming to see how similar the spirit of many successful software projects was. Creative collaboration, open play, extremely high trus

It's interesting and heartwarming to see how similar the spirit of many successful software projects was. Creative collaboration, open play, extremely high trust, by people who really intrinsically love what they do. It goes against so much of the MBA-worldview and bigcorp offices. Unix, GNU, Linux, early Python, early Rockstar Games etc.

busfahrer 1y ago
> early Rockstar Games I did not expect to see them in this list, can you elaborate?
- aap_ 1y ago
  As for Rockstar North/DMA specifically: It was a bunch of nerds making games in Scotland. From having reverse engineered gta3 and vice city and therefore knowing the code of these games quite intimately, i can tell that even at that time (i don't know what exactly was meant by "early") they were still a fairly small bunch of very talented people building the best game together that they could. No huge engines or design patterns, just very straightforward, well or reasonably well written code that does just what's it supposed to. All from scratch, the tooling as well. Of course that's just my interpretation (and maybe i'm projecting a bit) but i imagine it must have been a very fun project for the people involved. Doesn't reek much of management, bureaucracy and questionable practices getting in the way.
  - quadhome 1y ago
    From scratch? AIUI GTA3 and Vice City were built on RenderWare.
    - Cpoll 1y ago
      RenderWare was the preeminent PS2 graphics library. My impression is that it's more akin to OpenGL than to Unreal?
    - aap_ 1y ago
      That's true but it was little more than a portable rendering API, which was of course very useful for the PS2, but probably less interesting for the PC ports. So if you want to count that, you're right, it's not totally from scratch. But it wasn't built on an actual game engine.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  I just remembered this video https://youtu.be/7vWSi44ZTSw https://youtu.be/7vWSi44ZTSw and it seemed like a chill place with nerds having fun making something. (Actually they were still DMA at this time, not Rockstar). And as for the achievement, the product turned into a franchise with the biggest entertainment products ever made (GTA 5/6).
philipallstar 1y ago
> extremely high trust A lot of problems disappear when you have a high-trust societies, projects, companies, etc.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  Yes, but that requires admitting that the employees are flesh and bones humans with human social relationships between them and this stuff can't be tabulated and accounted and bean-counted. And it's rather outright seen as a risk factor, makes people less fungible, there's a risk that they gang up against the management, or there could be legal risk if they build too much of an insider culture etc. Highly aligned motivated and talented people with shared core values (like the pioneer ethos of hackers, tech optimism etc, and cultural references etc) can achieve so much. And they tend to work odd hours and overtime because they want to make the thing, and not because of hoping to get rich. Now I have two things to say about this. First, this type of passion is special and a manager can't hope to simply force it, and if it's demanded then all you get will be talkers who know the lingo of being so super passionate. The thing must be worth being passionate about and the team has to be aligned with the goal and have latitude to shape the project. This kind of work bes happens when the higher up kinda forget the team and they just intrinsically do it. It can't be planned. Second, some people are very opposed to these hight effort, almost obsessed teams because they see it as unfair ideals or unfair competition, because obviously someone with a family who has to pick up the kids at 4 pm can't do this cracked push overnight and sleeping at the office etc. But greatness simy cannot be made from steady, fixed-pace 9-5 jobs with work life balance and atomized employees. And that's okay, for most things we don't need greatness just okayness. But often people still can't stand that there are such great teams and want to drag them down in one way or another.
  - foldr 1y ago
    > But often people still can't stand that there are such great teams and want to drag them down in one way or another. This seems like an unnecessary attribution of malicious intentions. The obvious explanation for why people often oppose a culture of long hours is that long hours suck for anyone with a life outside of work. You explain this yourself with the example of someone who has kids.
BSDobelix 1y ago
I would add "Ken Olsen"-DEC and Sun Microsystems.
ThrowawayR2 1y ago
The Bell Telephone monopoly was among the biggest of the bigcorps of that era and had no shortage of MBAs. A better characterization might be that the Ma Bell had money to burn and computerization was a hot trend so the bean counters were willing to back speculative projects and research, not unlike VCs throwing money around.
- bonoboTP 1y ago
  There's a danger of romanticizing the past, but I think there was just less metric based pressure on these people than today. In the 70s, the whole consultant-led transformation of all corporations wasn't fully complete yet.
- gbacon 1y ago
  The article even makes reference to the use-or-lose approach to managing a departmental budget: And history shows that it happened partly because the department paying for it “had extra money, and if they didn’t spend it, they’d lose it the next year…”
  - fuzztester 1y ago
    Like in government departments and also in some companies that have a similar mentality.
- cestith 1y ago
  It’s worth remembering this was Bell Labs. It was a research and development organization. These weren’t line maintenance people and telephone operators free to create things during their work. They did a lot of applied research and a lot of pure research at Bell Labs back in the day. Lasers, fiber optics, underseas cables, communication satellites, transistors, discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and more came out of that organization. It was largely supported by the consent deal between the US government and AT&T that allowed them a telephone monopoly so long as their non-telephone research and inventions didn’t get marketed separately. So they’d create things that helped the company and the rest of the world, and then just release those things to the rest of the world.
duxup 1y ago
I worked at a big corp for a long time. Then I moved to a small company. I'm convinced that you can't ever get much done outside high trust environments, you just can't. The bureaucracy eventually takes over, managers generally wall things off, keep things secret, erode trust, new people can't even navigate the bureaucracy are so far from effecting change, new ideas just DOA. Not to say big companies or big projects can't make money / be well adopted, but you want to really do change, try new things sometime this century? ... need high trust.

busfahrer 1y ago

> early Rockstar Games I did not expect to see them in this list, can you elaborate?

aap_ 1y ago
As for Rockstar North/DMA specifically: It was a bunch of nerds making games in Scotland. From having reverse engineered gta3 and vice city and therefore knowing the code of these games quite intimately, i can tell that even at that time (i don't know what exactly was meant by "early") they were still a fairly small bunch of very talented people building the best game together that they could. No huge engines or design patterns, just very straightforward, well or reasonably well written code that does just what's it supposed to. All from scratch, the tooling as well. Of course that's just my interpretation (and maybe i'm projecting a bit) but i imagine it must have been a very fun project for the people involved. Doesn't reek much of management, bureaucracy and questionable practices getting in the way.
- quadhome 1y ago
  From scratch? AIUI GTA3 and Vice City were built on RenderWare.
  - Cpoll 1y ago
    RenderWare was the preeminent PS2 graphics library. My impression is that it's more akin to OpenGL than to Unreal?
  - aap_ 1y ago
    That's true but it was little more than a portable rendering API, which was of course very useful for the PS2, but probably less interesting for the PC ports. So if you want to count that, you're right, it's not totally from scratch. But it wasn't built on an actual game engine.
bonoboTP 1y ago
I just remembered this video https://youtu.be/7vWSi44ZTSw https://youtu.be/7vWSi44ZTSw and it seemed like a chill place with nerds having fun making something. (Actually they were still DMA at this time, not Rockstar). And as for the achievement, the product turned into a franchise with the biggest entertainment products ever made (GTA 5/6).

philipallstar 1y ago

> extremely high trust A lot of problems disappear when you have a high-trust societies, projects, companies, etc.

bonoboTP 1y ago
Yes, but that requires admitting that the employees are flesh and bones humans with human social relationships between them and this stuff can't be tabulated and accounted and bean-counted. And it's rather outright seen as a risk factor, makes people less fungible, there's a risk that they gang up against the management, or there could be legal risk if they build too much of an insider culture etc. Highly aligned motivated and talented people with shared core values (like the pioneer ethos of hackers, tech optimism etc, and cultural references etc) can achieve so much. And they tend to work odd hours and overtime because they want to make the thing, and not because of hoping to get rich. Now I have two things to say about this. First, this type of passion is special and a manager can't hope to simply force it, and if it's demanded then all you get will be talkers who know the lingo of being so super passionate. The thing must be worth being passionate about and the team has to be aligned with the goal and have latitude to shape the project. This kind of work bes happens when the higher up kinda forget the team and they just intrinsically do it. It can't be planned. Second, some people are very opposed to these hight effort, almost obsessed teams because they see it as unfair ideals or unfair competition, because obviously someone with a family who has to pick up the kids at 4 pm can't do this cracked push overnight and sleeping at the office etc. But greatness simy cannot be made from steady, fixed-pace 9-5 jobs with work life balance and atomized employees. And that's okay, for most things we don't need greatness just okayness. But often people still can't stand that there are such great teams and want to drag them down in one way or another.
- foldr 1y ago
  > But often people still can't stand that there are such great teams and want to drag them down in one way or another. This seems like an unnecessary attribution of malicious intentions. The obvious explanation for why people often oppose a culture of long hours is that long hours suck for anyone with a life outside of work. You explain this yourself with the example of someone who has kids.

BSDobelix 1y ago

I would add "Ken Olsen"-DEC and Sun Microsystems.

ThrowawayR2 1y ago

The Bell Telephone monopoly was among the biggest of the bigcorps of that era and had no shortage of MBAs. A better characterization might be that the Ma Bell had money to burn and computerization was a hot trend so the bean counters were willing to back speculative projects and research, not unlike VCs throwing money around.

bonoboTP 1y ago
There's a danger of romanticizing the past, but I think there was just less metric based pressure on these people than today. In the 70s, the whole consultant-led transformation of all corporations wasn't fully complete yet.
gbacon 1y ago
The article even makes reference to the use-or-lose approach to managing a departmental budget: And history shows that it happened partly because the department paying for it “had extra money, and if they didn’t spend it, they’d lose it the next year…”
- fuzztester 1y ago
  Like in government departments and also in some companies that have a similar mentality.
cestith 1y ago
It’s worth remembering this was Bell Labs. It was a research and development organization. These weren’t line maintenance people and telephone operators free to create things during their work. They did a lot of applied research and a lot of pure research at Bell Labs back in the day. Lasers, fiber optics, underseas cables, communication satellites, transistors, discovery of the cosmic microwave background, and more came out of that organization. It was largely supported by the consent deal between the US government and AT&T that allowed them a telephone monopoly so long as their non-telephone research and inventions didn’t get marketed separately. So they’d create things that helped the company and the rest of the world, and then just release those things to the rest of the world.

duxup 1y ago

I worked at a big corp for a long time. Then I moved to a small company. I'm convinced that you can't ever get much done outside high trust environments, you just can't. The bureaucracy eventually takes over, managers generally wall things off, keep things secret, erode trust, new people can't even navigate the bureaucracy are so far from effecting change, new ideas just DOA. Not to say big companies or big projects can't make money / be well adopted, but you want to really do change, try new things sometime this century? ... need high trust.