[bawolff]

This feels like a bad ancedote

A) kind of sounds like a toxic work environment

B) this is a bad way to reason about performance without knowing more. Is this actually a bottleneck? Would the heroic effort be better spent saving minutes elsewhere where its easy to save time instead of saving seconds during boot where its hard to save time and users encounter relatively rarely? Optimizing boot might be the right call but it also might not be.

Anything can be optimized. The real trick is to optimize your optimization so you optimize the right thing to get the most improvement possible as you are almost always limited by the amount of time you can spend optimizing so you can't do it all. Picking a component at random is a terrible way of doing optimization.

[hyperpape]

Didn’t use an original Macintosh, but I used a Mac Plus. It was pretty typical to turn your computer off between uses. This optimization was very valuable.

[taneq]

I don't think anyone's ever argued that Jobs was toxic af to work with, however some engineers respond to that kind of treatment by producing best-in-class work. It's one of those trolley problem style questions, would you want this software to be twice as good at the expense of knowing ten devs were bullied like that?