[johansch]

(I am Swedish.)

I think Silicon Valley-style working hours are actually sometimes required to win in the race of building world leading products. Of course, in the vast majority of the time it's probably being applied in a stupid way, just like in Japan.

It all comes down to how hard it is to scale up a team. ("The mythical man month", etc.) You can actually borrow against future productivity by running a team really, really hard when it really matters. (Compare with the stories of how iPhone 1.0 was developed.)

In Europe pulling off something like this is only feasible in a small start-ups where everyone knows what's at stake, and there is a reward mechanism in place that works.

[rwallace]

You can, but the debt generally comes due in a timescale of days. Running your team into the ground might be a useful strategy in a situation of "we have to have something to ship by nine a.m. next Monday morning or the company goes bankrupt," but situations where that's actually true are extremely rare. Trying it in the more typical case where the deadline is e.g. three months away will at best stretch three months work out to four or five months.

A scenario that does actually happen now and then is "the system has gone down, we don't know why, and there'll be hell to pay if we don't find the bug, fix it and get everything back up and running by Monday morning." In that case, fine, work the weekend if you have to - but then take Monday and Tuesday off.

[johansch]

I don't think I will trust you on that until you have built something, in a fierce global competition, ends up being used by hundreds of millions of people. Perhaps you have?

(I have.)

Again, after that sort of experience I would be glad to discuss this.

[tiles]

Just curious, where can I find stories about how the iPhone 1.0 was developed? I'm not sure what to search for.

[Scuds]

A book would be a fairly heavy undertaking since it's a compilation of interviews, casual chats, etc.

For casual chats, the Debug Podcast: http://www.imore.com/debug

http://www.imore.com/debug-39-nitin-ganatra-episode-i-system... with the former Director of Engineering, iOS Applications at Apple Inc, Nitin Ganatra

http://www.imore.com/debug-40-nitin-ganatra-episode-ii-os-x-... Debug 40: Nitin Ganatra episode II: OS X to iOS

http://www.imore.com/debug-41-nitin-ganatra-episode-iii-ipho... Debug 41: Nitin Ganatra episode III: iPhone to iPad

http://www.imore.com/debug-47-melton-ganatra-episode-i-demoi... What's it like to demo software to Steve Jobs http://www.imore.com/debug-48-melton-ganatra-episode-ii-unde... Part II

Why am I posting this into a talk about Japan? Oh well.

[yulaow]

The Bio book of Steve Jobs has some chapters about it. There are also some citations about some members of the team and good part of them said it was a fantastic experience, but they had also to change job after it because they felt really exhausted (in some parts they talk about 100h per week as a standard in some teams, so I can understand them).