| One of the reasons I come to hn so much is for motivation when things get tough (which is often). I don't think I've ever read anything here that motivated me more. This is already on my bulletin board. So the next time I opt for the "easy way out", I can look at this and remind myself not to be such a wimp. Just a few of the gems inside: The three of us spent the next six hours editing fifty thousand lines of code...It would have taken weeks for any one of us working alone. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive. "This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo). This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity. It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product. The secret to programming is having smart friends. I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs." programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices. ...we were in full crunch mode, working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week...If this story were a movie, you would now see the clock hand spinning and the calendar pages blowing away in the wind. ...it was a macho computer guy thing - we had never shipped a million copies of software before I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked...We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work. |
I find the story to be just the opposite: such behaviour of The Corporation is not motivating at all, in the productive sense. It is rather motivating to do something completely different from productive coding/work.