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> Who cares I worked until 2am every day for weeks while they left at 5pm because they "weren't coders".

> Sorry, ranting a bit.

Rant away! I don't want to hijack this thread, but there's a story I like to share with people when they become new managers. It's from Herb Ryman, one of the first Disney Imagineers.

"The year was 1953. Walt [Disney] said, ‘Hi Herbie. I’m over here at the studio. I wonder if you could come over here. Just come the way you are, I’ll be out front waiting for you.’ I was curious, and flattered that he picked up the phone and called me. I had no idea what he wanted.

He met me out front and shook my hand saying, ‘Hi Herbie, we’re in the Zorro building.’ So we went in, and I asked what this was all about. He said, ‘My brother Roy has to go to New York on Monday morning. He’s got to talk to some bankers there. You know bankers don’t have any imagination, none at all. You have to show them what you are going to do. Roy has to show them what this place is going to look like.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d like to see what this place is going to look like, too. Where have you got all this stuff?’ I thought maybe it was in the other room. Walt said, ‘You’re going to do it.’ I said, ‘No I’m not.’ There was a brief pause. Walt paced back and forth- we were alone in the room.

He went over to the corner and he turned his head around with his back to me and said, ‘Will you do it if I stay here with you?’

‘Yes, I’ll do it if you stay here.’"

(source) Working with Walt: Interviews with Disney Artists - https://books.google.ca/books?id=QXhbAbzAsngC&pg=PA176&lpg=P...

Googling "Will you do it if I stay here with you?" with the quotation marks returns four results, two of which are this comment.

One is a google book with the exact passage, and the last is a blog post quoting said book.

Just something interesting I noticed.

I wish I could remember where I first came across it. I had just read Lee Cockerell's "Creating Magic", and I went into a sort of deep dive for leadership lessons from Disney. This coincided with a fit of nostalgia for 1980's EPCOT, which drove my wife a bit crazy. You can blame the Horizons Resurrected project for that. It was Disney practically 24/7 for a couple months there.

I don't know if the Yesterland blog post is the one you came across, but they do a good job cataloging the different retellings of the story and even include some of the artwork Herb put together that weekend. Definitely worth a read.

http://www.yesterland.com/ryman.html

When I was at SEGA I was the Producer for the Menacer. It's was a clone of "gun" that Nintendo had called the Super Scope. I had to develop 6 games in 6 months with the hardware also being designed at the same time.

We were near the end, made our schedule, when I was called into a meeting. My schedule had been cut by 2 weeks. I ran out of the meeting and called 4 software development companies, the 2 hardware teams. We pulled together and finished with the new deadline.

The day I signed the paperwork for release, I was told the reason my schedule was cut was because a senior VP was going on vacation and he wanted to take the product with him to show his grandkids. He didn't want to show them something that might have bugs...

Pretty neat. I had Menacer as a kid and a friend had Super Scope. Neither really got a lot of games, although we liked Terminator on yours just for the cool robots and dark theme, I guess, and the Battleclash SNES game. We spent a lot of after school afternoons taking turns trying to get farther in both, perfecting our skills. Elemental Gearbolt was really good later on, but that was another generation ahead, I guess.

I designed two sets of games. The first set was thrown out because I assumed I had access to our current licenses, like Joe Montana, and I didn't. The only game that made it from the first set was my favorite, and still is, "Ready, Aim Tomatoes!". Named by the always amazing Haven Carter in marketing. The original designers from ToeJam & Earl did that game. They took a basic concept from me and blew it up into something that was great fun.

It's unfortunately common that once you're salaried, your compensation is capped at $X/yr for 40hr/week of work but it's reasonable for managers to demand extra hours above the 40 without increasing compensation accordingly. Rereading my last employment contract, the stipulation was I was paid assuming 40hrs/week, but the office expectation was 40 was a floor. 50-60 was more the norm. The whole salary exempt from overtime thing gets to be annoying quick.

Part of me thinks I should start invoicing employers for time spent at work over the 40hrs, charging an overtime rate, or something to increase compensation in exchange for the lost time, or modifying the contract accordingly if there's not an alternate compensation mechanism like comp time offered. The one employer I've worked at who was good about this let you disappear from the office if you hit your 80hrs for a 2wk pay period.

There is another side to this though: I am salary and I can work 6 hour days. My boss won't bat an eye. I can come and go when I want. I can take 2 hour lunches, whatever I want.

Obviously there's a limit, and this is highly dependent on where you work, but I love being salary vs being hourly.

Sorry, you'll never fix this alone. If you do this, you won't be a "team player".

That's what unions are for.

You could keep careful notes of hours worked that way come raise time, you can use it to negotiate a raise commensurate to the number of hours worked.

Good luck getting anywhere on this front with without both working in an in demand field and having a competing offer in hand when you ask for (demand) a raise.

> Rereading my last employment contract, the stipulation was I was paid assuming 40hrs/week, but the office expectation was 40 was a floor. 50-60 was more the norm. The whole salary exempt from overtime thing gets to be annoying quick.

That's only because if you refuse someone else will step in to take your place under those terms. Collective bargaining can be a powerful aid with things like that.

Don't work if you don't get paid.

I worked at a place where you were ranked and promoted based on how much of your life you were willing to sacrifice to clean up management schedule estimate fuckups and bad technology choices.

It's your choice to continue working at such places.

I'm lead developer of a project that was just submitter to Apple review an hour ago. This week haven't been easy, but both my direct manager and company CEO were in the office with us, even if they really didn't have anything to do. And needless to say, they ordered food in around 20-21 for everyone. And this has only been one week.

> It's your choice to continue working at such places.

To some degree. The problem is every place you talk to there is a "well there could be crunch times when we're busy and you'll have to put in extra hours but those won't be frequent" conversation which seems okay at first. Then you join and you find out they're fighting fires almost every week and depending on the fire management may get compensated whereas developers do not.

It's not always an easy thing to avoid. I've seen it at big companies and start-ups. Start-ups typically seem the worst with this type of thing in fact, at least in my experience.

My plan was to stop being a bitch and run the show myself. Only ... it's waaaay more stressful than being an employee ever was. So, there's that.

Is there anything you could do to get yourself some extra peace of mind?

When writing software, I almost always reach first for Erlang these days—not because it's the most performant platform, but because it allows for an architecture where individual Erlang processes (tasklets/green threads) can crash and be restarted producing only events in a log that I can debug at my leisure, rather than waking me up at 3AM to fight a fire.

If I were a CEO (and I have been, but only as a single founder, so I've never felt that "others depend on me to not go hungry" feeling), I'd be looking for similar wins in that dimension: fault-tolerant strategies allowing me to know that nobody's going to go hungry because of one mistaken assumption, so that I can sleep at night.

If I was doing consulting, I'd try to productize it; if I had a product, I'd try to sell it to enterprises; if I had enterprise customers, I'd try to get them on a yearly pre-payment schedule; if I was in one vertical, I'd try to "clone" my product for other verticals with their own brands and marketing; etc.

Are you looking for these? Or are you prioritizing growth: trying to, effectively, sprint for three years, rather than figuring out how to run a marathon?

I'd very much like to know more about your setup, which libraries you've picked and what your server arrangement looks like. Any chance I could learn more about what you've done?

Good stuff. Rant on.