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Comment by ghughes | Hacker News Reader

On one hand, I don't like the glorification of overwork and burning people out for the sake of maybe making a great product: "You're going to have to give up nights and weekends probably for a couple years as we make this product."

On the other hand, they did make the iPhone, so I guess this is a lesson to project managers and executives that death marches do occasionally pay off.

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In the end iPhone added billions to the company and shareholders, but interesting if all these engineers who spent nights and weekends to make that happen got an extra pay for that. Not much about that in the article, just the praise for extra work. If I remember correctly from iCon book, the was period when engineers on Steve's jobs team where paid less than in other teams in Apple. This would really suck working weekend and creating multibillion dollar product, but getting regular salary as the rest of the folks in the company.

Any idea if this division of Apple employees are eligible for stock options? If so, those may have ended up being one form of a payoff.

It seems a lot of influential software projects were death marches. I just finished a book about Windows NT which almost drove its developers to the breaking point. Mac development was the same.

However, I believe most death march projects don't end as something influential.

What's the book?

Probably "Showstopper!" by G. Zachary. I remember really liking it.

Showstopper is indeed a really fun read. IIRC the reason it was a death march project was because microsoft needed a unix competitor yesterday because everyone knew unix was going to take over the desktop and DOS/Windows was doomed.

Yup. Great read. Just right for a weekend

I think the real question to ask is "Could they have been just as successful without doing a death march?"

Obviously it's hard to know the answer to that, but I suspect it's yes.

Not a chance in the world.

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