What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?

During my short career as an in-house illustrator, it was perfectly acceptable for the art director to kick your ass and generally abuse you. You learned to develop a thick skin really quickly!

I wish this principle was adhered to across all industries where we (as individuals) get our 'work' reviewed. If you can't do your best and then be able to let go of it, it causes some serious pent-up anger and demotivation. I find myself slipping into 'brutalist feedback' mode (that I'm used to from creative work), before worrying about offending the recipient.

I'm not sure if this is coincidental, but anecdotally I found that my biggest shift in being able to let my creative work 'go' was after reading The Power of Now[0] and The Chimp Paradox[1], and practicing mindfulness. Fundamentally, I think it's an ego issue as to why it's so hard to take criticism. I'm certainly not saying ego-death is a prerequisite, but instead to learn how to short-circuit your anger away from feedback as a result of taking it too personally.

It is after all, not the work itself, but how it is received that you should be striving towards!

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Now [1] - https://chimpmanagement.com/the-chimp-paradox/

What, I'm currently through this process with my Masters' dissertation. It's not exactly disheartening, but it's uncomfortable.

Bonus, the math-heavy (I'm in computational physics) 70-page documentclass-article thing has a couple of asides that are so, so wrong (1.5 years ago I didn't really understand a lot of things) and it's embarassing to have them pointed out.

But eh, I'm glad I'm going through this process. ---

I'm an amateur student of philosophy and often want to blog about certain ideas I think I'm beginning to have. But I'm not sure enough to put my name on them! I wish I could hire a professional philosopher (many of which will be underemployed anyway) to look over my stuff and tell me when they're embarassingly wrong rather than just out of the box.

The most dreaded situations, for me, were clients who would tear something apart, but offered no helpful reason why. "Jazz it up" was something repeated an alarming number of times in meetings. I can also remember someone saying that they wanted us to use more colors since they were paying for a full color ad. Because, you know, that's what cost all the money. The colors.

Pauses, steps back and says, “I think it can use one little change, may I?”

He then takes a white paint brush and proceeds to erase my entire drawing with it.

“Ah, much better”, he says.

He was a total asshole but had a cult like following. Those of us remaining by the end of the semester loved him. To this day I credit that class with dramatically improving my drawing skills, but it definitely wasn’t for everyone.

To instill creativity in my direct reports, I have to smack them in the face when they fail to demonstrate sufficient creativity.

I know it sounds harsh, but they're developing great callouses on their face which they would not have obtained had it not been for my unorthodox training.

A lot of people might think I should apologize, but ask them in my presence if they would rather work elsewhere!

When I started getting into the arts, I was introduced to the culture of "workshopping" pieces, i.e. have my work criticized. It was disorienting at first, but the honest feedback was very useful plus it helped me develop a thick skin. It helped me get better fast.

- An opportunity to contribute to computing history.

- To work on something new and novel.

- Not having to worry about politics because there's only one diva allowed.

Not for everyone I'd agree, but there is certainly enough unhealthy appeal, kind of like hard liquor or bungee jumping ..

He recounted to me how he'd done this on Thanksgiving and I was just scratching my head, wondering "why would you do that?" These are people you might only see twice a year, the code will still be there on November 26th.

We've all found later versions of stuff inferior to the original, sometimes wildly and publicly so, like the Gap logo redesign, the various experimental efforts of George Lucas to modify Star Wars, windows 8, the new macbook, later versions of winamp, or whatever your personal disappointment has been with a later version of something you loved.

A good boss will figure out how to motivate the troops. To me, it sounds like Steve Jobs found someone on the team who was motivated by 'saving the presentation.'

(From 48 Laws of Power):

"In 1502, in Florence Italy there lay an enormous block of marble standing in the church of Santa Maria del Fiore. Everyone had agreed this piece of marble had been ruined and was impossible to sculpt. Friends of the great Michelangelo decided to write to the artist, then living in Rome. They were sure he could do something with the marble. Michelangelo traveled to Florence, examined the stone, and came to the conclusion that he could in fact carve a fine figure from it.

Piero Soderini, Florence’s Mayer, thought this was another waste of time to attempt to sculpt the impossible. Weeks later, as Michelangelo was putting the final touches on the statue Soderini entered the studio to examine it. Likening himself a connoisseur of fine art, he studied the huge work and told Michelangelo that while he thought the piece was magnificent, the nose was too big. Michelangelo realized that Soderini was standing in a place right under the sculpture and did not have the proper perspective. Of course he did not tell him this.

Without a word. He gestured Soderini up the scaffolding. Reaching for the nose he picked up a chisel, as well as a little bit of a marble dust that lay on the planks. Michelangelo started to tap lightly with the chisel letting the little bits of dust he had gathered in his hand fall little by little creating the illusion that he was changing the sculpture. He actually did nothing to change the nose, but gave every appearance of working on it. After a few minutes of this charade he stood aside: “Look at it now.” “I like it better,” replied Soderini, “you’ve made it come alive.

Michelangelo knew that by changing the sculpture and the shape of the nose, he might ruin it. Yet Soderini prided himself on his knowledge of his aesthetic judgement of art. So to offend such a man by arguing over such a thing as ‘perspective’ would be foolish and futile. In fact it would probably put future commissions in jeopardy. His solution was to change Soderini’s perspective (literally bringing him closer to the nose) without making him realize that this was the cause of his misconception. He found a way to keep perfection of the statue intact while at the same time making Soderini believe he had improved it. A genius move.”

Does anyone prefer huge teams in which each person has only a shallow understanding?

It's a matter of what success means to you. I don't value a fancy job title or a higher number on my bank account (above the 'basic' software engineer pay grade I am at already) enough to do this kind of mentally back-breaking BS work. I do the job I was hired for and get paid for. I do that job to the best of my ability 9-5 (well, 8-4) and then I leave.

For me, that constitutes having succeeded at the school, uni, job hunting and employment challenges. I expect most future successes in my live will come from my family/social live or will be personal triumphs like getting into shape and learning interesting new skills.

Much more onerous things happen regularly in lots of white collar jobs. People in medicine, law, finance, etc. A weekend with an all-nighter before some big deliverable? College students do this.

Steve Jobs was a singular character, who could pull off stunts like that and succeed. Achieving results consistently in that manner probably is more of an outlier rather than the norm. If you’re not Steve Jobs chances are this might work occasionally but in the long run you’ll ruin your company.

Being successful in most cases is a marathon, not a sprint.

At a previous job, I was at one time working on a large project under a enthusiastic, but hard driving project manager (he is a karate coach in his spare time). At the beginning of the project he pulled the entire team aside and held a pep talk, talking about how important this project was for the company, how hard he himself planned to work because of it, and finally how hard he expected us to work. He was upfront about the fact that there would be many days with very long hours, and he said the company was committed to doing what it would take to make it work for us: Paying taxis to get home from the client late at night, paying for meals and doing whatever to help those who had families with children (I don’t remember the specifics, as that didn’t apply to me at the time). Because of the personality of this project manager, it worked. He got us riled up, and for many weeks the whole team worked from early morning to late in the evening. At the end of the project, we received a small bonus and were commended in front of the rest of the company. During it all, the manager did what he had said he would: He worked as hard as any of us, staying each day until the last of us left, to the point where we worried about his ability to drive himself home safely.

In an environment such as this, I would expect many people who normally wouldn’t think they had it in them, would find that they also were able to perform to a level far higher than they were used to.

I don't think anyone at NeXT or Apple that worked on a successful product minded they had to work at night sometimes.

> Working at NeXT was the most exciting software engineering job I ever accepted. NeXT was like graduate school, bringing together a high concentration of some of the brightest and most innovative technical minds...

He loved it. Stressful as it surely was, he looks back on that weekend as a great memory.

I think probably everyone here on HN enjoys hard work, the good burn at the end of a productive and worthwhile day. It's the useless slog for unclear pointless goals that brings us down.

I personally love the times I'm so into what I'm doing at work, that I get up on Saturday morning and start coding away.

I started gradually reducing the number of hours I worked for 'real' until, a few years later, I found myself working for two hours a day, choosing to spend the rest on things that contributed to my sanity and self-development (on company time). To fill the gap, I would work on my own software projects, socialize with co-workers, do research on things I found interesting and read books.

Needless to say, nobody noticed. I kept this up for a number of years and then I quit. Looking back on it now, those were some of the best, most carefree years of my life. There is nothing like getting paid a competitive six figure salary to mostly do the things you enjoy and not care one iota about corporate management structures.