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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

> Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.

Just curious if anyone has any idea what the financial reward was for these approx 100 folks? Presumably options worth a few millions today, but that's some price.

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Best guess glory aka "exposure" aka nothing. As Hadi wrote

>Instead of hiring too fast, we kept a super-high bar for talent, betting that everybody would want to work for this new exclusive team at Microsoft that was so hard to get into. It worked.

This is Bill from 1985 https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

>After exchanging a few pleasantries, and telling me how much the Macintosh mattered to Microsoft, he looked me in the eye and said, "You're a really good programmer, right? I think you must be a really good programmer."

>"I guess so," I responded, not understanding why he was attempting to flatter me.

>"Well, I think you are. How long do you think it will take to do this project? A month or two? I think a really good programmer like you could get it done in less than two months."

Playing on pride to exploit brilliant people for pennies. If you read whole thing you will learn Jobs was even worse.

> Playing on pride to exploit brilliant people for pennies. If you read whole thing you will learn Jobs was even worse.

Yeah indeed. Go look into cluster B personality disorders and look for the similarities between this behavior you mention and the behaviors of psychopaths or bad narcissists. It's an eye opener for good/naive people.

Microsoft minted thousands of multi-millionaires in the 1990s due to stock options. The Seattle Times wrote once that there were 10,000+ of them living in the Seattle area. Many were quite ordinary employees.

Amazon has minted as many or more.

In some industries, people crunch, and everyone knows. It is very much considered to be a part of the job, and people that don't have their heads in sand are aware during hiring. Apple compensates very well but certainly knows how to push their engineers. The reward is to remain on a very rich boat during a fast-rising tide. Highly compensated software developers that have never had to crunch in their careers are lucky. And academics go through their own gauntlets...

This passage struck me as so sad. Was IE worth that? Would I break up my marriage for a product, for a company? For something 5 or 6 people remember and everyone just takes for granted later (best outcome if your product is highly successful)

Never. And it's told like something to be proud of. The american work memes are insane.

Ugh... that term, "broken families". I divorced when my sons were 10 and 7, and the divorce actually healed our family.

Given it was 25 years ago this would have been the mid 90s. They are probably multi millionaires but more so for simply getting MS stock rather than being personally rewarded for their efforts. After all this was already a big company with a lot of structure. Your compensation was likely based mostly on your role and level rather than the personal contribution you made to the company, and a lot of the gain you realized would have been from the general growth of Microsoft share price.

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