Can You Work in Netscape Time? (1995) | Hacker News Reader

Can You Work in Netscape Time? (1995)

fastcompany.com

46 pointsdiego19 comments

It would be interesting to do an experiment, and see if they would have gotten product out as fast, perhaps with higher quality, by just working 80 hour work weeks instead of 120+.

I have to believe, at some point, those extra hours started to reduce efficiency to the point at which there was a negative return on investment.

Some 15 years ago, when I was a software developer, most of the "problem resolution" situations happened outside the office when we were not thinking exclusively on the problem itself. In some occasions, in the end of a very busy day, we would leave the office an hour earlier to give us more "off-time" to let the ideas flow in. I think that pushing those over 100 hours a week worked in the beginning of industrialization where, really, more hours meant more products shipped. In our times, times of creativity, logging hours is irrelevant to productivity in general.

I know that in the short term it works. We also know that jwz has no desire to code professionally again.

Think how much they could have accomplished if they just worked 40 hour weeks!

Conventional wisdom in 1995: "How does a predator avoid becoming prey? How does a company with 75% of its market increase share against well-funded rivals? It's simple: nobody ever stops working."

Workplace fashion in 2012: "Think how much they could have accomplished if they just worked 40 hour weeks!"

What do you think they'll think in 17 years?

We will live in a Utopia where no one has to work.

Hey, I can dream can't I?

IME, the 1995 era thinking is still alive and well and not even just in little niches. Certainly we've made progress in that at least now there is a debate as to whether 40 hour weeks are better than 80 or 120 hour weeks, but I wouldn't go so far as to suggest it is conventional wisdom.

Yep. For one thing, their top programmer might have been able to do something besides fix other people's bleary-eyed bugs.

Why is jwz so much more famous than the other engineers who worked at Netscape?

He is famous for some other things too, like xemacs, xscreensaver, and DNA Lounge.

He's also had an interesting and opinionated website since basically forever.

Also it was he who talked them into open sourcing mozilla

DNA Lounge is famous because jwz.

Writing.

If you haven't seen it, the PBS documentary Code Rush (1998) is a good (but sometimes cringeworthy) snapshot of that time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush

btw, you can download Code Rush from archive.org:

http://archive.org/details/CodeRush_616

I wonder what caused Netscape Time to slow down so much that just one version(6 after skipping 5) took three years to release and allowed IE to catch up and actually become a better browser than Netscape 4.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

From people I've talked to who were there at the time, the basic answer is: technical debt. All their hacker bravery and Netscape Time drama had yielded a code base "just too complicated and crufty and hard to modify". Damned if they rewrote, and damned if they didn't.

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html

Wow - reading this is highly suggested, especially given the article relevance in the still current browser-war history!

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