Work Habits at Apple | Hacker News Reader

Work Habits at Apple

oleb.net

154 pointslibovness74 comments

Why would anyone subject themselves to this torture? It's not worth it. You're making money that you can't enjoy. You're missing out on your kids childhood to design a smartphone.

It's fun. Instead of spending 40-50 hours a week doing something you might or might not enjoy, you're on the cutting edge, and you're doing something you definitely enjoy.

Doesn't make it worth it, but that's part of it?

I think you've outlined something really important here in terms of value and individualism.

Some people get value from spending time in the great outdoors, others by growing and caring for a family, for a large number of people (I imagine) in Silicon Valley there is no better way to spend your time then sweating at 1 am because you need to solve a problem.

I'm one such person. Fortunately I don't have a family to look after, so I can dedicate myself to doing exactly what I absolutely love: working.

That doesn't mean I don't try to get enough sleep, that I don't exercise daily, and occasionally participate in yoga (not to mention my daily morning meditation practice). But still, to me, this type of lifestyle is fun. We'll see how old age influences my perception, of course.

Not everyone has children or intends to have children.

Some folks like the pressure - like being always on, are bored by "regular" life. Some folks like the power and the prestige (they are dangerous for those below).

Different strokes, different folks. Erdős missed out on all kinds of traditional life to do just math. If you care a lot about, or are really excited about what you're doing, then it's worth it. Or worth it for a while.

What Erdos worked on will outlast us all. Your great grandkids will be studying his theorems. OTOH, getting an iPhone to last beyond the annual upgrade cycle is a monumental achievement.

indeed. erdos is an extremely unfavourable comparison...

So, it's all justified if your work outlasts you? Such work is impossible to know in advance when you are working on it.

Impossible to know, quite possible to have a reasonable guess.

Yes but you're comparing the wrong things. A single iPhone may not last long, but the impact of the iPhone has been tremendous.

Erdos is an extreme case!

But for some people, given their talents, being part of making the iPhone might be a significant enough accomplishment to devote some serious time to.

I would bet many of them justify it as a means to build a fortune that their kids can use to live a better life. Kind of like immigrants moving to America and working all their life in factories so their kids could go to college. Unfortunately the sad truth is them being away from their family will probably hurt much more than a huge lump of cash would help.

Those who use that justification should go watch Breaking Bad.

For a long time, pay at Apple was well below industry average to boot. I don't know if that's changed. Also, finding an equivalent job in silicon valley might have been hard when Jobs and other execs had agreements about not hiring each other's people. I could see toughing it out for a couple years as a young person to pad my resume, but doing it long-term? Yeah, it's a little nuts.

But what about bonuses and other forms of compensation? I know of a number of companies where the executives and senior management make nominal amounts in salary but very large amounts in performance based compensation tied closely to certain metrics that the business has decided are important. Most significantly, these bonuses are not guaranteed, but are only given out if certain expectations are met.

Some people enjoy it and some people are willing to put up with it because the rewards for good performance are commensurate. A good book that describes this philosophy is Dream Big [1], which is about the group of investors who acquired Anheuser Busch, Heinz, Burger King, and most recently Tim Hortons. Typically in companies where you see this level of commitment there is both a large opportunity for reward and people are rewarded in proportion to the value you bring to the table.

For a look at the opposite end of the spectrum you might look at Microsoft currently (although this seems to be changing with the new CEO). I have a friend who works there currently as a manager and he's told me about the bureaucracy there where people are promoted largely on seniority, rather than merit.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/DREAM-BIG-Brazilian-Sicupira-Anheuser-...

This is very narrow minded. Designing a smartphone is very much a big deal. It has changed my job completely and has directly affected millions of people. It's not trivial as you make it sound.

Scientists, explorers in history have made many many such decisions in the past. This is nothing new. I mean the explorers of the past would leave their family behind and head on voyagers where return was in no way guaranteed. They are basically willingly agreeing to orphaning their children for fame and glory. Following through your logic, 'it is just a piece of land', who cares.

>'Why would anyone subject themselves to this torture?'

It wasn't at Apple or anything approaching it, but I had years of similar treatment - expectations of 24/7 availability, continuous last minute, personal service to executives and never-ending crunch time.

I didn't have kids or a mortgage to worry about and I had enough in the bank that I could probably have spent a year or more unemployed without much concern for money.

For me, it was several things.

* Pride in being dependable and capable of delivering on whatever was asked of me.

* A not entirely conscious expectation that I would eventually be rewarded for such sacrifice.

* Genuine enjoyment of much of the work I was doing.

Needless to say, my outlook has changed a bit in the years since, but looking back, I don’t think it was having a child or any other responsibility that did it.

More than anything it’s probably the simple realization that deriving enjoyment from something doesn't negate its cost. Moderation is straightforward for things which are easy to categorize. The difficulty in categorizing ‘enjoyable work’ is implicit.

I think that saying to the effect of ‘find a job you love and never work a day in your life’ is only talking about a certain part of your mind. Your body and all the unconscious and unobvious bits that make up your life are not immune to wear and tear by virtue of your positive perception.

Next would be understanding the diminishing returns and potential negatives of hard work. In short, if you’re going to work hard for someone else, aim high, help that person succeed and see that their success is tied to yours. Being too valuable to someone with low aspirations is career poison.

This really resonates deeply for me as well. When I was completely buried with difficult projects, I would occasionally complain about being "too busy". However, when things normalized to 40-50 hours a week, I would feel lazy. I reached a point where building a reputation as being someone capable of delivering when the situations were not ideal was a far greater motivator than money or free-time.

I found Daniel Pink's "Drive" an interesting read on the topic of what really motivates in the modern era.

Anyone else notice that all the responses to this parent in favour of these hours is using what looks to be their real name or last name and also seem to be written in the form of a humblebrag?

Sometimes I wonder if people are self censoring their comments on here in order to build a professional network or get hired.

I guess it's the other side of the coin to the greater internet fuckwad theory; the just-happens-to-be-awesome named commenter.

It's nice when people write up podcasts. There's so much content locked up in them that is only appreciated by 1% of the audience compared to when the same people write blog posts.

Author of the blog post here. I had this idea to start a site for crowdsourced podcast transcripts (or indeed any audio content) but never did it. I’d still love to see such a site because I agree that there is so much valuable content.

But transcription is just a huge amount of work and I’m not sure how well you could automate it with the help of software.

Seems like it's time for podcast.genius.com, which would be amazing.

That idea crossed my mind even seeing how many companies failed even during boom times.

Service could be powered by some speech recognition software (maybe more than one) which initially would give insane percentage of incorrectly recognized text. Community could fix those errors (weak link in my plan:)). Afterwards you feed data back to software and train it so next time it would work better.

Training would require marking which person talks when in episode to tune algorithms for each of them. Maybe group them by regional dialects.

Oh, another tiny small thingie - not clear how to monetize that.

Agreed about monetization. Ideally, this should be a community thing like Wikipedia but that’s probably unrealistic.

I really think it would be an amazing resource. There would be so much great content that the site would potentially rank really high on Google for a variety of search terms, too (again, like Wikipedia).

Monetization: you could sell the service to professional podcasters as it would increase content on their site, and possibly serve as another place to put ads for their sponsors.

If you focused on a core set of popular podcasts you could package it as a monthly ebook or similar product. While overall people don't like paying for content like that I think it's possible to find a niche market that would.

I don't, but people seem to actually use stuff like Siri, which tells me some amount of automated audio processing is currently feasible.

I just tried it, and voice dictation on the iPhone does a surprisingly good job with a well produced podcast. It's missing all punctuation of course, and tends to make a lot of mistakes on small words like prepositions. But for a first pass to edit from, it is surprisingly good.

I honestly think the blog approach where you highlight sections is the best way to do it. General transcripts are indeed almost impossible to do, especially when there are weekly shows that run for over two hours each episode.

Google has some pretty good software for this, thought it might be internal. When they have their "Talks at Google" events, there's a screen off to the side that provides real-time translated subtitles.

There's at least one talk where the speaker addresses this system, and tries to get it to transcribe funny stuff. Can't remember which one exactly, but it might be this one with Randall Munroe (xkcd).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJOS0sV2a24&list=UUbmNph6atA...

Transcription is already down to $1/minute. If $60 for an hour-long podcast isn't worth it to the authors, I'm not sure there's much value there.

https://castingwords.com/

My neighbor when I lived in the Mission worked at Apple. We're engineers of similar seniority and he worked longer hours than I did, worked more weekends than I did, and earned less than I did. To say nothing of the perks (I work at Google). Small sample size, but I was taken aback.

He told you how much he earned? You must be big buddies.

No way; it's become common to talk salary with my friends, if for no other reason than to have ammo when going into salary negotiations.

I think it's far easier when your at the same career categories in unrelated companies. A lot of problems from sharing salaries get sidestepped, and the usefulness is that much more.

Americans should do it more as a cultural practice, so market prices of salaries can be better spread.

Always occurred odd to me how in NA it's taboo to ask your salary. In New Zealand you could ask that same question of someone you just met, and they'd tell you most of the time. People who earn ridiculous amount might feel awkward revealing it, however for the most part people have no issue.

And if anyone brings it up as "ammo" in a conversation, well you're quickly called a dick and you move on.

>'Melton: Yeah. And it was sometimes a roll of the dice. Like, you get the email from your boss, like from Scott, and you would not be quite sure about [the answer], and then you would reply or forward, include Scott so he gets a reply, and you would send it to one of your people. And the death was if that person didn’t reply until the morning. Then that person has a black eye and you’ve just given them, made them look bad in front of your boss.'

As stated, that's very typical but no less appalling non-management.

Cover yourself with a speedy reply while deflecting onto a sacrificial subordinate in one move.

It only takes a few minutes to ping your reports and determine which of then can/will reply before CC'ing one of them a grenade.

Agreed. That's a complete dick-move.

One of the things Bill Gates commented about Steve Jobs, that he never really understood, is that when people turn around 35-40, they tend to chill out a bit, lose that intensity, and become "Management". For some reason, this didn't seem to happen to Steve, and he kept driving as hard as he did when he was 45 as was when he 25.

In comparison, Steve Ballmer, when he was on, was nuts (in the best way) - but, I get the sense he took his foot off the accelerator, particularly during the Vista years, and the Windows Phone response to iPhone years.

There is something to be said for "Youthful Intensity" - particularly if you can sustain it your entire working career without having a breakdown.

Jobs probably had several big chips on his shoulder that Gates never had, from being forced out of Apple, seeing the Mac lose badly to Windows, and then seeing Apple on the brink of death. Meanwhile, Gates was the richest man in the world and his company absolutely dominated the personal computing space.

Also, it seemed like jobs became more intense once he knew he was going to die.

Does dying at 56 from cancer you tried to treat using pseudoscience until it was inoperable count as "breaking down"?

Hard to say. The guy lived more of an interesting life and had a bigger impact on the world than any of us will ever come remotely close to.

Would 80 years of mostly mediocrity beat 56 years with plenty of "best on earth"?

do people really think like this? it's just a phone at the end of the day

Fan is short for 'fanatic' after all.

I don't know what I'd choose since I can't tell you a meaning for life that is at all universal or that I buy into all that much.

I do, however, know that Jobs was responsible for a lot more than the iPhone.

No kidding - Steve Jobs made Pixar possible. He had such an impressive career that "also started Pixar" is an interesting bit of trivia. Think about that for a second.

It's impressive, to be sure, but Jobs didn't start Pixar—he essentially bought it from Lucasfilm. [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixar#Early_history

Everyone knows that Jobs didn't start Pixar, and most of the people here are familiar with Steve's involvement, but even his stronger detractors would acknowledge that Pixar would not have accomplished all it had done in Movie Making had it not been for Steve's involvement.

Everyone knows that Jobs didn't start Pixar

Evidently at least one person didn't know that, because my comment was written in response to someone who wrote that Jobs "also started Pixar". If the commenter had written "also a main driving force behind Pixar", no correction would have been required.

The hard part is when other people are put off by your intensity. I think it's subtly beaten out of people unless they get to higher positions, because they don't like your anger at them when they fuck up.

Not included in the transcript is something they mentioned in the podcast is that they feel that the companies management is very much run like a startup with few people in charge sending direct e-mails not only to their direct reports but to anyone within the company.

Seems to me that what might solve some of this e-mail craziness would be to realize better that they are a big company and do more delegation, perhaps to different time zones if they need to have a 24 hour work cycle but more realistically just stop this nonsense and hopefully change the culture to be more logical.

At my company e-mail is something where you expect acknowledgement within 24-48 hours depending on urgency with answers provided on a best availability schedule. Managers also take on fielding a lot of stuff being directed to their reports because they have aggregate knowledge and let's face it distributing a developer for trivial stuff leads to pointless productivity loss.

> hopefully change the culture to be more logical.

And why exactly would they do that? It seems to be working out pretty well for them.

I'm not arguing that the culture is good in any transcending way, but it would be hard to argue that it's not working.

Yes that's a point I was expecting to be raised after I wrote the above comment as is normal with any Apple post, "Hey there doing great why change anything", but I'd argue that yes things are working out great for them now but it's clearly costing the employees a portion of their personal life and I feel that given how well off the company is it shouldn't be needed.

In the podcast these ex Apple employees also mention being glad to be out of Apple because of issues like this, so provided that they move away from this culture they may see better employee retention for mid tier employees rather than having people burn out and leave the company.

> Melton: And that’s what I tried to explain to people. It’s very subtle. It’s not required of you, but let’s be honest, it’s expected.

Well, it's required then.

When someone came into my office and said they wanna be a manager, I asked them, “How did you sleep last night?” And they said, “Oh, fairly well”. and I said, “Good, ’cause that’s the last good night’s sleep you’re gonna get.”

Having your underlings work to the point of sleep deprivation and estrangement from their families so that you can get the acclaim, the adrenaline rush, and outsize stock market payouts isn't "brilliant", or "intense." And it certainly isn't necessary to create good products. It's just egomaniacal bullshit, period.

It's like this in silicon valley in general. Now that I have a regular 9-5 that I don't have to take home every weekend, I don't hesitate when I'm called upon to go above and beyond. Also, I work smarter when I'm not stressed. I think most people do.

Just to play devils advocate, depending on what you are doing working smarter might be less productive than working dumber for longer hours.

Is it an essential requirement that in order to design great products or market leading products, management is supposed to work and force others to work during insane hours, especially sunday night?

I am not sure how frequently these things happen. May be ok, when you are near major deadline/shipment date but not on every week. Are there no other ways to avoid them like say, internal wiki/intranet ...etc so that mgmt can search answers on their own?

Many people followed Steve Jobs authoritative style of leadership after reading various accounts...etc. I hope mgmts of other companies won't shift to these methods concluding falsely that such working hours are essential for great products.

I appreciate people that follow the Charles Bukowski mantra of life and "Find what you love and let it kill you." However, the most depressing part of this article was in the last paragraph where Melton says, "And so you have to ask yourself, is that really the way you wanna live your life? ’Cause it’s not like I recommend it, either."

Maybe if they stopped working stupid hours they would stop releasing buggy software.

Time and time again there is good academic evidence that these working hours do not make productive and creative employees, quite the opposite in fact.

yes. you're not doing work of any real substance if you're habitually pinging emails around into the early hours of SUNDAY morning

And is this an efficient or effective way to run a company?

> I know I’ve read a lot of studies how this is a stupid way for the tech industry to function. And that’s certainly true.

Boy, I must be really stupid, since I subjected myself to this nonsense not in a glorious company like Apple, but in a go-nowhere fail-everytime startup...

The only true scarcity in your life is your time. I'm glad I keep ignoring pings from Apple recruiters.

Sounds like par for the course at another company beginning with "A"...

No wonder their stuff is so messed up, it's all fear all the time.

With the screwups in the release of iOS 8 it shows that such work habits do not guarantee successful software deployment.

Another iOS 8 screwup:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2689349/cloud-computing/ios...

Don't get me wrong, Apple fan here. Just not a fan of bad work environments.

If you know NOW that you could be dying tomorrow and not have these regrets of the dying, then more power to you. But I wonder how realistic that is.

The 5 Regrets of the dying: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/03/top-5-regrets-of-th...

#2: "I wish I hadn't worked so hard"

Another longer version: The Top 10 regrets of the dying http://dalepartridge.com/top-10-regrets-dying/

I think that just depends on who you ask. I agree with /u/tannerc that I find great fulfillment in being challenged every day and working longer hours to solve problems. I find vacation tedious! If I looked back and saw that I hadn't worked as hard as I could have, I would feel nothing but regret and disappointment. I understand this isn't true for everyone, and I'm not saying it should be. But this is way I'm wired, for better or for worse.

look at the transcript. these people are just passing around emails, not "solving problems". i see it as a form of mental illness

I'm not sure I would optimize my life for the deathbed version of me any more than I would for the 20 year old version of me. Those guys are crazy.

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