
Work Habits at Apple - libovness
http://oleb.net/blog/2014/09/work-habits-at-apple/
======
normloman
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.

~~~
incision
_> '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.

~~~
ianphughes
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.

------
smackfu
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.

~~~
elo
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.

~~~
laacz
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.

~~~
jkaunisv1
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.

------
bishnu
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.

~~~
sw87
He told you how much he earned? You must be big buddies.

~~~
exelius
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.

------
incision
_> '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.

~~~
staticfish
Agreed. That's a complete dick-move.

------
hyperliner
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...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/03/top-5-regrets-of-the-
dying_n_3640593.html)

#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/](http://dalepartridge.com/top-10-regrets-dying/)

~~~
killerdhmo
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.

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

------
ghshephard
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.

~~~
gyc
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.

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

------
Hansi
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.

~~~
robotresearcher
> 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.

~~~
Hansi
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.

------
frandroid
> 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.

------
dreamweapon
_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.

------
lubesGordi
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.

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

------
q2
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.

------
durbin
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."

------
calewis
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.

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

------
igonvalue
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.

------
jonsterling
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...

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

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

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

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

~~~
msie
Another iOS 8 screwup:

[http://www.infoworld.com/article/2689349/cloud-
computing/ios...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/2689349/cloud-
computing/ios-8-bug-deletes-iwork-docs.html)

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

