The part about being dedicated enough to donate weekends and vacation time struck me. I'm of multiple minds about that mentality when it's applied to a large company. On the one hand, there's something beautiful about having a day job so meaningful you'll happily do more of it for free. On the other hand, I wonder if there's something exploitative about the following situation: Both employees and owners give over their lives, employees get satisfaction, and owners get satisfaction plus the financial rewards of the lives everyone donated. On the other other hand, if the employees enter into that deal consciously and happily, then maybe nobody loses. On the other other other hand, maybe there's also an element of brainwashing--which can, in principle, cause people to consciously and happily enter into exploitative relationships. Clearly, this is a complicated issue, and I don't feel at all qualified to pass moral judgment on it one way or another.
>On the other other hand, if the employees enter into that deal consciously and happily, then maybe nobody loses.
Society loses. Friends and family lose. Health is probably compromised. Other businesses lose from the employees not being able to spend their money as frequently.
Maybe I wouldn't be so critical of it if we in American had the same amount of days off as other first world countries.
The key point is "consciously and happily". Different people have different situations going on in their life. If you're a 23-year old single employee, you might decide that you are willing to work 60 hours a week because you really like your work. If you're a 38-year old married employee with kids, you might decide that you're only willing to work 40 hours a week because you value time with your family. Having a company that realizes that there's a difference between people, and not everybody has the flexibility or willingness to put in 60-hour weeks, that's the key.
And this train goes back to the "perceived effort" vs "actual effort" approach to compensation.
Fundamentally, is 60+ hour weeks sustainable, even if you love your job? Many in HN might view burnout, or an unwillingness to work 60+/week, as a personal flaw. But there's also another camp that argues consistent overtime produces a poorer product in the end. Personally, I notice a dip once I've worked 50+ hours/week for a couple weeks. I come into work mentally tired & get far less done.
Sure, an easy approach to compensation is "how much of his time/life did he sacrifice to work?" It's also by far the most common. Additionally, the people who signal that they're working hard in through self-promotion tend to take home more bacon. I understand human beings are emotional creatures, but in the vacuum of commenting on how much people should be compensated for hours on the job in a white-collar brain-intensive task, I think there should be more nuance than "Pay = hours * rate".
I am not exceptionally smart, but I am a "hard worker." I often work nights and weekends, and I don't hate it.
As a result of my efforts, I am more skilled, and consequently enjoy a more lucrative position than I otherwise would. If I were a mediocre developer I could earn half as much as I do, or less. My nights & weekends developing software for my employer are investments in myself.
> My nights & weekends developing software for my employer are investments in myself.
No offense, but if they were investments in yourself I think you'd be either:
A) Moonlight for $$
B) Working on a startup idea you were thinking about [you are on HN after all]
The skill gain from doing stuff for your employer for $0, at least to me, doesn't seem equal to the return from things that my benefit me financially one day.
I'm not the parent, but here's my input: As a sysadmin/devops type who mostly enjoys building infrastructure, none of the stuff I've learned at work could really be done on my own time, and none of it is stuff I would be likely to find via contract work (or at least, nothing that I could schedule around a 9-5 job).
Also, not everyone has, or wants to execute on, startup ideas. Some people don't want to be founders. Some people don't want the stress, the responsibility, etc. I sure don't. I have a nice job where I can do experimental things with small/medium-sized infrastructure, I have a much higher budget than I would in a startup, I get a steady paycheque and vacation time, and a lot of awesome coworkers.
So all the stuff I've done at my job, like the parent post, is investment in my skills. The things I've built here, the technologies I've learned, the failed experiments, all of it contributes towards my professional skills much more effectively and more efficiently than doing it in my spare time, for a contract, or for a startup idea.
That works great when you need inspiration or a fresh perspective to get you unstuck. Those opportunities certainly arise in programming too, but additional time spent doing actual development are going to help too, both from a learning and practice point of view. If you want to become a better guitar player you need to spend a lot of time playing the guitar. Putting half of what could be your playing time into taking long walks in the woods or taking long showers will probably not be as helpful as actually playing the guitar. Programming is in many ways very similar, depending on exactly what it is you are doing when coding on nights and weekends.
Most people are motivated by more than money. Working in product development at a place like Apple, or Google, or Amazon, etc, gives you a chance to work with very smart, accomplished people. It gives you license to do great work and maybe push some envelopes with what is possible in your field. It gives you a platform to have a major impact on society. It makes other people say "wow" when they hear where you work, or what product you helped create.
For some people that is a form of motivation, and even a form of compensation. Doing graphic design at a PR agency for a cereal campaign, even if it pays more money and gives more vacation time, might be less attractive to people than a harder, more demanding job that confers the above benefits.
It's also important to look at the entire career. Busting her ass at Apple for 6 years might set up a young designer to get taken very seriously if she decides to move to another company, or start her own. That would be less true if she was a junior designer working hourly for Brauny paper towel company (or whatever).
"Busting her ass at Apple for 6 years might set up a young designer to get taken very seriously if she decides to move to another company, or start her own."
No. Don't take a job under the premise that it has good experience and will set you up for a later higher paying job with another company. That's a a myth. Get better at negotiating your salary now.
You should never take the mindset to to defer your salary in exchange for experience. Get paid what you're worth.
I think the argument is that a job is more than just about salary, as long as you're getting paid enough to live comfortably, because there's more to job satisfaction than your paycheque. In the case of Apple, that comes in the form of working in a good (pro-design) environment, on a good design team, on projects that people actually use. On top of that, you're working for a famous company on highly visible products, which is an additional bonus on top of the rest of the job.
I certainly would never tell someone to take a crappy job because of visibility, but if you're getting paid enough, then highly visible work is a 'nice to have'.
It gives you a platform to have a major impact on society.
Major? Can you give some examples where a line engineer at one of the big companies has personally done something through their work that has had a major impact on society? "Wow, you work at a cool place" is small talk and prestige, not something that has a societal impact; something that inherently changes the way people interact with and/or perceive each other.
"For Apple, having a small, really focused organization made a lot of sense when Steve was there, because so many ideas came from Steve. So having a smaller group work on some of these ideas made sense," Kawano says. "As Apple shifted to much more of a company where there's multiple people at the top, I think it makes sense that they're growing the design team in interesting ways."
If anything turns out to be Apple's downfall, it is embodied in this paragraph. In most companies, to beat your competitors, you first have to defeat the other corporate divisions. The presence of Steve Jobs probably prevented this and resulted in a significant part of Apple's competitive advantage. The key here is not Steve Jobs per se, but that a single individual could champion particular ideas and see them through to completion without opposition and interference.
Amazon currently enjoys something like this, I suspect.
Jobs did turn divisions against one another, as when considering whether to build the iPhone with iPod OS or OS X.
Jobs also permitted silos; for example under Jobs, iOS and OS X were largely separate teams. Cook seems to have taken a major step toward dissolving those silos by dismissing Scott Forestall and consolidating all design under Ive and all software under Federighi.
Based on the recent iOS and OS X previews, it looks like Apple divisions are working very well with one another right now.
Jobs did turn divisions against one another, as when considering whether to build the iPhone with iPod OS or OS X.
Jobs also permitted silos; for example under Jobs, iOS and OS X were largely separate teams.
Neither of those are counterexamples. While Jobs had different units compete, that competition was constructive in the sense of supplying multiple options which the leadership could then choose from. (Toyota also does this.) This is different from the passive-aggressive sabotage one often sees in big corporations.
Also, "silos" were used to foster new development. I suspect they were used to insulate groups from the passive-aggressive fratricide one sees in large corporations.
From Isaacson's book: he closely controlled all of his teams and pushed them to work as one cohesive and flexible company, with one profit-and-loss bottom line. “We don’t have ‘divisions’ with their own P&L,” said Tim Cook. “We run one P&L for the company.”
That's a good point. Amazon and Apple are/were extensions of SJ and Bezos. For better or worse the companies did/do what they wanted. If they wanted X, then X is what happened political infighting be damned.
From reading his biography it sounded like he experimented with lots of different diets. And it didn't seem like he chose them for any reason other than health.
I wish he went went for western medicine! I miss the guy.
I see his yacht and he never got to use it. I know it's trivial-- a rich guy not setting foot on his yacht, but Steve didn't seem like the typical rich dude. Anyways--his death reaffirmed just how short life is! I wish these companies would throw billions at cancer
research instead of Apps?
"MYTH #1 Apple Has The Best Designers" - don't want to be a troll, but it's enough to say "iOS7" as an anwser (e.g. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ios-7)
