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Comment by earthscienceman | Hacker News Reader

I don't think people indoctrinated in tech culture can understand just how weird something like this reads. All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense to me. I can't imagine ruining my family for a paycheck so I could say I developed the 3rd version of MS' web browser.

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I'll say one thing, and I know it will come off as cliche: If you weren't there, you may not understand.

In the early days of the consumer Internet (mid/late 90s) there was a real wild west / gold rush feeling to things and it did feel like we were changing the world (spoiler: most of us weren't).

I am not defending or excusing anything here, just saying that I'm sure it was a lot easier for some people, perhaps already predisposed to such behaviours, to become unhealthily obsessed with working on new Internet tech at the time because it was incredibly exciting to be working on what was genuinely a new frontier back then.

I was a teen but I remember watching my dad work on one of the first video codecs and playing a small video on an even smaller square frame inside a tiny computer monitor and him telling me how this would be the future… his codec wasn’t the main stream we use today but he was right and it was definitely a gold rush / change the world feel. Later in the 2000s for me I carried that same feeling we worked our asses off and yeah it didn’t amount to much but we learned so much… in the 2010 it’s how I was able to go on the build my own software business… It’s why I believe hard work , dedicated and consistent work does yield results that are worth it

But it was kind of a gold rush, race-to-first?

I mean look at the Web today using TCP, IPv4, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, with companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon. If the internet was created with what we know now it would look much different. You will never be able to create a technology or company so flawed like that today.

I don't think most of us knew what the Internet would look like in 25 years. My guess back then was way more regulation, as opposed to the commercial monopolies we have today, but what did I know, I was barely in my 20s..

All the stuff you listed above (except for HTML/CSS/JS) already existed and was not invented in the 90s, and was already the foundation of the Internet at that point.

There was not much chance of changing or disrupting those things.

Also hindsight is 20/20 of course. Easy to look back two decades and say "what were they thinking?" etc..

People have pride in their work. The MegaCorp, the politics, the noise all fades away and you just want to X or achieve Y. It's not something to belittle, it's something to be celebrated.

Not everything has to come back down to a paycheck. You can be paid for work but you can absolutely love what you do and/or the challenge it brings to your life.

Agreed. As I read the lines on the long hours and resultant divorces, all I could think of was "...and for what? A better browser?". Certainly IE advanced the state of the art at the time, but if Microsoft hadn't won the browser wars and Netscape had remained dominant and inched along with incremental improvements, we still would have reached the point where we are today, but maybe a little later.

> we still would have reached the point where we are today, but maybe a little later.

or maybe a bit earlier if MS hadn't won but just been a credible competitor and then something like Opera came along - a 3 way race would probably have evolved things quicker.

Like those overplanted baby forests that grow up quicker.

Without making a value judgement, there's an aspect of the human psychology that revels in certain challenges simply because they are hard and impactful. This can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing. It can separately be good or bad for the people involved, and for the world that they impact. But it is a normal and recurring part of human nature.

To give an example from another industry altogether, James Lapine just released a book detailing the process of creating the American musical Sunday in the Park with George.

The experience described in that book matches what you’re saying very closely, it sounds absolutely excruciating for all involved, but the director and composer’s belief that they were making something worthy carried them through.[0]

[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Putting-Together-Stephen-Sondheim-C...

It's a good trait, but we must be responsible in gratifying that urge.

I'm not even sure I would call it a "good trait" (though I'm not sure I would call it a "bad trait" either), I just felt like the GP feigning a total lack of understanding and claiming that anybody who's experienced this feeling must be "indoctrinated" seemed disingenuous. For better or worse most of us have experienced it at one time or another, and all of us have at least witnessed it in other people. It's nothing mysterious or unimaginable.

It is a missing part of the human condition and, especially it seems to me, the male human condition to strive for something. Especially when that something is as a group. It's the feeling, I imagine, we got as hunting mammoth, or raiding others and defending our own community, or exploring a new land with dragons around the corner.

We don't have that anymore and we are poorer for it.

I envy, therefore, those that get glimpses of it through spacex achievements, or internet explorer 3.

I get mine from video games but it's probably lessor in degree. Yet still, when I felt it the strongest, it still holds one of the highest places in my memory.

Family and children are simply not the same.

It's not a bad thing that us men don't have to kill and die in large proportions just to keep the rest of the tribe going. Let's not overly romanticize an evolutionary trait useful for getting us throw ourselves into meat grinders. Let's enjoy our games and leave it at that. (Mine is tennis)

I didn't mean to imply that I'd trade modern life for it.

It's just that the drive is still there. And it's useful in understanding depression in men, and the will to make the best piece of software for your corporation.

Tennis cannot replace it or video games. We are stuck not wholly satisfied and must make the best of it.

Oh I agree with you there - let's recognize this vile impulse and do our best to prevent it from causing any more harm.

" If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori."

Characterizing the want to "strive for something, especially when that something is as a group" as a "vile impulse" is a bad take. It's pretty hard to argue that that we would be better off just keeling over and accepting things as they are, lest we succumb to the awful human behavior of organizing to change something we don't like.

That very same vile impulse was, is, and always will be the way we manage to overcome humanity's greatest challenges. Trying to condition people to suppress it is not a good idea.

This subculture exists everywhere. I play basketball and the most revered player is Kobe Bryant. He isn’t the best, but his work ethic and competitiveness was beyond all others. He’d probably be a jerk to play with, but most people are never in a position to do hard work to deliver something that they consider valuable.

Now what is valuable differs to each person. Basketball is just a sport. Chess just a game. A surgeon saves just one life at time. He helped write a new version of a browser. But to all of them, it’s important to them.

Well Kobe Bryant isn't a scab like these people that work overtime for a monopolist.

The NBA is a monopoly for pro basketball in the US.

Yes, but the Lakers are not. And the players have a union.

Competition within the NBA is zero-sum so it isn't like Kobe working really hard further entrenches the NBA anywhere close to the same degree as IE for MS.

He is also dead, but I am assuming that's known

The work I did at Microsoft helped build thousands of businesses, and later on I helped secure thousands more. I find it truly strange that I shouldn't feel proud of that.

It's very reminiscent of "The Soul of a New Machine" which is an early example of the genre.

^ Underrated comment. If you want to gain a real sense of how people thought and felt during the computer revolution, read this book.

Showstopper![1] covers Windows NT in a similar vein and Dealers of Lightning[2] is another good read that goes into some if the really interesting history of Xerox PARC.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Showstopper-Breakneck-Windows-Generat...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer...

The part you are missing is that at that time, it felt like the entire company's future was in jeopardy. It wasn't inconceivable, back then, that if Netscape dominated, every aspect of Microsoft's business would soon be rendered obsolete.

They were working hard to ensure the company continued to exist, a pretty noble cause. Your "3rd version of MS web browser" is a trivialization.

That's a fair point.

Funny how without these efforts the web and technologies pretty much the entire world used over the last two decades would probably have been very, very different - I'm not judging better or worse.

In fact Microsoft as a company might not even be relevant anymore without what these folks did. Sun, Netscape and Corel might rule the IT world today.

It's entirely possible that for some of those marriages, the additional strain of the project simple accelerated the divorce timing (versus causing it).

It's well-known that given enough stress, many marriages that would have otherwise been relatively healthy can be pushed into insolvency.

For example: controlling for other factors, the divorce rate among married parents who have a child with autism is measurably higher.

> All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense to me.

Or so those people could work hard for 5-10 years instead of working hard for 40+ years like most people do. Microsoft employees have been paid very well for a long time and the stock compensation they received in the early to mid 1990s was exceptionally lucrative.

The most important part of what you said, is "make no sense to me." It's tremendously wonderful that we don't get to dictate what other people choose to do with their lives and time.

It's perfectly ok to be enamored with something like new Internet tech circa 1995, want to work in a segment that excites you, work exceptionally hard for three or five years, and then change out of that work to something more routine and less demanding.

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