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Comment by AIorNot | Hacker News Reader

I'm 50, worked at few cool places and lots of boring ones. to paraphrase, Tolstoy tends to be right -all happy families are similar and unhappy families are unhappy in unique ways

OpenAI is currently selected for the brightest and young excited minds, (and a lot of money).. bright, young (as in full of energy) and excited people will work well anywhere- esp if given a fair amount of autonomy.

Young people talking about how hard they worked is not a sign of a great corp culture, just a sign that they are in the super excited stage of their careers

In the long run who knows, I tend to view these companies as groups of like minded people and groups of people change and the dynamic changees overnight -so if they can sustain that culture sure, but who knows..

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I said this elsewhere on the thread and so apologize for repeating, but: I know mid-career people working at this firm who have been through these conditions, and they were energized by the experience. They're shipping huge stuff that tens of millions of people will use almost immediately.

The cadence we're talking about isn't sustainable --- has never been sustained anywhere --- but if insane sprints like this (1) produce intrinsically rewarding outcomes and (2) punctuate otherwise-sane work conditions, they can work out fine for the people involved.

It's completely legit to say you'd never take a job where this could be an expectation.

Calvin is the founder/CTO of Segment, not old but also not some doe eyed new grad.

On one hand, yes. But on the other hand, he's still in his 30s. In most fields, this would be considered young / early career. It kind of reinforces the point that bright, young people can get a lot done in the tech world.

> In most fields, this would be considered young / early career

Is it considered young / early career in this field?

Calvin is loaded from the Segment exit, he would not work if he wasn't excited about the work. The other founders just went on to do their own thing or non-profits.

I worked there for a few years and Calvin is definitely more of the grounded engineering guy. He would introduced him as an engineer and just get talking code. He would spend most of his time with the SRE/core team trying to tackle the hardest technical problem at the company.

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