A former Uber engineer's disaster story

Re:A former Uber engineer's disaster story by 11thEarlOfMar on Thursday December 10, 2020 @12:25PM (#25376004)

I'm reminded of the story of Windows NT and how David Cutler commented at one point after the release that divorces and nervous breakdowns were tracked in the program metrics. I expect that's hyperbole, but there is a real cost to these death marches.

I couldn't find that specific quote, though, and being 25 years back it could be a false memory of who said it (I did read it somewhere, if you were on the team at the time, please speak up!). Here are a couple of illustrations[0][1].

[0] http://read.pudn.com/downloads196/ebook/923902/ShowStopper!-...

[1] http://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2007/09/dave_cutler_w...

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Re:A former Uber engineer's disaster story by munificent on Thursday December 10, 2020 @01:06PM (#25376474)

> I expect that's hyperbole, but there is a real cost to these death marches.

I used to be a game developer at EA. In the middle of one particularly nightmarish 60-hour-weeks-for-months crunch, a twenty-something artist with no known pre-existing conditions spontaneously died in his sleep.

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Re:A former Uber engineer's disaster story by anonacct38 on Thursday December 10, 2020 @08:16PM (#25381131)

I went through a pretty intense crunch time at a fortune 10.

We had one person go to the hospital with tachycardia and 3 people who were vomiting. There were only 10 people on the team.

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Re:A former Uber engineer's disaster story by Bayart on Thursday December 10, 2020 @10:32PM (#25381947)

I find it fascinating that so much engineers (arguably « smart » people) are actively hurting themselves over a freaking job and acting as if it were just a fact of life.

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Re:A former Uber engineer's disaster story by whomst on Friday December 11, 2020 @02:09AM (#25383206)

Plenty of people throughout history have martyred themselves for what they believed in. Fascinating for sure but being smart is a completely different question.

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Re:A former Uber engineer's disaster story by saagarjha on Thursday December 10, 2020 @01:05PM (#25376462)

I remember that some engineers on the iPhone project went through divorces as a result of working on it.

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Re:A former Uber engineer's disaster story by sixstringtheory on Thursday December 10, 2020 @04:08PM (#25378703)

I believe it. During my last stretch of unemployment I started tracking the days I couldn't get out of bed in my spreadsheets.

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Re:A former Uber engineer's disaster story by georgiecasey on Saturday December 12, 2020 @08:27AM (#25398106)

I started reading the intro to that Show Stopper book and can't stop. Great stuff, thanks

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