jammons

I manage now, but application software engineering historically.

Hah! Nope, 100% wet-neuron generated work here.

Thanks, yeah, I was trying to make it clear what the post was about for anyone clicking.

Sorry if I messed that up when posting it

Slack's blog is at slack.engineering. It's called Several People Are Coding. This is not from Slack, as noted by philfreo.

I'm pretty sure you guys owe my employer for several hours of time I've spent playing with eightbitbeats over the past few days.

Much appreciated. :)

I'm a developer at Mahalo, and still have time to sing in operas, organize an a cappella group, blog, read, date, play ultimate frisbee, workout 4-5 times/week, code on some personal programming projects, and generally enjoy life. Most of the talk of 80 weeks is way over-hyped. Some times are certainly trying during a push, but it's by no means absurd.

Personally, I love all of the opportunities to hang out with other team members. We spend our working hours together, getting to know each other outside of work means that I get to work with my friends all day. It's awesome. You make a good point about that sort of thing become less enticing as you get older. We have a young team though, so it works out for the most part.

That said though, we have people on the team who never come to any of the outside events, and I wouldn't say that they are treated any differently. Everyone's free to make their own choices in this matter. At the end of the day, if they enjoy the work and we all get along, no one cares what you do when you go home.

To correct Jason, I think our near zero turnover has been closer to 8-9 months long. But it's certainly improved significantly over when I started at Mahalo about a year and a half ago. I would attribute that to Jason's hiring of smart people, recognizing those with skills in areas he may be weak in, and putting them in positions where they can do something about it.

I'd say this is far from evil.

That was sarcasm. Thanks for the downvotes though.

I've been at Mahalo for about 1 1/2 years now, and I can certainly appreciate what all of you are saying about how I'd have to be an idiot to work here. Luckily I had no idea who Jason was when I started, so I didn't know all of the lore surrounding his insanity. Most of it is exactly that. People get together and sensationalize his attitude and statements (he encourages this a bit with his public persona, I'll grant you that).

For the most part, working with him has been a pleasant experience. He can flip out from time to time, often there's a good reason, sometimes not. He's not much more crazy than any other boss I've ever had, and his contributions to Mahalo far outweigh any of this.

On the plus side, we get sweet perks, our internal culture is awesome (because we don't get slackers on the team), and we're doing some very cool stuff on the technical side of things. (Expect to see more of that in the future, and if you're ever in LA, stop by the ScaleLA or LA Django meetups we host.)

That said, I'm a little dismayed that hacker news spends so much time gossiping about Jason. Get over it guys. If you don't want to work for him, don't. If you do, send over a resume.

Yeah, as an employee at Mahalo, I can confirm that no one is being forced to work here.