25 years ago Microsoft released Internet Explorer 3.0, its first real salvo in the “Browser Wars”. This launch taught taught me how a giant corporation could move at the speed of a startup.
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To motivate us more, I plastered the hallways with quotes from Netscape’s founder, Marc Andreessen: “Netscape will soon reduce Windows to a poorly debugged set of device drivers.” It reminded us that this new startup threatened to destroy all of Microsoft.
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The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!
Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.
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This wasn’t a toxic pressure cooker of working against one’s will. The leadership worked hardest of all. Most of us were in our early twenties and it was a launch point for many careers.
Every member of this team considered it a highlight of their career.
Chrome was delivered without any sprints at all. The team came in at 9 and left at 5 (figuratively, people actually kept their own ~8h schedules) every workday for a couple years like clockwork. No drama. No broken marriages, no broken families.
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How did chrome-team manage to deliver high quality software without death marches?
Funny you ask... Turns out that software projects actually benefit strongly from having senior technical leadership deeply involved.
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Software engineering is engineering. Like other kinds of engineering, it’s a skill you develop over a lifetime, not a decade.
When I joined chrome-team I was in my early 30s. And I was on the junior side.
Most of the core team had already worked on one or two browsers before!
Having strong technical leadership has lots of advantages, but one of them is it naturally leads to a healthier cadence. These folks typically have to be home for dinner, and they’re old enough to know that death marches don’t work.
Update (2021-08-18): See also: Hacker News.