What was it like to work for Netscape?

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Interesting

Tuesday, 26 July 1994, 4am.

I’ve been working here at Mosaic for a month and a half now, and I haven’t been sleeping much, or even going home very often.

Lou and Rob spent all day today building remote control cars. This was kind of annoying, since I and all the others were working out butts off, and they were just screwing around all day. I wandered over to Chouck’s cube and said, “so is this car thing annoying you?” He reached his arms wide, scrunched up his face, and said “Only about this much.” I nodded, and went back to my desk.

Ten minutes later he came over and asked, “So does it annoy you too, or were you just wondering whether it annoyed me because I’m so easily annoyed?” I said that it annoyed me, but probably a tiny bit less than it did him.

At around 4pm, Lou was packing up and preparing to go home, when he mentioned to me that Marc had called him in to his office and asked if he had enough work to do. I’d been wondering that myself, so I asked, “Well, do you?” He said that he had just been feeling really burnt out for the last few days, and needed to relax. This is completely understandable, but I said that maybe it would be better if he were to do his relaxing away from the office, instead of doing it right in everyone’s face while they were working.

Marc wants me to be done with the Unix client in time for SGI to ship it along with Irix 5.3. That means that it has to be rock solid in, like, less than two months. I’ve got so little of the code written that I don’t even have a sense yet of whether that’s even remotely possible; it’s all over the floor. We’ve got bits and pieces, but I don’t see the big picture. It’d be really easy to let him bully me into agreeing, but I don’t want to miss; the stakes are too high this time, too many people are watching us for us to be able to screw up at all…

Thursday, 28 July 1994, 11pm.

I slept at work again last night; two and a half hours curled up in a quilt underneath my desk, from 11am to 1:30pm or so. That was when I woke up with a start, realizing that I was late for a meeting we were scheduled to have to argue about colormaps and dithering, and how we should deal with all the nefarious 8-bit color management issues. But it was no big deal, we just had the meeting later. It’s hard for someone to hold it against you when you miss a meeting because you’ve been at work so long that you’ve passed out from exhaustion.

Sunday, 5 August 1994, 5am.

I just got home; the last time I was asleep was, let’s see, 39 hours ago. And I’m not even tired right now. I guess I’m on my second or third or eighteenth wind. I only came home because I was worried that if I stayed there any longer, I’d fall asleep at the wheel again. I didn’t want to stay down there for another night, because I really need a shower at this point; it was a hot day today, and Lou and I played some intense games of air hockey last night that got me all sweaty and disgusting.

Wow, I must be tired — I just turned on the television, and MTV is actually moving too fast for me to understand it.

I’ve had a sore throat and a cough for about a week now, but I haven’t done anything about it, because I don’t have time. I think I’m keeping myself from getting a cold by sheer force of will.

On friday, which is when I most recently woke up, I got to work at around three, and had a ton of email waiting, all work related. And we had an all-hands meeting 4pm, and everyone wanted to come talk to me at once before then, so I was feeling really overwhelmed and behind. I mean, I had only been away from the office for like seven hours! The meeting was another mind-blower; apparently we closed some kind of OEM deal (I forget with who) for like 600,000 seats of the client. Gag. I actually get the feeling that our sales and marketing people know what they’re doing! I’ve never gotten that feeling from them at any previous job. This is wild.