Such an incredible story, it's hard to fathom that video calling was not ubiquitous in 2010! (I was 7 back then, but i thought video calling mustve been around for long so why aren't they more popular). I'm a junior at my job and right now I'm struggling with stomach issues :( it's incredible to see people sustaining such crazy workloads over such a long time. I'm really embarrassed to ask this but...how do you cope with those pains and still manage to think straight?
Sorry to hear about the stomach issues. Health is a thing that's so hard to control — there are certainly things all of us can do to worsen our health, but sometimes when things go wrong, it's not clear how to make it better. I hope you recover soon.
At the time, I didn't have any health issues going on, and so it wasn't problematic to keep up the hours. If I'm honest, I loved them — the intensity of it all, seeing how hotfixes improved successful calls for millions of users. But I don't think it would have felt the same if the intensity didn't let up after 6 weeks. At some point, things can go from exciting → death march.
The long term key is probably to find the right balance between periods of exciting, intense times vs. periods of rest. I've had plenty of the latter in my career as well, and I've been fortunate to mostly not have major health issues.
Thanks for sharing this story. I was at Skype since early 2011 working from Palo Alto office and went through Microsoft acquisition. One if most vivid memories at that time was our offsite in Amsterdam when Tony Bates (Skype CEO) was video calling Zuck live on stage during the keynote address, demoe’d Facebook video calling powered by Skype.
That must have been an amazing experience. People these days forget how novel it was back then to bring the power of Skype across the Facebook network to users who may or may not have been familiar with it before. COVID has made all of this commonplace, but 16 years ago none of it was.
A big thing we focused on back then, which now is just table stakes, is being able to get the call set up as easily as possible. People forget how much work it was to install Skype or some other video calling platform, find your relative on that platform, make a call on that platform while they still have the app running, and all that stuff. These days, we rightfully expect all of that to be single click. But prior to Covid, this was very far from single click. A whole lot of the effort in the product was around the first user experience of how to get that binary installed on your laptop with as little work and confusion as possible.
Such an incredible story, it's hard to fathom that video calling was not ubiquitous in 2010! (I was 7 back then, but i thought video calling mustve been around for long so why aren't they more popular). I'm a junior at my job and right now I'm struggling with stomach issues :( it's incredible to see people sustaining such crazy workloads over such a long time. I'm really embarrassed to ask this but...how do you cope with those pains and still manage to think straight?
Sorry to hear about the stomach issues. Health is a thing that's so hard to control — there are certainly things all of us can do to worsen our health, but sometimes when things go wrong, it's not clear how to make it better. I hope you recover soon.
At the time, I didn't have any health issues going on, and so it wasn't problematic to keep up the hours. If I'm honest, I loved them — the intensity of it all, seeing how hotfixes improved successful calls for millions of users. But I don't think it would have felt the same if the intensity didn't let up after 6 weeks. At some point, things can go from exciting → death march.
The long term key is probably to find the right balance between periods of exciting, intense times vs. periods of rest. I've had plenty of the latter in my career as well, and I've been fortunate to mostly not have major health issues.
Thanks a lot for the honesty Philip! :)
Thanks for sharing this story. I was at Skype since early 2011 working from Palo Alto office and went through Microsoft acquisition. One if most vivid memories at that time was our offsite in Amsterdam when Tony Bates (Skype CEO) was video calling Zuck live on stage during the keynote address, demoe’d Facebook video calling powered by Skype.
That must have been an amazing experience. People these days forget how novel it was back then to bring the power of Skype across the Facebook network to users who may or may not have been familiar with it before. COVID has made all of this commonplace, but 16 years ago none of it was.
great post! thanks for all your work on this, i remember this being incredible when it first came out (and underappreciated too)
A big thing we focused on back then, which now is just table stakes, is being able to get the call set up as easily as possible. People forget how much work it was to install Skype or some other video calling platform, find your relative on that platform, make a call on that platform while they still have the app running, and all that stuff. These days, we rightfully expect all of that to be single click. But prior to Covid, this was very far from single click. A whole lot of the effort in the product was around the first user experience of how to get that binary installed on your laptop with as little work and confusion as possible.
Thanks for your kind words!