I came across a tweet by former Netflix engineer Alex Castillo that reflects on the value of caring at work.
Alex recounts how the team he had just joined at the streaming giant discovered a broken legacy app on a Friday and managed to fix everything by the following Monday.
The tweet attributes the quick turnaround to how much the people involved “cared.” But to me, the picture that emerges is one of unsustainable overwork.
Does Working Through the Weekend Mean Caring?
The legacy app Alex’s team inherited was so broken that they couldn’t even run it locally, let alone deploy a fix for it when short on time on a Friday. They decided to regroup on Monday to find a solution. Alex, eager to prove himself, spent the weekend writing a new app to serve as a drop-in replacement. “I was done by Monday at 8 a.m. Just enough time to shower and walk to the office.”