What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?
Welcome to the creative industry, it&#x27;s not unusual for businesses with a design culture to operate like this. It would be pretty similar working for any big name architect anywhere. Likewise in graphic design, product design etc... If you come from a design background you will be used to having your work taken apart at a presentation because it will have been happening since the first day of architecture&#x2F;art&#x2F;design school. It&#x27;s a key skill to learn to be able to let go of the work you have done, stand back and analyse it dispassionately then go back and re-do things. After all, the criticism is meant to make the work better and better work gives you more of a sense of achievement. Yes, it was done in a way which was a little bit cheeky, but it doesn&#x27;t sound mean to me.<p>It can be drastically worse than this. When I was at architecture school in the 90&#x27;s some tutors would actually compete to see if they could make students cry in presentations. Things like physically tearing up hand drawn plans in front of all the other students. I remember tutors going round the final year presentation at midnight and deciding the general standard wasn&#x27;t good enough, phoning the people they thought needed to do more work, telling them they would fail and that they needed to get out of bed and work for another 24 hours. These were people that had been already been working super long hours for weeks to get their stuff done. Madness. It wasn&#x27;t just my school that was like this either, it was much worse back then but there are still pockets of this culture in my industry. It is no wonder that back then architecture students in the UK had the highest rate of suicide.