The Cray guys had their own funny culture as well, though. Cray was incredibly process-based, whereas SGI was entirely seat-of-the-pants product driven. Merging those two cultures was incredibly painful; ultimately the Cray guys won out and SGI became process driven[1]. There's a really twisted article in Wired after Cray got spun out where they complained about all the money they got from SGI because it came with sandals and pets-at-work-allowed rules.
From the Cray culture (and some of the Cray employees) we got the IRIX release train, where we'd ship a new QA'd release every quarter. If a feature wasn't ready it just got pushed out to the next release, no big deal (sometimes this didn't work out; bizarrely one of the biggest screwups came from the CXFS guys who were working in the old Cray campus in Eagan, MN).
[1]: Though as I read Zero to One it's interesting to see Theil's perspective on process-vs-product outlook. Definitely the product-driven SGI was the more optimistic one.
From the Cray culture (and some of the Cray employees) we got the IRIX release train, where we'd ship a new QA'd release every quarter. If a feature wasn't ready it just got pushed out to the next release, no big deal (sometimes this didn't work out; bizarrely one of the biggest screwups came from the CXFS guys who were working in the old Cray campus in Eagan, MN).
[1]: Though as I read Zero to One it's interesting to see Theil's perspective on process-vs-product outlook. Definitely the product-driven SGI was the more optimistic one.