Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997? The famous story is that Apple was nosediving under the current CEO and that Apple's acquisition of NeXT (and bringing Steve Jobs back as CEO) revitalised the company. I read about drastic staff / product cuts and re-focusing on the company, however that was always told from the outside. Was someone working at Apple during that transition and has any interesting stories / can share their experience? |
So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn’t have a badge to enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door to enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building.
Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Café Mac, seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it, so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of plastic… at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the color was orange. Many months later, Steve introduced the first iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell of the future iBook.
Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on different projects: I was working on backend web services development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we obviously had to improve for the next presentation… stressful yes, but truly enjoyable. More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve.
Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT).
It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months presented on stage by Steve… I still miss the excitement from it even if it is more than 15 years ago.
Edit: fixing a few typos
In typical Steve fashion he had a slide-preso for the reveal. He began with a kind of simplified history of the computer user-interface: starting with the command-line. His next slide showed the graphical user interface popularized, surprise, by his earlier Apple Macintosh.
The NeXt slide (ha ha) showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, the NeXT user interface. A "boo" from one of the engineers in the crowd.
Jobs froze and the showman tone of his voice was gone, "Who said that? Who booed?" He was clearly enraged. He stared into the audience, scanning the faces of the engineers. I think he followed that with some expletives and a claim that the NeXT UI was an amazing step in UI design but I was still kind of in shock myself.
You know, this is actually a rather good thing. So many companies are just bloated with projects that they want to see through just to see them through and they make zero sense in the grand scheme of the company. If you have a single person responsible for everything that can just make the hard choices and be the bad guy it is much more healthy for the whole....assuming that person cuts the right things and makes the right choices.
I worked at Amazon for a bit and remember this kind of thing in preparation for a release/conference (Re:Invent). I don't miss it at all.
I have a lot of funny stories. Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter. That was my first day at work. And no, I'm not a datacenter employee, everyone on the team did everything, there were just very few of us.
We had to work from about 10am to about 3 or 4 am every day to make the deadline, we sometimes got Sundays off. There was a lot of rage and anger at many management levels.
Steve would get a question about a two button mouse at every company meeting, he was super pissed every time about the question. We enjoyed trolling him.
Steve's attention to detail was unbelievable. I once witnessed him make a team work overnight just to move an icon 10 pixels to the left.
The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. He was able to figure out the concept of "cloud" well before its time, and make a shift towards that.
Of course, he was an supernatural presenter. I witnessed him present through some really messed up errors in live demos and no one I asked in the audience afterwards even noticed the errors.
It was an insane work environment, never seen anything like it.
I vividly recall the day Steve introduced the iMac in the Infinite Loop quad. If I had to pick a day that telegraphed Apple's future fortunes, it would be that day. Rhapsody's potential was compelling, but as Macintosh OS it was still pretty Crapsody at the time. The iMac was a Real Thing — as friendly as computers get, that only Apple could've created and sold.
The idea that QuickTime¹ would be the runtime for HyperCard 3² — or from a different perspective, that HyperCard stacks would be just another media type — was extremely clever. We'd³ previously experimented with specific interactive functionality, but QTi generalized interactive media capabilities in a technically-interesting way that would greatly amplify both what HyperCard and what QuickTime were capable of.
The 1996 WWDC session Hypercard 3.0: The Phoenix Rises was electric. Here's a report from that session, complete with a response from the awesome Kevin Calhoun. http://folkstream.com/muse/teachhc/hc3.html
> It would be great to know and see what it was going to be all about!
From an authoring POV, it was "just" HyperCard with super-powers. But from a distribution POV, the magic was that stacks would work anywhere that Movies worked — web pages, email, documents, applications (imagine GUIs composed of "micro-stack" controls), etc.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime#QuickTime_interactiv... ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard#HyperCard_3.0 ³ Royal "we", my specific role was evangelism
Upon showing up to a nice top-floor suite near Delores Park, I knew immediately that these would be nicer "old electronics" — turns out it was a BUNCH of PROTOTYPE Apple Computers (no "LISA," but plenty of history and unique items, given their hacked-together nature); 'WOZ literally had his hands on at least ONE of these,' I remember thinking; 'CERTAINLY!'
I mistakenly told the disposer of this "old electronics" just how cool all this HISTORY was, to which he immediately realized that I wasn't going to be throwing any of it away. Needless to say, he accompanied me to the junkyard as we both watched Apple History get run over by a skidsteer.
Just tragic. PS T.R. sucks - gfkt Leah!
Task Rabbit?
Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (edit, not Steve Jobs, but a new company by former Apple employees). We had a few devices. I remember the demos where they would click on a button to turn off a processor in the GUI while rendering a mandelbrot image, and it would slow to a crawl. It was such a pretty UI.
The story of the entire team for Claris quitting six months before they tried to release Claris 5 was recently documented on HN here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32271139
I was an intern the prior summer, and they called me when the team quit to join under a co-op at University of Washington and try to release the software.
Everyone was operating on a schedule that had bonuses tied to them. We hit the middle milestone and they got their bonuses.
Since I was only a co-op and not really a full fledged employee (even though I was there with the team until 11 pm on lots of Saturday nights) they didn't give me a bonus. They gave me a leather satchel with Claris Works written on it.
It was one of the most awkward moments in my life, the rest of the team looked mortified that we were at a fancy dinner and they were receiving big 5 figure checks and I was getting a recycled piece of swag. That probably speaks to the culture at Apple at the time.
I didn't really care. As a college student at the time, I thought I was as rich as I would ever get making an annualized $32k. After my internship where I was basically playing basketball in between two hours of coding, I thought the exit interview would be "You were the worst intern ever and we hope we never see you again." But, they hired me back and it was a fun time.
Are you sure it wasn't NeXT that you're thinking of?
I distinctly remember the Apple recruitment booth was empty, vs all of the high-activity booths around them. I remember it vividly because it was sad seeing how far they had fallen, people weren't interested in even talking to the recruiter.
Imagine getting a job at Apple in 1997 and never selling a share. I know some people that have been at Apple for 12+ years and are planning on retiring next year, they are multi-multi-millionaires just from regular stock grants.
- employees used to steal Steve’s license plates as a joke so that’s why he was always leasing cars. The maximum grace period for getting plates was six months so he’d change Mercedes every six months.
- Steve used to park in the handicap spot up front at IL1.
- there was gourmet chocolate milk for Steve stashed in the back of refrigerators at Cafe Macs. Yes I know he was vegan but I questioned the story as well. Apparently it was a secret indulgence only a few knew about.
- he had his own connection from PAIX (Palo Alto Internet Exchange) to his house.
- he had his own mail server at Apple.
- an employee with the corporate email steve@ before Steve’s return was asked to give up his email address for Steve.
- Steve had his own personal IS&T person to go to his house or work on things for him. On average they lasted a few months before Steve asked that tech be fired (for whatever reason), and HR just shuffled them somewhere else in the company.
- if you were in an elevator with Steve after coming back from a smoke break, you were likely in deep shit and probably out of a job.
I remember using an old company directory tool app for employees and looking up Steve. It said he report to Woz. When you looked up Woz, it said he reported to Steve.
Isaacson's book is like the notes one takes before writing the actual book -- a starting point, but very incomplete and there's no center to it. If you want to read a Jobs biography that is good -- but does not pull punches -- "Becoming Steve Jobs" is the one to get.
[1] roughly 1/3 of the company https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...
What I don't think a lot of people knew at the time was the hand Jobs played in the birth of Pixar, which is definitely something to be cocky about.
One of my coworkers decided he was going to specialize in ObjectiveC, because yes the jobs were rare but they paid a premium. This was before Apple started talking to BeOS and NeXT about an acquisition, so I thought he was crazy.
When the iPhone came out and mobile apps became a gold rush, I spent a lot of time wondering where he was now and whether he had a Scrooge McDuck room to swim in his money.
Having that outside experience likely shaped him to shine in his second go around.
I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia.
The FCP team located in IL1 on the third floor I believe. Most of the floor was occupied by the Apple Advance Technology Group. ATG had a really cool space with private offices ringing the outside walls and interior areas with lots of whiteboards and space for doing whatever ATG did. Larry Tesler had a double wide private office and there was a lot of commotion.
The "Blue" team working in MacOs 9 was below us. It was very busy down there as OS 9 was the engine that still powered the company. Those first cool iMacs and MacBooks weren't running OSX! I don't think we even had a "Beaker" build yet.
Steve simply didn't like ATG and over the next few months the spaces rapidly cleared out. We were once stuck in a corner and soon we had a lot of room to set up a couple of large commercial quality edit suite with Avid Media Composers and other high end gear to help make FCP a commercial success.
I wasn't part of any sort of political competition; we just kept making FCP, but watching the exodus of ATG people and seeing how stressed out Steve Glass was running the Blue team was getting me down.
The NeXT people were setting up their world in IL2, with Avie taking an office on the 4th floor and an unofficial sort of NeXT hardware museum springing up outside of the area where the pool table was. It was a cool place to visit; lots of neat NeXT hardware and some SparcStations as well. A Symbolics workstation also showed up in a conference room on the second floor, although it may have been at Apple earlier. If you looked in various hardware labs, there was always intersting hardware to be found; DEC, Infographics, VAX and more.
It wasn't at all obvious to me that Apple was going to figure things out; Steve was being disruptive (in a good way?), but Gil, Ellen, Steve Glass and others were still around and all the NeXT people were doing their thing. I was convinced by some former Be people to go join Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and some other Apple engineering heroes of mine (Darin Adler, John Sullivan) at Eazel.
Eazel folded within eighteen months and I was back at Apple as part of a group hire Andy helped setup with Steve. Anyone who wanted to work at Apple just showed up the next Monday and got to work! Many of those who didn't come to Apple ended up going to Danger Research, Google and other startups. A lot eventually ended up at Apple anyway.
The Apple I came back to was different in that Steve was officialy CEO, but the divisions between groups were still there. It would take several more years before I felt that things felt healthy. As soon as I did think things felt good, Steve become ill, Scott Forstall erected a secure fortress on my floor on IL2 and the political shenanigans began. My initial stock grant priced at $14 a share had grown, gone through a couple of splits and the company was doing billions of dollars a quarter. A far cry from the bleak days of 1997!
I still believe Apple did a bad choice because, in my opinion BeOS was the far superior OS paradigm. Next was a Nix clone with some GUI over it, but BeOS was different, was smarter and the world is poorer after its demise.
I've only heard it twice, and only once in any detail. It strikes me as both far fetched rationally but also weirdly possible with Jobs.
First, Steve killed Cyberdog. You'd have thought the world was coming to an end. Second, he came in with his Openstep Thinkpad, and that was it for months. I thought they'd turn that OS around, leverage MAE, and have Openstep 5 running by mid-98.
Jobs made a deal with Gates for a $150MM investment that would effectively save Apple. Of course, both companies got something out of it. Nobody gives you that kind of money for free.
It a great business lesson. Your competitor doesn't have to lose for you to win.
It is also important to remain humble. You never know when you'll need help. I am going through an interesting moment right now while starting a new tech business.
While I have funded 100% of it myself so far, my best customer is someone who was in direct and intense competition with my other business 15 years ago. We are now talking about him coming-in as an investor and taking-over CEO responsibilities so I can focus on technology. Had we been nasty to each other over a decade ago, these conversations would have been impossible today.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/29/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-wh...
>David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million.
>It a great business lesson.
that stealing is bad?
Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bugs. Everyone knew it was a mess, but went along with it, fatalistically thinking that any OS-level project would be that messy.
I went across the street to JavaSoft: small teams cranking out code that would last forever. Swing was built in a year. Signs on the offices not to disturb the programmers. ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. One main engineering manager hired a bunch of kids out of college. The JDK tech lead, Mark Reinhold, is still at the helm today.
Night and day; it was like going from the Soviet Union to the U.S.
When considering a new job, I almost don't care about technology. Engineering culture makes all the difference.
Jony did not come from NeXT, as many seem to believe.
Also, the ads tell a story of a consumer world that has changed since then. From professional life focused (back then) to indulgence and quick consumption focused now. Maybe WIRED knew their audience back then, and have a wider one on the internet now..
It's also analogous to a batter who doesn't stop his swing right after the moment he hits (or misses) the ball; he follows through. Because having the attitude of always following through, even when it seemingly no longer matters, increases the number and range of hits.
In response to the ksec's Jobs quote, maxbond said: "You're suggesting asking people to work into the night to make an aesthetic change that will benefit no customers, that will not make the workplace friendlier or more productive, and that you may never even lay eyes on again, is craftsmanship? I would suggest its authoritarian control for it's own sake."
The proof is in the pudding. Jobs exhibited extremely unusual, 1-in-10,000, seemingly odd, useless behavior in making the painting demand. Is it really nothing but pure coincidence that the same individual had the extremely unusual, 1-in-10,000 achievement of taking a company that was on its deathbed, arguably in its last throes, and turning it into one of the largest, most successful and influential companies in the world?
No, it is not. That doesn't mean it's worth it to the individual workers who had to do that work. Clearly, in many cases, including ksec's, it was not. But was it was worth it to the company and its shareholders? Yes.
In his first public appearance after revealing he had surgery to remove a tumor from his pancreas in 2004, Jobs met with a handful of reporters at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, Calif. to unveil a new 750-square-foot "mini" store design. Half the size of the typical Apple retail stores of the time, the mini design featured an all-white ceiling, lit from behind; Japanese-made stainless-steel walls, with holes around the top for ventilation that mimicked the design of the PowerMac G5; and a shiny, seamless white floor made with "material used in aircraft hangars," Jobs said at the time.
Before the gigantic curtain draped across the storefront came down, though, Jobs was having a meltdown, refusing in the minutes before the unveiling to step outside and greet reporters. Why? Because the store design that looked so great on paper didn't stand up to real-world use. The walls showed off every handprint and the floors were marred by black scuff marks from the handful of people readying the store for the big reveal.
Jobs was ultimately convinced to step outside, and the curtain was drawn before the small gathering of reporters. When I saw the floor, I immediately turned to Jobs, standing next to me, and asked if he had been involved in every aspect of the design. He said yes. "It was obvious that whoever designed the store had never cleaned a floor in their life," I told him. He narrowed his eyes at me and stepped inside.
A few months later an Apple executive told me that Jobs had all of the designers return to the store after it opened on Saturday, and spend the night on their hands and knees cleaning the white surface. After that, Apple switched the floors to the stone tiles now prevalent in its designs.
Did I mention every single Ethernet cable had to be cut to length and if any server moved all the cables had to be remade ? Lol. They finally hired a wiring company to do all that work because I think we all protested to programming during the night and cutting cables during the day or vice versa.
Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means?
I imagine Elon Musk (at least used to, not sure if he still does) cause the same experience in employees. That's the sense you get when you read books like "Liftoff" that document the early days of SpaceX.
This strikes me as funny because of all the canonically silver iMacs and Macbooks that came afterward. Is black even an option?
I’m sure the keynotes today will never have an error again, save a media server dying mid transcode and even then I’d expect there to be backups.
Wow! What was the product?
Having two small kids myself, I agree one button would be better for learning.
(a) Deprecation of a framework is inaccurate. It was halting development on OpenDoc -- which had been sold as the future of software development on Macs and other OS's up to that point (sort of, you had to be there). There is no modern parallel; Apple halting all development on UIKit and removing support and tools for it tomorrow would be something like it.
(b) Steve said in the video that the guy in the audience might be right. But he also said that Apple had to focus to survive.
Apple just barely made it -- remember that while the iMac was a design masterpiece, it wasn't that big compared to the rest of the industry; Apple was still essentially fighting for its life with every hardware release until the iPod.
Long time ago and my memory could be iffy.
Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than Scully did.
I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software stack.
Steve Jobs' vision of a walled garden with tight vertical integration was what has kept Apple alive all these years and why things like the iPhone are so successful. I have both an iPhone and an Android, and the integration between iPhone and all its products is beyond comparison to Android.
It was absolute malpractice to buy NeXT for the OS, which was an obsolete, moribund, and expensive version of Unix.
What they ended up getting was adult management, which was not what they bought the company for, but was what Apple needed.
https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260
And god, Jobs just drips with a sort of icky confidence and condescension, and there's certainly a lot of cult of personality present in the audience members.
I'm very curious what you worked on at Be - the development team wasn't that large, was it?
Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2]
There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear that Apple would end up turing into the Apple we have today.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)
And a lot of coat-tail riding. Kind of the beginning of the end of the good times as an engineer (as far as I was concerned).
This sounds like the company I work for presently
- The ability and willingness of the management to invest time and resources into development of proper work processes and infrustructure (imagine having to code without version control in a team)
- Understanding that things aren't always done the moment they appear to be done
- Realization that many things are done to lower the cognitive load exclusively (why do we have to spend 20 hours refactoring the thing if it already works?)
- Understanding why it is important to lower the cognitive load
- And dozens more
These are merely signs, though. One can put 'dnd' signs on doors, but what difference does that make if the same people who introduce the signs still disturb the people behind the doors whenever they feel like it. (no pun intended, couldn't word it better)
It comes down to understanding the nuances, and mutual respect, I think?
This resonated with me. Whether you are recruiting or looking culture is incredibly powerful.
I'd easily trade pay (within reason) and any tech stack for a truly great culture where I felt driven and engaged and was doing meaningful work, but the latter is really hard to understand ahead of time.
On the one hand the lead was infinitely proud of being able to have 2 (or was it three?) monitors on his desk, big CRTs on a desk designed during the Cold War, by a designer who had nightmares about nuclear blasts and wanted someplace safe to duck and cover. You could do that with Macs but not quite yet with Windows. If memory serves, Linux got that ability before Windows did but don't quote me on that.
On the other hand they were writing what is ostensibly a concurrent application on an operating system with no protected memory and no pre-emptive multitasking, so the whole thing was using hand-rolled cooperative multitasking via C longjumps. It's no wonder the Windows team had an easier time keeping up with Netscape for that golden year. They were from what I understand cross compiling, and the Windows team could just do Windowsy things with a fifth of the staff.
So my experience of this era, through that lens, through learning to hate Macs at the hands of Mathematica, and also through rumor mills, was that a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up against the same ceiling that NextStep was helping Apple route around.
I told my Mac loving friends to talk to me when Apple had a modern OS. So when NextStep merged my ears pricked up. My first Mac ended up being an anomaly. Apple briefly produced a 13" Mac with a discrete video card, which they haven't since. I had been struggling to get Linux drivers for a Fujitsu LightBook, which was ridiculously small, but was practically obsolete by the time I got everything working. That device is the sole time I've contributed to Linux, which was cool but exhausting. So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back.
You could still see the bones of NextStep in OS X for some time.
The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which I later learned is a lot for one college), in 2 labs when I started, eventually in 3 that I knew of, one of which I ended up with after hours access to. On many occasions they were the only open machines. I had helped too many people who lost their papers to faulty disk drives and learned that the best way to write a paper was to keep my Unix account empty and mail myself copies, so it hardly mattered that I didn't have a floppy for the NeXTs. It didn't hurt that they never figured out how to meter the NeXT laser printer, so while it wasn't the best or fastest printer on campus, it was the only free one. "Your printah is out of paypah."
Not just making the same tradeoffs, but making a lot of the same software -- early PalmOS was effectively a handheld remake of Mac OS. Same CPU architecture, very similar OS design. Some of the A-traps even had similar or identical names.
As one among your customer base for both versions, indeed. People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there was at least some hope of killing an errant application and continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much worse.
>a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs.
That makes sense, both from an attractive-new-startup view (I'm sure many within Apple c. 1997 was pushing for a small, inexpensive Apple PDA to respond to Palm), and from a familiar-feeling-OS view.
>So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back.
I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in college and hated it (as mentioned above), but OS X was a revelation.
I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is it. Period.
(I wrote the above on Slashdot ten years ago <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>. I see no need for changes.)
>The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which I later learned is a lot for one college)
I don't think my college ever deployed NeXTs in public student labs the way it did deploy HP workstations <https://np.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/ludshu/macinto...>, but I did use them in college as well. I still think NeXTStep did UI better than MacOS pre- or post-Unix.
Didn't know about this. This is before ‘webOS’, right? What kind of OS problems are we talking here?
Oh man that brings back memories!
And from what I heard, Sun as a whole was a highly dysfunctional company as well, even during the time in question. The dot com boom just papered over a lot of the dysfunction for a few years.
Ah, the Performa era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa
Mind you, my first Mac was a Performa, as we sure didn’t know better.
Checks out. I'm still bitter towards Swing though. But impressive what they could put out in a year.
That said, I'm absolutely NOT a fan of the JWZ sleeping bag under your desk/get it done whatever the cost mindset that was everywhere in the 90's.
In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending how you look at it) for ICs. Why?
IME it has led to so much “talk” and bloat, and useless meetings led by people trying to prove something who go on and on about things that make no sense. No execution, only flattery and BS.
IMO, the only levels you need should be Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, and Software Architect. The architects should be rare, and there should be a healthy mix of seniors and juniors focused on building and supporting products internal and customer facing.
Why do we have several layers of managers? Out of a dozen managers only two have been good. They’re also the first ones fired. It just seems stupid, even if it’s purposefully done that way (that’s even dumber to consider). Have lean teams with a lead, and a manager who manages several teams, and a director for each product offering who reports to a CTO or something. VP, SVP, EVP. Why?
I’m on a team where people waste so much time and yet I see those same people get promoted, while I’m told I’m disengaged because I don’t turn on my camera in bullshit meetings (to plan future meetings or ramble). On the other hand, my team consistently delivers on time or sooner, while those teams take forever.
It’s sad, really.
Promotions tend to represent some combination of four things to most companies:
• more expected impact and workload,
• more status,
• more money, and
• more expected industry experience and seniority
The three level system you propose might work if the company using it is in fact actually flatter in its internal hierarchy on those traits - but if it’s not, from the perspectives of the workers, all you’ve done is intentionally obscured the mechanics of the actual hierarchy you’re using in a way that even further obscures pay disparities, denies workers who are motivated by externally visible status a route to progression, equates high performing “just below architect” and “barely above software engineer” workloads in a way likely to incentivize many seniors to coast, and surrenders an easy tool for gauging performance by measuring how successfully someone is progressing at the company and in the field based on their level vs. years of experience.
This reminded me of my time at iHeartMedia. The company had an entire department of non-coding architects. They produced so many Visio diagrams that the company had to purchase a product that indexed these documents so that they could be searched.
The amount of busywork that was produced still takes my breath away.
Limiting IC layers doesn't remove all the other politics.
Probably same reason hn has points count beyond 500
It would be crazy if someone just shook up the whole company top to bottom, but google is still making money and apple wasn’t
So I think it will never happen
Sounds a lot like a lot of FAANG companies today.
> ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year.
9K classes in a year sounds crazy as hell
9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC
Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take over enterprise business computing.
How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year? Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console output, when I run NPM to pull in dependencies, lol.
Makes me sad to read this!
This is exactly what FileMaker Pro does.
You have the underlying data structure that is independent of calculations and presentation. It is sparse by definition, and can store far more data than any spreadsheet in existence. It can include defined relationships between the different kinds of data.
You have the calculations, that are stored with the data structure, but are functionally independent from it. They can transform, combine, and summarize the data in just about any way you like. They can store their results, increasing speed at the cost of storage, or they can be on demand.
You have the presentation, which depends on the data but is defined separately -- you can have as many different presentation forms as you like, hundreds or even thousands.
And you have actual code that can run on the data and validate it, modify it, organize it etc.
I think only momentum and lack of vision has prevented FM from eating spreadsheets' lunch.
They will only be able to sell their best contacts with trusted tales of good things.
I think that's a great summary.
Look out for companies that try to manage what they don't understand. It can lead to the 'car mechanic phenomenon'. I call it that because it's like the feeling some get when they get the bill from the car mechanic. They can't fix it themselves, so how do they know if someone's pulling one over on them?
Steve returned to Apple as VP of CoreOS or something like that. I was super happy when he came back. I think he is living in the rain forests of Hawaii now, clad only in palm leaves.
For example, to keep compensation in line with market and reduce attrition, there were definitely more people who got promoted to ICT5 last year and the designation has thus been diluted.
Furthermore, candidates coming in from other large companies expect the title/leveling prestige in many cases, and ICT5 is a tough sell while trying to hire a Google L7/8. So Apple does have a fair number of ICT6 from that.
I also think limiting IC layers and keeping the above politics minimal can work - Netflix did that for a long time and was very successful as a company with their approach. Most IC at Netflix were simply titled "senior software engineer", with pay being a wide band dependent on market value. They no longer do that for some reasons, and have adopted the standard large level hierarchy.
Not everyone becomes MD, but you definitely become VP by sticking around for a few years.
I did. Steve Jobs is survivorship bias at its finest. I've met and interviewed plenty of "detail orientated" bosses and not all of them create trillion dollar entities.
> Maybe he was just a jerk, or perhaps he was giving an object lesson.
1. There is no legitimate reason to make a server rack a different color.
2. Making people work until 3am isn't a lesson. It ignores all studies that suggest that depriving people of sleep makes them less productive.
Moving an icon 10 pixels...okay maybe I get it. There is some practical utility in that for an end-user and it teaches development teams the importance of why the details matter. However this is probably my biggest gripes with the stories about Jobs. My interpretation is that he was inconsistently diligent and was only detail orientated for "details matter" sake, but not always the right details.
It's not. Aesthetics are actually a design principle: "Beautiful products/objects are perceived as easier to use and more valuable than ugly ones. Even if it is not true!" Since no one is actively looking at server racks there is no opportunity for the color to even play a factor.
> And yes, many detail oriented bosses are not successful, but Jobs actually did create a trillion dollar entity so I think this is more than just a survivorship bias.
Huh? You literally just defined survivorship bias. If only one party (Jobs) survives a large party ("many detailed oriented bosses"), then that's a survivor, and you're bias to thinking that would led that party to success is because of the same characteristics as the others that didn't.
[0] - https://uxdesign.cc/design-principle-aesthetics-af926f8f86fe
Triple click is only a thing on iOS, apparently. Thank you for the correction: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204390
Double click is easy to teach but it’s sure as hell not discoverable. Whereas second and middle button advocates have, to me, semi convincingly claimed that they could also be taught through consistent application. In other words, not better but not worse.
I think I disagree, but I am pretty Steve-cynical. It seemed to follow a pattern of Steve shutting down things that he wasn't in charge of, or that smacked of Sculley-era Apple?
IL4 used to have a technical library — and a kind museum of Apple products (including a Lisa) that you could play with. My manager let us know one day we might pop over to the library and "check out a few books" - a little bird had told him that we might not have to return them as the library was going bye bye.
And so it did. Eventually I think I donated my Foley and Van-Dam to a library for their book sale.
I know some people from ATG found places to stay if they really, really wanted to, but unless you could directly related your work to something on Steve's agenda, you were gone. Kim stayed and worked on voice recognition, Larry Yaeger stayed and worked on InkWell, Jerome stayed and worked on latent semantics analysis for email spam detection, etc.
Look up S3TC/DXTC texture compression, S3 copied Apple video codec verbatim and patented it for 3D graphics use. Somehow Apple missed that and didnt fight initial patent, result was losing couple iphone court cases 10 years later and purging S3TC from mobile.
Avid Media Composer was born and grew up on Mac hardware. Same goes for Adobe Premiere, all thanks to ATG work.
https://computerhistory.org/blog/quicktime-and-the-rise-of-m...
ATG might of saved Apple from going bankrupt in late nineties - Microsoft fucked up getting caught conspiring with Intel, paying third party contractor to steal QuickTime code https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_... Thats the origin of the infamous "Microsoft saved Apple in the nineties" myth https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5TdqfNE1QU In reality:
>David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million.
Oral History of Larry Tesler part 1 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZUhobpe6XA
Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 2 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OloLXE4I5fw
Oral History of Larry Tesler Part 3 of 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJKW7A2rC4s
Oral History of Andy Grignon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_VtQBIEb6I Quicktime 1995-1998, iPod, iPhone https://www.businessinsider.com/meet-andy-grignon-apples-ipo... Currently Walmart of all places.
The most basic of market research would tell you that in gaming, content is king. And with Google's track record of cancelling products, nobody would trust what they offered even if it was vastly technically superior.
While other platform vendors have technical stuff, some of it deep dives into their technology stack, Google's ones are mostly about Play Store, KPIs, and when technical, very superficial, where a blog post would be enough.
How can a studio thrust such company into having what it matters to launch a AAA tile, while being asked to rewrite for their platform.
The only problem is I may have been the only person in the target market so that wasn't going to work financially... And even I was going to have an exceptionally low LTV at maybe one game purchase per year (or less). And if they charged a monthly subscription, I'd never do it. So, yeah, terrible business.
But Google's track record wasn't a showstopper for me on a toy. It's different for business stuff like GCP.
Sadly this was not the sentiment at the time when Google announced their new CEO.
Meta is a shitshow, but I’ll give Zuck credit for at least have A vision of *something*.
Sundars vision is to keep Larry and Sergei’s money machine humming along. That’s it. That’s the goal, cover the costs of the founders private islands by letting the CFO make all the real decisions
Though the event handling part sounds like DOS' raw approach, versus Win95's abstraction—and I guess could plague any kind of a system.
Of course, what Microsoft wasn't ready for was the hardware getting so good that Apple could just port their existing desktop OS and software over.
Eh, I mean, MS attempted that more that once themselves: though WinCE wasn't Win9x inside, it sure looked like one, and purportedly even had swap.
In 1996 Palm OS had hardcoded screen resolution with no color support. They had no memory protection. Palm also used already-obsolete DragonBall/68K processors when faster ARMs were already available.
I take it that wasn't the case at Palantir. Since I'm convinced that all humans are status-seeking, I'm curious how Palantir satisfied that urge, if not w/ title differentiation.
Additionally silver brackets aren't inferior, like plywood. This is more like the craftsman chewed you out for using Phillips screws instead of flatheads for your table, because the craftsman feels that Phillips are for bookcases and flatheads are for tables.
The problem is when they insisted that everyone else must use windows and Mac and Linux machines weren’t allowed.
"Friend" should have his head examined. This kind of snobbery attitude does not do any good
It is more about having plenty of mature developer tools at your finger tips to get the job done with lots of automation. Also having source of everything allows you to check how something is architected and designed and also improves your own code.
It is very painful to work on Windows laptops when you don't have access to proper dev tools which is the case in most of the corporate setups where they want to uniformity of images to make administration easy.
Ask where the documentation is.
Ask how much input engineers have on what they are working on.
Ask how many meetings hours they average per day.
This is the way. Ask this question of people working at a legacy company and they won't be able to meet your eyes.
I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number of companies at this point, and I've never seen this 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.
> it will never happen
I can see it happening. They have just one cash cow in advertising, and it's not terribly secure. TikTok is already a serious threat to YouTube. If this became a crisis, it wouldn't sink the company, but it'd certainly shake it up.
I'd argue Snapchat is probably their most direct competitor, but Snapchat's DAU is still growing fine, because even in Snapchat's case I think you can argue they're used differently. Snapchat seems to be used primarily to stay in touch with friends where as TikTok seems to be used to find/share short-form video content with strangers.
IDK about the social network side. Google doesn't really have one, so it's whatever.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Usually it's smaller companies eating the big companies lunch via competition. But that usually takes a very long time (or competition is crushed by 'good intentions' aka gov policy). I know 'intrapenuership' and spawning isolated startups internally, where teams that are walled off from the middle managers of the larger company, was pushed by Clayton M. Christensen.
But the two areas that seem to be in a death grip with this problem are: modern western governments and monopolies (usually with market position enforced by said governments).
Whenever people push for reducing bureaucracy in gov they get accused of only wanting to help the rich or get crushed by the benefactors (lobbyists/NIMBYs/'local jobs' protection rackets/etc). And monopolies survive even when they are an organizational disaster internally, because where else can customers go?
So unfortunately, there isn't really an "Iron" solution to bureaucracy (depending on what you mean by "Iron"). The best you can do is work to minimize the amount of it (akin to optimizing an algorithm so that it's more efficient), but some level or amount will always remain, and that amount is largely related to how large the organization is.
Open Source?
Specifically, removing the power to coerce.
Further, it is difficult for many people in an organization to understand the contributions of people working in areas in which they are not expert, and thus it is easy to misunderstand whether they are devoted to the goals of the organization.
So I’m not sure this “Iron Law” can predict anything or help understand anything in a real world situation. It seems to boil to (roughly) “the bastards always win.”
Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People have their complaints, but it's a paradise compared to creating Mac apps because there aren't too many wrong ways to do something, the OS handles a lot more for you, and initially it was a gold rush because of how readily you could profit from making apps. It became standard for everything to have an iPhone app.
Macs, on the other hand, always suffered from a lack of third-party software. Eventually it began to matter less cause of web stuff, but it's still an issue.
You work on stimulating things and get paid what you accept.
You’ll have a yearly review where you have your say, and pay can be increased if employer think it’s worth it.
Titles are problematic in teams working to produce good stuff!
We should compare ourselves to athletes more than the MBA powerpoint version of a company.
I hear Tom Brady is a legend - is he an S10 quarterback? Senior quarterback? Or just a quarterback with high a salary based on performance?
I believe levels are instruments for managers not employees.
If you’re going to say the hierarchy should be based on people doing real work, well I agree, but that is pretty much impossible to measure in groups beyond a certain size.
This groups beyond a certain size problem is the root of the problem, not levels, which are just a stopgap measure to slow the brakes on the deterioration and degeneracy that you find in any gigantic group of people.
Poor management requires boxes.
Better management actually care and help employees perform and improve.
In the end it’s about culture.
Some sort of holistic 360 reviews by peers where others can vouch for you could work. What’s the big deal with having one senior paid 180k and another 350k if their impacts are considerably different? I have personally dealt with BS like “we can’t promote you rn but also can’t give you a raise because you’re at the upper limit of your salary band”. That’s not fair, imo.
The real thing you’re getting at is that people should only be paid and promoted for real work, and not for bullshit work, but that’s basically impossible to measure once organizations grow beyond a certain size.
Also, in orgs beyond a certain size, “holistic” peer review based evals make bullshit promo culture worse, not better. It basically ends up meaning how much people like you, and accelerates the shift toward a culture where people optimize for that instead of doing real work. And then you’re back at square one.
Are you building a Mac-first app using the most blessed toolkit (Cocoa)? You're probably fine, so long as you're not looking to toss out a binary and forget about it for 5+ years (periodically recompiling with newer SDKs and such). Even 20 years down the road getting old FOSS Cocoa projects building and running again isn't too hard, because even though there are a lot of deprecations the deprecated stuff largely still works.
On the other hand if you're building lowest common denominator cross platform desktop apps, yeah life might be harder. Same for games. That said I think the bulk of this pain comes from making assumptions that an unavoidably changing world will remain static — the sort of backwards compatibility provided by Microsoft is really the exception not the rule, and even there it's starting to flake away likely because the teams at MS are growing tired of having nearly unbounded backwards compatibility act as a ball and chain on OS development.
For running apps that were created without their devs' intent of long-term maintenance I think the best thing is probably third party compatibility layers like WINE, which allow for a pinned API target without locking OS vendors into decades old decisions and emergences.
If you look at what most software does, it's pretty static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface doesn't change much over time. The software should be a lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft showed that it's possible, and they even did it with third-party hardware. Same with the web. If Apple wanted compatibility with less burden, they could've provided better abstractions to devs. "Do things this one sanctioned way, and it won't break."
Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your game library, sometimes permanently. If I understand correctly, Apple even intentionally let OpenGL go stale to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official software release is a kludge, and despite the common claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE translation layer itself but some other consequence of semi-incompatibility).
And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it was for longer than people expected.
They were nice sometimes, like with Rosetta (and v2).
The answer could potentially be "the docs", but that's not necessarily sufficient like you point out. However, you could ask follow-ups, e.g., whether the docs have multiple facets like user guides in addition to low-level API guides.
OTOH, where you go when don't know how to do something doesn't necessarily have to be the docs, and info here can still be valuable to understand. E.g., are questions typically discussed in public forums or is it discussed in private DMs? The former is typically a better signal in my experience.
And it's not like other ecosystems do better. The standard complaint about JS is that you try to do something basic in that ecosystem and discover you have 10,000 modules in node_modules. Not so different, really, except that the Java stuff comes from a single team with a relatively coherent design philosophy.
but in Java everything is a class, main function? in a class. a library of static functions? in a class.
The real complaint here is more about the syntax boilerplate involved in writing top level functions in Java that map to classes with static methods. Kotlin shows there's no deep reason why the Java language has to be written this way, it's just notation. They picked it to avoid complicating the language with special cases, but I can easily agree that smarter syntax is more important than the Java guys have historically believed. Kotlin is proving this at the moment.
Kidding aside, I always found Java as a core language (and the basic standard library for it) to be mostly fine, but the weird architecture astronaut cult that hovered around it and infected many of the commonly used libraries to be a real problem.
Maybe things are different now for the language, I haven't touched it in many years at this point.
Is that why Google search heavily forces tons of Youtube results to the top now even when it is barely relevant?
Queue the four minute youtube ad.
I think Java is a good language if your problem space is ok with the GC and some other quirks.
The problem space I've been in has issues with GC, so C++ or Rust are the main choices there (Go too, but not my preference).
All I know is that I attend a lot of Java conferences and meetups, and I'm STILL waiting to encounter a flesh-and-blood human in real life whose employer really wavers between Java and Rust. That's like choosing between a Humvee and a submarine, their optimal problem spaces barely overlap.
You'd be surprised. For a lot of stuff Rust is a good fit, aside drivers and OSes, Java is too.
There are succesful full text search engines written in Java (Lucene, and Elasticsearch on top of it), there are succesful event streaming platforms written in Java (Kafka), there are succesful distributed data processing tools written in Java (Hadoop, Spark), databases (Cassandra), and very very high performance trading engines (LMAX), very high performing servers (rapidoid, smart-servlet), and other such things besides, all categories of which have been quite big domains for C/C++ (and thus something like Rust).
The competition I am starting to see is between C++ and Rust, with the few teams looking at Rust loving it. I did recently help write a RFP response that noted software will be written in C++ and Rust, and the RFP was awarded to us.
I am in a different world though, as I am a contractor for the DOD. It's more like a lot of small to medium sized companies than one big company, which is why some groups can use Java and others C++ and others Rust.
I have the same problem of differentiating between hobbyists and professional experience, both on HN and when interviewing. I had someone tell me they knew Java, then found out they had done maybe 5 months of Java work and didn't know some of the most basic things.
As for myself, in terms of writing professional software for clients, I've done the following, in order of amounts worked: Java, C++, Python, Javascript, Erlang, R, Ruby, Clojure, C, Scala, and C#. I've done Rust and Elixir in personal projects, but not yet for clients. I plan to transition to a full-time Rust project in the coming years.
To me it's an indication that programmers are getting to run wild past the technical domain, after all trying to hire for a Java codebase vs a Rust codebase is enough to kill a company depending on the space due to salary expectations and availability alone.
Java => Go
C++ => Rust
The Database and System software that was created in 2000s very much was based on Java. But modern, performant Database and System software is written in Go/C++.
I don't know how many people were working on that
but when developing standard library you do not really want to rush designs. You want to be very, very careful about it.
Here's a book about it from one of the most experienced people in API/Standard lib design on the planet
https://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-Conventio...
https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/allclasse...
So if ~10k classes were really written in a year, then I can only assume that most of that was the compiler or virtual machine runtime (i.e. C++ code) rather than the standard library Java code.
Regardless of how anyone feels about "verbosity" or "design patterns" in Java application code, the underlying JDK is pretty inarguably one of the most solid and impressive pieces of tech ever developed. I'm not throwing any rocks at that codebase.
I agree, JVM is impressive.
Tell that to Haskell.
Also, I've seen some pretty gnarly use of String in Java.
It’s not the lines that take time; it’s getting the code to the “well-designed” state, double so (if not more) for an API.
One of my friends described tech platforms as following a cycle where they're popular while they're loss-leading, but eventually they try to reel in profits that are actually proportional to their valuation, and everyone switches to the next thing. This implies that later investors are duped into holding the bag for something that's not worth the investment. Idk if he's right, but given the tendency for tech to ride bubbles, he could be.
Explains why there are no high performance production Java applications...