13 ms·

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big

by mrshoe 16y ago

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. ...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had. Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. They still manage to hire great engineers, though. So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?... any company that needs to have good software. I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's dominated by Steve Jobs and a focus on design and attention to detail. Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft, IMHO. That's very subjective, I realize, but the market seems to agree. At any rate, Apple does produce good software. So are the hacker culture and the elitist focus really necessary for a technology company to succeed? Is Apple a complete anomaly while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are typical? What say you, pg? I realize it's borderline suicidal to post an HN comment that simultaneously calls out pg and lauds Apple, but it's criminal to completely leave the best (imho) technology company out of a discussion about attributes of great technology companies.

pbhjpbhj 16y ago
>Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. The article is about Yahoo and in a round about way the move of internet marketing focus from 90s banner advertising to search marketing in 00s. I didn't find Apple Computers Inc. (as it was) to be missing, indeed I'm kinda at a loss where you think Apple fit in to this article. There are already plenty of articles about Apple.
- _delirium 16y ago
  I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample--- a company that does things basically the opposite of Google, and is very ambivalent about being a technology company rather than a media company, yet is very successful. (One difference is that Apple seems to be very good at selling media/entertainment/image, whereas Yahoo was never a superb media company.)
  - pbhjpbhj 16y ago
    >I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample Check, but it's quite far off from being Yahoo and IMO wouldn't add to this article.
  - statictype 16y ago
    Doesn't Steve Jobs always refer to Apple as a software company? A company that's "passionate about making great software". Even though they make great hardware, his position seems to be that its the software that delivers the product experience.
    - lukifer 16y ago
      Jobs frequently quotes Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."
    - saint-loup 16y ago
      I think wondering whether Apple is a software or hardware company is not the best way to understand the issue. Apple sells devices (and marginally services) that allow you to do things, that's about it. It's not even about experience (I don't know what user experience means, when I go to Google Map, I don't want to have some kind of Magic™ experience, I just want to check some location), it's about having good tools for day-to-day or pro activities. And the merit of Apple is to make this tools so that the hardware interfere with the software and the software doesn't interfere with what Im am doing.
strlen 16y ago
> I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's a mistake to say that. All the work that went into the LLVM/Clang, low-level development that's done OS X and iOS isn't something that you can do without hackers; neither are the algorithms used by Aperture or even iPhoto.
- mrshoe 16y ago
  Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.
  - WiseWeasel 16y ago
    Seems like a strange criterion. Would programmers hired to do HR be fulfilled in their jobs? Would they last very long? How does that even work? Do you slip a javascript requirement in the HR position posting? It just seems like you might be missing out on some great HR talent with such an arbitrary requirement.
    - robryan 16y ago
      It depends if you have 1 HR person or something like 10,20+. If it is a large department, having someone from a programming background that is looking for a change could be a big asset if the HR department is primarily dealing with programmers.
    - flipper 16y ago
      Digressing for a moment, what about the reverse, i.e., how long would the average HR consultant last as a programmer? They'd have to organize a swap: the programmer hands over their brain, the HR consultant their mendacity.
    - jarek 16y ago
      Programmers have all sorts of side interests. I wouldn't mind studying and potentially working in linguistics for a while; I don't see why there wouldn't be someone who's into working with people in an HR-ish role.
pg 16y ago
I don't know enough about what it's like inside Apple now to say. Certainly from what I've heard there used to be a hackerly culture in the past. I remember reading how mystified and offended Gil Amelio was by it. But I don't know what things are like now. Is there anyone here who can talk about it? Is the atmos hackerly or corporate?
- mrshoe 16y ago
  It's neither. It's ship-great-product-y.
  - adammichaelc 16y ago
    So it's hackerly...
    - mrshoe 16y ago
      No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. They often invent new technologies to enable their products, but that's very different from thinking primarily about technology (a mistake, I would argue, that Google is guilty of frequently). Taking as an example a project like Google Wave, I would even go as far as to say that a strong hacker culture and an obnoxious elitist culture of hiring only the best programmers can be serious detriments to a technology company. YMMV, but, culture-wise, I'd much rather build (and work for) an Apple than a Google. Edit in reply to your reply: I thought it was any company that needs to have good software. But even so, surely Apple doesn't pay significantly more than Google (a hacker-centric company) and surely they're in roughly the same domain (iOS/Android, iAd, etc.). I think the real problem is in your next sentence: Otherwise you can't attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. That's a big false dichotomy. Sure, suit-centric technology companies will fail. And hacker-centric technology companies sometimes succeed. I think Apple shows that a culture that is neither suit-centirc nor hacker-centric is the best option of all. If many of your YC companies are trying to build great technology companies, they should take that to heart.
mey 16y ago
I'd argue that Apple is a hardware design company that knows how to contract things correctly (from Mac era to today). Apple has always been focused on a complete packaged form, from Lisa to the iPad. They demand perfection, secrecy, and obsession from their people. Some of their worst years are because the business talent of Steve Jobs was not at the helm. How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking? Apple still see's their OS as a package with the hardware. I would think this is part of their attachment to iOS (that and the massive markup and market penetration they've had so far). The iPod gen 1 through gen 4 was not a hacker platform. " Apple did not develop the iPod software entirely in-house, instead using PortalPlayer's reference platform based on two ARM cores. The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.[4] Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.[4] As development progressed, Apple continued to refine the software's look and feel. " -- Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#1986.E2.80.931993:_Rise_and_fall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#1986.E2.80.931993:_R... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod Edit: I could go on longer, for example, OSX coming from BSD and NextStep etc but I'm done. :)
- philwelch 16y ago
  How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking? About until Steve Jobs came back. But the Apple of 1985 to 1997 was not the Apple of today. That Apple is long dead. The Apple of today is basically NeXT, plus the branding and whatever other assets NeXT could salvage from Apple. As far as that company is concerned, their core OS had protected memory and preemptive multitasking since 1989.
  - jacobolus 16y ago
    Let’s make some other statements about as reasonable as yours (absent further supporting explanation): The Mughal India of the 16th–19th centuries was not the India of today. That India is long dead. The India of today is basically the British Raj, plus the branding, mix of religions and whatever else the British could salvage. The Republican party of 1860–1970 was not the Republican party of today. That GOP is long dead. The GOP of today is basically the unholy mix of Kristol & Podhoretz foreign & economic policy with Jerry Falwell & Pat Robertson social policy, plus the branding and whatever panders to fiscal conservative constituents they could salvage from the party’s historic base of support. The field of economics of 1780–1950 was not the economics of today. That economics is long dead. The economics of today is basically the Friedmanite Chicago school, plus the branding and whatever other assets they could salvage from economics. Now, in all three of these cases, there’s some little bit of truth behind the wholly oversimplified (to the point of wrongness) analysis. But taking these statements at face value obscures more than it reveals, and reflects a poor understanding of how cultural assimilation works in any institution or society. (And denies evolutionary change, as well; Apple today is not exactly the same as Apple of ca. 2000) * * * In short: you’d better have some better analysis to back yourself up here, because as it stands I think your claim is, to the first approximation, false, even if there is a tiny bit of truth to it.
philwelch 16y ago
Apple isn't a software company per se--they have a lot of EE's, other engineers, industrial designers, and so forth. These people have different cultures from hackers, by and large. But by and large they seem to demand the most from everyone they hire, including programmers. They don't have the compulsion to fill up on staff as much as they want to have the best people. It's impossible to tell without working there (and once you work there you probably lose the privilege of speaking openly about this stuff) but it seems Apple is just a generalized, multidisciplinary example of what pg's talking about.
- elblanco 16y ago
  But for all that, I don't think Apple's ever found themselves with the reputation of the type of single-minded overarching elitist snobbery as the backbone of the hiring process in the same way Google has. "...but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring..." Apple seems to want to hire the best, but the best being based on actual capability instead of the school you went to.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    The similarities are more important than the differences. Apple and Google both want to hire the best damn people they can, Google just values academic background a little more.
jdc 16y ago
Great hackers will work under great leaders who have only a working knowledge of the technology. Steve Jobs is the conductor and Apple is the orchestra. Jobs can bring all the right people into a room, sell them his idea, and have them rabidly strive to produce. The real difference here is the management's competence.
dman 16y ago
Some companies with hackerly culture - eg Xerox, Sun , Microsoft seem to enter this phase where a lot of cutting edge research and exciting hacking happens but doesnt translate into revenue or customer appreciation. Apple particularly seems to have avoided this problem phenomenally and sometimes I get the feeling that google is susceptible to it. Any speculation into why this might happen ?
- DanielN 16y ago
  This seems to coinside, at least in the examples you give, with companies that have a "suit culture" who still recognize the importance of perpetuating a hacker culture. Maybe it is a simple flaw in the to-market process for such cultures.
Eliezer 16y ago
Apple is still prestigious for programmers. If you're a good programmer and you work at Apple, you're not embarrassed to tell your friends about it.
- mortenjorck 16y ago
  Apple's legendary UX is driven equally as much by programmers who write efficient code as it is by designers who design efficient UIs.
JesseAldridge 16y ago
Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. You sure about that? From http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/welcome.html http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/welcome.html: "Whether you want to be an iPod engineer, a Concierge at an Apple Retail Store, or a sushi chef on an Apple campus (yes, we have sushi chefs), we’re looking for the best. People who are smart, creative, up for any challenge, and incredibly excited about what they do. In other words, Apple people. You know, the kind of people you’d want to hang around with anyway."
- rmc 16y ago
  Every company says the want to hire the best.
  - JesseAldridge 16y ago
    Which is why I didn't say the claim was false. I just have doubts that it's true. Googling "apple hiring process" turns up this: http://www.ifoapplestore.com/stores/hiring.html http://www.ifoapplestore.com/stores/hiring.html "And lastly, the competition for jobs is intense! Sr. v-p Retail Ron Johnson has said it's tougher to be hired than being accepted by Stanford University--literally. During one talk he said Apple hired 978 store employees during 2002 from an applicant pool of 16,438, or less than a 6% chance of being hired (Stanford accepted 12.6 % for 2005). Put another way, only 1 in 17 applicants is hired." Sure that's just retail, but it seems reasonable to guess that a similar hiring process exists for other fields.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
pvg 16y ago
Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. As it should be since for the most part, Apple has been conspicuously absent as an internet and web company, especially during the period discussed in the article. I have many reservations about the conclusions and generalizations PG draws, but it seems silly to fault him for not including Apple. He didn't mention General Electric either.
gokhan 16y ago
On producing good software... Apple's software always runs on controlled environments. I wonder if they can pay that much attention to detail if they build for Web (Google) or any random hardware (Microsoft). Apple somehow avoids the added complexity of supporting the majority. For now it works, though.
pointillistic 16y ago
Speaking of Apple. Perhaps for personal reasons PG omits to mention the business trajectory and the personality of the leaders.This includes the element of luck that is far greater component of success that a culture, even the hacker culture. This doesn't mean that the culture is not important but you cant have an argument about "what went wrong with Yahoo" without "what went right with Yahoo" or Google, etc. In case of Yahoo a nothing HTML page was propelled to a media empire during the crazy dotcom boom, while Google stumbled as randomly onto the search goldmine. Both companies were created in the PhD classrooms of Stanford U, not in a garage like Apple. Next both Google and Yahoo brought in professional executives or "suits" to run the firms, speak to Wall St. etc. Eric Schmidt is a professional CEO, not a hacker. He was at Sun, then he tried to revive Novell and then was tapped for Google.Yahoo is also run by a professional CEO now. How does that compare to the single minded life long vision of Steve Jobs? What role the leadership and their personalities plays in running the companies beyond the culture? Remember Apple was a "has been" company with plenty of suits and they even fired Steve Jobs at some point. There is a fundamental flaw in PG's argument, he is trying to have a rational explanation about an irrational path to success of failure.
- jonknee 16y ago
  Eric Schmidt is a hacker... He even wrote lex.
  - acqq 16y ago
    Wow that's interesting: I've found a paper from 1975 Lex − A Lexical Analyzer Generator http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf and Google's Eric E Schmidt was only 20 at that time according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt He got BSEE on Princeton in 1976. OK, both Bell Labs and Princeton are in New Jersey, but it's still quite impressive to be the developer of lex in Bell Labs as a 20-year old Princeton student. Of course even more impressive is being 129th richest person in the world in 2006.
- geebee 16y ago
  Eric Schmidt does wear a suit, that is true. But I always thought that the type of professional CEO chosen by yahoo and google essentially told the story of the future of the two companies. Eric Schmidt has a PhD in CS (according to wikipedia, he wrote his dissertation on solving problems in distributed computing). Terry Semel has a BS in accounting and worked in the entertainment industry for two decades (warner bros). I don't know much more about the two men, but I'm 100% certain that Schmidt did a colossal amount of programming in his day, and I really doubt that Semel ever did, though I can't be sure of this. This has to have a serious effect on the hacker culture. If nothing else, Google's choice sends a message to programmers that technical ability matters all the way to the top. Yahoo's says it doesn't, at least not enough to be a required attribute of the highest ranking person at the company.
dieterrams 16y ago
Apple is a user experience-centric culture, with a profound appreciation for how excellent engineering makes better user experiences possible. This definitely doesn't strike me as hacker-centric in that Googley/Facebookey way that PG describes. Apple undoubtedly employs many talented hackers, but they're not so much the center of its culture as they are its foundation. A brilliant and responsive UI with a stupidly simple implementation will be more highly prized than a work of coding genius that only marginally furthers user experience. Of course, if you want to extend the idea of hacking so that one can speak of user experience hackers, then Apple would definitely qualify as having a "hacker-centric culture".
bioskope 16y ago
Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft Not really. Please do not confuse Apple's successful products with anything else. Microsoft still delivers on software products in a way (admittedly a hardware company)Apple never could. Oh and as for comparisons with Google, thats even more ludicrous.

by mrshoe 16y ago

pbhjpbhj 16y ago

>Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. The article is about Yahoo and in a round about way the move of internet marketing focus from 90s banner advertising to search marketing in 00s. I didn't find Apple Computers Inc. (as it was) to be missing, indeed I'm kinda at a loss where you think Apple fit in to this article. There are already plenty of articles about Apple.

_delirium 16y ago
I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample--- a company that does things basically the opposite of Google, and is very ambivalent about being a technology company rather than a media company, yet is very successful. (One difference is that Apple seems to be very good at selling media/entertainment/image, whereas Yahoo was never a superb media company.)
- pbhjpbhj 16y ago
  >I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample Check, but it's quite far off from being Yahoo and IMO wouldn't add to this article.
- statictype 16y ago
  Doesn't Steve Jobs always refer to Apple as a software company? A company that's "passionate about making great software". Even though they make great hardware, his position seems to be that its the software that delivers the product experience.
  - lukifer 16y ago
    Jobs frequently quotes Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."
  - saint-loup 16y ago
    I think wondering whether Apple is a software or hardware company is not the best way to understand the issue. Apple sells devices (and marginally services) that allow you to do things, that's about it. It's not even about experience (I don't know what user experience means, when I go to Google Map, I don't want to have some kind of Magic™ experience, I just want to check some location), it's about having good tools for day-to-day or pro activities. And the merit of Apple is to make this tools so that the hardware interfere with the software and the software doesn't interfere with what Im am doing.

strlen 16y ago

> I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's a mistake to say that. All the work that went into the LLVM/Clang, low-level development that's done OS X and iOS isn't something that you can do without hackers; neither are the algorithms used by Aperture or even iPhoto.

mrshoe 16y ago
Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.
- WiseWeasel 16y ago
  Seems like a strange criterion. Would programmers hired to do HR be fulfilled in their jobs? Would they last very long? How does that even work? Do you slip a javascript requirement in the HR position posting? It just seems like you might be missing out on some great HR talent with such an arbitrary requirement.
  - robryan 16y ago
    It depends if you have 1 HR person or something like 10,20+. If it is a large department, having someone from a programming background that is looking for a change could be a big asset if the HR department is primarily dealing with programmers.
  - flipper 16y ago
    Digressing for a moment, what about the reverse, i.e., how long would the average HR consultant last as a programmer? They'd have to organize a swap: the programmer hands over their brain, the HR consultant their mendacity.
  - jarek 16y ago
    Programmers have all sorts of side interests. I wouldn't mind studying and potentially working in linguistics for a while; I don't see why there wouldn't be someone who's into working with people in an HR-ish role.

pg 16y ago

I don't know enough about what it's like inside Apple now to say. Certainly from what I've heard there used to be a hackerly culture in the past. I remember reading how mystified and offended Gil Amelio was by it. But I don't know what things are like now. Is there anyone here who can talk about it? Is the atmos hackerly or corporate?

mrshoe 16y ago
It's neither. It's ship-great-product-y.
- adammichaelc 16y ago
  So it's hackerly...
  - mrshoe 16y ago
    No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment. One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. They often invent new technologies to enable their products, but that's very different from thinking primarily about technology (a mistake, I would argue, that Google is guilty of frequently). Taking as an example a project like Google Wave, I would even go as far as to say that a strong hacker culture and an obnoxious elitist culture of hiring only the best programmers can be serious detriments to a technology company. YMMV, but, culture-wise, I'd much rather build (and work for) an Apple than a Google. Edit in reply to your reply: I thought it was any company that needs to have good software. But even so, surely Apple doesn't pay significantly more than Google (a hacker-centric company) and surely they're in roughly the same domain (iOS/Android, iAd, etc.). I think the real problem is in your next sentence: Otherwise you can't attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. That's a big false dichotomy. Sure, suit-centric technology companies will fail. And hacker-centric technology companies sometimes succeed. I think Apple shows that a culture that is neither suit-centirc nor hacker-centric is the best option of all. If many of your YC companies are trying to build great technology companies, they should take that to heart.

mey 16y ago

I'd argue that Apple is a hardware design company that knows how to contract things correctly (from Mac era to today). Apple has always been focused on a complete packaged form, from Lisa to the iPad. They demand perfection, secrecy, and obsession from their people. Some of their worst years are because the business talent of Steve Jobs was not at the helm. How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking? Apple still see's their OS as a package with the hardware. I would think this is part of their attachment to iOS (that and the massive markup and market penetration they've had so far). The iPod gen 1 through gen 4 was not a hacker platform. " Apple did not develop the iPod software entirely in-house, instead using PortalPlayer's reference platform based on two ARM cores. The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.[4] Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.[4] As development progressed, Apple continued to refine the software's look and feel. " -- Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#1986.E2.80.931993:_Rise_and_fall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#1986.E2.80.931993:_R... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod Edit: I could go on longer, for example, OSX coming from BSD and NextStep etc but I'm done. :)

philwelch 16y ago
How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking? About until Steve Jobs came back. But the Apple of 1985 to 1997 was not the Apple of today. That Apple is long dead. The Apple of today is basically NeXT, plus the branding and whatever other assets NeXT could salvage from Apple. As far as that company is concerned, their core OS had protected memory and preemptive multitasking since 1989.
- jacobolus 16y ago
  Let’s make some other statements about as reasonable as yours (absent further supporting explanation): The Mughal India of the 16th–19th centuries was not the India of today. That India is long dead. The India of today is basically the British Raj, plus the branding, mix of religions and whatever else the British could salvage. The Republican party of 1860–1970 was not the Republican party of today. That GOP is long dead. The GOP of today is basically the unholy mix of Kristol & Podhoretz foreign & economic policy with Jerry Falwell & Pat Robertson social policy, plus the branding and whatever panders to fiscal conservative constituents they could salvage from the party’s historic base of support. The field of economics of 1780–1950 was not the economics of today. That economics is long dead. The economics of today is basically the Friedmanite Chicago school, plus the branding and whatever other assets they could salvage from economics. Now, in all three of these cases, there’s some little bit of truth behind the wholly oversimplified (to the point of wrongness) analysis. But taking these statements at face value obscures more than it reveals, and reflects a poor understanding of how cultural assimilation works in any institution or society. (And denies evolutionary change, as well; Apple today is not exactly the same as Apple of ca. 2000) * * * In short: you’d better have some better analysis to back yourself up here, because as it stands I think your claim is, to the first approximation, false, even if there is a tiny bit of truth to it.

philwelch 16y ago

Apple isn't a software company per se--they have a lot of EE's, other engineers, industrial designers, and so forth. These people have different cultures from hackers, by and large. But by and large they seem to demand the most from everyone they hire, including programmers. They don't have the compulsion to fill up on staff as much as they want to have the best people. It's impossible to tell without working there (and once you work there you probably lose the privilege of speaking openly about this stuff) but it seems Apple is just a generalized, multidisciplinary example of what pg's talking about.

elblanco 16y ago
But for all that, I don't think Apple's ever found themselves with the reputation of the type of single-minded overarching elitist snobbery as the backbone of the hiring process in the same way Google has. "...but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring..." Apple seems to want to hire the best, but the best being based on actual capability instead of the school you went to.
- philwelch 16y ago
  The similarities are more important than the differences. Apple and Google both want to hire the best damn people they can, Google just values academic background a little more.

jdc 16y ago

Great hackers will work under great leaders who have only a working knowledge of the technology. Steve Jobs is the conductor and Apple is the orchestra. Jobs can bring all the right people into a room, sell them his idea, and have them rabidly strive to produce. The real difference here is the management's competence.

dman 16y ago

Some companies with hackerly culture - eg Xerox, Sun , Microsoft seem to enter this phase where a lot of cutting edge research and exciting hacking happens but doesnt translate into revenue or customer appreciation. Apple particularly seems to have avoided this problem phenomenally and sometimes I get the feeling that google is susceptible to it. Any speculation into why this might happen ?

DanielN 16y ago
This seems to coinside, at least in the examples you give, with companies that have a "suit culture" who still recognize the importance of perpetuating a hacker culture. Maybe it is a simple flaw in the to-market process for such cultures.

Eliezer 16y ago

Apple is still prestigious for programmers. If you're a good programmer and you work at Apple, you're not embarrassed to tell your friends about it.

mortenjorck 16y ago
Apple's legendary UX is driven equally as much by programmers who write efficient code as it is by designers who design efficient UIs.

JesseAldridge 16y ago

Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. You sure about that? From http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/welcome.html http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/welcome.html: "Whether you want to be an iPod engineer, a Concierge at an Apple Retail Store, or a sushi chef on an Apple campus (yes, we have sushi chefs), we’re looking for the best. People who are smart, creative, up for any challenge, and incredibly excited about what they do. In other words, Apple people. You know, the kind of people you’d want to hang around with anyway."

rmc 16y ago
Every company says the want to hire the best.
- JesseAldridge 16y ago
  Which is why I didn't say the claim was false. I just have doubts that it's true. Googling "apple hiring process" turns up this: http://www.ifoapplestore.com/stores/hiring.html http://www.ifoapplestore.com/stores/hiring.html "And lastly, the competition for jobs is intense! Sr. v-p Retail Ron Johnson has said it's tougher to be hired than being accepted by Stanford University--literally. During one talk he said Apple hired 978 store employees during 2002 from an applicant pool of 16,438, or less than a 6% chance of being hired (Stanford accepted 12.6 % for 2005). Put another way, only 1 in 17 applicants is hired." Sure that's just retail, but it seems reasonable to guess that a similar hiring process exists for other fields.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

pvg 16y ago

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article. As it should be since for the most part, Apple has been conspicuously absent as an internet and web company, especially during the period discussed in the article. I have many reservations about the conclusions and generalizations PG draws, but it seems silly to fault him for not including Apple. He didn't mention General Electric either.

gokhan 16y ago

On producing good software... Apple's software always runs on controlled environments. I wonder if they can pay that much attention to detail if they build for Web (Google) or any random hardware (Microsoft). Apple somehow avoids the added complexity of supporting the majority. For now it works, though.

pointillistic 16y ago

Speaking of Apple. Perhaps for personal reasons PG omits to mention the business trajectory and the personality of the leaders.This includes the element of luck that is far greater component of success that a culture, even the hacker culture. This doesn't mean that the culture is not important but you cant have an argument about "what went wrong with Yahoo" without "what went right with Yahoo" or Google, etc. In case of Yahoo a nothing HTML page was propelled to a media empire during the crazy dotcom boom, while Google stumbled as randomly onto the search goldmine. Both companies were created in the PhD classrooms of Stanford U, not in a garage like Apple. Next both Google and Yahoo brought in professional executives or "suits" to run the firms, speak to Wall St. etc. Eric Schmidt is a professional CEO, not a hacker. He was at Sun, then he tried to revive Novell and then was tapped for Google.Yahoo is also run by a professional CEO now. How does that compare to the single minded life long vision of Steve Jobs? What role the leadership and their personalities plays in running the companies beyond the culture? Remember Apple was a "has been" company with plenty of suits and they even fired Steve Jobs at some point. There is a fundamental flaw in PG's argument, he is trying to have a rational explanation about an irrational path to success of failure.

jonknee 16y ago
Eric Schmidt is a hacker... He even wrote lex.
- acqq 16y ago
  Wow that's interesting: I've found a paper from 1975 Lex − A Lexical Analyzer Generator http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf and Google's Eric E Schmidt was only 20 at that time according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt He got BSEE on Princeton in 1976. OK, both Bell Labs and Princeton are in New Jersey, but it's still quite impressive to be the developer of lex in Bell Labs as a 20-year old Princeton student. Of course even more impressive is being 129th richest person in the world in 2006.
geebee 16y ago
Eric Schmidt does wear a suit, that is true. But I always thought that the type of professional CEO chosen by yahoo and google essentially told the story of the future of the two companies. Eric Schmidt has a PhD in CS (according to wikipedia, he wrote his dissertation on solving problems in distributed computing). Terry Semel has a BS in accounting and worked in the entertainment industry for two decades (warner bros). I don't know much more about the two men, but I'm 100% certain that Schmidt did a colossal amount of programming in his day, and I really doubt that Semel ever did, though I can't be sure of this. This has to have a serious effect on the hacker culture. If nothing else, Google's choice sends a message to programmers that technical ability matters all the way to the top. Yahoo's says it doesn't, at least not enough to be a required attribute of the highest ranking person at the company.

dieterrams 16y ago

Apple is a user experience-centric culture, with a profound appreciation for how excellent engineering makes better user experiences possible. This definitely doesn't strike me as hacker-centric in that Googley/Facebookey way that PG describes. Apple undoubtedly employs many talented hackers, but they're not so much the center of its culture as they are its foundation. A brilliant and responsive UI with a stupidly simple implementation will be more highly prized than a work of coding genius that only marginally furthers user experience. Of course, if you want to extend the idea of hacking so that one can speak of user experience hackers, then Apple would definitely qualify as having a "hacker-centric culture".

bioskope 16y ago

Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft Not really. Please do not confuse Apple's successful products with anything else. Microsoft still delivers on software products in a way (admittedly a hardware company)Apple never could. Oh and as for comparisons with Google, thats even more ludicrous.