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Steve Jobs WAS a flakey joker though. My father was a senior engineer and manager at NeXT, and I often came to the office with him as they built their own manu
by KirinDave 8y ago
Steve Jobs WAS a flakey joker though.
My father was a senior engineer and manager at NeXT, and I often came to the office with him as they built their own manufacturing line. I learned to write my first GUI code on a NeXT Color Station in my father's lab on weekends when he'd go into work. I got to meet Jobs more than once. I realized early on he was a strange and scary guy and that I didn't want to be like him.
Surely ya'll have heard the "triangle firing" story from NeXT? A senior engineer had, as a joke, a triangle up on the wall who's points were labeled "On time, Complete, Under Budget" and at the bottom, "Pick any two." This is a slightly cynical take on a pretty famous constraint diagram. Steve Jobs looked at this and literally fired the guy on the spot for having a "bad attitude." It didn't matter that "it's a joke."
At Apple, Jobs was famously abusive with his staff, demanding that each one be able to entertain and interest him even if that was clearly not their job. It's not a joke to say folks avoided Jobs whenever they could, you could end up with double workload or pressure on your manager or whatever just because you couldn't articulate your current work in a compelling way.
Maybe he succeeded because he was these things, but to many people he was a frightening, tyrannical, capricious person.
- creep 8y ago>I realized early on he was a strange and scary guy and that I didn't want to be like him. What about your interactions with him gave you that impression? Genuinely curious.
- KirinDave 8y agoAt first I thought he was joking about putting me to work at NeXT then I realized he might not be. When I said I still wanted to go to college he gave me a look for just a moment like I was an idiot. He never bothered to notice me again. Not like I had a choice. Holy crap what would my dad have even done to me if I had decided not to go to college...
- scarface74 8y agoIf you had experience at NeXT on your resume before you turned 18, would you have needed to go to college? Alternatively, what's wrong with working for a couple of years to see if you really wanted to go to college for CS? If I had the chance to get a job as a programmer straight out of school, I might have chosen that and go to school part time.
- KirinDave 8y agoI deeply regret not getting a PhD or at least a masters. I'm forever stuck being a slacker without the real insights my peers with such accomplishments have. My career is all about being an operator, and as time goes on this feels more and more hollow. It's not like most folks even remember NeXT.
- scarface74 8y agoIf NeXT hadn't been bought by Apple and the operating system hadn't become the basis of OS X and then the iPhone, it would have been no more than a trivia question. But since it is running on over a billion devices, I think most tech savvy people know about it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]