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Jim Black's Steve Jobs Story

455 points by tzhenghao 8y ago

cvaidya1986 8y ago
Great story.
js2 8y ago
Copy/paste for those wanting to avoid FB. Jim Black (May 16 at 8:25pm): I had the privilege of working with John Carmack as a technology evangelist at Apple when he ported Quake III Arena to Rhapsody, Apple’s internal name for the OpenStep/Mach kernel based MacOS X. I enjoyed John's reminiscence about working with Steve and Apple and thought I would share a few of my own memories from that time which provided me with some of the most satisfying moments and lessons of my career. John was the first game developer I ever worked with. Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him. John agreed to come to Cupertino and meet with several teams to share his development experiences with them. I picked him up in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. He stood unassumingly in the lobby, framed in the background by a Christmas Tree. On day one, we met with several internal teams at Apple. I was accustomed to see 3rd party developers emerge somewhat awed by their meetings with Apple engineers. In John’s case the reaction was reversed. I’ve never seen anyone grok complex systems and architectures so quickly and thoroughly as John. Amusingly, he walked around the Apple campus unrecognized by all but for the occasional, former NeXT employee. On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood. After an hour of waiting for Steve in IL1, he marched into the room, and immediately mistook me for John Carmack, extending his hand to shake mine (we had never met). I locked eyes with Steve Jobs and looked down significantly at the Apple badge on my belt. Without missing a beat, Steve shifted his extended hand to John's. That’s when Steve noticed the T-shirt and the meeting, as soon as it had begun, took a turn for the worse. Steve’s jaw muscles visibly tensed and he became stone-faced. Clearly deeply offended by John’s T-shirt, he sat down at the conference table and looked straight ahead, silent. John kicked off the meeting by saying, “So I’ve been working with MacOS for the past month and here’s what I learned.” His #1 concern (at an extremely high level) concerned OpenGL permissions and security for which he felt Apple needed a better solution than what he’d learned about the day before in meetings with the graphics team, even if it came at a slight cost in performance for 3D games. This was, suffice to say, typical of John in that he was approaching an issue from an objective engineering perspective and arguing for the most technically correct solution rather than pushing for something that might be of benefit to his personal projects. Steve listened and abruptly said, “That’s not what we’re doing!” Then he looked at the three Apple employees in the room and asked, “Is it?” I confirmed that what John was raising as a concern came from a meeting with the graphics architecture team the day before. Without batting an eye, Steve stood up, tramped over to a Polycom phone and dialed from apparent memory the phone number of the engineering director whose admin informed Steve that he was at an offsite in Palo Alto. Steve hung up, sat down, and about 30 seconds later the phone rang with the engineering director on the line. Steve said, “I’m here with a graphics developer. I want you to tell him everything we’re doing in MacOS X from a graphics architecture perspective.” Then he put his elbows on the table and adopted a prayer-like hand pose, listening to and weighing the arguments from his trusted director of engineering and from the game guy with the bloody smiley-face T-shirt. And what happened next was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever witnessed about Steve or any Silicon Valley exec. Early on in the discussion, the Apple engineer realized that “graphics engineer” in the room was John Carmack. And he realized that he was going to need to defend his technical decision, on the merits, in front of Steve. After extended back and forth, the Apple engineer said, “John, what you’re arguing for is the ideal …” He never made it to the next word because Steve suddenly stood bolt upright, slamming both palms onto the desk and shouting, “NO!!!!” “NO!!! What John is saying is NOT the ideal. What John is saying is what we have to do!!! Why are we doing this? Why are we going to all this trouble to build this ship when you’re putting a TORPEDO IN ITS HULL?!!!!” All of this was said with the utmost conviction and at extremely high volume. To his credit, John, seated directly next to a yelling Steve Jobs, didn’t even flinch. What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service. Steve listened to both sides and made a call that would have long lasting implications for MacOS. As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment. After the meeting ended, I walked John to the Apple store on campus (this was before there were actual Apple stores) and asked him on the way what he thought of Steve’s response to the mouse comment. John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.” Good call, John :)
- Jarb 8y ago
  Thank you, much appreciated! I always wondered if the decision to only have one fire button in Q3A was based off its compatibility with Mac OS, and thus a lack of a second mouse button. Other FPS at the time (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Half-Life) usually had a secondary fire button to allow for alternate weapon functions (e.g. grenade launcher on SMG, zoom on sniper rifle/crossbow, etc), which was mapped to the right mouse button.
  - pvg 8y ago
    Seems unlikely, since Q3A used all the mouse buttons on PC by default, just like in previous versions of Quake. Those games also don't have secondary firing modes, Q3A is supposed to be a sort of ultimate refinement of Quake deathmatch.
  - justin66 8y ago
    No, secondary weapon functions were never a q3 thing. They wouldn't have nerfed the game for OS X regardless, especially not when you could just plug in a PC mouse or rebind the controls to use some other key.
- usefulcat 8y ago
  > Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” That's a bit like saying that the worst thing about losing an arm is that now your shirts don't fit. The iMac mouse sucked because it was round, making it nearly impossible to tell without looking at it whether it was pointed the right way. So when you thought you were moving it straight up, the pointer would nearly always wander off to the side. I never did understand how they could make such a huge blunder, given that the mouse is literally the first control (after the power button) one would typically use to interact with a Mac.
  - kps 8y ago
    Not just because it was round, but because it was round without tactile directional cues. DEC had some round mice, which, while not great, did not have the Jobs-puck orientation problem because they had distinct buttons. https://www.oldmouse.com/articles/hawley/DEC-VAX.shtml https://www.oldmouse.com/articles/hawley/DEC-VAX.shtml
post_break 8y ago
"On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood." Was it the watchmen comedian logo?
- wyldfire 8y ago
  That seems likely from the description. I don't know if Jobs knowing that would've changed much for their interaction though.
- dpflan 8y ago
  I think it's a similar design, but I have a vivid memory of a kid in my elementary school (~1995) wearing a shirt like this: black t-shirt with a big yellow smiley face with gory bullet-wound to the forehead. It was a strong image especially for kids. The Watchmen logo is spattered on the side. I can't find the t-shirt I'm remembering but there are similar current examples: https://www.amazon.com/Smiley-Bullet-Black-Adult-T-Shirt/dp/B014Q6CZ6A https://www.amazon.com/Smiley-Bullet-Black-Adult-T-Shirt/dp/... > Watchmen Smiley Face: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen#/media/File:Watchmen,_issue_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen#/media/File:Watchmen,...
  - empath75 8y ago
    When I was a kid I made an animation of that on an amiga 500. Yellow smiley face, gunshot in the forehead and blood dripping down. I showed my dad and I still don’t know if he was impressed that I figured out how to do that or thought I should see a psychiatrist.
- Isamu 8y ago
  Does anybody remember the interface from Plan9 or Inferno where the "kill process" button was originally a smiley face with blood trickling from a bullet hole in the forehead? Then they fixed it to be more bland when it started shipping more. Oh, and the Comedian just wore a regular smiley button. The blood was his own, spattered from when he was thrown from a building. No bullet hole.
cornholio 8y ago
Jobs comes off as quite an obnoxious dude.
- bgroins 8y ago
  I love the incessant deification of Steve Jobs, regardless of his mistakes, juvenile behavior, and constant stories about his abuse of his staff. In this story Jobs mistakes the wrong person for John Carmack, becomes deeply offended by a silly t-shirt, screams at his staff and slams his hands the table like a 2 year old. But the author is impressed with Jobs and makes him out to be the hero. At my work we would call this a hostile and abusive work environment, but within the Jobs cult of personality it's a net positive.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    Actually I wouldn't be surprised if anyone else at Apple behaving like Jobs would quickly receive a warning from HR if not shown the door.
    - e1ven 8y ago
      For example, You may note that Scott Forstall doesn't work at Apple anymore.
      - rusk 8y ago
        * Scott Forstall doesn't work at Apple anymore* and neither does software ...
        tambourine_man 8y ago
        Ouch
    - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
      Because as an employee, you’re basically the ultimate cuck in the eyes of upper management.
robotkdick 8y ago
Here's a link to the original John Carmack story in case anyone missed it: https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=214641282559.. https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=214641282559....
stagger87 8y ago
This is a typical situation for most companies. I've been in the position of the "trusted engineer" several times where conversations with customers can very quickly change the direction of engineering. Fortunately, in all of those situations my boss wasn't an asshole. Honestly, all these recent stories about jobs really just paint him in a negative light.
- wpietri 8y ago
  Definitely. And my real issue with Jobs is more the ripple effect. So many people read stories of Jobs being an asshole and think, "Oh, this is how you success." Ignoring the many assholes who weren't as brilliant or as thoroughly lucky. Look at Theranos, for example. The CEO was practically a Jobs impersonator. From the turtlenecks and the air of brilliance to the controlling, abusive, and secrecy-oriented behaviors. How many people fell for the fraud? And I can't count the wantrepreneurs I've come across that had similar theories.
  - lowken10 8y ago
    I think Elizabeth Holmes belongs in prison. However, I read her bio and she was a genius on par with Jobs.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      For breaking what law(s)?
      - rpedela 8y ago
        Fraud? The kind of fraud that can get someone hurt or killed like the bogus diagnostic tests which could mean a patient ends up taking the wrong drug and/or dose which hurts them.
        paulcole 8y ago
        Do you think Elon Musk should be in jail for the misleading content on this page: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
degenerate 8y ago
Can anyone with knowledge of the "OpenGL permissions and security" issue explain the problem?
- justin66 8y ago
  You'd need knowledge of the beta version of Open GL on OS X, from twenty years ago, as well.
- rusk 8y ago
  I've no knowledge of OpenGL but based on the content in the story I'd take a stab that they weren't implemented fully for performance reasons. I don't know why a game developer would be so concerned with that though. But I know nothing about game development either ...
- mentat 8y ago
  Probably the ability to read memory from arbitrary places in the kernel via DMA. It's continued to be a challenged for DMA devices...
  - justin66 8y ago
    Carmack worked on the Linux Utah-GLX drivers in the runup to q3's release and would have had a lot of thoughts on the low-level GL implementation details.
JacobJans 8y ago
John Carmack's reminiscences about Steve Jobs: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223...
- rusk 8y ago
  Here's that story for those that don't want to go to FB too :) John Carmack 14 May at 17:27 · Steve Jobs My wife once asked me “Why do you drop what you are doing when Steve Jobs asks you to do something? You don’t do that for anyone else.” It is worth thinking about. As a teenage Apple computer fan, Jobs and Wozniak were revered figures for me, and wanting an Apple 2 was a defining characteristic of several years of my childhood. Later on, seeing NeXT at a computer show just as I was selling my first commercial software felt like a vision into the future. (But $10k+, yikes!) As Id Software grew successful through Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, the first major personal purchase I made wasn’t a car, but rather a NeXT computer. It turned out to be genuinely valuable for our software development, and we moved the entire company onto NeXT hardware. We loved our NeXTs, and we wanted to launch Doom with an explicit “Developed on NeXT computers” logo during the startup process, but when we asked, the request was denied. Some time after launch, when Doom had begun to make its cultural mark, we heard that Steve had changed his mind and would be happy to have NeXT branding on it, but that ship had sailed. I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs. Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally. When NeXT managed to sort of reverse-acquire Apple and Steve was back in charge, I was excited by the possibilities of a resurgent Apple with the virtues of NeXT in a mainstream platform. I was brought in to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve. Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.” It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions. But when I knew what I was talking about, I would stand my ground against anyone. When Steve did make up his mind, he was decisive about it. Dictates were made, companies were acquired, keynotes were scheduled, and the reality distortion field kicked in, making everything else that was previously considered into obviously terrible ideas. I consider this one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had. OpenGL never seriously threatened D3D on PC, but it was critical at Apple, and that meant that it remained enough of a going concern to be the clear choice when mobile devices started getting GPUs. While long in the tooth now, it was so much better than what we would have gotten if half a dozen SoC vendors rolled their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age. I wound up doing several keynotes with Steve, and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method. My first impression of “Keynote Steve” was him berating the poor stage hands over “This Home Depot shit” that was rolling out the display stand with the new Mac, very much not to his satisfaction. His complaints had a valid point, and he improved the quality of the presentation by caring about details, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work for him in that capacity. One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote. When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo. I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with: “I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.” That goes a long way, and nobody said a thing after that. When my wife and I later started building games for feature phones (DoomRPG! Orcs&Elves!), I advocated repeatedly to Steve that an Apple phone could be really great. Every time there was a rumor that Apple might be working on a phone, I would refine the pitch to him. Once he called me at home on a Sunday (How did he even get my number?) to ask a question, and I enthused at length about the possibilities. I never got brought into the fold, but I was excited when the iPhone actually did see the light of day. A giant (for the time) true color display with a GPU! We could do some amazing things with this! Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the same keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”. After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access! Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine. I was making some guesses, but I argued that the iPhone hardware and OS provided sufficient protection for native apps. I pointed at a nearby engineer and said “Don’t you have an MMU and process isolation on the iPhone now?” He had a wide eyed look of don’t-bring-me-into-this, but I eventually got a “yes” out of him. I said that OS-X was surely being used for things that were more security critical than a phone, and if Apple couldn’t provide enough security there, they had bigger problems. He came back with a snide “You’re a smart guy John, why don’t you write a new OS?” At the time, my thought was, “Fuck you, Steve.”. People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn’t want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that “Steve appreciates vigorous conversation”. Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn’t appreciate that. The Steve Jobs “hero / shithead” rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready. I wound up writing several successful iPhone apps on the side (all of which are now gone due to dropping 32 bit support, which saddens me), and I had many strong allies inside Apple, but I was on the outs with Steve. The last iOS product I worked on was Rage for iOS, which I thought set a new bar for visual richness on mobile, and also supported some brand new features like TV out. I heard that it was well received inside Apple. I was debriefing the team after the launch when I got a call. I was busy, so I declined it. A few minutes later someone came in and said that Steve was going to call me. Oops. Everyone had a chuckle about me “hanging up on Steve Jobs”, but that turned out to be my last interaction with him. As the public story of his failing health progressed, I started several emails to try to say something meaningful and positive to part on, but I never got through them, and I regret it. I corroborate many of the negative character traits that he was infamous for, but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe. I showed up for him.
jccalhoun 8y ago
Interesting story. Can the link be changed to the non-mobile version?
- robotkdick 8y ago
  You can replace the m in the link with www to get a non-mobile version.
ryandrake 8y ago
> Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him. Weird how “writing portable software” was (and in many places still is) considered deep wizardry. I remember the timeframe described here and indeed “porting our software to a non-Windows platform” was on every company’s list of things they’ll never have time to do, because everyone’s code base was so thoroughly (often unnecessarily) tied to Win32. The bad ol days...
- MBCook 8y ago
  To be fair if you’re doing all your own UI it’s a bit easier. Porting a bunch of Win32 GUI to Carbon/Cocoa would be a big deal. But I agree. I remember being impressed at seeing boxed Linux copies day one. Yet today we can still wait YEARS for Mac ports of games, if we get them at all, even though they’re using a cross platform engine.
  - ovao 8y ago
    The Linux edition of Q3A also — remarkably — came in a collector's tin, which I severely regret not buying at the time.
    - MBCook 8y ago
      That was the box that lasted the longest at my local computer store, long after almost all other boxed Linux software disappeared.
- barrkel 8y ago
  It's a bit easier in a game that renders its whole UI custom, though. A standard desktop app would be heavily tied to Win32 simply because of UI controls. Similarly, a server app, if designed for performance, would likely be using overlapped I/O.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
waynecochran 8y ago
Great comment about the mouse at the end. John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.” The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is throw away their crappy mouse, and replace it with a decent three button mouse.
- ovao 8y ago
  You throw away an $80 mouse?
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    No different than throwing away a $100 OS when you buy a computer. Sometimes there simply isn't a way to purchase it without the undesired item included.
  - ThrowawayR2 8y ago
    > You throw away an $80 mouse? If it doesn't do what one wants it to do, it's worth $0 to them.
    - ovao 8y ago
      But potentially worth something to someone else, which is an argument for selling it or even donating it. Throwing it away seems downright silly.
- golergka 8y ago
  Funny how people can such a different taste for these things. I've switched back from Mac to Windows some time ago, and the thing I miss the most is the touchbar.
  - Jyaif 8y ago
    You can't possibly mean the touchbar. Are you talking about the touchpad?
scarface74 8y ago
In his story about how Steve Jobs told the engineer point blank to make changes and how impressive it was. I think a lot of people underestimate how effective Steve Jobs was as the CEO because he was Steve Jobs. A CEO of a company has role power, but that's really the least effective. If the employees don't respect thier managers, the managers can't be effective. It's usually used by production workers, but developers will also Work-to-Rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) and do the bare minimum. I don't know of any non founder CEO that can inspire workers (or investors) to follow them in a completely different direction.
- baxtr 8y ago
  I wonder how long that guy stayed at Apple afterwards, does anyone know?
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Why wouldn't he stay? If the decision was technically correct and he may be able to talk to Carmack directly to ask for advice, that would be a rare opportunity to learn.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - AceJohnny2 8y ago
    Edit: oh wait, you're probably asking about the Engineering Directory, not Jim Black. Jim Black's facebook page says he's VP at Magic Leap, so this must be him: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimblack2 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimblack2 Looks like this was during his second stint at Apple, where he stayed for just 1 year, before going to NVIDIA for 16 years. He did have a previous stint at Apple from 1992-1997, so 5 years.
golergka 8y ago
> Clearly deeply offended by John’s T-shirt, he sat down at the conference table and looked straight ahead, silent. Why would he be offended by Watchmen reference?
- toxicFork 8y ago
  From John Carmack's post - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825... ) "When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.”"
- nailer 8y ago
  I really wish people would stop downvoting polite questions like this. This is a reasonable thing to ask (I had the same question and just searched for it in these comments) and it feels odd that it's omitted from the story.
  - PhasmaFelis 8y ago
    This particular one was probably downvoted because it's either naive or a weak joke to assume that Jobs knew or cared that it was a Watchmen reference. A much better question would be "why was he offended by a fairly innocuous T-shirt." That's the sort of thing that might get you the side-eye from a particularly high-strung middle school teacher, but it's pretty funny to imagine someone like Jobs being so uptight.
CNJ7654 8y ago
I saw Steve Jobs at a grocery store in Los Angeles. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying. The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter. When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
mehrdada 8y ago
This YouTube clip (at ~2hr into the video) ties in with the original story that Carmack told about his wedding and is where Steve chronicles the story from his angle: https://youtu.be/SjlLG1EzJ2k?t=7223 https://youtu.be/SjlLG1EzJ2k?t=7223
mathattack 8y ago
Interesting. I’ve seen other Jobsesque CEOs in action. One was the only person in the company who could overrule an internally focused CTO. I couldn’t figure out if it was “Thank God we have him to defend the views of our partners or customers” or “A great CEO shouldn’t set up an org that needs this kind of intervention.” The “Only I know best” types tend to flame out before they get the Jobsian Success. (Even Jobs needed to crash and burn one and a half times)
- ksec 8y ago
  was there ever a cto at apple.
stcredzero 8y ago
What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service. In terms of diplomacy and tone, Steve Jobs doesn't do well in this story. However, for intellectual and engineering integrity, he's in entirely different league from most US politicians. From what I've seen, the typical US politican would rather puff up and pretend their constituent's majority position is scientific fact than actually engage with science, fact, and expertise. I think this is a good way to sum up his genius abilities: 1) An ability to see past consensual illusions to engineering and design truths and first principles. 2) A low ability to transmit such insights in a diplomatic way. (Though, given a position of power, his messages are unambiguous and highly persuasive. Effective != moral, however.)
- philwelch 8y ago
  There's enough stories where Jobs could be persuasive when he wanted to; it's just a lot easier to scream at someone if that would work, too. I'm reminded of Lyndon Johnson, oddly enough.
- Nomentatus 8y ago
  'Tis true we don't know the backstory - but Steve may have tangled with his guy before, he may have tried diplomacy with him and before and found it just didn't penetrate his defenses, or he may have felt the display was necessary to nudge another one or two of his troops who were present. Or he may have wanted to create a viral story to prod his troops and the situation provided him the perfect opportunity. I've known bosses who planned and scripted their explosions (and the topic of them) days or even weeks in advance and then waited for the right moment in front of the right crowd to present itself, if the issue was sufficiently critical, to pop their cork spectacularly. So we can't necessarily assume Jobs was impetuously undiplomatic or just fumbled the diplomacy aspect. I do believe there are instances of Jobs exhibiting diplomacy and politess.
not_that_noob 8y ago
What Jobs does here is truly impressive, for the following reasons: * he listens carefully to the customer - not just pretend, but truly understand the issue from the customer's point of view * he then allows his engineering manager to present the counterargument - to understand what the current situation is * he's able to then follow the back and forth of what is presumably a highly-technical conversation. Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation. * he then makes the call - you'd be surprised by how rare the simple ability to make a quick decision is * he then has the power to make the internal team do what is required - again, you'd be surprised how in some companies internal teams ignore or subvert the leadership's directions What this incident shows is his singular ability to listen to customers, conceive of the ideal product in his head and make the team deliver it. That explains a lot of his success. PS None of this should be construed as absolving any of Jobs' negative personality traits.
- philwelch 8y ago
  It didn't seem to me like he followed the back-and-forth so much as he just cut off his own guy, screamed at him, and humiliated him in front of one of the most legendary programmers in the world. To paraphrase The Dude, Steve Jobs wasn't wrong, he was just an asshole.
  - not_that_noob 8y ago
    Yeah - he could have been nicer. No question. But notice his guy didn't quit. People who worked for him seemed to actually admire his ability to be dedicated to the product and make decisions based on what was best for the product. That's pretty rare. And it was not personal with Jobs - he was just so upset that reality differed from the ideal. He was deeply technical. He began his career as a programmer at Atari. [Edit] Jobs had many traits that would lead a psychiatrist to classify him as sociopathic - not mass murderer type, but the psychological type. For example, his complete lack of empathy towards his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge for a long while. One of the weird traits of sociopaths is that to navigate world that requires understanding of empathy and emotions, an understanding they don't have, they build models of human behavior and can choose to deploy those models when required toward their aims. What's interesting also here is his ability to be singularly brutal to his subordinate, while at the same time be completely empathetic to the customer's view point. Just my amateur psychologist 2c, but that combination of brutality on one side with solicitousness on the other adds weight to my view that he was a high-functioning sociopath.
privacypoller 8y ago
Anyone here ever work with a genius who wasn't an asshole? I did and he'll always be a key part of the template to which I both aspire and measure others. It's not like the stories about Carmack make him out to be a saintly, fuzzy human but I will definitely give him credit for standing firm on some big ideals/principals, even if I don't share them. I guess I just hope that you can (a) be really good at your work - like -genius good - and also (b) a decent, empathetic human being. Wishful thinking? maybe, but I don't really want to be top-level successful if you've gotta choose.
- karthikb 8y ago
  Most geniuses aren't assholes. But no one writes news stories about individuals that have no drama and are pleasant to work with.
  - criddell 8y ago
    Woz is a notable exception to your rule.
  - halestock 8y ago
    Er, John Carmack?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- jfoutz 8y ago
  Knuth? i mean, i've never worked with him, but he's apparently great.
  - nailer 8y ago
    He doesn't consider mathemetical flaws to be bugs. Not saying that makes him an asshole, but as a product person, this has has harmed TeX's ability to complete it goal of allowing anyone to create typeset documents.
camillomiller 8y ago
[rant] Why are these stories posted on Facebook, of all places? [/rant] You would guess that people of this stature would know better...
- kyle-rb 8y ago
  Carmack is CTO of Oculus, which is owned by Facebook. So I imagine that's part of why a lot of his social media presence is there these days. Not sure about Jim Black.
tooltalk 8y ago
Was Jobs actually technical enough to understand the substance of the technical discussion? I had/reported to a couple of not-so-technical managers for short stints in my 20 yr career and I always found it supremely annoying that they were often making misguided technical/business decisions based on most recent buzzwords and sales pitch from software/hardware vendors).
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  You don't always need to understand the specifics. Even without hearing the actual argument we know this about it: These two people know what they're talking about. One if them is arguing against his own interests because he's convinced it's the right thing to do. The other one agrees, but thinks that it's impractical. So the decision comes down to: Would I rather do it right, or be practical? And that's entirely at the discretion of the guy in charge of the project. It's worth noting that no one was trying to sell anything here, unlike the situation's you're describing.
  - tooltalk 8y ago
    Yes, Apple's graphic engineer and John probably knew what they were talking about, but I suspect that Jobs did. It seems like based on that vague description, John wasn't necessarily arguing against his own interest and Apple engineers might have had to consider constraints that neither Steve or John was familiar with. Take for instance Steve's response to John's disliking for the iMac mouse -- in this case, Steve quoted "every study" that there were usability issues with first-time users. But on the topics of OpenGL security, his trigger word, it seems, was "ideal."
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      > Yes, Apple's graphic engineer and John probably knew what they were talking about, but I suspect that Jobs did. I'm going to assume you meant "didn't". My point is that he didn't have to. Decision makers rarely have an expert understanding of what they're deciding on, but that's ok, because their value in the process is making a decision. For the most part I'd go so far as to argue that it doesn't even matter that they make the right decision, just that they make a decision. Look at the Linux Desktop, my favorite whipping boy. How many different implementations are there of pretty much every layer of that monstrously fragmented beast? Is this because everyone who made these things is stupid? Probably not, they just all have (sometimes vastly) different opinions on how things should be. If, in the early days of the Linux Desktop, someone had been able to say "this is the way it will be done, end of discussion"* and have people listen we might have a stable and consistent free desktop os today. What if all the effort that was spent endlessly reinventing the wheel had instead been spent on a singular vision? It would still have its warts and quirks sure, because sometimes bad decisions would get made, but I'm pretty confident it'd be a damn sight better than what we have now. *Some will argue that the value in the Linux Desktop is precisely because no one can do this. They're not wrong, they just shouldn't be surprised that most other people want something different from their desktop os.
microcolonel 8y ago
Indeed, it is wise (if you have the capital) not to let things fester, especially when you know you're doing the wrong thing. Perhaps if you want to build the kind of good will that allows Neo Apple to sell the torture devices they today call products at the rates they do, you should be more concerned with the direction of your engineering department, and less with who is or is not an "asshole". I don't even like Steve Jobs, in fact, I think Steve Jobs' life may be a net negative for my life, if not the world at large, and I think that the way he treated his kids is unconscienable, but it is not acceptable to let compromise be the norm in your engineering department. Just look at the situation now, as it relates to graphics drivers on OS X, and you'll see why the whip must be cracked. Regarding the fact that your petty compromises add up to a broken product, ignorance is not an excuse. It is not "empathic" or "compassionate" to allow the ego of one person (the compromising engineer) destroy the efforts of thousands (everyone else who depends on the success of the product). Empathy without foresight is somehow even worse than greed without conscience.
avyfain 8y ago
For those of you who don't want to go on FB, here's a Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/wTMW1q13 https://pastebin.com/wTMW1q13
adamwk 8y ago
Unrelated: has it always been the case, the lack of selecting text in Facebook posts?
- a_t48 8y ago
  It works for me if I remove the URL's "m." prefix.
crikli 8y ago
I find nothing remotely special about a C-suite operator siding with an outside voice against a "trusted" internal resource. Even if the operator is the legendary Steve Jobs. C-suite operators, honestly, tend to just not really trust their internal resources. Often to their detriment. I'm a tech consultant and am typically brought in by C-suite operators to assist them with deeply technical decisions. I tell clients out of the gate that what we're going to recommend will probably be 10% my firm's ideas and 90% ideas gleaned from interviews with their own personnel, slightly repackaged, better sold, but always attributed to the originator.
mentos 8y ago
As a windows gamer growing up I always felt Mac was deliberately going out of its way to not be a first class platform for gaming. Anyone know why Steve Jobs might have ignored the demand for gaming? Maybe it was his time at Atari?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
telltruth 8y ago
Does anyone know the background on smiley face with bullet in head t-shirt? There are people selling this t-shirt but no one seems to have what's the context. BTW, you are not going to have this kind of experience anymore. Most CEOs (i.e. except two) and VPs of large public companies don't talk to "graphics engineer" from a small company, let alone they actually care about such low level details. Perhaps this is why there are no more Steve Jobs.
DonHopkins 8y ago
>As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment. Sounds like John Carmack and Doug Englebart are on the same page: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-... How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future. Two decades before the personal computer, a shy engineer unveiled the tools that would drive the tech revolution. By Valerie Landau, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2018. >In 1979, Xerox allowed Steve Jobs and other Apple executives to tour its labs twice, in exchange for the right to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock. Once Jobs began working on these ideas, they became even more streamlined. Engelbart’s mouse had three buttons, which he used in different combinations to perform a range of tasks. After licensing this invention from the Stanford Research Institute, Apple decided it would be simpler to give it just one button. Engelbart lamented that the mouse’s capability had been dumbed down to make it “easy to use.”
macca321 8y ago
John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.” Or no keys on a phone.

455 points by tzhenghao 8y ago

cvaidya1986 8y ago

Great story.

js2 8y ago

Copy/paste for those wanting to avoid FB. Jim Black (May 16 at 8:25pm): I had the privilege of working with John Carmack as a technology evangelist at Apple when he ported Quake III Arena to Rhapsody, Apple’s internal name for the OpenStep/Mach kernel based MacOS X. I enjoyed John's reminiscence about working with Steve and Apple and thought I would share a few of my own memories from that time which provided me with some of the most satisfying moments and lessons of my career. John was the first game developer I ever worked with. Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him. John agreed to come to Cupertino and meet with several teams to share his development experiences with them. I picked him up in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. He stood unassumingly in the lobby, framed in the background by a Christmas Tree. On day one, we met with several internal teams at Apple. I was accustomed to see 3rd party developers emerge somewhat awed by their meetings with Apple engineers. In John’s case the reaction was reversed. I’ve never seen anyone grok complex systems and architectures so quickly and thoroughly as John. Amusingly, he walked around the Apple campus unrecognized by all but for the occasional, former NeXT employee. On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood. After an hour of waiting for Steve in IL1, he marched into the room, and immediately mistook me for John Carmack, extending his hand to shake mine (we had never met). I locked eyes with Steve Jobs and looked down significantly at the Apple badge on my belt. Without missing a beat, Steve shifted his extended hand to John's. That’s when Steve noticed the T-shirt and the meeting, as soon as it had begun, took a turn for the worse. Steve’s jaw muscles visibly tensed and he became stone-faced. Clearly deeply offended by John’s T-shirt, he sat down at the conference table and looked straight ahead, silent. John kicked off the meeting by saying, “So I’ve been working with MacOS for the past month and here’s what I learned.” His #1 concern (at an extremely high level) concerned OpenGL permissions and security for which he felt Apple needed a better solution than what he’d learned about the day before in meetings with the graphics team, even if it came at a slight cost in performance for 3D games. This was, suffice to say, typical of John in that he was approaching an issue from an objective engineering perspective and arguing for the most technically correct solution rather than pushing for something that might be of benefit to his personal projects. Steve listened and abruptly said, “That’s not what we’re doing!” Then he looked at the three Apple employees in the room and asked, “Is it?” I confirmed that what John was raising as a concern came from a meeting with the graphics architecture team the day before. Without batting an eye, Steve stood up, tramped over to a Polycom phone and dialed from apparent memory the phone number of the engineering director whose admin informed Steve that he was at an offsite in Palo Alto. Steve hung up, sat down, and about 30 seconds later the phone rang with the engineering director on the line. Steve said, “I’m here with a graphics developer. I want you to tell him everything we’re doing in MacOS X from a graphics architecture perspective.” Then he put his elbows on the table and adopted a prayer-like hand pose, listening to and weighing the arguments from his trusted director of engineering and from the game guy with the bloody smiley-face T-shirt. And what happened next was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever witnessed about Steve or any Silicon Valley exec. Early on in the discussion, the Apple engineer realized that “graphics engineer” in the room was John Carmack. And he realized that he was going to need to defend his technical decision, on the merits, in front of Steve. After extended back and forth, the Apple engineer said, “John, what you’re arguing for is the ideal …” He never made it to the next word because Steve suddenly stood bolt upright, slamming both palms onto the desk and shouting, “NO!!!!” “NO!!! What John is saying is NOT the ideal. What John is saying is what we have to do!!! Why are we doing this? Why are we going to all this trouble to build this ship when you’re putting a TORPEDO IN ITS HULL?!!!!” All of this was said with the utmost conviction and at extremely high volume. To his credit, John, seated directly next to a yelling Steve Jobs, didn’t even flinch. What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service. Steve listened to both sides and made a call that would have long lasting implications for MacOS. As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment. After the meeting ended, I walked John to the Apple store on campus (this was before there were actual Apple stores) and asked him on the way what he thought of Steve’s response to the mouse comment. John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.” Good call, John :)

Jarb 8y ago
Thank you, much appreciated! I always wondered if the decision to only have one fire button in Q3A was based off its compatibility with Mac OS, and thus a lack of a second mouse button. Other FPS at the time (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Half-Life) usually had a secondary fire button to allow for alternate weapon functions (e.g. grenade launcher on SMG, zoom on sniper rifle/crossbow, etc), which was mapped to the right mouse button.
- pvg 8y ago
  Seems unlikely, since Q3A used all the mouse buttons on PC by default, just like in previous versions of Quake. Those games also don't have secondary firing modes, Q3A is supposed to be a sort of ultimate refinement of Quake deathmatch.
- justin66 8y ago
  No, secondary weapon functions were never a q3 thing. They wouldn't have nerfed the game for OS X regardless, especially not when you could just plug in a PC mouse or rebind the controls to use some other key.
usefulcat 8y ago
> Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” That's a bit like saying that the worst thing about losing an arm is that now your shirts don't fit. The iMac mouse sucked because it was round, making it nearly impossible to tell without looking at it whether it was pointed the right way. So when you thought you were moving it straight up, the pointer would nearly always wander off to the side. I never did understand how they could make such a huge blunder, given that the mouse is literally the first control (after the power button) one would typically use to interact with a Mac.
- kps 8y ago
  Not just because it was round, but because it was round without tactile directional cues. DEC had some round mice, which, while not great, did not have the Jobs-puck orientation problem because they had distinct buttons. https://www.oldmouse.com/articles/hawley/DEC-VAX.shtml https://www.oldmouse.com/articles/hawley/DEC-VAX.shtml

post_break 8y ago

"On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood." Was it the watchmen comedian logo?

wyldfire 8y ago
That seems likely from the description. I don't know if Jobs knowing that would've changed much for their interaction though.
dpflan 8y ago
I think it's a similar design, but I have a vivid memory of a kid in my elementary school (~1995) wearing a shirt like this: black t-shirt with a big yellow smiley face with gory bullet-wound to the forehead. It was a strong image especially for kids. The Watchmen logo is spattered on the side. I can't find the t-shirt I'm remembering but there are similar current examples: https://www.amazon.com/Smiley-Bullet-Black-Adult-T-Shirt/dp/B014Q6CZ6A https://www.amazon.com/Smiley-Bullet-Black-Adult-T-Shirt/dp/... > Watchmen Smiley Face: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen#/media/File:Watchmen,_issue_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen#/media/File:Watchmen,...
- empath75 8y ago
  When I was a kid I made an animation of that on an amiga 500. Yellow smiley face, gunshot in the forehead and blood dripping down. I showed my dad and I still don’t know if he was impressed that I figured out how to do that or thought I should see a psychiatrist.
Isamu 8y ago
Does anybody remember the interface from Plan9 or Inferno where the "kill process" button was originally a smiley face with blood trickling from a bullet hole in the forehead? Then they fixed it to be more bland when it started shipping more. Oh, and the Comedian just wore a regular smiley button. The blood was his own, spattered from when he was thrown from a building. No bullet hole.

cornholio 8y ago

Jobs comes off as quite an obnoxious dude.

bgroins 8y ago
I love the incessant deification of Steve Jobs, regardless of his mistakes, juvenile behavior, and constant stories about his abuse of his staff. In this story Jobs mistakes the wrong person for John Carmack, becomes deeply offended by a silly t-shirt, screams at his staff and slams his hands the table like a 2 year old. But the author is impressed with Jobs and makes him out to be the hero. At my work we would call this a hostile and abusive work environment, but within the Jobs cult of personality it's a net positive.
- cm2187 8y ago
  Actually I wouldn't be surprised if anyone else at Apple behaving like Jobs would quickly receive a warning from HR if not shown the door.
  - e1ven 8y ago
    For example, You may note that Scott Forstall doesn't work at Apple anymore.
    - rusk 8y ago
      * Scott Forstall doesn't work at Apple anymore* and neither does software ...
      - tambourine_man 8y ago
        Ouch
  - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
    Because as an employee, you’re basically the ultimate cuck in the eyes of upper management.

robotkdick 8y ago

Here's a link to the original John Carmack story in case anyone missed it: https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=214641282559.. https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=214641282559....

stagger87 8y ago

This is a typical situation for most companies. I've been in the position of the "trusted engineer" several times where conversations with customers can very quickly change the direction of engineering. Fortunately, in all of those situations my boss wasn't an asshole. Honestly, all these recent stories about jobs really just paint him in a negative light.

wpietri 8y ago
Definitely. And my real issue with Jobs is more the ripple effect. So many people read stories of Jobs being an asshole and think, "Oh, this is how you success." Ignoring the many assholes who weren't as brilliant or as thoroughly lucky. Look at Theranos, for example. The CEO was practically a Jobs impersonator. From the turtlenecks and the air of brilliance to the controlling, abusive, and secrecy-oriented behaviors. How many people fell for the fraud? And I can't count the wantrepreneurs I've come across that had similar theories.
- lowken10 8y ago
  I think Elizabeth Holmes belongs in prison. However, I read her bio and she was a genius on par with Jobs.
  - paulcole 8y ago
    For breaking what law(s)?
    - rpedela 8y ago
      Fraud? The kind of fraud that can get someone hurt or killed like the bogus diagnostic tests which could mean a patient ends up taking the wrong drug and/or dose which hurts them.
      - paulcole 8y ago
        Do you think Elon Musk should be in jail for the misleading content on this page: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://www.tesla.com/autopilot

degenerate 8y ago

Can anyone with knowledge of the "OpenGL permissions and security" issue explain the problem?

justin66 8y ago
You'd need knowledge of the beta version of Open GL on OS X, from twenty years ago, as well.
rusk 8y ago
I've no knowledge of OpenGL but based on the content in the story I'd take a stab that they weren't implemented fully for performance reasons. I don't know why a game developer would be so concerned with that though. But I know nothing about game development either ...
mentat 8y ago
Probably the ability to read memory from arbitrary places in the kernel via DMA. It's continued to be a challenged for DMA devices...
- justin66 8y ago
  Carmack worked on the Linux Utah-GLX drivers in the runup to q3's release and would have had a lot of thoughts on the low-level GL implementation details.

JacobJans 8y ago

John Carmack's reminiscences about Steve Jobs: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223...

rusk 8y ago
Here's that story for those that don't want to go to FB too :) John Carmack 14 May at 17:27 · Steve Jobs My wife once asked me “Why do you drop what you are doing when Steve Jobs asks you to do something? You don’t do that for anyone else.” It is worth thinking about. As a teenage Apple computer fan, Jobs and Wozniak were revered figures for me, and wanting an Apple 2 was a defining characteristic of several years of my childhood. Later on, seeing NeXT at a computer show just as I was selling my first commercial software felt like a vision into the future. (But $10k+, yikes!) As Id Software grew successful through Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, the first major personal purchase I made wasn’t a car, but rather a NeXT computer. It turned out to be genuinely valuable for our software development, and we moved the entire company onto NeXT hardware. We loved our NeXTs, and we wanted to launch Doom with an explicit “Developed on NeXT computers” logo during the startup process, but when we asked, the request was denied. Some time after launch, when Doom had begun to make its cultural mark, we heard that Steve had changed his mind and would be happy to have NeXT branding on it, but that ship had sailed. I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs. Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally. When NeXT managed to sort of reverse-acquire Apple and Steve was back in charge, I was excited by the possibilities of a resurgent Apple with the virtues of NeXT in a mainstream platform. I was brought in to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve. Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.” It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions. But when I knew what I was talking about, I would stand my ground against anyone. When Steve did make up his mind, he was decisive about it. Dictates were made, companies were acquired, keynotes were scheduled, and the reality distortion field kicked in, making everything else that was previously considered into obviously terrible ideas. I consider this one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had. OpenGL never seriously threatened D3D on PC, but it was critical at Apple, and that meant that it remained enough of a going concern to be the clear choice when mobile devices started getting GPUs. While long in the tooth now, it was so much better than what we would have gotten if half a dozen SoC vendors rolled their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age. I wound up doing several keynotes with Steve, and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method. My first impression of “Keynote Steve” was him berating the poor stage hands over “This Home Depot shit” that was rolling out the display stand with the new Mac, very much not to his satisfaction. His complaints had a valid point, and he improved the quality of the presentation by caring about details, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work for him in that capacity. One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote. When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo. I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with: “I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.” That goes a long way, and nobody said a thing after that. When my wife and I later started building games for feature phones (DoomRPG! Orcs&Elves!), I advocated repeatedly to Steve that an Apple phone could be really great. Every time there was a rumor that Apple might be working on a phone, I would refine the pitch to him. Once he called me at home on a Sunday (How did he even get my number?) to ask a question, and I enthused at length about the possibilities. I never got brought into the fold, but I was excited when the iPhone actually did see the light of day. A giant (for the time) true color display with a GPU! We could do some amazing things with this! Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the same keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”. After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access! Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine. I was making some guesses, but I argued that the iPhone hardware and OS provided sufficient protection for native apps. I pointed at a nearby engineer and said “Don’t you have an MMU and process isolation on the iPhone now?” He had a wide eyed look of don’t-bring-me-into-this, but I eventually got a “yes” out of him. I said that OS-X was surely being used for things that were more security critical than a phone, and if Apple couldn’t provide enough security there, they had bigger problems. He came back with a snide “You’re a smart guy John, why don’t you write a new OS?” At the time, my thought was, “Fuck you, Steve.”. People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn’t want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that “Steve appreciates vigorous conversation”. Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn’t appreciate that. The Steve Jobs “hero / shithead” rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready. I wound up writing several successful iPhone apps on the side (all of which are now gone due to dropping 32 bit support, which saddens me), and I had many strong allies inside Apple, but I was on the outs with Steve. The last iOS product I worked on was Rage for iOS, which I thought set a new bar for visual richness on mobile, and also supported some brand new features like TV out. I heard that it was well received inside Apple. I was debriefing the team after the launch when I got a call. I was busy, so I declined it. A few minutes later someone came in and said that Steve was going to call me. Oops. Everyone had a chuckle about me “hanging up on Steve Jobs”, but that turned out to be my last interaction with him. As the public story of his failing health progressed, I started several emails to try to say something meaningful and positive to part on, but I never got through them, and I regret it. I corroborate many of the negative character traits that he was infamous for, but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe. I showed up for him.

jccalhoun 8y ago

Interesting story. Can the link be changed to the non-mobile version?

robotkdick 8y ago
You can replace the m in the link with www to get a non-mobile version.

ryandrake 8y ago

> Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him. Weird how “writing portable software” was (and in many places still is) considered deep wizardry. I remember the timeframe described here and indeed “porting our software to a non-Windows platform” was on every company’s list of things they’ll never have time to do, because everyone’s code base was so thoroughly (often unnecessarily) tied to Win32. The bad ol days...

MBCook 8y ago
To be fair if you’re doing all your own UI it’s a bit easier. Porting a bunch of Win32 GUI to Carbon/Cocoa would be a big deal. But I agree. I remember being impressed at seeing boxed Linux copies day one. Yet today we can still wait YEARS for Mac ports of games, if we get them at all, even though they’re using a cross platform engine.
- ovao 8y ago
  The Linux edition of Q3A also — remarkably — came in a collector's tin, which I severely regret not buying at the time.
  - MBCook 8y ago
    That was the box that lasted the longest at my local computer store, long after almost all other boxed Linux software disappeared.
barrkel 8y ago
It's a bit easier in a game that renders its whole UI custom, though. A standard desktop app would be heavily tied to Win32 simply because of UI controls. Similarly, a server app, if designed for performance, would likely be using overlapped I/O.
- ryandrake 8y ago

waynecochran 8y ago

Great comment about the mouse at the end. John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.” The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is throw away their crappy mouse, and replace it with a decent three button mouse.

ovao 8y ago
You throw away an $80 mouse?
- organsnyder 8y ago
  No different than throwing away a $100 OS when you buy a computer. Sometimes there simply isn't a way to purchase it without the undesired item included.
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  > You throw away an $80 mouse? If it doesn't do what one wants it to do, it's worth $0 to them.
  - ovao 8y ago
    But potentially worth something to someone else, which is an argument for selling it or even donating it. Throwing it away seems downright silly.
golergka 8y ago
Funny how people can such a different taste for these things. I've switched back from Mac to Windows some time ago, and the thing I miss the most is the touchbar.
- Jyaif 8y ago
  You can't possibly mean the touchbar. Are you talking about the touchpad?

scarface74 8y ago

In his story about how Steve Jobs told the engineer point blank to make changes and how impressive it was. I think a lot of people underestimate how effective Steve Jobs was as the CEO because he was Steve Jobs. A CEO of a company has role power, but that's really the least effective. If the employees don't respect thier managers, the managers can't be effective. It's usually used by production workers, but developers will also Work-to-Rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) and do the bare minimum. I don't know of any non founder CEO that can inspire workers (or investors) to follow them in a completely different direction.

baxtr 8y ago
I wonder how long that guy stayed at Apple afterwards, does anyone know?
- scarface74 8y ago
  Why wouldn't he stay? If the decision was technically correct and he may be able to talk to Carmack directly to ask for advice, that would be a rare opportunity to learn.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- AceJohnny2 8y ago
  Edit: oh wait, you're probably asking about the Engineering Directory, not Jim Black. Jim Black's facebook page says he's VP at Magic Leap, so this must be him: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimblack2 https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimblack2 Looks like this was during his second stint at Apple, where he stayed for just 1 year, before going to NVIDIA for 16 years. He did have a previous stint at Apple from 1992-1997, so 5 years.

golergka 8y ago

> Clearly deeply offended by John’s T-shirt, he sat down at the conference table and looked straight ahead, silent. Why would he be offended by Watchmen reference?

toxicFork 8y ago
From John Carmack's post - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825... ) "When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.”"
nailer 8y ago
I really wish people would stop downvoting polite questions like this. This is a reasonable thing to ask (I had the same question and just searched for it in these comments) and it feels odd that it's omitted from the story.
- PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  This particular one was probably downvoted because it's either naive or a weak joke to assume that Jobs knew or cared that it was a Watchmen reference. A much better question would be "why was he offended by a fairly innocuous T-shirt." That's the sort of thing that might get you the side-eye from a particularly high-strung middle school teacher, but it's pretty funny to imagine someone like Jobs being so uptight.

CNJ7654 8y ago

I saw Steve Jobs at a grocery store in Los Angeles. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying. The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter. When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.

mehrdada 8y ago

This YouTube clip (at ~2hr into the video) ties in with the original story that Carmack told about his wedding and is where Steve chronicles the story from his angle: https://youtu.be/SjlLG1EzJ2k?t=7223 https://youtu.be/SjlLG1EzJ2k?t=7223

mathattack 8y ago

Interesting. I’ve seen other Jobsesque CEOs in action. One was the only person in the company who could overrule an internally focused CTO. I couldn’t figure out if it was “Thank God we have him to defend the views of our partners or customers” or “A great CEO shouldn’t set up an org that needs this kind of intervention.” The “Only I know best” types tend to flame out before they get the Jobsian Success. (Even Jobs needed to crash and burn one and a half times)

ksec 8y ago
was there ever a cto at apple.

stcredzero 8y ago

What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service. In terms of diplomacy and tone, Steve Jobs doesn't do well in this story. However, for intellectual and engineering integrity, he's in entirely different league from most US politicians. From what I've seen, the typical US politican would rather puff up and pretend their constituent's majority position is scientific fact than actually engage with science, fact, and expertise. I think this is a good way to sum up his genius abilities: 1) An ability to see past consensual illusions to engineering and design truths and first principles. 2) A low ability to transmit such insights in a diplomatic way. (Though, given a position of power, his messages are unambiguous and highly persuasive. Effective != moral, however.)

philwelch 8y ago
There's enough stories where Jobs could be persuasive when he wanted to; it's just a lot easier to scream at someone if that would work, too. I'm reminded of Lyndon Johnson, oddly enough.
Nomentatus 8y ago
'Tis true we don't know the backstory - but Steve may have tangled with his guy before, he may have tried diplomacy with him and before and found it just didn't penetrate his defenses, or he may have felt the display was necessary to nudge another one or two of his troops who were present. Or he may have wanted to create a viral story to prod his troops and the situation provided him the perfect opportunity. I've known bosses who planned and scripted their explosions (and the topic of them) days or even weeks in advance and then waited for the right moment in front of the right crowd to present itself, if the issue was sufficiently critical, to pop their cork spectacularly. So we can't necessarily assume Jobs was impetuously undiplomatic or just fumbled the diplomacy aspect. I do believe there are instances of Jobs exhibiting diplomacy and politess.

not_that_noob 8y ago

What Jobs does here is truly impressive, for the following reasons: * he listens carefully to the customer - not just pretend, but truly understand the issue from the customer's point of view * he then allows his engineering manager to present the counterargument - to understand what the current situation is * he's able to then follow the back and forth of what is presumably a highly-technical conversation. Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation. * he then makes the call - you'd be surprised by how rare the simple ability to make a quick decision is * he then has the power to make the internal team do what is required - again, you'd be surprised how in some companies internal teams ignore or subvert the leadership's directions What this incident shows is his singular ability to listen to customers, conceive of the ideal product in his head and make the team deliver it. That explains a lot of his success. PS None of this should be construed as absolving any of Jobs' negative personality traits.

philwelch 8y ago
It didn't seem to me like he followed the back-and-forth so much as he just cut off his own guy, screamed at him, and humiliated him in front of one of the most legendary programmers in the world. To paraphrase The Dude, Steve Jobs wasn't wrong, he was just an asshole.
- not_that_noob 8y ago
  Yeah - he could have been nicer. No question. But notice his guy didn't quit. People who worked for him seemed to actually admire his ability to be dedicated to the product and make decisions based on what was best for the product. That's pretty rare. And it was not personal with Jobs - he was just so upset that reality differed from the ideal. He was deeply technical. He began his career as a programmer at Atari. [Edit] Jobs had many traits that would lead a psychiatrist to classify him as sociopathic - not mass murderer type, but the psychological type. For example, his complete lack of empathy towards his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge for a long while. One of the weird traits of sociopaths is that to navigate world that requires understanding of empathy and emotions, an understanding they don't have, they build models of human behavior and can choose to deploy those models when required toward their aims. What's interesting also here is his ability to be singularly brutal to his subordinate, while at the same time be completely empathetic to the customer's view point. Just my amateur psychologist 2c, but that combination of brutality on one side with solicitousness on the other adds weight to my view that he was a high-functioning sociopath.

privacypoller 8y ago

Anyone here ever work with a genius who wasn't an asshole? I did and he'll always be a key part of the template to which I both aspire and measure others. It's not like the stories about Carmack make him out to be a saintly, fuzzy human but I will definitely give him credit for standing firm on some big ideals/principals, even if I don't share them. I guess I just hope that you can (a) be really good at your work - like -genius good - and also (b) a decent, empathetic human being. Wishful thinking? maybe, but I don't really want to be top-level successful if you've gotta choose.

karthikb 8y ago
Most geniuses aren't assholes. But no one writes news stories about individuals that have no drama and are pleasant to work with.
- criddell 8y ago
  Woz is a notable exception to your rule.
- halestock 8y ago
  Er, John Carmack?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
jfoutz 8y ago
Knuth? i mean, i've never worked with him, but he's apparently great.
- nailer 8y ago
  He doesn't consider mathemetical flaws to be bugs. Not saying that makes him an asshole, but as a product person, this has has harmed TeX's ability to complete it goal of allowing anyone to create typeset documents.

camillomiller 8y ago

[rant] Why are these stories posted on Facebook, of all places? [/rant] You would guess that people of this stature would know better...

kyle-rb 8y ago
Carmack is CTO of Oculus, which is owned by Facebook. So I imagine that's part of why a lot of his social media presence is there these days. Not sure about Jim Black.

tooltalk 8y ago

Was Jobs actually technical enough to understand the substance of the technical discussion? I had/reported to a couple of not-so-technical managers for short stints in my 20 yr career and I always found it supremely annoying that they were often making misguided technical/business decisions based on most recent buzzwords and sales pitch from software/hardware vendors).

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
You don't always need to understand the specifics. Even without hearing the actual argument we know this about it: These two people know what they're talking about. One if them is arguing against his own interests because he's convinced it's the right thing to do. The other one agrees, but thinks that it's impractical. So the decision comes down to: Would I rather do it right, or be practical? And that's entirely at the discretion of the guy in charge of the project. It's worth noting that no one was trying to sell anything here, unlike the situation's you're describing.
- tooltalk 8y ago
  Yes, Apple's graphic engineer and John probably knew what they were talking about, but I suspect that Jobs did. It seems like based on that vague description, John wasn't necessarily arguing against his own interest and Apple engineers might have had to consider constraints that neither Steve or John was familiar with. Take for instance Steve's response to John's disliking for the iMac mouse -- in this case, Steve quoted "every study" that there were usability issues with first-time users. But on the topics of OpenGL security, his trigger word, it seems, was "ideal."
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    > Yes, Apple's graphic engineer and John probably knew what they were talking about, but I suspect that Jobs did. I'm going to assume you meant "didn't". My point is that he didn't have to. Decision makers rarely have an expert understanding of what they're deciding on, but that's ok, because their value in the process is making a decision. For the most part I'd go so far as to argue that it doesn't even matter that they make the right decision, just that they make a decision. Look at the Linux Desktop, my favorite whipping boy. How many different implementations are there of pretty much every layer of that monstrously fragmented beast? Is this because everyone who made these things is stupid? Probably not, they just all have (sometimes vastly) different opinions on how things should be. If, in the early days of the Linux Desktop, someone had been able to say "this is the way it will be done, end of discussion"* and have people listen we might have a stable and consistent free desktop os today. What if all the effort that was spent endlessly reinventing the wheel had instead been spent on a singular vision? It would still have its warts and quirks sure, because sometimes bad decisions would get made, but I'm pretty confident it'd be a damn sight better than what we have now. *Some will argue that the value in the Linux Desktop is precisely because no one can do this. They're not wrong, they just shouldn't be surprised that most other people want something different from their desktop os.

microcolonel 8y ago

Indeed, it is wise (if you have the capital) not to let things fester, especially when you know you're doing the wrong thing. Perhaps if you want to build the kind of good will that allows Neo Apple to sell the torture devices they today call products at the rates they do, you should be more concerned with the direction of your engineering department, and less with who is or is not an "asshole". I don't even like Steve Jobs, in fact, I think Steve Jobs' life may be a net negative for my life, if not the world at large, and I think that the way he treated his kids is unconscienable, but it is not acceptable to let compromise be the norm in your engineering department. Just look at the situation now, as it relates to graphics drivers on OS X, and you'll see why the whip must be cracked. Regarding the fact that your petty compromises add up to a broken product, ignorance is not an excuse. It is not "empathic" or "compassionate" to allow the ego of one person (the compromising engineer) destroy the efforts of thousands (everyone else who depends on the success of the product). Empathy without foresight is somehow even worse than greed without conscience.

avyfain 8y ago

For those of you who don't want to go on FB, here's a Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/wTMW1q13 https://pastebin.com/wTMW1q13

adamwk 8y ago

Unrelated: has it always been the case, the lack of selecting text in Facebook posts?

a_t48 8y ago
It works for me if I remove the URL's "m." prefix.

crikli 8y ago

I find nothing remotely special about a C-suite operator siding with an outside voice against a "trusted" internal resource. Even if the operator is the legendary Steve Jobs. C-suite operators, honestly, tend to just not really trust their internal resources. Often to their detriment. I'm a tech consultant and am typically brought in by C-suite operators to assist them with deeply technical decisions. I tell clients out of the gate that what we're going to recommend will probably be 10% my firm's ideas and 90% ideas gleaned from interviews with their own personnel, slightly repackaged, better sold, but always attributed to the originator.

mentos 8y ago

As a windows gamer growing up I always felt Mac was deliberately going out of its way to not be a first class platform for gaming. Anyone know why Steve Jobs might have ignored the demand for gaming? Maybe it was his time at Atari?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

telltruth 8y ago

Does anyone know the background on smiley face with bullet in head t-shirt? There are people selling this t-shirt but no one seems to have what's the context. BTW, you are not going to have this kind of experience anymore. Most CEOs (i.e. except two) and VPs of large public companies don't talk to "graphics engineer" from a small company, let alone they actually care about such low level details. Perhaps this is why there are no more Steve Jobs.

DonHopkins 8y ago

>As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment. Sounds like John Carmack and Doug Englebart are on the same page: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-invented-future-180967498 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-... How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future. Two decades before the personal computer, a shy engineer unveiled the tools that would drive the tech revolution. By Valerie Landau, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2018. >In 1979, Xerox allowed Steve Jobs and other Apple executives to tour its labs twice, in exchange for the right to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock. Once Jobs began working on these ideas, they became even more streamlined. Engelbart’s mouse had three buttons, which he used in different combinations to perform a range of tasks. After licensing this invention from the Stanford Research Institute, Apple decided it would be simpler to give it just one button. Engelbart lamented that the mouse’s capability had been dumbed down to make it “easy to use.”

macca321 8y ago

John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.” Or no keys on a phone.