4 ms·
These basic designs pretty much stayed the course all the way through OS 9, and some even in OS X. It's gotta be surreal to think something she designed is on m
by djsumdog 8y ago
These basic designs pretty much stayed the course all the way through OS 9, and some even in OS X. It's gotta be surreal to think something she designed is on millions of devices. Reminds me of someone I met who wrote video drivers for Intel. It's something small you don't think about, a tiny piece that is essential in bringing the whole thing together.
Too often we think about the captains of the ships, the Gates and Bezos and Musks of this world. People attribute so much to them, when all they really did is convince other people with actual skill to make the things they wanted. I doubt Elon could design the engine of a rocket. There are no Tony Starks outside of the movies. There are 60 ~ 150 engineers who carefully design and check each others work.
It's like when we see Columbus discovering the new world, even though so many other civilizations had discovered it before him, ignoring all the ships and crews that got him there, and the fact that the new world was named after Amerigo Vespucci, the cartographer who actually mapped it out.
There are hundreds or thousands of engineers and designers like this one, who are the people who really make these products real.
- pvg 8y agoGates was quite heavily involved in making Microsoft's early products, long before they had '60 to 150 engineers'. In the case of Jobs, the really enduring mystery to me is that despite some seemingly disqualifying personality flaws, he managed to both surround himself with very talented people and get them to do outstanding work together. Once, you could chalk it up to luck but somehow he did it repeatedly.
- petard 8y agoI found the anecdotes from John Carmack about working with Jobs really interesting in this regard. Apart from being probably very smart Jobs did care a lot about the things they were building, and willing to throw everything overboard if you could convince him that an existing approach was not the right thing to do. It is something many managers or leaders lack IMHO, not willing to do the "right thing" because of politics, market studies or something else.
- pvg 8y agoI didn't get that impression from the Carmack stories at all. If you haven't had a chance before, dig into the early Mac development history at folkore.org. A number of the stories involve the team engaged in some (in hindsight) hilarious and ridiculous effort to humor, misdirect or otherwise manage Jobs in situations that arose primarily from him being profoundly, stubbornly, catastrophically wrong. The eventual resolution never involves Jobs saying 'ok, ok, you lot were right, let's do it your way'.
- petard 8y agoInteresting, will read up on these. There's ten years difference between early Apple and late Apple Jobs so maybe things were different for Carmack. In the end, Jobs must have been doing something right given his track record.
- pvg 8y agoNo doubt! It seems surprisingly difficult tease out exactly what it was, even if you trawl through all the anecdotes, histories and biographies. Perhaps it's simply that his proverbial reality distortion field held for long enough for his collaborators make the unreality reality.
- mseebach 8y agoThere's also potential reality distortion in the other direction: how much of the early-apple lore has survived untainted by three decades of mythology, never mind the general haze of time (I know I'm telling a story from 2013 that's certainly not gotten more boring over time -- thing were crazy, but I'd not trust my self to be able to gave a 100% accurate account of exactly how crazy)? How much of it is an accurate recollection of what things were like day-to-day, and how much of it is a particularly crazy couple of week before the shareholder meeting that got amplified?
- pvg 8y ago
- alxlaz 8y agoJoel Spolsky has a good story about Gates and his understanding of engineering. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev... Edit: there's a tl;dr on the particular topic of Gates' engineering skills buried in the story (which I'll quote below), but I encourage everyone to read the whole damn thing because that is how you successfully lead engineers. tl;dr "It was a good point. Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer."
- gtycomb 8y agoA fine read ... a piece that teaches us so much about the human side of things that matter in engineering management.
- pvg 8y agoThat was quite a bit later. Here's a super-short summary of Microsoft's earliest days. https://www.wired.com/2011/04/0404bill-gates-paul-allen-form-microsoft/ https://www.wired.com/2011/04/0404bill-gates-paul-allen-form... He definitely became famous as an executive and captain of industry. But he very much started on the hands-on, nerd side of things.
- trevor-e 8y agoI work on an app that has several million active users per month, and I have to admit it's quite the rush sometimes. I never expected to experience that sensation in software development. It definitely made me appreciate all the software that's out there in public view.
- pmichaud 8y ago> I doubt Elon could design the engine of a rocket. In this case, you're wrong. Elon is actually the lead engineer on at least early SpaceX rockets.
- tempaccnt123 8y agoWell, it is true that he gave himself that title.