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What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?
- cosmojg 8y agoWhat was the demo application's purpose? I'm having trouble grokking that from the post.
- lukeh 8y agoSounds like it might have been a demo of DBKit or EOF (NeXT's ORMs).
- pvg 8y agoProbably EOF/EOModeller. He was later the CEO of a startup I worked at, the founders were both EOFy people.
- ams6110 8y agoI remember watching Steve demo EOF at a tradeshow in Chicago, probably around 1995. His demo system crashed hard in the middle of the presentation, and we got to watch it reboot NEXTSTEP on the big screen. He handled it well, with an "oops" and a laugh, but I bet some people got their asses handed to them afterwards.
- johnvanommen 8y agoLast year I watched a demo in San Jose where the company started re-writing the code, in front of the audience, during the demo. I felt terrible for them; it would've looked a lot better if they just fell back on something else. It was boring watching them write code, people were getting up and leaving, it made it look like they were wildly unprepared. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire company went kaput after that.
- pking 8y agoI'm surprised a demo visibly failed. Steve almost always had a hidden backup computer and an engineer following along with the preplanned demo in lockstep. If the machine crashed, a switch could be through and the demo could continue on the new machine.
- pking 8y agoIt was DBKit, the precursor to EOF. DBKit started life as a sales demo to show that the NeXT was useful enough to connect to a real corporate database. The demo was so popular that the field asked it to be integrated into Application Builder, except that there wasn't an actual framework or design behind it. So we needed to come up with something. DBKit was later rewritten with a real architecture which became Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF).
- vinhboy 8y agoSaturday morning meeting, then worked all night, on the whim of one person, to present on Monday. Just wow. If this is what it takes to succeed in our industry, then I accept that I will not. I just simply do not have the stamina for it. I am not trying to be flippant. I am genuinely amaze how driven some people are.
- ec109685 8y agoAs long as this isn’t a common thing, sometimes you have to commit and go for it to get to the next level.
- justinjlynn 8y agoIt sounds like an awful place to work; a cult-like working environment controlled by an sociopathic ego maniac with no concept of the value of other people's self-worth and time. Demanding last minute changes to a design that's probably been presented and approved by you at least a dozen times in order to lie to your future customers at the cost of your engineer's weekend while telling them they ruined the whole thing. What? I mean, seriously? Who could possibly excuse that behaviour? I don't think Jobs was so much a charismatic leader as he was lucky enough to encourage trauma bonding between the right people while just barely managing to maintain control.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- icelancer 8y ago"I don't think Jobs was so much a charismatic leader as he was lucky enough to encourage trauma bonding between the right people while just barely managing to maintain control." You are ignoring the whole other side of him that made him effective and revolutionary: His vision of the future was second to none. It doesn't make Steve - or people who act like Steve - in the right. But his genius wasn't just pissing off a bunch of people to get them to "trauma bond." The iPhone didn't get made that way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- patrickg_zill 8y agoThe author of this answer, I note is a neuroscientist. Wouldn't be surprised if he knew Bud Tribble prior to joining NeXT, who also was a neuroscientist (or studied it a great deal).
- tephenor 8y ago> Data Science Manager at Uber > 2018-present Geez. I guess this guy loves working at companies run by psychopaths.
- confluence 8y agoPsychopaths just pay better.
- justinjlynn 8y agoPsychopaths pay what they'll make you think is better but in reality is as little as they can manage to make you accept.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoSome do, others just don't care about what'd be a fair compensation and will do whatever it takes.
- vostok 8y agoDid NeXT pay well, that is, as well as Uber pays today in inflation adjusted terms?
- ckocagil 8y agoThey not only pay you scraps, but keep you hostage by employing blacklists shared by multiple companies (so that if you leave, you don't get another job at a high level company) and conspire with other companies to keep your wages low. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... "The defendants are Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay"
- mpweiher 8y agoSociopaths. Anyway, better than a company run by "the clueless". See the MacLeod Life Cycle of the Firm, in: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
- orbitingpluto 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome
- antirez 8y agoI don't know what to think. Here we have a report of an engineer that was told a so harsh thing (you ruined XYZ just because a demo was not what the spectator was looking for), with the boss evaluating probably a very technical thing like an ORM, without having AFAIK the competences, and the report is that it was a great experience.
- Fnoord 8y agoHmm, well, if you read Jobs responses he was exaggerating, dramatic, and manipulative: "he looked at the demo for 5 minutes and told me I had "ruined NeXTSTEP" (the software platform)" -> overly dramatic, exaggerating. ""Unless...", he paused with a twinkle in his eye, "there is a way of making it work like the old way,"" -> of course that way exists, but it requires working on saturday. He's not asking that directly though. Manipulative. ""This is 10 times, no 100 times, no 1000 times better!!!"" -> Overly dramatic, exaggerating.
- tjoff 8y agoIt is telling that they had been preparing for this demo for 3 months and Jobs decided to come by two days before the demo, on a Saturday, only to trash the project and personally attack the developers. It is quite the skill to be able to do that in a way that is motivational.
- Fnoord 8y agoImagine he decided to come by on Friday instead. Oh well, then we wouldn't have this story either. EDIT: My bad I meant Thursday instead of Friday, so that it could've been fixed on a regular Friday.
- jakobegger 8y agoPeople in the comments here focus on the bad bits (working at night), but then there's this: - an enthusiastic CEO working with the team on Sunday morning - standing ovations from the customer on Monday Sure, if you have a family you probably can't do that often, but I'd love a job with an occasional experience like this.
- rusk 8y agoAlso: - An opportunity to contribute to computing history. - To work on something new and novel. - Not having to worry about politics because there's only one diva allowed. Not for everyone I'd agree, but there is certainly enough unhealthy appeal, kind of like hard liquor or bungee jumping ..
- wpietri 8y agoIs there any reason to think other people weren't intensely political? If everybody's running around trying to look good for the abusive diva, I'd expect there'd be a ton of politicking.
- rusk 8y agoFair point ... I kind of thought it was more like everybody is in the firing line. But yeah - I can see how this could just lead to people just trying to not be the one to mess up. In my head I was thinking of that other narcissistic megalomaniac boss Jose Mourinho, and how his style of management drew the media away from the players and allowed them to "just play". A benefit for the top players no doubt, but I've no evidence that this was how Jobs operated ...
- segmondy 8y agoWhat history? What's new and novel? Xerox parc, SGI & Sun already did everything the hardware could. Software-wise it gave us terrible things I rather not know about. Objective-C & Appstore.
- 8y ago
- deepaksurti 8y ago>> One thing that was unusual is that all the technical people there understood all aspects of the machine Is this something 'Apple' specific culture wise, I remember SJ saying Apple was the biggest collection of startups on the planet. I personally prefer small sized teams with lots of in depth knowledge per engineer on the team. IMHO, unless you have a deep understanding of the machine you are working on, you can't make a difference. Not to say that, without it, one will suck, I guess it is that X factor in the outcome I am alluding to. OTOH, there are other places which won't stick to small team sizes, more stakeholders, yet succeed. So there is that.
- EliRivers 8y agoI personally prefer small sized teams with lots of in depth knowledge per engineer on the team. Does anyone prefer huge teams in which each person has only a shallow understanding?
- zorked 8y agoIt's very much a thing in the traditional corporate world.
- wpietri 8y agoFew would say they prefer that, but quite a lot of people are in situations like that, so they apparently do prefer it.
- EliRivers 8y agoI suspect that everyone prefers it but just don't have the option. I'd like to hire only people with a deep knowledge of the projects they'll be working on. Turns out that's impossible.
- SuoDuanDao 8y agoWhen you take into account the larger talent pool for building a team like that, I'd say probably quite a few. Especially once you add in the incentive for individual managers to grow their own teams.
- superasn 8y agoThe last part sounds like a classic Henry Kissinger move[1] where he would tell people without even looking at their work "Is that the best you can do?" After which the person spent an entire night reworking the whole thing.. to which Kissinger said "ok I'll take a look now" [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-you-can-do-henry-kissinger-work-ethic-brad-sullivan- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-you-can-do-henry-kissing...
- lixtra 8y agoNowadays this has bred a generation that resubmit the same work again even if you tell them specifically what’s wrong.
- kristiandupont 8y agoIt has? I have never experienced that and I would be very surprised if someone did that to me.
- gear54rus 8y agoIt doesn't take much effort on your part to check that something hasn't been fixed. But it does take a lot of effort to re-do the work you spent much time on because some jerk pulls idiotic tricks. Evolution succeeds once again.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- PostOnce 8y agoThis could backfire, looking hard for improvements where there are none leads to change for change's sake where the change might be inferior. We've all found later versions of stuff inferior to the original, sometimes wildly and publicly so, like the Gap logo redesign, the various experimental efforts of George Lucas to modify Star Wars, windows 8, the new macbook, later versions of winamp, or whatever your personal disappointment has been with a later version of something you loved.
- 8y ago
- agumonkey 8y agoIn a similar vein there's Carmack interactions with Jobs online now. Worth a read.
- CodeCube 8y agohttps://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223&id=100006735798590 https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825...
- capslockremap 8y agoMemory: you forget the bad parts
- willyt 8y agoWelcome to the creative industry, it's not unusual for businesses with a design culture to operate like this. It would be pretty similar working for any big name architect anywhere. Likewise in graphic design, product design etc... If you come from a design background you will be used to having your work taken apart at a presentation because it will have been happening since the first day of architecture/art/design school. It's a key skill to learn to be able to let go of the work you have done, stand back and analyse it dispassionately then go back and re-do things. After all, the criticism is meant to make the work better and better work gives you more of a sense of achievement. Yes, it was done in a way which was a little bit cheeky, but it doesn't sound mean to me. It can be drastically worse than this. When I was at architecture school in the 90's some tutors would actually compete to see if they could make students cry in presentations. Things like physically tearing up hand drawn plans in front of all the other students. I remember tutors going round the final year presentation at midnight and deciding the general standard wasn't good enough, phoning the people they thought needed to do more work, telling them they would fail and that they needed to get out of bed and work for another 24 hours. These were people that had been already been working super long hours for weeks to get their stuff done. Madness. It wasn't just my school that was like this either, it was much worse back then but there are still pockets of this culture in my industry. It is no wonder that back then architecture students in the UK had the highest rate of suicide.
- eludwig 8y agoThis is so, so true! I went to Parsons School of Design in the late 70s and the final presentations were ungodly brutal. It was very normal for people to leave in tears. The good part about this (the bad part is obvious lol) is that many people who shouldn’t have been there and would not have made it in the commercial art business would go and do something else after these reviews. It was probably for the best. During my short career as an in-house illustrator, it was perfectly acceptable for the art director to kick your ass and generally abuse you. You learned to develop a thick skin really quickly!
- sarreph 8y ago> It's a key skill to learn to be able to let go of the work you have done, stand back and analyse it dispassionately then go back and re-do things. I wish this principle was adhered to across all industries where we (as individuals) get our 'work' reviewed. If you can't do your best and then be able to let go of it, it causes some serious pent-up anger and demotivation. I find myself slipping into 'brutalist feedback' mode (that I'm used to from creative work), before worrying about offending the recipient. I'm not sure if this is coincidental, but anecdotally I found that my biggest shift in being able to let my creative work 'go' was after reading The Power of Now[0] and The Chimp Paradox[1], and practicing mindfulness. Fundamentally, I think it's an ego issue as to why it's so hard to take criticism. I'm certainly not saying ego-death is a prerequisite, but instead to learn how to short-circuit your anger away from feedback as a result of taking it too personally. It is after all, not the work itself, but how it is received that you should be striving towards! [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Now https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Now [1] - https://chimpmanagement.com/the-chimp-paradox/ https://chimpmanagement.com/the-chimp-paradox/
- ratbeard 8y agoFrom this story I take away: - A Sr. Marketing staff member saw technical deficiencies in the project and pulled a _complete 180°_ literally days before showtime in front of a huge client, successfully. - Jobs pushed his workers hard.. though the ends justify the means - The NeXT computer pioneered nearly everything we take for granted today (mouse, networking, Objective C) in a package targeted at the high end consumer. Sound familiar? Brilliant. [edit: clarify meaning]
- PunchTornado 8y agoI don't think anyone takes for granted Objective C today. It's not used but for legacy code. Awful thing anyway.
- ams6110 8y agoHardly awful. It was message dispatch object oriented programming. It allowed development of what was essentially the Mac OS X operating system and applications, in the early 1990s. Software that ran on a 25Mhz Motorola 68040. Years before Windows 95, and far more advanced and cohesive and productive than any other desktop computing platform. HTTP and web browsing was invented on a NeXT computer.
- wingerlang 8y agoWhat makes you think it is used only for legacy code?
- jonhendry18 8y agoIf Taligent had used Objective-C instead of C++ they might have actually shipped something.
- awinder 8y agoWhy the mouse? That was a holdover from Steve’s time at Apple, which was famously “borrowed” from Xerox PARC. Unless next did something special with the mouse that I’m unaware of.
- 8y ago