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What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs
- kristopher 14y agoTwo things that stood-out: >"Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M" and >"We would "throw them into the cauldron", and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas."
- ErikAugust 14y ago"Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M" Very interesting way to look at it.
- ricardobeat 14y agoThis second quote is part of what is now called design thinking and the "ideation" process. Take all input - no criticism allowed at this point - put everything on the table, and discuss as a group. It's very effective, generates more diverse ideas and prevents people from clinging to their own (I plead guilty).
- venus 14y ago> critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas And I wonder how critically important it was, also, that the mixing pot be attended in person, with spoken words the only ingredients allowed? If it's done by email, no-one forgets which idea was the CEO's.
- ZeroGravitas 14y agoI found the second one strange since I'd also read this, with my empasis added: "Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, __he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.__" I thought Bud was surely exaggerating, until I observed Steve in action over the next few weeks. The reality distortion field was a confounding melange of a charismatic rhetorical style, an indomitable will, and an eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand. If one line of argument failed to persuade, he would deftly switch to another. Sometimes, he would throw you off balance by suddenly adopting your position as his own, without acknowledging that he ever thought differently. from: http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Field.txt http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Reality_Distortion_Fi...
- xd 14y ago"I think it was October or November of 1998" .. "The idea of "personal digital media" was born." .. "Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home movies on their computers." Wasn't this the same time digital cameras and relevant sized mass storage at affordable prices started to become common place?
- radge 14y agoNo. Digital cameras became affordable nearer 2001-2002.
- plunchete 14y agoI'm pretty sure that at that time I had tons of music (using winamp) and photos on my computer (scanning was the way at that time).
- shawnc 14y agoyou're one of the 'very few' then. As was I.
- veemjeem 14y agoYou must've been somewhere nice that had fast internet. I think most people back then had dialup, and downloading a single song would take at least 20 minutes on their 28.8k modem.
- mech4bg 14y agoYou just waited that long to download music. That was all there was to it. MP3 was mindblowing when it was first released, in terms of how good it sounded for the size. Obviously many people just ripped their own CDs. Many CD-ROMs didn't support ripping CDs at a data level - so you had to rip in real-time via analog! Crazy.
- bane 14y agoYou just queue up a bunch of stuff using a download manager[1] and stay connected for longer. Come back the next day (or two or three) and voila! The good managers would even resume partial downloads if the connection dropped (which it always did). [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getright http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getright
- cheald 14y agoBetween this and the Safari story, I'm struck at just how deep Apple's internal secrecy ethos runs. The idea that there is that level of dedication to keeping a project hidden, not just from outsiders, but from almost the entire rest of the company just blows my mind. It certainly explains how they're able to keep projects secret for as long as they do.
- loceng 14y agoIt also indirectly supports how important it is to not have leaks so marketing efforts in the future don't get weakened. Edit: Forgot a word..
- bitcartel 14y agoIs a culture of secrecy a good thing? Look at Apple Maps, it would clearly have benefited from more eyeballs.
- cheald 14y agoI personally feel that projects can benefit from more input and more opportunity for constructive criticism. That said, I also don't run the largest company in the US, so I'm not sure I'm qualified to make a judgment call there. I think that Apple tends to be a bit echo-chambery, but they've historically built solid stuff, so it's hard to criticize their development methodology too heavily. It'll be interesting to see how that contrasts with changes in their corporate ethos in a post-Jobs era.
- taligent 14y agoPeople overplay the Apple Maps card. There was only ONE thing Apple did wrong with Apple Maps. And that was to not license data far, far more aggressively. The fact is that Google Maps as an app is buggy, lags terribly and clunky all round. It's the high quality of the data that sets it apart.
- nikster 14y agoI beg to disagree. I was surprised that Apple Maps also get the information granularity completely wrong, that is the amount of data presented at a zoom level. This, and not the data, made the app uttterly unusable for me on a recent trip to Hong Kong. I could either see the overview of the area I was in with no street names for all the minor streets around me, which made it unusable. Or I could zoom in and finally see the smaller street names, but lose all overview. Also unusable. It seems like they could have just copied Gmaps for that... I sure hope they fix it soon.
- sprash 14y agoSo Apple basically was Steve Jobs. Time to ditch some stock.
- cicloid 14y agoI think you should have said, "Apple is people working hard, iterating and delivering." Many of those hard working folks are still at Apple. If Jobs was Apple, there should still be some skunkworks projects left behind to ship and the numbers are still favorable to Apple.
- danso 14y agoYes, but as the OP describes, the process involved much iteration and constant feedback and energy from Jobs, not just a memo of what he wanted to see on launch day
- Firehed 14y agoI think the point was that Jobs was working with the teams as a contributor more than a dictator. It very specifically pointed out that Jobs' ideas were decoupled from his role as CEO (as were everyone else's) so there were just lots of ideas, and the best ones stayed around while the rest were thrown out. Perhaps Jobs started that process, but I'm sure it still exists with him gone.
- Steko 14y agoMaybe you could mortgage your house and short the stock too? Let us know how that works out for you.
- nikster 14y agoWhen you look at some of the iApps - like iPhoto - i dont think he's irreplaceable. iPhoto sucks and always has. In software design, his influence was definitely hit and miss. Even a genius can err at times ;)
- Evbn 14y ago
- danabramov 14y agoReading this reminded me of a post by Miguel de Icaza: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Nov-07.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Nov-07.html Basically, Miguel argues that Walter Isaacson failed, as did many who tried to describe Steve Jobs recently: >Whenever the story gets close to an interesting historical event, or starts exploring a big unknown of Steve's work, we are condescendingly told that "Steve Activated the Reality Distortion Field". >Every. Single. Time. >Not once did the biographer try to uncover what made people listen to Steve. Not once did he try to understand the world in which Steve operated. The breakthroughs of his work are described with the same passion as a Reuters news feed: an enumeration of his achievements glued with anecdotes to glue the thing together. It's great to see a real account of working with him, minus the “magic” BS.
- kamaal 14y agoAfter reading his biography by Walter Isaacson. I lost all respect I had for Steve Jobs. At the end of the book it felt like he rode on the successes of other geniuses like Steve Wozniak, Jonathan Ive and many others. His biggest advantage seems to have be, that he was with Steve Wozniak when Apple 1 and 2 were made. After that it was riding on others success and building cult of personality around him. Walter Isaacson sort of ruined it.
- michaelpinto 14y agoBut I have to wonder if Jobs manipulated Isaacson so people would worry less about Apple after his passing away? Isaacson's book was very poorly done and offered very few actual insights other than Jobs getting to see his father. In fact after I read Inside Apple I was left wondering how Isaacson got away with writing something so lightweight.
- hilko 14y agoI was rather disappointed too. Maybe his approach was the only one that would provide a good story for non-techies, but I didn't like it. But then I'm a geek.
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- aviswanathan 14y agoWas expecting something about how tyrannical and ruthless an operator he was. Pleasantly surprised by this article (not at his devotion to product), but by the fact that he took his CEO hat off and participated in product as a team member whose ideas could be thrown away like everyone else's.
- mech4bg 14y agoDid I miss something here...? "In 1991, I started work at NeXT, as Product Manager for Interpersonal Computing. It was the internet, before there was much of an internet. We called it Interpersonal Computing, but nobody paid attention until 5 years later when the WWW was born." The web existed in 1991, and Mosaic was launched in 1993. I first saw it in 1993, and it was a pretty big deal at the time. Have I misunderstood his '5 years later' statement?
- leoc 14y ago1996 wasn't when the Web was born, but it is a lot closer to the point in time when the Web and the Internet went mainstream. IIRC 1994 is often given as that year, and even by 1995 it (famously http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_book... ) wasn't obvious to everyone that they were now at the centre of computing.
- csixty4 14y agoYeah. 1994 is when I started seeing Zen and the Art of the Internet on the endcaps at Crown Books. Late 1995-1996 is when I started seeing books about the web given the same prominence.
- rhizome 14y agoThe WWW didn't get its third 'W' until the unrestricted domain market opened up via Network Solutions in 1995.
- suyash 14y agoWhat's news here? We already knew how much Steve Jobs loved to design products.
- michaelwww 14y agoIt's more about the author than Steve Jobs and there is no new information about Steve Jobs.
- vor_ 14y agoThe news is that there wasn't some "reality distortion field" cliche or temper tantrum. It's an account of Steve Jobs that you rarely read: sitting down with a team and iteratively designing products.
- nikster 14y agoIndeed. No reality distortion fields or elevator firings or questions about virginity. Then again, I suppose all those really crazy things happened during his fist stint at Apple when he was young and restless.
- adventured 14y agoSo what's it actually like working with Steve Jobs? Half joking aside, it would have been nice if the author would have spent more than 1/5th of the article actually talking about what he claimed he was going to give insight on. Instead the author spent most of the article tooting his own horn, which is fine, if that's what the title had indicated to expect.
- bob-wagner 14y agoExactly what I thought. Disappointed.
- kenfromm 14y agoYou don't know Glenn. He's a natural story teller and while proud of what he's done, he recognizes that he's just one of many people trying to create something that hasn't been created before. In reading into his comments of his history with Steve, you're viewing him as intentionally pumping up his own story. The truth is he's trying very hard to be honest with the listener as to his comings and goings with Apple and with Steve. He worked with him closely, then stepped away and came back. Multiple times. By telling the story of this, he lets readers know that he wasn't always by his side and that he left to try other things but circled back at different junctures in his life and in Steve's. Knowing Glenn and his successes and failures and talking with him over many a margarita at Compadres (after long bouts of writing NeXTSTEP code with him), the story brought strong memories and a very clear voice of different periods and circumstances across several years. He shows an arc of ups and downs in both careers and a lot of hard work and sweat that often didn't get notice until many years later if at all. Rereading the story, I don't get boastful at all. I get much appreciation for being able to be on a pretty cool ride and being able to create some great products. There's also disappointment in some hard work that didn't pay off. But above all appreciation for someone who continually rolled up his sleeves to get in the ring, take chances, and build something... or in this case tell a damn good story.
- smackfu 14y agoYeah, but here's the only sentence that really talks about "what it's like working with Steve": "Steve would draw a quick vision on the whiteboard, we'd go work on it for a while, bring it back, find out the ways in which it sucked, and we'd iterate, again and again and again. "
- transitionality 14y agoSo Jobs loved to micromanage. And it worked at Apple and at NeXT and at Apple, because Jobs knew a thing or two about software. But micromanaging your own cancer care doesn't work so well, does it now?
- yozmsn 14y agoA little harsh, but basically true. I SPoke to my doctor about Jobs and he basically said, if Jobs had gone with treatment when the cancer was discovered there was a 90% chance he would make it, as opposed to ~30% chance when he realized carrots aren't manna.
- philwelch 14y agoJudging from the Isaacson biography, Jobs would have been fine had he actually attended to the fact that he had cancer right away, rather than spending a year ignoring it.
- transitionality 14y agoHe didn't ignore it, he wasted that year on alternative medicine voodoo. This detail may not have made it to the Isaacson book, I didn't read it.
- philwelch 14y agoIt did make it into the book--Jobs mostly spent that year eating differently, but it wasn't a major focus of his life and aside from the change in diet he did more or less ignore it. If he obsessed over it as much as he actually obsessed over things at times, perhaps things would have gone differently. But it's clear that he did not.
- transitionality 14y agoIt appears the book glossed over what actually happened. Jobs worked with a number of alternative medicine con artists, to no result, obviously. Obsessing doesn't work when the methodology is wrong, and alternative medicine is the wrong methodology for treating serious medical problems.
- leoc 14y ago> The idea of "personal digital media" was born. This was Steve's vision, and why he put together the iMac DV, with Firewire and iMovie. We called it the Digital Hub strategy internally, to encourage you to put lots of personal digital media on your home computer. Here is Jobs presenting the Digital Hub concept at Macworld 2001: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8 (See also http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/10/71956?currentPage=3 http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/1... ) You can also see how the Digital Hub idea evidently influenced the layout of the Apple Store http://lowendmac.com/orchard/08th/roots-of-the-apple-store.h.. http://lowendmac.com/orchard/08th/roots-of-the-apple-store.h.... : the stands devoted to a particular kind of task, with appropriate gadgets attached to a Mac.
- jasonkolb 14y ago"It sounds kind of self-serving to say this, but he and I were a lot alike in that way, and in that process" It's interesting that everyone seems to come away with this opinion, I wonder what it says about Steve's personality. I remember from reading his biography that many of the people he ultimately had failings out with claimed the exact same thing.
- hilko 14y agoOoh, that's a wonderful observation. I've known a number of people that I would call 'Jobsian', based on my limited knowledge of him, of course. And in all cases they were really good at making me feel just that way.
- chernevik 14y agoUnanswered questions about Steve Jobs: - How did he hire? What traits was he looking for? How did he evaluate technical ability? He seemed able to hire technical people able to stretch through the conventionally accepted boundaries. - How did he manage technical people? He seemed able to identify those boundaries that could be pushed through, and motivate people through them. - How did he envision the plausible technical possibilities outside the conventional wisdom? - How did he envision product possibilities enabled by the combination of those various possibilities? I get the love of design and focus on user experience. It's the ability to find to that at the edge of technical possibility that seems unique to me.
- carbon8 14y agoThis sounds very similar to what I've heard from people who have actually worked with Jobs, as well as the Steve Jobs described by Ken Segall in Insanely Simple http://www.amazon.com/Insanely-Simple-Obsession-Drives-Success/dp/1591844835 http://www.amazon.com/Insanely-Simple-Obsession-Drives-Succe... Segall’s description of Jobs includes an important additional component: obsession with keeping things simple (hence the book title). Segall provides numerous anecdotes of Jobs beating an idea with the “Simple Stick,” as he calls it, and compares it favorably against his relatively frustrating experiences working with other companies like Intel and Dell.
- rlu 14y agoNot to sound harsh but reading that was a complete waste of time. In the end it came down to this: Q: What is it really like working with Steve Jobs? A: It wasn't magic, it was hard work, thoughtful design, and constant iteration. No way, really? Come on, I'm sure everyone on HN knows that this is true for any product.
- MrHus 14y agoEveryone knows but it's nice to be reminded sometimes that Apple's level of polish is not the work of gods, and that it can be attained by hard work. The media likes to portray Apple as a magical force and deify's Jobs as the grand Wizard, it nice to see he's just a guy behind the curtains.
- WayneDB 14y agoAlso - Am I the only one who thinks that Apple's products aren't really very good?
- nollidge 14y agoOf course you're not. But that's not an objective assessment, and neither is the opposite view. Jobs still managed to create products that a significant chunk of humanity subjectively enjoys. That's not easy.
- lordastral 14y agoI would imagine it would be kind of stinky.
- rjzzleep 14y agoi actually like it, it's basically the same that everyone else did that made a successful product. iterate. there's nothing magical about it. if that's what you look for, you will be disappointed. he wasn't some kind of genius. he just tried out what worked and iterated. it's the same reason why macbooks looked so smooth, while stupid acer was still putting fan ins on the bottom of the laptop until intel gave them ultrabook designs. really? who would do that. clearly none at acer has ever used an acer laptop for actual portable usage. typed from my acer ultraportable with fan in at the bottom
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- noptic 14y agoChange the title OR the text. This was an interesting article about the cool things he did. Steve Jobs was involved in this work but this is NOT what this article is about.
- Mordor 14y agoOne wonders at what Tim Cook regards his true purpose with the "magic wand of CEO"?
- LilValleyBigEgo 14y agoI've heard many stories about Jobs in his later life. He liked to walk into functional working groups and just shit on people just because he could. On multiple occasions I and friends witnessed Jobs inciting arguments with people and then firing them on the spot. He would approach a random person while walking around the Apple campus and ask them why they were doing what they were doing, and if he didn't like their answer he'd tell them to get the fuck out. I once saw him approach a network engineer who had just finished implementing a wi-fi infrastructure install for a large building on the campus. He complained that he could "see" the routers that were attached near the ceilings. When it was explained that the routers were visible because the ceiling panels obstructed the ceiling he said "I don't give a fuck, make them go away. I don't want to see them." The engineer had to remove all of the routers, re-position them and then add twice the number of routers to accommodation the signal loss.