
Jim Black's Steve Jobs Story - tzhenghao
https://m.facebook.com/JamesHBlack/posts/10156560054277932
======
not_that_noob
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
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
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.

~~~
wilsonnb
Jobs was not deeply technical.

If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs got hired at Atari because he showed them
a board for some arcade game that Steve Wozniak had designed and conveniently
forgot to tell them that he didn't actually design the thing.

I also think I read that Steve Jobs lied to Woz about how much Atari paid him
for it so he could cheat Woz out of the money.

I'm pretty sure I read about this in a book called "The Ultimate History of
Video Games". [1]

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-
Pokemon/...](https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-
Pokemon/dp/0761536434)

~~~
pfranz
I've heard both of those stories from multiple places. I don't know exactly
how you'd define "technical," he clearly wasn't a strong engineer, but I have
heard multiple examples of him managing technical things. I remember around
the same time he was known for memorizing chips and vendors very very well
that he could source them very cheaply.

I think a good firsthand example is a one hour q&a with developers he did in
1997 soon after returning to Apple:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ16_YxLbB8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ16_YxLbB8)

He doesn't necessarily show off deep technical knowledge, but he is able to
discuss strategy about technology directly with developers. Managing
technology is his competitive advantage.

~~~
michaelcampbell
Not the OP but I don't define "technical" as "being able to manage technical
things".

It's absurd that anyone would.

------
stagger87
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
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
I think Elizabeth Holmes belongs in prison. However, I read her bio and she
was a genius on par with Jobs.

~~~
paulcole
For breaking what law(s)?

~~~
rpedela
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
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)

~~~
rpedela
No because as far as I am aware Elon has not tried to actively hide the
problems even if he sometimes paints a rosier picture than reality. That is
very different from telling everyone, including regulators, that the
diagnostic tests work great, safe, effective. And there are documents showing
they knew it didn't work. Theranos is like Enron.

------
scarface74
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
I wonder how long that guy stayed at Apple afterwards, does anyone know?

~~~
scarface74
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.

------
post_break
"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?

~~~
rasalas
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thresh.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thresh.jpg)

John Carmack in 1997 wearing what is presumably the exact shirt.

~~~
gameswithgo
I think the guy in the car is Thresh, who won Carmack's Ferrari in a quake
tournament:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Fong](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Fong)

You can download recordings of his tournaments, where you can freely change
your POV to thresh, or his opponent, or just fly around, and watch him play.
Pretty amazing skill!

------
privacypoller
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
Most geniuses aren't assholes. But no one writes news stories about
individuals that have no drama and are pleasant to work with.

~~~
halestock
Er, John Carmack?

------
waynecochran
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.

~~~
Zelphyr
Kind of an apples to oranges comparison on Carmack's point though (no pun
intended). Keyboards were invented 100 years earlier than the mouse. People,
especially older adults, instinctively knew how to use them.

~~~
talmand
When the first keyboard type interface was invented for typewriters and such,
did people instinctively know how to use them immediately? Besides, at that
time the concept of a two button mouse was not new and had been in use with
computers for years.

~~~
Zelphyr
I don't know about when typewriters were new, but up until recently, many
people were actively scared to use a computer. I worked with people who would
physically shake when they would use a computer because they terrified of
breaking something.

The mouse, while designed to help quell those fears, was still a part of the
computer and still scary to those people.

The number of buttons probably didn't matter in the whole scheme of things.
They would've been afraid of it regardless. But his instinct was already to
remove anything from a design that wasn't absolutely necessary. So it fit with
his way of thinking to suggest that people wouldn't use a mouse with two
buttons. If eliminating one button could make those people less afraid of the
computer, then that was the way to go.

All that said; I too thought that mouse sucked. But I was a power user by then
and it wasn't designed for me.

~~~
WalterBright
> because they terrified of breaking something

Not really. More like they were terrified that the keyboard would shoot out
sparks and fire, and throw them across the bridge of the Enterprise.

------
ryandrake
> 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...

~~~
barrkel
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
Yea I should have qualified that I was mostly talking about games companies.
Games _should_ be among the easiest software to release on multiple platforms
for to not needing platform specific UI controls. Actually I struggle to think
of a single major component to a game that must be platform-specific. Yet, of
all the software I use, games tend to be the ones stubbornly stuck on Windows.

~~~
bangonkeyboard
_> Actually I struggle to think of a single major component to a game that
must be platform-specific._

Different platforms often have totally different graphics APIs. Even when
platforms share APIs, driver quality, compliance, and fast paths vary greatly.
The Mac still used a completely different processor architecture from the PC
at the time of this story, requiring platform-specific optimizations and
approaches.

Games, particularly cutting edge ones that demand performance, and especially
from that era, are much more likely to need to be tailored to their platforms.

~~~
ryandrake
These are semi-good reasons for games of the past but I thought this was
actually less of a problem these days with the rise of cross-platform game
engines. If you use Unity or something, porting your 2018-era game to Mac or
Linux should be a recompile at most.

The other thread mentions the business cost of releasing and _supporting_
these other platforms, which I totally understand.

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

~~~
mentat
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
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.

------
stcredzero
_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
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.

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

~~~
jseliger
I was reading Ben Horowitz's book _The Hard Thing About Hard Things_ the other
day, and the stories about Jobs and Carmack remind me of this passage:

>"When do you hold the bus?"

>The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate
a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most
talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered,
"If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you'll be so late you'll
miss the game, so you can't do that. The bus must leave on time. However,
sometimes you'll have a player that's so good that you hold the bus for him,
but only him."

>Phil Jackson, the coach who has won the most NBA championships, was once
asked about his famously flakey superstar Dennis Rodman, "Since Dennis Rodman
is allowed to miss practice, does this mean other star players like Michael
Jordan and Scottie Pippin can miss practice too?" Jackson replied, "Of course
not. There is only room for one Dennis Rodman on this team. In fact, you
really can only have a very few Dennis Rodmans in society as a whole;
otherwise, we would degenerate into anarchy."

>You may find yourself with an employee who fits one of the above descriptions
[heretic, flake, or jerk] but nonetheless makes a massive positive
contribution to the company. You may decide that you will personally mitigate
the employee's negative attributes and keep her from polluting the overall
company culture. That's fine, but remember: You can only hold the bus for her.

Really exceptional people often get exceptions. One challenge may be that more
people think they are really exceptional, than really are really exceptional.

~~~
philwelch
Fascinating counterexample about Dennis Rodman, though: Gregg Popovich
famously decided Rodman was too much trouble and got rid of him after only one
season, vowed that he would never tolerate a player like that again, and ended
up winning five championships and counting, while building a team that
remained a serious contender almost continuously from 1999 to, frankly, the
moment Kawhi Leonard got injured last year.

~~~
LiweiZ
If the Bulls kept their roster, they would highly likely get one or two more
championships. The Bulls roster was more diversified and hard to froster from
a builder's point's of view.

~~~
philwelch
That is a huge if. By 1998, the big three basically couldn't stand each other
anymore and only kept showing up because they wanted to finish out the second
threepeat. If they managed to keep the wheels from coming off in the 98-99
season, they possibly could have beaten the Spurs, even though Rodman was
definitely declining by then and the Spurs had two Hall-of-Fame big men and
the Bulls had Luc Longley. In 2000, they'd run into Shaq and Kobe, and by
then, Shaq was unstoppable.

~~~
LiweiZ
Spurs is always a very well engineered team. It's a beautifully crafted team.
That's why they last long as a team. Personally, I'd put Barkley and Malone
above Tim due to their options to create space and finish. Bulls core members
are all very unique and top specialized in their own domains while all held
very high bball iq and passing skills. Your words let me notice how
diversified that Bulls was both in terms of basketball ability and their
personalities. That's beyond engineering. I can't believe I'm talking about
bball on HN and found out a new angle.

Thank you. That is definitely a huge if. And shaq vs MJ's Bulls in 2000
could've been a must watch. Bulls would definitely make some adjustment to get
some fresher blood. But just as they went through big man's era, their answer
would probably not get one or two big men to go head to head against shaq.
They played in their own way and took advantage of opponent's weakness.

------
crikli
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.

------
cornholio
Jobs comes off as quite an obnoxious dude.

~~~
bgroins
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
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
For example, You may note that Scott Forstall doesn't work at Apple anymore.

~~~
rusk
* Scott Forstall doesn't work at Apple anymore*

and neither does software ...

~~~
tambourine_man
Ouch

------
mehrdada
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)

------
DonHopkins
>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-...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-
invented-future-180967498)

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.”

------
mathattack
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
was there ever a cto at apple.

------
microcolonel
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.

------
tooltalk
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
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
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
> 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.

------
camillomiller
[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
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.

------
robotkdick
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..).

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

------
telltruth
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.

------
golergka
> 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?

~~~
nailer
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
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.

------
mentos
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?

------
macca321
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.

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

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

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

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

------
js2
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 :)

~~~
usefulcat
> 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.

~~~
justwalt
I remember having this problem in my fifth grade computer lab, along with
disliking the single button.

I’m not sure how they justified filling a computer lab in an elementary school
with iMacs, especially since the only things we did on them were typing tests
and playing Oregon Trail.

~~~
saagarjha
> I’m not sure how they justified filling a computer lab in an elementary
> school with iMacs, especially since the only things we did on them were
> typing tests and playing Oregon Trail.

Because it made someone at least four levels removed from your school feel
good about themselves that they were able to integrate technology in the
classroom.

------
cvaidya1986
Great story.

