
What It's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs (2011) - walterbell
http://inventor-labs.com/blog/2011/10/12/what-its-really-like-working-with-steve-jobs.html
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antirez
It's a shame the article does not have any content at all about how it was
like working with Steve Jobs. It's an article about the design process they
used, with very little info anyway.

~~~
wmeredith
I also thought this was super weird. I kept thinking the author was going to
get around to it, but then it just... ended.

~~~
herbturbo
...ended with a link to his new project selling washing machines. Presumably
why the article has been resurrected in the first place.

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swalsh
I read this article back in 2011... it always stayed with me. The idea that
once you put your idea out there, it's no longer yours. That the vision is a
shared thing. That pot of soup, is a brilliant concept.

Last year I was working for a startup, I was working with a man I greatly
respected, and still do, and he's crazy smart. However he was also my boss,
which meant that at the end of the day his opinions mattered just a bit more
than mine. Which is fine for decisions, but sucked in a collaborative design.

There was this large project going on, we were building some tech that was
going to be the core of our business, and together we had been thinking
through this problem for a long time. Then one day I came to the office, and
he said "I think i got it, now I want you to listen to the whole thing first
before you add anything... cause what I have works". It turned out to be the
first sentence in a really terrible period between us. All sense of
collaboration was gone after that. It was him telling me how things were going
to be, and anytime I tried to contribute (add or change something) I was being
insubordinate. I started to get very emotional, which lead to him getting
emotional... I passionately believed in a few core concepts, and sometimes i'd
even get through to him, but then a few days later he'd forget my argument and
get really angry at me. If he was just another senior engineer, I think things
would have gone much better, but the fact that he was my boss made things
crazy difficult. Conversations would end with "because I have 40 years of
experience". I felt like I was no longer allowed to contribute if my idea was
too drastically different.

My point is, when you're in a position of power having an actual equal design
collaboration is hard to accomplish. Everyone is passionate about their own
ideas. Reading this article made me respect Steve because if this is true, he
accomplished a very difficult task.

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Isamu
> if this is true, he accomplished a very difficult task.

I think this is critically important, and it is clear that people don't get
this at all.

For Steve, I have seen it described by different people, his ability to change
his mind even though he was passionate about his previous position. He could
be persuaded.

This is key for iteration.

~~~
kbenson
> This is key for iteration.

This is key for everything in life. If you can't or won't change your opinion,
you are necessarily stuck with the sometimes poor initial choices you make.
Over-investment in the process over the result is problem in many places.

~~~
Domenic_S
Strong beliefs, loosely held.

~~~
solipsism
_weakly_ held, is the saying/quote/mantra

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bootload
There is a good series of stories by members of the Mac team tagged, _"
Reality Distortion"_ from _" Revolution in the Valley"_ ~
[http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&top...](http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&topic=Reality%20Distortion)

Of the stories I like this one, _" Reality Distortion Field"_ by Andy
Hertzfeld ~
[http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...](http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Reality_Distortion_Field.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&topic=Reality+Distortion)

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cpg
TL;DR

> That is what I remember most about Steve, that he simply loved designing and
> shipping products

Nothing new. The rest of the article is ego-boosting reminiscence.

Edit: typo

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jernfrost
You would think, but 9/10 people making comments about Steve Jobs on the
internet describe him as only a savvy marketeer and business man. Steve didn't
invent anything, doesn't know how to program bla bla, is how it goes. While
Steve Jobs was an asshole in many ways this is a gross injustice to his
legacy. He clearly had a lot of input and influence on Apple products and was
important in making them good.

But I find people, especially those who only consider the engineering parts of
products to take this view.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I think the influence was a high level of systems thinking. He didn't just
design products, he designed what you could do with products, and he designed
how and why people would want them - which is a level of insight that eludes
anyone who thinks a product is a list of features or (worse) a technology
stack.

Having said that, iMovie was good, iPhoto was okay-to-good, but iTunes has
always been awful.

I've never understood why it was so badly designed. (And it's getting worse,
by all accounts.)

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shrewduser
It's true, he couldn't throw the ball or tackle but he was the coach, the
playmaker, and a damn fine one.

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tunap
My favorite play was when he flew his private jet to the UK to bribe the man
he stole the ipod design from to testify in court that he(Steve) did NOT steal
the idea from Sony. Good stuff.

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zepto
Do you had any evidence of this?

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tunap
This guy probably does:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_Kramer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kane_Kramer)

Edit: Not Sony.

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camperman
"Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M,.."

Hah - ain't that the truth.

~~~
rajacombinator
Did not understand that line ... Implies NeXT had to pay Apple 400M?? In what
sense?

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panic
Apple paid 400M to acquire NeXT, but NeXT's management ended up taking over
the company. So really, NeXT paid -$400M to acquire Apple. It's like how Pixar
acquired Disney for -$7.4B.

~~~
mikeash
Software too. Mac OS X (and later, iOS) is a direct continuation of NeXT's
NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP OSes. Objective-C came to Apple from NeXT. All the Cocoa
APIs used on the Mac come from NeXT, and the UIKit APIs used for iOS
development are a direct descendant of them. The modern Apple contains very
little of pre-1996 Apple but lots of pre-1996 NeXT.

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janvdberg
Here's what I always wondered: how much did Steve need Apple? (The other way
around is well known). But couldn't Steve Jobs have done the iPod, iPhone,
iPad etc. without Apple? Apple was pretty much in shambles right, when he
returned? So what was there that he couldn't do with NeXT (or any other
company for that matter)?

~~~
tambourine_man
Millions of loyal customers and a very recognizable brand.

But yes, why couldn't he build that on Next when he could at Apple is a good
question.

I guess the personal computer was a singular opportunity in history to start
something from scratch and still compete with the big guys (in hardware)

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Apple had a huge dealer network, a global supply chain, a famous brand, and a
collection of industry relationships.

NeXT had none of the above. It had some enthusiastic academic customers, but
by the end it was trying to sell an OS with very limited success.

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neves
Quote:"Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home
movies on their computers."

Sometimes I think Apple guys are megalomaniac, but this guy beats it. It looks
like it happened due to iMovie, not to the newly born digital cameras or
Napster.

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vacri
Regarding the "cauldron", it's a damn shame that "hey, light gray text on
white looks awesome!" rose to the top.

Perhaps someone gave the cauldron a hard stir and loosened that idea from
where it had been burnt onto the bottom where it belongs?

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pluckytree
People think Steve was arrogant, but this guy takes the cake. Steve would
always thank the whole team and everyone involved when a product was
introduced. I believe at Pixar (couldn’t find a reference) that he pushed for
everyone at the company to be in the movie credits, right down to the
janitorial staff. This guy is all about taking credit for the work of a very
small number of people and comparing himself to Steve. Plus, this is just
poorly researched and frankly just lame, for lack of a better word. Some
snippets:

\- I’ll call him Steve (Everyone called him Steve. Employees still refer to
execs by their first name)

\- "I worked with Steve Jobs" can mean, "I saw him in the elevator once when I
was at a meeting at Apple" …… I actually worked with the guy, and I'm
realizing that perhaps I worked with him more closely than almost anyone (Who
cares? Where are the stories about working with him? You should have more
stories than anyone)

\- I was employee #40 (No one cares. Employee #1765 could change the world
more than you)

\- We called it Interpersonal Computing, but nobody paid attention until 5
years later when the WWW became more mainstream. (We were so ahead of the
curve that what we worked on wasn’t even given a name. WWW? I was around then
and I don’t remember many people calling it that)

\- We were done ahead of schedule, as it turned out (No you weren’t. No one
who works in software, especially a 1.0 product, believes you)

\- I think it was October or November of 1998 (Try using the WWW to look it
up. It was October and it was actually 1999)

So far, that covers 2/3rds of the article. Still no mention of what it’s like
to work with Steve.

\- What he was passionate about was, I think, quite simple: he liked to build
products. I do, too. This we had in common. (Incredible, it’s like you were
soulmates)

\- So I think that in some very real sense, I had a better understanding of
Steve and how he worked, and what motivated him, than almost anyone in the
world. (You should really write an article about what Steve was like to work
with. With lots of stories since you were so close to him.)

\- It sounds kind of self-serving to say this, but he and I were a lot alike
in that way, and in that process. (The whole article is self-serving. It’s far
more about you than Steve. That’s right, even I call him Steve from outside
the secret cabal you were part of.)

So, in summary, Glenn Reid is amazing, almost Steve-like, and what it was like
to work with Steve consisted going into rooms with whiteboards and throwing
out ideas and debating the details of a product.

Arrogant engineers don’t make great products. Oh, you didn’t mention your
engineering team. And the team that made the hardware. Or you EPM that kept
you on schedule so you could ship early or something. What about people that
wrote the low-level software your app depended on? Did you write everything
from the kernel on up to iMovie? You have very little in common with Steve
other than you were in the same room with him a lot and apparently have no
actual stories to tell.

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dontscale
Bookmark

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CIPHERSTONE
Someone should product design that blog, or my browser if that was the reason
it looked so horrible...

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kdamken
It looked pretty strange for me as well.

Who knows though... Maybe it's a bold new, modern art type of design.

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rchaud
I've always thought that engineer blogs tend to use this Paul Graham 1990s CSS
styling as a sort of "content-first" badge of honour.

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kdamken
If that's the case, then that's actually kind of charming and I totally
support that.

