What It's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs (2011)
inventor-labs.com
inventor-labs.com
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.
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.
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.
This is the sense I got from Steve Jobs as well- he was passionate and he would say things definitively, but he understood collaboration. He was persuadable.
I am persuadable, my biggest lament though is that so few people try. So many people just demand that things be done a certain way- and often with the worst excuse "that's how other companies do it" (or "that's standard practice" or even "best practices" -- which is just saying "I belong to a cargo cult.")
That attitude is death to a startup.
Of the stories I like this one, "Reality Distortion Field" by Andy Hertzfeld ~ http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
> 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
But I find people, especially those who only consider the engineering parts of products to take this view.
So did Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergiy Brin, Jerry Yang etc. (steve case, fecesbook, myspace and other shitty cut-n-paste non-algorithmic efforts were underway many knew how to cut and paste myspace text entry boxes to spy on girls and call users "dumb fucks" in the AOL/Iomega space).
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.)
Edit: Not Sony.
The end result being that they completely missed the boat on the then-nascent digital music market, and less than 15 years later, have spun off most of those brands and hardware-wise, Playstation aside, are limited to making (very nice) camera sensors for iPhones.
Example: "As a team member, not as CEO. He quietly left his CEO hat by the door, and collaborated with us. He was basically the Product Manager for all of the products I worked on, even though there eventually were other people with that title, who usually weren't allowed in the room :)"
Self-contradictory. He made himself de facto Product Manager — more powerful actually, since other Product Managers "usually weren't allowed in the room". Virtually by definition, the top boss is whatever manager they decide to be.
(Did the author ever analyze the power relations in each meeting? Would the boss even tolerate someone who was too good at it?)
Hah - ain't that the truth.
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)
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.
NeXT, on the other hand, struggled from the beginning. They sold a total of 50,000 computers, ever. They had, relative even to Apple in its deepest slump, zero name recognition and zero customer base.
Resources probably mattered a lot too. Even when doing poorly, Apple could sink significant resources into new projects. The problem with pre-Jobs Apple was that the sank their resources into bad (or badly executed) projects like Newton, Copland, and Gershwin. They were able to put that into developing the iPod, whereas I think NeXT just didn't have the money for such a project.
Maybe in USA, but for the rest of the world it was barely known outside of recording studios and newspaper photo labs.
Slightly before this time, at the dawn of the web I had a NeXT box and they where great machines, but they where expensive and outside of early web dev and some scientific stuff they where not heavily used. Sun was eating at their scientific market with the Sun Stations and web dev kind of took off on every platform so the price point became less and less justifiable. My personal opinion is that NeXT would not have survived had Apple not come knocking at their door and would have suffered the same fate as BeOS, though jobs had the resources to drag it out far longer that Be did. It was not his success at NeXT that brought Apple back to the table with hat in hand, but rather it was his success with Pixar.
It was a time of consolidation, The Amiga had died, Atari was long out of the game and the Mac OS was aging rapidly hardware was fixed the only two options on the table where PC and Mac everything else had fallen by the wayside and the Mac's operating system was on life support. Copeland had died which was supposed to be the savior OS and as such the Mac, while holding it's own in pure hardware specs given the move to the PPC was not capitalizing on modern hardware or computing due to the OS. Meanwhile the hardware game was set so Steve was having no luck breaking into the market with his own hardware platform. Apple and NeXT needed each other and Apple needed Steve so it was a do or die for both. Apple was on the ropes pretty bad, there stock was $11 a share (god it sucked to be a broke college kid) and Gates shortly after this point would bail them out with a loan to stave off anti-trust allegations for another decade. Had the NeXT / Apple merger not happened both companies would not exist today. Kind of funny to think how close one of the largest companies of the times, almost blinked out of existence.
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.
Perhaps someone gave the cauldron a hard stir and loosened that idea from where it had been burnt onto the bottom where it belongs?
- 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.
Who knows though... Maybe it's a bold new, modern art type of design.