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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

One of favorite interviews of Steve Wozniak is still the one by jl in Founders at Work.

http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html

> When I got done, I'm looking at these 2 floppies that look just the same. And I decided that I might have written onto the good one from the bad, and I did. So I had lost it all. I went back to my hotel room. I slept for a while. I got up about 10:00 a.m. or so. I sat down and, out of my head and my listings, recreated everything, got it working again, and we showed it at the show. It was a huge hit. Everybody was saying, "Oh my God, Apple has a floppy!" It just looked beautiful, plugged into a slot on our computer. We were able to say "run color math," and it just runs instantly. It was a change in time.

But the real eureka moment for me was the very first time I ever read data back. I wrote it on the floppy, which was easy, but read it back, got it right. I just died.

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This is insanely great reading. I love how old-school technical it is. I haven't finished reading yet, but my favorite quote so far:

> "What advice would you give to hackers who are thinking about starting a company or making something on their own?"

> "Wozniak: First of all, try to have the highest of ethics and to be open and truthful about things, not hiding. If you have to hide something for company reasons, at least explain what you're doing. Don't mislead people. Know in your heart that you are a good person with good goals because that will carry over to your own self-confidence and your belief in your engineering abilities. Always seek excellence: make your product better than the average person would."

I love that quote too. To add to "always seek excellence", here is his "how":

> Livingston: What is the key to excellence for an engineer?

> Wozniak: You have to be very diligent. You have to check every little detail. You have to be so careful that you haven't left something out. You have to think harder and deeper than you normally would. It's hard with today's large, huge programs.

How many times on HN do we hear about actual engineering excellence vs. the hack, the weekend mvp, the "if your product doesn't embarrass you, you've released too late" dogma?

> if your product doesn't embarrass you, you've released too late

In the age of shallow work, this is the dogma, that justifies shitty things being released as a philosophy of continuous improvement.

In my opinion no lasting and great product can be built that way. Only more shitty things that flood our market. You collect feedback on your shitty app and implement optimization? How does that differ from design by committee?

To be timeless and produce the highes possible quality you have to go deep, understand the problem you are trying to solve and solve it once and for all.

Solve it to and above the best ability you can bring to the table at exactly that moment in time.

Excellent comment.

I'm not sure that many software companies today are aware of how corrosive it is to the company's culture to not strive for excellence and integrity, and to encourage the same from every employee. What exactly does it accomplish to ship a product that is buggy or half-completed, just so that you can hit a deadline ? Do these companies think that the customer isn't going to notice ? It's much better to be honest with a customer about issues when you become aware of them, and allow the customer to plan accordingly.

And striving for excellence might produce something that lives on way beyond it's time.

Just to name an example, I would name the designs[0] of (or inspired by) Dieter Rams[1].

[0]: http://www.cultofmac.com/188753/the-braun-products-that-insp... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieter_Rams

You ever see the first few versions of Facebook and Twitter? http://makers.crew.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/OG-Twitter....

The point is, if you have a good idea, regardless of how complete it is, get it out there and see if it warrants going further.

I don't think you can defend Facebook or Twitter as timeless or high quality. Even Google is kind of meh at a technical level.

I was directly responding to "In my opinion no lasting and great product can be built that way." Facebook, Twitter, and certainly Google have been proven to be long lasting. Google is ubiquitous at this point!

Android for example is good enough, but far from Great IMO. Granted, this is all subjective but an overhead sprinkler whose sensor is a part that melts/deforms with heat is timeless solution that just works (1879 https://www.google.com/patents/US218564) . An electronic sensor could work, but has far more failure modes. Now compare this with say Facebook whose design regularly undergoes significant revision.

> have the highest of ethics

This summer I read a couple of stories about Woz in Programmers at Work. Around 1980, when Apple was about to go public, it became clear that there were two kinds of employees: the engineers who were focused on work, and others who spent all their energy gaming stock options. When Woz found out that the shares ended up being so unbalanced, he made a large pool of his own shares available to employees. The "scheming" employees still ended up taking advantage of the others (and Woz) by gaming that arrangement. This is not altogether shocking, since other stories indicate that Woz spent his own spare time for example, seeing how many digits of `e` he could fit into one of their computers (edit "He had to use every single piece of memory, including the memory on the display screen, to hold this big number. And he didn't have any intermediate results because all the memory was holding just one number. This program took fourteen days to run.")[0]

I have such high respect for Woz. I believe he really does put "being a good person in his heart" above everything else.

[0] This was from the interview with a programmer who worked for Apple at the time (edit Andy Hertzfeld). Sorry for the bad retelling, I don't have the book handy.

Finally finished reading and that's an amazing interview. I thought I had read all the histories of Apple but I stilled learned something new. Love the technical content.

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