Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#211

Post by zeusk » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:00 AM UTC

StevePerkins wrote: post #42

tester756 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guys were creating Java? > ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. 9K classes in a year sounds crazy as hell

A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines. 9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take over enterprise business computing. How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year? Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console o…

Complete maybe, but it was not fun learning or using swing in college.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#212

Post by diskzero » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:03 AM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #206

diskzero wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Larry Tesler is no longer around to write such a retrospective. I am not sure who else might be able to do it. One of my favorite ATG project was the Dylan[1] programming language. Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2] There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear…

> There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. I think I disagree, but I am pretty Steve-cynical. It seemed to follow a pattern of Steve shutting down things that he wasn't in charge of, or that smacked of Sculley-era Apple? IL4 used to have a technical library — and a kind museum of Apple products (including a Lisa) that you could…

The loss of that library was sad, but didn't all the books go to the Stanford Apple archive? I also grabbed a book on parsers.

I know some people from ATG found places to stay if they really, really wanted to, but unless you could directly related your work to something on Steve's agenda, you were gone. Kim stayed and worked on voice recognition, Larry Yaeger stayed and worked on InkWell, Jerome stayed and worked on latent semantics analysis for email spam detection, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#213

Post by gajjanag » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:04 AM UTC

smugma wrote: post #165

mradek wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish companies would be run in a way that removes insane leveling completely. In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending how you look at it) for ICs. Why? IME it has led to so much “talk” and bloat, and useless meetings led by people trying to prove something who go on and on about things that make no sense. No execution, only flattery and BS. IMO, the only levels you need should be Software Engineer,…

The IC leveling at Apple is similar to what you have described. ICT 3/4/5 roughly maps to what you have. The problem with this is that while it's relatively easy to go from a 3 to a 4 after a few years, it's a huge jump from 4 to 5, and then after that you've basically peaked for life. If you just care about building great things, it can work, but for many people, feeling like there's growth and not stagnation is a p…

Not really true anymore unfortunately, and the system is converging with other large organizations.

For example, to keep compensation in line with market and reduce attrition, there were definitely more people who got promoted to ICT5 last year and the designation has thus been diluted.

Furthermore, candidates coming in from other large companies expect the title/leveling prestige in many cases, and ICT5 is a tough sell while trying to hire a Google L7/8. So Apple does have a fair number of ICT6 from that.

I also think limiting IC layers and keeping the above politics minimal can work - Netflix did that for a long time and was very successful as a company with their approach. Most IC at Netflix were simply titled "senior software engineer", with pay being a wide band dependent on market value. They no longer do that for some reasons, and have adopted the standard large level hierarchy.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#214

Post by mlindner » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:06 AM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #201

MaintenanceMode wrote: post #91

I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was just about to be released. I was building another product that was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)! I have a lot of funny stories. Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter. That was my first day at work…

> The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means…

I've never worked in such an environment myself but I imagine it feels something like soldiers feel following a leader who feels like he knows what he's doing. It's the feeling of shared hardship and shared experience and it creates culture of driving to follow the leader.

I imagine Elon Musk (at least used to, not sure if he still does) cause the same experience in employees. That's the sense you get when you read books like "Liftoff" that document the early days of SpaceX.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#215

Post by pstuart » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:07 AM UTC

hinkley wrote: post #30

beefman wrote: post #14

I was at Apple 2006-2010 and worked with many who were there during SJ's return. It was drastic in both product and headcount cuts.[1] SJ was many things but above all, he was feared. [1] roughly 1/3 of the company https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...

I recall people of that era wondering why the guy who created NeXT, a cool idea with zero commercial success, was so arrogant as to think he knew how to make a winning product. What I don't think a lot of people knew at the time was the hand Jobs played in the birth of Pixar, which is definitely something to be cocky about. One of my coworkers decided he was going to specialize in ObjectiveC, because yes the jobs wer…

He was also there for the Apple I & II, and Mac. His arrogance was understandable, especially in how it floundered in his absence.

Having that outside experience likely shaped him to shine in his second go around.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#216

Post by cloudking » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:17 AM UTC

nr2x wrote: post #143

agloeregrets wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say in it, except Steve. You know, this is actually a rather good thing. So many companies are just bloated with projects that they want to see through just to see them through and they make zero sense in the grand scheme of the company. If you have a single person responsible for everything that ca…

This is why Sundar is a nice guy but shit CEO.

Well he did cut Stadia, which had a sizable team working on it.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#217

Post by tinglymintyfrsh » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:22 AM UTC

w10-1 wrote: post #16

It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally. Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bu…

I wrote a 1.2 Swing desktop app with a JNI DLL to call Win32 to create a desktop shortcut. The hilarious part is it violated the EULA because a JRE was shipped and ran from a CD. It took about 30 seconds to load, so it seemed very important. :) It was themed with a JPG in the background to paint the window object's canvas.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#218

Post by tinglymintyfrsh » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:24 AM UTC

aljfds3 wrote: post #177

mradek wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish companies would be run in a way that removes insane leveling completely. In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending how you look at it) for ICs. Why? IME it has led to so much “talk” and bloat, and useless meetings led by people trying to prove something who go on and on about things that make no sense. No execution, only flattery and BS. IMO, the only levels you need should be Software Engineer,…

At Palantir, there are no levels at all, everyone is just a simple software engineer. It's their relevant experience that gives an engineer leverage on a project.

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#219

Post by diskzero » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:25 AM UTC

E39M5S62 wrote: post #200

diskzero wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The development team was very small. I worked on audio mixing code, capturing video encoded from Bt848 cards, audio and video codecs, anything related to audio and video timing. Several great programmers were there and continue to do amazing things at other companies big and small. I ended up working with many of them at Apple. At some point, it seems many had to choose between Google or Apple.

Very neat. I bought a cheap Bt848 card in '99. I used my BeOS machine to watch TV in my first college dorm. Thanks for all of the memories!

The first version of the driver was written by Be's VP of Engineering, Steve Sakoman. Steve started the "Big Newton" project at Apple and his experience with the AT&T processor was the reason the first BeBox prototypes used AT&T Hobbit CPUs.

Steve returned to Apple as VP of CoreOS or something like that. I was super happy when he came back. I think he is living in the rain forests of Hawaii now, clad only in palm leaves.

Re: Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?

#220

Post by JKCalhoun » Sat, Oct 22, 2022, 1:38 AM UTC

diskzero wrote: post #212

JKCalhoun wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it all down. I think I disagree, but I am pretty Steve-cynical. It seemed to follow a pattern of Steve shutting down things that he wasn't in charge of, or that smacked of Sculley-era Apple? IL4 used to have a technical library — and a kind museum of Apple products (including a Lisa) that you could…

The loss of that library was sad, but didn't all the books go to the Stanford Apple archive? I also grabbed a book on parsers. I know some people from ATG found places to stay if they really, really wanted to, but unless you could directly related your work to something on Steve's agenda, you were gone. Kim stayed and worked on voice recognition, Larry Yaeger stayed and worked on InkWell, Jerome stayed and worked on…

Relating your work to something on Steve's agenda is kind of what I was describing. As another pointed out, there were some amazing technologies that came out of ATG. It is impossible to know if they would have been interesting to Jobs though at the time.