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

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

#271

Post by jordanbeiber »

nostrebored wrote: post #267
jordanbeiber wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - what does it mean? You work on stimulating things and get paid what you accept. You’ll have a yearly review where you have your say, and pay can be increased if employer think it’s worth it. Titles are problematic in teams working to produce good stuff! We should compare ourselves to athletes more than the MBA powerpoint version of a company. I hear Tom Brady is a legend - is he an S10 quarterback? Senior q…

Everyone who cares about Brady is watching him and knows how he is performing. This is not true of engineers.

This is why I’m stating it’s a management tool.

Poor management requires boxes.

Better management actually care and help employees perform and improve.

In the end it’s about culture.

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

#272

Post by bredren »

alecbz wrote: post #190
bredren wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When considering a new job, I almost don't care about technology. Engineering culture makes all the difference. This resonated with me. Whether you are recruiting or looking culture is incredibly powerful.

This is hard though because culture often isn't very legible. I'd easily trade pay (within reason) and any tech stack for a truly great culture where I felt driven and engaged and was doing meaningful work, but the latter is really hard to understand ahead of time.

It is. However, in earlier phases people can recruit from their networks.

They will only be able to sell their best contacts with trusted tales of good things.

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

#273

Post by abudabi123 »

sroussey wrote: post #235
nso95 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy have times changed

Now there are, what, six iPads? Not sure how people decide on anything not the cheapest or most expensive. There are four “middle” options.

The techspec page for the product is buried on the Apple Store app. Personalities such as MKBHD on YT is who I rely on to figure out what the product is targetted at.

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

#274

Post by solardev »

zwaps wrote: post #246
solardev wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it bad to discourage status-seeking behavior, such that the people are just that way... look elsewhere?

Can you, as a business, afford it?

Probably? Is it really the ladder climbers or the everyday folks doing the grunt work?

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

#275

Post by aasasd »

wvenable wrote: post #185
aasasd wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up against the same ceiling. Didn't know about this. This is before ‘webOS’, right? What kind of OS problems are we talking here?

Palm OS was designed for the hardware of the time. It was very simple but ran well. Compared to Microsoft's approach of building a stripped down clone of Windows NT that barely ran on the hardware of the era. But in the long term Microsoft's approach was more successful because as hardware improved they had an OS ready to take advantage of it. Of course, what Microsoft wasn't ready for was the hardware getting so goo…

> What Microsoft wasn't ready for was the hardware getting so good that Apple could just port their existing desktop OS and software over.

Eh, I mean, MS attempted that more that once themselves: though WinCE wasn't Win9x inside, it sure looked like one, and purportedly even had swap.

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

#276

Post by lloydatkinson »

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…

So what was his problem with two button mice anyway?

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

#277

Post by origin_path »

Aperocky wrote: post #47
origin_path wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many classes do you think it should have, ballpark, given the same feature set? GUI toolkits alone can produce thousands of classes because there are thousands of concepts that make sense to model, then add on security, collections, many utilities, XML handling, multiple RPC systems and so on. It's hard to over-state how large the Java standard library is. And it's not like other ecosystems do better. The standar…

If it is necessary to have that many classes, then there should be so many classes. but in Java everything is a class, main function? in a class. a library of static functions? in a class.

With an alternative design you'd need to have some other code container concept, but it'd be almost exactly the same as a class file. If the JVM also had a separate notion of a non-class file, just hold to hold static methods, then it'd boil down to duplicating the format. Most languages decide to make the source file the first-class container concept, or in native languages, the DLL/.so, but this isn't obviously better and comes with its own downsides. Orienting the VM around classes has a bunch of upsides that contribute to Java being successful.

The real complaint here is more about the syntax boilerplate involved in writing top level functions in Java that map to classes with static methods. Kotlin shows there's no deep reason why the Java language has to be written this way, it's just notation. They picked it to avoid complicating the language with special cases, but I can easily agree that smarter syntax is more important than the Java guys have historically believed. Kotlin is proving this at the moment.

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

#278

Post by simonh »

sgerenser wrote: post #258
ribs wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could Apple could have gotten a real OS more quickly? The Mac OS of the time had no preemptive multitasking or protected memory, so software running on it was doomed to be made unstable by all the other software. NextStep, maybe it was what you say, but they needed to make a change.

BeOS was the other option being considered. It was arguably more advanced and powerful than NeXTStep. But Jean Louis Gassée played hardball thinking he had Apple on the ropes, and they went with NeXT instead.

To be fair Gassée has said since they probably made the right choice.

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

#279

Post by simonh »

KerrAvon wrote: post #132
Aloha wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were I think some of the most underrated management that Apple had, they at least had a better clue about where the company needed to go. Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than Scully did.

No, Gil and Ellen were incompetent. If they had understood how to separate the wheat from the chaff, a useful version of Copland could have been out in 1997. They were not willing to say no and fire people. The first thing Steve did when he took over? Mass layoff. It was absolute malpractice to buy NeXT for the OS, which was an obsolete, moribund, and expensive version of Unix. What they ended up getting was adult ma…

The big advantage of NeXT was the development tooling, it was streets ahead of almost anything else. As a unix it was nothing to write home about, but as a desktop OS it didn't need to be. Just being a Unix at all with decent networking was a huge advantage compared to all the misconceived desktop OS projects at MS, IBM and Apple at the time.

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

#280

Post by DeathArrow »

At that time, Apple made bids for two operating systems. One was Next, represented by Steve Jobs and the other was BeOS, represented by Jean Louis Gasee.

I still believe Apple did a bad choice because, in my opinion BeOS was the far superior OS paradigm. Next was a Nix clone with some GUI over it, but BeOS was different, was smarter and the world is poorer after its demise.

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