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Icon Ambulance

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Re: Icon Ambulance

#41

Post by rikthevik »

nosse wrote: post #24
Jayasimhan wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not if your boss saved a multi billion $ business from bankruptcy and converted it into the most valuable company in the US. It is the credibility that Jobs has built over many decades that speaks as all these blog posts now.. If you know the man who calls you on a Sunday deeply cares about the product's finish, you better be part of the perfection than spoil it.

I kind of agree. But that's still micromanaging. Even though Steve's micromanaging seems to be excellent, it still will fire back at some point. That point might be now.

Causation != Correlation, except when it does. :) It's going to be interesting to see what Apple does without Jobs, though it's impossible to consider what they would have done without Jobs. :)

Re: Icon Ambulance

#42

Post by eftpotrm »

tlrobinson wrote: post #25
cmelbye wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think attention to detail in terms of a column name is different than attention to visual design and look and feel of a product.

Steve Jobs doesn't think so. Have you seen the insides of Apple products? They're as beautiful as the outsides of competitors' products.

Beautiful, maybe; maintainable, not so sure. A colleague's iMac is likely to need a motherboard replacement and he was going through the procedure with me. The amount of work and the sheer cost of parts for something so routine on a PC astounded me.

Re: Icon Ambulance

#44

Post by aneth »

Assuming the anecdote is accurate, my guess is this was Steve's subtle way of nudging Vic to be more attentive to details. I don't think Steve would call anyone at anytime making a fuss over such a small thing - he would never get any work done.

Call someone who's work is starting to slip once on a Sunday to complain about some minutiae, and you are letting them know that you are watching - even if you aren't really watching all the time. I think this is a leadership technique, not the micro-management it appears to be.

This also is a way of Steve asserting control and dominance. Making someone scurry over a mis-tinted letter sets the tenor of the relationship.

I think it's important not to take the wrong lessons from all these anecdotes. Jobs knows how to get good work out of people by causing them to demand perfection of themselves and to fear producing imperfect products. No CEO has time to exact perfection end to end - their job is to set standards, expectation, and culture. Sometimes ridiculous demonstrations of micro-management are just what someone needs.

Re: Icon Ambulance

#45

Post by comice »

I think most rational people would have said something like: "Steve, I agree that is an important detail but it does not warrant a phone call to me on Sunday morning. Send me an email. We'll speak tomorrow."

The question is, why didn't people say things like that to Steve Jobs?

Or do only the ones that prostrated themselves to him ever speak up? (or get the attention when they do?)

I want some stories of people telling Jobs to piss off.

Re: Icon Ambulance

#46

Post by nadam »

nhashem wrote: post #6

Because it's Steve Jobs, this is a great anecdote. I'm sure we'll hear dozens of them in the next couple days and weeks, all examples of Jobs' attention to detail and design resulting in superior products and software. Yet imagine your boss calling you on a Sunday and saying, "So I was reviewing the DBA's data model for the new product, and I really don't like how he's called the columns with customers identifiers 'c…

I think there IS a difference, I just don't know exactly what... So I am just thinking loudly: The diffrence may be that you have to work on a relatively risky product which when executed with extremely high attention to detail can have huge impact. A consumer hardware is seemingly such a thing. Probably a new programming language or a very elegant software lib either. The boring Java business application which I am maintaining at my workplace right now and contains hundreds of tables and hundreds of thousands lines of code, but only has impact on a relatively few customers is not such a thing. My side project, which is a relatively small (but relatively risky in its approach) software lib might be such a thing.

TLDR: When executing something which is not risky and not very innovative and/or cannot have high impact by nature (niche market) but takes a lot of grunt work, high attention to detail does not pay off.

Re: Icon Ambulance

#47

Post by apetrovic »

tlrobinson wrote: post #25
cmelbye wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think attention to detail in terms of a column name is different than attention to visual design and look and feel of a product.

Steve Jobs doesn't think so. Have you seen the insides of Apple products? They're as beautiful as the outsides of competitors' products.

Relevant: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

Re: Icon Ambulance

#48

Post by rimantas »

tlrobinson wrote: post #25
cmelbye wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think attention to detail in terms of a column name is different than attention to visual design and look and feel of a product.

Steve Jobs doesn't think so. Have you seen the insides of Apple products? They're as beautiful as the outsides of competitors' products.

To quote the man himself (from Playboy interview):

  > When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers,
  > you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even
  > though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll
  > know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of
  > wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic,
  > the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Re: Icon Ambulance

#49

Post by tezmc »

nhashem wrote: post #6

Because it's Steve Jobs, this is a great anecdote. I'm sure we'll hear dozens of them in the next couple days and weeks, all examples of Jobs' attention to detail and design resulting in superior products and software. Yet imagine your boss calling you on a Sunday and saying, "So I was reviewing the DBA's data model for the new product, and I really don't like how he's called the columns with customers identifiers 'c…

For your database example he'd be absolutely right to do so. Removal of inconsistencies is a detail that too many programmers think isn't important, but something as simple as a column name can cause all kinds of consequences down the line.

If it stayed in a programmer further down the line would have to spend a few moments trying to decide if s/he should be using customer_id or cust_id, might have to go into the database to double-check, might have to write additional code to handle special case tables with cust_id, all of which requires additional testing and adds to the amount of cruft code that needs to be maintained, whereas they could have just written generic code to consistently use customer_id in all cases.

It's like some sort of code butterfly effect.

Of course, if it was a manager who called me on Sunday who was incompetent or who had poor taste in visual or code design... well... then it would be a different story.

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