What Jobs does here is truly impressive, for the following reasons:
* he listens carefully to the customer - not just pretend, but truly understand the issue from the customer's point of view
* he then allows his engineering manager to present the counterargument - to understand what the current situation is
* he's able to then follow the back and forth of what is presumably a highly-technical conversation. Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation.
* he then makes the call - you'd be surprised by how rare the simple ability to make a quick decision is
* he then has the power to make the internal team do what is required - again, you'd be surprised how in some companies internal teams ignore or subvert the leadership's directions
What this incident shows is his singular ability to listen to customers, conceive of the ideal product in his head and make the team deliver it. That explains a lot of his success.
PS None of this should be construed as absolving any of Jobs' negative personality traits.
It didn't seem to me like he followed the back-and-forth so much as he just cut off his own guy, screamed at him, and humiliated him in front of one of the most legendary programmers in the world.
To paraphrase The Dude, Steve Jobs wasn't wrong, he was just an asshole.
I wonder whether in fact the Apple engineer was glad to have official permission from the boss to do the Right Thing.
It's not exactly uncommon to have the choice between one option that's clearly better technically, and another that's easier to implement with the limited time and resources you have, or more compatible with customers' peculiar needs, or a better fit for now-clearly-unwise decisions made in the past.
And usually you pick the technically inferior decision with a little sigh and a feeling of regret that the right business decision isn't the right technical decision.
But if the CEO has just shouted at you that you have to do the technically right thing ... well, getting shouted at is seldom fun, but it's got to make a pleasant change to be not just allowed but instructed to do whatever it takes to go with the design you think is "ideal".
Yeah - he could have been nicer. No question. But notice his guy didn't quit. People who worked for him seemed to actually admire his ability to be dedicated to the product and make decisions based on what was best for the product. That's pretty rare. And it was not personal with Jobs - he was just so upset that reality differed from the ideal.
He was deeply technical. He began his career as a programmer at Atari.
[Edit]
Jobs had many traits that would lead a psychiatrist to classify him as sociopathic - not mass murderer type, but the psychological type. For example, his complete lack of empathy towards his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge for a long while. One of the weird traits of sociopaths is that to navigate world that requires understanding of empathy and emotions, an understanding they don't have, they build models of human behavior and can choose to deploy those models when required toward their aims. What's interesting also here is his ability to be singularly brutal to his subordinate, while at the same time be completely empathetic to the customer's view point. Just my amateur psychologist 2c, but that combination of brutality on one side with solicitousness on the other adds weight to my view that he was a high-functioning sociopath.
Steve was an asshole, but an amazingly smart, perceptive and brilliant one. He listened, realized that there needed to be a change and told the team to take care of it. It is clear that it could have been handled nicer but, it was Steve. You got the whole package good or bad. For the most part he got it right, delivery not withstanding. I was privileged to have known him, even if he was an ass.
Clearly, it made an impression. I wish everyone took software as seriously as Jobs did and shouted at others when a point needed to be made. Say what you will about a shouting boss not being nice or fun to work for, but I think getting shouted at undeniably makes you more attentive to an issue than if steve had tried to instruct him calmly.
How is being passionate about making the right decision being an asshole? He didn’t call his engineer any names, he criticized he decision.
At my last job a director (that eventually became my boss) got angry with me because I called the product I worked on a “piece of shit”. He said while the product was “suboptimal”, my language was offensive. I told him that what I found truly offensive was the millions of dollars a month our company was losing because of this “suboptimal” product, and that no one would let me fix it.
First hand accounts of 20 year old conversations are likely over dramatized, but I find a first hand account to be much more credible than someone reading a first hand account and deciding the first hand account just got it totally wrong.
We don't know the specifics of the work environment there. I mean if you were working on a trading pit on Wall Street would be offended when your boss/co-workers yell at you "f- off" or "get the f- out"?
The reaction of the same person should be different if the work environment never had the f- word pronounced though. That would mean trouble.
That's about Steve Wozniak (who actually made the product that made Apple great) though, not Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak seems like a great person. Steve Jobs... not so much.
Interesting. I've read it more like he winged it by following his gut which told him there is a person here who has utmost respect of people he trusts, so he should probably follow that lead.
> Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation.
I mean, he has had almost complete knowledge of the stack along the years. Whereas a lot of CEOs just get in large companies at some point of their life because a new CEO is needed.
Without knowing the details, I'm curious if Jobs made the decision based on a deep understanding of the issue, or if he just trusted John more than the Apple engineer.
It sounds like he made the call immediately after the Apple engineer admitted Carmack’s solution was “ideal”. That may have been the culmination of Carmack making the more convincing points (not recounted in TFA) but the fact that Jobs pounces on this admission and ends the back and forth immediately seems like that is a big part of what he was looking for or how he made up his mind.
This is a typical situation for most companies. I've been in the position of the "trusted engineer" several times where conversations with customers can very quickly change the direction of engineering. Fortunately, in all of those situations my boss wasn't an asshole. Honestly, all these recent stories about jobs really just paint him in a negative light.
There is a missing piece of complexity here and other comments regarding "asshole" behavior.
The story recounted here is a concise demonstration of some aspects of leadership — decisiveness, fairness of discussion, and as mentioned the confidence to steer a large company.
But in these stories the means by which those aspects are demonstrated are colored by toxic masculinity. The rage with which Steve is attributed, the combative or abusive belittling he was known for & demonstrated here is the the very same toxic interpersonal dominance normalized by mass culture as essential male behavior.
There are emotionally supportive ways of doing exactly what Steve did. Perhaps his success could have been even greater had he executed what seems to have been an innate wellspring of leadership ability with a supportive disposition.
To be honest, all of that is considerably less frustrating than the kind of passive aggressive bullshit I generally see it’s place. I’d rather have someone be honest and yell at me than engage in passive aggressive nagging and slithering around behind my back whining about things. It doesn’t seem realistic that the default fallback in the absence of “toxic masculinity” is “emotionally supportive”.
Not disagreeing with you, but unless I misunderstood something, it seems Jobs sided with John because it was obvious that the design they were going for with MacOS Graphics was wrong, and Jobs was pissed that the Apple engineer tried to defend it. If you ask me that's a perfectly reasonable scenario to get pissed.
Except we have no idea WHY the engineer was trying to defend it. He might've been told previously by Jobs himself that their solution was "the" solution and that they wouldn't entertain alternatives.
Imagine how the conversation could've gone if the engineer had agreed with Carmack and Jobs didn't. "Well, yeah, that approach could be better...". Jobs would've probably cut him off for not towing the company line and fired him.
>> Honestly, all these recent stories about jobs really just paint him in a negative light.
Not really. That's not my interpretation of the story at all. People who judge others for being a jerk in isolation lose the fact that it often comes with the territory of being a visionary or extra-effective at their job.
Sure, it'd be great if Jobs was nice. It'd also be nice if your middle manager who knows your dog's name and loves his family was as smart as Jobs. But skills are finite and scarce, and almost no one develops them all, a lesson many D&D players learn immediately after rolling a character.
Jobs was a dick. But that was the price. If someone is a dick and half as smart and effective as Jobs, yeah, that's a negative. For someone like Jobs, Carmack (plenty of stories about him that are "negative" as you say, I might add), and other 4+ SD talents, it comes with the package. Expecting otherwise is folly.
Do they paint him in a bad light? I guess they all seem to match up to my internal image of who Jobs was. They don’t make him look worse, they just confirm how bad it was.
I guess I kind of assume everyone knows Jobs was insufferable at this point.
Definitely. And my real issue with Jobs is more the ripple effect. So many people read stories of Jobs being an asshole and think, "Oh, this is how you success." Ignoring the many assholes who weren't as brilliant or as thoroughly lucky.
Look at Theranos, for example. The CEO was practically a Jobs impersonator. From the turtlenecks and the air of brilliance to the controlling, abusive, and secrecy-oriented behaviors. How many people fell for the fraud? And I can't count the wantrepreneurs I've come across that had similar theories.
Look I see your point and I agree. However, having worked in a number of big companies I am really at a loss as to what is the right way to coerce a number of humans into the "right" direction. I have sat in meetings where ignorant executives have blabbered on and on about nothing because the company and CEO felt it was important to hear everyone out. This works if everyone at the table is knowledgeable and able to swallow their ego. You get people making ridiculous statements like we need to replace our database that runs the whole organisation. I have also worked in a company where the CEO cut people who were blabbering short, mostly rightly but rudely so. I think the two approaches have a time and place. There is probably no need to be rude but I don't know how one cuts someone off without being rude.
There's a line beyond which Jobsian behaviors will ruin the productivity and happiness of the Woz. Holmes/Kissenger and friends flew over it and landed in "scientists are being forced (and encouraged) to lie to keep their jobs," territory.
A Jobs impersonator...but without the talent, taste for design, passion for products, or virtually any other positive quality that he had. IMO Holmes has more in common with Jordan Belfort than Steve Jobs.
In his story about how Steve Jobs told the engineer point blank to make changes and how impressive it was. I think a lot of people underestimate how effective Steve Jobs was as the CEO because he was Steve Jobs.
A CEO of a company has role power, but that's really the least effective. If the employees don't respect thier managers, the managers can't be effective.
Why wouldn't he stay? If the decision was technically correct and he may be able to talk to Carmack directly to ask for advice, that would be a rare opportunity to learn.
"On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood."
You can download recordings of his tournaments, where you can freely change your POV to thresh, or his opponent, or just fly around, and watch him play. Pretty amazing skill!
I think it's a similar design, but I have a vivid memory of a kid in my elementary school (~1995) wearing a shirt like this: black t-shirt with a big yellow smiley face with gory bullet-wound to the forehead. It was a strong image especially for kids. The Watchmen logo is spattered on the side. I can't find the t-shirt I'm remembering but there are similar current examples: https://www.amazon.com/Smiley-Bullet-Black-Adult-T-Shirt/dp/...
Does anybody remember the interface from Plan9 or Inferno where the "kill process" button was originally a smiley face with blood trickling from a bullet hole in the forehead? Then they fixed it to be more bland when it started shipping more.
Oh, and the Comedian just wore a regular smiley button. The blood was his own, spattered from when he was thrown from a building. No bullet hole.
Anyone here ever work with a genius who wasn't an asshole? I did and he'll always be a key part of the template to which I both aspire and measure others.
It's not like the stories about Carmack make him out to be a saintly, fuzzy human but I will definitely give him credit for standing firm on some big ideals/principals, even if I don't share them.
I guess I just hope that you can (a) be really good at your work - like -genius good - and also (b) a decent, empathetic human being.
Wishful thinking? maybe, but I don't really want to be top-level successful if you've gotta choose.
I maintain that my cofounder is a genius (computer vision and signal processing), and he's one of the kindest nicest people I have known.
Being good at something and not being toxic to humans you interact with are absolutely orthogonal -- it's just that a lot of geniuses can get away with being douches, that we let it happen.
He doesn't consider mathemetical flaws to be bugs. Not saying that makes him an asshole, but as a product person, this has has harmed TeX's ability to complete it goal of allowing anyone to create typeset documents.
Kind of an apples to oranges comparison on Carmack's point though (no pun intended). Keyboards were invented 100 years earlier than the mouse. People, especially older adults, instinctively knew how to use them.
When the first keyboard type interface was invented for typewriters and such, did people instinctively know how to use them immediately? Besides, at that time the concept of a two button mouse was not new and had been in use with computers for years.
Funny how people can such a different taste for these things. I've switched back from Mac to Windows some time ago, and the thing I miss the most is the touchbar.
Ha, even as a 10 year old kid in '96 I found the Mac's decision to have a 1 button mouse to be painful (coming from windows). I remember not having much of a concept of how companies were ran but instinctively felt there had to be someone stubborn somewhere.
No different than throwing away a $100 OS when you buy a computer. Sometimes there simply isn't a way to purchase it without the undesired item included.
> Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him.
Weird how “writing portable software” was (and in many places still is) considered deep wizardry. I remember the timeframe described here and indeed “porting our software to a non-Windows platform” was on every company’s list of things they’ll never have time to do, because everyone’s code base was so thoroughly (often unnecessarily) tied to Win32. The bad ol days...
It's a bit easier in a game that renders its whole UI custom, though. A standard desktop app would be heavily tied to Win32 simply because of UI controls. Similarly, a server app, if designed for performance, would likely be using overlapped I/O.
Yea I should have qualified that I was mostly talking about games companies. Games should be among the easiest software to release on multiple platforms for to not needing platform specific UI controls. Actually I struggle to think of a single major component to a game that must be platform-specific. Yet, of all the software I use, games tend to be the ones stubbornly stuck on Windows.
By committing to making the software portable to, and available on, other platforms, you are also committing your company to incur the testing and support costs for each platform. Many of these costs are fixed, so the more obscure the platform, the bigger proportion of your revenues on that platform will be eaten up in costs.
For this reason, from a business perspective, it makes sense to write games only for Windows. Anything else is bad business.
This is a great argument against releasing (or more specifically, offering support) for multiple platforms, but not an argument for writing your software non-portable in the first place. I’ve worked on projects that technically could have easily been recompiled and released on multiple platforms but were not, for valid business reason.
Carmack worked on the Linux Utah-GLX drivers in the runup to q3's release and would have had a lot of thoughts on the low-level GL implementation details.
I've no knowledge of OpenGL but based on the content in the story I'd take a stab that they weren't implemented fully for performance reasons. I don't know why a game developer would be so concerned with that though. But I know nothing about game development either ...
What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service.
In terms of diplomacy and tone, Steve Jobs doesn't do well in this story. However, for intellectual and engineering integrity, he's in entirely different league from most US politicians. From what I've seen, the typical US politican would rather puff up and pretend their constituent's majority position is scientific fact than actually engage with science, fact, and expertise.
I think this is a good way to sum up his genius abilities: 1) An ability to see past consensual illusions to engineering and design truths and first principles. 2) A low ability to transmit such insights in a diplomatic way. (Though, given a position of power, his messages are unambiguous and highly persuasive. Effective != moral, however.)
There's enough stories where Jobs could be persuasive when he wanted to; it's just a lot easier to scream at someone if that would work, too. I'm reminded of Lyndon Johnson, oddly enough.
'Tis true we don't know the backstory - but Steve may have tangled with his guy before, he may have tried diplomacy with him and before and found it just didn't penetrate his defenses, or he may have felt the display was necessary to nudge another one or two of his troops who were present. Or he may have wanted to create a viral story to prod his troops and the situation provided him the perfect opportunity. I've known bosses who planned and scripted their explosions (and the topic of them) days or even weeks in advance and then waited for the right moment in front of the right crowd to present itself, if the issue was sufficiently critical, to pop their cork spectacularly. So we can't necessarily assume Jobs was impetuously undiplomatic or just fumbled the diplomacy aspect. I do believe there are instances of Jobs exhibiting diplomacy and politess.
I was reading Ben Horowitz's book The Hard Thing About Hard Things the other day, and the stories about Jobs and Carmack remind me of this passage:
>"When do you hold the bus?"
>The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered, "If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you'll be so late you'll miss the game, so you can't do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you'll have a player that's so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him."
>Phil Jackson, the coach who has won the most NBA championships, was once asked about his famously flakey superstar Dennis Rodman, "Since Dennis Rodman is allowed to miss practice, does this mean other star players like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippin can miss practice too?" Jackson replied, "Of course not. There is only room for one Dennis Rodman on this team. In fact, you really can only have a very few Dennis Rodmans in society as a whole; otherwise, we would degenerate into anarchy."
>You may find yourself with an employee who fits one of the above descriptions [heretic, flake, or jerk] but nonetheless makes a massive positive contribution to the company. You may decide that you will personally mitigate the employee's negative attributes and keep her from polluting the overall company culture. That's fine, but remember: You can only hold the bus for her.
Really exceptional people often get exceptions. One challenge may be that more people think they are really exceptional, than really are really exceptional.
Fascinating counterexample about Dennis Rodman, though: Gregg Popovich famously decided Rodman was too much trouble and got rid of him after only one season, vowed that he would never tolerate a player like that again, and ended up winning five championships and counting, while building a team that remained a serious contender almost continuously from 1999 to, frankly, the moment Kawhi Leonard got injured last year.
Here's that story for those that don't want to go to FB too :)
John Carmack
14 May at 17:27 ·
Steve Jobs
My wife once asked me “Why do you drop what you are doing when Steve Jobs asks you to do something? You don’t do that for anyone else.”
It is worth thinking about.
As a teenage Apple computer fan, Jobs and Wozniak were revered figures for me, and wanting an Apple 2 was a defining characteristic of several years of my childhood. Later on, seeing NeXT at a computer show just as I was selling my first commercial software felt like a vision into the future. (But $10k+, yikes!)
As Id Software grew successful through Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, the first major personal purchase I made wasn’t a car, but rather a NeXT computer. It turned out to be genuinely valuable for our software development, and we moved the entire company onto NeXT hardware.
We loved our NeXTs, and we wanted to launch Doom with an explicit “Developed on NeXT computers” logo during the startup process, but when we asked, the request was denied.
Some time after launch, when Doom had begun to make its cultural mark, we heard that Steve had changed his mind and would be happy to have NeXT branding on it, but that ship had sailed. I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs.
Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally.
When NeXT managed to sort of reverse-acquire Apple and Steve was back in charge, I was excited by the possibilities of a resurgent Apple with the virtues of NeXT in a mainstream platform.
I was brought in to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve.
Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.”
It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.
But when I knew what I was talking about, I would stand my ground against anyone.
When Steve did make up his mind, he was decisive about it. Dictates were made, companies were acquired, keynotes were scheduled, and the reality distortion field kicked in, making everything else that was previously considered into obviously terrible ideas.
I consider this one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had. OpenGL never seriously threatened D3D on PC, but it was critical at Apple, and that meant that it remained enough of a going concern to be the clear choice when mobile devices started getting GPUs. While long in the tooth now, it was so much better than what we would have gotten if half a dozen SoC vendors rolled their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age.
I wound up doing several keynotes with Steve, and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method.
My first impression of “Keynote Steve” was him berating the poor stage hands over “This Home Depot shit” that was rolling out the display stand with the new Mac, very much not to his satisfaction. His complaints had a valid point, and he improved the quality of the presentation by caring about details, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work for him in that capacity.
One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote.
When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo.
I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with:
“I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.”
That goes a long way, and nobody said a thing after that.
When my wife and I later started building games for feature phones (DoomRPG! Orcs&Elves!), I advocated repeatedly to Steve that an Apple phone could be really great. Every time there was a rumor that Apple might be working on a phone, I would refine the pitch to him. Once he called me at home on a Sunday (How did he even get my number?) to ask a question, and I enthused at length about the possibilities.
I never got brought into the fold, but I was excited when the iPhone actually did see the light of day. A giant (for the time) true color display with a GPU! We could do some amazing things with this!
Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the same keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”.
After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!
Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine.
I was making some guesses, but I argued that the iPhone hardware and OS provided sufficient protection for native apps. I pointed at a nearby engineer and said “Don’t you have an MMU and process isolation on the iPhone now?” He had a wide eyed look of don’t-bring-me-into-this, but I eventually got a “yes” out of him.
I said that OS-X was surely being used for things that were more security critical than a phone, and if Apple couldn’t provide enough security there, they had bigger problems. He came back with a snide “You’re a smart guy John, why don’t you write a new OS?” At the time, my thought was, “Fuck you, Steve.”.
People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn’t want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that “Steve appreciates vigorous conversation”.
Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn’t appreciate that.
The Steve Jobs “hero / shithead” rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready.
I wound up writing several successful iPhone apps on the side (all of which are now gone due to dropping 32 bit support, which saddens me), and I had many strong allies inside Apple, but I was on the outs with Steve.
The last iOS product I worked on was Rage for iOS, which I thought set a new bar for visual richness on mobile, and also supported some brand new features like TV out. I heard that it was well received inside Apple.
I was debriefing the team after the launch when I got a call. I was busy, so I declined it. A few minutes later someone came in and said that Steve was going to call me. Oops.
Everyone had a chuckle about me “hanging up on Steve Jobs”, but that turned out to be my last interaction with him.
As the public story of his failing health progressed, I started several emails to try to say something meaningful and positive to part on, but I never got through them, and I regret it.
I corroborate many of the negative character traits that he was infamous for, but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe.
"Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently."
This was Ibsen's method as well. Notoriously, if he needed a private tutorial, say on an aspect of physics for a play he was writing, Ibsen would make outrageously false statements about the relevant physics in front of a Nobel laureate in physics in order to provoke exactly the energetic private tutorial he needed, from an expert. Didn't give a shit about embarrassing himself.
I find nothing remotely special about a C-suite operator siding with an outside voice against a "trusted" internal resource. Even if the operator is the legendary Steve Jobs. C-suite operators, honestly, tend to just not really trust their internal resources. Often to their detriment.
I'm a tech consultant and am typically brought in by C-suite operators to assist them with deeply technical decisions. I tell clients out of the gate that what we're going to recommend will probably be 10% my firm's ideas and 90% ideas gleaned from interviews with their own personnel, slightly repackaged, better sold, but always attributed to the originator.
I love the incessant deification of Steve Jobs, regardless of his mistakes, juvenile behavior, and constant stories about his abuse of his staff. In this story Jobs mistakes the wrong person for John Carmack, becomes deeply offended by a silly t-shirt, screams at his staff and slams his hands the table like a 2 year old. But the author is impressed with Jobs and makes him out to be the hero. At my work we would call this a hostile and abusive work environment, but within the Jobs cult of personality it's a net positive.
I don't disagree with your assessment but, right or wrong, Steve Jobs was on another level.
Most great leaders have character flaws. Some of them are very obnoxious petty people. See Nick Saban or Michael Jordan.
Steve Jobs pushed people to achieve extraordinary things. My guess is they would not have achieved many of those things without his influence and authority. That's what great leaders do.
But it's true. If you are a selfish narcissistic jerk people remember that too. Maybe more than what you accomplished.
The negatives are over exaggerated, just like the positives. Its ridiculous to reduce someones entire career 20 incidents out of the hundreds of daily interactions over a few decades amounting to > 1million.
Ironically, your approach is no different than the persons you're criticizing. You're also basing your opinion on 1% of the dataset, just a different 1%.
This story, to me, highlights Jobs' notorious ability to change his mind when presented with information that pointed to the right way of doing something, even in the face of social pressure to do otherwise. He could've been more diplomatic about it for sure. But so many people of his ilk don't have that capacity that it makes me think its more a facet of that personality type than a character flaw in particular to Jobs.
There's a fascinating amount of shamelessness and unwillingness to admit when you're wrong, though, if you're willing to drive people 100% in one direction one day and then completely reverse course the next while making it sound like it was their fault.
Completely. You could have had an identical story without the drama, which seems to have been completely due to Jobs. Had you let Carmack talk to the lead engineer for about fifteen minutes, I'm sure he would've come around entirely for objective reasons, rather than because the boss screamed at him.
> Had you let Carmack talk to the lead engineer for about fifteen minutes, I'm sure he would've come around entirely for objective reasons
I wish this were true. Yet I've been so many projects around me go months and even years down some very-clearly wrong direction, because the engineering lead refuses to course correct. Typical patterns are:
- The system design attempts to address "future" issues, making it two orders of magnitude more complex than necessary.
- The eng lead wants to "get it right from the beginning." So months later, you have a beautiful CI pipeline, coding standards, base classes, etc, and still no usable prototype.
- Trying to solve all possible use cases, with one system.
- The above, but then focusing on just one use case so narrowly, the rest have to be crammed in.
I could keep going. These are cases when you need a decisive (and technically sharp) manager above to call bullshit and rip the bandaid if necessary.
And this story leaves unanswered the question of why they compromised on a suboptimal architecture in the first place. In my experience, 95% of the time it's due to some other constraint imposed by an executive. E.g., a made-up ship date.
So it's perfectly possible that had the head of graphics gone for what he knew was the ideal solution in the first place, he would have been yelled at by Jobs for that. It wouldn't be the first time that a HiPPO caused a boss to do a 180 and implicitly blame the underlings rather than own up.
That's actually what happened according to the story. The lead admitted that Carmack was right, and then Jobs got angry at the lead for not making a good technical decision from the outset.
If you read some biographies of influential people, they were often very obnoxious and uncaring assholes in person. When the culture is obsessed with personality cults, there is tendency to to worship them or completely dismiss their achievements.
Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller, ...
Do not forget Jack Tramiel, known for "Jack attacks", "I don't believe in compromising, but winning" and his intense micromanagement where every spending over 1000 USD had to be signed by him and he refused budgets, because they were a "license to steal". What do you think happened when he went on vacation :-)
This YouTube clip (at ~2hr into the video) ties in with the original story that Carmack told about his wedding and is where Steve chronicles the story from his angle: https://youtu.be/SjlLG1EzJ2k?t=7223
>As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment.
Sounds like John Carmack and Doug Englebart are on the same page:
How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future.
Two decades before the personal computer, a shy engineer unveiled the tools that would drive the tech revolution. By Valerie Landau, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2018.
>In 1979, Xerox allowed Steve Jobs and other Apple executives to tour its labs twice, in exchange for the right to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock. Once Jobs began working on these ideas, they became even more streamlined. Engelbart’s mouse had three buttons, which he used in different combinations to perform a range of tasks. After licensing this invention from the Stanford Research Institute, Apple decided it would be simpler to give it just one button. Engelbart lamented that the mouse’s capability had been dumbed down to make it “easy to use.”
Interesting. I’ve seen other Jobsesque CEOs in action. One was the only person in the company who could overrule an internally focused CTO. I couldn’t figure out if it was “Thank God we have him to defend the views of our partners or customers” or “A great CEO shouldn’t set up an org that needs this kind of intervention.”
The “Only I know best” types tend to flame out before they get the Jobsian Success. (Even Jobs needed to crash and burn one and a half times)
Was Jobs actually technical enough to understand the substance of the technical discussion? I had/reported to a couple of not-so-technical managers for short stints in my 20 yr career and I always found it supremely annoying that they were often making misguided technical/business decisions based on most recent buzzwords and sales pitch from software/hardware vendors).
You don't always need to understand the specifics. Even without hearing the actual argument we know this about it:
These two people know what they're talking about.
One if them is arguing against his own interests because he's convinced it's the right thing to do.
The other one agrees, but thinks that it's impractical.
So the decision comes down to: Would I rather do it right, or be practical? And that's entirely at the discretion of the guy in charge of the project.
It's worth noting that no one was trying to sell anything here, unlike the situation's you're describing.
Yes, Apple's graphic engineer and John probably knew what they were talking about, but I suspect that Jobs did.
It seems like based on that vague description, John wasn't necessarily arguing against his own interest and Apple engineers might have had to consider constraints that neither Steve or John was familiar with. Take for instance Steve's response to John's disliking for the iMac mouse -- in this case, Steve quoted "every study" that there were usability issues with first-time users.
But on the topics of OpenGL security, his trigger word, it seems, was "ideal."
Does anyone know the background on smiley face with bullet in head t-shirt? There are people selling this t-shirt but no one seems to have what's the context.
BTW, you are not going to have this kind of experience anymore. Most CEOs (i.e. except two) and VPs of large public companies don't talk to "graphics engineer" from a small company, let alone they actually care about such low level details. Perhaps this is why there are no more Steve Jobs.
"When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.”"
I really wish people would stop downvoting polite questions like this. This is a reasonable thing to ask (I had the same question and just searched for it in these comments) and it feels odd that it's omitted from the story.
This particular one was probably downvoted because it's either naive or a weak joke to assume that Jobs knew or cared that it was a Watchmen reference.
A much better question would be "why was he offended by a fairly innocuous T-shirt." That's the sort of thing that might get you the side-eye from a particularly high-strung middle school teacher, but it's pretty funny to imagine someone like Jobs being so uptight.
I had the privilege of working with John Carmack as a technology evangelist at Apple when he ported Quake III Arena to Rhapsody, Apple’s internal name for the OpenStep/Mach kernel based MacOS X. I enjoyed John's reminiscence about working with Steve and Apple and thought I would share a few of my own memories from that time which provided me with some of the most satisfying moments and lessons of my career.
John was the first game developer I ever worked with. Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him.
John agreed to come to Cupertino and meet with several teams to share his development experiences with them. I picked him up in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. He stood unassumingly in the lobby, framed in the background by a Christmas Tree.
On day one, we met with several internal teams at Apple. I was accustomed to see 3rd party developers emerge somewhat awed by their meetings with Apple engineers. In John’s case the reaction was reversed. I’ve never seen anyone grok complex systems and architectures so quickly and thoroughly as John. Amusingly, he walked around the Apple campus unrecognized by all but for the occasional, former NeXT employee.
On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood. After an hour of waiting for Steve in IL1, he marched into the room, and immediately mistook me for John Carmack, extending his hand to shake mine (we had never met). I locked eyes with Steve Jobs and looked down significantly at the Apple badge on my belt. Without missing a beat, Steve shifted his extended hand to John's.
That’s when Steve noticed the T-shirt and the meeting, as soon as it had begun, took a turn for the worse.
Steve’s jaw muscles visibly tensed and he became stone-faced. Clearly deeply offended by John’s T-shirt, he sat down at the conference table and looked straight ahead, silent.
John kicked off the meeting by saying, “So I’ve been working with MacOS for the past month and here’s what I learned.” His #1 concern (at an extremely high level) concerned OpenGL permissions and security for which he felt Apple needed a better solution than what he’d learned about the day before in meetings with the graphics team, even if it came at a slight cost in performance for 3D games. This was, suffice to say, typical of John in that he was approaching an issue from an objective engineering perspective and arguing for the most technically correct solution rather than pushing for something that might be of benefit to his personal projects.
Steve listened and abruptly said, “That’s not what we’re doing!” Then he looked at the three Apple employees in the room and asked, “Is it?” I confirmed that what John was raising as a concern came from a meeting with the graphics architecture team the day before. Without batting an eye, Steve stood up, tramped over to a Polycom phone and dialed from apparent memory the phone number of the engineering director whose admin informed Steve that he was at an offsite in Palo Alto. Steve hung up, sat down, and about 30 seconds later the phone rang with the engineering director on the line.
Steve said, “I’m here with a graphics developer. I want you to tell him everything we’re doing in MacOS X from a graphics architecture perspective.” Then he put his elbows on the table and adopted a prayer-like hand pose, listening to and weighing the arguments from his trusted director of engineering and from the game guy with the bloody smiley-face T-shirt.
And what happened next was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever witnessed about Steve or any Silicon Valley exec. Early on in the discussion, the Apple engineer realized that “graphics engineer” in the room was John Carmack. And he realized that he was going to need to defend his technical decision, on the merits, in front of Steve. After extended back and forth, the Apple engineer said, “John, what you’re arguing for is the ideal …”
He never made it to the next word because Steve suddenly stood bolt upright, slamming both palms onto the desk and shouting, “NO!!!!”
“NO!!! What John is saying is NOT the ideal. What John is saying is what we have to do!!! Why are we doing this? Why are we going to all this trouble to build this ship when you’re putting a TORPEDO IN ITS HULL?!!!!”
All of this was said with the utmost conviction and at extremely high volume. To his credit, John, seated directly next to a yelling Steve Jobs, didn’t even flinch.
What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service. Steve listened to both sides and made a call that would have long lasting implications for MacOS.
As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment.
After the meeting ended, I walked John to the Apple store on campus (this was before there were actual Apple stores) and asked him on the way what he thought of Steve’s response to the mouse comment. John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.”
> Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.”
That's a bit like saying that the worst thing about losing an arm is that now your shirts don't fit.
The iMac mouse sucked because it was round, making it nearly impossible to tell without looking at it whether it was pointed the right way. So when you thought you were moving it straight up, the pointer would nearly always wander off to the side. I never did understand how they could make such a huge blunder, given that the mouse is literally the first control (after the power button) one would typically use to interact with a Mac.
I totally get why so many people hated those mice, but I loved them. I collected them from people who didn't like them so I could keep using them for years. My last one finally crapped out in 2015. Now I'm in a love/hate relationship with the Magic Mouse 2. Which I believe also elicits strong feelings from people.
Not just because it was round, but because it was round without tactile directional cues. DEC had some round mice, which, while not great, did not have the Jobs-puck orientation problem because they had distinct buttons. https://www.oldmouse.com/articles/hawley/DEC-VAX.shtml
I remember having this problem in my fifth grade computer lab, along with disliking the single button.
I’m not sure how they justified filling a computer lab in an elementary school with iMacs, especially since the only things we did on them were typing tests and playing Oregon Trail.
Thank you, much appreciated!
I always wondered if the decision to only have one fire button in Q3A was based off its compatibility with Mac OS, and thus a lack of a second mouse button. Other FPS at the time (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Half-Life) usually had a secondary fire button to allow for alternate weapon functions (e.g. grenade launcher on SMG, zoom on sniper rifle/crossbow, etc), which was mapped to the right mouse button.
Seems unlikely, since Q3A used all the mouse buttons on PC by default, just like in previous versions of Quake. Those games also don't have secondary firing modes, Q3A is supposed to be a sort of ultimate refinement of Quake deathmatch.
No, secondary weapon functions were never a q3 thing. They wouldn't have nerfed the game for OS X regardless, especially not when you could just plug in a PC mouse or rebind the controls to use some other key.
I saw Steve Jobs at a grocery store in Los Angeles. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
Indeed, it is wise (if you have the capital) not to let things fester, especially when you know you're doing the wrong thing.
Perhaps if you want to build the kind of good will that allows Neo Apple to sell the torture devices they today call products at the rates they do, you should be more concerned with the direction of your engineering department, and less with who is or is not an "asshole". I don't even like Steve Jobs, in fact, I think Steve Jobs' life may be a net negative for my life, if not the world at large, and I think that the way he treated his kids is unconscienable, but it is not acceptable to let compromise be the norm in your engineering department. Just look at the situation now, as it relates to graphics drivers on OS X, and you'll see why the whip must be cracked.
Regarding the fact that your petty compromises add up to a broken product, ignorance is not an excuse. It is not "empathic" or "compassionate" to allow the ego of one person (the compromising engineer) destroy the efforts of thousands (everyone else who depends on the success of the product).
Empathy without foresight is somehow even worse than greed without conscience.
What Jobs does here is truly impressive, for the following reasons:
* he listens carefully to the customer - not just pretend, but truly understand the issue from the customer's point of view
* he then allows his engineering manager to present the counterargument - to understand what the current situation is
* he's able to then follow the back and forth of what is presumably a highly-technical conversation. Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation.
* he then makes the call - you'd be surprised by how rare the simple ability to make a quick decision is
* he then has the power to make the internal team do what is required - again, you'd be surprised how in some companies internal teams ignore or subvert the leadership's directions
What this incident shows is his singular ability to listen to customers, conceive of the ideal product in his head and make the team deliver it. That explains a lot of his success.
PS None of this should be construed as absolving any of Jobs' negative personality traits.
It didn't seem to me like he followed the back-and-forth so much as he just cut off his own guy, screamed at him, and humiliated him in front of one of the most legendary programmers in the world.
To paraphrase The Dude, Steve Jobs wasn't wrong, he was just an asshole.
I wonder whether in fact the Apple engineer was glad to have official permission from the boss to do the Right Thing.
It's not exactly uncommon to have the choice between one option that's clearly better technically, and another that's easier to implement with the limited time and resources you have, or more compatible with customers' peculiar needs, or a better fit for now-clearly-unwise decisions made in the past.
And usually you pick the technically inferior decision with a little sigh and a feeling of regret that the right business decision isn't the right technical decision.
But if the CEO has just shouted at you that you have to do the technically right thing ... well, getting shouted at is seldom fun, but it's got to make a pleasant change to be not just allowed but instructed to do whatever it takes to go with the design you think is "ideal".
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Yeah - he could have been nicer. No question. But notice his guy didn't quit. People who worked for him seemed to actually admire his ability to be dedicated to the product and make decisions based on what was best for the product. That's pretty rare. And it was not personal with Jobs - he was just so upset that reality differed from the ideal.
He was deeply technical. He began his career as a programmer at Atari.
[Edit] Jobs had many traits that would lead a psychiatrist to classify him as sociopathic - not mass murderer type, but the psychological type. For example, his complete lack of empathy towards his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge for a long while. One of the weird traits of sociopaths is that to navigate world that requires understanding of empathy and emotions, an understanding they don't have, they build models of human behavior and can choose to deploy those models when required toward their aims. What's interesting also here is his ability to be singularly brutal to his subordinate, while at the same time be completely empathetic to the customer's view point. Just my amateur psychologist 2c, but that combination of brutality on one side with solicitousness on the other adds weight to my view that he was a high-functioning sociopath.
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Steve was an asshole, but an amazingly smart, perceptive and brilliant one. He listened, realized that there needed to be a change and told the team to take care of it. It is clear that it could have been handled nicer but, it was Steve. You got the whole package good or bad. For the most part he got it right, delivery not withstanding. I was privileged to have known him, even if he was an ass.
Clearly, it made an impression. I wish everyone took software as seriously as Jobs did and shouted at others when a point needed to be made. Say what you will about a shouting boss not being nice or fun to work for, but I think getting shouted at undeniably makes you more attentive to an issue than if steve had tried to instruct him calmly.
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How is being passionate about making the right decision being an asshole? He didn’t call his engineer any names, he criticized he decision.
At my last job a director (that eventually became my boss) got angry with me because I called the product I worked on a “piece of shit”. He said while the product was “suboptimal”, my language was offensive. I told him that what I found truly offensive was the millions of dollars a month our company was losing because of this “suboptimal” product, and that no one would let me fix it.
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First hand accounts of 20 year old conversations are likely over dramatized, but I find a first hand account to be much more credible than someone reading a first hand account and deciding the first hand account just got it totally wrong.
We don't know the specifics of the work environment there. I mean if you were working on a trading pit on Wall Street would be offended when your boss/co-workers yell at you "f- off" or "get the f- out"?
The reaction of the same person should be different if the work environment never had the f- word pronounced though. That would mean trouble.
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Wow, to me this read completely differently. More like a primadonna, making knee jerk judgments and contemptuously bandying about his authority.
The impressive character was Carmack.
Any CEO who makes a blue box and pranks the Pope with it is ... atypical. (more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box#History)
God, I miss the mythos of Steve.
That's about Steve Wozniak (who actually made the product that made Apple great) though, not Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak seems like a great person. Steve Jobs... not so much.
A playful joke like that would land someone in prison for a decade today.
Interesting. I've read it more like he winged it by following his gut which told him there is a person here who has utmost respect of people he trusts, so he should probably follow that lead.
> Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation.
I mean, he has had almost complete knowledge of the stack along the years. Whereas a lot of CEOs just get in large companies at some point of their life because a new CEO is needed.
In the story, Jobs acts as a rational ( screaming aside) adult. Is there anything else?
Without knowing the details, I'm curious if Jobs made the decision based on a deep understanding of the issue, or if he just trusted John more than the Apple engineer.
It sounds like he made the call immediately after the Apple engineer admitted Carmack’s solution was “ideal”. That may have been the culmination of Carmack making the more convincing points (not recounted in TFA) but the fact that Jobs pounces on this admission and ends the back and forth immediately seems like that is a big part of what he was looking for or how he made up his mind.
This is a typical situation for most companies. I've been in the position of the "trusted engineer" several times where conversations with customers can very quickly change the direction of engineering. Fortunately, in all of those situations my boss wasn't an asshole. Honestly, all these recent stories about jobs really just paint him in a negative light.
There is a missing piece of complexity here and other comments regarding "asshole" behavior.
The story recounted here is a concise demonstration of some aspects of leadership — decisiveness, fairness of discussion, and as mentioned the confidence to steer a large company.
But in these stories the means by which those aspects are demonstrated are colored by toxic masculinity. The rage with which Steve is attributed, the combative or abusive belittling he was known for & demonstrated here is the the very same toxic interpersonal dominance normalized by mass culture as essential male behavior.
There are emotionally supportive ways of doing exactly what Steve did. Perhaps his success could have been even greater had he executed what seems to have been an innate wellspring of leadership ability with a supportive disposition.
To be honest, all of that is considerably less frustrating than the kind of passive aggressive bullshit I generally see it’s place. I’d rather have someone be honest and yell at me than engage in passive aggressive nagging and slithering around behind my back whining about things. It doesn’t seem realistic that the default fallback in the absence of “toxic masculinity” is “emotionally supportive”.
lol this is the first time I've heard toxic masculinity used seriously
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Not disagreeing with you, but unless I misunderstood something, it seems Jobs sided with John because it was obvious that the design they were going for with MacOS Graphics was wrong, and Jobs was pissed that the Apple engineer tried to defend it. If you ask me that's a perfectly reasonable scenario to get pissed.
Except we have no idea WHY the engineer was trying to defend it. He might've been told previously by Jobs himself that their solution was "the" solution and that they wouldn't entertain alternatives.
Imagine how the conversation could've gone if the engineer had agreed with Carmack and Jobs didn't. "Well, yeah, that approach could be better...". Jobs would've probably cut him off for not towing the company line and fired him.
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>> Honestly, all these recent stories about jobs really just paint him in a negative light.
Not really. That's not my interpretation of the story at all. People who judge others for being a jerk in isolation lose the fact that it often comes with the territory of being a visionary or extra-effective at their job.
Sure, it'd be great if Jobs was nice. It'd also be nice if your middle manager who knows your dog's name and loves his family was as smart as Jobs. But skills are finite and scarce, and almost no one develops them all, a lesson many D&D players learn immediately after rolling a character.
Jobs was a dick. But that was the price. If someone is a dick and half as smart and effective as Jobs, yeah, that's a negative. For someone like Jobs, Carmack (plenty of stories about him that are "negative" as you say, I might add), and other 4+ SD talents, it comes with the package. Expecting otherwise is folly.
Talent allows some people get away with being jerks. If you think talent and bad behavior go hand in hand, you should meet some new talented people.
Do they paint him in a bad light? I guess they all seem to match up to my internal image of who Jobs was. They don’t make him look worse, they just confirm how bad it was.
I guess I kind of assume everyone knows Jobs was insufferable at this point.
Can you clarify your point here? That Jobs shouldn't have listened to John?
Jobs could have made his point without shouting, i.e. being an asshole.
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Definitely. And my real issue with Jobs is more the ripple effect. So many people read stories of Jobs being an asshole and think, "Oh, this is how you success." Ignoring the many assholes who weren't as brilliant or as thoroughly lucky.
Look at Theranos, for example. The CEO was practically a Jobs impersonator. From the turtlenecks and the air of brilliance to the controlling, abusive, and secrecy-oriented behaviors. How many people fell for the fraud? And I can't count the wantrepreneurs I've come across that had similar theories.
> thoroughly lucky.
Jobs made a huge success 3 times:
1. the Apple II
2. Pixar
3. return to Apple and transforming it from 90 days to bankruptcy to the biggest corporation in the world
You can ascribe one of the above to luck, but faced with all three, Jobs was just that good, and made his own luck.
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Look I see your point and I agree. However, having worked in a number of big companies I am really at a loss as to what is the right way to coerce a number of humans into the "right" direction. I have sat in meetings where ignorant executives have blabbered on and on about nothing because the company and CEO felt it was important to hear everyone out. This works if everyone at the table is knowledgeable and able to swallow their ego. You get people making ridiculous statements like we need to replace our database that runs the whole organisation. I have also worked in a company where the CEO cut people who were blabbering short, mostly rightly but rudely so. I think the two approaches have a time and place. There is probably no need to be rude but I don't know how one cuts someone off without being rude.
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There's a line beyond which Jobsian behaviors will ruin the productivity and happiness of the Woz. Holmes/Kissenger and friends flew over it and landed in "scientists are being forced (and encouraged) to lie to keep their jobs," territory.
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A Jobs impersonator...but without the talent, taste for design, passion for products, or virtually any other positive quality that he had. IMO Holmes has more in common with Jordan Belfort than Steve Jobs.
I think Elizabeth Holmes belongs in prison. However, I read her bio and she was a genius on par with Jobs.
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> Honestly, all these recent stories about jobs really just paint him in a negative light.
These tend to coincidentally crop up every year just before a WWDC and the September iPhone drop.
In his story about how Steve Jobs told the engineer point blank to make changes and how impressive it was. I think a lot of people underestimate how effective Steve Jobs was as the CEO because he was Steve Jobs.
A CEO of a company has role power, but that's really the least effective. If the employees don't respect thier managers, the managers can't be effective.
It's usually used by production workers, but developers will also Work-to-Rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule) and do the bare minimum.
I don't know of any non founder CEO that can inspire workers (or investors) to follow them in a completely different direction.
I wonder how long that guy stayed at Apple afterwards, does anyone know?
Why wouldn't he stay? If the decision was technically correct and he may be able to talk to Carmack directly to ask for advice, that would be a rare opportunity to learn.
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Edit: oh wait, you're probably asking about the Engineering Directory, not Jim Black.
Jim Black's facebook page says he's VP at Magic Leap, so this must be him:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimblack2
Looks like this was during his second stint at Apple, where he stayed for just 1 year, before going to NVIDIA for 16 years.
He did have a previous stint at Apple from 1992-1997, so 5 years.
"On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood."
Was it the watchmen comedian logo?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thresh.jpg
John Carmack in 1997 wearing what is presumably the exact shirt.
I think the guy in the car is Thresh, who won Carmack's Ferrari in a quake tournament:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Fong
You can download recordings of his tournaments, where you can freely change your POV to thresh, or his opponent, or just fly around, and watch him play. Pretty amazing skill!
I don’t think anyone could ask for more than this post provides.
Great find!
I think it's a similar design, but I have a vivid memory of a kid in my elementary school (~1995) wearing a shirt like this: black t-shirt with a big yellow smiley face with gory bullet-wound to the forehead. It was a strong image especially for kids. The Watchmen logo is spattered on the side. I can't find the t-shirt I'm remembering but there are similar current examples: https://www.amazon.com/Smiley-Bullet-Black-Adult-T-Shirt/dp/...
> Watchmen Smiley Face: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watchmen#/media/File:Watchmen,...
When I was a kid I made an animation of that on an amiga 500. Yellow smiley face, gunshot in the forehead and blood dripping down.
I showed my dad and I still don’t know if he was impressed that I figured out how to do that or thought I should see a psychiatrist.
Does anybody remember the interface from Plan9 or Inferno where the "kill process" button was originally a smiley face with blood trickling from a bullet hole in the forehead? Then they fixed it to be more bland when it started shipping more.
Oh, and the Comedian just wore a regular smiley button. The blood was his own, spattered from when he was thrown from a building. No bullet hole.
The yellow smiley face was a prominent early-90s late 80s acid-house/rave subculture symbol, and a version with a bullethole in the head was common.
https://noisey.vice.com/en_us/article/a337mb/history-smiley-...
That seems likely from the description. I don't know if Jobs knowing that would've changed much for their interaction though.
Anyone here ever work with a genius who wasn't an asshole? I did and he'll always be a key part of the template to which I both aspire and measure others.
It's not like the stories about Carmack make him out to be a saintly, fuzzy human but I will definitely give him credit for standing firm on some big ideals/principals, even if I don't share them.
I guess I just hope that you can (a) be really good at your work - like -genius good - and also (b) a decent, empathetic human being.
Wishful thinking? maybe, but I don't really want to be top-level successful if you've gotta choose.
Most geniuses aren't assholes. But no one writes news stories about individuals that have no drama and are pleasant to work with.
Woz is a notable exception to your rule.
Er, John Carmack?
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I maintain that my cofounder is a genius (computer vision and signal processing), and he's one of the kindest nicest people I have known.
Being good at something and not being toxic to humans you interact with are absolutely orthogonal -- it's just that a lot of geniuses can get away with being douches, that we let it happen.
One thing a lot of people seem to miss is that being nice is a choice [0] -- nicety to others is a learnable skill.
[0] https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate...
>Anyone here ever work with a genius who wasn't an asshole?
Absolutely. Those are the people we should want to work with and strive to become.
Knuth?
i mean, i've never worked with him, but he's apparently great.
He doesn't consider mathemetical flaws to be bugs. Not saying that makes him an asshole, but as a product person, this has has harmed TeX's ability to complete it goal of allowing anyone to create typeset documents.
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John Carmack himself? He seems like a great guy. Or wouldn't you call him a genius?
Hal Finney.
Great comment about the mouse at the end.
The first thing I do when I get a new Mac is throw away their crappy mouse, and replace it with a decent three button mouse.
Carmack comedic skills seem as high as his engineering skills.
I would pay to see his happy deadpan delivery of that question to Steve Jobs and enjoy the pause after that.
Kind of an apples to oranges comparison on Carmack's point though (no pun intended). Keyboards were invented 100 years earlier than the mouse. People, especially older adults, instinctively knew how to use them.
I don’t think it was remotely serious, he probably just wanted to say it to tease him a bit
When the first keyboard type interface was invented for typewriters and such, did people instinctively know how to use them immediately? Besides, at that time the concept of a two button mouse was not new and had been in use with computers for years.
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Also, keyboards have letters
Funny how people can such a different taste for these things. I've switched back from Mac to Windows some time ago, and the thing I miss the most is the touchbar.
You can't possibly mean the touchbar. Are you talking about the touchpad?
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Ha, even as a 10 year old kid in '96 I found the Mac's decision to have a 1 button mouse to be painful (coming from windows). I remember not having much of a concept of how companies were ran but instinctively felt there had to be someone stubborn somewhere.
But new Mac mice have two buttons and a scroll wheel. Then have for at least a decade.
No friggin' middle mouse button though. You can't even configure their mice? to behave as if it had a middle button. Go ahead. Try.
Maybe get the touchpad instead then.
You throw away an $80 mouse?
No different than throwing away a $100 OS when you buy a computer. Sometimes there simply isn't a way to purchase it without the undesired item included.
> You throw away an $80 mouse?
If it doesn't do what one wants it to do, it's worth $0 to them.
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> Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him.
Weird how “writing portable software” was (and in many places still is) considered deep wizardry. I remember the timeframe described here and indeed “porting our software to a non-Windows platform” was on every company’s list of things they’ll never have time to do, because everyone’s code base was so thoroughly (often unnecessarily) tied to Win32. The bad ol days...
It's a bit easier in a game that renders its whole UI custom, though. A standard desktop app would be heavily tied to Win32 simply because of UI controls. Similarly, a server app, if designed for performance, would likely be using overlapped I/O.
Yea I should have qualified that I was mostly talking about games companies. Games should be among the easiest software to release on multiple platforms for to not needing platform specific UI controls. Actually I struggle to think of a single major component to a game that must be platform-specific. Yet, of all the software I use, games tend to be the ones stubbornly stuck on Windows.
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To be fair if you’re doing all your own UI it’s a bit easier. Porting a bunch of Win32 GUI to Carbon/Cocoa would be a big deal.
But I agree. I remember being impressed at seeing boxed Linux copies day one.
Yet today we can still wait YEARS for Mac ports of games, if we get them at all, even though they’re using a cross platform engine.
The Linux edition of Q3A also — remarkably — came in a collector's tin, which I severely regret not buying at the time.
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By committing to making the software portable to, and available on, other platforms, you are also committing your company to incur the testing and support costs for each platform. Many of these costs are fixed, so the more obscure the platform, the bigger proportion of your revenues on that platform will be eaten up in costs.
For this reason, from a business perspective, it makes sense to write games only for Windows. Anything else is bad business.
This is a great argument against releasing (or more specifically, offering support) for multiple platforms, but not an argument for writing your software non-portable in the first place. I’ve worked on projects that technically could have easily been recompiled and released on multiple platforms but were not, for valid business reason.
> Weird how “writing portable software” was (and in many places still is) considered deep wizardry
Well, at this time most code had OS-specific hacks for performance reasons…
Can anyone with knowledge of the "OpenGL permissions and security" issue explain the problem?
You'd need knowledge of the beta version of Open GL on OS X, from twenty years ago, as well.
Probably the ability to read memory from arbitrary places in the kernel via DMA. It's continued to be a challenged for DMA devices...
Carmack worked on the Linux Utah-GLX drivers in the runup to q3's release and would have had a lot of thoughts on the low-level GL implementation details.
I've no knowledge of OpenGL but based on the content in the story I'd take a stab that they weren't implemented fully for performance reasons. I don't know why a game developer would be so concerned with that though. But I know nothing about game development either ...
What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service.
In terms of diplomacy and tone, Steve Jobs doesn't do well in this story. However, for intellectual and engineering integrity, he's in entirely different league from most US politicians. From what I've seen, the typical US politican would rather puff up and pretend their constituent's majority position is scientific fact than actually engage with science, fact, and expertise.
I think this is a good way to sum up his genius abilities: 1) An ability to see past consensual illusions to engineering and design truths and first principles. 2) A low ability to transmit such insights in a diplomatic way. (Though, given a position of power, his messages are unambiguous and highly persuasive. Effective != moral, however.)
There's enough stories where Jobs could be persuasive when he wanted to; it's just a lot easier to scream at someone if that would work, too. I'm reminded of Lyndon Johnson, oddly enough.
'Tis true we don't know the backstory - but Steve may have tangled with his guy before, he may have tried diplomacy with him and before and found it just didn't penetrate his defenses, or he may have felt the display was necessary to nudge another one or two of his troops who were present. Or he may have wanted to create a viral story to prod his troops and the situation provided him the perfect opportunity. I've known bosses who planned and scripted their explosions (and the topic of them) days or even weeks in advance and then waited for the right moment in front of the right crowd to present itself, if the issue was sufficiently critical, to pop their cork spectacularly. So we can't necessarily assume Jobs was impetuously undiplomatic or just fumbled the diplomacy aspect. I do believe there are instances of Jobs exhibiting diplomacy and politess.
John Carmack's reminiscences about Steve Jobs: https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2146412825593223...
I was reading Ben Horowitz's book The Hard Thing About Hard Things the other day, and the stories about Jobs and Carmack remind me of this passage:
>"When do you hold the bus?"
>The great football coach John Madden was once asked whether he would tolerate a player like Terrell Owens on his team. Owens was both one of the most talented players in the game and one of the biggest jerks. Madden answered, "If you hold the bus for everyone on the team, then you'll be so late you'll miss the game, so you can't do that. The bus must leave on time. However, sometimes you'll have a player that's so good that you hold the bus for him, but only him."
>Phil Jackson, the coach who has won the most NBA championships, was once asked about his famously flakey superstar Dennis Rodman, "Since Dennis Rodman is allowed to miss practice, does this mean other star players like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippin can miss practice too?" Jackson replied, "Of course not. There is only room for one Dennis Rodman on this team. In fact, you really can only have a very few Dennis Rodmans in society as a whole; otherwise, we would degenerate into anarchy."
>You may find yourself with an employee who fits one of the above descriptions [heretic, flake, or jerk] but nonetheless makes a massive positive contribution to the company. You may decide that you will personally mitigate the employee's negative attributes and keep her from polluting the overall company culture. That's fine, but remember: You can only hold the bus for her.
Really exceptional people often get exceptions. One challenge may be that more people think they are really exceptional, than really are really exceptional.
Fascinating counterexample about Dennis Rodman, though: Gregg Popovich famously decided Rodman was too much trouble and got rid of him after only one season, vowed that he would never tolerate a player like that again, and ended up winning five championships and counting, while building a team that remained a serious contender almost continuously from 1999 to, frankly, the moment Kawhi Leonard got injured last year.
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Here's that story for those that don't want to go to FB too :)
John Carmack
14 May at 17:27 ·
Steve Jobs
My wife once asked me “Why do you drop what you are doing when Steve Jobs asks you to do something? You don’t do that for anyone else.”
It is worth thinking about.
As a teenage Apple computer fan, Jobs and Wozniak were revered figures for me, and wanting an Apple 2 was a defining characteristic of several years of my childhood. Later on, seeing NeXT at a computer show just as I was selling my first commercial software felt like a vision into the future. (But $10k+, yikes!)
As Id Software grew successful through Commander Keen and Wolfenstein 3D, the first major personal purchase I made wasn’t a car, but rather a NeXT computer. It turned out to be genuinely valuable for our software development, and we moved the entire company onto NeXT hardware.
We loved our NeXTs, and we wanted to launch Doom with an explicit “Developed on NeXT computers” logo during the startup process, but when we asked, the request was denied.
Some time after launch, when Doom had begun to make its cultural mark, we heard that Steve had changed his mind and would be happy to have NeXT branding on it, but that ship had sailed. I did think it was cool to trade a few emails with Steve Jobs.
Several things over the years made me conclude that, at his core, Steve didn’t think very highly of games, and always wished they weren’t as important to his platforms as they turned out to be. I never took it personally.
When NeXT managed to sort of reverse-acquire Apple and Steve was back in charge, I was excited by the possibilities of a resurgent Apple with the virtues of NeXT in a mainstream platform.
I was brought in to talk about the needs of games in general, but I made it my mission to get Apple to adopt OpenGL as their 3D graphics API. I had a lot of arguments with Steve.
Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently. They might be pragmatic, but couldn’t actually be good. “I have Pixar. We will make something [an API] that is actually good.”
It was often frustrating, because he could talk, with complete confidence, about things he was just plain wrong about, like the price of memory for video cards and the amount of system bandwidth exploitable by the AltiVec extensions.
But when I knew what I was talking about, I would stand my ground against anyone.
When Steve did make up his mind, he was decisive about it. Dictates were made, companies were acquired, keynotes were scheduled, and the reality distortion field kicked in, making everything else that was previously considered into obviously terrible ideas.
I consider this one of the biggest indirect impacts on the industry that I have had. OpenGL never seriously threatened D3D on PC, but it was critical at Apple, and that meant that it remained enough of a going concern to be the clear choice when mobile devices started getting GPUs. While long in the tooth now, it was so much better than what we would have gotten if half a dozen SoC vendors rolled their own API back at the dawn of the mobile age.
I wound up doing several keynotes with Steve, and it was always a crazy fire drill with not enough time to do things right, and generally requiring heroic effort from many people to make it happen at all. I tend to think this was also a calculated part of his method.
My first impression of “Keynote Steve” was him berating the poor stage hands over “This Home Depot shit” that was rolling out the display stand with the new Mac, very much not to his satisfaction. His complaints had a valid point, and he improved the quality of the presentation by caring about details, but I wouldn’t have wanted to work for him in that capacity.
One time, my wife, then fiancée, and I were meeting with Steve at Apple, and he wanted me to do a keynote that happened to be scheduled on the same day as our wedding. With a big smile and full of charm, he suggested that we postpone it. We declined, but he kept pressing. Eventually my wife countered with a suggestion that if he really wanted “her” John so much, he should loan John Lassiter to her media company for a day of consulting. Steve went from full charm to ice cold really damn quick. I didn’t do that keynote.
When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo.
I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with:
“I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.”
That goes a long way, and nobody said a thing after that.
When my wife and I later started building games for feature phones (DoomRPG! Orcs&Elves!), I advocated repeatedly to Steve that an Apple phone could be really great. Every time there was a rumor that Apple might be working on a phone, I would refine the pitch to him. Once he called me at home on a Sunday (How did he even get my number?) to ask a question, and I enthused at length about the possibilities.
I never got brought into the fold, but I was excited when the iPhone actually did see the light of day. A giant (for the time) true color display with a GPU! We could do some amazing things with this!
Steve first talked about application development for iPhone at the same keynote I was demonstrating the new ID Tech 5 rendering engine on Mac, so I was in the front row. When he started going on about “Web Apps”, I was (reasonably quietly) going “Booo!!!”.
After the public cleared out and the rest of us were gathered in front of the stage, I started urgently going on about how web apps are terrible, and wouldn’t show the true potential of the device. We could do so much more with real native access!
Steve responded with a line he had used before: “Bad apps could bring down cell phone towers.” I hated that line. He could have just said “We aren’t ready”, and that would have been fine.
I was making some guesses, but I argued that the iPhone hardware and OS provided sufficient protection for native apps. I pointed at a nearby engineer and said “Don’t you have an MMU and process isolation on the iPhone now?” He had a wide eyed look of don’t-bring-me-into-this, but I eventually got a “yes” out of him.
I said that OS-X was surely being used for things that were more security critical than a phone, and if Apple couldn’t provide enough security there, they had bigger problems. He came back with a snide “You’re a smart guy John, why don’t you write a new OS?” At the time, my thought was, “Fuck you, Steve.”.
People were backing away from us. If Steve was mad, Apple employees didn’t want him to associate the sight of them with the experience. Afterwards, one of the execs assured me that “Steve appreciates vigorous conversation”.
Still deeply disappointed about it, I made some comments that got picked up by the press. Steve didn’t appreciate that.
The Steve Jobs “hero / shithead” rollercoaster was real, and after riding high for a long time, I was now on the down side. Someone told me that Steve explicitly instructed them to not give me access to the early iPhone SDK when it finally was ready.
I wound up writing several successful iPhone apps on the side (all of which are now gone due to dropping 32 bit support, which saddens me), and I had many strong allies inside Apple, but I was on the outs with Steve.
The last iOS product I worked on was Rage for iOS, which I thought set a new bar for visual richness on mobile, and also supported some brand new features like TV out. I heard that it was well received inside Apple.
I was debriefing the team after the launch when I got a call. I was busy, so I declined it. A few minutes later someone came in and said that Steve was going to call me. Oops.
Everyone had a chuckle about me “hanging up on Steve Jobs”, but that turned out to be my last interaction with him.
As the public story of his failing health progressed, I started several emails to try to say something meaningful and positive to part on, but I never got through them, and I regret it.
I corroborate many of the negative character traits that he was infamous for, but elements of the path that led to where I am today were contingent on the dents he left in the universe.
I showed up for him.
"Part of his method, at least with me, was to deride contemporary options and dare me to tell him differently."
This was Ibsen's method as well. Notoriously, if he needed a private tutorial, say on an aspect of physics for a play he was writing, Ibsen would make outrageously false statements about the relevant physics in front of a Nobel laureate in physics in order to provoke exactly the energetic private tutorial he needed, from an expert. Didn't give a shit about embarrassing himself.
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That's more candid and balanced, and consequently more moving, than maybe anything else I've read about him.
I find nothing remotely special about a C-suite operator siding with an outside voice against a "trusted" internal resource. Even if the operator is the legendary Steve Jobs. C-suite operators, honestly, tend to just not really trust their internal resources. Often to their detriment.
I'm a tech consultant and am typically brought in by C-suite operators to assist them with deeply technical decisions. I tell clients out of the gate that what we're going to recommend will probably be 10% my firm's ideas and 90% ideas gleaned from interviews with their own personnel, slightly repackaged, better sold, but always attributed to the originator.
Jobs comes off as quite an obnoxious dude.
I love the incessant deification of Steve Jobs, regardless of his mistakes, juvenile behavior, and constant stories about his abuse of his staff. In this story Jobs mistakes the wrong person for John Carmack, becomes deeply offended by a silly t-shirt, screams at his staff and slams his hands the table like a 2 year old. But the author is impressed with Jobs and makes him out to be the hero. At my work we would call this a hostile and abusive work environment, but within the Jobs cult of personality it's a net positive.
I don't disagree with your assessment but, right or wrong, Steve Jobs was on another level.
Most great leaders have character flaws. Some of them are very obnoxious petty people. See Nick Saban or Michael Jordan.
Steve Jobs pushed people to achieve extraordinary things. My guess is they would not have achieved many of those things without his influence and authority. That's what great leaders do.
But it's true. If you are a selfish narcissistic jerk people remember that too. Maybe more than what you accomplished.
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if anyone else at Apple behaving like Jobs would quickly receive a warning from HR if not shown the door.
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Yeah, I have interactions with managers all the time where I state my ideas, someone else disagrees and then my boss makes the right call.
For some reason that doesn’t sound dramatic without the possibility of someone being yelled at or fired.
The negatives are over exaggerated, just like the positives. Its ridiculous to reduce someones entire career 20 incidents out of the hundreds of daily interactions over a few decades amounting to > 1million.
Ironically, your approach is no different than the persons you're criticizing. You're also basing your opinion on 1% of the dataset, just a different 1%.
This story, to me, highlights Jobs' notorious ability to change his mind when presented with information that pointed to the right way of doing something, even in the face of social pressure to do otherwise. He could've been more diplomatic about it for sure. But so many people of his ilk don't have that capacity that it makes me think its more a facet of that personality type than a character flaw in particular to Jobs.
There's a fascinating amount of shamelessness and unwillingness to admit when you're wrong, though, if you're willing to drive people 100% in one direction one day and then completely reverse course the next while making it sound like it was their fault.
Completely. You could have had an identical story without the drama, which seems to have been completely due to Jobs. Had you let Carmack talk to the lead engineer for about fifteen minutes, I'm sure he would've come around entirely for objective reasons, rather than because the boss screamed at him.
> Had you let Carmack talk to the lead engineer for about fifteen minutes, I'm sure he would've come around entirely for objective reasons
I wish this were true. Yet I've been so many projects around me go months and even years down some very-clearly wrong direction, because the engineering lead refuses to course correct. Typical patterns are:
- The system design attempts to address "future" issues, making it two orders of magnitude more complex than necessary.
- The eng lead wants to "get it right from the beginning." So months later, you have a beautiful CI pipeline, coding standards, base classes, etc, and still no usable prototype.
- Trying to solve all possible use cases, with one system.
- The above, but then focusing on just one use case so narrowly, the rest have to be crammed in.
I could keep going. These are cases when you need a decisive (and technically sharp) manager above to call bullshit and rip the bandaid if necessary.
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And this story leaves unanswered the question of why they compromised on a suboptimal architecture in the first place. In my experience, 95% of the time it's due to some other constraint imposed by an executive. E.g., a made-up ship date.
So it's perfectly possible that had the head of graphics gone for what he knew was the ideal solution in the first place, he would have been yelled at by Jobs for that. It wouldn't be the first time that a HiPPO caused a boss to do a 180 and implicitly blame the underlings rather than own up.
That's actually what happened according to the story. The lead admitted that Carmack was right, and then Jobs got angry at the lead for not making a good technical decision from the outset.
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If you read some biographies of influential people, they were often very obnoxious and uncaring assholes in person. When the culture is obsessed with personality cults, there is tendency to to worship them or completely dismiss their achievements.
Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller, ...
Do not forget Jack Tramiel, known for "Jack attacks", "I don't believe in compromising, but winning" and his intense micromanagement where every spending over 1000 USD had to be signed by him and he refused budgets, because they were a "license to steal". What do you think happened when he went on vacation :-)
Except maybe in his testimony, I don't remember that from reading about Bill Gates.
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This YouTube clip (at ~2hr into the video) ties in with the original story that Carmack told about his wedding and is where Steve chronicles the story from his angle: https://youtu.be/SjlLG1EzJ2k?t=7223
>As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment.
Sounds like John Carmack and Doug Englebart are on the same page:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/douglas-engelbart-...
How Douglas Engelbart Invented the Future. Two decades before the personal computer, a shy engineer unveiled the tools that would drive the tech revolution. By Valerie Landau, Smithsonian Magazine, January 2018.
>In 1979, Xerox allowed Steve Jobs and other Apple executives to tour its labs twice, in exchange for the right to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock. Once Jobs began working on these ideas, they became even more streamlined. Engelbart’s mouse had three buttons, which he used in different combinations to perform a range of tasks. After licensing this invention from the Stanford Research Institute, Apple decided it would be simpler to give it just one button. Engelbart lamented that the mouse’s capability had been dumbed down to make it “easy to use.”
Interesting. I’ve seen other Jobsesque CEOs in action. One was the only person in the company who could overrule an internally focused CTO. I couldn’t figure out if it was “Thank God we have him to defend the views of our partners or customers” or “A great CEO shouldn’t set up an org that needs this kind of intervention.”
The “Only I know best” types tend to flame out before they get the Jobsian Success. (Even Jobs needed to crash and burn one and a half times)
was there ever a cto at apple.
Was Jobs actually technical enough to understand the substance of the technical discussion? I had/reported to a couple of not-so-technical managers for short stints in my 20 yr career and I always found it supremely annoying that they were often making misguided technical/business decisions based on most recent buzzwords and sales pitch from software/hardware vendors).
You don't always need to understand the specifics. Even without hearing the actual argument we know this about it:
These two people know what they're talking about. One if them is arguing against his own interests because he's convinced it's the right thing to do. The other one agrees, but thinks that it's impractical.
So the decision comes down to: Would I rather do it right, or be practical? And that's entirely at the discretion of the guy in charge of the project.
It's worth noting that no one was trying to sell anything here, unlike the situation's you're describing.
Yes, Apple's graphic engineer and John probably knew what they were talking about, but I suspect that Jobs did.
It seems like based on that vague description, John wasn't necessarily arguing against his own interest and Apple engineers might have had to consider constraints that neither Steve or John was familiar with. Take for instance Steve's response to John's disliking for the iMac mouse -- in this case, Steve quoted "every study" that there were usability issues with first-time users. But on the topics of OpenGL security, his trigger word, it seems, was "ideal."
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[rant] Why are these stories posted on Facebook, of all places? [/rant]
You would guess that people of this stature would know better...
Carmack is CTO of Oculus, which is owned by Facebook. So I imagine that's part of why a lot of his social media presence is there these days.
Not sure about Jim Black.
Here's a link to the original John Carmack story in case anyone missed it: https://m.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=214641282559....
For those of you who don't want to go on FB, here's a Pastebin: https://pastebin.com/wTMW1q13
Does anyone know the background on smiley face with bullet in head t-shirt? There are people selling this t-shirt but no one seems to have what's the context.
BTW, you are not going to have this kind of experience anymore. Most CEOs (i.e. except two) and VPs of large public companies don't talk to "graphics engineer" from a small company, let alone they actually care about such low level details. Perhaps this is why there are no more Steve Jobs.
> Clearly deeply offended by John’s T-shirt, he sat down at the conference table and looked straight ahead, silent.
Why would he be offended by Watchmen reference?
From John Carmack's post - https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825... )
"When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.”"
I really wish people would stop downvoting polite questions like this. This is a reasonable thing to ask (I had the same question and just searched for it in these comments) and it feels odd that it's omitted from the story.
This particular one was probably downvoted because it's either naive or a weak joke to assume that Jobs knew or cared that it was a Watchmen reference.
A much better question would be "why was he offended by a fairly innocuous T-shirt." That's the sort of thing that might get you the side-eye from a particularly high-strung middle school teacher, but it's pretty funny to imagine someone like Jobs being so uptight.
As a windows gamer growing up I always felt Mac was deliberately going out of its way to not be a first class platform for gaming.
Anyone know why Steve Jobs might have ignored the demand for gaming? Maybe it was his time at Atari?
Interesting story. Can the link be changed to the non-mobile version?
You can replace the m in the link with www to get a non-mobile version.
John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.”
Or no keys on a phone.
Unrelated: has it always been the case, the lack of selecting text in Facebook posts?
It works for me if I remove the URL's "m." prefix.
Copy/paste for those wanting to avoid FB.
Jim Black (May 16 at 8:25pm):
I had the privilege of working with John Carmack as a technology evangelist at Apple when he ported Quake III Arena to Rhapsody, Apple’s internal name for the OpenStep/Mach kernel based MacOS X. I enjoyed John's reminiscence about working with Steve and Apple and thought I would share a few of my own memories from that time which provided me with some of the most satisfying moments and lessons of my career.
John was the first game developer I ever worked with. Three weeks after I sent him development hardware (an iMac) he informed me that the PC and Mac versions of Quake III Arena were in “feature parity.” I still recall my shock upon reading that email from him.
John agreed to come to Cupertino and meet with several teams to share his development experiences with them. I picked him up in the lobby of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. He stood unassumingly in the lobby, framed in the background by a Christmas Tree.
On day one, we met with several internal teams at Apple. I was accustomed to see 3rd party developers emerge somewhat awed by their meetings with Apple engineers. In John’s case the reaction was reversed. I’ve never seen anyone grok complex systems and architectures so quickly and thoroughly as John. Amusingly, he walked around the Apple campus unrecognized by all but for the occasional, former NeXT employee.
On Day 2, John was to meet with Steve. I never knew whether it was by design or not, but on that day John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood. After an hour of waiting for Steve in IL1, he marched into the room, and immediately mistook me for John Carmack, extending his hand to shake mine (we had never met). I locked eyes with Steve Jobs and looked down significantly at the Apple badge on my belt. Without missing a beat, Steve shifted his extended hand to John's.
That’s when Steve noticed the T-shirt and the meeting, as soon as it had begun, took a turn for the worse.
Steve’s jaw muscles visibly tensed and he became stone-faced. Clearly deeply offended by John’s T-shirt, he sat down at the conference table and looked straight ahead, silent.
John kicked off the meeting by saying, “So I’ve been working with MacOS for the past month and here’s what I learned.” His #1 concern (at an extremely high level) concerned OpenGL permissions and security for which he felt Apple needed a better solution than what he’d learned about the day before in meetings with the graphics team, even if it came at a slight cost in performance for 3D games. This was, suffice to say, typical of John in that he was approaching an issue from an objective engineering perspective and arguing for the most technically correct solution rather than pushing for something that might be of benefit to his personal projects.
Steve listened and abruptly said, “That’s not what we’re doing!” Then he looked at the three Apple employees in the room and asked, “Is it?” I confirmed that what John was raising as a concern came from a meeting with the graphics architecture team the day before. Without batting an eye, Steve stood up, tramped over to a Polycom phone and dialed from apparent memory the phone number of the engineering director whose admin informed Steve that he was at an offsite in Palo Alto. Steve hung up, sat down, and about 30 seconds later the phone rang with the engineering director on the line.
Steve said, “I’m here with a graphics developer. I want you to tell him everything we’re doing in MacOS X from a graphics architecture perspective.” Then he put his elbows on the table and adopted a prayer-like hand pose, listening to and weighing the arguments from his trusted director of engineering and from the game guy with the bloody smiley-face T-shirt.
And what happened next was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever witnessed about Steve or any Silicon Valley exec. Early on in the discussion, the Apple engineer realized that “graphics engineer” in the room was John Carmack. And he realized that he was going to need to defend his technical decision, on the merits, in front of Steve. After extended back and forth, the Apple engineer said, “John, what you’re arguing for is the ideal …”
He never made it to the next word because Steve suddenly stood bolt upright, slamming both palms onto the desk and shouting, “NO!!!!”
“NO!!! What John is saying is NOT the ideal. What John is saying is what we have to do!!! Why are we doing this? Why are we going to all this trouble to build this ship when you’re putting a TORPEDO IN ITS HULL?!!!!”
All of this was said with the utmost conviction and at extremely high volume. To his credit, John, seated directly next to a yelling Steve Jobs, didn’t even flinch.
What was so impressive to me in that meeting was not the drama so much as it was that Steve Jobs made a decision on the merits to side with John on a technical issue rather than his longstanding and trusted graphics engineer. He overcame his original distaste for the T-shirt and made the right call. Most CEOs would have dismissed John’s comments or paid them lip service. Steve listened to both sides and made a call that would have long lasting implications for MacOS.
As a comical aftermath to the story, John next told Steve point blank that the iMac mouse “sucked.” Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.” John sat expressionless for 2 seconds, then moved on to another topic without comment.
After the meeting ended, I walked John to the Apple store on campus (this was before there were actual Apple stores) and asked him on the way what he thought of Steve’s response to the mouse comment. John replied, “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.”
Good call, John :)
> Steve sighed and explained that “iMac was for first-time computer buyers and every study showed that if you put more than one button on the mouse, the users ended up staring at the mouse.”
That's a bit like saying that the worst thing about losing an arm is that now your shirts don't fit.
The iMac mouse sucked because it was round, making it nearly impossible to tell without looking at it whether it was pointed the right way. So when you thought you were moving it straight up, the pointer would nearly always wander off to the side. I never did understand how they could make such a huge blunder, given that the mouse is literally the first control (after the power button) one would typically use to interact with a Mac.
I totally get why so many people hated those mice, but I loved them. I collected them from people who didn't like them so I could keep using them for years. My last one finally crapped out in 2015. Now I'm in a love/hate relationship with the Magic Mouse 2. Which I believe also elicits strong feelings from people.
Not just because it was round, but because it was round without tactile directional cues. DEC had some round mice, which, while not great, did not have the Jobs-puck orientation problem because they had distinct buttons. https://www.oldmouse.com/articles/hawley/DEC-VAX.shtml
I remember having this problem in my fifth grade computer lab, along with disliking the single button.
I’m not sure how they justified filling a computer lab in an elementary school with iMacs, especially since the only things we did on them were typing tests and playing Oregon Trail.
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> Copy/paste for those wanting to avoid FB.
Appreciated.
> “I wanted to ask him what would happen if you put more than one key on a keyboard. But I didn’t.”
Funny, today we know exactly what would happen. The tablet/phone just wouldn't sell that well.
Thank you, much appreciated! I always wondered if the decision to only have one fire button in Q3A was based off its compatibility with Mac OS, and thus a lack of a second mouse button. Other FPS at the time (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Half-Life) usually had a secondary fire button to allow for alternate weapon functions (e.g. grenade launcher on SMG, zoom on sniper rifle/crossbow, etc), which was mapped to the right mouse button.
Seems unlikely, since Q3A used all the mouse buttons on PC by default, just like in previous versions of Quake. Those games also don't have secondary firing modes, Q3A is supposed to be a sort of ultimate refinement of Quake deathmatch.
No, secondary weapon functions were never a q3 thing. They wouldn't have nerfed the game for OS X regardless, especially not when you could just plug in a PC mouse or rebind the controls to use some other key.
> John wore a T-shirt that featured a smiley face with a bullet hole in the forehead from which trickled a few drops of blood.
Was it this one? http://watchmen.wikia.com/wiki/Comedian%27s_badge
I saw Steve Jobs at a grocery store in Los Angeles. I told him how cool it was to meet him in person, but I didn’t want to be a douche and bother him and ask him for photos or anything. He said, “Oh, like you’re doing now?” I was taken aback, and all I could say was “Huh?” but he kept cutting me off and going “huh? huh? huh?” and closing his hand shut in front of my face. I walked away and continued with my shopping, and I heard him chuckle as I walked off. When I came to pay for my stuff up front I saw him trying to walk out the doors with like fifteen Milky Ways in his hands without paying.
The girl at the counter was very nice about it and professional, and was like “Sir, you need to pay for those first.” At first he kept pretending to be tired and not hear her, but eventually turned back around and brought them to the counter.
When she took one of the bars and started scanning it multiple times, he stopped her and told her to scan them each individually “to prevent any electrical infetterence,” and then turned around and winked at me. I don’t even think that’s a word. After she scanned each bar and put them in a bag and started to say the price, he kept interrupting her by yawning really loudly.
Indeed, it is wise (if you have the capital) not to let things fester, especially when you know you're doing the wrong thing.
Perhaps if you want to build the kind of good will that allows Neo Apple to sell the torture devices they today call products at the rates they do, you should be more concerned with the direction of your engineering department, and less with who is or is not an "asshole". I don't even like Steve Jobs, in fact, I think Steve Jobs' life may be a net negative for my life, if not the world at large, and I think that the way he treated his kids is unconscienable, but it is not acceptable to let compromise be the norm in your engineering department. Just look at the situation now, as it relates to graphics drivers on OS X, and you'll see why the whip must be cracked.
Regarding the fact that your petty compromises add up to a broken product, ignorance is not an excuse. It is not "empathic" or "compassionate" to allow the ego of one person (the compromising engineer) destroy the efforts of thousands (everyone else who depends on the success of the product).
Empathy without foresight is somehow even worse than greed without conscience.