Comment by chrisseaton
5 years ago
> I got the $10 million, because it was going to be my job on the line, and potentially, my ability to work in industry at a high level, ever again, in the future.
I don't get why working hard to meet a deadline but unfortunately missing it would get you blacklisted from the industry?
Normally it wouldn’t. But Steve Jobs very publicly threw a camera at someone who crossed him. He had a reputation for long held grudges that fundamentally fractured business relationships (eg IIRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something, and similar reaction to integrating ZFS being announced early). Guy was an asshole, but he was an extraordinarily powerful asshole.
Nvidia is difficult to work with because they're as prideful (or more) as Apple. ZFS is hard to license commercially because it means having to negotiate with Oracle, who are evil.
Well, and there were those desoldering GPUs.
At the time it meant working with Sun not Oracle. Further, it didn’t need licensing - DTrace, under the same CDDL license - ships with macOS to this day.
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I had a laptop with one of those GPUs. Apple replaced the motherboard. With the same exact thing. It's like if your defective Takata air bag was replaced with... a defective Takata air bag.
Yeah Nvidia is a pain in the ass. But they weren’t banned from Apple platforms for that, as I understand it.
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In hindsight I wish I said he was an incredibly effective asshole. Lots of powerful people are assholes. It’s not often they continue to hold much power as a corpse.
Still ten minutes to edit the post.
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> IRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something
may also be the major issues with their chipset.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254
Nah Apple has had plenty of hardware issues over the years.
However Jobs was a master presenter and showman, and extremely anal about getting L&F just right (go check the calculator story, or recounting of his preparation for keynotes — you can also see how things broke down as soon as they started bringing in third parties, or after Jobs’ death).
Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up.
[0] I expect detrimentally so at times, Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised — at least under Jobs; go check the history of the iPhone for flagrant examples of that where you’d just see colleagues disappear into unknown voids and HIG went full SCP
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Apple used Nvidia chips for years after the 8600M GT. I think their last use of Nvidia chips was the Kepler generation. Which meant that because a MBP came with a Nvidia 650 or something, you could put a Titan in a Mac Pro which was nice!
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It was a lot of he-says she-says with those chips, but as far as I understood it, it mostly came down to Apple using cheap solder. When the Nvidia chips inevitably started to heat up, it caused the solder to come loose which caused the notorious graphics issues. IIRC, there were even reports of people reviving dead or malfunctioning logic boards by doing ye olde "oven trick", which pretty much confirmed that it was an assembly issue, not a manufacturing one.
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Because if he didn't make the deadline, Steve Jobs would get on the horn with any company he applied to and tell them how badly he fucked up, just to spite him.
"You'll never work in this town again" was a real threat in Hollywood if you pissed off (or refused to put out for) the wrong producer. Powerful people wield power indiscriminately to discharge fleeting grudges.
Between that and his ":)" response to the Google recruiter getting fired because they were unaware of the collusion going on between Apple and Google, he will go down as one of the worst, most abusive tech barons in history.
I think he has already gone down in tech history, and it wasn't as "one of the worst, most abusive tech barons".
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> how badly he fucked up
I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?
And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs?
That'd depend on exactly how bad the screwup was but Steve Jobs was notoriously unforgiving if you made a promise and didn't have a good reason for missing it. That might not have been the case here, since they clearly slipped it due to the Intel transition, but if he was in an unforgiving mood or someone else was looking for a scapegoat, remember this example of how closed the community was at the time:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/04/23...
I think the "Steve Jobs" part is just a random assumption from the parent.
More likely he'd have problem being hired at that level simply because he would be associated with a major failed project, Jobs or no Jobs.
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Not every company would, but the CEOs of the major tech companies that a guy with Terry's impact would have probably liked to work at? I'd buy it. Those guys talked all the time, and I doubt they were gonna let one hire get in the way of a major corporate relationship.
> I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?
If I understand correctly,in this particular situation, fucking up would cost Apple at least $200M--so it had to be a total success for him.
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> I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?
If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up. The CEO was counting on you to take a letter to Garcia, and though you 'gave it a good go' Garcia never got his letter, so why would that CEO consider you someone to count on again?
> And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs?
Because he built this industry.
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It's never been a thing in Silicon Valley. This sounds like someone misunderstanding or inflating the stakes.
I worked at Apple when Steve Jobs was still there and it definitely sounds odd.
I had never heard of project-based profit sharing or being fired and named/shamed for non-delivery. I had personally seen coding mistakes cost tens of millions in lost revenue and the developers were still there and many got promoted.
Surely if he was promised $10 million and Apple didn't pay up there would be grounds for a lawsuit. Especially since that stock would be worth so much more today.