80 and 90 hour work weeks? Steve Jobs changing software direction at nearly every weekly meeting? Huge secrecy requirements including assigned lunch breaks? I hope they were getting paid a lot.
Well, if they got any stock, it's worth about 50x as much now as it was then (not adjusting for inflation or other factors). So if they were getting $25k in stock for 4 years, that would be worth a few million today.
The sad thing is I'd wager 95-99% of startup employees put in work hoping for some kind of similar payout, only to never find it.
> Well, if they got any stock, it's worth about 50x as much now as it was then (not adjusting for inflation or other factors). So if they were getting $25k in stock for 4 years, that would be worth a few million today.
But that's assuming they held onto all that stock for all this time, which is probably did not happen in the vast majority of cases. My guess is that most sold it for less than 10x within 10 years.
If they were paid for their actual time (i.e. something like overtime) they would have made in excess of $25K and could have invested it wherever. That they happened to work at Apple and it did what it did was a little lucky.
I think Jobs was a special and good leader in many ways, but also a total jerk.
Imagine if Jobs were to have kept notes and been more coherent in his feedback i.e. "I don't like the menus. Don't distract the team now but analyze it, and I want a plan for adjust them in X weeks. Then, push it into the schedule".
There may actually be some benefit in keeping your devs. on a 1 or 2 weeks sprint dogleash but I doubt it. Keeping them on pace but not needlessly diverting them is good.
And Hardware leaders not understanding refactoring is bad. I mean, we never really estimate it well, but still.
I think it shows us how far marketing goes with respect to how we understand a company as much as it's products.
When I worked at Apple in the 1980s and 1990s, their payscale was not especially impressive. Based on what we can learn from public information, that hasn't changed much.
In fact, maybe it's gotten worse. When I worked for Apple in the 1980s and 1990s I lived in Cupertino and walked to the office every day. The last time they tried recruiting me, the offer was not enough for me to do that (Cupertino has gotten more expensive to live in). Maybe if the offer had been enough to do that, I would have bitten; I liked most of my time at Apple, and I loved living in Cupertino and walking to work. Some people I like and respect are reportedly still there.
I don't think big salaries are the draw at Apple. Some of what recruits candidates is moonbeams and fairy dust, just like in the games and movie and music industries. In the cold light of reason, that stuff shouldn't justify a discount on the payscale, but in the real world it apparently does.
TL;DR: (Though you really, really should read it, it's fascinating)
A guy got paid actual money to work on a variant of iPod that works like a James Bond gadget, with the secret stuff hidden under a boring interface option and all.
> You usually get 30 seconds in before Steve would grab the iPod out of my boss’s hand and would just start clicking around to play with it. And of course that’s the worst thing ever because half of the stuff isn’t hooked up yet and Steve’s going to hit something and then it’s going to crash. And then Steve just decides that you’re all a bunch of idiots because your software crashes. So we hated it when that happened.
Smart idea...do a bunch of random input as if you were a confused user and see what happens.
That is indeed a fine test to perform and I’d hope that random clicking was already part of the testing. But I think the issue is that he was testing functionality that wasn’t yet (fully?) implemented and when it inevitably crashed he berated the team. Don’t personally wanna relitigate the “was Jobs a bad boss” thing as I feel like that’s been done to death, but feel free to pull that thread and consider why Jobs might have behaved this way.
I don’t think it’s either of those. Steve cared first and foremost about the user experience and the only way to understand that is to use the device.
As for perfectionism I think that’s overblown. I’ve read or listened to many people who worked with him and yes he was demanding but almost all oft gem had huge respect for him personally and professionally.
The thing is Jobs hired the absolute best engineers he could get, and worked with the best for his whole career. That was just the standard he was used to and expected.
If so, I think he knew the features weren’t finished, but he demanded the product not to crash nevertheless. It’s an interesting thing to expect as a product owner: A stability-first approach to development.
I personally hate the “it’s temporary” excuse we developers often have.
The way I work, is that the entire project is in "Ship" quality, the entire time of development; just not yet complete. Incomplete functionality means a blank screen or a button that doesn't do anything. It never means that something crashes.
My goal is zero crashes, ever; at any time during development. The same with memory leaks or severely anomalous behavior.
It's an old-fashioned way of working that results in basically zero tech debt.
I'm allergic to debt, of any kind.
The nice thing about working this way, is you get incredibly well-formed UX, and you don't have that awful "QA surprise," at the end of the project.
It also goes a lot faster than you might think, as bugs get fixed close to the time of their creation.
Sounds like you have bunch of stuff conflated here. Zero crashes don't mean you get a well-formed UX and that there are no QA surprises. No crashes ever during any time doesn't neither mean that there is zero technical debt, unless we have vastly different understanding of what technical debt even means...
You could write in Elm, which has no runtime exceptions and thus no crashes (barring stack overflows and similar). I have and it didn't seem to result in zero tech debt, incredibly well-formed UX, or a shortage of QA surprises.
I've always found it interesting that the 6502 was little endian given that members of the team that designed it worked on the 6800 before, and that was big-endian. I keep meaning to comb through Chuck Peddle / Bill Mensch interviews to see if they comment on what led them to go little endian on the 6502.
"I used to be a big-endian fan until I finally figured out why the 6502 designers switched to little-endian: it let them start the addition of an index to an address on the LSB before the MSB was read, whereas if you read the MSB first you need to wait for the LSB addition before you know if you need to add a carry to it."
Also re: Mac OS Classic on little-endian... the only attempt I think was the "Star Trek" project, an attempt to build a Mac OS that ran on Intel hardware as a competitor to Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
I was curious too, so I took a quick read through a Newton ROM hex dump. I'm pretty sure it's running in big endian mode.
00000000 ea 00 06 2c ea 68 00 01 ea 6c ff ef ea 68 00 00
00000010 ea 67 ff fc ea 67 ff fb ea 67 ff f9 ea 67 ff f7
Those e nybbles you see at the top of each word are pretty standard arm32, meaning "execute always" in it's ubiquitous conditional execution of instructions. Them being in byte 0 rather than byte 3 of each word means that it's stored in big endian order. The rest of the instruction makes sense too as branch offsets in big endian (since this would be the cpu exception vector table).
There for sure could be some weird other piece of information I'm missing (like maybe the rom image is pre swapped for efficient emulation on big endian systems like Mac/PowerPC?), but barring that it really looks like Newton was a big endian system.
> Apple had a lot of special projects that would go on at various times. There were people who would have their office doors closed, and whenever you would go and see if they wanted to go to lunch, they would actually have black cloth they would put over whatever they were working on. This was not that uncommon.
Come on now, these are consumer products. And the technology already existed. If you want "special", then work for NASA, DoD, or CERN.
I'm reading the transcript and it's interesting. There must be a transcription process done by someone who is not one of the participants of the conversation. Perhaps automated but (roughly) vetted by a human afterwards.
> When the iPod shipped originally, it only worked on _max_ and it used the HFS plus file system, which was Apple’s file system. And then at some point they said most of the world uses Windows. And so we want to be able to sell a Windows version too. And so we added support for _Phat 32_ so that you could hook the iPod up to a Windows.
"You use one less gate, if you do it little NDN rather than big NDN and so Intel and I guess arm chose little NDN because it used slightly less hardware"
Hi, podcast host here. I got the transcript done through rev.com and didn't proof read it because usually they are pretty solid. That was a mistake, I am fixing it right now.
> There was a little team of a couple of guys who got Linux running on early iPhone hardware. There was a team from the Mac group that got a cut down version of the Mac operating system running on the early iPhone hardware. They showed all this stuff to Steve and to the senior vice president of software engineering. And they ended up picking the one that was based on the Mac OS
Kind of cool to daydream of that alternate reality
First of all, the last time I was an Apple employee was in the late 1990s, so I don't have any special knowledge of what it's like now. I'd be at least mildly suprised, though, if the corporate culture has changed a lot.
I worked on one of the experimental Newton OSes before the product was shipped. I worked 100-hour weeks for nearly two years. Nobody ever told me or even hinted to me that I needed to do that. My motivation was purely internal, based on the slim chance that I might succeed in making something that millions of people would want, and that would make their lives better in some ways that I envisioned.
By the way, just because I did it, don't assume I think it's a good idea. I don't.
The most striking thing to me is that apple never kept any written records of its collaborations with the government. Not even emails. It was all hand shakes and whispers. I would have guessed that there is some kind of official proceedings involved in such a thing. I thought it was interesting that he said the DOE engineers seemed really sharp. I wonder how they incentive the best people to work a government job.
To the author, pretty please consider making a download link to the audio file accessible on your episode page. I can search for it in developer tools but it’s a tad annoying. :)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 93.3 ms ] threadThe sad thing is I'd wager 95-99% of startup employees put in work hoping for some kind of similar payout, only to never find it.
But that's assuming they held onto all that stock for all this time, which is probably did not happen in the vast majority of cases. My guess is that most sold it for less than 10x within 10 years.
10years was 50x
2500$ is 1M now
That 25k would be 10M now per year, or $40M in your example
I think Jobs was a special and good leader in many ways, but also a total jerk.
Imagine if Jobs were to have kept notes and been more coherent in his feedback i.e. "I don't like the menus. Don't distract the team now but analyze it, and I want a plan for adjust them in X weeks. Then, push it into the schedule".
There may actually be some benefit in keeping your devs. on a 1 or 2 weeks sprint dogleash but I doubt it. Keeping them on pace but not needlessly diverting them is good.
And Hardware leaders not understanding refactoring is bad. I mean, we never really estimate it well, but still.
I think it shows us how far marketing goes with respect to how we understand a company as much as it's products.
This is what being passionate is all about.
In fact, maybe it's gotten worse. When I worked for Apple in the 1980s and 1990s I lived in Cupertino and walked to the office every day. The last time they tried recruiting me, the offer was not enough for me to do that (Cupertino has gotten more expensive to live in). Maybe if the offer had been enough to do that, I would have bitten; I liked most of my time at Apple, and I loved living in Cupertino and walking to work. Some people I like and respect are reportedly still there.
I don't think big salaries are the draw at Apple. Some of what recruits candidates is moonbeams and fairy dust, just like in the games and movie and music industries. In the cold light of reason, that stuff shouldn't justify a discount on the payscale, but in the real world it apparently does.
A guy got paid actual money to work on a variant of iPod that works like a James Bond gadget, with the secret stuff hidden under a boring interface option and all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24188791 "The Case of the Top Secret iPod"
Smart idea...do a bunch of random input as if you were a confused user and see what happens.
If it was literally a nightly or something though then that's different and definitely an asshole move.
As for perfectionism I think that’s overblown. I’ve read or listened to many people who worked with him and yes he was demanding but almost all oft gem had huge respect for him personally and professionally.
The thing is Jobs hired the absolute best engineers he could get, and worked with the best for his whole career. That was just the standard he was used to and expected.
I personally hate the “it’s temporary” excuse we developers often have.
My goal is zero crashes, ever; at any time during development. The same with memory leaks or severely anomalous behavior.
It's an old-fashioned way of working that results in basically zero tech debt.
I'm allergic to debt, of any kind.
The nice thing about working this way, is you get incredibly well-formed UX, and you don't have that awful "QA surprise," at the end of the project.
It also goes a lot faster than you might think, as bugs get fixed close to the time of their creation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_engineering
FWIW, the LaserWriter 16/600 PS (introduced 1994) uses an Intel 80168 as I/O processor for AppleTalk serving etc.
So Apple did develop for and ship little endian CPUs way before the iPod.
Most PPC chips would actually run both big or little endian and but im not sure weather MAC OS Clasic ever ran anything other then big endian.
EDIT, found it in this forum post on 6502.org http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=6369&start=0
"I used to be a big-endian fan until I finally figured out why the 6502 designers switched to little-endian: it let them start the addition of an index to an address on the LSB before the MSB was read, whereas if you read the MSB first you need to wait for the LSB addition before you know if you need to add a carry to it."
Never went far though.
ARM was always little-endian by default. It has a big-endian mode, too, but now days it's virtually never used.
But did Apple actually use the big endian mode in the Newton, which shipped in 1993? Google hasn't been able to give me a clear answer on this.
There for sure could be some weird other piece of information I'm missing (like maybe the rom image is pre swapped for efficient emulation on big endian systems like Mac/PowerPC?), but barring that it really looks like Newton was a big endian system.
https://github.com/pguyot/DCL/blob/master/Sample_Code/Toolch...
MACHINEFLAGS := -march=armv3 -mbig-endian
Come on now, these are consumer products. And the technology already existed. If you want "special", then work for NASA, DoD, or CERN.
> When the iPod shipped originally, it only worked on _max_ and it used the HFS plus file system, which was Apple’s file system. And then at some point they said most of the world uses Windows. And so we want to be able to sell a Windows version too. And so we added support for _Phat 32_ so that you could hook the iPod up to a Windows.
max = Macs I'd imagine, and Phat 32 is FAT32 :D
"You use one less gate, if you do it little NDN rather than big NDN and so Intel and I guess arm chose little NDN because it used slightly less hardware"
NDN obviously supposed to be 'endian'.
Kind of cool to daydream of that alternate reality
I never understood how you get teams to work that much but one of the factors at least in this case is not wanting to let your team down.
I worked on one of the experimental Newton OSes before the product was shipped. I worked 100-hour weeks for nearly two years. Nobody ever told me or even hinted to me that I needed to do that. My motivation was purely internal, based on the slim chance that I might succeed in making something that millions of people would want, and that would make their lives better in some ways that I envisioned.
By the way, just because I did it, don't assume I think it's a good idea. I don't.
Right now you can do -> "Podcast Player" -> "RSS", but I realize that is non-obvious.
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