[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Job...
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Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in
1997?
The famous story is that Apple was nosediving under the current CEO
and that Apple's acquisition of NeXT (and bringing Steve Jobs back
as CEO) revitalised the company. I read about drastic staff /
product cuts and re-focusing on the company, however that was
always told from the outside. Was someone working at Apple during
that transition and has any interesting stories / can share their
experience?
Author : tb8424
Score : 199 points
Date : 2022-10-21 14:20 UTC (8 hours ago)
| hsm3 wrote:
| I feel like the Isaacson bio is fairly accurate factually on that
| time, from what I knew as a senior SW Eng at NeXT/Apple. It was a
| huge course change, eventually pushed through the entire software
| org by Steve, the NeXT leadership and a set of Apple folks that
| chose to embrace the new direction.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I'm really thankful I had a chance to work at 1 Infinite Loop
| during that time. I worked with other Developer Relations folks
| in IL3, with near-daily trips to IL2 to either meet with folks on
| the QuickTime team or just hang out. Occasionally I'd get early
| glimpses at things like QTi and HyperCard 3.
|
| I vividly recall the day Steve introduced the iMac in the
| Infinite Loop quad. If I had to pick a day that telegraphed
| Apple's future fortunes, it would be that day. Rhapsody's
| potential was compelling, but as Macintosh OS it was still pretty
| Crapsody at the time. The iMac was a Real Thing -- as friendly as
| computers get, that only Apple could've created and sold.
| scroot wrote:
| The world needs to know more about HyperCard 3. I wish some
| kind person would throw a development version up online for us
| plebs to explore. It would be great to know and see what it was
| going to be all about!
| apengwin wrote:
| Imagine the UK when Boris triumphantly returns as PM
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I was a T.Rbbt back in the SF Bay Area, over a decade ago, in the
| early wild west days of the "gig economy;" one of my first gigs
| was to "throw away a bunch of old electronics." As a diehard
| Apple fanboy, since 1991, I was excited for even the opportunity
| to throw away old history (knowing nothing more than "old
| electronics").
|
| Upon showing up to a nice top-floor suite near Delores Park, I
| knew immediately that these would be nicer "old electronics" --
| turns out it was a BUNCH of PROTOTYPE Apple Computers (no "LISA,"
| but plenty of history and unique items, given their hacked-
| together nature); 'WOZ literally had his hands on at least ONE of
| these,' I remember thinking; 'CERTAINLY!'
|
| I mistakenly told the disposer of this "old electronics" _just
| how cool all this HISTORY was_ , to which he immediately realized
| that I wasn't going to be throwing any of it away. Needless to
| say, he accompanied me to the junkyard as we both watched Apple
| History get run over by a skidsteer.
|
| Just tragic. PS T.R. sucks - gfkt Leah!
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| _T.Rbbt_
|
| Task Rabbit?
| diskzero wrote:
| I have a fairly interesting perspective; I was there when Steve
| first returned, left after a few months and then returned in less
| than eighteen months.
|
| I initially joined as a refugee from Be, as it became obvious the
| PowerPC would no longer be a viable platform for BeOS. I joing
| the Final Cut Pro team, which has just joined Apple as part of an
| aquisition of the "Key Grip" video editor from Macromedia.
|
| The FCP team located in IL1 on the third floor I believe. Most of
| the floor was occupied by the Apple Advance Technology Group. ATG
| had a really cool space with private offices ringing the outside
| walls and interior areas with lots of whiteboards and space for
| doing whatever ATG did. Larry Tesler had a double wide private
| office and there was a lot of commotion.
|
| The "Blue" team working in MacOs 9 was below us. It was very busy
| down there as OS 9 was the engine that still powered the company.
| Those first cool iMacs and MacBooks weren't running OSX! I don't
| think we even had a "Beaker" build yet.
|
| Steve simply didn't like ATG and over the next few months the
| spaces rapidly cleared out. We were once stuck in a corner and
| soon we had a lot of room to set up a couple of large commercial
| quality edit suite with Avid Media Composers and other high end
| gear to help make FCP a commercial success.
|
| I wasn't part of any sort of political competition; we just kept
| making FCP, but watching the exodus of ATG people and seeing how
| stressed out Steve Glass was running the Blue team was getting me
| down.
|
| The NeXT people were setting up their world in IL2, with Avie
| taking an office on the 4th floor and an unofficial sort of NeXT
| hardware museum springing up outside of the area where the pool
| table was. It was a cool place to visit; lots of neat NeXT
| hardware and some SparcStations as well. A Symbolics workstation
| also showed up in a conference room on the second floor, although
| it may have been at Apple earlier. If you looked in various
| hardware labs, there was always intersting hardware to be found;
| DEC, Infographics, VAX and more.
|
| It wasn't at all obvious to me that Apple was going to figure
| things out; Steve was being disruptive (in a good way?), but Gil,
| Ellen, Steve Glass and others were still around and all the NeXT
| people were doing their thing. I was convinced by some former Be
| people to go join Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and some
| other Apple engineering heroes of mine (Darin Adler, John
| Sullivan) at Eazel.
|
| Eazel folded within eighteen months and I was back at Apple as
| part of a group hire Andy helped setup with Steve. Anyone who
| wanted to work at Apple just showed up the next Monday and got to
| work! Many of those who didn't come to Apple ended up going to
| Danger Research, Google and other startups. A lot eventually
| ended up at Apple anyway.
|
| The Apple I came back to was different in that Steve was
| officialy CEO, but the divisions between groups were still there.
| It would take several more years before I felt that things felt
| healthy. As soon as I did think things felt good, Steve become
| ill, Scott Forstall erected a secure fortress on my floor on IL2
| and the political shenanigans began. My initial stock grant
| priced at $14 a share had grown, gone through a couple of splits
| and the company was doing billions of dollars a quarter. A far
| cry from the bleak days of 1997!
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| I had a PowerPC Mac in ~1998 and I put BeOS R4.5 on it. What a
| HUGE change from MacOS ... I couldn't believe a computer could
| actually act and respond like that! I jumped ship to Intel
| hardware to stick with BeOS.
|
| I'm very curious what you worked on at Be - the development
| team wasn't that large, was it?
| diskzero wrote:
| The development team was very small. I worked on audio mixing
| code, capturing video encoded from Bt848 cards, audio and
| video codecs, anything related to audio and video timing.
| Several great programmers were there and continue to do
| amazing things at other companies big and small. I ended up
| working with many of them at Apple. At some point, it seems
| many had to choose between Google or Apple.
| scroot wrote:
| ATG sounds like it was an incredibly creative little group, and
| it's a shame such a thing was more or less disbanded (along
| with letting HyperCard die, etc). SK8 in particular looks like
| it was very interesting. Someone needs to write a full
| retrospective of that group!
| diskzero wrote:
| I agree. Larry Tesler is no longer around to write such a
| retrospective. I am not sure who else might be able to do it.
| One of my favorite ATG project was the Dylan[1] programming
| language.
|
| Larry was working a lot on what would become Stagecast.[2]
|
| There was so much going on, but the way Steve saw it, nothing
| was shipping. I think he made the right choice shutting it
| all down. As I said above, it wasn't at all clear that Apple
| would end up turing into the Apple we have today.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dylan_(programming_language)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagecast_Creator
| m0llusk wrote:
| Yes. One of the more memorable things that happened went on when
| I moved my office to Infinite Loop. Steve Jobs was curious about
| everything, so he would walk the halls, knock on doors, introduce
| himself "Hi. I'm Steve Jobs." And then ask about what people were
| working on. I was jealous as I would have loved to point out the
| biggest challenges we were dealing with in the hope of getting
| more resources. To my astonishment essentialy every Apple
| employee in this position objected "You can't ask me that!" And
| then quit the next day. It was genuinely bizarre to witness this.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| Steve Jobs comes by and every employee tells him that he can't
| ask what they're working on and they all quit the next day?
| That sounds a little hyperbolic.
| m0llusk wrote:
| Admittedly I only saw Steve doing this like two or three
| times. The group that was next to mine was not large and was
| gone in about a week. Heard similar stories from others who
| observed Steve Jobs randomly talking to people who then left
| and also heard some of these people talking about these
| events. Morale was very low in many groups at that time and a
| lot of people working there had quite remarkable egos.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Doesn't it seem more likely that the CEO (or proto-CEO, you
| didn't clarify what time period this was) fired these
| people after they were uncooperative in these informal
| talks?
| oidar wrote:
| So the people that were being interviewed by Jobs quit after he
| asked what they were doing? Or were there others hired to walk
| around and gather information that quit after interviewing
| employees? In either case, why were they quitting?
| yoda_sl wrote:
| I came on board with the NeXT acquisition (or rather reverse
| acquisition as ex-NeXT often refer to)...
|
| So I do recall seeing a few times after we relocated to Infinite
| Loop, that Steve at first was just working as a consultant, and
| not as an employee. Thus at the time he didn't have a badge to
| enter in IL1 (Infinite Loop 1: hold Apple HQ); many times when he
| was coming in the morning, he had to wait at the glass door to
| enter the campus, until some kind soul was letting him in
| (despite the policy only badged employees could enter or visitors
| with a printed tag). I saw it happening more than once while
| grabbing a coffee at the coffee booth in the IL1 building.
|
| Later on, after he came back officially as CEO (or iCEO), I
| remember clearly during a lunch with co-workers (at Cafe Mac,
| seating outside) watching at a distance Steve & Jony walking
| inside the campus, then seating at a bench and Jony opening some
| carrying case/luggage, and let Steve pull the content out of it,
| so he could look at it in the sun: it looked like a piece of
| plastic... at the time, we had no clue what it was, except the
| color was orange. Many months later, Steve introduced the first
| iBook (which was the first Mac with Wifi): when I saw the orange
| color of the iBook I made the connection with what we saw back
| that day; Jony was most likely showing to Steve the first shell
| of the future iBook.
|
| Steve otherwise at work was truly laser focus at a time on
| different projects: I was working on backend web services
| development with public facing web site, so usually every 2 weeks
| our boss was presenting to Steve our progress (every week or even
| more while closer to ship): our boss usually was always coming
| back with clear feedback on what was good or terrible, which we
| obviously had to improve for the next presentation... stressful
| yes, but truly enjoyable. More than once, Steve did cut some
| projects that were close to finish and you just had to go along
| since no one had a say in it, except Steve.
|
| Obviously I have a few more stories of that sort, since I spent
| close to 20 years at Apple (/NeXT).
|
| It was quite something to get the hard work you did for months
| presented on stage by Steve... I still miss the excitement from
| it even if it is more than 15 years ago.
|
| Edit: fixing a few typos
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| The one that sticks with me was the demo to the engineering
| team of "Aqua". A small team had been developing the new
| "lickable" user interface that was called Aqua. Before the
| release of OS X with the new UI, Jobs assembled the engineers
| that worked on the OS that would be tasked with carrying the UI
| throughout with their frameworks/apps.
|
| In typical Steve fashion he had a slide-preso for the reveal.
| He began with a kind of simplified history of the computer
| user-interface: starting with the command-line. His next slide
| showed the graphical user interface popularized, surprise, by
| his earlier Apple Macintosh.
|
| The NeXt slide (ha ha) showed, perhaps unsurprisingly, the NeXT
| user interface. A "boo" from one of the engineers in the crowd.
|
| Jobs froze and the showman tone of his voice was gone, "Who
| said that? Who booed?" He was clearly enraged. He stared into
| the audience, scanning the faces of the engineers. I think he
| followed that with some expletives and a claim that the NeXT UI
| was an amazing step in UI design but I was still kind of in
| shock myself.
| diskzero wrote:
| When I came back to Apple in 2000, I remember walking to
| visit a friend from Eazel (John Harper) who was working on
| CoreAnimation and seeing your office. I was totally star
| struck, way more than having to deal with Steve every week. I
| mean, you are the guy who wrote Glider!
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I heard about that meeting from someone who was also there --
| supposedly Steve also said in response to the booing
| something to the effect that "what the hell has Apple done in
| the last ten years?"
| cutenewt wrote:
| Sounds like a Jobsian version of Musk's "what have you done
| this week"
| sgt wrote:
| I think there is a lot of interest in your stories, if you
| would be willing to write them down and post them back to HN.
| mavsman wrote:
| > usually every 2 weeks our boss was presenting to Steve our
| progress (every week or even more while closer to ship): our
| boss usually was always coming back with clear feedback on what
| was good or terrible
|
| I worked at Amazon for a bit and remember this kind of thing in
| preparation for a release/conference (Re:Invent). I don't miss
| it at all.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| > More than once, Steve did cut some projects that were close
| to finish and you just had to go along since no one had a say
| in it, except Steve.
|
| You know, this is actually a rather good thing. So many
| companies are just bloated with projects that they want to see
| through just to see them through and they make zero sense in
| the grand scheme of the company. If you have a single person
| responsible for everything that can just make the hard choices
| and be the bad guy it is much more healthy for the
| whole....assuming that person cuts the right things and makes
| the right choices.
| nr2x wrote:
| This is why Sundar is a nice guy but shit CEO.
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| I was there in 1999 as OS X was being developed, and the beta was
| just about to be released. I was building another product that
| was released at MacWorld in 2000 (and still exists today)!
|
| I have a lot of funny stories. Steve didn't like our data center
| rack mounts being silver, we had to pull them all out and spray
| paint them black, because silver just wasn't acceptable, in a
| datacenter. That was my first day at work. And no, I'm not a
| datacenter employee, everyone on the team did everything, there
| were just very few of us.
|
| We had to work from about 10am to about 3 or 4 am every day to
| make the deadline, we sometimes got Sundays off. There was a lot
| of rage and anger at many management levels.
|
| Steve would get a question about a two button mouse at every
| company meeting, he was super pissed every time about the
| question. We enjoyed trolling him.
|
| Steve's attention to detail was unbelievable. I once witnessed
| him make a team work overnight just to move an icon 10 pixels to
| the left.
|
| The guy had a vision that seems unparalleled. He was able to
| figure out the concept of "cloud" well before its time, and make
| a shift towards that.
|
| Of course, he was an supernatural presenter. I witnessed him
| present through some really messed up errors in live demos and no
| one I asked in the audience afterwards even noticed the errors.
|
| It was an insane work environment, never seen anything like it.
| apeace wrote:
| > I was building another product that was released at MacWorld
| in 2000 (and still exists today)!
|
| Wow! What was the product?
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| iTools, or as it's known today, iCloud. It was supposed to be
| a dial-up service, if you can wrap your head around that. But
| halfway through the project he realized that doesn't make
| sense and pivoted. A timely, brilliant move.
| codexjourneys wrote:
| > Steve didn't like our data center rack mounts being silver,
| we had to pull them all out and spray paint them black, because
| silver just wasn't acceptable, in a datacenter.
|
| This strikes me as funny because of all the canonically silver
| iMacs and Macbooks that came afterward. Is black even an
| option?
| diskzero wrote:
| Steve loved black, until he loved glossy pastels, then rich
| Corinthian leather interfaces and then brushed aluminum. This
| was one of the most very frustrating things about designing
| user interfaces for him; once you figured out his internal
| design language, he would radically change it overnight!
| MaintenanceMode wrote:
| Somewhere in Steve logic somethings are black, somethings are
| silver, that's just the way it is.
| spinlock wrote:
| I think this is a huge part of his success. That clarity
| makes buying simpler for customers. You get the color that
| your device is supposed to be. Period.
| purpleblue wrote:
| I didn't work there, but for all you old-timers, I attended the
| Brass Ring job fair at the Santa Clara convention center, early
| 1997 before Jobs rejoined.
|
| I distinctly remember the Apple recruitment booth was empty, vs
| all of the high-activity booths around them. I remember it
| vividly because it was sad seeing how far they had fallen, people
| weren't interested in even talking to the recruiter.
|
| Imagine getting a job at Apple in 1997 and never selling a share.
| I know some people that have been at Apple for 12+ years and are
| planning on retiring next year, they are multi-multi-millionaires
| just from regular stock grants.
| reggaemahn wrote:
| I wasn't working there but when Jobs came back, Gil Amelio was at
| the helm, not Sculley. Sculley was long gone by that time. Also
| worth noting is that Amelio had also cancelled a bunch of
| projects to cut down costs but Jobs' was more drastic.
| tb8424 wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying, changed the original post
| smm11 wrote:
| I was not there, but two things from that summer have stuck with
| me.
|
| First, Steve killed Cyberdog. You'd have thought the world was
| coming to an end. Second, he came in with his Openstep Thinkpad,
| and that was it for months. I thought they'd turn that OS around,
| leverage MAE, and have Openstep 5 running by mid-98.
| hulitu wrote:
| simonh wrote:
| If you've not seen it, this video of Job' informal talk with WWDC
| attendees in 1997 is a classic. At the time he was only
| consulting at Apple after the Next acquisition and Gil Amelio was
| still at the helm. He talks quite a bit about how the company is
| re-engineering itself and refocusing on a narrower set of
| products, and deals constructively with some pretty hardball
| questions from the audience.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyd0tP0SK6o&t=1086s
| tejohnso wrote:
| Anybody familiar with the Improv / Quantrix spreadsheets that
| he claims is 5X - 10X more productive than Excel? What's so
| special about them? Has that functionality found its way into
| Excel at this point?
| AlanYx wrote:
| Quantrix is still popular today for large financial
| modelling. The main advantage of Improv/Quantrix was that
| everything is named, and formulas are expressed as logical
| formulas, not references to spreadsheet columns, which makes
| the spreadsheets themselves more interpretable and readily
| auditable. If you're disciplined with named ranges, you can
| do a similar thing in Excel these days, but it doesn't really
| feel as natural as it did in Improv, and on a multi-person
| team with varying Excel skill levels it can be a challenge to
| maintain that discipline.
| antidnan wrote:
| https://instadeq.com/blog/posts/no-code-history-lotus-
| improv...
| gcanyon wrote:
| "Within a few months, Pito had come up with the fundamental
| idea at the core of Improv: that the raw data in a
| spreadsheet, the way that the user views the data, and the
| formulas used to perform calculations can all be separated
| from each other."
|
| This is exactly what FileMaker Pro does.
|
| You have the underlying data structure that is independent
| of calculations and presentation. It is sparse by
| definition, and can store far more data than any
| spreadsheet in existence. It can include defined
| relationships between the different kinds of data.
|
| You have the calculations, that are stored with the data
| structure, but are functionally independent from it. They
| can transform, combine, and summarize the data in just
| about any way you like. They can store their results,
| increasing speed at the cost of storage, or they can be on
| demand.
|
| You have the presentation, which depends on the data but is
| defined separately -- you can have as many different
| presentation forms as you like, hundreds or even thousands.
|
| And you have actual code that can run on the data and
| validate it, modify it, organize it etc.
|
| I think only momentum and lack of vision has prevented FM
| from eating spreadsheets' lunch.
| spfzero wrote:
| IIRC Improv natively had what later became known as "pivot
| tables" in Excel. Improv didn't call it anything special, it
| was just an inherent part of using it.
|
| Long time ago and my memory could be iffy.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's interesting because he clearly has some vision, but he is
| also a master salesman and manipulator. He pretty adeptly
| dodges the question about "yea, this is good for Apple but what
| about developers", because he launches into a sales pitch that
| ropes you in but leads you to the time that we have today,
| where Apple uses its walled garden approach to bend and mold
| developers to their will. It's likely to me that, even at this
| time, Jobs probably had the whole 30% cream off the top model
| in his head. It also leads to where macOS and iOS-only
| developers are worn down by the siphoning and churn and
| sidelined by the prominence of cross-platform web and Electron
| apps.
|
| https://youtu.be/qyd0tP0SK6o?t=1260
|
| And god, Jobs just drips with a sort of icky confidence and
| condescension, and there's certainly a lot of cult of
| personality present in the audience members.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I read that one differently. His presentation style was not
| as well developed as later, but setting that aside I doubt he
| had a grand plan. What he appeared to have is a point of view
| that without developers Apple was going to die no matter what
| else they did, and without more compelling hardware it also
| wouldn't matter what else they did. He knew that Apple's
| leverage with the big vendors (Adobe, MS) was limited, so my
| guess is he was at the point of this talk fishing around
| trying to figure out how to hustle the company out of that
| situation. He knew that the current product line was very
| poor and not making them money. The $150M MS deal was
| masterful. The product simplification was necessary. But you
| can see the fishing around, they talked about licensing,
| supporting Intel, enterprise app dev and server
| infrastructure, all kinds of random stuff. So I don't
| attribute any grand plan, just a really specific view on what
| Apple's problem was and a lot of hustling to try to solve
| them.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Is this the one with the loaded question/insult from an
| audience member about deprecating a framework? Cause I agree
| that Apple has been too developer-hostile on Mac OS for a very
| long time, even though I'm mostly on the user side (but have
| also done a little Mac dev). They unnecessarily break third-
| party software too often, to the point where many devs have
| given up on proper Mac support and just thrown things into an
| Electron app. Maybe the guy in the audience was right.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| No, you can't really draw that line from 1997 to today's
| Apple.
|
| (a) Deprecation of a framework is inaccurate. It was halting
| development on OpenDoc -- which had been sold as the future
| of software development on Macs and other OS's up to that
| point (sort of, you had to be there). There is no modern
| parallel; Apple halting all development on UIKit and removing
| support and tools for it tomorrow would be something like it.
|
| (b) Steve said in the video that the guy in the audience
| might be right. But he also said that Apple had to focus to
| survive.
|
| Apple just barely made it -- remember that while the iMac was
| a design masterpiece, it wasn't that big compared to the rest
| of the industry; Apple was still essentially fighting for its
| life with every hardware release until the iPod.
| [deleted]
| hot_gril wrote:
| Thanks for the insight. As you can maybe tell, this was
| happening soon after I was born. I got into computers at an
| early age, and it was 90s hand-me-down stuff, so I got
| vague exposure to the old state of things.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| That one was so funny. He may have been right, but Apple's
| chess moves speak for themselves. They've built one of the
| most valuable companies in history.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I don't think the deprecation-happy policy helped them. I
| think they succeeded _in spite_ of that because they made
| products that were great on their own. The iMac, iPod, and
| iPhone were so user-friendly, and that 's orthogonal to the
| Mac dev experience.
|
| Also, iPhone OS was actually a great dev platform unlike
| Mac OS, which facilitated a huge app ecosystem at least
| initially (nowadays apps are less of a thing). People have
| their complaints, but it's a paradise compared to creating
| Mac apps because there aren't too many wrong ways to do
| something, the OS handles a lot more for you, and initially
| it was a gold rush because of how readily you could profit
| from making apps. It became standard for everything to have
| an iPhone app.
|
| Macs, on the other hand, always suffered from a lack of
| third-party software. Eventually it began to matter less
| cause of web stuff, but it's still an issue.
| bombcar wrote:
| A culture of deprecation certainly helped; you couldn't
| iMac without it (everyone raged about it not having a
| floppy drive).
|
| And even so they support carbon or cocoa or whatever it
| was for longer than people expected.
| hot_gril wrote:
| They could have an iMac with a floppy drive. At the time,
| CDs were already popular enough, and external floppy
| drives were available. They didn't just drop the thing
| everyone's using.
|
| They were nice sometimes, like with Rosetta (and v2).
| hot_gril wrote:
| A hardware example of when Apple dropped the thing
| everyone's using: The 2016 MacBook Pro forced a cutover
| to USB-C when it was at about 0% adoption, and it was a
| mess.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I think the post-OS-X Mac dev experience varies a good
| deal depending on the type of software you're making.
|
| Are you building a Mac-first app using the most blessed
| toolkit (Cocoa)? You're probably fine, so long as you're
| not looking to toss out a binary and forget about it for
| 5+ years (periodically recompiling with newer SDKs and
| such). Even 20 years down the road getting old FOSS Cocoa
| projects building and running again isn't too hard,
| because even though there are a lot of deprecations the
| deprecated stuff largely still works.
|
| On the other hand if you're building lowest common
| denominator cross platform desktop apps, yeah life might
| be harder. Same for games. That said I think the bulk of
| this pain comes from making assumptions that an
| unavoidably changing world will remain static -- the sort
| of backwards compatibility provided by Microsoft is
| really the exception not the rule, and even there it's
| starting to flake away likely because the teams at MS are
| growing tired of having nearly unbounded backwards
| compatibility act as a ball and chain on OS development.
|
| For running apps that were created without their devs'
| intent of long-term maintenance I think the best thing is
| probably third party compatibility layers like WINE,
| which allow for a pinned API target without locking OS
| vendors into decades old decisions and emergences.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Many devs don't maintain their software the way you
| describe. I don't think they should need to.
|
| If you look at what most software does, it's pretty
| static. Like you're telling the OS to draw windows with
| buttons and run your code in response to inputs. More
| complex with games, but still. The Mac user interface
| doesn't change much over time. The software should be a
| lot safer from OS changes. Microsoft showed that it's
| possible, and they even did it with third-party hardware.
| Same with the web. If Apple wanted compatibility with
| less burden, they could've provided better abstractions
| to devs. "Do things this one sanctioned way, and it won't
| break."
|
| Mac OS was not good for games in the end. It was common
| for a minor OS release to break a good portion of your
| game library, sometimes permanently. If I understand
| correctly, Apple even intentionally let OpenGL go stale
| to push Metal instead. This was all on top of DirectX
| being Windows-only. Relying on WINE for an official
| software release is a kludge, and despite the common
| claim that it comes at no performance cost, somehow
| things tended to be much slower in it (not from the WINE
| translation layer itself but some other consequence of
| semi-incompatibility).
| Aloha wrote:
| Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock were I think some of the most
| underrated management that Apple had, they at least had a
| better clue about where the company needed to go.
|
| Also, I think Michael Spindler did more damage to Apple than
| Scully did.
| purpleblue wrote:
| Amelio was going to drive Apple straight off a cliff with his
| vision of opening up MacOS and basically destroying the
| brand. SGI did that and the company no longer exists now.
|
| Steve Jobs' vision of a walled garden with tight vertical
| integration was what has kept Apple alive all these years and
| why things like the iPhone are so successful. I have both an
| iPhone and an Android, and the integration between iPhone and
| all its products is beyond comparison to Android.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| No, Gil and Ellen were incompetent. If they had understood
| how to separate the wheat from the chaff, a useful version of
| Copland could have been out in 1997. They were not willing to
| say no and fire people. The first thing Steve did when he
| took over? Mass layoff.
|
| It was absolute malpractice to buy NeXT for the OS, which was
| an obsolete, moribund, and expensive version of Unix.
|
| What they ended up getting was adult management, which was
| not what they bought the company for, but was what Apple
| needed.
| ribs wrote:
| How could Apple could have gotten a real OS more quickly?
| The Mac OS of the time had no preemptive multitasking or
| protected memory, so software running on it was doomed to
| be made unstable by all the other software. NextStep, maybe
| it was what you say, but they needed to make a change.
| hsm3 wrote:
| I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a
| legendary failure, just a shocking public show of
| incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from
| NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at
| Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and
| they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of
| vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my
| opinion as a lead eng from that time), and it is clear to me
| that Apple would have continued to spiral into oblivion under
| their lead (like yahoo).
|
| I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT
| deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software
| stack.
| Aloha wrote:
| I dont blame Copland on Amelio, like the product was
| moribund before he got there, he had the sense to realize
| it was moribund, hire someone to verify that and then to
| cancel it and go find something else.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| No, Copland could have shipped. It would have taken some
| actual management skill to get it there. Gil's
| contribution was to buy his way out of the problem.
| bergenty wrote:
| Interesting, ended up watching the entire thing. So much to
| grok in retrospect but if I was in that crowd a lot of it would
| sound like hand wavy, bullshit, intangible business speak to
| me. Really puts into perspective the vision that some people
| have that many of us can't grasp. This talk is a great victory
| for amazing product management.
| hedgehog wrote:
| The best reading on that period I'm aware of is the Jim Carleton
| book "Apple". He's a WSJ reporter who was covering the company at
| the time and the book covers the period ending around when Jobs
| returned but before he stepped in as CEO. The thing I find most
| interesting about that book is it was written without being
| tainted by knowledge of the company's later resurgence. It
| provides a really different take than anything written much
| later. I didn't care for Walter Isaacson's book much, he injects
| too much of his own opinion into things and besides being
| obnoxious I don't think his calibration on the business is very
| good.
| temende wrote:
| Do you have a link to the book? Googling "Jim Carleton apple
| book" doesn't turn up anything (although your comment is
| already now ranked #3 for that search query!)
| akamaka wrote:
| https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Jim-Carlton/dp/0887309658
| kroger wrote:
| Maybe that's the book? (by Jim Carlton):
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Apple-Jim-Carlton/dp/0887309658
| marcusverus wrote:
| Try "Jim Carlton", sans the 'e'.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| I have the Carlton book; beware that it is chock full of
| inaccuracies -- I don't recommend it. Gil Amelio's book ("On
| the Firing Line"?) is better.
|
| Isaacson's book is like the notes one takes before writing the
| actual book -- a starting point, but very incomplete and
| there's no center to it. If you want to read a Jobs biography
| that is good -- but does not pull punches -- "Becoming Steve
| Jobs" is the one to get.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Thanks for recommendations. It's been a while since I've read
| the Carlton book, do you remember offhand any major errors?
| jansan wrote:
| I did not work there, but I had a copy of this iconic June 1997
| issue of Wired Magazine and managed to lose it somehow:
|
| https://www.wired.com/2008/03/bz-apple-ourbad/
| giantrobot wrote:
| The Internet Archive has your back[0].
|
| [0] https://archive.org/details/eu_Wired-1997-06_OCR
| runjake wrote:
| One of the most famous examples was Jony Ive. Jony was recruited
| to Apple in 1992 after Steve left.
|
| Jony did not come from NeXT, as many seem to believe.
| pohl wrote:
| _...as many seem to believe_
|
| I've ever encountered anyone who thinks that.
| runjake wrote:
| Obviously, I have or I would not have mentioned it.
| xrd wrote:
| I was at Claris (subsidiary of Apple at the time, my paychecks
| were from Apple) up in Portland right before then.
|
| Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS (edit,
| not Steve Jobs, but a new company by former Apple employees). We
| had a few devices. I remember the demos where they would click on
| a button to turn off a processor in the GUI while rendering a
| mandelbrot image, and it would slow to a crawl. It was such a
| pretty UI.
|
| The story of the entire team for Claris quitting six months
| before they tried to release Claris 5 was recently documented on
| HN here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32271139
|
| I was an intern the prior summer, and they called me when the
| team quit to join under a co-op at University of Washington and
| try to release the software.
|
| Everyone was operating on a schedule that had bonuses tied to
| them. We hit the middle milestone and they got their bonuses.
|
| Since I was only a co-op and not really a full fledged employee
| (even though I was there with the team until 11 pm on lots of
| Saturday nights) they didn't give me a bonus. They gave me a
| leather satchel with Claris Works written on it.
|
| It was one of the most awkward moments in my life, the rest of
| the team looked mortified that we were at a fancy dinner and they
| were receiving big 5 figure checks and I was getting a recycled
| piece of swag. That probably speaks to the culture at Apple at
| the time.
|
| I didn't really care. As a college student at the time, I thought
| I was as rich as I would ever get making an annualized $32k.
| After my internship where I was basically playing basketball in
| between two hours of coding, I thought the exit interview would
| be "You were the worst intern ever and we hope we never see you
| again." But, they hired me back and it was a fun time.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Claris is STILL a subsidiary of Apple
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| > Everyone in the office was really excited about the BeOS
| (Steve Jobs' new company before he returned to Apple).
|
| Are you sure it wasn't NeXT that you're thinking of?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS#History
| xrd wrote:
| Doh, you are right. BeOS was from different former Apple
| employees. Thanks!
| [deleted]
| w10-1 wrote:
| It's hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally.
|
| Marketing had products for every conceivable niche. Engineering
| was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty
| middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers in new glass-
| walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code against a
| component that had been delivered months earlier only to find
| that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bugs. Everyone
| knew it was a mess, but went along with it, fatalistically
| thinking that any OS-level project would be that messy.
|
| I went across the street to JavaSoft: small teams cranking out
| code that would last forever. Swing was built in a year. Signs on
| the offices not to disturb the programmers. ~1,000 classes in
| 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year. One main engineering manager
| hired a bunch of kids out of college. The JDK tech lead, Mark
| Reinhold, is still at the helm today.
|
| Night and day; it was like going from the Soviet Union to the
| U.S.
|
| When considering a new job, I almost don't care about technology.
| Engineering culture makes all the difference.
| perardi wrote:
| _Marketing had products for every conceivable niche._
|
| Ah, the Performa era.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Performa
|
| Mind you, my first Mac was a Performa, as we sure didn't know
| better.
| hinkley wrote:
| Right before that era I worked on Mosaic for Windows, and the
| Mac developers sat across the stairwell from us. The Mac guys
| had a very love hate relationship with Macs.
|
| On the one hand the lead was infinitely proud of being able to
| have 2 (or was it three?) monitors on his desk, big CRTs on a
| desk designed during the Cold War, by a designer who had
| nightmares about nuclear blasts and wanted someplace safe to
| duck and cover. You could do that with Macs but not quite yet
| with Windows. If memory serves, Linux got that ability before
| Windows did but don't quote me on that.
|
| On the other hand they were writing what is ostensibly a
| concurrent application on an operating system with no protected
| memory and no pre-emptive multitasking, so the whole thing was
| using hand-rolled cooperative multitasking via C longjumps.
| It's no wonder the Windows team had an easier time keeping up
| with Netscape for that golden year. They were from what I
| understand cross compiling, and the Windows team could just do
| Windowsy things with a fifth of the staff.
|
| So my experience of this era, through that lens, through
| learning to hate Macs at the hands of Mathematica, and also
| through rumor mills, was that a lot of Apple's OS people ended
| up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same set of
| tradeoffs. It was very weird watching subsequent Palm models
| start to bump up against the same ceiling that NextStep was
| helping Apple route around.
|
| I told my Mac loving friends to talk to me when Apple had a
| modern OS. So when NextStep merged my ears pricked up. My first
| Mac ended up being an anomaly. Apple briefly produced a 13" Mac
| with a discrete video card, which they haven't since. I had
| been struggling to get Linux drivers for a Fujitsu LightBook,
| which was ridiculously small, but was practically obsolete by
| the time I got everything working. That device is the sole time
| I've contributed to Linux, which was cool but exhausting. So I
| ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships with
| /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back.
|
| You could still see the bones of NextStep in OS X for some
| time.
|
| The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines (which
| I later learned is a lot for one college), in 2 labs when I
| started, eventually in 3 that I knew of, one of which I ended
| up with after hours access to. On many occasions they were the
| only open machines. I had helped too many people who lost their
| papers to faulty disk drives and learned that the best way to
| write a paper was to keep my Unix account empty and mail myself
| copies, so it hardly mattered that I didn't have a floppy for
| the NeXTs. It didn't hurt that they never figured out how to
| meter the NeXT laser printer, so while it wasn't the best or
| fastest printer on campus, it was the only free one. "Your
| printah is out of paypah."
| spfzero wrote:
| > "Your printah is out of paypah."
|
| Oh man that brings back memories!
| ylee wrote:
| >On the other hand they were writing what is ostensibly a
| concurrent application on an operating system with no
| protected memory and no pre-emptive multitasking, so the
| whole thing was using hand-rolled cooperative multitasking
| via C longjumps. It's no wonder the Windows team had an
| easier time keeping up with Netscape for that golden year.
|
| As one among your customer base for both versions, indeed.
| People who never used pre-Unix MacOS have no idea how
| unreliable it was. Windows 95 and 98 weren't great, but there
| was at least some hope of killing an errant application and
| continuing on. System 7? No hope whatsoever. It didn't help
| that Mosaic (and Netscape) wasn't very reliable regardless of
| platform, but the OS's own failings made things that much
| worse.
|
| >a lot of Apple's OS people ended up going to Palm, where
| they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs.
|
| That makes sense, both from an attractive-new-startup view
| (I'm sure many within Apple c. 1997 was pushing for a small,
| inexpensive Apple PDA to respond to Palm), and from a
| familiar-feeling-OS view.
|
| >So I ran to a pretty UI, works out of the box, but ships
| with /bin/bash with open arms and never looked back.
|
| I figured this out on the day in 2003 when I first tried out
| OS X. I've been using Linux since 1995 and had tried every
| available desktop: CDE, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment (The horror
| .. the horror ...), Window Maker/AfterStep, fvwm, and even
| older ones like Motif and twm. I'd used Mac OS 7 and 8 in
| college and hated it (as mentioned above), but OS X was a
| revelation.
|
| I still use Linux as a server, but for a Unixlike desktop
| that actually works and runs a lot of applications, OS X is
| it. Period.
|
| (I wrote the above on Slashdot ten years ago
| <https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2940345&cid=40457103>.
| I see no need for changes.)
|
| >The university ended up with upward of 60 NeXT machines
| (which I later learned is a lot for one college)
|
| I don't think my college ever deployed NeXTs in public
| student labs the way it did deploy HP workstations <https://n
| p.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/ludshu/macinto...>, but
| I did use them in college as well. I still think NeXTStep did
| UI better than MacOS pre- or post-Unix.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > So my experience of this era, through that lens, through
| learning to hate Macs at the hands of Mathematica, and also
| through rumor mills, was that a lot of Apple's OS people
| ended up going to Palm, where they made pretty much the same
| set of tradeoffs.
|
| Not just making the same tradeoffs, but making a lot of the
| same software -- early PalmOS was effectively a handheld
| remake of Mac OS. Same CPU architecture, very similar OS
| design. Some of the A-traps even had similar or identical
| names.
| aasasd wrote:
| > _A lot of Apple 's OS people ended up going to Palm, where
| they made pretty much the same set of tradeoffs. It was very
| weird watching subsequent Palm models start to bump up
| against the same ceiling._
|
| Didn't know about this. This is before 'webOS', right? What
| kind of OS problems are we talking here?
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I think he talks about a very different era
| KerrAvon wrote:
| A long time ago now, but I vaguely recall that the original
| PalmPilot OS chose to replicate the mistakes of the
| original Mac. Data structures exposed all over the place,
| apps had to implement the basics of event handling rather
| than have most of it handled for them.
| aasasd wrote:
| I'm not sure what services PalmOS provided to the apps,
| but to my limited knowledge the apps themselves were non-
| multitasking, and had a standardized database per each
| app instead of the filesystem (i.e. something like proto-
| IndexedDB, but more oriented to documents or blobs). So
| it's kinda difficult to imagine them having the problems
| of quasi-multitasking and more complex MacOS. But perhaps
| things became involved by PalmOS 5.
|
| Though the event handling part sounds like DOS' raw
| approach, versus Win95's abstraction--and I guess could
| plague any kind of a system.
| mradek wrote:
| I wish companies would be run in a way that removes insane
| leveling completely.
|
| In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending how
| you look at it) for ICs. Why?
|
| IME it has led to so much "talk" and bloat, and useless
| meetings led by people trying to prove something who go on and
| on about things that make no sense. No execution, only flattery
| and BS.
|
| IMO, the only levels you need should be Software Engineer,
| Senior Software Engineer, and Software Architect. The
| architects should be rare, and there should be a healthy mix of
| seniors and juniors focused on building and supporting products
| internal and customer facing.
|
| Why do we have several layers of managers? Out of a dozen
| managers only two have been good. They're also the first ones
| fired. It just seems stupid, even if it's purposefully done
| that way (that's even dumber to consider). Have lean teams with
| a lead, and a manager who manages several teams, and a director
| for each product offering who reports to a CTO or something.
| VP, SVP, EVP. Why?
|
| I'm on a team where people waste so much time and yet I see
| those same people get promoted, while I'm told I'm disengaged
| because I don't turn on my camera in bullshit meetings (to plan
| future meetings or ramble). On the other hand, my team
| consistently delivers on time or sooner, while those teams take
| forever.
|
| It's sad, really.
| starik36 wrote:
| > The architects should be rare
|
| This reminded me of my time at iHeartMedia. The company had
| an entire department of non-coding architects. They produced
| so many Visio diagrams that the company had to purchase a
| product that indexed these documents so that they could be
| searched.
|
| The amount of busywork that was produced still takes my
| breath away.
| smugma wrote:
| The IC leveling at Apple is similar to what you have
| described. ICT 3/4/5 roughly maps to what you have. The
| problem with this is that while it's relatively easy to go
| from a 3 to a 4 after a few years, it's a huge jump from 4 to
| 5, and then after that you've basically peaked for life. If
| you just care about building great things, it can work, but
| for many people, feeling like there's growth and not
| stagnation is a problem. It also creates a problem for
| managers having to temper those expectations.
|
| Limiting IC layers doesn't remove all the other politics.
| aljfds3 wrote:
| At Palantir, there are no levels at all, everyone is just a
| simple software engineer. It's their relevant experience that
| gives an engineer leverage on a project.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| > In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending
| how you look at it) for ICs. Why?
|
| Probably same reason hn has points count beyond 500
| fardo wrote:
| > In my current company there are 7 or 8 levels (depending
| how you look at it) for ICs. Why?
|
| Promotions tend to represent some combination of four things
| to most companies:
|
| * more expected impact and workload,
|
| * more status,
|
| * more money, and
|
| * more expected industry experience and seniority
|
| The three level system you propose might work if the company
| using it is in fact actually flatter in its internal
| hierarchy on those traits - but if it's not, from the
| perspectives of the workers, all you've done is intentionally
| obscured the mechanics of the actual hierarchy you're using
| in a way that even further obscures pay disparities, denies
| workers who are motivated by externally visible status a
| route to progression, equates high performing "just below
| architect" and "barely above software engineer" workloads in
| a way likely to incentivize many seniors to coast, and
| surrenders an easy tool for gauging performance by measuring
| how successfully someone is progressing at the company and in
| the field based on their level vs. years of experience.
| [deleted]
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Well, it's much easier to write a brand new language and class
| libraries. Everything is self contained, there are no dumb
| users involved, no undocumented external functions, most of the
| library functions can be ported from existing languages etc.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Your description of 1997 Apple sounds uncomfortably close to
| modern Google. I miss working for startups.
| [deleted]
| hk1337 wrote:
| Maybe even modern Apple, as if Apple just sort of reverted
| after Steve Jobs passed away.
| pvg wrote:
| It's very much apples to goggles - google is gigantic, mature
| company with some problems and one that makes occasional
| missteps. It still makes many things people like, including
| truckfuls of money. 1997 Apple had a very enthusiastic
| userbase, small and dwindling market share, mostly terrible
| products and was teetering on the edge of extinction.
| hot_gril wrote:
| It's more how I feel about the SWE culture, not the
| company's fate. You're right that they're very different
| scenarios, including the fact that it's not 1997 anymore.
| pvg wrote:
| It's just a fundamentally different thing to be working
| for a company that is not a burning shipwreck. It
| influences culture and everything else much more strongly
| than some of the organizational parallels (although I
| think these are pretty weak as well). Imagine what
| working at Google would be like if Google was a _losing_
| search engine company.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Depends how it's losing. Could be like Yahoo! who just
| accepted its fate and sank as gracefully as possible, or
| could be like Apple who fought back.
| chubot wrote:
| That was also echoing through my brain while reading through
| the comment (worked there awhile ago)
|
| It would be crazy if someone just shook up the whole company
| top to bottom, but google is still making money and apple
| wasn't
|
| So I think it will never happen
| mooreds wrote:
| Nothing is forever.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Good point, it's not a good comparison.
|
| > it will never happen
|
| I can see it happening. They have just one cash cow in
| advertising, and it's not terribly secure. TikTok is
| already a serious threat to YouTube. If this became a
| crisis, it wouldn't sink the company, but it'd certainly
| shake it up.
| kypro wrote:
| The "TikTok threat" is so overblown. It's not activity
| competing with any existing social or video platform.
| It's competing for time, but that's about it. No one is
| using TikTok to stay in touch with their Grandmother or
| watching 2 hour Podcasts on it. They invented a new type
| of video entertainment which has a social element, that's
| it - it's neither a YouTube or a social network
| competitor.
|
| I'd argue Snapchat is probably their most direct
| competitor, but Snapchat's DAU is still growing fine,
| because even in Snapchat's case I think you can argue
| they're used differently. Snapchat seems to be used
| primarily to stay in touch with friends where as TikTok
| seems to be used to find/share short-form video content
| with strangers.
| hot_gril wrote:
| It directly competes for some use cases, for time, and
| for ads. One person's total time spent watching videos
| doesn't grow just because there's a new platform on the
| block. Kids even use TikTok as an alternative to Google
| searches for knowledge. I'm not saying TikTok alone can
| wreck Google, but YouTube at least felt threatened enough
| to make something similar called Shorts.
|
| IDK about the social network side. Google doesn't really
| have one, so it's whatever.
| cma wrote:
| > Kids even use TikTok as an alternative to Google
| searches for knowledge
|
| Is that why Google search heavily forces tons of Youtube
| results to the top now even when it is barely relevant?
| hot_gril wrote:
| Maybe not cause of TikTok directly but because subtitled
| videos in general are an easier format on a phone
| compared to scrolling around search results and dealing
| with 2-5 popups (including the cookies agreement) on
| every site. Web browsing is much easier on a PC, but
| that's the minority use case.
| [deleted]
| hot_gril wrote:
| Hmm, doesn't feel good having such a negative comment rise up
| this much.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Any stories you'd be willing to share from your time at
| JavaSoft?
| switchbak wrote:
| > Swing was built in a year
|
| Checks out. I'm still bitter towards Swing though. But
| impressive what they could put out in a year.
|
| That said, I'm absolutely NOT a fan of the JWZ sleeping bag
| under your desk/get it done whatever the cost mindset that was
| everywhere in the 90's.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Bitter towards Swing?
| simoneau wrote:
| FYI: JWZ has long-since disavowed this attitude, and much
| else.
| tester756 wrote:
| You guys were creating Java?
|
| > ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year.
|
| 9K classes in a year sounds crazy as hell
| layer8 wrote:
| Creating new classes is easy. Keeping the number down while
| still restricting them to a well-defined responsibility each
| is actually hard.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| A typical well-designed class will usually be a few hundred
| lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines.
|
| 9k classes * 100-300 == 900k-2.7m LOC
|
| Not TOO crazy for the most complete standard library ever
| developed, for a language meant from the beginning to take
| over enterprise business computing.
|
| How many LOC are in whatever meme language is hype this year?
| Hell, I feel like I see nearly that many lines of console
| output, when I run NPM to pull in dependencies, lol.
| Communitivity wrote:
| I think much of the maligning Java gets is either due to
| people looking at badly written Java (2k LOC classes,
| factories of factories of factories, 15 arg methods, import
| * everywhere, etc.), or claims in error because they are
| not based on modern Java (claiming bad parallelism a la
| Hensen, citing a lack of modules, noting no functional
| support).
|
| I think Java is a good language if your problem space is ok
| with the GC and some other quirks.
|
| The problem space I've been in has issues with GC, so C++
| or Rust are the main choices there (Go too, but not my
| preference).
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Java has long been crippled beyond the regular GC
| limitations by lack of value types, but that's finally,
| _finally_ going away.
| dboreham wrote:
| Explains why there are no production Java applications...
| programmer_dude wrote:
| FTFY...
|
| Explains why there are no high performance production
| Java applications...
| StevePerkins wrote:
| I read comments like this all the time on HN and Reddit.
| But it's hard for me to separate real professional
| experience at day jobs, from hobbyist wishful thinking in
| personal side projects.
|
| All I know is that I attend a lot of Java conferences and
| meetups, and I'm STILL waiting to encounter a flesh-and-
| blood human in real life whose employer really wavers
| between Java and Rust. That's like choosing between a
| Humvee and a submarine, their optimal problem spaces
| barely overlap.
| Communitivity wrote:
| Where I work some teams are using Java, and some are just
| starting to use Rust. Different problem spaces entirely
| though, as you said. I've seen Java used here for ETL
| work, Modeling & Sim work, web apps, and Android. I've
| seen Rust on two projects, both were real-time or near-
| real-time efforts.
|
| The competition I am starting to see is between C++ and
| Rust, with the few teams looking at Rust loving it. I did
| recently help write a RFP response that noted software
| will be written in C++ and Rust, and the RFP was awarded
| to us.
|
| I am in a different world though, as I am a contractor
| for the DOD. It's more like a lot of small to medium
| sized companies than one big company, which is why some
| groups can use Java and others C++ and others Rust.
|
| I have the same problem of differentiating between
| hobbyists and professional experience, both on HN and
| when interviewing. I had someone tell me they knew Java,
| then found out they had done maybe 5 months of Java work
| and didn't know some of the most basic things.
|
| As for myself, in terms of writing professional software
| for clients, I've done the following, in order of amounts
| worked: Java, C++, Python, Javascript, Erlang, R, Ruby,
| Clojure, C, Scala, and C#. I've done Rust and Elixir in
| personal projects, but not yet for clients. I plan to
| transition to a full-time Rust project in the coming
| years.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _That 's like choosing between a Humvee and a
| submarine, their optimal problem spaces barely overlap._
|
| You'd be surprised. For a lot of stuff Rust is a good
| fit, aside drivers and OSes, Java is too.
|
| There are succesful full text search engines written in
| Java (Lucene, and Elasticsearch on top of it), there are
| succesful event streaming platforms written in Java
| (Kafka), there are succesful distributed data processing
| tools written in Java (Hadoop, Spark), databases
| (Cassandra), and very very high performance trading
| engines (LMAX), very high performing servers (rapidoid,
| smart-servlet), and other such things besides, all
| categories of which have been quite big domains for C/C++
| (and thus something like Rust).
| deltree7 wrote:
| You can make a very good case for any organization to
| replace
|
| Java => Go
|
| C++ => Rust
|
| The Database and System software that was created in
| 2000s very much was based on Java. But modern, performant
| Database and System software is written in Go/C++.
|
| https://landscape.cncf.io/
| BoorishBears wrote:
| Seeing a company (as opposed to a person) choose between
| Java and Rust would paint a very bleak picture for their
| future.
|
| To me it's an indication that programmers are getting to
| run wild past the technical domain, after all trying to
| hire for a Java codebase vs a Rust codebase is enough to
| kill a company depending on the space due to salary
| expectations and availability alone.
| killjoywashere wrote:
| This is the kind of comment I come to HN for. That's a
| powerful insight on work estimation.
| Someone wrote:
| > A typical well-designed class will usually be a few
| hundred lines of code, tops. Often less than 100 lines.
|
| It's not the lines that take time; it's getting the code to
| the "well-designed" state, double so (if not more) for an
| API.
| tester756 wrote:
| That's 36 classes per *day* (900/250 workdays)
|
| I don't know how many people were working on that
|
| but when developing standard library you do not really want
| to rush designs. You want to be very, very careful about
| it.
|
| Here's a book about it from one of the most experienced
| people in API/Standard lib design on the planet
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Framework-Design-Guidelines-
| Conventio...
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I think the first part of a standard lib is pretty
| straightforward to design. String operations, math,
| standard protocols, I/O are petty well understood. It
| gets more tricky once you get to higher levels
| abstraction like UI.
| makapuf wrote:
| Nio and streams API show that even those were not evident
| from the beginning of java.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| I can't speak for grandparent commenter. However, I can
| point out that the standard library for Java 17 has a
| TOTAL of 4,388 classes. TODAY. A quarter-century after
| the timeframe that they're talking about:
|
| https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/docs/api/allcla
| sse...
|
| So if ~10k classes were really written in a year, then I
| can only assume that most of that was the compiler or
| virtual machine runtime (i.e. C++ code) rather than the
| standard library Java code.
|
| Regardless of how anyone feels about "verbosity" or
| "design patterns" in Java application code, the
| underlying JDK is pretty inarguably one of the most solid
| and impressive pieces of tech ever developed. I'm not
| throwing any rocks at that codebase.
| tester756 wrote:
| >the underlying JDK is pretty inarguably one of the most
| solid and impressive pieces of tech ever developed.
|
| I agree, JVM is impressive.
| adastra22 wrote:
| The 90's were a weird time.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Sounds about right for Java..
| origin_path wrote:
| How many classes do you think it should have, ballpark,
| given the same feature set? GUI toolkits alone can produce
| thousands of classes because there are thousands of
| concepts that make sense to model, then add on security,
| collections, _many_ utilities, XML handling, multiple RPC
| systems and so on. It 's hard to over-state how large the
| Java standard library is.
|
| And it's not like other ecosystems do better. The standard
| complaint about JS is that you try to do something basic in
| that ecosystem and discover you have 10,000 modules in
| node_modules. Not so different, really, except that the
| Java stuff comes from a single team with a relatively
| coherent design philosophy.
| Aperocky wrote:
| If it is necessary to have that many classes, then there
| should be so many classes.
|
| but in Java _everything_ is a class, main function? in a
| class. a library of static functions? in a class.
| mypalmike wrote:
| Sure, classes act as namespaces in that case. What pain
| point does it cause?
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Does the AbstractFactoryFactoryInterface and
| AbstractFactoryFactoryImpl count as two different
| classes...?
|
| Kidding aside, I always found Java as a core language (and
| the basic standard library for it) to be mostly fine, but
| the weird architecture astronaut cult that hovered around
| it and infected many of the commonly used libraries to be a
| real problem.
|
| Maybe things are different now for the language, I haven't
| touched it in many years at this point.
| ngc248 wrote:
| Yeah it was never the language or the core libs which
| were the problem, it was mostly some of the frameworks
| which had the FactoryFactory problem
| silisili wrote:
| Sounds like a typical enterprise Java hello world type
| application.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I disagree with what I call Java's OOP obsession, but I
| have to admire the drive behind that ecosystem.
| Aperocky wrote:
| I'm disgusted by it, but admire the ability for the
| system to run in spite of the mess that the pattern
| generate.
| hot_gril wrote:
| At least with lambdas and `var`, they yielded a bit on
| the old ways.
| cgb223 wrote:
| > Marketing had products for every conceivable niche.
| Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered
| over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of engineers
| in new glass-walled offices, producing plans. I wrote test code
| against a component that had been delivered months earlier only
| to find that it was just a stub. Even the debugger had bugs.
| Everyone knew it was a mess, but went along with it,
| fatalistically thinking that any OS-level project would be that
| messy.
|
| This sounds like the company I work for presently
| baby wrote:
| What do you look at in engineering culture?
| jimt1234 wrote:
| I had a friend interview at "Big Nameless Corp" a few years
| ago. He said when he saw that the engineers interviewing him
| all had Windows laptops, he knew immediately it wasn't an
| engineer-friendly culture. I always thought that was funny.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| And how do you even "look" at it from the outside? Ask
| interviewers and they will always tell you that they have
| great culture, teamwork, etc
| Aperocky wrote:
| Easy,
|
| Ask where the documentation is.
|
| Ask how much input engineers have on what they are working
| on.
|
| Ask how many meetings hours they average per day.
| replyifuagree wrote:
| >Ask how much input engineers have on what they are
| working on.
|
| This is the way. Ask this question of people working at a
| legacy company and they won't be able to meet your eyes.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Thank you. These are valuable pointers.
| streblo wrote:
| > Ask where the documentation is.
|
| I've had a reasonably long career and worked at a number
| of companies at this point, and I've never seen this
| 'documentation' that engineers are supposedly producing.
| Aperocky wrote:
| We really have the opposite problem, there are lots of
| documentations but they are not exactly organized or all
| up to date. Much easier to fix than not having any of
| them I would guess.
| baby wrote:
| I feel like having too much doc is not really a problem
| :)
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Welcome to health care. We produce a ton of documents
| that then disappear into a terrible document management
| system to never be found again.
| gorjusborg wrote:
| I think existence of documentation is a poor metric,
| personally.
| sfink wrote:
| I think a better metric is to ask why the documentation
| isn't better. Nobody is ever happy with their
| documentation, whether they have too little or too much.
| But if the engineers think it's because they're being
| pushed too hard and there's no slack time available to
| write docs? Red flag. They have explicitly considered the
| question and realized that the effort to write the docs,
| compounded by the need to keep them up to date and/or the
| cost of allowing them to be out of date, is not worth it
| in their particular situation? Good sign. They feel kind
| of bad and guilty about the state of the docs? Too normal
| to be much of a sign, but still positive.
| streblo wrote:
| These questions are ultimately just asking what the work
| culture is like, they don't really have anything to do
| with documentation. And in that sense they're good
| questions to ask during an interview. As you allude to
| though, I don't think you're going to get good
| information if you just ask surface level questions about
| docs.
| spc476 wrote:
| Ask if I find a bug in the code, what's the process to
| getting it fixed? And about how long is that?
| n4bz0r wrote:
| I would assume there is no one thing to put a finger on. But
| there are some signs one can take a note of. Generally
| speaking, to name a few:
|
| - The ability and willingness of the management to invest
| time and resources into development of proper work processes
| and infrustructure (imagine having to code without version
| control in a team)
|
| - Understanding that things aren't always done the moment
| they appear to be done
|
| - Realization that many things are done to lower the
| cognitive load exclusively ( _why do we have to spend 20
| hours refactoring the thing if it already works?_ )
|
| - Understanding why it is important to lower the cognitive
| load
|
| - And dozens more
|
| These are merely signs, though. One can put 'dnd' signs on
| doors, but what difference does that make if the same people
| who introduce the signs still disturb the people behind the
| doors whenever they feel like it. (no pun intended, couldn't
| word it better)
|
| It comes down to understanding the nuances, and mutual
| respect, I think?
| gorjusborg wrote:
| > It comes down to understanding the nuances, and mutual
| respect, I think?
|
| I think that's a great summary.
|
| Look out for companies that try to manage what they don't
| understand. It can lead to the 'car mechanic phenomenon'. I
| call it that because it's like the feeling some get when
| they get the bill from the car mechanic. They can't fix it
| themselves, so how do they know if someone's pulling one
| over on them?
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Obligatory story how someone tailgated to apple's office long
| after being fired to finish his project around '94 I think:
| https://youtu.be/Dl643JFJWig
| par wrote:
| > Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans
| papered over nasty middle-management infighting. Hundreds of
| engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans.
|
| Sounds a lot like a lot of FAANG companies today.
| duxup wrote:
| Sadly just sounds like ... human organizations often get.
| bhawks wrote:
| The iron law of bureaucracy:
|
| Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any
| bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of
| people:
|
| First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of
| the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers
| in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and
| launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some
| agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet
| Union collective farming administration.
|
| Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization
| itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the
| education system, many professors of education, many
| teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters
| staff, etc.
|
| The Iron Law states that in every case the second group
| will gain and keep control of the organization. It will
| write the rules, and control promotions within the
| organization.
|
| https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
| dmix wrote:
| I've always wondered what the Iron Solution to
| Bureaucracy looks like.
|
| Usually it's smaller companies eating the big companies
| lunch via competition. But that usually takes a very long
| time (or competition is crushed by 'good intentions' aka
| gov policy). I know 'intrapenuership' and spawning
| isolated startups internally, where teams that are walled
| off from the middle managers of the larger company, was
| pushed by Clayton M. Christensen.
|
| But the two areas that seem to be in a death grip with
| this problem are: modern western governments and
| monopolies (usually with market position enforced by said
| governments).
|
| Whenever people push for reducing bureaucracy in gov they
| get accused of only wanting to help the rich or get
| crushed by the benefactors (lobbyists/NIMBYs/'local jobs'
| protection rackets/etc). And monopolies survive even when
| they are an organizational disaster internally, because
| where else can customers go?
| abxytg wrote:
| []
| msoad wrote:
| can you elaborate?
| [deleted]
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Probably like every large organization.
| nr2x wrote:
| Can confirm.
| bredren wrote:
| > When considering a new job, I almost don't care about
| technology. Engineering culture makes all the difference.
|
| This resonated with me. Whether you are recruiting or looking
| culture is incredibly powerful.
| beefman wrote:
| I was at Apple 2006-2010 and worked with many who were there
| during SJ's return. It was drastic in both product and headcount
| cuts.[1] SJ was many things but above all, he was feared.
|
| [1] roughly 1/3 of the company
| https://www.mercurynews.com/2014/08/29/1997-apple-bites-the-...
| hinkley wrote:
| I recall people of that era wondering why the guy who created
| NeXT, a cool idea with zero commercial success, was so arrogant
| as to think he knew how to make a winning product.
|
| What I don't think a lot of people knew at the time was the
| hand Jobs played in the birth of Pixar, which is definitely
| something to be cocky about.
|
| One of my coworkers decided he was going to specialize in
| ObjectiveC, because yes the jobs were rare but they paid a
| premium. This was before Apple started talking to BeOS and NeXT
| about an acquisition, so I thought he was crazy.
|
| When the iPhone came out and mobile apps became a gold rush, I
| spent a lot of time wondering where he was now and whether he
| had a Scrooge McDuck room to swim in his money.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Now we are in LinkedIn era, it is easy to find out what are
| old coworkers doing
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