Good for you, Owen. A manager/corporate leader who rips his staff in public doesn't deserve to have good people working for him. I've heard a number of stories about Job's "asshole factor".
--Doug On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 11:58 AM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: > Right on! Your experiences resonate completely with mine. > > The Apple story did get ugly. Starting with the Pirate Flag: > http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Pirate_Flag.txt > things slowly degraded between the Lisa and Mac team. > > It culminated in a Lisa-Mac team meeting where Jobs eviscerated the Lisa > project, and brow-beat the Lisa team into quitting or figuring out another > place in the company. It was truly a black experience. Probably for the > best, but it could be done without rage. It became a Russian novel. > > Fortunately for my group of 4, the PrintShop was doing double duty and was > on both teams. And with the laser printer in sight, and other printers > finally being able to come into the architecture (early inkjet, daisy > wheels, and so on), Jobs saw the advantage of a sophisticated, non-pirate > approach in that domain. > > But still, he once really badly ripped one of the PrintShop members in > public. I flew into his office in a rage, and quit. I walked out with > 20,000 shares of stock. > > So it went. It was tough to be at Apple and be at all formal in computer > science. > > All in all, in my three companies, Sun was by far the best. I actually got > paid to fail and even got dinged on a performance appraisal for not taking > enough risks! That lead to going to the SFI Complex Systems Summer School > and taking complexity into SunLabs. Now *that* is risky! But when we were > done, a small group of us were starting in on some of Stephanie Forrest's > ideas for self healing servers .. servers that "groomed" each other. > > Complexity rocks! And that's why I love this list, we're truly unique. > > -- Owen > > > > On Nov 27, 2009, at 12:20 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > >> Here is another picture >> http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&gallery=1 >> Somehow Steve Jobs got all the money, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson >> got all the glory, and you got all the hard work? What a distribution. >> >> My first task in my first job after university was working on printing >> procedures as well. Writing printing functions is not a very thankful task, >> there is always a printer, printer driver or paper size which does not work. >> And the system would work without them, they do not belong to the core of >> the system. >> >> In every software system there is a core and a shell - the core that's the >> part >> which gets, stores, and processes the data. It is the part which is >> encapsulated by the API. The shell consists of additional parts: >> localization and translation, import and export, and printing. The system >> would run without the shell, it would only be a bit less useful. >> >> If you join a software team late, your first work is often at this shell - >> if you would join Google as an engineer today, you would probably work on >> some Javascript problems in the calendar functions. Or printing functions >> for the calendar. I wonder what Software Wizard Andy Hertzfeld is doing at >> Google currently? >> >> -J. >> > >
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