What it's Really Like Working with Steve Jobs

Reading this reminded me of a post by Miguel de Icaza:<p><a href="http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Nov-07.html" rel="nofollow">http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2012/Nov-07.html</a><p>Basically, Miguel argues that Walter Isaacson failed, as did many who tried to describe Steve Jobs recently:<p>&#62;Whenever the story gets close to an interesting historical event, or starts exploring a big unknown of Steve's work, we are condescendingly told that "Steve Activated the Reality Distortion Field".<p>&#62;Every. Single. Time.<p>&#62;Not once did the biographer try to uncover what made people listen to Steve. Not once did he try to understand the world in which Steve operated. The breakthroughs of his work are described with the same passion as a Reuters news feed: an enumeration of his achievements glued with anecdotes to glue the thing together.<p>It's great to see a real account of working with him, minus the “magic” BS.

So what's it actually like working with Steve Jobs?<p>Half joking aside, it would have been nice if the author would have spent more than 1/5th of the article actually talking about what he claimed he was going to give insight on. Instead the author spent most of the article tooting his own horn, which is fine, if that's what the title had indicated to expect.

Between this and the Safari story, I'm struck at just how deep Apple's internal secrecy ethos runs. The idea that there is that level of dedication to keeping a project hidden, not just from outsiders, but from almost the entire rest of the company just blows my mind.<p>It certainly explains how they're able to keep projects secret for as long as they do.

Two things that stood-out:<p>&#62;"Many years later, when NeXT acquired Apple for negative -$400M"<p>and<p>&#62;"We would "throw them into the cauldron", and stir it, and soon nobody remembered exactly whose ideas were which. This let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas."

"I think it was October or November of 1998" .. "The idea of "personal digital media" was born." .. "Before then, very vew people had any personal photos, or music, or home movies on their computers."<p>Wasn't this the same time digital cameras and relevant sized mass storage at affordable prices started to become common place?

Unanswered questions about Steve Jobs:<p>- How did he hire? What traits was he looking for? How did he evaluate technical ability? He seemed able to hire technical people able to stretch through the conventionally accepted boundaries. - How did he manage technical people? He seemed able to identify those boundaries that could be pushed through, and motivate people through them. - How did he envision the plausible technical possibilities outside the conventional wisdom? - How did he envision product possibilities enabled by the combination of those various possibilities?<p>I get the love of design and focus on user experience. It's the ability to find to that at the edge of technical possibility that seems unique to me.

Did I miss something here...?<p>"In 1991, I started work at NeXT, as Product Manager for Interpersonal Computing. It was the internet, before there was much of an internet. We called it Interpersonal Computing, but nobody paid attention until 5 years later when the WWW was born."<p>The web existed in 1991, and Mosaic was launched in 1993. I first saw it in 1993, and it was a pretty big deal at the time. Have I misunderstood his '5 years later' statement?

Not to sound harsh but reading that was a complete waste of time. In the end it came down to this:<p>Q: What is it really like working with Steve Jobs?<p>A: It wasn't magic, it was hard work, thoughtful design, and constant iteration.<p>No way, really? Come on, I'm sure everyone on HN knows that this is true for any product.

Was expecting something about how tyrannical and ruthless an operator he was. Pleasantly surprised by this article (not at his devotion to product), but by the fact that he took his CEO hat off and participated in product as a team member whose ideas could be thrown away like everyone else's.

So Apple basically was Steve Jobs. Time to ditch some stock.

This sounds very similar to what I've heard from people who have actually worked with Jobs, as well as the Steve Jobs described by Ken Segall in Insanely Simple <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insanely-Simple-Obsession-Drives-Success/dp/1591844835" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Insanely-Simple-Obsession-Drives-Succe...</a><p>Segall’s description of Jobs includes an important additional component: obsession with keeping things simple (hence the book title). Segall provides numerous anecdotes of Jobs beating an idea with the “Simple Stick,” as he calls it, and compares it favorably against his relatively frustrating experiences working with other companies like Intel and Dell.

&#62; The idea of "personal digital media" was born. This was Steve's vision, and why he put together the iMac DV, with Firewire and iMovie. We called it the Digital Hub strategy internally, to encourage you to put lots of personal digital media on your home computer.<p>Here is Jobs presenting the Digital Hub concept at Macworld 2001: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9046oXrm7f8</a> (See also <a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/10/71956?currentPage=3" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/commentary/cultofmac/2006/1...</a> ) You can also see how the Digital Hub idea evidently influenced the layout of the Apple Store <a href="http://lowendmac.com/orchard/08th/roots-of-the-apple-store.h.." rel="nofollow">http://lowendmac.com/orchard/08th/roots-of-the-apple-store.h...</a>. : the stands devoted to a particular kind of task, with appropriate gadgets attached to a Mac.

"It sounds kind of self-serving to say this, but he and I were a lot alike in that way, and in that process"<p>It's interesting that everyone seems to come away with this opinion, I wonder what it says about Steve's personality. I remember from reading his biography that many of the people he ultimately had failings out with claimed the exact same thing.

i actually like it, it's basically the same that everyone else did that made a successful product. iterate.<p>there's nothing magical about it. if that's what you look for, you will be disappointed. he wasn't some kind of genius. he just tried out what worked and iterated.<p>it's the same reason why macbooks looked so smooth, while stupid acer was still putting fan ins on the bottom of the laptop until intel gave them ultrabook designs. really? who would do that. clearly none at acer has ever used an acer laptop for actual portable usage.<p>typed from my acer ultraportable with fan in at the bottom

What's news here? We already knew how much Steve Jobs loved to design products.

Change the title OR the text. This was an interesting article about the cool things he did. Steve Jobs was involved in this work but this is NOT what this article is about.

One wonders at what Tim Cook regards his true purpose with the "magic wand of CEO"?

So Jobs loved to micromanage. And it worked at Apple and at NeXT and at Apple, because Jobs knew a thing or two about software. But micromanaging your own cancer care doesn't work so well, does it now?