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Comment by mrshoe | Hacker News Reader

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article.

...the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.

Is Apple a big winner, like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook (the other companies he mentions repeatedly)? Bigger. (Check the last 1, 5 or 10 years on Google finance for the GOOG or MSFT comparison. FB is not public, but...) Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No. They still manage to hire great engineers, though.

So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture?... any company that needs to have good software.

I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all. It's dominated by Steve Jobs and a focus on design and attention to detail. Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft, IMHO. That's very subjective, I realize, but the market seems to agree. At any rate, Apple does produce good software.

So are the hacker culture and the elitist focus really necessary for a technology company to succeed? Is Apple a complete anomaly while Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are typical? What say you, pg?

I realize it's borderline suicidal to post an HN comment that simultaneously calls out pg and lauds Apple, but it's criminal to completely leave the best (imho) technology company out of a discussion about attributes of great technology companies.

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I don't know enough about what it's like inside Apple now to say. Certainly from what I've heard there used to be a hackerly culture in the past. I remember reading how mystified and offended Gil Amelio was by it. But I don't know what things are like now. Is there anyone here who can talk about it? Is the atmos hackerly or corporate?

It's neither. It's ship-great-product-y.

So it's hackerly...

No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment.

One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. They often invent new technologies to enable their products, but that's very different from thinking primarily about technology (a mistake, I would argue, that Google is guilty of frequently).

Taking as an example a project like Google Wave, I would even go as far as to say that a strong hacker culture and an obnoxious elitist culture of hiring only the best programmers can be serious detriments to a technology company. YMMV, but, culture-wise, I'd much rather build (and work for) an Apple than a Google.

Edit in reply to your reply: I thought it was any company that needs to have good software. But even so, surely Apple doesn't pay significantly more than Google (a hacker-centric company) and surely they're in roughly the same domain (iOS/Android, iAd, etc.). I think the real problem is in your next sentence: Otherwise you can't attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. That's a big false dichotomy. Sure, suit-centric technology companies will fail. And hacker-centric technology companies sometimes succeed. I think Apple shows that a culture that is neither suit-centirc nor hacker-centric is the best option of all. If many of your YC companies are trying to build great technology companies, they should take that to heart.

Very good counter point. However, the few people I know that work at apple are good hackers. So maybe Apple is a cross between Design/Hacker culture. To me it seems optimal to balance the the Hacker culture with Designer culture. Kind of like a yin and yang. What are your thoughts PG? Doesn't design matter? Most YC funded web sites look very good. Isn't a design culture important to have?

Steve Jobs has said as much. He often talks about how apple is "the intersection of technology and the liberal arts."

One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company.

No it isn't. I said that you either need that or to pay people a lot or to be in an interesting industry where there are no competitors who have hacker cultures. If Apple doesn't have a hacker culture, then it would probably be an example of the latter.

I'm not sure it's that either. All of the Apple folks I know are pretty fanatical about the mantra of design. They are motivated to be good hackers because they have a strong desire to make beautiful products, rather than the other way around.

Although this may not be as nice as a hacker-centric culture (if you are a hacker), it is still leagues better than an utterly non-hacker centric culture, because the devs are respected for what they do at Apple. This seems to be a critical difference necessary for producing great products.

To respond to your "If", I think Apple clearly does have a hacker culture. Even if we say it's a cult of Steve Jobs, I don't think it's a far cry to say Jobs is a consumer product hacker and a bit of a market hacker.

Two essential qualities of good hackers is an abundant ability to synthesize elegant solutions from disparate details, and a desire to create great things. Jobs may not write code but he clearly has these two qualities. So even if Apple does not have an engineer-centric culture, a design culture driven by Jobs can be directly compatible. You see the differences of course, in the products Google and Apple make, but I think the point is that great hackers can work at Apple because they can get behind Jobs vision.

Contrast this with a "suit-driven" company where decisions are made by looking at statistics and market research, and executives strategize about how to maximize sales based on the superficial product understanding they have. Even worse, places where you actually have people in power who couldn't give a crap about the product as long as they have a $500k+ salary rolling in every year.

"I don't think it's a far cry to say Jobs is a consumer product hacker and a bit of a market hacker."

Exactly. Apple isn't really about winning or losing; they're rewriting the game. Does it really get more "hackerly" than that?

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think we should be careful that "hacker" doesn't lose meaning altogether. This thread is coming close to defining "hacking" as simply "winning". That is, if it works, it's hackerly, if it doesn't, it isn't.

The winning/losing framing is from the essay itself. If anything, this thread is coming closer to defining "hacking" as not simply "writing code." The question is whether or not Apple has a hacker culture, since one could argue that, while Apple's software tends to be great, it's a byproduct of their obsession with beautiful products, rather than their singular focus. I'm suggesting that, if anything, the tendency on Hacker News is to define "hacking" as simply "writing code," whereas, I think it's more about the intent. You could argue, very easily, that Y Combinator is hacking venture capital -- or that Apple is hacking the entire ecosystem around their products.

I agree that "hacking" connotes more than simply "coding".

I'm not going to venture more complete definition here, but I think a lot of the themes around "unix culture" (e.g., small pieces loosely joined), open source (e.g. bazaar vs. cathedral approach to design and architecture), and even agile methodologies (e.g. "the simplest thing that could possibly work") could apply. But there's more to it than that.

From this perspective, I agree that you could easily characterize Y Combinator as "hacking" VC. I just don't see what Apple is doing as hacking.

In fact, in some ways it seems to me that Apple is doing the opposite of hacking (or at least trying to give that impression). Apple seems to want to create an impression of "intelligent design" around their products--they've got it all figured out and are delivering it to you complete, fully-formed and flawless. To my mind "hacking" connotes a more evolutionary approach: let's just try this and iterate.

This isn't a value judgement on either approach, I just have a hard time aligning Apple's behaviour as an organization with my personal understanding of "hackerly".

I don't think what pg means by "hackerly culture" is any different from what you said. It sounds like Apple is doing exactly what pg tells hackers to do: make something people want. "Hackerly culture" to me implies that you have people ("hackers") who are able to explore the space of possibilities and invent new things rather than just building them to some businessman's specification. It's not essential that you vent a bunch of experimental Google Labs projects out onto the world to have a hackerly culture--Apple just aborts more of its false starts in the womb. (Steve Jobs said in an interview once that one of the things Apple does best is deciding which of their projects go forward or not--they had a promising PDA a few years back but stopped development prior to release because they didn't think the PDA market was worthwhile at the time compared to portable music.)

The term "hacker," if this discussion provides the definition, seems more and more nebulous to me. Next we'll start hearing about "rockstars" (god forbid).

Down that road lies that 'hackerly' finally becomes redefined as 'everything we consider a good thing'. It's OK for Apple to not be 'hackerly', while still being able to develop great products and software.

My girlfriend studies industrial engineering and knows quite a bit about innovation and product development. If I combine everything I've heard from her with everything I've heard about Apple, then I conclude that Apple simply excels at leveraging/executing all the well-known 'best practices'. There's nothing 'hackerly' required to do proper innovation and product development, unless you expand 'hackerly' to include 'doing business the way it should be done'

Well, here's what I mean--pg's essay criticized Yahoo for putting product managers in charge of dictating specs to programmers, instead of the programmers being able to think for themselves. I don't get the impression that's the case at Apple.

Agree 100%. Just adding:

The "dictating specs to programmers" practice seems to stem from the silly notion of applying manufacturing processes to software development. In the view of companies with this notion, programmers are little more than unskilled translators - the parallel of line workers in manufacturing jargon.

In my experience, one of the worst abusers of this "square peg/round hole" paradigm are internal IT departments.

I read a study in IEEE Computer sometime in the Summer of 2001 or 2002 that showed how bad the application of Waterfall was for software development. Does anyone know of a study on the application of manufacturing processes to software development?

I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that practice stemmed largely from older days, when "programmers" were people who translated specifications into machine code or assembly, and programs were actually written and specified by higher ups--essentially, the day that programmers were more like human compilers than what programmers do today.

I can't speak to early computing, but starting around when business applications emerged (60's/early 70's?), developers were very involved in gathering requirements, designing, coding, testing, etc. Shortly after I entered the field, circa 1992, I started hearing about software development as an assembly line process. The developer role started being split: BA, architect, coder, sometimes a QA staff, etc. Whenever I've worked on projects with teams split out this way, it becomes a nightmare of communication overhead and miscommunicated requirements.

Apple has many core competencies other than software, including hardware design, marketing, and retail. But the common theme I see between them is that they refuse to do things the way everyone else does, and that they hire the best and brightest to work on their problems. Also, they never accept that something can't be done. To me, this sounds very hackerly, just applied to different domains.

Another core competency that Apple has, one that neither Yahoo or Google seem to be able to figure out, is the ability to create, penetrate and dominate new markets. For all the various products Google creates, it's still essentially an advertising company using search as its publishing media in terms of what makes them money.

Very pitifully few of Google's projects have either created new markets they can dominate, or have penetrated existing markets to the point they can drive billion dollar business units. Gmail, Maps and Android exception to that point, but Google is woefully incompetent in most other respects. And the first two in that list are simply different takes on the search paradigm while Android is a knock-off of the iPhone OS (a really good knock-off, but certainly not a game changing original new idea).

> Gmail, Maps and Android

Those are very big exceptions.

The thing that those 3 have something in common with their search engine and Adwords; they all inspired the same initial reaction: "Someone's finally fixed what's wrong with incumbant market players - this is a game changer". Do you remember what it was like in the days when spammed to death AltaVista, "2MB inbox" Hotmail, static image Multimap, clunky WinMobile and popups/animated gif banners were the kings? (Android is not quite the same, since the iPhone had pointed the way).

I've not seen that many software products which were so obviously disruptive; it's no wonder they became giant-killers. Facebook is the only other one I can think of.

On the other hand, some of their other big products have not be a huge success precisely they haven't been game-changers. Google Docs, for example, might be a good example of a web office suite; but it's hardly a game changer as far as office suites go, because it doesn't do some of the core things that people do daily with office suites. It was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow starter. Whereas Maps for example, you knew at the beiginning that nothing else could touch it

Maybe saying that hackers want to work with other hackers isn't general enough? People who are good at what they do attract others who are also good at what they do. While it's true that working with the best programmers is a draw, so is working with the best artists or graphic designers or physicists. Mutual respect can cross disciplines.

Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology.

I would actually disagree with the last part of that. I think Apple is always thinking about technology, but in the context of design. The Apple difference is not simply that design comes first, technology second, but that design is the gatekeeper for technology.

The iPod is the shining example. Could Apple have made a music player before the mass-production of the 1.8" hard drive? Sure, but it wouldn't have been the wonder to hold in your hand that the iPod was. It was when the technology was ready for the design requirements that they pounced on the opportunity.

Same thing with the iPhone. Apple could have made a smartphone before affordable capacitive multi-touch screens, multi-gigabyte flash drives, and fast-enough-for-desktop-browsing SoCs, but they likely didn't feel they could make a user experience to their standard with anything less.

I agree completely, Apple looks at technology as an enabler of design, not the driver of it.

"They think about products, not technology."

How can you be so sure about their thought process? Maybe it is the other way around, they just turn it around when it comes to presenting it to the public.

Maybe product companies should be run by turtlenecks.

Apple is very design-driven, but to a large extent design is treated as an engineering function. Also, the attitude towards aspects of the product that are not directly user-facing (such as APIs, "engine" type code like WebKit or llvm, kernel internals, etc) is quite hackerly but also very much driven by thinking about ultimate benefits to the user.

I would say their products and technology are very close to the same thing. I think the biggest difference with Apple, which also yields a more useful way to evaluate other companies, is that Apple is not a software company.

Google's products are mostly software running on servers in datacenters. Facebooks products are the same way. Yahoo's products were mostly software.

Apple's products are not mostly software. Apple sells consumer devices run by software. It's an important distinction, and looking at it that way lets you compare with different sorts of companies, like the technology startup Emotiv Systems[1][2]. They're developing consumer devices that read brain activity like an EEG. They likely spend a lot of time developing their SDK and other software, but they also have to focus on the physical product, like Apple does.

Sometimes people forget or don't realize that "hacker culture" has always had a contingent of hardware guys building solar-cars and robots[3] and kites with cameras.

[1] http://www.emotiv.com/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotiv_Systems

[3] http://www.irobot.com

It's a very hackerly culture (in some ways still living off the inheritance of Woz), but you won't ever hear about that for two reasons:

1. Secrecy is part of the culture.

2. Engineers work hard at Apple, and many teams are surprisingly small. There are no 20% projects at Apple because nobody has the time.

2. That is not all that different from Google.

Most Googlers I've talked to call it the 120% project.

It's very corporate where I work (not in Cupertino, so no surprise). But everyone I've come across works very hard, not just engineers. And I couldn't agree more about no-one having any time, many people bring their MacBooks home and continue sending emails late into the evening (GMT) to people in HQ in Cupertino (who are eight hours behind).

EDIT: Going on the Apple jobs listing for Cupertino, there is plenty of openings for engineers.

http://jobs.apple.com/index.ajs?BID=1&method=mExternal.s...

At Apple, Steve Job's 20% project takes up 100% of your time.

I'd argue that Apple is a hardware design company that knows how to contract things correctly (from Mac era to today). Apple has always been focused on a complete packaged form, from Lisa to the iPad. They demand perfection, secrecy, and obsession from their people. Some of their worst years are because the business talent of Steve Jobs was not at the helm.

How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking?

Apple still see's their OS as a package with the hardware. I would think this is part of their attachment to iOS (that and the massive markup and market penetration they've had so far).

The iPod gen 1 through gen 4 was not a hacker platform.

" Apple did not develop the iPod software entirely in-house, instead using PortalPlayer's reference platform based on two ARM cores. The platform had rudimentary software running on a commercial microkernel embedded operating system. PortalPlayer had previously been working on an IBM-branded MP3 player with Bluetooth headphones.[4] Apple contracted another company, Pixo, to help design and implement the user interface under the direct supervision of Steve Jobs.[4] As development progressed, Apple continued to refine the software's look and feel. " -- Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.#1986.E2.80.931993:_R... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod

Edit: I could go on longer, for example, OSX coming from BSD and NextStep etc but I'm done. :)

How long did their core OS not have protected memory, or pre-emptive multitasking?

About until Steve Jobs came back. But the Apple of 1985 to 1997 was not the Apple of today. That Apple is long dead. The Apple of today is basically NeXT, plus the branding and whatever other assets NeXT could salvage from Apple. As far as that company is concerned, their core OS had protected memory and preemptive multitasking since 1989.

Let’s make some other statements about as reasonable as yours (absent further supporting explanation):

The Mughal India of the 16th–19th centuries was not the India of today. That India is long dead. The India of today is basically the British Raj, plus the branding, mix of religions and whatever else the British could salvage.

The Republican party of 1860–1970 was not the Republican party of today. That GOP is long dead. The GOP of today is basically the unholy mix of Kristol & Podhoretz foreign & economic policy with Jerry Falwell & Pat Robertson social policy, plus the branding and whatever panders to fiscal conservative constituents they could salvage from the party’s historic base of support.

The field of economics of 1780–1950 was not the economics of today. That economics is long dead. The economics of today is basically the Friedmanite Chicago school, plus the branding and whatever other assets they could salvage from economics.

Now, in all three of these cases, there’s some little bit of truth behind the wholly oversimplified (to the point of wrongness) analysis. But taking these statements at face value obscures more than it reveals, and reflects a poor understanding of how cultural assimilation works in any institution or society. (And denies evolutionary change, as well; Apple today is not exactly the same as Apple of ca. 2000)

* * *

In short: you’d better have some better analysis to back yourself up here, because as it stands I think your claim is, to the first approximation, false, even if there is a tiny bit of truth to it.

In the second Jobs era, Apple's CEO, central technology, and (in the early years) the bulk of their executive team were directly installed from NeXT. Dogs and smoking were banned from the campus, the icon garden was taken down, Apple's entire industrial design was dropped in favor of new directions, and almost all of their software technology was eventually abandoned along with the Newton and the traditional Old World ROM hardware design.

It's certainly true that Apple is now more NeXT than it is what it was. Perhaps it's something different enough from both of those--but it followed NeXT's evolutionary path more than Apple's.

I agree with you that the emphasis changed dramatically from the Apple of before Jobs’ return, which had a (relatively to now) large basic R&D arm, and a vision for the future alternating between wheel-spinning and incoherence. But I don’t think the Apple of today is especially like NeXT either, probably mostly because the markets it aims for are so completely different. For example, the first iMacs and iBooks don’t seem remotely related to the NeXT design aesthetic, and IMO neither do modern iPhones or PowerBooks. Something like the iPod doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with NeXT, in user base, in problem space, in software style, in product vision, etc.

You’re right that early versions of OS X looked much more like NeXTStep than they did like previous versions of Mac OS (being built on NeXT’s codebase), and still today is in many small details a regression. But as OS X has matured, it has felt ever more like "classic" Mac OS, not less. I think if NeXT had been independently successful and turned NeXTStep into a consumer OS, it would have evolved in a dramatically different direction (though of course that’s counterfactual).

I don’t really know what it was or is like to work inside these companies, but I doubt that the feel of NeXT could be quite like the feel of the modern Apple, if only because modern Apple is so much bigger.

A lot of good thoughts, but...

But as OS X has matured, it has felt ever more like "classic" Mac OS, not less.

Past the transition from public beta to release and maybe a couple small points after that, I don't see how this is true at all, and I've extensively used both. What similarities do you notice?

Mostly in the little details, and the overall emotional feeling. Examples:

(It’s not a change since OS X 10.0, but....) Right from the beginning having the menu bar at the top was better than the NeXT per-window menu bars (there were legal reasons for the NeXTStep behavior, sure, but a menu at the top feels so Mac-ish to me, that that difference alone is huge). Much of the conventions for menu organization/structure and so on (and definitely conventions for keyboard shortcuts, for the overall keyboard layout, &c. &c.) is much more Mac-alike than NeXT-alike.

Hardware finally caught up with the software (and the software was optimized better for performance), so that the interface is as “snappy” as OS 9 used to be on then-current hardware. (Early OS X felt terribly sluggish by comparison.)

The mouse acceleration curve reverted to something much more like the classic Mac version (in 10.3 maybe?).

The menus at some point (10.1? 10.2?) returned to the proper behavior of allowing diagonal selection. The alternative is a fundamentally broken interface, and every time I use an operating system that does it wrong I want to stab the guy responsible.

Finally in 10.4, the corners of the screen properly activated the Apple/Spotlight menus (taking advantage of “Fitt’s Law”).

Drag & drop support improved and was properly widely adopted.

AppleScript support by first-party apps got much better.

Dialog boxes got better writing, including somewhat more consistent use of verb buttons.

Did ⌘. (command-period) work everywhere (anywhere?) for cancel in dialogs in early versions of OS X? I don’t remember.

OS X print dialogs still aren’t my favorite, but they’ve improved relative to 10.0 print dialogs, adopting some of the feel of earlier dialogs.

Save dialogs improved a lot since 10.0. I don’t think ⌘D properly went to the desktop in early OS X versions, but I’m not positive about that.

Places where (in NeXT tradition) early OS X used “inspectors”, for instance in the Get Info window, later OS X reverted to the better "classic" Mac OS behavior. (This happened in various first-party apps too, but I’m not thinking of examples off-hand; it’s been a while).

NeXT-ish UI elements like drawers have been gradually phased out, in favor of UI elements which seem more spiritually Mac-ish. Oh, and remember early OS X Cocoa tab view widgets? Wow, were those dumb. Little wonder they’re pretty much gone.

I think support for Mac file aliases was sorta crappy in early OS X versions, but I don’t remember the details.

Cocoa applications started properly dealing with references to files rather than to path locations, for things like re-opening saved files, etc. etc.; early versions of OS X were filled with apps which would behave improperly when a user moved a file.

Exposé feels much more like a culturally Mac-like feature than the use of the Dock, etc. Though Spaces seems more NeXT-ish to me (I don’t remember if NeXTStep had multiple desktops... did it?).

The appearance of OS chrome tended back towards the simplicity of classic Mac OS (obviously not to the precise appearance, but to the feel), with every OS version further away from pinstripes, distracting transparency, slow unnecessarily flashy animations, etc. And not only the overall window ornamentation. Take a look at the folder icons, for example, which look like OS 7.5 icons (I always hated the ones from OS 8–9).

The Finder never regained its spatial-ity (as John Siracusa periodically laments), but it got much better at remembering window state in each version from 10.0 to 10.3.

Disks get properly mounted on the desktop by default (I don’t remember precisely the history of this, but I believe the default was not to show them on the desktop at some point; maybe I’m just confusing early OS X with Windows here).

The Finder at some point (10.4? 10.5?) finally allowed icons to be spaced closer together as in "classic" Mac OS.

The Finder got back color labels in 10.3, an OS 7 feature, which I believe were missing altogether from 10.0–10.2.

Finder keyboard and mouse selection behavior, especially in list mode, improved dramatically from 10.0 to 10.4. In general, the mouse and keyboard behavior of list widgets – rows, disclosure triangles, heading sorting and column resizing, etc. – improved quite a bit.

* * *

I’m sure there are dozens of other such things (if you read through Siracusa reviews and John Gruber’s notes about each OS version I’m sure you’ll find a bundle), but listing more here doesn’t accomplish much. I’m not trying to argue that "classic" Mac OS feels the same as the current OS X does, or that OS X doesn’t also include many very NeXT-feely features like the Finder column view, &c. I do think though that OS X is somewhere between a NeXTStep/Mac hybrid and its own thing altogether, both in specific features and in less tangible “how it feels” aspects.

Did you type all this for a reply or did you copy and paste it from writing it before?

Typed it. Thought a bit, clicked edit, typed some more, thought a bit, etc.

By the way, CA banned smoking in the workplace in 1998. I don’t think Apple’s changing policies about that can be solely attributed to the takeover of NeXT culture.

Jobs was a year ahead of the curve I guess. But the main thing was banning dogs--from a lot of things I read, one of the big unofficial benefits of working at Apple before the second Jobs era is how you could bring your dog to work and spend your breaks playing frisbee with him.

"The Apple of today is basically NeXT, plus the branding and whatever other assets NeXT could salvage from Apple."

Basically, they merged the branch back into the trunk.

> I wouldn't say that Apple is dominated by a hacker culture at all.

It's a mistake to say that. All the work that went into the LLVM/Clang, low-level development that's done OS X and iOS isn't something that you can do without hackers; neither are the algorithms used by Aperture or even iPhoto.

Oh, there are plenty of great hackers at Apple. That doesn't mean the company has a "hacker-centric culture", though. Does Apple make "a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing", like the article mentions about Facebook? No way.

Seems like a strange criterion. Would programmers hired to do HR be fulfilled in their jobs? Would they last very long? How does that even work? Do you slip a javascript requirement in the HR position posting? It just seems like you might be missing out on some great HR talent with such an arbitrary requirement.

It depends if you have 1 HR person or something like 10,20+. If it is a large department, having someone from a programming background that is looking for a change could be a big asset if the HR department is primarily dealing with programmers.

Digressing for a moment, what about the reverse, i.e., how long would the average HR consultant last as a programmer? They'd have to organize a swap: the programmer hands over their brain, the HR consultant their mendacity.

Programmers have all sorts of side interests. I wouldn't mind studying and potentially working in linguistics for a while; I don't see why there wouldn't be someone who's into working with people in an HR-ish role.

One caveat: best technical recruiters are former programmers (it's an automatic plus if a recruiter tells me "I'll take your LaTeX resume, I used it a lot in grad school").

I can attest this.

I got called from Google during 2006. The HR guy screened me on the phone with all TCP/IP questions. I was amazed because he knew so much about TCP/IP and UNIX socket. It turned out that he was a former software engineer in Bell Lab/Lucent. It has been the best initial phone screen that I ever have.

Why would a programmer go work in HR?

I don't know. The guy who called said he was working as contract recruiter for Google. Maybe it's due to bad economy or downsizing?

I can imagine a software engineer who is suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome switches jobs from writing to keyboard to talking on the phone.

I'm reminded of JWZ's article http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/phones.html

One of the latest tactics that the headhunters have been using is to begin with a line like ``Hey, I used to be an engineer! But now I'm hanging out here doing recruiting, cool huh?''

Good catch. Maybe I am naive and am fooled.

Maybe I should follow JWZ's step. Selling alcohols is more lucrative than programming!

Speaking of Apple. Perhaps for personal reasons PG omits to mention the business trajectory and the personality of the leaders.This includes the element of luck that is far greater component of success that a culture, even the hacker culture. This doesn't mean that the culture is not important but you cant have an argument about "what went wrong with Yahoo" without "what went right with Yahoo" or Google, etc. In case of Yahoo a nothing HTML page was propelled to a media empire during the crazy dotcom boom, while Google stumbled as randomly onto the search goldmine. Both companies were created in the PhD classrooms of Stanford U, not in a garage like Apple.

Next both Google and Yahoo brought in professional executives or "suits" to run the firms, speak to Wall St. etc. Eric Schmidt is a professional CEO, not a hacker. He was at Sun, then he tried to revive Novell and then was tapped for Google.Yahoo is also run by a professional CEO now. How does that compare to the single minded life long vision of Steve Jobs? What role the leadership and their personalities plays in running the companies beyond the culture? Remember Apple was a "has been" company with plenty of suits and they even fired Steve Jobs at some point.

There is a fundamental flaw in PG's argument, he is trying to have a rational explanation about an irrational path to success of failure.

Eric Schmidt is a hacker... He even wrote lex.

Wow that's interesting: I've found a paper from 1975

Lex − A Lexical Analyzer Generator

http://staff.ustc.edu.cn/~shzhang/staff/lesk-lex.pdf

and Google's Eric E Schmidt was only 20 at that time according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt

He got BSEE on Princeton in 1976. OK, both Bell Labs and Princeton are in New Jersey, but it's still quite impressive to be the developer of lex in Bell Labs as a 20-year old Princeton student.

Of course even more impressive is being 129th richest person in the world in 2006.

Eric Schmidt does wear a suit, that is true. But I always thought that the type of professional CEO chosen by yahoo and google essentially told the story of the future of the two companies. Eric Schmidt has a PhD in CS (according to wikipedia, he wrote his dissertation on solving problems in distributed computing). Terry Semel has a BS in accounting and worked in the entertainment industry for two decades (warner bros).

I don't know much more about the two men, but I'm 100% certain that Schmidt did a colossal amount of programming in his day, and I really doubt that Semel ever did, though I can't be sure of this. This has to have a serious effect on the hacker culture. If nothing else, Google's choice sends a message to programmers that technical ability matters all the way to the top. Yahoo's says it doesn't, at least not enough to be a required attribute of the highest ranking person at the company.

Apple is still prestigious for programmers. If you're a good programmer and you work at Apple, you're not embarrassed to tell your friends about it.

Apple's legendary UX is driven equally as much by programmers who write efficient code as it is by designers who design efficient UIs.

Apple isn't a software company per se--they have a lot of EE's, other engineers, industrial designers, and so forth. These people have different cultures from hackers, by and large. But by and large they seem to demand the most from everyone they hire, including programmers. They don't have the compulsion to fill up on staff as much as they want to have the best people.

It's impossible to tell without working there (and once you work there you probably lose the privilege of speaking openly about this stuff) but it seems Apple is just a generalized, multidisciplinary example of what pg's talking about.

But for all that, I don't think Apple's ever found themselves with the reputation of the type of single-minded overarching elitist snobbery as the backbone of the hiring process in the same way Google has.

"...but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring..."

Apple seems to want to hire the best, but the best being based on actual capability instead of the school you went to.

The similarities are more important than the differences. Apple and Google both want to hire the best damn people they can, Google just values academic background a little more.

Do they have this obnoxiously elitist focus? No.

You sure about that?

From http://www.apple.com/jobs/us/welcome.html:

"Whether you want to be an iPod engineer, a Concierge at an Apple Retail Store, or a sushi chef on an Apple campus (yes, we have sushi chefs), we’re looking for the best. People who are smart, creative, up for any challenge, and incredibly excited about what they do. In other words, Apple people. You know, the kind of people you’d want to hang around with anyway."

Every company says the want to hire the best.

Which is why I didn't say the claim was false. I just have doubts that it's true.

Googling "apple hiring process" turns up this:

http://www.ifoapplestore.com/stores/hiring.html

"And lastly, the competition for jobs is intense! Sr. v-p Retail Ron Johnson has said it's tougher to be hired than being accepted by Stanford University--literally. During one talk he said Apple hired 978 store employees during 2002 from an applicant pool of 16,438, or less than a 6% chance of being hired (Stanford accepted 12.6 % for 2005). Put another way, only 1 in 17 applicants is hired."

Sure that's just retail, but it seems reasonable to guess that a similar hiring process exists for other fields.

Some companies with hackerly culture - eg Xerox, Sun , Microsoft seem to enter this phase where a lot of cutting edge research and exciting hacking happens but doesnt translate into revenue or customer appreciation. Apple particularly seems to have avoided this problem phenomenally and sometimes I get the feeling that google is susceptible to it. Any speculation into why this might happen ?

This seems to coinside, at least in the examples you give, with companies that have a "suit culture" who still recognize the importance of perpetuating a hacker culture. Maybe it is a simple flaw in the to-market process for such cultures.

Great hackers will work under great leaders who have only a working knowledge of the technology.

Steve Jobs is the conductor and Apple is the orchestra. Jobs can bring all the right people into a room, sell them his idea, and have them rabidly strive to produce.

The real difference here is the management's competence.

Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article.

As it should be since for the most part, Apple has been conspicuously absent as an internet and web company, especially during the period discussed in the article. I have many reservations about the conclusions and generalizations PG draws, but it seems silly to fault him for not including Apple. He didn't mention General Electric either.

Apple is a user experience-centric culture, with a profound appreciation for how excellent engineering makes better user experiences possible. This definitely doesn't strike me as hacker-centric in that Googley/Facebookey way that PG describes. Apple undoubtedly employs many talented hackers, but they're not so much the center of its culture as they are its foundation. A brilliant and responsive UI with a stupidly simple implementation will be more highly prized than a work of coding genius that only marginally furthers user experience.

Of course, if you want to extend the idea of hacking so that one can speak of user experience hackers, then Apple would definitely qualify as having a "hacker-centric culture".

>Apple is very conspicuously absent from this article.

The article is about Yahoo and in a round about way the move of internet marketing focus from 90s banner advertising to search marketing in 00s. I didn't find Apple Computers Inc. (as it was) to be missing, indeed I'm kinda at a loss where you think Apple fit in to this article.

There are already plenty of articles about Apple.

I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample--- a company that does things basically the opposite of Google, and is very ambivalent about being a technology company rather than a media company, yet is very successful. (One difference is that Apple seems to be very good at selling media/entertainment/image, whereas Yahoo was never a superb media company.)

>I think the implication was that Apple is a counterexample

Check, but it's quite far off from being Yahoo and IMO wouldn't add to this article.

Doesn't Steve Jobs always refer to Apple as a software company? A company that's "passionate about making great software".

Even though they make great hardware, his position seems to be that its the software that delivers the product experience.

Jobs frequently quotes Alan Kay: "People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

I think wondering whether Apple is a software or hardware company is not the best way to understand the issue. Apple sells devices (and marginally services) that allow you to do things, that's about it. It's not even about experience (I don't know what user experience means, when I go to Google Map, I don't want to have some kind of Magic™ experience, I just want to check some location), it's about having good tools for day-to-day or pro activities. And the merit of Apple is to make this tools so that the hardware interfere with the software and the software doesn't interfere with what Im am doing.

On producing good software...

Apple's software always runs on controlled environments. I wonder if they can pay that much attention to detail if they build for Web (Google) or any random hardware (Microsoft). Apple somehow avoids the added complexity of supporting the majority. For now it works, though.

Yet that seems to produce much better software than Google or Microsoft

Not really. Please do not confuse Apple's successful products with anything else. Microsoft still delivers on software products in a way (admittedly a hardware company)Apple never could. Oh and as for comparisons with Google, thats even more ludicrous.

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