What was it like to be a software engineer at NeXT?

The technology really was great. Their understanding of object orientation was superior. The developer tools were wonderful. The user experience was generally a delight. We could develop custom software in a fraction of the time of people using the tools of the day. NeXT had a true vision of the future.

However, what they didn't have was much understanding of economics. The only reason that NeXT wasn't a complete commercial failure was that Apple's board wanted Steve Jobs back. If not, Apple might instead have bought out Be. And if Apple had succeeded in developing their own next-gen OS, both NeXT and Be might be minor footnotes these days. Even prior to the deus ex machina buyout, NeXT was on a slow and steady path to failure. They'd gone from an integrated hardware vendor to an OS-on-other-hardware vendor to a dev-tools-on-other-OSes vendor, and it's not clear that would have worked either. Once the acquisition was announced, they promised to take care of the people who had stuck with them and then did jack.

I took a few lessons away from my time with NeXT. 1) Just because I thought something was technically superior didn't mean it was commercially viable. 2) Being too far ahead of the market is worse than being behind it. 3) Never trust a "visionary leader" to look out for you, no matter what he says. He's in it for himself and the vision; the little people are expendable.

But you're definitely right that it made using other stuff painful. I stopped doing GUI development altogether rather than shift to Windows, which was incomparably awful by comparison.

After watching DHH's video and reading the Rails book, it reminded me so much of my previous experience with NeXT technology that I had no other choice but to go with Rails.

The dynamism of Ruby had a lot in common with ObjC's runtime. And reading about ActiveRecord at that time I also had the feeling that its authors had worked with EOF before.

All in all, NeXT built great stuff. I still own a NeXTstation Color that I got in 1992 (one of these days I should try to turn it on again). And it's a testament to the quality of that software that some pieces that I'm still running today, like Apple Mail, trace back almost directly to tools I started using back then (NeXTMail).

The closest I got to experience inner workings of NeXT software is observing the boot log of Mac OS (which you can see if you boot it with Qemu/Clover). I haven't seen so many triple exclamation marks in a while. That somehow didn't leave the impression of carefully and intentionally designed software.

Doesn't stop tons of people from hating it :)

Found out that another colleague had a few of them in a storage closet, and had aspirations of cobbling them together to make a working one. I gave him the machines.

He went on vacation, someone cleared out the closet, and fucking recycled them all. When he came back he was livid. I still feel the loss.

cube: 305 mm x 305 mm x 315 mm

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co82323...

The difference is that top engineers have more options these days. They can choose to move into a high paying job at Google or Facebook where they don't have to deal with abusive relationships with the CEO.

Instead, companies with abusive CEOs attract people with high ambitions who don't yet have the skills and resume to walk into an easier, high-paying job. The CEO (ab)uses the ambitious, early-career people to extract as much work as possible before they burn out. The employees use the grind to level up their skills and resume to pivot into a better job later.

I worked for one such company early in my career. Turnover was high. It was basically a pipeline that either led to burnout or a cushy, high-paying job elsewhere if you could survive the abuse long enough to get an impressive resume out of it.

The catch is that none of us wanted to talk about how terrible the working environment was, because it would only devalue those lines on our resume. So instead we kept quiet and let everyone assume the famous tech company and CEO we worked for were actually amazing places to work. Anything else would be self-sabotage. It's a strange cycle.

I think Jobs would be thought of exactly the same if he were around and in his prime today: a very controversial figure who produces amazing work but has his fair share of detractors for a number of reasons. Remember, Steve's behavior was barely tolerated by a large number of people. He was hated by many, loved by many, merely tolerated by most.

The linked post by Blaine Garst is _glowing_ proudly of having worked with Steve Jobs and the all star team he assembled. Quote: "great minds collaborating and challenging each other to succeed. With the best CEO on the planet." The "challenging each other" maybe the important point. If you are a normal dude it is easy being intimidated by a big ego. But if you are an A-player you can hold your ground?

Maybe it was even the case that engineers, who are focused on objective technical details/goals and having a thick skin, dealt best with Jobs?

He did mellow with age, though. The Steve Jobs biography actually latched onto this as a key narrative element—a way to construct Jobs's personal arch—and I do believe it's genuine based on everything else I've read about the guy.

And it's notable that Jobs only really reached his zenith in these later years. The original Macintosh had a splashy launch, but sales began dwindling pretty quickly[1], and NeXT never had much commercial success before Apple bought them. My admiration of Jobs is really for the person he was in his last decade. He was a visionary long before that, of course, but ideas are relatively cheap, and Jobs couldn't execute.

Jobs was, to be sure, certainly still a demanding figure at the end of his life (and I would not have wanted to work for him), but I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have him beat.

1: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

I could never work for Steve Jobs because I wouldn’t have put up with his ridiculous behavior and would have walked.

Part of the situation that lead to the MeToo movement was power, and Steve Jobs had a lot of power over people who worked for him.

This was something I knew since starting my career, and worked for the last ten years to make sure no one (other than governments) has so much power over me that I have to listen to them.

Not sure I've seen many (any?) instances of his abusive behavior being celebrated in my 30 years of following him. Certainly some awe over how scary he was.

I've often thought it amazing that he was as successful as he was despite his terrible behavior.

However, I think it depends a lot on where in his career arc this transition happened. If he had been caught out early on, it could well have kept him from rising. Imagine the Twitter furor if a rising exec got caught cheating his business partner, for example. [1] Of course, it could have gone the other way; his conscious manipulation of his image [2] could have led him to be less abusive, or at least better at concealing it.

But if it came later, once he was head of Apple, I doubt it would have mattered much. He was already notoriously an asshole. [3] People will accept a lot as long as the money keeps rolling in and the asshole seems irreplaceable.

[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve-jobs-...

[3] E.g., this from 2011. https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10

Do you think that engineers designing the plumbing system of the F1 rocket engine knew pretty much anything about "compiler design" or "motherboard design"?

What you are in fact observing is a human system's tendency to adapt to growing complexity. Human systems adapt to growing complexity by specializing it's members to particular skills (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_specialization).

It's just a fact that way back then in the NeXT days, the computer was not as complex, the understanding of which was just about achievable by 1 human. Eventually, that metric exceeds 1.

For the case of the first apple computer, it was ~1 (Wozniak), in the case of Apollo, it was >100.

Cognitive Specialization is an aspect of all living things, but is very apparent in the Human species. Computers got more complex in just the same fashion as how farming went from a farmer, a bull, and a blacksmith, to gigantic conglomerates to make the fertilizer, tractors, watering system, etc., that comprise of >10,000 humans.

The real change was the change in the culture of computer use from original creation to consumption and distribution of certain limited kinds of creation - which are mostly imitative, nostalgic, and either backwards- or (at best) sideways-looking rather than genuinely original.

Real invention is now actively disfavoured. Google did a fair amount in the 00s but has slowly abandoned most of it, Amazon does a bit of blue sky but is mostly focussed on consumerism, Musk's idea of blue sky is straight out of a 1950s Tom Swift novel, and Facebook and Twitter are both hopeless. Netflix is cable TV done right - finally. But it's still cable TV.

There are some exceptions at Apple, which still has a kind of legacy tradition of doing cool new stuff (see also, M1) but even that is a mix of invention for the sake of it and strategic lock-in as a goal.

The result is a landscape full of development geared to comfortable suburban consumerism and associated corporate bureaucracy. There's very little interest in game changing technical development for the sake of it - which was more or less what NeXT was about. And there's even less interest in computing as subversion and empowerment, which was - believe it or not - a big interest in the 70s.

FOSS doesn't change this. (It likes to believe it does, but practically it really doesn't.)

Quantum computing and AI may be on the cusp - but even if they do something interesting they're going to be coopted by ad tech as soon as the paint dries.

So it's not about technical scope so much as imagination failure. The real loss is the loss of imagination - something that tech and media have both done a lot of damage to over the last couple of decades.

If you work at a hardware company, even in a role that's very far from hardware, you become aware of this stuff because it effects you. Even if you don't understand ASIC at all, you still know about, oh, such and such process node has this issue, because it impacted our schedule and somebody told me about it at a lunch table. And you may not even know how to solder, but you can say, oh this needs rework, 0 ohm resistor at point such and such to make the display work, because you need to know it to go to the lab and have the work done.

Really the thing I understood the least working at a company like that was actual productization. You hear about something you worked on a year and a half ago being a tablet, or an embedded device, and you'd be like, oh, that old thing is just being released now? And it's in that form factor? huh.

By getting it right, which saw an explosion in the market, leaving us in a position now where there is more work to be done than the people who understand systems from top to bottom can handle alone. If those pioneering efforts had failed, the tech industry would now be insignificant and those superstars would be struggling to find work, never mind those who have a lesser understanding/care.

I suppose Bell Labs might feel the same. I have a prof who goes to work there on summers occasionally taking a couple undergrads with him. He is one of the best teachers.

Together with Bull, Wang, Datasaab, NCR, and a few more they pretty much defined minicomputers. They dominated the computing space for about a decade. Then they were undercut from the UNIX companies. Which in turn were undercut about a decade later by microcomputers, PC hardware and things like Linux took over.

In their short run, minicomputers were commercially successful and quickly became entrenched and neither their business models nor their expensive hardware could compete with the later generations of computers. All of the above companies went into bankruptcy or were bought out and stripped during the early 90s.

Computing hardware generations seem to get a longer lifespan though as we are still stuck with PC-style hardware. It has managed to evolve as stay relevant, probably in large because of Intel.

Both have obvious extensive Smalltalk influence.

Apple only forces their software on hardware they manufacture themselves. If you want other software, just buy hardware made by a different company. There are still many of them.

So go buy a generic computer that hasn't had Apple's fingers on it. Contrast that to the 90s, when finding a computer without Windows and IE on it was much more difficult. And if you did find one, you'd still pay for a Windows license because that's the kind of deals Microsoft bludgeoned OEMs with.

Prior to iOS, you distributed your program.

And now Apple doesn't allow one to write Android programs? I missed that one.

Your comparison is poor. Starting with the fact that a minority of devices run Apple operating systems.

This is not true of Apple, one can build a business and completely ignore them. Google on the other hand, good luck with that.