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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> I got the $10 million, because it was going to be my job on the line, and potentially, my ability to work in industry at a high level, ever again, in the future.

I don't get why working hard to meet a deadline but unfortunately missing it would get you blacklisted from the industry?

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Normally it wouldn’t. But Steve Jobs very publicly threw a camera at someone who crossed him. He had a reputation for long held grudges that fundamentally fractured business relationships (eg IIRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something, and similar reaction to integrating ZFS being announced early). Guy was an asshole, but he was an extraordinarily powerful asshole.

In hindsight I wish I said he was an incredibly effective asshole. Lots of powerful people are assholes. It’s not often they continue to hold much power as a corpse.

Still ten minutes to edit the post.

Meh, I’d rather walk my pup and eat dinner. If people are curious they’ll find it

Nvidia is difficult to work with because they're as prideful (or more) as Apple. ZFS is hard to license commercially because it means having to negotiate with Oracle, who are evil.

Well, and there were those desoldering GPUs.

At the time it meant working with Sun not Oracle. Further, it didn’t need licensing - DTrace, under the same CDDL license - ships with macOS to this day.

Even further than that, Sun owned ZFS and was not bound to the license they gave to everyone else. If Apple demanded that ZFS on Mac OS X were a proprietary component, Sun might've actually gone with it.

Sun had, by then, mostly given up on the workstation market. They had everything to gain from making Unix mainstream, even if it was OSX instead of Solaris, and pretty much nothing to lose.

FWIW the beta-quality implementation of ZFS in macOS was removed only after Oracle bought Sun.

Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived.

Also Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were known to be best buddies.

> Though that doesn't explain how DTrace survived.

I think Larry Ellison discovered, much to his dissatisfaction, open source products and their forks, are incredibly hard to kill.

I'd love to have seen his face when he realized that he wouldn't be able to kill MySQL.

Yeah Nvidia is a pain in the ass. But they weren’t banned from Apple platforms for that, as I understand it.

I had a laptop with one of those GPUs. Apple replaced the motherboard. With the same exact thing. It's like if your defective Takata air bag was replaced with... a defective Takata air bag.

> IRC Nvidia being permanently banned from Apple platforms for early announcing something

may also be the major issues with their chipset.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203254

Apple used Nvidia chips for years after the 8600M GT. I think their last use of Nvidia chips was the Kepler generation. Which meant that because a MBP came with a Nvidia 650 or something, you could put a Titan in a Mac Pro which was nice!

Nvidia still offered the "unofficial" official driver for a long time that let you run unsupported GPUs in Mac Pros or Hackintoshes for quite a while. I ran a couple of Maxwell generation NVidia parts this way, even though macOS out of the box didn't support them, Keppler wasn't the last that worked.

The only downside back then was when a new macOS release hit, you would have to wait for Nvidia to release the updated third party driver. IIRC there was one major OS ten release I was stuck waiting a few months before the driver landed. This extended the lifespan of a lot of Mac Pros greatly!

It was a lot of he-says she-says with those chips, but as far as I understood it, it mostly came down to Apple using cheap solder. When the Nvidia chips inevitably started to heat up, it caused the solder to come loose which caused the notorious graphics issues. IIRC, there were even reports of people reviving dead or malfunctioning logic boards by doing ye olde "oven trick", which pretty much confirmed that it was an assembly issue, not a manufacturing one.

"Soldergate" impacted all vendors that shipped nVIDIA chipsets back at the time, and the cause was not "cheap" solder - rather, the back-then relatively new lead-free solder that was mandated by the European Union's RoHS directive in ~2005-2006. The manufacturers didn't have much experience with the stuff back then and chose a solder formulation that didn't hold up well to repetitive thermal stress.

See also the Xbox 360 RRoD plague from the same period.

The "bumps" (industry term for solder left on bottom of chip to attach to a board/circuit) in question are specified by the GPU chip vendor, not Apple.

This is why every single NVidia customer during this period was affected, not just Apple. NVidia ended up making several large compensation payments to several big vendors such as HP too etc.

Its amazing how quickly people have forgotten what a big a deal this was, it was terrible for much of the laptop industry for a year or two. It was after "Bumpgate" as tech media termed it at the time that Apple's relationship with Nvidia ended too, coincidence or not.

> https://semiaccurate.com/2009/08/21/nvidia-finally-understan...

As for it being "he-says she-says with those chips", I can't agree. There was an entire settled class action lawsuit at the time directly blaming NVidia for all affected Dell, HP and Apple computers. I've had to raid web.archive.org, but you can still find the details:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101011074425/http://www.nvidia...

Nah Apple has had plenty of hardware issues over the years.

However Jobs was a master presenter and showman, and extremely anal about getting L&F just right (go check the calculator story, or recounting of his preparation for keynotes — you can also see how things broke down as soon as they started bringing in third parties, or after Jobs’ death).

Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up.

[0] I expect detrimentally so at times, Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised — at least under Jobs; go check the history of the iPhone for flagrant examples of that where you’d just see colleagues disappear into unknown voids and HIG went full SCP

> Apple has long been extremely compartmentalised

Oh, I have been told that Apple could only build such great products because of the tight integration that would never be possible if Apple was split into e.g. a hardware and software company.

Apple only feels compartmentalised if (a) you're a low level engineer and (b) you're working on a secretive project. Otherwise it's a normal big tech company.

But the team responsible for writing all of the Forth firmware code very much worked closely with the hardware teams as you would expect.

> Keeping things under as tight a wrap as possible with extreme OPSEC[0] is one of those things Apple has always done, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Jobs would get very cross about a supplier fucking that up.

I sat across from a Graphic Designer at Apple who accidentally published some of the iPods marketing assets to the website a few days before the launch. It was discovered soon after by a rumour site and there was a flurry of meetings to fix it.

The designer was never fired or reprimanded. And he never received a screaming phone call from Steve Jobs.

I am not privy to vendor negotiations but would be really surprised if Apple was making multi-billion decisions based solely on a vendor leaking something. Especially back then when Apple wasn't out of its recovery.

Because if he didn't make the deadline, Steve Jobs would get on the horn with any company he applied to and tell them how badly he fucked up, just to spite him.

"You'll never work in this town again" was a real threat in Hollywood if you pissed off (or refused to put out for) the wrong producer. Powerful people wield power indiscriminately to discharge fleeting grudges.

> how badly he fucked up

I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?

And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs?

> I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?

If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up. The CEO was counting on you to take a letter to Garcia, and though you 'gave it a good go' Garcia never got his letter, so why would that CEO consider you someone to count on again?

> And why would every company in the industry even listen to a rant from Steve Jobs?

Because he built this industry.

> If the CEO sets a goal for the business, and you 'gave it a good goal' but failed, causing the business to miss its goal, with consequences including lost revenue or lawsuits, in that CEO's eyes you fucked up.

Are you under the impression that for example lawyers are fired every time they lose a case and a company has to pay out?

Not every company would, but the CEOs of the major tech companies that a guy with Terry's impact would have probably liked to work at? I'd buy it. Those guys talked all the time, and I doubt they were gonna let one hire get in the way of a major corporate relationship.

> I don't think it's 'fucking up' to give something a good go but not quite make it, is it?

If I understand correctly,in this particular situation, fucking up would cost Apple at least $200M--so it had to be a total success for him.

I'd put the initial fuck-up on Apple marketing, who used the UNIX trademark without license nor compatibily.

This was an attempt to repair the damage that had already been done, by passing the UNIX compliance required to become an official, paid, licensee.

In bigcorps, marketing can freely make false claims, and engineering is on the hook for delivery.

You are technically correct that this was a sales fuckup, but the shit storm would 100% be directed towards the “underperforming, delivery-target missing” programmers.

Isn't this a good example of engineering and management working together to make changes over multiple departments?

The engineers got time to asses if the project was feasible and what kind of support they need. Management fully supported them and made the other departments play ball and they made allies in other departments that helped them making the changes necessary.

They were asked if they could do a job and given the time and ressources to asses the situation. If they had any doubts they could've said no and let the legal department take over.

It's legals mistake. Ads have to be run by them. They should have caught it.

That'd depend on exactly how bad the screwup was but Steve Jobs was notoriously unforgiving if you made a promise and didn't have a good reason for missing it. That might not have been the case here, since they clearly slipped it due to the Intel transition, but if he was in an unforgiving mood or someone else was looking for a scapegoat, remember this example of how closed the community was at the time:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/04/23...

I think the "Steve Jobs" part is just a random assumption from the parent.

More likely he'd have problem being hired at that level simply because he would be associated with a major failed project, Jobs or no Jobs.

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

"OK, I've seen enough, " Steve interrupted me. "It's great. Apple is going to bundle it with the Mac. Congratulations."

But then he paused, and stared at me for a moment with an incredibly intense gaze, as if he was sizing me up or maybe just trying to scare me.

"But I don't want you taking advantage of this situation. I'm not going to allow you to take advantage of Apple."

"What do you mean?" I asked him, genuinely puzzled.

"There's no way that you could have written that program without confidential information that you learned by working at Apple. You don't have the right to charge whatever you like for it."

I started to get angry. "The program is only half finished, and if I don't think you're paying me fairly, I won't be motivated to finish it."

Steve gave me another intense stare as he paused for a few seconds. Then he stated a single number, without explanation.

"One hundred thousand dollars."

"I don't know," I told him, "I think it's probably worth a lot more than that."

"Don't argue with me. $100,000 is fair, and you know it."

I didn't seem to have any alternative but to capitulate to Steve's price setting,

there are better Steve stories on that site, mostly about abuse and psychological manipulation.

Which proves and is related to the story how?

> "I entered Steve's office with a bit of trepidation, because I thought that Switcher was worth at least a quarter of a million dollars to Apple, but I was sure that Steve would never want to pay me that much. But I was also proud of Switcher, and was interested in seeing how Steve would react to it."

The previous paragraph

Between that and his ":)" response to the Google recruiter getting fired because they were unaware of the collusion going on between Apple and Google, he will go down as one of the worst, most abusive tech barons in history.

I think he has already gone down in tech history, and it wasn't as "one of the worst, most abusive tech barons".

Unfortunately so, to the extent that this is true.

Pretty sure he's widely acknowledged as a guy who was an insufferable prick to work for (or an asshole Dad in the case of his daughter). Plenty of stories of unpleasant interactions with him.

My personal favorite of the early Apple stories was the one where Jean-Louis Gassée saw him park his big dumb Mercedes in a disabled parking spot and said "I never realized those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped" [0].

[0]: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

>Pretty sure he's widely acknowledged as a guy who was an insufferable prick to work for (or an asshole Dad in the case of his daughter). Plenty of stories of unpleasant interactions with him.

Yes, we have anecdotes (plus all the other nice things people said about him, including his daughter in her book and the author of TFA elsewhere in Quora).

Those are not what he is remembered about though, but for building one of the biggest companies on Earth (at times, the biggest), plus doing it twice in his 20s and in his 40s, while also building two other companies (one worth billions for its movies, the other sold to his first company for half a billion), plus defining several modern consumer tech markets and/or phenomena.

And of course, there are far far worse employers than a demanding jerk (abusers, rapists, racists, thieves, even murderous CEOs and founders) - and with less saving graces and nowhere near the same results.

Well...when you put it like that...

Also, at least per a lot of his defenders, most (maybe not all ) of the anecdotes were pre-NeXT Steve vs post-NeXT Steve...albeit who knows what to believe...

I was around Apple pre Next and people there were already afraid of Steve

He was also remembered as being hired as a line engineer at Atari early on in his career who by all accounts would have been fired almost immediately if it hadn't been for Wozniak doing a lot of his work for him.

Entrepreneur most definitely, engineer... not so much.

But even then, probably still a better engineer than many people who are smugly declaring that he wasn't a good engineer.

After all, he was hired by Atari, and got parts delivered to him personally by Bill Hewlett and an internship at HP as he was a young electronics enthusiast.

Of course if he's being compared to Wozniak, well different league.

It's never been a thing in Silicon Valley. This sounds like someone misunderstanding or inflating the stakes.

I worked at Apple when Steve Jobs was still there and it definitely sounds odd.

I had never heard of project-based profit sharing or being fired and named/shamed for non-delivery. I had personally seen coding mistakes cost tens of millions in lost revenue and the developers were still there and many got promoted.

Surely if he was promised $10 million and Apple didn't pay up there would be grounds for a lawsuit. Especially since that stock would be worth so much more today.

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