Steve Jobs immediately got rid of "About boxes" and Easter eggs when he returned to Apple. Probably the right call if you want to promote a brand of professionalism for your company.
But it is a bit more than that. About boxes that indicated the engineers that worked on the software are kind of cute in a way — recalling a time when a couple of programmers could write The Finder.
Credits (and Easter eggs) also speak of a time when engineers, if not driving the boat, were at least given a good deal of leeway to sign their creations.
I feel like there were a cadre of engineers that Jobs tried desperately to keep out of the public eye around the time of iTunes, etc. Worried, I suppose, about poaching.
Presenting at WWDC turned out to be the best way an Apple engineer could pass out their resumé.
When the engineers were essentially muted I think it represented a power shift at Apple toward management, marketing, design.
Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory.
I, on the other hand, miss the cowboy programming days.
Yes, that's what I meant by how much money you bring into the company.
If you bring in $1B a day (and save countless lives) and I can easily hire another employee just like you, why wouldn't I have done so already? Perhaps that is your point?
Be that as it may, how overpaid do you think tech employees are compared to the cost of replacing them?
Year over year wage increases relative to all workers and competition for labor in the tech sector are the signals you want to use. Total mergers and acquisitions and number of discontinued software products would be good secondary signals.
> Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory.
I will. Opportunity cost is the danger in focusing on the stock price beyond your existential financial needs.
What did silencing those engineers cost in terms of creativity and motivation? Yes Apple’s stock price went up, but at what cost? How many iPhone-level innovations did their corporate culture cost?
This exactly. It was Jobs himself who said "Real artists sign their work" - as in the (literal) case of the original Mac, which included the signatures of the Mac team including Steve Jobs.
Losing that sort of energetic and creative culture has short term and long term costs which are hard to quantify.
I’ve never thought of it that way. Come to think of it, I could name many of the influential people at Apple from the 1970s through the 1990s beyond the founders and CEOs. Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Ike Nassi, Alan Kay, Susan Kare, Chris Espinosa, Johanna Hoffman, Jean Louis Gassée, Steve Sakoman, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman immediately come to mind. I can also name many of the key NeXT players, like Avie Tevanian and Bertrand Sertlet. However, with the exceptions of Jony Ive and Scott Forstall, I don’t know the names of key engineers and product designers at Apple these days. This may be due to Apple’s evolving culture of secrecy.
Outside of WWDC (which isn't even in person anymore) Apple doesn't seem to allow its technical staff to have much public visibility. On the other hand, the decline in visibility you cite might also correspond somewhat with a media shift toward the web and social media. I expect Apple has strict requirements regarding employee blogs and social media presence.
It's a shame, because Apple has great technical and design staff, and it would be nice to hear more from them.
But of course Apple is also a much larger company now than it was in the 1980s-2000s.
Not sure if SJ was to blame, but your sentiment about the commoditization of software engineering is right on target. It was industry-wide.
It's true that teams had to grow in size as software got more complex. Was commoditization the best way to do it? It certainly aggregated power in the hands of management. That was probably an intended consequence.
One unintended consequence is that tech leads and staff engineers became increasingly selected more for political than technical merit. That in turn decreased the per-capita merit of the workforce as a whole.
Post-ZIRP and post-AI, a lot of layoffs are still ahead IMO.
But it is a bit more than that. About boxes that indicated the engineers that worked on the software are kind of cute in a way — recalling a time when a couple of programmers could write The Finder.
Credits (and Easter eggs) also speak of a time when engineers, if not driving the boat, were at least given a good deal of leeway to sign their creations.
I feel like there were a cadre of engineers that Jobs tried desperately to keep out of the public eye around the time of iTunes, etc. Worried, I suppose, about poaching.
Presenting at WWDC turned out to be the best way an Apple engineer could pass out their resumé.
When the engineers were essentially muted I think it represented a power shift at Apple toward management, marketing, design.
Good for Apple. It served the company and the brand well. No one can argue with the stock trajectory.
I, on the other hand, miss the cowboy programming days.