I think either Adam Bryant (organizational psychology at Wharton) or Erin Meyer (same at INSEAD) turned me on to this idea. I think it's generally a good one to (very slightly) accelerate new working relationships to a place of trust, and the emotional pearl-clutching in this thread is interesting to observe.
The best examples I've seen of such manuals (and the best working relationships that have been informed by them) share a common thread: sharing about ourselves where useful,[^1] in order to help others know us better,[^2] and not to control or compel them to do any specific behavioral thing.
So, far from an "instructions [to follow]" (@phoenixy1) or "a one-size-fits-all approach to how different people should act with an individual" (@ralferoo), I think many people intend that the document simply share context in order that you can understand them better, and do whatever you like with the information.
There seems to also be a suggestion that producing such a document is in and of itself a burden to others (@jasoncartwright is very upset about the "arrogance" of even writing one, let alone "expect[ing]" someone to read it, @phoenixy considers them to be a "pretty unreasonable burden"). I can understand the reaction, but I think provided there is no expectation that anyone read it, or that it be a means of controlling or compelling someone to behave a certain way, it's pretty benign overall. (Like, I think everyone would at least once or twice in their careers have access to such a document about some colleague or another, if they thought it were relatively sincere? If so, I say go forth and self-document, just don't have any expectations.)
Here are the sections in mine:
1. Why I have this thing
2. The success criteria for my role, and some general ways I try to achieve them
3. Some general patterns of working (one-on-one cadence, skip mtgs, whatever)
4. Blind spots I have that others have experienced (all verbatim, sought from a mix of new/old colleagues, a few new ones added each year)
5. A few situations where those same people would encourage others to specifically seek me out in a jam (as before, all verbatim yada yada - not necessarily work-related)
6. Work things I love doing / work things that I find stressful (drawn from scenarios the reader will likely encounter)
Of these, 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6 contain precisely zero information relating to my preferences or instructions on "how to" do something. I'm simply providing what I hope to be useful context about me and my role at work. (Assuming you take me at my word that I am not sharing the things I love / things I find stressful for any reason other than you knowing me better.)
The general patterns of working at 3 contains some preferences relating to out of hours contact (along lines of "I don't check my emails or Slack outside of office hours, so you should call or text me if there is an emergency or if a few minutes of my time can save you several hours on something"). Maybe that's somehow outdated now? It's the sort of thing I like to know before I reach out to someone out of hours – a bit like I know some people who appreciate a heads up when visiting a "shoes off" household, so they can wear socks or clip their toenails.
tl;dr I think if you are clear that you have no expectation that anyone even read it, and share relevant, practical context on working together -- with a significant portion sincerely sought from a mixture of people, rather than your own navel-gazing -- these kinds of manuals can be a good shout.
I like reading them, and I like understanding my colleagues better. So I'll tell you that I would enjoy reading yours, and if you ever write one please share it, and that I hope you read mine. That's pretty much it!
[^1]: What constitutes " useful" is of course my determination to make, just as it's your determination to decide that what I shared wasn't useful, and tell me as much.
[^2]: I guess this is predicated on the axiom that understanding your colleagues better is useful. I suspect it is useful -- I think if I had to bet on whether or not any person is more effective in collaborative tasks with a stranger, or with someone they have worked professionally with in any field for several years, I would pick the latter -- although this is uninformed.
Writing this manual just sounds so incredibly tedious. Not only there is nothing much interesting even for me about myself, now I have to find something interesting (and useful!) for others. And obviously, I can't just leave an empty page around. Ugh.
If only there were some document where you share whether or not you would be open to feedback on how you came off. That would save someone the trouble of asking and wasted time if it's a no.
It's unclear whether you are misusing Vision Pro to mean the entire category of AR/VR headsets, or the specific model Apple launched this year.
> unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally
I think by success you mean "be a $10bn business" (a quarter as big as Apple's wearables business today), and for Apple, success might mean something very different.
> The reality is, this is a covid product and covid is over.
What do you mean by this? Certainly you can't mean that Apple mistakenly designed this product for the COVID era, given its history?
Apple acquired Peter Meier's AR company in 2015, and recruited Mike Rockwell from Dolby in the same year to lead the group working on the headset.[^1] In 2017 they recruited the head of AR from NASA's Jet Propulsion lab.[^2]
Apple in fact appears to have delayed the project in 2019[^3] because Jony Ive pushed Rockwell and his team to build a standalone device, not one with compute offloaded to an external processing unit.
This product had been under active development for nearly three years by the time COVID hit (Fletcher Rothkopf appears to have started on the project in January 2016 according to his LinkedIn), so what functionality do you think is linked to COVID? Literally everything shipping in VisionOS is standard ecosystem stuff for Apple.
> Regardless of price (outside being extremely cheap) I don't see people even dropping $1500 on this thing.
You mean this specific device? Or the category in general?
> I don't have a single person in my life that has used a VR headset for anything more than beatsaber and the occasional movie.
Laaaadiesssss annddddd gentleeeeeemennnnnnnn
In the red corner, doing what they do best… Apple Inc.! Hits selected from their homepage's top-level navigation… Macintosh ($bn business)! iPad ($bn business)! iPhone ($bn business)! Watch ($bn business)! AirPods ($bn business)! TV & Home ($bn business)!
And in the blue corner, enabling a hasty generalization about the future of a product category based on usage of present day technology … "everyone cglan knows!" Track record of predicting $bn businesses through word or deed… [TBD]!
> They're sweaty, heavy, and they're just isolating to wear for long periods of time, along with various other edge cases like glasses and eye strain.
Literally none of this is grounds to dismiss an entire product category (especially given that Apple has largely solved the "glasses" edge case).
> There's already a pretty big movement to limit screen time and cut down on technology
I must not have noticed that trend in the quarterly results of any consumer electronics company I track. (I did, however, notice the screenless Humane Pin thing self-destruct.) Do you believe that this trend you have noticed is a) likely to constrain the sales of a $3,500 "Pro" device, b) likely to overall dampen enthusiasm for the category over the course of the next decade, and finally c) any more worthwhile to talk about than the inane claptrap about your friends and family being oracles of a new market?
> I could see something like the ray ban meta glasses taking off, especially with an enhanced siri and some AR.
Wait so you are dismissing the entire category based on your friends not using AR/VR? Christ. Good thing Apple, Meta, Sony, and the other manufacturers shipping millions of a nascent product category can just copy your winning combination of "something like the ray ban meta glasses" with "an enhanced siri" (?) and "some AR" (???). Coming right up!
> But the vision pro and VR in general feels like a form of nerd sniping that the general public literally doesn't care about other than randomly using it at parties.
I have used a lot of AR and VR devices, including Vision Pro. I do not use any devices regularly (more than once per month), but it is completely self-evident that such devices have the potential to be UX breakthroughs of similar ilk to modern smartphone / tablets.
I would be betting on Apple, Meta, and all the other hardware manufacturers here – not your friends.
I know if I like the taste of a new dish without being a great chef. And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.
> And so can people know if they (and their friends) will buy and use a $3k - or $1.5k - VR headset.
This is not the claim being made by the parent I responded to. Right out of the gate, OP said:
> I told my friends that the vision pro was unlikely to succeed or at least succeed culturally.
I.e. OP is specifically making a general claim about this product category, based on the usage habits of friends who are all - I would wager - using hokey Oculus/Vive-type hardware, and not Vision Pro.
It's the same rhetoric people were probably saying on alt.hackers in 1995 about paper film vs. digital cameras, and it's specious reasoning.
Happy to skinny my reply down to simpler words for you, just in case you're genuinely here to join substantive discussion of technical topics, and simply suck at it:
1. Why do you think Vision Pro is a COVID product?
2. Why do you think your friends' usage patterns for legacy AR/VR devices is a useful indicator of the eventual popularity of this product category?
3. Do you have any data to substantiate your claim that people are cutting down on screen time to the detriment of shipping hardware SKUs?
Have spent extended periods in the last 12 months with Pipedrive, Attio, Salesforce, and Hubspot, if this helps:
Pipedrive - simultaneously lightweight and no-frills whilst impossibly slow and antiquated. The simple act of navigating through records and performing actions is laborious. The price is extraordinarily high relative to the UX and functionality (same ballpark as Attio, the clear leader IMO). Same category as Gem (ATS) to me – I'm sure lots of people are working on it, but with a slightly resigned air as they see Ashby building a way more performant and capable product.
Salesforce – not as slow as I recalled it being in ~2015, but still pretty "heavy" feeling. Commercial terms are as unpleasant as ever,[^1] and the professional services + 'does anything you need' angle is IMO designed to bamboozle non-technical stakeholders into outsourcing significant portions of sales and operations engineering to Salesforce Ecosystem® Trusted Partners® or whatever they're called. Unlike Attio (which embraces the fact that yes, this is just a fucking database with useful workflows on top), Salesforce seems to do what it can to prevent you from feeling like you're interacting with a database (right up to and including making it less convenient to use than, say, psql).
Hubspot – It's not a huge N, but of the half-a-dozen occasions I've spent time with companies using HubSpot, at least half the time people hated it because it had been misconfigured or inexpertly set up. The CRM side is, I think, relatively benign, but attribution modeling and campaign tracking is a poor UX in my opinion, and I found myself exporting giant .CSVs to analyze with Excel and Python. (Saving grace: Dan Lyons didn't enjoy working there, which suggests that they might be doing something right culturally[^2])
Attio – It isn't perfect, but it's the first CRM product I've used to be just good software, without the "for CRM" qualifier. Model is that it ingests all email traffic and calendar appointments from registered seats, offers rich support for creating data models and relationships (e.g. we have objects representing Deals, Contracts, and Invoices and the associated attributes in Attio – making it a general purpose "Customer OS" for us), has the right mix of powerful but not overwhelming tools for reporting, batch emailing, etc. Has its quirks (floats are limited to four decimal places, you have to create new lists before you select the objects you want to store in it, etc.) but it's outstanding software, trivial to integrate without writing too much code, and by leaning into the idea that yes, this is a database, so yes, feel free to define models and relationships and attributes, it is rapidly integrated into the workflows of technical users.
HTH!
[^1]: In 2015 or so, I had a "friend" who found that his colleague forgot to set a reminder for the renewal/break period in a 24 month Salesforce contract, belatedly tried to activate it, and was told that the contract had automatically extended for a further 24 months. Said "friend" created a fake General Counsel on LinkedIn with a real company email address, created a reasonably convincing email thread between themselves and the fake GC (FW: Salesforce Renewal "Is this legal?" RE: FW: Salesforce Renewal [Hastily googled legal perspectives ending in an admonishment that GC was bored and would love to sink their teeth into this dispute) which they "accidentally" forwarded back to Salesforce (even going so far as to do one of those silly honor system Outlook email recalls). The renewal was rescinded pretty quickly!
Neither a Vision Pro owner nor much of a hog cranker, so this comment may be something of a 'premature ejaculation', but I don't think there's any prospect of native applications designed to aid manipulating oneself to issue passing App Review.
I own a AVP, hog cranking is its killer use case. Porn on the AVP exists today whether Apple likes it or not.
Passing app review doesnt matter, there are a number of subscription websites (sexlikereal, wankz, czechvr etc) which offer UHD uncompressed 8K MP4 videos for download. It is entirely possible (and quite easy) to download these UHD videos to a Mac, mount the folder containing the goon material on the Mac as a drive on the Vision Pro (local network drive), and stream the video to the AVP using a 3rd party 3d video player; Moonplayer is the pick of the bunch at the moment.
I must say the experience is pretty damn good. I can see people getting addicted to it an unhealthy way. The sites mentioned above are only producing 8K at the moment, I think the AVP can handle more pixels, and there are new cameras coming on to the market (https://x.com/Blackmagic_News/status/1800273164867658228) which will really crank things up a notch.
There is a tremedous market oppurtunity available here, its niche at the moment, but once you experience good quality VR porn its hard to go back to the flat stuff.
Truly a golden era for fast-forwarding through videos of dead-eyed men and women rutting on camera. (Thank you – I genuinely learned a lot from your reply.)
> You seem legitimately offended that this guy has preferences and opinions
No, I am not offended that anyone has preferences or opinions. What I am responding to is this language:
> Neither a Vision Pro owner nor much of a hog cranker
> native applications designed to aid manipulating oneself
> dead-eyed men and women rutting on camera
...which is intended to indicate disdain towards people who produce or consume pornographic material. I think that this person is going out of their way to be an unkind contrarian regarding porn, and in my opinion that deserves a little light ridicule!
> ...which is intended to indicate disdain towards people who produce or consume pornographic material.
The only intention was to rejoin OP's "hog cranking" euphemism with some fun ones from the English lexicon. (That it appears to have caused you to make a spectacle of yourself for no reason whatsoever is a bit of a bonus, though.)
> I must say the experience is pretty damn good. I can see people getting addicted to it an unhealthy way
I don't disagree, but I think interactive sex apps (with virtual partner or teledildonics) would be a much better experience that video playback (vr or not). Higher image quality, interactivity, and Im sure some sex-toy manufacturer(s) has a bluetooth/wifi API already for additional "immersion". There's a market for a much hornier Replika, if Apple would allow it. As for ethical & security implications of such an app, I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.
> [150 words about a totally different product and platform]
Vision Pro isn't something I would use regularly, but you're bringing opinions about a 14" CRT monitor to a thread soliciting opinions on a specific 30" 1080P TV. I think we are beyond the stage where useful generalizations about "the state of AR/VR" can be drawn from exposure to a single device.
The disparity in screen quality and OS sophistication between Oculus 3 and Vision Pro is enormous (and both platforms are self-evidently in their infancy).
Whether you think they have succeeded or not, and whether you think the price point is reasonable or not, Vision Pro is as different to Quest 3 as a BlackBerry Bold 9700 was to a Nokia 7650.
No it's not. When tossing up a vr purchase it's Vision pro, quest 3 or big screen beyond. Price points all vary but they are literally all the same shiz just served on a different shovel.
Each have their pros, each have their cons (well the mvp has mostly cons being the worst of the 3 but hey its having a crack).
Putting aside the enormous hardware difference between the two, even if they were "the same shiz" spec-wise, Id still not comment on Vision Pro over Quest - the reason being I have Macook Air. Spec-wise, that laptop is almost identical to any other laptop, but the level of refinement is on another planet. Its tousands little things that make using Air a joy, while dealing with my work HP Zbook is a pain in every way.
For that same reason, I dont dare to compare Vision to any other VR (and I tried a few, not Vision Pro tho).
> Spec-wise, that laptop is almost identical to any other laptop
Post-M series I hear this from time to time and always ask people to show me something in the same weight class with equivalent battery life, performance, and screen quality.
Has the market finally caught up to the point where your statement is true? (Not asking you to research, just curious if any spring to mind from any pre-purchase research you did.)
> Putting aside the enormous hardware difference between the two
I think this is far too charitable.
1. We are a largely technical audience.
2. We are discussing a product category where, per the last ten years of discussion about early hardware drawbacks (and the critical consensus on Vision Pro), the screen inescapably defines the experience.
Anyone on HN describing Vision Pro's screen as "the same shiz" as Quest 3 must either be a troll or operating with a knowledge gap so vast as to make meaningful discussion very, very difficult.
Like, if you don't understand the math, read the reviews and trust that this is not a global cabal of Apple apologists making shit up. Occam's Razor: this is a $3500 device where 35% of the BOM is the screens ($550-ish), compared to a $500 device where ~19% of the BOM is screens ($80). Of course they aren't in the same league.
> Post-M series I hear this from time to time and always ask people to show me something in the same weight class with equivalent battery life, performance, and screen quality
Law of diminishing returns. If I
only need 8 hours of battery life, the fact that the M6 MacPro has a 48-day battery won't move me - a Framework/Dell with a 12-hour battery life would be on par as "good enough for me" on the battery life metric.
> If I only need 8 hours of battery life, the fact that the M6 MacPro has a 48-day battery won't move me
But it will. Suddenly you don't need to worry about putting it on charger on the evening, it will still be there second day with enough charge to leave you worry free. It's a fundamental change that competition just doesn't get.
I am still a bit surprised they went with so much aluminium, but I expected the final weight to be bigger. Can't wait for Vision Air. Imagine it supporting OpenXR from windows machine, instant hit for massive gamer audience already used to spending thousands on peripherals.
You just listed the shovels. It's all just vr. That's the shiz, the shovel is the specs. The end use though is the same shiz between them with the same goal, the goal is to provide vr.
> Apple marketed their PPC systems as "a supercomputer on your desk"
It's certainly fair to say that twenty years ago Apple was marketing some of its PPC systems as "the first supercomputer on a chip"[^1].
> but it was nowhere near the performance of a supercomputer of that age.
That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing. (If you'll forgive me: like, fucking obviously? The entire reason they made the claim is precisely because the latest room-sized supercomputers with leapfrog performance gains were in the news very often.)
The claim was that the G4 was capable of sustained gigaflop performance, and therefore met the narrow technical definition of a supercomputer.
You'll see in the aforelinked marketing page that Apple compared the G4 chip to UC Irvine’s Aeneas Project, which in ~2000 was delivering 1.9 gigaflop performance.
This chart[^2] shows the trailing average of various subsets of super computers, for context.
This narrow definition is also why the machine could not be exported to many countries, which Apple leaned into.[^3]
> Maybe similar performance to a supercomputer from the 1970's
What am I missing here? Picking perhaps the most famous supercomputer of the mid-1970s, the Cray-1,[^4] we can see performance of 160 MFLOPS, which is 160 million floating point operations per second (with an 80 MHz processor!).
The G4 was capable of delivering ~1 GFLOP performance, which is a billion floating point operations per second.
>That was not the claim. Apple did not argue that the G4's performance was commensurate with the state of the art in supercomputing.
This is marketing we're talking about, people see "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it. Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
> The entire reason they made the claim is
The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer, which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product. Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon. Gimmicks like "supercomputer on a chip" don't last long when the competition is far ahead.
> This is marketing we're talking about, people see "supercomputer on a chip" and they get hyped up by it.
That is also not in dispute. I am disputing your specific claim that Apple somehow suggested that the G4 was of commensurate performance to a modern supercomputer, which does not seem to be true.
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
This is why context is important (and why I'd appreciate clarity on whether you genuinely believe a supercomputer from the 1970s was anywhere near as powerful as a G4).
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, megapixels were a proxy for camera quality, and megahertz were a proxy for processor performance. More MHz = more capable processor.
This created a problem for Apple, because the G4's SPECfp_95 (floating point) benchmarks crushed Pentium III at lower clock speeds.
PPC G4 500 MHz - 22.6
PPC G4 450 MHz - 20.4
PPC G4 400 MHz - 18.36
Pentium III 600 MHz – 15.9
For both floating point and integer benchmarks, the G3 and G4 outgunned comparable Pentium II/III processors.
You can question how this translates to real world use cases – the Photoshop filters on stage were real, but others have pointed out in this thread that it wasn't an apples-to-apples comparison vs. Wintel – but it is inarguable that the G4 had some performance advantages over Pentium at launch, and that it met the (inane) definition of a supercomputer.
> The reason they marketed it that way was to get people to part with their money. Full stop.
Yes, marketing exists to convince people to buy one product over another. That's why companies do marketing. IMO that's a self-evidently inane thing to say in a nested discussion of microprocessor architecture on a technical forum – especially when your interlocutor is establishing the historical context you may be unaware of (judging by your comment about supercomputers from the 1970s, which I am surprised you have not addressed).
I didn't say "The reason Apple markets its computers," I said "The entire reason they made the claim [about supercomputer performance]…"
Both of us appear to know that companies do marketing, but only you appear to be confused about the specific claims Apple made – given that you proactively raised them, and got them wrong – and the historical backdrop against which they were made.
> In the first link you added, there's a photo of a Cray supercomputer
That's right. It looks like a stylized rendering of a Cray-1 to me – what do you think?
> which makes the viewer equate Apple = Supercomputer = I am a computing god if I buy this product
The Cray-1's compute, as measured in GFLOPS, was approximately 6.5x lower than the G4 processor.
I'm therefore not sure what your argument is: you started by claiming that Apple deliberately suggested that the G4 had comparable performance to a modern supercomputer. That isn't the case, and the page you're referring to contains imagery of a much less performant supercomputer, as well as a lot of information relating to the history of supercomputers (and a link to a Forbes article).
> Apple's marketing has always been a bit shady that way.
All companies make tradeoffs they think are right for their shareholders and customers. They accentuate the positives in marketing and gloss over the drawbacks.
Note, too, that Adobe's CEO has been duped on the page you link to. Despite your emphatic claim:
> Apple was 100% using the "supercomputer" claim to make their luddite audience think they had a performance advantage, which they did not.
The CEO of Adobe is quoted as saying:
> “Currently, the G4 is significantly faster than any platform we’ve seen running Photoshop 5.5,” said John E. Warnock, chairman and CEO of Adobe.
How is what you are doing materially different to what you accuse Apple of doing?
> And soon after that period Apple jumped off the PPC architecture and onto the x86 bandwagon.
They did so when Intel's roadmap introduced Core Duo, which was significantly more energy-efficient than Pentium 4. I don't have benchmarks to hand, but I suspect that a PowerBook G5 would have given the Core Duo a run for its money (despite the G5 being significantly older), but only for about fifteen seconds before thermal throttling and draining the battery entirely in minutes.
My iBook G4 was absolutely crushed by my friends Wintel laptops that they bought for half as much.
Granted it was more carriable and had somewhat better battery life (needed it cause how much longer was needed to do stuff) but really performance was not a good reason to go with Apple hardware, and that still holds true as far as I'm concerned.
That is a long time – bet it felt even longer to the poor PowerBook DRI at Apple who had to keep explaining to Steve Jobs why a G5 PowerBook wasn't viable!
> Why do so many go devs feel the need to make statements like this
This is a common conceit when writing for the sort of audience who might, for example, nitpick something as utterly uncontroversial as an author's disclaimer acknowledging common criticisms of a language they enjoy working with.
