i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc...
One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar name about it. His advice for other team members in the same spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt to fix it."
HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.
Same story for me at a game studio bought by Microsoft. It was simply not worth the hassle.
As an employee I still had to sit through the same customer support as anyone else, talking to some person at an Indian call center with a bad line. After some failed attempts I just gave up and lived with my misspelled address.
My spouse is principal architect for a platform made by a large cloud vendor.
It takes an Act of Congress, a Papal Conclave who produces white smoke on the first vote, Divine Intervention, and Interdiction by a Vice President, all offered in triplicate upon the altar of subpar IT support organizations, to get a ticket closed -with- a resolution in less than a year. If it’s not something they already have a script for it’s almost certainly impossible as far as IT support is concerned.
The company makes billions of dollars a year, employs tens of thousands of people, and they still can’t craft a competent and empowered IT support organization. Even if just for their own developers and technical experts.
I was once issued %%my full first name and last name%%@company.
It was insane to type that, and no one could really work with it. And we had several alias domains.
An IT director actually came to me and said “we can shorten that if you’d like”.
Sure. I ended up with lastname@company. That created a lot of chaos for a few days because my initial username had already been fully propagated. These were the days before niceties like SCIM, so everything was in-house glue, manual work, or obscure third party solutions.
I’d do that every time I get a chance! Ex-HPE black label on my resume from a startup I used to work in that they bought. That company is a complete horror show.
It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason.
All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.
Everyone in my entire team - best of engineering as well as every manager left. Underpaying and over subscribing people has become a hallmark over there - it's just a body shop now. Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout. Upper management has no vision and everyone's constantly firefighting and struggling to catch up with competitors who had long term vision to invest in engineering teams, tooling and infrastructure to scale up the products and people. They want to do in 2 years what took Google and Amazon a couple of decades. Result post-HPE: poor quality, unscalable, cobbled together, barely functional codebase. Before, the startup I worked for had a well balanced rare combination of high performance, modular and well architected codebase. Later the constant push to ship as fast as possible to catch up with competition, completely destroyed the whole thing - teams, codebase and infrastructure. All because they only know how to react and have no idea how to stay ahead of the curve. Buying startups has become their only means of survival as talent stays away from their brand and the only way to justify value to shareholders is to jump from one rock to another, hoping the new one will rocket them away from the black hole they are spiraling into - all they manage to do is stick to the new rock and pull it with them as fast as they were going into the hole they will eventually vaporize in.
Most of the industry and most series C/D startups are like that. It’s a sad state boys and girls. Once you’ve been here long enough, disillusionment sets in. Corporate greed, (em)powered by shareholder greed, takes top priority.
This company had a rule where the mail was first name + last name initial. So, timc@company.com if you're Tim Cook. Naturally they ended up hiring a customer success person called "Ana Lopes".
She of course noticed on the first day and complained, but IT dragged their feet until some high-profile customer saw "reply to ANAL" in the automated ZenDesk email and send an angry email to the CEO.
Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)
2000 is a pretty low amount. presumably theyd have to spend way more than that to enforce it, so they would NOT spend it, in which case its free money that you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order
I friend of mine was an MD advisor to a bio-tech startup. They wanted her to sign off on things that she didn't feel comfortable signing. I guess she wasn't too happy with them as she gave up a $30K severance so she could disparage them. :-)
>you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order
You're saying that if someone offers me a small amount of money I should accept it, but if someone offers me a large amount of money I should maybe reject it?
I think the idea is, assuming you have already resolved to disparage the company
in that case, rightfully you should not take the money regardless of the amount.
but, if it's a tiny amount of money (tiny enough to indicate that the company probably isn't going to bother coming after you in court) then you can maybe consider taking it anyway and accepting the miniscule risk
whereas receiving a vast sum of money would carry a much larger risk of legal action
When NCC Group fired me, they characterized the payment for a nondisparagement agreement as "severance", and didn't offer anything else.†
So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll.
I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred.
† They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.
Non-disparagement clauses are generally legal in Europe, too. In addition, defamation laws may apply to what is said/written about a company, so one should be careful in any case.
In the late 90s I worked for a now defunct Australian electronics retailer, who were also a well-known AS/400 shop. Our stock reports etc would come via email from qsecofr@<domain>.com.au.
The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400.
I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.
this reminds me when I was at a course from a big software company in the late 90s, and we had problems setting up the system at first because some executive in Germany had named his machine localhost.
Ah, I remember this feature, somewhere within Directory services setup.
I have successfully obtained -.-@hp.com and a few more similar weird email addresses. Sometimes back is 2006 or 2007
(not an unix sysadmin, just guessing what happened from my shaky knowledge)
cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file.
When email got interconnected more across servers, generally the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on their home folder on the server started to be able to forward to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for sending email into the organization, and voilà, the root email account for the default domain name receives the entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the servers running with the default configuration and domain fallback.
IIRC cron writes stdout to the local mail spool (<user>@localhost). If the server is configured correctly, with an SMTP service for the domain, these emails are basically forwarded to <user>@<domain>
In practice, I have never seen a Linux server with an actual SMTP server configured correctly in 20 years, so the worst that usually happens is that cronjobs never actually leave the machine. You used to get a mail notification when you logged in if cron had written something, but that doesn’t happen anymore on recent distros.
Lots of domains have a locahost record set up. I used to think it was funny to use them for email forms when entering an email was required and the email validation would accept them. eg: to set the email to root@localhost.uu.net for example.
It's usually configured correctly at some point in time and then the configuration "rots": it becomes inconsistent, some emails are forwarded, other are lost, nobody cares, etc.
In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.
If you want emails from some random internal machine, you can use one of the HPE SMTP servers. There was one for internal email, another for external iirc although I'm not sure there was a difference in practice. Those SMTP servers would do a DNS lookup before accepting the email.
When I set this sort of thing up, I'd get myself a hostname on an internal subdomain. But that was a truly miserable experience. It was a multi-stage form submission on a server I imagine to be the closest possible relation to an actual potato. It was soul-destroyingly slow. Alternatively, you could just pretend your machine was hpe.com - the hostname was valid, even if the IP was totally wrong, and the SMTP server would accept it.
My guess is that there was a bunch of stuff that pre-dated the HP/HPE split and they took the quick and dirty option whenever the old internal domain name got yanked during the changeover. And if your process runs as root, you get root@hpe.com and hope there's something in the subject/body to identify the specific machine.
Cronjobs often run as root. If the host has is configured to send emails when a cronjob is completed it will default to sending it to user@domain where the user is the user the cronjob runs as, and the domain is what was configured in the cron configuration.
Minor nitpicky correction: cron only sends an email if there's any stdout of the job.
This is an important distinction because if you have configured mail forwarding, your cron jobs should be configured to output only on error.. then any emails are actionable.
Moreutils has a great command `chronic` which is a wrapper command like `time` or `sudo`, ie. you just run `chronic <command>`. It'll supress stdout and stderr until the command exits at which point it will print only if the exit code was non-zero.
That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails — and to a CEO no less. I wish all my emails were so clear, direct, and personable.
: Edit : The OP has history until recently - My message is off base and in the wrong context. Apologies.
I feel like I'm in crazy town...
Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and
set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com
would go to me.
This was a bad idea, I'm sorry.
I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you,
not to me. I think that makes more sense.
My apologies.
Signed, new guy.
This was
> That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails
Why ? What is happening if you can't email your boss/upper on the regular like that ?
"Hey, I'm gonna be late today, ate too many burritos last night and had to visit the hospital"
> What is happening if you can't email your boss/upper on the regular like that ?
In a 40 person startup or small company, sure. In a 400 person company, the guy at the top is a few levels removed from "your boss" to be emailing with "on the regular".
OP had Jobs as his CEO for 20 years (hired in 1991, until Jobs passed in 2011), and says this was the only time Jobs directly emailed with him (of course, 400 people in 1991 was the smallest the company would be during that time, it would only grow from there).
> OP had Jobs as his CEO for 20 years (hired in 1991, until Jobs passed in 2011), and says this was the only time Jobs directly emailed with him (of course, 400 people in 1991 was the smallest the company would be during that time, it would only grow from there).
You're right, I had to dig into OPs history to find that. I take back what I said. He gets every pass he wants, and now it makes sense.
Idolizing steve jobs, or anyone running such an evil corp is honestly just evil as well. Apart from bullying potential competitors, Apple is at top of the list for running an extensive mass surveillance on all of it's users
I was an early employee at a startup and happened to share a similar name and initials with the guy who eventually became CFO. oooo boy - lots of receipts and approval emails sent my way. I would forward/delete and we'd laugh about it.
Then we started to get big and it became less funny. Not my fault, and nobody blamed me, but one week we had a quarterly sales meeting and the company flew in 50+ reps from around the country... Those folks can spend money. I did my best to avoid reading, but receipts for extravagant food/drinks were hard to ignore.
At a high-profile place, I too used an automated IT thing to make a first-name email alias for myself, and there was a semi-famous person there with the same first name.
It played out much like this story: I started getting email for the VIP, so I told them, and switched it over to them. I don't recall them being as gracious as Steve Jobs that time. Then, the only other interaction I had with them was them during my time there, was them declining my request to participate in something. :)
I did something very similar, but the effects were different - people who intended to send mail to other people with my first name had my new distribution list (I created a distribution list with myname@company.com with myself as the only member) pop up as the first thing in their autocomplete.
I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>".
I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.
This post is particularly funny to me as well as I also had a very common name@apple.com email and I would often get sensitive emails, including travel info, sent to me - despite the fact that I had worked there longer than most peers.
I eventually grew so annoyed with it that I ended up surrendering the email to said person as it was a losing battle.
you and i certainly have very different ideas of what an "awful" human being looks like
and i hate to play mr. ceo defender but "a very good businessman who made a lot of money" is selling him rather short, i think. he developed several products that radically changed the paradigm of computing and consumer electronics. that deserves a certain degree of veneration, i think. he didn't get rich by jacking up the price of insulin or dumping chemical waste into rivers or selling petroleum products or developing a human psychology-hacking enterprise to sell ads.
For the insulin thing, maybe you are thinking of Martin Shkreli. What he did got him in prison more than he got him rich.
For the pollution thing, the truth is that many of those who got rich polluting the rivers and such actually produced lots of innovation. Plastics fit your description, and I think few things have been more of a paradigm shift than plastics.
I get you with the ads business, but Google made a revolutionary search engine, Amazon disrupted e-commerce. I have a hard time defending Facebook/Meta but they have their fair share of innovation.
Almost all "very good businessman who made a lot of money" actually made great things, that's how you make a lot of money doing business. Though usually, there is a dark side, and Steve Jobs is no exception. You can also make a lot of money just being an asshole, think crime lords, or Martin Shkreli, but it often doesn't end well.
Well, sort of. Matt Levine noted at the time that penalties for fraud are usually based on damages. Shkreli's fraud had no damages (and his legal team, obviously, emphasized this), but people hated him, so he was sentenced based on unusual factors.
taking ideas and making them, i.e., translating said ideas and said "makes" into consumer-ready and profitable products at high quality and massive scale, is not exactly running a lemonade stand and certainly isn't just a flick of the magic wand.
sure, he wasn't John von Neumann. fine. certainly one hell of a visionary and one hell of an executive, though, and a sharp and insightful person. for anyone here who hasn't yet seen it, check out "steve jobs: the lost interview". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m68auPIPRk&t=1s
jobs wasn't a charlatan and he was certainly no slouch.
I think it's pretty well documented that Jobs had direct input into product design. But also, hiring and managing people effectively to produce novel products is part of producing those products.
Of course Steve Jobs had character flaws and made mistakes but this meme that he was some kind of Stalin character sending people to the gulags is an ignorant joke.
Steve Jobs was deeply loved and respected by his family, friends, and colleagues. People who knew him intimately, who lived and worked with him every day for decades in many cases.
IMO it makes more sense to judge people by their worst than their best behavior. A monster who's deeply loved by his family is still a monster. I didn't read "Small Fry" by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, but the picture painted in the reviews of that memoir is scathing and heart breaking. He was a terrible father to her and he knew it.
I think he was all of those things, but also could be the opposite of those things, too.
Humans are complex and when you already changed the course of history by 25 or whatever, you are going to be even more complex.
I don’t idolize Steve Jobs but I do find him to contrast positively against other similar figures like Gates and Ellison. Low bars, I know. But I guess I wanted to defend that people can have a soft spot for Jobs without ever making a dime from any of his endeavors.
There's a great interview of Allen Baum, high school friend of Wozniak and peripherally involved in the early years of Apple (he pilfered the HP stock room to supply Woz with parts for the Apple 1 & 2 prototypes). He was a roommate with Jobs for one summer and, notably, doesn't say anything bad about him over the course of the three hour interview.
People are complex, with good and bad areas, which is precisely what makes cults of personality problematic. And the discourse around some people (Jobs in particular) is waaaay more cultish than is healthy.
And this particular anecdote is the poster child for it.
'Printing out and framing the response' as the daydream reaction to receiving that e-mail is wild, even with the caveats.
He made a lot of clients very happy with the products they bought. Products that are not just small gimmicks, but something they use every day as their main drivers in work and personal lives. And yes, since we've seen Apple with and without him twice already, there's enough information to suggest it was his personal effect.
So is being asshole to a few thousand employees worse or better than improving life of tens of millions (at least) with great products that they use everyday? Not an easy question to answer. But it's certainly not just about money and shareholder value.
He also changed the world. We are all flawed people. At least Steve didn’t pretend otherwise, unlike Bill Gates who fancies himself some altruist, but in fact is evil. Aside from the Epstein allegations and likely reasons for his divorce, he has done some very questionable things to black and brown people in the name of “health.”
> The fact that most research participants and their families are unaware that they are part of a vaccine trial, leaves no room for justice or compensation.
What an absolute load of tripe.
Straight from disease surveillance being a bad thing (it isn't) to this drivel /eyeroll.
Disease surveillance helps stop potential pandemics before the cost of addressing them and the damage the can cause, including loss of life, reaches colossal proportions. Recommended reading: The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.
I note how the conspiratorial assertion of Africans being used, in effect, as guinea pigs is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatever. Vaccine trials happen everywhere, not just in Africa, and no national healthcare system in Africa blindly accepts vaccines as if people were experimental animals.
Did you give informed consent yourself for the childhood vaccinations you received?
34 years? I have 10 years at a couple of FAANGs, and got $3M in stock, with maxed out 401k, etc. I am having thoughts about retiring early, maybe in 5 years. Long time Apple employees could definitely retire after 10 years. He most likely stayed there because he liked the job.
$0.37 is the split-adjusted price, it was never actually quoted that low at the time (for anyone wondering if Apple really used to be a penny stock in the early 2000s).
You could also have bought $1,000 worth of stock at the time and it would be worth one million today (since 1995 with reinvested dividends, source ChatGPT). Up to you whether the 32 years spent in the office makes the money more worthwhile to you.
Exactly how does one purchase $1,000 in stock of a company never listed on a stock exchange? NeXt was never public.
For the love of God, use the right tool. Portfolio back testers are a dime a dozen and easy to use and get 100% accurate answers. LLMs are the wrong tool to get investment expertise from.
Apple was, though. They went public in 1980. The IPO price, adjusted for splits, was a little under $0.10 per share. Ignoring any dividends, etc. your $1000 today is the equivalent of over 10,000 shares of Apple, worth almost $2 million today.
I had mark@apple.com during my time there, accidentally got added to one of the exec’s threads from Tim and felt pretty silly (and didn’t read anything in that thread, couldn’t delete it fast enough, had to email Tim to explain)
sorry! that might get me in trouble. i didn't get in trouble for registering the alias, though i did remove it after getting one too many disturbing emails.
that didn't stop me from registering it again at my next employer, where i received more complaints, but in this case they were less out there and i actually knew the people who could do something about them (smaller company, support shadowing shifts), and there i was eventually able to wire the alias into their official process after forwarding enough of them to the people i knew.
I was mikel@apple.com for about a decade. I never got misdirected mail, probably because there aren’t all that many people with the first name "Mikel." The only other one I personally know of is Mikel Bancroft, who works at Franz, inc.
I first learned about the ability to apply for custom aliases at my university after noticing a guy I knew didn't have the usual pattern — first 5 of last name, first name initial, and nothing or else numbers 2+ depending upon your order in line. So I was 'millej3'.
I had a colleague, also at a university, where the policy was first 4 of surname, then first name initial. Her name was S____ Cuntin. Yes, they actually issued it.
I'm in my 40s so bit of a grey beard now, but I worked with the real grey beards at University of Michigan. Something like 75k active staff and students, and more than 600k living alumni, yet their email addresses were like bob@umich.edu. Setting up the first campus email server came with privileges.
In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.
USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.
Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.
I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."
To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.
I imagine that certain people of a particular temperament might deliberately leave such a thing be, perhaps for their own amusement, or maybe because they consider it to say more about the company than it says about them. Is this individual such a person?
Mind blown. I remember getting very excited that my teacher in 1991 sent an email. I didn't see the email or use that computer. Just the concept that the email was sent to another country. Weird I barely remember what the email was about. But something along the lines of science and contacting another school.
I had a UUCP email and news feed back in the early 90's, when I was a teenager. I'd get several emails a week from other nerds. I imagine someone at an actual tech company got many more!
I once did this. I (Peter) had pclark@adroll and a co-founder of the 750 ish person company I worked at had peter@adroll. Other Peter was widely known as PK.
I jokingly emailed IT and asked to have P(eterclar)K@adroll and to my surprise they gave it to me. They even asked me if I thought it would be confusing for proper PK and I feigned confusion.
I promptly got a lot of email for proper PK and since he was co-founder, CFO and board member I decided this wasn’t a funny prank.
What a great example of how to own a mistake, apologize, communicate, and get it fixed. I can think of so many past situations with coworkers that would have been so much better handled with quick communication like this.
Owning a mistake is amazing, actually I do believe it's one of the most important skills you need to learn in any profession. You won't learn it in University, only when you think the world is on the line.
It's a super nice example. Explain the situation as early as possible, don't be afraid and roll with it.
The idea of any official Apple presentation today beginning with a humorous rendition of _God Save the Queen_ is so absurd I can't help but smile at what we've lost.
AFAIK, WebObjects is still in use inside Apple, but also Project Wonder and WOLips have kept the tooling active (it all stopped working after Apple depreciated the Obj-C/Java bridge) and modern libraries for WebObjects.
It was probably no better than most of the other frameworks we have. Most things aren't. In a set of lots of things, it's more fun to speculate about the ones that we haven't seen, but there's a good chance they're about the same as the ones we have.
Steve is easily the most entertaining conference speaker I’ve had the pleasure to attend in person. He was a regular at MacSysAdmin for many years, and always in the Friday afternoon slot when you need a jolt of energy. Good times.
Like many CEOs, Steve Jobs' primary skills seemed to be motivation and decision making, which means not always being correct and indeed sometimes confidently incorrect. But crucially gives direction & certainty for a company. He also didn't like the idea of third party apps and now iPhones are basically platforms for third party apps to run on.
I never had an iPhone but I think I disabled all haptic feedback on my Android phones and tablets since forever. I find it very annoying. My phone vibrates only to signal messages and calls. BTW, I don't type on the keyboard, I swype so I have less need for feedbacks.
Ha. My version of this is that Jimmy Wales has once emailed me, while I have never emailed him. He was weighing in on, of all things, whether the main page for "Georgia" should be the country or the US state.
My interactions with Steve Jobs came earlier, when he wasn't quasi-mythical, but was already a PITA. A typical interaction with Steve Jobs in 1976:
"Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?"
"No, I'm Steve Jobs."
"Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?"
I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was.
Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer.
I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical.
Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place.
First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.
Tangentially, there remains a test electric car gathering {r,d}ust in one of Google's parking lots, from the early years, that I believed "belonged" to Sergey. IIRC it's at 37.417743, -122.082186
I wonder if they'll ever move it out, put it in a museum or something.
It would be a cool tribute to redirect next.com to the Mac Studio product page, as the closet descendant of the NeXTcube. Similarly, Apple still has control of pasemi.com - if only Apple’s chip team had a similar webpage…
When C-Cube Microsystems was bought by LSI Logic in 2001, they grandfathered the old C-Cube e-mail policy of first/last initial. I ended up with the sweet e-mail address, re@lsil.com. Pretty good for a fairly large company.
When Abhi Talwalkar became CEO, they changed to firstname.lastname. My manager, who had a 17 character last name, was not pleased.
Two days into my first job at a large global organisation, I got send the internal budget for the entire company. Turned out the the CEO's email address was "tfa@our.domain" and mine was "tf@our.domain". ups.
It's a really cool story, but I can't help but feel a lot has be idealized around regular people who did extraordinary things.
I mean, Steve Jobs had to work with people, but he wasn't some prophet. He was a talented guy, who had his failures and successes, more of the latter.
It is a cool story, but if my boss of 15 years ago becomes world famous, I'm not going to personally treasure the email he sent with 4 words, possible 2 automated, write a blog post about it.
I'm just going to giggle to myself a little. Again, I might be in the minority here.
I’d hypothesize you would if you thought he was a great boss, and the opportunity to work there was unique.
Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction.
> Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction
I have a vision, not 20/20, but it involves you working for me. Good idea.
Heh - I had something similar when I started at Microsoft - but from my wife (now ex), who was emailing "[myGivenFirstName]@microsoft.com" for some reason, thinking that I was the only person with that name at Microsoft (uh-huh) and furious that I wasn't answering her, when I was away during initial onboarding...
Ok well the rest of us got emails at 2am demanding we
Come in and fix some random slide in a presentation. And the world all thought this was “fun and quirky”.
One thing that struck me reflecting on this is how much of Steve Job's mythos is about his harsh unrelenting treatment of his employees. I think notes like this shows that Steve must have shown a lot of gratitude as well which goes unnoticed because its less exciting to talk about.
I emailed Steve Jobs right after he came back to Apple and suggested they make a carry-able computer that could project the interface and keyboard input to any glass surface.
At that point, Steve was just starting to kill all the “moonshots” and “cool tech but who is really going to buy it” products like the Newton and OpenDoc. Even if he read the email, there’s no way he’d be interested in something like that at the time.
Honestly, kind of sad that Tim Cook’s reply was so generic. I don’t think I’m off base in saying this, and from personal experience, he is really not connected to the people at the company.
Hayman did a lot of WWDC presentations of WebObjects which was the only thing really keeping NeXT alive prior to the merger. He mentions elsewhere that towards the end Jobs was mostly at Pixar and NeXT was reduced to selling $50,000 WebObjects licenses but also had its first profitable quarter.
A big part of me has suspected, especially after reading biographies about him, that Pixar was simply better aligned with his creative side. NeXT was a business, one he knew well, but Pixar made things with computing and I think that really appealed to Jobs.
I didn’t pick up any sarcasm at all. It was a good idea which clearly hadn’t occurred to SJ himself, but would have been obvious once seeing the suggestion
On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”
I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.
When I explained to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!"
But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? He just wasn't in the mood to be told that he could have a better user interface.
So I gave him one of the a "NeRD" buttons I'd made for NeWS NeRDs, which he appreciated.
Up to that time, NeXT was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!
Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!
Do you mean like a radial menu? I love those and I don't understand why more software doesn't use them. The GTA V weapon wheel is a great interface for selecting a weapon, and they are really fast to use in Blender.
Yes that's right! The pie menus in Blender are wonderful, as is the whole Blender app, ecosystem, and community.
Here's the paper we published in 1988 showing that pie menus were 15% faster and had significantly lower error rates than linear menus, which I 3/4 unsuccessfully tried to explain and demonstrate to Steve Jobs. (At least I got three "that sucks" to one "Wow, that’s neat" out of him. ;)
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus. Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, ACM SIGCHI '88:
It's near impossible to convince people like Steve Jobs and organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Open Software Foundation, and even less open-to-outside-ideas open source projects like GIMP, to adopt unconventional ideas like pie menus.
One of Blender's outstanding qualities is that they listen to their users and don't suffer from NIH syndrome, fortunately!
I got frustrated at trying to get pie menus into official corporate user interface toolkits, and took a job in the game industry at Maxis, where you're not only allowed but even required to roll your own user interface, and got them into SimCity and The Sims:
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:
I have absolutely no respect for Tim Cook anymore. I understood that Cook was the operations guy and not a product guy like Jobs.
I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like.
But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent court case where he ignored Phil Schiller (head of App Store and long time a Apple employee) who suggested they do the right thing as far as the courts ruling, and how the experience is worse not being able to buy third party content (kindle) and subscriptions within apps. Well you can now. The Kindle app has been updated.
Of course I don’t care if they skim 30% from games, loot boxes and coins where 90% of their revenue comes from.
I wouldn’t consider it an honor to get an email from Cook. The enshittification of iOS is completely on him.
> How did you like being stuck with Lightning ports until the EU forced them?
Didn’t make much difference for me, in fact I still use a phone with lightning.
The rest don’t really matter for me, I have not downloaded anything from the App Store after the initial phone setup and I don’t spend money on subscriptions. Apple being hostile to open platforms and competitors is a forty year old story.
On the one hand, an amusing anecdote about an interaction with someone that ended up becoming massively famous does come across as somewhat noteworthy, but on the other hand, the fact that Job's response basically translates to: "Um, ok." does make this kind of... sad?
Side effects of living in a world where wealth and power have become virtues. I think we subconsciously judge our own value based on how many degrees we came to stepping onto the world's "stage".
This is how I felt. A blog article 34 years later about a interaction so trivial that Jobs probably forgot it even happened 10 seconds later. I cringe a little. But hey whatever makes people happy.
Hey, running into someone who is exceptional and having a fun story to tell about it is reasonable and doesn't deserve this negative energy.
That time I ran into Larry Bird, or just missed having dinner with Douglas Adams, or the time I talked to Jonny Kim-- they're little markers of time in my existence. I know they're not gods, and I've done pretty cool things myself, but I'm still in awe of the cool stuff they've done.
More than 20 years ago now, my brother (who was maybe 9) had his friend over for lunch and the night before my brother had spent the night at his house.
So my mother asks what they got up to, and the friend says they were playing water pistol fights with his sister’s boyfriend, “Wa-kin”, who was visiting.
We then ask what the boyfriend does, and he responds that he’s an actor. (Just be aware now that we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.)
So we say, cool, has he acted in anything we might know?
And friend says something like “Oh, lots of movies, Gladiator, Signs, others…”.
At which point I remember thinking, “no way!” and “so that’s how Joaquin is pronounced” (as I’d only ever seen it written).
Turns out the friend’s sister was a model living in New York which explained the situation I would never have guessed.
I completely agree. Both emails from Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are totally impersonal and routine. It's entirely possible they weren't even "personally sent" by either.
There's nothing wrong with the stories, just the overall sentiment behind them.
Steve: what would this product be like if it were magical?
Engineer: I don’t think we can build that with our current technology.
Steve: I don’t give a fuck. You’re a nerd who is meant to like inventing. Do it.
It’s really easy when we live in the world of the Mac, and the iPhone to say “Ah it was inevitable” but Steve’s approach to product is what got us here. He made sure that the GUI was computers, that capacitive touchscreens were smart phones.
Being arguably the greatest product guy and salesman of all time is some feat.
> After launch, MobileMe was widely panned, full of embarrassing bugs. Jobs gathered employees in an Apple auditorium and asked them, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” And when his team started to answer, Job snapped, saying, “Why the F doesn’t it do that?” He spent the next hour berating the group, saying they had tarnished Apple’s reputation and that they should all hate each other for having let each other down. He then fired the head of the team and replaced him on the spot. Steve wasn’t happy at all. He clearly felt very deep shame and took it out on his team”
This is really something meaningful. You are bold and the lucky one to have direct message from one of the greatest innovator in history of human mankind. Congratulation.
It's interesting that they can just reassign an email alias to someone else without any approvals. Could this be a permissions oversight? Or could the person who designed the system thought that heck it's always permitted to reassign an email alias owned by the current user?
The sheer number of multi-million dollar value domains you could snag in those days was wild. All that ended when it changed to, IIRC, $200/2yr and everyone suddenly dropped all their parked domains.
We were all a bit high and mighty and believed commercial use of the Internet was an awful idea. So grabbing any domain for selling things (cars.com, movies.com, sex.com) was out of the question. We were so, so wrong.
Everyone’s super concerned about security and control, but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes, be savvy about security, protect key assets, but “permissions oversight” about claiming an alias seems excessive.
You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with very tight security, something will still happen. It’s best to have backups, a good restore plan, and a relaxed culture*. Or that’s what I think, anyway.
I’m in SME land though, not big tech. But then again, 99.99% companies are.
One of the biggest time sinks and "velocity" killers in BigTech, and sometimes also in MediumTech, is the need to get approval (sometimes multiple people's approvals) for absolutely everything. Often, approvers are among the most senior, busy people in the company, and "approving a dozen things" is not even top 100 on their list of things to do today. There are people who spend >75% of their time just "chasing" approvers and reminding them to please, please, please approve my Thing X so we can launch Product Y on time!
In multinational megacorps this is more or less modus operandi. I am not even mad anymore, I realized this aint malice but simply inevitable as size goes up and time passes on.
The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but its inevitable.
I feel you. I keep hearing people in software say "wild west" when they mean "absence of paternalistic bureaucratic controls."
The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders as the physical space?
> but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom
Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen?
Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.
Registering an alias self-service style is fine. What's potentially problematic is changing that alias once it has become established. Please read my original comment again.
And every NeXT machine came with an email waiting in your inbox out of the box from sjobs@next.com complete with Lip Service voice message from Steve Jobs.
Of course you likely had no immediate way to reply to an internet email address like that at the time out of the box.
Even with the privacy concerns aside, you need individual mailboxes for reasons of maintaining organization.
I think your point would be better made if in your hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.
The bigger issue is probably being allowed to set up an arbitrary one at _all_ without approvals. Once you have one, redirecting it is maybe not the biggest issue? Could still be problematic though.
This story is quite old, security culture in tech was really quite basic and forgotten in a lot of places. I would hope that a similar thing would not be allowed today at anything like a big company.
>security culture in tech was really quite non-existent
This is 1991, the actual number of people on the internet was tiny back then. Things like SMTP servers were commonly open relays (for some reason I'm remembering sendmail being an open relay out of the box).
A lot of the internet culture wasn't based on security, but of the premise you shouldn't be a dick.
It quickly changed in the next few years as the number of people online exploded.
Yep! A formative experience of my childhood was working out how to type SMTP commands over telnet and sending mail from billg@microsoft.com to my dad. Such "opportunities" vanished decades ago.
Worked at an aerospace concern in the early 90s… for the first year or so there was no firewall. Yes, my Mac and PC directly on the internet with routable addresses.
I soon set up a website and webcam as they were shipped. CU-See-Me blew my mind. At some point I stood up a Quake server and invited friends to play. ;-)
Took a while to get a first name @ company email address.
I work for a large company 50k employees (not in IT) with the standard email format <firstname>.<lastname>@company.com
The company has a automated way to change your email address if your name changes, so I changed my last name to @. which allowed me officialy change my email address to <firstname>.@company.com. Then raised an IT fault to get my email address 'fixed' and remove the . after my name.
i love this. A startup I was at during early COVID times got acquired into Hewlett Packard Enterprise, so we all became HPE employees with HPE addresses. There was a similar form there to request "ryancnelson"@hpe, etc...
One of my co-workers got cute and asked for "root@hpe.com" .... And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.
They must have learned from your experience. When we were acquired by HPE they did not let us choose and our director of engineering got an email address that misspelled his name... fixing it involved him being locked out of all systems while the people trying to fix it emailed someone else with a similar name about it. His advice for other team members in the same spot was "if you don't like your email address, do not attempt to fix it."
HPE was truly a trip. I paid $2000 to be able to disparage them online and it was worth every penny.
Same story for me at a game studio bought by Microsoft. It was simply not worth the hassle. As an employee I still had to sit through the same customer support as anyone else, talking to some person at an Indian call center with a bad line. After some failed attempts I just gave up and lived with my misspelled address.
My spouse is principal architect for a platform made by a large cloud vendor.
It takes an Act of Congress, a Papal Conclave who produces white smoke on the first vote, Divine Intervention, and Interdiction by a Vice President, all offered in triplicate upon the altar of subpar IT support organizations, to get a ticket closed -with- a resolution in less than a year. If it’s not something they already have a script for it’s almost certainly impossible as far as IT support is concerned.
The company makes billions of dollars a year, employs tens of thousands of people, and they still can’t craft a competent and empowered IT support organization. Even if just for their own developers and technical experts.
I was once issued %%my full first name and last name%%@company.
It was insane to type that, and no one could really work with it. And we had several alias domains.
An IT director actually came to me and said “we can shorten that if you’d like”.
Sure. I ended up with lastname@company. That created a lot of chaos for a few days because my initial username had already been fully propagated. These were the days before niceties like SCIM, so everything was in-house glue, manual work, or obscure third party solutions.
I’d do that every time I get a chance! Ex-HPE black label on my resume from a startup I used to work in that they bought. That company is a complete horror show.
It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason.
All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.
Everyone in my entire team - best of engineering as well as every manager left. Underpaying and over subscribing people has become a hallmark over there - it's just a body shop now. Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout. Upper management has no vision and everyone's constantly firefighting and struggling to catch up with competitors who had long term vision to invest in engineering teams, tooling and infrastructure to scale up the products and people. They want to do in 2 years what took Google and Amazon a couple of decades. Result post-HPE: poor quality, unscalable, cobbled together, barely functional codebase. Before, the startup I worked for had a well balanced rare combination of high performance, modular and well architected codebase. Later the constant push to ship as fast as possible to catch up with competition, completely destroyed the whole thing - teams, codebase and infrastructure. All because they only know how to react and have no idea how to stay ahead of the curve. Buying startups has become their only means of survival as talent stays away from their brand and the only way to justify value to shareholders is to jump from one rock to another, hoping the new one will rocket them away from the black hole they are spiraling into - all they manage to do is stick to the new rock and pull it with them as fast as they were going into the hole they will eventually vaporize in.
"Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout."
This is exactly how Epic the Electronic Medical Record company operates, but on new college grads instead of Engineers.
Most of the industry and most series C/D startups are like that. It’s a sad state boys and girls. Once you’ve been here long enough, disillusionment sets in. Corporate greed, (em)powered by shareholder greed, takes top priority.
What do you do then?
I’ve been out of the work rat race for over 3 years now, but I’ll have to go back within a year… and I’m dreading it.
It’s my most valuable skill set, I just want to throw up when I see what the industry has become and I don’t know how to deal with it.
Wow
That’s so Brazilian, in the sense of the film[1] not the country.
There’s something of Bob Hoskins’ heating engineer in what you’ve described.
1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(1985_film)
I have a Brazilian (the country) email story.
This company had a rule where the mail was first name + last name initial. So, timc@company.com if you're Tim Cook. Naturally they ended up hiring a customer success person called "Ana Lopes".
She of course noticed on the first day and complained, but IT dragged their feet until some high-profile customer saw "reply to ANAL" in the automated ZenDesk email and send an angry email to the CEO.
I still raise a glass occasionally to good old William Anker.
What were the details of paying $2000?
Not the commenter, but I would assume forgoing an exit bonus/severance payment that was contingent upon signing a non-disparagement agreement.
Yup exactly. I got my retention bonus and 2 months pay and all that stuff without agreeing to anything, and they offered a little bit more to agree not to disparage them. I'm pretty chatty so decided it wasn't worth it ;)
2000 is a pretty low amount. presumably theyd have to spend way more than that to enforce it, so they would NOT spend it, in which case its free money that you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order
I friend of mine was an MD advisor to a bio-tech startup. They wanted her to sign off on things that she didn't feel comfortable signing. I guess she wasn't too happy with them as she gave up a $30K severance so she could disparage them. :-)
Sometimes the knowledge that they’re sweating after you reject the offer is worth quite a lot.
and maybe they change their behavior :) the sacrifice does have value.
>you shouldnt have turned down because it was way too small for a gag order
You're saying that if someone offers me a small amount of money I should accept it, but if someone offers me a large amount of money I should maybe reject it?
That sounds backwards to me.
I think the idea is, assuming you have already resolved to disparage the company
in that case, rightfully you should not take the money regardless of the amount.
but, if it's a tiny amount of money (tiny enough to indicate that the company probably isn't going to bother coming after you in court) then you can maybe consider taking it anyway and accepting the miniscule risk
whereas receiving a vast sum of money would carry a much larger risk of legal action
yeah just game theory. their money was so small that it was meaningless for its intended purpose.
[dead]
When NCC Group fired me, they characterized the payment for a nondisparagement agreement as "severance", and didn't offer anything else.†
So now I'm free to tell people that they fired me with zero days' notice and zero severance. That's just the way they roll.
I find it funny that their nondisparagement policy specifically causes disparagement that otherwise couldn't have occurred.
† They also gave me an explicit reassurance that I shouldn't worry about my health benefits, because those would remain good until the end of the month. I didn't find this particularly reassuring, since it was Halloween.
Question is, how many zeros would it take to convince you otherwise.
Some number, absolutely. I don't have that much integrity ;)
As long as the first digit wasn't also a zero.
As a European, it is absolutely WILD to me that this is legal.
Non-disparagement clauses are generally legal in Europe, too. In addition, defamation laws may apply to what is said/written about a company, so one should be careful in any case.
> bonus/severance
bribe?
In the late 90s I worked for a now defunct Australian electronics retailer, who were also a well-known AS/400 shop. Our stock reports etc would come via email from qsecofr@<domain>.com.au.
The QSECOFR (Security Officer) user is effectively root on OS/400.
I would've thought they would run these jobs as some other user, but apparently not.
Dick Smith?
Reminds me of that public speaker announcement asking (in American English) a Mr. Peter File to please report to the service desk.
(Not from "Brazil" the film, but Monty Python-originating regardless.)
this reminds me when I was at a course from a big software company in the late 90s, and we had problems setting up the system at first because some executive in Germany had named his machine localhost.
How was that mess ever fixed?
I guess they contacted the executive and had them change the name?
on edit: I do remember we had to come back to the course the next day, so it took a day to get it fixed.
Was the co-worker called Newman?
I read the last sentence 'And boy, there's a lot of cron jobs running at HP.' in Newman's voice:
From the Seinfeld episode The Diplomat's Club:
"I took over his route. And boy, were there a lot of dogs on that route."
Ah, I remember this feature, somewhere within Directory services setup. I have successfully obtained -.-@hp.com and a few more similar weird email addresses. Sometimes back is 2006 or 2007
I’m confused why cron jobs would be sending emails to root@hpe.com?
(not an unix sysadmin, just guessing what happened from my shaky knowledge)
cron jobs reports activity by email to the user (UID) they are running, historically UNIX boxes have the ability to handle mail locally (people would leave messages to each other by connecting to the same server via terminal), so that the root cron activity would land into the root (/root) account mbox file.
When email got interconnected more across servers, generally the service that would dispatch mail to the users account on their home folder on the server started to be able to forward to to others servers, if a domain name was provided. Add to it the ability to fallback to a _default_ domain name for sending email into the organization, and voilà, the root email account for the default domain name receives the entirety of the cron jobs running under root of all the servers running with the default configuration and domain fallback.
If you ever come across a ~/dead.letter file, that's one way it can be misconfigured. ;)
IIRC cron writes stdout to the local mail spool (<user>@localhost). If the server is configured correctly, with an SMTP service for the domain, these emails are basically forwarded to <user>@<domain>
In practice, I have never seen a Linux server with an actual SMTP server configured correctly in 20 years, so the worst that usually happens is that cronjobs never actually leave the machine. You used to get a mail notification when you logged in if cron had written something, but that doesn’t happen anymore on recent distros.
Lots of domains have a locahost record set up. I used to think it was funny to use them for email forms when entering an email was required and the email validation would accept them. eg: to set the email to root@localhost.uu.net for example.
It's usually configured correctly at some point in time and then the configuration "rots": it becomes inconsistent, some emails are forwarded, other are lost, nobody cares, etc.
In my case, I configured Postfix to redirect all mails looking like (root|admin|postmaster)@server to myemailaddress+(root|admin|postmaster)_server@domain and Postfix ignores what comes after the + in the user part. So I get all the emails but I still know where they come from. It has worked well for quite some years now but I'm not deluding myself, I know that at some time, that will rot too.
If you want emails from some random internal machine, you can use one of the HPE SMTP servers. There was one for internal email, another for external iirc although I'm not sure there was a difference in practice. Those SMTP servers would do a DNS lookup before accepting the email.
When I set this sort of thing up, I'd get myself a hostname on an internal subdomain. But that was a truly miserable experience. It was a multi-stage form submission on a server I imagine to be the closest possible relation to an actual potato. It was soul-destroyingly slow. Alternatively, you could just pretend your machine was hpe.com - the hostname was valid, even if the IP was totally wrong, and the SMTP server would accept it.
My guess is that there was a bunch of stuff that pre-dated the HP/HPE split and they took the quick and dirty option whenever the old internal domain name got yanked during the changeover. And if your process runs as root, you get root@hpe.com and hope there's something in the subject/body to identify the specific machine.
Cronjobs often run as root. If the host has is configured to send emails when a cronjob is completed it will default to sending it to user@domain where the user is the user the cronjob runs as, and the domain is what was configured in the cron configuration.
Minor nitpicky correction: cron only sends an email if there's any stdout of the job.
This is an important distinction because if you have configured mail forwarding, your cron jobs should be configured to output only on error.. then any emails are actionable.
Moreutils has a great command `chronic` which is a wrapper command like `time` or `sudo`, ie. you just run `chronic <command>`. It'll supress stdout and stderr until the command exits at which point it will print only if the exit code was non-zero.
I copied the same idea in my static collection of sysadmin utilities:
https://github.com/skx/sysbox/
Or something like "ab-production@company.com", where ab is whatever a mage system.
That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails — and to a CEO no less. I wish all my emails were so clear, direct, and personable.
: Edit : The OP has history until recently - My message is off base and in the wrong context. Apologies.
I feel like I'm in crazy town...
Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com would go to me. This was a bad idea, I'm sorry. I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you, not to me. I think that makes more sense.
My apologies. Signed, new guy.
This was
> That is one of the most beautifully crafted “I did something dumb” emails
Why ? What is happening if you can't email your boss/upper on the regular like that ?
"Hey, I'm gonna be late today, ate too many burritos last night and had to visit the hospital"
BOSS : Great idea, thanks
> PROFOUND!
> What is happening if you can't email your boss/upper on the regular like that ?
In a 40 person startup or small company, sure. In a 400 person company, the guy at the top is a few levels removed from "your boss" to be emailing with "on the regular".
OP had Jobs as his CEO for 20 years (hired in 1991, until Jobs passed in 2011), and says this was the only time Jobs directly emailed with him (of course, 400 people in 1991 was the smallest the company would be during that time, it would only grow from there).
> OP had Jobs as his CEO for 20 years (hired in 1991, until Jobs passed in 2011), and says this was the only time Jobs directly emailed with him (of course, 400 people in 1991 was the smallest the company would be during that time, it would only grow from there).
You're right, I had to dig into OPs history to find that. I take back what I said. He gets every pass he wants, and now it makes sense.
Idolizing steve jobs, or anyone running such an evil corp is honestly just evil as well. Apart from bullying potential competitors, Apple is at top of the list for running an extensive mass surveillance on all of it's users
I think it’s less idolizing and more just interesting to have anecdotes about household name celebrities
Are you really unable to see why someone would have trepidation about emailing something silly like that to Steve Jobs? Use your imagination.
No I agree thus is wierdly pathetic and absurd
I hate this pandering garbage.
The context changes when you see the OP devoted a lot of his life to it. God forbid we don't encourage that here.
I was an early employee at a startup and happened to share a similar name and initials with the guy who eventually became CFO. oooo boy - lots of receipts and approval emails sent my way. I would forward/delete and we'd laugh about it.
Then we started to get big and it became less funny. Not my fault, and nobody blamed me, but one week we had a quarterly sales meeting and the company flew in 50+ reps from around the country... Those folks can spend money. I did my best to avoid reading, but receipts for extravagant food/drinks were hard to ignore.
That beats my similar anecdote.
At a high-profile place, I too used an automated IT thing to make a first-name email alias for myself, and there was a semi-famous person there with the same first name.
It played out much like this story: I started getting email for the VIP, so I told them, and switched it over to them. I don't recall them being as gracious as Steve Jobs that time. Then, the only other interaction I had with them was them during my time there, was them declining my request to participate in something. :)
I did something very similar, but the effects were different - people who intended to send mail to other people with my first name had my new distribution list (I created a distribution list with myname@company.com with myself as the only member) pop up as the first thing in their autocomplete.
I started to receive mail across the entire company for people who typed "myname<TAB>".
I deleted the distribution list a few minutes later.
You did the right thing handing over the alias, but yeah, getting the cold shoulder afterward stings a little
This post is particularly funny to me as well as I also had a very common name@apple.com email and I would often get sensitive emails, including travel info, sent to me - despite the fact that I had worked there longer than most peers.
I eventually grew so annoyed with it that I ended up surrendering the email to said person as it was a losing battle.
A colleague had an email when they started that was very similar to an SVP. When they highlighted the confusion, it got fixed promptly.
I have a colleague in a big tech firm whose email address is derived from his initials, resulting in the glorious: "svp@<company>.com"
Needless to say, he sometimes gets emails he shouldn't.
If anything, all it taught me was that nobody at the company would bother to check directory before emailing.
Now that the company uses Slack however, I imagine there’s a lot less confusion.
Was it this guy?
https://xkcd.com/1279/
This was such a great story.
Steve was a mischievous person himself, so surely a part of him respected this.
My first real job my boss told me "Everyone fucks up, it's ok, when you do your first big fuck up... just be honest, and tell me."
3 years later I accidentally took down all the ATMs for one of the largest consumer banks in America for a while in the middle of the night.
My boss came in "Hey you finally did it, you took longer than most, but that was a good one!" and that was all that was ever said about it.
You misspelled “sociopathic” pretty severely, for what it’s worth.
LOL the guy parked in handicapped spaces and let’s celebrate his mischief, aiiight y’all go off.
This was dead, I vouch for this not because I agree with it. But to show what HN has been to Steve jobs in the past 12 years.
And honestly a lot of the praise in this thread is a recent shift.
This is poorly phrased, but cuts at the heart of it. He was a narcissist, and a colossal asshole, and all around an awful human being...
But he was a very good businessman who made a lot of money, and that's what's important.
you and i certainly have very different ideas of what an "awful" human being looks like
and i hate to play mr. ceo defender but "a very good businessman who made a lot of money" is selling him rather short, i think. he developed several products that radically changed the paradigm of computing and consumer electronics. that deserves a certain degree of veneration, i think. he didn't get rich by jacking up the price of insulin or dumping chemical waste into rivers or selling petroleum products or developing a human psychology-hacking enterprise to sell ads.
For the insulin thing, maybe you are thinking of Martin Shkreli. What he did got him in prison more than he got him rich.
For the pollution thing, the truth is that many of those who got rich polluting the rivers and such actually produced lots of innovation. Plastics fit your description, and I think few things have been more of a paradigm shift than plastics.
I get you with the ads business, but Google made a revolutionary search engine, Amazon disrupted e-commerce. I have a hard time defending Facebook/Meta but they have their fair share of innovation.
Almost all "very good businessman who made a lot of money" actually made great things, that's how you make a lot of money doing business. Though usually, there is a dark side, and Steve Jobs is no exception. You can also make a lot of money just being an asshole, think crime lords, or Martin Shkreli, but it often doesn't end well.
pharmabro went to prison for sec fraud, not the daraprim hike
Well, sort of. Matt Levine noted at the time that penalties for fraud are usually based on damages. Shkreli's fraud had no damages (and his legal team, obviously, emphasized this), but people hated him, so he was sentenced based on unusual factors.
That's the justice system for you.
He did not develop any products. He hired people who hired other people to come up with the ideas and then make them.
taking ideas and making them, i.e., translating said ideas and said "makes" into consumer-ready and profitable products at high quality and massive scale, is not exactly running a lemonade stand and certainly isn't just a flick of the magic wand.
sure, he wasn't John von Neumann. fine. certainly one hell of a visionary and one hell of an executive, though, and a sharp and insightful person. for anyone here who hasn't yet seen it, check out "steve jobs: the lost interview". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m68auPIPRk&t=1s
jobs wasn't a charlatan and he was certainly no slouch.
I think it's pretty well documented that Jobs had direct input into product design. But also, hiring and managing people effectively to produce novel products is part of producing those products.
Of course Steve Jobs had character flaws and made mistakes but this meme that he was some kind of Stalin character sending people to the gulags is an ignorant joke.
Steve Jobs was deeply loved and respected by his family, friends, and colleagues. People who knew him intimately, who lived and worked with him every day for decades in many cases.
IMO it makes more sense to judge people by their worst than their best behavior. A monster who's deeply loved by his family is still a monster. I didn't read "Small Fry" by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, but the picture painted in the reviews of that memoir is scathing and heart breaking. He was a terrible father to her and he knew it.
I think he was all of those things, but also could be the opposite of those things, too.
Humans are complex and when you already changed the course of history by 25 or whatever, you are going to be even more complex.
I don’t idolize Steve Jobs but I do find him to contrast positively against other similar figures like Gates and Ellison. Low bars, I know. But I guess I wanted to defend that people can have a soft spot for Jobs without ever making a dime from any of his endeavors.
There's a great interview of Allen Baum, high school friend of Wozniak and peripherally involved in the early years of Apple (he pilfered the HP stock room to supply Woz with parts for the Apple 1 & 2 prototypes). He was a roommate with Jobs for one summer and, notably, doesn't say anything bad about him over the course of the three hour interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN02z1KbFmY
He screwed Woz out of money before he was even rich, and denied his daughter was his own. They are all pricks.
They're definitely all human. We should all strive to pass tests like the ones jobs failed, but not hold anyone to their absolutes.
People are complex, with good and bad areas, which is precisely what makes cults of personality problematic. And the discourse around some people (Jobs in particular) is waaaay more cultish than is healthy.
And this particular anecdote is the poster child for it.
'Printing out and framing the response' as the daydream reaction to receiving that e-mail is wild, even with the caveats.
That still doesn’t imply that people cut him slack strictly because of profits received, which was my only point.
He made a lot of clients very happy with the products they bought. Products that are not just small gimmicks, but something they use every day as their main drivers in work and personal lives. And yes, since we've seen Apple with and without him twice already, there's enough information to suggest it was his personal effect.
So is being asshole to a few thousand employees worse or better than improving life of tens of millions (at least) with great products that they use everyday? Not an easy question to answer. But it's certainly not just about money and shareholder value.
He also changed the world. We are all flawed people. At least Steve didn’t pretend otherwise, unlike Bill Gates who fancies himself some altruist, but in fact is evil. Aside from the Epstein allegations and likely reasons for his divorce, he has done some very questionable things to black and brown people in the name of “health.”
https://www.afribundance.com/2023/04/03/bill-gates-is-fundin...
> The fact that most research participants and their families are unaware that they are part of a vaccine trial, leaves no room for justice or compensation.
What an absolute load of tripe.
Straight from disease surveillance being a bad thing (it isn't) to this drivel /eyeroll.
Disease surveillance helps stop potential pandemics before the cost of addressing them and the damage the can cause, including loss of life, reaches colossal proportions. Recommended reading: The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett.
I note how the conspiratorial assertion of Africans being used, in effect, as guinea pigs is entirely unsupported by any evidence whatever. Vaccine trials happen everywhere, not just in Africa, and no national healthcare system in Africa blindly accepts vaccines as if people were experimental animals.
Did you give informed consent yourself for the childhood vaccinations you received?
34 years at Apple/Next. Amazing tenure!
$$$$$
Yes, that is one of the main incentives for working.
Whenever I find someone at my company who has worked there over 30 years it's usually because of company doesn't pay enough to retire.
I suspect unless you have a gambling problem, that "34 years at Apple/Next" would be enough to retire on.
34 years? I have 10 years at a couple of FAANGs, and got $3M in stock, with maxed out 401k, etc. I am having thoughts about retiring early, maybe in 5 years. Long time Apple employees could definitely retire after 10 years. He most likely stayed there because he liked the job.
[flagged]
When did Apple start issuing stock/RSUs? Probably only in 2004 when Google got rich
https://contracts.justia.com/companies/apple-111/contract/95...
2003, when the share price was $0.37
$0.37 is the split-adjusted price, it was never actually quoted that low at the time (for anyone wondering if Apple really used to be a penny stock in the early 2000s).
Nit: share price was not $0.37, there's been a couple stock splits since.
In case anyone is curious, AAPL has split a combined 56-to-1 since 2003.
Jesus! Folks in the 30 years prior must be fuming
You could also have bought $1,000 worth of stock at the time and it would be worth one million today (since 1995 with reinvested dividends, source ChatGPT). Up to you whether the 32 years spent in the office makes the money more worthwhile to you.
Exactly how does one purchase $1,000 in stock of a company never listed on a stock exchange? NeXt was never public.
For the love of God, use the right tool. Portfolio back testers are a dime a dozen and easy to use and get 100% accurate answers. LLMs are the wrong tool to get investment expertise from.
Apple was, though. They went public in 1980. The IPO price, adjusted for splits, was a little under $0.10 per share. Ignoring any dividends, etc. your $1000 today is the equivalent of over 10,000 shares of Apple, worth almost $2 million today.
Whilst working in corporate I tried to get matt@apple.com which was showing as free, but in fact somebody in retail had claimed it. Good for them!
I had mark@apple.com during my time there, accidentally got added to one of the exec’s threads from Tim and felt pretty silly (and didn’t read anything in that thread, couldn’t delete it fast enough, had to email Tim to explain)
There are a lot of stories like this where people accidentally get emails and then not read them. Why wouldn't you read the email?
Because that’s the story you hear. The story that happened might be different.
I loved my job at Apple and I don’t know what level of surveillance they have on the work computers. It’s just absolutely not worth the risk.
One reason: everything is insider trading.
What possible upside is there to reading it? The potential downside is getting fired. I’d delete it too
Really feels like the sender should be the one at risk and not the receiver.
i nabbed complaints@apple.com for a while. that was pretty scarring actually.
I’m interested in reading the rest of this story.
sorry! that might get me in trouble. i didn't get in trouble for registering the alias, though i did remove it after getting one too many disturbing emails.
that didn't stop me from registering it again at my next employer, where i received more complaints, but in this case they were less out there and i actually knew the people who could do something about them (smaller company, support shadowing shifts), and there i was eventually able to wire the alias into their official process after forwarding enough of them to the people i knew.
I was mikel@apple.com for about a decade. I never got misdirected mail, probably because there aren’t all that many people with the first name "Mikel." The only other one I personally know of is Mikel Bancroft, who works at Franz, inc.
Somewhere out there is a very proud retail Matt with a prime slice of Apple email real estate
I managed to claim my 4-letter-first-name@apple.com. Not having an English name definitely helps.
What if a new employee was named Steve Teve?
I first learned about the ability to apply for custom aliases at my university after noticing a guy I knew didn't have the usual pattern — first 5 of last name, first name initial, and nothing or else numbers 2+ depending upon your order in line. So I was 'millej3'.
Then I thought about the guy's name: D___ Hoover.
He had applied for, and got, 'hoover'.
I had a colleague, also at a university, where the policy was first 4 of surname, then first name initial. Her name was S____ Cuntin. Yes, they actually issued it.
I'm in my 40s so bit of a grey beard now, but I worked with the real grey beards at University of Michigan. Something like 75k active staff and students, and more than 600k living alumni, yet their email addresses were like bob@umich.edu. Setting up the first campus email server came with privileges.
I don't get it, what's wrong with "hooved"?
I got an alias setup for my uni address. Although it asked where it should go, so I just directed it directly to my Gmail.
My inbox was closed after graduation. My forwarding alias worked for years after.
Unrelated fact, a university ending email domain is enough to prove student status for a lot of software.
>Unrelated fact, a university ending email domain is enough to prove student status for a lot of software.
When Facebook first came out, it was the only way I could get an account.
Heh. I have a somewhat related story.
In the market we sell into, mergers, acquisitions and spin-outs are the norm. People shift employers all the time without changing offices. It's a whole Thing.
USUALLY this is somewhat drama-free, and USUALLY there's not an issue with email addresses, but this is not a story about the usual case.
Most places now seem to use the firstname.lastname@corp.com style of address. This is a good idea, and creates collisions less often than flastname@ style addresses would. However, one of my customers -- someone who had been happily a first.last@companyA.com user -- got acquired by an org that insisted on the old style flast@companyB.com addresses.
I will not provide the name of my customer, but the problem that ensued was of the same type, and yet a bit more severe, than it would have been if his name were "Steve Hithead."
To this day, though, his address honors the local convention. STANDARDS MUST BE FOLLOWED NO MATTER WHAT, apparently.
I worked at a place where legal swooped in and banished reuse of email addresses for an odd long period (like 7 years).
That created problems with contractors as any interruption in service required a new address. So we had a few John.Smith183@example.com in the org.
Hahahaha. I wish HN allowed the use of the joy emoji in response for these types of posts.
I imagine that certain people of a particular temperament might deliberately leave such a thing be, perhaps for their own amusement, or maybe because they consider it to say more about the company than it says about them. Is this individual such a person?
s(teve)2@next.com
Mind blown. I remember getting very excited that my teacher in 1991 sent an email. I didn't see the email or use that computer. Just the concept that the email was sent to another country. Weird I barely remember what the email was about. But something along the lines of science and contacting another school.
OP says: "suddenly a whole cavalcade of misdirected email was winding up in my inbox"
I wonder what kind of email flooding this was like in 1991. 1/day? 1/week?
I had a UUCP email and news feed back in the early 90's, when I was a teenager. I'd get several emails a week from other nerds. I imagine someone at an actual tech company got many more!
Why only first name? Should have set up `jobs@apple.com` to forward directly to Steve Jobs too and let the comedy ensure.
This was at NeXT, not Apple.
Sorry, jobs@next.com. The joke works either way. :)
I’m surprised his estate or Apple doesn’t have steve.jobs pointing at something.
I once did this. I (Peter) had pclark@adroll and a co-founder of the 750 ish person company I worked at had peter@adroll. Other Peter was widely known as PK.
I jokingly emailed IT and asked to have P(eterclar)K@adroll and to my surprise they gave it to me. They even asked me if I thought it would be confusing for proper PK and I feigned confusion.
I promptly got a lot of email for proper PK and since he was co-founder, CFO and board member I decided this wasn’t a funny prank.
Great story, put a smile on my face.
If this kind of thing is up your alley, check out techemails.com
I love these because I was involved in some of the deals they post about and I finally get to see behind the scenes of what was being talked about :)
Wow this is such a neat website! Thanks for sharing!
> Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb and
> set up a mail alias so that steve@next.com
> would go to me.
> This was a bad idea, I'm sorry.
> I've changed it to steve@next.com goes to you,
> not to me. I think that makes more sense.
> My apologies.
> Signed, new guy.
What a great example of how to own a mistake, apologize, communicate, and get it fixed. I can think of so many past situations with coworkers that would have been so much better handled with quick communication like this.
It really is the perfect message. It's effective, efficient, impactful and human at the same time. No wonder they've had such a long tenure at Apple.
Owning a mistake is amazing, actually I do believe it's one of the most important skills you need to learn in any profession. You won't learn it in University, only when you think the world is on the line.
It's a super nice example. Explain the situation as early as possible, don't be afraid and roll with it.
The fawning over the response bothers me no end.
Other super power phrases: I'm sorry, it's my fault, I forgive you, can you forgive me?
You might have jumped into the wrong thread of mine.
It must have been a big difference between working for a cutting edge tech company like next and a regular company back then.
Steve Hayman, long time NeXT/Apple employee who just retired last week from Apple having started in 1993 with NeXT.
His WebObjects demo from 2001 is one of the most entertaining tech demos I've ever seen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfWnDJtUyrw
Oh my god what a gem: “it’s got a steep learning curve which is good because that means you learn a lot in a short period of time” hahaha
Absolutely stealing this
The idea of any official Apple presentation today beginning with a humorous rendition of _God Save the Queen_ is so absurd I can't help but smile at what we've lost.
In many ways, WebObjects feels ahead of its time.
Sometimes I wonder what happened to these ideas.
AFAIK, WebObjects is still in use inside Apple, but also Project Wonder and WOLips have kept the tooling active (it all stopped working after Apple depreciated the Obj-C/Java bridge) and modern libraries for WebObjects.
It was probably no better than most of the other frameworks we have. Most things aren't. In a set of lots of things, it's more fun to speculate about the ones that we haven't seen, but there's a good chance they're about the same as the ones we have.
Steve is easily the most entertaining conference speaker I’ve had the pleasure to attend in person. He was a regular at MacSysAdmin for many years, and always in the Friday afternoon slot when you need a jolt of energy. Good times.
What a great video :). Interesting how some old ideas are new again. Thank you for sharing this and congrats to Steve Hayman for his tenure at Apple!
"It's got a steep learning curve but that's ok, because it means you learn a lot in a short period of time."
Watched only a short time, but the phone call were he pretends to be a lifeline for "who wants to be a millionaire" cracked me up.
At one point he asks someone in the front row if EOF is patented, and then blurts out "software patents are evil" amongst other things.
Really refreshing to see.
- OP mentioned this briefly with the plans to expand in 2021 [1] (Good old google still useful : [ "Steve next com" before:2025 ] )
- Also excluding rare words from the search allows finding several AI Summarizers for Hacker News [ "Steve next com" -amazed ]
[1] https://blog.hayman.net/2021/02/07/business-cards-i-have-kno...
So Steve was against haptic feedback on the iPhone? I may have to turn it off in that case.
Like many CEOs, Steve Jobs' primary skills seemed to be motivation and decision making, which means not always being correct and indeed sometimes confidently incorrect. But crucially gives direction & certainty for a company. He also didn't like the idea of third party apps and now iPhones are basically platforms for third party apps to run on.
I never had an iPhone but I think I disabled all haptic feedback on my Android phones and tablets since forever. I find it very annoying. My phone vibrates only to signal messages and calls. BTW, I don't type on the keyboard, I swype so I have less need for feedbacks.
Ha. My version of this is that Jimmy Wales has once emailed me, while I have never emailed him. He was weighing in on, of all things, whether the main page for "Georgia" should be the country or the US state.
Despite P&G, people tend to assume my name ends Or instead of Er, so I thought it'd be smoother to get firstname@domain.tld
Turns out folks used to firstinitiallastname@ are confused pretty much every time I tell them to get me at firstname@
My interactions with Steve Jobs came earlier, when he wasn't quasi-mythical, but was already a PITA. A typical interaction with Steve Jobs in 1976:
"Hi! Are you Steve Wozniak?"
"No, I'm Steve Jobs."
"Okay ... umm ... where is Steve Wozniak?"
I suspect people's preference for those who were actually building things, over selling them, may have twisted SJ's character ... I mean, more twisted than it already was.
Ironically, two people I worked with in the early Apple days -- Steve Jobs, enough already said, and Jef Raskin, who designed the first incarnation of the Macintosh -- both died of pancreatic cancer.
I actually miss Jef. We lived together for a while, as I was finishing Apple Writer and my frequent commutes from Oregon were becoming impractical.
Here's a Jef Raskin story I think almost no one knows. Jet resolved to design an electric car. He packed a bunch of 12 volt car batteries into a relatively small, lightweight car, and, after removing the ICE, rigged an electric motor in its place.
First test drive, Jef tried to descend a hill, only to discover the car's brakes, which until then had gotten an assist from the ICE, were nowhere near adequate to stop the suddenly-massive battery bank. Very scary, briefly out of control, but no harm done.
Tangentially, there remains a test electric car gathering {r,d}ust in one of Google's parking lots, from the early years, that I believed "belonged" to Sergey. IIRC it's at 37.417743, -122.082186
I wonder if they'll ever move it out, put it in a museum or something.
So the mythical Apple car project actually goes way back :)
Did he take these screenshots decades ago and hold onto them all this time?
Same also wondering this. Also wondering why so few are wondering about them.
Was wondering the same thing
This is how I find out next.com returns a 301 to apple.com. Fascinating!
For a while a few years ago they had it misconfigured and you could browse apple.com at next.com -- so pages like next.com/ipad worked.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130301092249/http://www.next.c...
It would be a cool tribute to redirect next.com to the Mac Studio product page, as the closet descendant of the NeXTcube. Similarly, Apple still has control of pasemi.com - if only Apple’s chip team had a similar webpage…
When C-Cube Microsystems was bought by LSI Logic in 2001, they grandfathered the old C-Cube e-mail policy of first/last initial. I ended up with the sweet e-mail address, re@lsil.com. Pretty good for a fairly large company.
When Abhi Talwalkar became CEO, they changed to firstname.lastname. My manager, who had a 17 character last name, was not pleased.
Most wholesome HN post this year
Two days into my first job at a large global organisation, I got send the internal budget for the entire company. Turned out the the CEO's email address was "tfa@our.domain" and mine was "tf@our.domain". ups.
That's a fun little story
These two short emails are the best tech flex I’ve ever seen ;-) Nice one and enjoy your retirement!
The audio snippet was value enough to visit this page. Awesome story too!
Nice story! I loved reading it.
When open mail relays used to exist I used to route all my mail through whitehouse.gov.
That’s so cool. :)
What a great career you’ve had to work with some really legendary people.
It's a really cool story, but I can't help but feel a lot has be idealized around regular people who did extraordinary things.
I mean, Steve Jobs had to work with people, but he wasn't some prophet. He was a talented guy, who had his failures and successes, more of the latter.
It is a cool story, but if my boss of 15 years ago becomes world famous, I'm not going to personally treasure the email he sent with 4 words, possible 2 automated, write a blog post about it.
I'm just going to giggle to myself a little. Again, I might be in the minority here.
I’d hypothesize you would if you thought he was a great boss, and the opportunity to work there was unique.
Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction.
Again, I like the guy, but you say this :
> to get something so visionary
In what world are 4 words visionary ?
"Great idea, thank you"
You're idealizing a boss you worked with..
I assume they mean the email at the top of the post, with the photo and embedded audio.
> Just reading that email felt magical to me - to get something so visionary on your first day at a company in the early 90s would’ve convinced me they were leading me in the right direction
I have a vision, not 20/20, but it involves you working for me. Good idea.
Write a blog about me when I'm gone.
The OG voice messages.
Heh - I had something similar when I started at Microsoft - but from my wife (now ex), who was emailing "[myGivenFirstName]@microsoft.com" for some reason, thinking that I was the only person with that name at Microsoft (uh-huh) and furious that I wasn't answering her, when I was away during initial onboarding...
How can one tell for sure if an email is from a specific person?
That was a very sweet post, thank you.
dre@apple.com got some interesting emails and iMessages after Apple acquired Beats.
It's a great idea.
Honestly, this belongs in the museum of "wholesome oopsies in tech."
32 years at Apple... which immediately made me look up Apple's share price.
In 1993 in was about 50c (there may have been stock splits since), and it peaked at about $255 in December last year.
Great story.
Have to ask…what’s up with that avatar for Tim Cook?
It's his image in Apple's internal employee directory, also used for emails. It's an old image, probably taken in the early 2000s.
Oh this is about email. Thought it might be from the Xerox PARC tour, or the Sherlock app, etc.
I applaud the simple, blunt honesty from the very beginning:
> Hi - I'm new here. I did something dumb
Ok well the rest of us got emails at 2am demanding we Come in and fix some random slide in a presentation. And the world all thought this was “fun and quirky”.
One thing that struck me reflecting on this is how much of Steve Job's mythos is about his harsh unrelenting treatment of his employees. I think notes like this shows that Steve must have shown a lot of gratitude as well which goes unnoticed because its less exciting to talk about.
A quick and nice acknowledgment in an email is "a lot of gratitude"?
I don't see it.
I emailed Steve Jobs right after he came back to Apple and suggested they make a carry-able computer that could project the interface and keyboard input to any glass surface.
I'm not sure how a glass surface would work given how lasers interact with glass.
But this style of keyboard has been done in various forms as far back as '92. They're awful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projection_keyboard
At that point, Steve was just starting to kill all the “moonshots” and “cool tech but who is really going to buy it” products like the Newton and OpenDoc. Even if he read the email, there’s no way he’d be interested in something like that at the time.
In 2010 I emailed Steve Jobs about an idea for improving iWork 09. I forgot what it was. No reply ever.
Did you get a reply?
and? did he reply?
Yes, "thanks," from NeXTmail.
Honestly, kind of sad that Tim Cook’s reply was so generic. I don’t think I’m off base in saying this, and from personal experience, he is really not connected to the people at the company.
The experience as CEO of a company with 10e2-10e3 headcount is a lot different than the experience with 10e4-10e6 headcount.
Any number of negative employees would be troubling, but I admit 9.9 million of them would be especially bad.
But the latter can often afford a secretary, if not a team of secretaries, to handle these sorts of things, with permission to add his signature.
Personally I'd either say nothing or farm the research out to an assistant for long tenure employees.
That's actually his personality based on my knowledge of interactions with him. He is sort of a workaholic robot.
There's no evidence that Steve Jobs knew Steve Hayman from Adam. "This was the only email I ever personally received from Steve Jobs."
Hayman did a lot of WWDC presentations of WebObjects which was the only thing really keeping NeXT alive prior to the merger. He mentions elsewhere that towards the end Jobs was mostly at Pixar and NeXT was reduced to selling $50,000 WebObjects licenses but also had its first profitable quarter.
A big part of me has suspected, especially after reading biographies about him, that Pixar was simply better aligned with his creative side. NeXT was a business, one he knew well, but Pixar made things with computing and I think that really appealed to Jobs.
All speculation of course.
He probably only knew him as Shayman
It would have been funnier if he replied with "Great idea, thank you."
I love how sarcastic this reply comes across. Did it feel at all like that in the moment or was it received as earnest?
I didn’t pick up any sarcasm at all. It was a good idea which clearly hadn’t occurred to SJ himself, but would have been obvious once seeing the suggestion
On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”
I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever.
When I explained to him how flexible NeWS was, he told me "I don't need flexibility -- I got my window system right the first time!"
But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? He just wasn't in the mood to be told that he could have a better user interface.
So I gave him one of the a "NeRD" buttons I'd made for NeWS NeRDs, which he appreciated.
Up to that time, NeXT was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!
Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!
Do you mean like a radial menu? I love those and I don't understand why more software doesn't use them. The GTA V weapon wheel is a great interface for selecting a weapon, and they are really fast to use in Blender.
Yes that's right! The pie menus in Blender are wonderful, as is the whole Blender app, ecosystem, and community.
Here's the paper we published in 1988 showing that pie menus were 15% faster and had significantly lower error rates than linear menus, which I 3/4 unsuccessfully tried to explain and demonstrate to Steve Jobs. (At least I got three "that sucks" to one "Wow, that’s neat" out of him. ;)
An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus. Jack Callahan, Don Hopkins, Mark Weiser, and Ben Shneiderman, ACM SIGCHI '88:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...
The purpose of visualization is insight, not pictures: An interview with visualization pioneer Ben Shneiderman:
https://medium.com/multiple-views-visualization-research-exp...
Here is a 30 year retrospective of pie menus that I wrote 7 years ago (the 37 year anniversary of the paper is coming up in a few days on May 15):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1
Lots of demos of different kinds of pie menus here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc&list=PLX66BqHq0q...
It's near impossible to convince people like Steve Jobs and organizations like Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Open Software Foundation, and even less open-to-outside-ideas open source projects like GIMP, to adopt unconventional ideas like pie menus.
One of Blender's outstanding qualities is that they listen to their users and don't suffer from NIH syndrome, fortunately!
I got frustrated at trying to get pie menus into official corporate user interface toolkits, and took a job in the game industry at Maxis, where you're not only allowed but even required to roll your own user interface, and got them into SimCity and The Sims:
The Sims, Pie Menus, Edith Editing, and SimAntics Visual Programming Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-exdu4ETscs
Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold:
https://donhopkins.medium.com/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a27...
X11 SimCity Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jvi98wVUmQA
Multi Player SimCityNet for X11 on Linux:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fVl4dGwUrA
Micropolis Online (SimCity) Web Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8snnqQSI0GE
I have absolutely no respect for Tim Cook anymore. I understood that Cook was the operations guy and not a product guy like Jobs.
I even have to begrudgingly admit that he has to navigate the political waters in both China and the US doing things I don’t like.
But he consistently makes Apple’s products worse in the name of money - advertising on the phone, malicious compliance in the EU, what came out in the recent court case where he ignored Phil Schiller (head of App Store and long time a Apple employee) who suggested they do the right thing as far as the courts ruling, and how the experience is worse not being able to buy third party content (kindle) and subscriptions within apps. Well you can now. The Kindle app has been updated.
Of course I don’t care if they skim 30% from games, loot boxes and coins where 90% of their revenue comes from.
I wouldn’t consider it an honor to get an email from Cook. The enshittification of iOS is completely on him.
The current MacBooks and iMacs are the best computers they have every sold.
I agree. But how did like not being able to click on “Buy Book” from the Kindle app until three days ago when the court forced them?
How do you like all of the ads in the App Store and they are thinking about adding more?
How did you like having an 8GB MacBook and the overpriced upgrades until Apple Intelligence forced them to have 16GB minimum?
How did you like being stuck with Lightning ports until the EU forced them?
And the malicious compliance in the EU.
> How did you like being stuck with Lightning ports until the EU forced them?
Didn’t make much difference for me, in fact I still use a phone with lightning.
The rest don’t really matter for me, I have not downloaded anything from the App Store after the initial phone setup and I don’t spend money on subscriptions. Apple being hostile to open platforms and competitors is a forty year old story.
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Tim cook is not an inspirational figure, quite the opposite
Ok but for Pete’s sake, he was a CEO not a God - the geek hero worship is a bit excessive
On the one hand, an amusing anecdote about an interaction with someone that ended up becoming massively famous does come across as somewhat noteworthy, but on the other hand, the fact that Job's response basically translates to: "Um, ok." does make this kind of... sad?
Side effects of living in a world where wealth and power have become virtues. I think we subconsciously judge our own value based on how many degrees we came to stepping onto the world's "stage".
This is how I felt. A blog article 34 years later about a interaction so trivial that Jobs probably forgot it even happened 10 seconds later. I cringe a little. But hey whatever makes people happy.
Hey, running into someone who is exceptional and having a fun story to tell about it is reasonable and doesn't deserve this negative energy.
That time I ran into Larry Bird, or just missed having dinner with Douglas Adams, or the time I talked to Jonny Kim-- they're little markers of time in my existence. I know they're not gods, and I've done pretty cool things myself, but I'm still in awe of the cool stuff they've done.
I have a famous person anecdote I enjoy telling.
More than 20 years ago now, my brother (who was maybe 9) had his friend over for lunch and the night before my brother had spent the night at his house.
So my mother asks what they got up to, and the friend says they were playing water pistol fights with his sister’s boyfriend, “Wa-kin”, who was visiting.
We then ask what the boyfriend does, and he responds that he’s an actor. (Just be aware now that we live in Johannesburg, South Africa.)
So we say, cool, has he acted in anything we might know?
And friend says something like “Oh, lots of movies, Gladiator, Signs, others…”.
At which point I remember thinking, “no way!” and “so that’s how Joaquin is pronounced” (as I’d only ever seen it written).
Turns out the friend’s sister was a model living in New York which explained the situation I would never have guessed.
Kevin Nash and I peed next to one another in an airport bathroom one time.
Well don't leave us hanging.
I completely agree. Both emails from Steve Jobs and Tim Cook are totally impersonal and routine. It's entirely possible they weren't even "personally sent" by either.
There's nothing wrong with the stories, just the overall sentiment behind them.
Steve was a temperamental guy. It's not geek hero worship, just being afraid of your boss, plus the timidness and vulnerability of being a new hire.
Have Jobs ever been a compter geek hero? Wozniak is the one people raise to the skys.
Steve is the hero of salesmen, consultants and CEO-s, should not be a hero for geeks and actual developers.
Geeks and developers can have multiple dimensions to their personality.
I respect Steve Jobs for his ruthless and uncompromising focus on quality and his attention to detail. He wasn't just a sales guy.
I mean, the salesman-CEO/founder is way better at selling themselves as a hero of tech & innovation than the engineer-CTO/founder.
Sending every new user an email with a "very personal welcome" and audio message for example.
Steve Jobs knew how to ship products people want. I have no respect for developers in a corporate settings who don’t ship.
Steve: what would this product be like if it were magical?
Engineer: I don’t think we can build that with our current technology.
Steve: I don’t give a fuck. You’re a nerd who is meant to like inventing. Do it.
It’s really easy when we live in the world of the Mac, and the iPhone to say “Ah it was inevitable” but Steve’s approach to product is what got us here. He made sure that the GUI was computers, that capacitive touchscreens were smart phones.
Being arguably the greatest product guy and salesman of all time is some feat.
> After launch, MobileMe was widely panned, full of embarrassing bugs. Jobs gathered employees in an Apple auditorium and asked them, “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” And when his team started to answer, Job snapped, saying, “Why the F doesn’t it do that?” He spent the next hour berating the group, saying they had tarnished Apple’s reputation and that they should all hate each other for having let each other down. He then fired the head of the team and replaced him on the spot. Steve wasn’t happy at all. He clearly felt very deep shame and took it out on his team”
https://medium.com/initialized-capital/how-founders-must-cha...
Can you imagine “Apple Intelligence” being this bad under Jobs?
Contrast that with Cook…
“where can we put more ad units that make the product worse”
“Let’s ignore Phil Schiller’s advice, the judge’s court order and make the experience of paying outside of the App Store as shitty as possible”.
“Let’s keep our base model Macs at 8GB for over a decade to save a little money and get people to pay for upgrades”
I really hate Tim Cook.
We tell stories of things that are noteworthy. We find this to be entertaining.
Where are you seeing geek hero worship here?
Dude wrote a small anecdote on their blog and this is your response?
Yeah, a small anecdote on their blog after 34 years on the job. Does not seem like worship at all.
It is respect, not worship.
This is really something meaningful. You are bold and the lucky one to have direct message from one of the greatest innovator in history of human mankind. Congratulation.
It's interesting that they can just reassign an email alias to someone else without any approvals. Could this be a permissions oversight? Or could the person who designed the system thought that heck it's always permitted to reassign an email alias owned by the current user?
It was 1991. They were an up start tech company. It was a different time.
You could also register a domain for free by sending an email form to a bot. It was truly the wild frontier.
The sheer number of multi-million dollar value domains you could snag in those days was wild. All that ended when it changed to, IIRC, $200/2yr and everyone suddenly dropped all their parked domains.
We were all a bit high and mighty and believed commercial use of the Internet was an awful idea. So grabbing any domain for selling things (cars.com, movies.com, sex.com) was out of the question. We were so, so wrong.
The biggest factor is the small company… same could happen today.
And I'm sure it was the responsibility of a single person editing /etc/aliases in Emacs, not a big drawn out process too.
Everyone’s super concerned about security and control, but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom. Yes, be savvy about security, protect key assets, but “permissions oversight” about claiming an alias seems excessive.
You’ll have 1,000x more headaches and burned operational cash getting everyone to approve everyone else’s every step than handling one security incident in a decade. And even with very tight security, something will still happen. It’s best to have backups, a good restore plan, and a relaxed culture*. Or that’s what I think, anyway.
I’m in SME land though, not big tech. But then again, 99.99% companies are.
* common sense exceptions apply.
One of the biggest time sinks and "velocity" killers in BigTech, and sometimes also in MediumTech, is the need to get approval (sometimes multiple people's approvals) for absolutely everything. Often, approvers are among the most senior, busy people in the company, and "approving a dozen things" is not even top 100 on their list of things to do today. There are people who spend >75% of their time just "chasing" approvers and reminding them to please, please, please approve my Thing X so we can launch Product Y on time!
For sure. It kills projects and companies large and small.
In multinational megacorps this is more or less modus operandi. I am not even mad anymore, I realized this aint malice but simply inevitable as size goes up and time passes on.
The best companies that realize this can minimize it, but its inevitable.
I feel you. I keep hearing people in software say "wild west" when they mean "absence of paternalistic bureaucratic controls."
The virtual space is locked down so so so much harder than the physical because it's "free" to automate, but the vibe is it's outrageously uncontrollable. I get it when we're talking the whole Internet, but the same group of insiders as the physical space?
> but the best places I worked in were more concerned with freedom
Sure. But if that's the case why do you even have individual email? Make everything a group email and group IM. Not allowed to send messages to a specific person; can only send messages to everyone. What would happen?
Can you see the flaw in this logic? Email isn't only for discussing work projects. It needs to be private for discussions involving HR, legal, and other personnel matters.
Steve Jobs’s email was not taken away. A guy was allowed to register an alias self-service style. Everyone could reach Jobs on his email.
Registering an alias self-service style is fine. What's potentially problematic is changing that alias once it has become established. Please read my original comment again.
And every NeXT machine came with an email waiting in your inbox out of the box from sjobs@next.com complete with Lip Service voice message from Steve Jobs.
Of course you likely had no immediate way to reply to an internet email address like that at the time out of the box.
Even with the privacy concerns aside, you need individual mailboxes for reasons of maintaining organization.
I think your point would be better made if in your hypothetical, we still had individual mailboxes, but everyone could see into everyone else's mailbox.
The bigger issue is probably being allowed to set up an arbitrary one at _all_ without approvals. Once you have one, redirecting it is maybe not the biggest issue? Could still be problematic though.
This story is quite old, security culture in tech was really quite basic and forgotten in a lot of places. I would hope that a similar thing would not be allowed today at anything like a big company.
>security culture in tech was really quite non-existent
This is 1991, the actual number of people on the internet was tiny back then. Things like SMTP servers were commonly open relays (for some reason I'm remembering sendmail being an open relay out of the box).
A lot of the internet culture wasn't based on security, but of the premise you shouldn't be a dick.
It quickly changed in the next few years as the number of people online exploded.
Yep! A formative experience of my childhood was working out how to type SMTP commands over telnet and sending mail from billg@microsoft.com to my dad. Such "opportunities" vanished decades ago.
Fun times :)
Worked at an aerospace concern in the early 90s… for the first year or so there was no firewall. Yes, my Mac and PC directly on the internet with routable addresses.
I soon set up a website and webcam as they were shipped. CU-See-Me blew my mind. At some point I stood up a Quake server and invited friends to play. ;-)
Are you requesting a process and architecture retrospective on a company from 30 years ago? :-)
Took a while to get a first name @ company email address.
I work for a large company 50k employees (not in IT) with the standard email format <firstname>.<lastname>@company.com
The company has a automated way to change your email address if your name changes, so I changed my last name to @. which allowed me officialy change my email address to <firstname>.@company.com. Then raised an IT fault to get my email address 'fixed' and remove the . after my name.