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Ryan Wu

The weekend was packed and next week is full, so I did the fashionable thing and went the day it opened.

I came out thinking, again, that Steve Jobs was very, very good.

(Some of the film is below. Stop here if you would rather not.)

Jobs looks a little nervous in the interview. It is 1995 (NeXT is bought by Apple the following year). A lot of what he says still works as a reference for companies today, large or just starting.

What follows is how I understood it. Corrections welcome.

Marketing and sales lead the company only in businesses that are not a monopoly, like a cola company, because the product itself does not change very fast. That is where the leverage is. Technology is not like that.
If a company copies an idea from overseas and then puts the weight on technical R&D, the failure rate is going to be high. The weight is in the wrong place.

A company with a monopoly is not necessarily a big company. It might be a small idea nobody else has shipped, or a specific technology and architecture. On execution, I agree with the EZTABLE CEO: focus on the details of the product.

A lot of people think a good idea is 90% of the work. Execution is what actually matters.
Between a great idea and a great product there is great technology. Ideas evolve, and get better, while you are building them.
So you have to hire A-players. Those people push each other. Sometimes they argue. Sometimes they fight. That is good for the goal of the team.

A-players are also the hardest people to manage, so they need a leader (he is talking about himself).
An easy-to-manage A-player does not exist. The interviewer points out that a pile of people who followed Jobs at Apple later left. XDDDD A good software company wants a real culture, a positive loop across the team, and the best product it can get out of constant tries and failures. What happens more often is hiring the wrong people: people who can only execute, or who cannot sit with the details. They end up obeying a rough spec, get boxed in by it, and never put the value the product was supposed to carry into the user’s hands.

People often call Jobs a dictator. In the film he keeps saying the company belongs to the employees, not the boss. On the way home I remembered a piece I liked from a few days earlier: Why we call foreigners “individual heroes,” and also say foreigners understand teamwork better than Taiwanese people.

Jobs is a leader with a strong style. He is glad when the team hesitates. A member who will not compromise is help, not friction. He can also talk to the team straight, and talk them into walking the same direction. That is the right move. In the interview he says: “Real top talent does not need you to baby their ego.” Only a leader who says what they think gets a team that says what it thinks.

That article describes a pattern in Taiwanese industry: a group that does not dare to ask, a silence, and pressure on anyone who steps out to think or question. A cold chorus of cicadas becomes a quiet, compromised team. The problem is not only that the schools produce kids who do not ask. The team leader cannot accept someone who will not compromise (saving face, loving face, protecting a seat, muddled thinking, a bad temper — fill in your own). The ending is always the same high-pressure policy: everyone below, be quiet. A team like that will not ship a good product. It may not ship a product at all before the work is killed.

The content of the product matters far more than the process. The real soul is the content, not the process.
That lines up with something XDite wrote a while back, Maybe you should stop and listen to what the engineers are saying. A project manager who only tracks the schedule and does not care about the content or the culture can wreck a whole product.

The reverse is also true. What R&D understands cannot stop at the technology. It has to take the requirement and the human part into account, and then implement that with technical logic. Then the culture goes into the product, and the user can feel it. Which is the point above: A-players are the ones who can do this.

The people who actually understand the content are also the ones who can estimate what the product will cost.
Some managers or bosses treat R&D as an asset: the code works today, don’t fuss over the architecture, the schedule matters more.

A while later a new batch of burned-out R&D shows up, and the maintenance cost is frightening. That is the obvious result. The previous people thought too little, so the next people spend the effort to tear it down and rebuild, then add, then change. Those costs are hidden. You only see them if you look from the content. Otherwise you spend extra time and energy, and the product fails or misses the window.

Programming is going to be everywhere in the next ten years. Everyone should write programs.

Writing programs trains people to clarify their own thinking. People write programs because they want to share what they feel, and because they want a tool that lets them build their own world.
Steve Jobs in 1995, calling the 2012 Code Year trend while it was still heating up. In the interview he also talks about the next decade. He is very bullish on the network. Printers and personal computers, he says, will both be reshaped by it. He takes a shot at Microsoft along the way: good thing network technology is not owned by a company that does not innovate. He even predicts that the network will become an important medium for social life.

Today, in 2012, Facebook and Twitter — and later Apple’s AirPrint — still developed inside that field of view. Hard not to respect the foresight.

I sat down to jot a few thoughts and it is past 3am. I will add the rest when it comes back.