[jarjoura]

Unfortunately, I was only an intern then new-grad during those early aughts of Forstall's reign. He was quite a brilliant man, very quick-witted and always one step ahead of you. Steve Jobs entrusted all of Apple's coolest projects with him for that reason. So all the biggest demos you saw on stage were under Forstall's leadership at one point or another.

However, if you wanted to work on those cool projects, it meant you had to work with Forstall and he was intimidating to say the least. A mini-SJ people internally would call him. Any feature you were working on that needed SJ approval went through Forstall's monocle eye first.

On the one hand, he was one of the few leads that would remember my name and say hi to me when passing in the hall. On the other, I was scared to look him in the eye lol. I do think he held his reports to unreasonably high bars by expecting long hours of work and he seemed to find joy in seeing people squirm. It was weird.

[derangedHorse]

For some reason it's always the people who you try to avoid that end up learning your name the quickest. I knew a VP known to encourage harsh working conditions that I tried to steer clear of, but he always took the effort of remembering my name and coming over to my desk to say hi lol