[chrisrhee]

I contracted on-site in Cupertino for a year. They have 35,000 employees, so if you're looking to join a tiny start-up where everyone is 23 years old and best friends, you're not going to find that at Apple. Actually, I used the large crowds of employees to my advantage and basically "snuck" into the offices every day for the last few months I worked there when my security badge stopped working (long/uninteresting story.)

I've never worked for a big corporation, but working for Apple is probably like working for any other company with that size of a workforce. Some people love their job, some people are bored and a lot of it depends on which group/department you're in. I was a little turned off by the cubicle/office farms in some of the buildings, which are probably setup like that due to security.

I saw Steve Jobs a few times at the cafeteria. But he did not yell at me. Or anyone else.

[gjm11]

and basically "snuck" into the offices every day for the last few months: In the unlikely event that you haven't already read http://www.pacifict.com/Story/, you should. As should anyone else who doesn't immediately know what story that is from what I just said. It's simultaneously inspiring and horrifying. (More of the former.)

[chrisrhee]

Haha, yes, I read this a while back.

People with good intentions have been breaking into Apple's secure buildings in two different millenia now.

[davidalln]

Fantastic story, and it pointed out that there is a beyond excellent graphing calculator on my computer! No more Wolfram Alpha for x= equations!

[TY]

This is a fantastic story, it deserves its own HN thread!

I doubt that this would be possible in today's Apple though...

If FSJ commented on this, he would probably mention dispatching Moshe in a time travel machine :-)

[edw519]

One of the reasons I come to hn so much is for motivation when things get tough (which is often). I don't think I've ever read anything here that motivated me more.

This is already on my bulletin board. So the next time I opt for the "easy way out", I can look at this and remind myself not to be such a wimp.

Just a few of the gems inside:

The three of us spent the next six hours editing fifty thousand lines of code...It would have taken weeks for any one of us working alone.

Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive.

"This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo).

This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity.

It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product.

The secret to programming is having smart friends.

I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs."

programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices.

...we were in full crunch mode, working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week...If this story were a movie, you would now see the clock hand spinning and the calendar pages blowing away in the wind.

...it was a macho computer guy thing - we had never shipped a million copies of software before

I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked...We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work.

[Create]

The Graphing Calculator Story.mp4 54:26 - 3 years ago goog://

I find the story to be just the opposite: such behaviour of The Corporation is not motivating at all, in the productive sense. It is rather motivating to do something completely different from productive coding/work.

[unalone]

He's talking about the behavior of the employees who made the program.

[Create]

The problem is, that he lowers the bar, strongly encouraging the "management™"[1] to AAPLy the mushrooming[2] technique, which I believe they [did] do.

[1] imho the whole story is BS (because he was bound to bump into someone, if not when going to the bathroom). AAPL is one of the few public companies being openly secretive, and they are known to use [military grade, an HP heritage] security: you simply cannot clown around for long unwantedly.

[2] Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft

[zacharydanger]

And he's talking about the insidious behavior of Apple.

[Create]

I think you('ll) enjoy the play:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosencrantz_&_Guildenstern_...