I don't know enough about what it's like inside Apple now to say. Certainly from what I've heard there used to be a hackerly culture in the past. I remember reading how mystified and offended Gil Amelio was by it. But I don't know what things are like now. Is there anyone here who can talk about it? Is the atmos hackerly or corporate?
It's very corporate where I work (not in Cupertino, so no surprise). But everyone I've come across works very hard, not just engineers. And I couldn't agree more about no-one having any time, many people bring their MacBooks home and continue sending emails late into the evening (GMT) to people in HQ in Cupertino (who are eight hours behind).
EDIT: Going on the Apple jobs listing for Cupertino, there is plenty of openings for engineers.
No, it's not. That gets at the very essence of my original comment.
One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. They often invent new technologies to enable their products, but that's very different from thinking primarily about technology (a mistake, I would argue, that Google is guilty of frequently).
Taking as an example a project like Google Wave, I would even go as far as to say that a strong hacker culture and an obnoxious elitist culture of hiring only the best programmers can be serious detriments to a technology company. YMMV, but, culture-wise, I'd much rather build (and work for) an Apple than a Google.
Edit in reply to your reply: I thought it was any company that needs to have good software. But even so, surely Apple doesn't pay significantly more than Google (a hacker-centric company) and surely they're in roughly the same domain (iOS/Android, iAd, etc.). I think the real problem is in your next sentence: Otherwise you can't attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. That's a big false dichotomy. Sure, suit-centric technology companies will fail. And hacker-centric technology companies sometimes succeed. I think Apple shows that a culture that is neither suit-centirc nor hacker-centric is the best option of all. If many of your YC companies are trying to build great technology companies, they should take that to heart.
Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology.
I would actually disagree with the last part of that. I think Apple is always thinking about technology, but in the context of design. The Apple difference is not simply that design comes first, technology second, but that design is the gatekeeper for technology.
The iPod is the shining example. Could Apple have made a music player before the mass-production of the 1.8" hard drive? Sure, but it wouldn't have been the wonder to hold in your hand that the iPod was. It was when the technology was ready for the design requirements that they pounced on the opportunity.
Same thing with the iPhone. Apple could have made a smartphone before affordable capacitive multi-touch screens, multi-gigabyte flash drives, and fast-enough-for-desktop-browsing SoCs, but they likely didn't feel they could make a user experience to their standard with anything less.
One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company.
No it isn't. I said that you either need that or to pay people a lot or to be in an interesting industry where there are no competitors who have hacker cultures. If Apple doesn't have a hacker culture, then it would probably be an example of the latter.
I'm not sure it's that either. All of the Apple folks I know are pretty fanatical about the mantra of design. They are motivated to be good hackers because they have a strong desire to make beautiful products, rather than the other way around.
Although this may not be as nice as a hacker-centric culture (if you are a hacker), it is still leagues better than an utterly non-hacker centric culture, because the devs are respected for what they do at Apple. This seems to be a critical difference necessary for producing great products.
To respond to your "If", I think Apple clearly does have a hacker culture. Even if we say it's a cult of Steve Jobs, I don't think it's a far cry to say Jobs is a consumer product hacker and a bit of a market hacker.
Two essential qualities of good hackers is an abundant ability to synthesize elegant solutions from disparate details, and a desire to create great things. Jobs may not write code but he clearly has these two qualities. So even if Apple does not have an engineer-centric culture, a design culture driven by Jobs can be directly compatible. You see the differences of course, in the products Google and Apple make, but I think the point is that great hackers can work at Apple because they can get behind Jobs vision.
Contrast this with a "suit-driven" company where decisions are made by looking at statistics and market research, and executives strategize about how to maximize sales based on the superficial product understanding they have. Even worse, places where you actually have people in power who couldn't give a crap about the product as long as they have a $500k+ salary rolling in every year.
I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I think we should be careful that "hacker" doesn't lose meaning altogether. This thread is coming close to defining "hacking" as simply "winning". That is, if it works, it's hackerly, if it doesn't, it isn't.
The winning/losing framing is from the essay itself. If anything, this thread is coming closer to defining "hacking" as not simply "writing code." The question is whether or not Apple has a hacker culture, since one could argue that, while Apple's software tends to be great, it's a byproduct of their obsession with beautiful products, rather than their singular focus. I'm suggesting that, if anything, the tendency on Hacker News is to define "hacking" as simply "writing code," whereas, I think it's more about the intent. You could argue, very easily, that Y Combinator is hacking venture capital -- or that Apple is hacking the entire ecosystem around their products.
I agree that "hacking" connotes more than simply "coding".
I'm not going to venture more complete definition here, but I think a lot of the themes around "unix culture" (e.g., small pieces loosely joined), open source (e.g. bazaar vs. cathedral approach to design and architecture), and even agile methodologies (e.g. "the simplest thing that could possibly work") could apply. But there's more to it than that.
From this perspective, I agree that you could easily characterize Y Combinator as "hacking" VC. I just don't see what Apple is doing as hacking.
In fact, in some ways it seems to me that Apple is doing the opposite of hacking (or at least trying to give that impression). Apple seems to want to create an impression of "intelligent design" around their products--they've got it all figured out and are delivering it to you complete, fully-formed and flawless. To my mind "hacking" connotes a more evolutionary approach: let's just try this and iterate.
This isn't a value judgement on either approach, I just have a hard time aligning Apple's behaviour as an organization with my personal understanding of "hackerly".
I don't think what pg means by "hackerly culture" is any different from what you said. It sounds like Apple is doing exactly what pg tells hackers to do: make something people want. "Hackerly culture" to me implies that you have people ("hackers") who are able to explore the space of possibilities and invent new things rather than just building them to some businessman's specification. It's not essential that you vent a bunch of experimental Google Labs projects out onto the world to have a hackerly culture--Apple just aborts more of its false starts in the womb. (Steve Jobs said in an interview once that one of the things Apple does best is deciding which of their projects go forward or not--they had a promising PDA a few years back but stopped development prior to release because they didn't think the PDA market was worthwhile at the time compared to portable music.)
Down that road lies that 'hackerly' finally becomes redefined as 'everything we consider a good thing'. It's OK for Apple to not be 'hackerly', while still being able to develop great products and software.
My girlfriend studies industrial engineering and knows quite a bit about innovation and product development. If I combine everything I've heard from her with everything I've heard about Apple, then I conclude that Apple simply excels at leveraging/executing all the well-known 'best practices'. There's nothing 'hackerly' required to do proper innovation and product development, unless you expand 'hackerly' to include 'doing business the way it should be done'
Well, here's what I mean--pg's essay criticized Yahoo for putting product managers in charge of dictating specs to programmers, instead of the programmers being able to think for themselves. I don't get the impression that's the case at Apple.
The "dictating specs to programmers" practice seems to stem from the silly notion of applying manufacturing processes to software development. In the view of companies with this notion, programmers are little more than unskilled translators - the parallel of line workers in manufacturing jargon.
In my experience, one of the worst abusers of this "square peg/round hole" paradigm are internal IT departments.
I read a study in IEEE Computer sometime in the Summer of 2001 or 2002 that showed how bad the application of Waterfall was for software development. Does anyone know of a study on the application of manufacturing processes to software development?
I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that practice stemmed largely from older days, when "programmers" were people who translated specifications into machine code or assembly, and programs were actually written and specified by higher ups--essentially, the day that programmers were more like human compilers than what programmers do today.
I can't speak to early computing, but starting around when business applications emerged (60's/early 70's?), developers were very involved in gathering requirements, designing, coding, testing, etc. Shortly after I entered the field, circa 1992, I started hearing about software development as an assembly line process. The developer role started being split: BA, architect, coder, sometimes a QA staff, etc. Whenever I've worked on projects with teams split out this way, it becomes a nightmare of communication overhead and miscommunicated requirements.
The term "hacker," if this discussion provides the definition, seems more and more nebulous to me. Next we'll start hearing about "rockstars" (god forbid).
Maybe saying that hackers want to work with other hackers isn't general enough? People who are good at what they do attract others who are also good at what they do. While it's true that working with the best programmers is a draw, so is working with the best artists or graphic designers or physicists. Mutual respect can cross disciplines.
Apple has many core competencies other than software, including hardware design, marketing, and retail. But the common theme I see between them is that they refuse to do things the way everyone else does, and that they hire the best and brightest to work on their problems. Also, they never accept that something can't be done. To me, this sounds very hackerly, just applied to different domains.
Another core competency that Apple has, one that neither Yahoo or Google seem to be able to figure out, is the ability to create, penetrate and dominate new markets. For all the various products Google creates, it's still essentially an advertising company using search as its publishing media in terms of what makes them money.
Very pitifully few of Google's projects have either created new markets they can dominate, or have penetrated existing markets to the point they can drive billion dollar business units. Gmail, Maps and Android exception to that point, but Google is woefully incompetent in most other respects. And the first two in that list are simply different takes on the search paradigm while Android is a knock-off of the iPhone OS (a really good knock-off, but certainly not a game changing original new idea).
The thing that those 3 have something in common with their search engine and Adwords; they all inspired the same initial reaction: "Someone's finally fixed what's wrong with incumbant market players - this is a game changer". Do you remember what it was like in the days when spammed to death AltaVista, "2MB inbox" Hotmail, static image Multimap, clunky WinMobile and popups/animated gif banners were the kings? (Android is not quite the same, since the iPhone had pointed the way).
I've not seen that many software products which were so obviously disruptive; it's no wonder they became giant-killers. Facebook is the only other one I can think of.
On the other hand, some of their other big products have not be a huge success precisely they haven't been game-changers. Google Docs, for example, might be a good example of a web office suite; but it's hardly a game changer as far as office suites go, because it doesn't do some of the core things that people do daily with office suites. It was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow starter. Whereas Maps for example, you knew at the beiginning that nothing else could touch it
I would say their products and technology are very close to the same thing. I think the biggest difference with Apple, which also yields a more useful way to evaluate other companies, is that Apple is not a software company.
Google's products are mostly software running on servers in datacenters. Facebooks products are the same way. Yahoo's products were mostly software.
Apple's products are not mostly software. Apple sells consumer devices run by software. It's an important distinction, and looking at it that way lets you compare with different sorts of companies, like the technology startup Emotiv Systems[1][2]. They're developing consumer devices that read brain activity like an EEG. They likely spend a lot of time developing their SDK and other software, but they also have to focus on the physical product, like Apple does.
Sometimes people forget or don't realize that "hacker culture" has always had a contingent of hardware guys building solar-cars and robots[3] and kites with cameras.
Apple is very design-driven, but to a large extent design is treated as an engineering function. Also, the attitude towards aspects of the product that are not directly user-facing (such as APIs, "engine" type code like WebKit or llvm, kernel internals, etc) is quite hackerly but also very much driven by thinking about ultimate benefits to the user.
Very good counter point. However, the few people I know that work at apple are good hackers. So maybe Apple is a cross between Design/Hacker culture. To me it seems optimal to balance the the Hacker culture with Designer culture. Kind of like a yin and yang. What are your thoughts PG? Doesn't design matter? Most YC funded web sites look very good. Isn't a design culture important to have?
How can you be so sure about their thought process? Maybe it is the other way around, they just turn it around when it comes to presenting it to the public.
