We spend a lot of time talking about Apple around here, but we know very little about what it’s actually like to work for the company. Things are so tight-lipped at times that it seems like we’re chasing unicorns through the halls of a vast labyrinth.
Today, we’re getting just a little nugget of what it was like to work for Bertrand Serlet. David Cásseres wrote up an interesting little post about their relationship, and what it was like during the NeXT/Apple merger during the late 90s.
Here’s a golden nugget,
And in 2003 after working with OS X for a few years, I was laid off. As I left, Bertrand was hounding me to fix a bug in a system I was only peripherally related to. I was pretty bitter about Bertrand for a few years. Called him a few names. But I eventually calmed down.
And then, when I started hearing about Snow Leopard, I realized that this was what Bertrand had been aiming at all along: the release where the system — not the user features — really got what it needed. I suspect he had to win a big argument with Steve Jobs to get to that point. And he got there. Snow Leopard’s under-the-hood features, such as Grand Central Dispatch, were huge leaps forward in operating system and application frameworks technology. I gained a great deal of respect for Bertrand at that point.
There’s two things we can take away from this article, which you can read in its entirety on Cásseres’ blog. First, leaders know where they’re headed, and sometimes it might take a while to get there. But, once they do, it’s pretty obvious in hindsight that they knew where they were heading to begin with. Second, if you’re really passionate about something, don’t stop working towards it—you’ll get there eventually.
Article Via Daring Fireball
