Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was infamous for his harsh critiques of the work of his team. Hardware or software, if Steve wasn’t 100% happy, you would certainly know about it.
Chris Espinosa, who wrote the first Macintosh calculator app and still works at Apple as its longest-serving employee, found a creative way around Steve’s never-ending critiques in what must be one of the best ever examples of managing upwards …
Arstechnica’s Benj Edwards was reminded of the story shared by Andy Hertzfeld.
Espinosa thought his initial calculator design looked good, but Jobs had other ideas when he saw it. Hertzfeld describes the scene: “‘Well, it’s a start,’ Steve said, ‘but basically, it stinks. The background color is too dark, some lines are the wrong thickness, and the buttons are too big.’”
For several days, Espinosa would incorporate Jobs’ suggestions from the previous day, only to have Jobs find new faults with each iteration […]
Rather than continue the endless revision cycle, Espinosa took a different approach. According to Hertzfeld, Espinosa created a program that exposed every visual parameter of the calculator through pull-down menus: line thickness, button sizes, background patterns, and more. When Jobs sat down with it, he spent about 10 minutes adjusting settings until he found a combination he liked.
Not only did Espinosa circumvent potentially days of further iterations, but the end result was so successful that it remained almost unchanged for 17 years.
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