Ask HN: Was anyone working at Apple during Steve Jobs' return in 1997?
It&#x27;s hard to overstate how bloated Apple was internally.<p>Marketing had products for every conceivable niche.  Engineering was all posturing: great hand-waving plans papered over nasty middle-management infighting.  Hundreds of engineers in new glass-walled offices, producing plans.  I wrote test code against a component that had been delivered months earlier only to find that it was just a stub.  Even the debugger had bugs.  Everyone knew it was a mess, but went along with it, fatalistically thinking that any OS-level project would be that messy.<p>I went across the street to JavaSoft: small teams cranking out code that would last forever.  Swing was built in a year. Signs on the offices not to disturb the programmers. ~1,000 classes in 1.1, ~10K in 1.2 the next year.  One main engineering manager hired a bunch of kids out of college.  The JDK tech lead, Mark Reinhold, is still at the helm today.<p>Night and day; it was like going from the Soviet Union to the U.S.<p>When considering a new job, I almost don&#x27;t care about technology.  Engineering culture makes all the difference.