I remember reading the iWoz book by Steve Wozniak.

At the end he had some advice and one thing he said went against all popular advice but sort of agreed with my internal dialog.

It was basically "work alone".

EDIT: "Artists work best alone. Work alone."

Woz would have been nowhere without Jobs.

Jobs wouldn’t have succeeded when he came back without Schiller, Forstall, Cook, Fadell, etc.

I took it to mean "get in the zone", not "don't play well with others".

How did that whole leaving artists alone to get in the zone work out when Ive wasn’t reigned in?

Interesting perspective. I think the truth is they needed each other and the circumstances in which they excelled.

Wozniak didn’t do anything significant after Apple. Not meant to be a judgmental, once you almost die it kind of changes your priorities and just by founding Apple he has done more in his life than most.

Jobs on the other hand, cofounded Apple, Next, and Pixar. The leaders at Next basically took over at Apple and the leaders at Pixar basically took over Disney’s animation division and ushered in a new era of animation.

Jobs of course didn’t do it by himself (my whole point). But he had some type of talent with finding the right people and getting them to do their best work. Was that the RDF? I don’t know.

Seems to me like Woz has lived a fullfilling life doing basically what he's wanted to do. I don't see how that's not significant. My impression is that he never made his life's mission the ostensibly virtuous path of making commodity products for the masses. Not at Apple and not elsewhere. If I were to admire someone for how they lived their life, I'd probably choose Woz, not Jobs, because it almost seems laughably unhealthy to do otherwise.

Isn’t that exactly what I said?

once you almost die it kind of changes your priorities and just by founding Apple he has done more in his life than most.

Wozniak did the Apple thing and got lucky purely down to Jobs' drive. Wozniak did the engineering and then left or took a hiatus. The was it and he did nothing else. I admire his technical ability for what he did but he didn't do much of note after Apple. I could be wrong.

He invented the first universal remote. There’s that...

The way i see it is Jobs ripped of Woz, without Woz Job's is nothing. On the other hand without Job's Woz would still been a successful engineer at a tech organization.

Team players don't work alone.

What has happened to all the introverts who work alone? They're not working in tech. Tech is for extroverts who get paid to copy from public GitHub repositories and paste into private GitHub repositories and sell proprietary products built upon code ripped from open source projects.

But that's okay. Not everybody can be an extrovert who gets paid to pretend to code. RMS said it best:

> I could answer that nobody is forced to be a programmer. Most of us cannot manage to get any money for standing on the street and making faces. But we are not, as a result, condemned to spend our lives standing on the street making faces, and starving. We do something else.

And then RMS was railroaded out of the free software movement he started by the social extroverts who replaced all the introverts in tech.

I'm an introvert. I'm a coder. I don't get paid to code. I do something else.

Oh, please. Don't pretend to speak for introverts. I am an introvert. I love my alone time. I have no social media presence. I also thrive on collaboration, mentoring, and generally building software with other humans. It is fun, it creates business value, and it leads to better code as well. There are many people in tech like this. We're not extroverts (although extroverts are great, too) but we recognize software engineering is a social discipline of which sitting on your own coding forms only a part.

Yes, of course, you're entitled to be a misanthrope and do whatever you want on your own. Fine. But your picture of tech is warped. There is no conspiracy of extroverts; it's just that you don't like working with other people.

It's a bit sad that although coding tends to attract introverts, most SW development (especially in a work environment) fundamentally needs to be more social than other engineering disciplines.

If you can find a job where you, and only you, are writing code, and not integrating it into a larger piece of SW, then everything is fine and you can work alone. This is incredibly rare.

There is very little in SW that is clearly objective. How to architect the code well, rules about when to reuse code, when to abstract, whether to use a global variable, how to name things, even whether to use GOTO are all opinions - not facts. As such, the SW world has to put in a lot more effort in campaigning for what they consider good design and good coding practices.

Look at code reviews. This is, at its very core, a social practice. In my experience, most of the discussions in code reviews do not involve bugs (which are very objective), but are dominated by style and design discussions, which are subjective.

In most other engineering disciplines, things are a lot more clear cut. There usually are not 20 different ways to achieve something, and the criteria for quality is much clearer.

I too am an introvert. But I also realize that complex SW development is at odds with introversion. I can lament the situation, but I cannot blame extroverts for this. They didn't come in and crowd things. It is inherent to the beast. As a SW developer, I do need to influence my fellow developers (as well as my customers). I have to learn those skills. One can do that while still being an introvert.

(Not meaning to invalidate your point about RMS and organizations and social movements. I agree with you on that. But for SW development, some level of social skills legitimately gives you an advantage)

There seems to have been something that happened between the 80s and 90s and today that caused any team doing something non-trivial to go from like 3-8 people to more like 100. Like, you look at a description of exactly what the project was and you ballpark what you'd need today, and it's like 100+ people. The team that actually did it was eight humans and an office cat, and in many cases not one of them is famous for being some superhuman-level programmer.

I'm not sure what caused it. You'd think the opposite would have happened, in fact, since our tools are supposed to be so much better now. But I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that part of it's something along the lines of changing interests and work styles for developers entering the field.

It your takeaway is that on the RMS debacle, then I find it rather sad. Without diminishing his achievements, the man is such a bad people person that he literally couldn't understand and respect other people's boundaries and sexually harassed several women.

No matter how good of an activist or a movement leader you are, if you can't stop yourself from being a huge creep, you should not hold a position of power and work with other people. Ever.

Yeah, he might be a deeply unpleasant person, and perhaps he shouldn't be a leader, but when the histories of the 20th century and the Internet are written, he'll have a starring place.

>sexually harassed several women.

Links please with specifics. Also is there reasonable evidence?

RMS achieved precisely because he is a bad people person. He did what he believed needed to be done to reform the software industry the way he wanted it and he succeeded without regard for what other people thought of him. Unfortunately capitalists adapted to make tons of money exploiting the results of his life's work and social influencers influenced him out of society.

And don't worry about me. I prefer to work alone and I'm in the process of getting banned from your fine forum right now for expressing unpopular opinions.

I agree. I remember there was a bit of criticism in the iOS twitter community about iOS development influencers giving bad advice, because they haven't worked on meatier projects.

Can't find much anymore but here's one example of a tweet:

https://twitter.com/alex_v_bush/status/1277002102351499265

Not to downplay the course developers and marketers. That's a valuable and difficult skill! It's just different than developing.