Socrates said “Virtue does not come from money, but rather from virtue comes money, and all other things good to man.” John Siracusa opens his latest essay with that quotation. It was featured, he points out, on the website of Ambrosia Software, which released really good games for the Mac back in the days when the Mac gaming landscape was sparse.
Siracusa’s point is all about Apple, and how back in the day it at least seemed like the idea of doing good — in the sense of doing your best work, exhibiting virtue — was one of the animating principles of the company. You could see that kind of thinking associated with Apple and the people who used their products. You could also see the absence of it associated with other companies in the same industry: Microsoft, Dell, Compaq, HP, and on down the list. His ultimate point is that nowadays you don’t see it at Apple any more; like other huge companies (and remember that Apple is right at the top of that list now, at least in terms of money, if not staff), they make decisions based solely on money, not virtue.
This has led me to think about my own career, which includes many years at Apple, mostly in the 1990s when it was a much smaller and different company. At the time there was a popular conception that Apple was sort of populated by technically adept hippies who had a beer party every Friday and were probably laid back and relaxed about work. The beer party was a real thing, and so were bagels for breakfast one day per week (I think it might have been Thursday). But the rest was wrong; Apple was populated by highly intelligent, intense people and 60-hour (and longer) weeks were the norm. Everybody cared. Whether a feature offered ease of use, and would be intuitive for users was discussed endlessly, and not just by the user-interface designers. By everybody. Every single person I worked with at Apple sweated every single detail, down to individual pixels, screen and print layout details hardly anybody else would even notice, and logistical problems like translating products into 73 languages and introducing a new product simultaneously everywhere in the world.
If you worked at Apple in those days, the pay and benefits were excellent. But nobody I knew was there just for the money; we were all there to make a difference. To do our own little part in something we thought was big, important, and really great.
Siracusa mentions that Apple wound up at “the brink of bankruptcy.” That was in the late 1990s and the point at which I left the company to start my own business. It turned out to be a lot harder than I anticipated to try to maintain any focus on “virtue” in the face of the economics of business. I ended up back in larger corporations, and found that something was missing. It’s even more missing now than it was twenty years ago.
Nearly all of my work experience has focused on software; coding, designing, and describing it. There’s been a sea change in the way software is created, at least in big development teams in the companies I’ve been involved with. Coding is vastly easier these days, thanks to the rise of languages that are more amenable to human brains (at least mine; I was rubbish at assembly language, C, and any other development tool that insisted that you “think like a computer.” And the processes are different too. The thing that’s missing, though, is more about the companies and their values than about the era. It’s virtue; the attention to detail. Software is shipped with bugs the companies know about, but the decision is made that it’s “good enough.” The watchword today is “MVP” or minimum viable product. You don’t need to build something great, or something that in Steve Jobs’ words is going to “make a dent in the universe.” You just need something you can talk somebody into buying, and fast. Managers will say “we’ll fix it later,” and some of them may even believe that, but it’s not true. Later on, nobody has time to fix it because they’ve been ordered to build the next thing that’s “just good enough.” But “good enough” is not “good,” it’s not virtue, and it’s missing something important. I’m coming to thing that the missing part is the most important.
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