previously at blog.hayman.net

People seemed to enjoy my From Steve Jobs: Great Idea, thank you anecdote (125,000 views so far), which inspired a big discussion on Hacker News, and even translations and rewrites in Japanese, Italian and a site from India that used a super clickbaity title.

(The Italian one is really quite nice, please check it out and click the ‘translate’ button in your browser if your Italian is just as good as mine. Thank you Dario.)

Google’s AI seems to have missed the point slightly. Here’s the AI-generated result of a search for steve@next.com

Um, it wasn’t “presumably the real Steve Jobs” who started panicking.

get to the part about Steve Jobs and the piano already

I think everybody that worked at NeXT had a Steve Jobs story. Well now that I think about it, I have a few more. Some I’m not comfortable retelling - yet - but here’s a tame one.

napa valley, NeXT sales retreat, 1992

I was a Systems Engineer for NeXT in about 1992, which was a field engineering position on the sales team. You’d help customers set up NeXT networks, build their own apps, relay their concerns back to headquarters in Redwood City, try to impress your field engineering colleagues with your mad Objective-C and Interface Builder skills, etc.

We had some sort of Sales Retreat in Napa Valley. The entire field sales organization — which might have been 20 or so field engineers, another 20 or so account executives, various VPs, some support folks and more — all congregated at some hotel or other.

Steve Jobs - our CEO - came to speak to us as we all shared stories of our (cough) massive successes selling the NeXT computer.

later that night

That evening, everybody retired to the bar.

The bar happened to have a piano in it. Steve sat down at the piano and started noodling around. Not playing anything too dramatic, as I recall, just a chord here, a chord there, a few little jazzy progressions.

I decided I should say something, so I boldly strode up to the piano and spoke to the piano player, and said,

“Don’t quit your day job."

He laughed. (He did not fire me on the spot, fortunately.)

And I think we’re all glad he took my advice.