From the begining, no two Apple job interviews were the same.
In May 1978, Chuck Mauro sat in Apple's lobby waiting for Steve Wozniak.
Eventually, perhaps a half hour later, a gentleman named Rod Holt rescued me from ‘lobby limbo’ and brought me back to Apple’s fledgling engineering department. Rod apologized and indicated that Woz forgot he had the interview and wasn’t coming into the office that day! Great. No Woz, no interview, no job. Much to my surprise, Rod offered to interview me very casually anyway, introduced me to several key engineering players, and told me to come back the next Monday morning to start working! Woz had apparently decided he already was going to hire me and gave Rod the approval to make an offer in his absence.
Mauro joined the Systems Software team, and met Wozniak the following day.
Woz sat me down in his office, and we discussed my assignment, which was to evolve a high-resolution graphics drawing package to include color correction for line and pixel plots. I was a bit apprehensive about it since I’d never written any code for video graphics. The Apple II’s hi-res mode could display color pixels, but not every color at every x,y location. It was an unfortunate quirk of the NTSC signal requirements for color TVs based on the resolution the Apple II was generating. Armed with the data I started my assignment.
Mauro eventually left Apple to found Advanced Logic Systems (ALS), with investment from Wozniak.
+++++++++
Jim Gable left the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to study at Harvard Business School, taking his Macintosh with him.
At Harvard, you're in the same section all year long. You don't change classes. You're with the same people every class, all year long. Pretty soon, the people in my class knew they were stuck with the ‘Apple nut’.
Gable tried to secure an Apple summer internship for 1985
I called Apple over and over. I decided I was going to talk my way into Apple for my summer internship. I just hounded the poor, poor woman in H.R. I’m certain I drove her crazy because I would think up some reason why I had to talk to her or talk to somebody. I just kept ringing. I was very frank. I said, “Listen, I'm crazy about the Mac. I know a lot of people involved with the Mac, and I want to do this. Remember, too, that at that time, the Macintosh was not even a year old. I told that poor lady I would do anything to support the Mac. You just put me anywhere, if it helps the Mac, offer me anything, and I'm going to do it. You just tell me what to do. And one day, she said, “OK, I have an internship for you - in corporate treasury. This is the best I can offer”. I think I said ‘yes’ before she finished the sentence.
Gable graduated from university after the internship:
I just kept my head down and watched everything. In time, I got to meet some of the people who ran product management back then, and so when I completed my studies at Harvard, it was much easier to set up interviews because I'd met everybody, and I knew where to start. I didn’t have to torture that poor lady again!
Gable started in product management under Keast and Trepanier.
If I had not gotten into Apple, I had no idea what I would have done because I didn't have a plan B.
Gable started in the Printing Group, then co-led the Bass team that delivered TrueType and he eventually became product line marketing manager for PowerPC.
+++++++
Konstantin Othmer was at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
I went to Caltech and studied EE, which was more of an applied physics kind of thing. One day, my roommate said that Apple was on campus interviewing for jobs and I should go over, “…maybe they can help you with the issues you are having programming the Apple II.” I had been working on projects on the side, and in those days, getting tech support was difficult. I went over to where Apple was interviewing. I knocked on the door, and the guy asked what time my appointment was. I told him I didn’t have an appointment but just wanted to see if they could help me with some issues on the Apple II. As the arrogant kid, I figured this was ‘just some recruiter,’ and I would talk way over their head, so I went through various bugs I had found with the Apple II ROM, and one in particular with the mouse driver. I complained about Apple’s system software, and then he said, “OK, let me get back to you on that.” A few days later, he called and suggested I come up to Cupertino for an interview. I told him I was not interested; I just wanted my tech support questions answered, but he insisted and said it would be fun for me to visit the Cupertino campus. So I agreed.
Turns out that the ‘recruiter’ was Harvey Lehtman. Before being a Senior Manager at Apple, Lehtman was a member of Douglas Engelbart’s illustrious SRI research group that, over a ten year period, developed the mouse, windowed editing tools, hypertext, and tools for networked collaboration. Lehtman was one of Apple's first senior engineers that developed the Apple Lisa user interface.
He walked me around the team and introduced me to everyone, including the engineer responsible for the mouse driver. I was like, “Oh shit, hopefully, I don’t sound like an idiot now, this is the guy's code I was complaining about!” - I repeated the story (this time with not as much energy) about the buggy driver and he said, “Yes, we had that issue in one of the beta releases”. Boy, was I relieved. Anyway, they ended up making an offer to pay me $2340 per month.
Othmer became the lead architect of QuickDraw.
+++++++
Gifford Calenda needed staff to bolster System 7's ranks. Phac Le Tuan was invited to interview at Apple.
I didn't have many experiences with job interviews because I met the CEO of Benson in Paris, and he made me an offer directly, and that was it. Apple could not have been any more different. I probably went through 10 to 15 different interviews. There were so many. Apple would make you meet a lot of people, people who would be your potential boss, but also your peers and people who might work for you. And the process is that everybody has to like you, and want you in so you need to fit at the level of technology and technical knowledge, but also, with the people and having the personality that would fit with the team, that would not be, you know, too different from the team. Luckily, my nature is not to get stressed by things you don’t control, but it took a long time. I finally got an offer from Apple, and on my first day I nervously entered Gifford Calenda’s office, and he said, ‘I’m glad you are here, Phac, but I don't have a job for you. I've filled the position and then he paused, somehow enjoying the moment with my jaw on the floor, and then he added, which still impresses me to this day, he said, ‘Welcome to Apple, we love you, hang in there, read Inside Macintosh, we will find something for you for sure’.
Phac Le Tuan helped run the Blue Meanies.
++++++
Bob McNinch worked at IBM for five years, and won sales awards.
I was working for Big Blue in London when my boss was recruited by Tom Lawrence, the first President of Apple Europe. One of his first calls was to me 'I want you to come to Paris and help us set up Apple Computer in Europe.' I told him I had heard of Paris but who were Apple? I joined anyway and was soon in Paris as one of the first of Apple Europe's employees.
+++++++
Steve Perlman remembers:
I saw that it (the Mac) had all these cool graphics capabilities. They were interested in the user experience: it was designed for an average person in simplicity and very graphically oriented, albeit in black and white. I decided that there was hope. I kept calling Apple, again and again, trying to find somebody to talk to me to get an interview there.
Perlman eventually landed interviews. Larry Tesler recalled for the CHM what happened next at Apple HQ.
"…somehow (Perlman) knew my name…and came and found me, talked to me. So I kind of interviewed him…I could see why maybe his personality might turn you off a little bit, but this guy is good, you know. I called ERG (Education Research Group) and said, “You really should hire this guy. And if you don’t, I’m going to find a way to hire him.”
Less than two years later, Tesler introduced Perlman to give a technology demonstration in front of a packed staff-only audience. Soon after, Perlman became Principal Scientist, Apple.
+++++++++
Wil Oxford was set to complete his PhD in Biomedical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of North Carolina, and began interviewing. He spoke with recruiters at IBM's famed Thomas Watson Jr Research Labs, and was offered a position, though he was unsure if he'd fit in.
The recruiter took me aside and said, ‘You know, Will, on Fridays you can wear jeans. I was horrified. What if I want to wear jeans on Monday? I’d come from academia which was - casual, and everyone at IBM wore a suit. Still, the work that IBM was doing was incredible so I had to seriously consider the job. I brought my wife up to New York and we toured around, looked at houses.
Oxford then headed west to speak with Xerox, SUN and Apple.
I actually flew out to the Bay Area and knocked on doors to get interviews because I knew eventually I was going to have to get a real job. At that point, I had interviewed twice at IBM and turned down one offer and had another one still waiting. I met these amazing people inside ATG, Mike Potel, Mark Lentczner, Toby Ferrand, Steve Perlman, and Jim Batson. And to put it simply, I saw myself. I met people who thought like me, who acted like me and - who dressed like me! When I came back home from my visit to Apple, my wife tells people, that she had to pull me down off the ceiling. I was just in such a state. I just knew that's where I needed to be. My parents though were horrified. My mother had already gone out and bought me three wool suits because it gets cold in New York in the winter. So, when I told them that I was gonna go work at some little tiny startup in California, they were just appalled. My whole family were just sure I'd gone off my rocker.
Wil Oxford helped bring 16-bit audio to the Mac, alongside Steve Milne.
++++++++
Steve Milne assessed his career:
The startup I was at couldn’t get traction so I worked as a consultant for Packet Technologies, Inc. (which evolved into Stratacom which in turn was bought by Cisco) and started to look around at other opportunities. I still really wanted to get into doing something with computers and music, because I've always loved playing guitar and other instruments. When the Mac first came out, I started using it to drive synthesizers. They were MIDI sequencers, they couldn't do digital audio, but they could play music I wrote on the $1500 synthesizers. MIDI was a good way to start doing music creation on a very primitive computer that didn't have a lot of power. It was always on my mind. The Macintosh as a music device, and it seemed like it wasn't much of a leap for the Mac to be THE platform. Maybe I could get a job there.
So I applied to Apple, and was interviewed first with Sam Holland's Aquarius team, which was making a RISC chip, and then had another interview with Mike Potel, Mark Lentczner and Dave Wilson in the ATG Graphics & Sound group. They grilled me pretty hard. A lot of very technical questions. Mike was asking me questions about DSP and other advanced audio technologies and luckily I had studied all of that at MIT so I knew some of the answers and I'd published a few papers at my previous job and I told them that. I remember Dave looking at me as if he was skeptical about me writing those papers, but he actually went and checked, and found out I was legit.
It was a pretty hard interview but I was pretty confident at the time and after a week, I got a job offer from Apple. At the time I was still with Packet which I knew they were gonna take off. Had I stayed with Packet, I would have made far more money than what I did at Apple but I never looked back and never regretted it because I wanted to get into the music side. It made me remember a guy I worked with at Wang who was also interested in computer music. We said, ‘one of these days, we're going to bite the bullet, and we're just going to do what it takes to get into computerized music production. Forget the money and the stock options’. As it turned out, I took the Apple offer and spent the rest of my career doing professional audio.
Milne co-invented AIFF while at Apple.
++++++++
Phac Le Tuan recalls:
I had to hire a lot of people for System 7/Blue, and the goal was to hire people for what you thought they could do, not necessarily what they had done, not because their previous experience matches exactly what you're looking for - because people evolve quickly.
Tom Ryan continues:
I quit HP for Apple but Phac didn’t tell me what I would be doing, and before I had even accepted the job, he had arrived at my house with a Macintosh and a whole bunch of books and said, “Start learning". I was shocked and said, “I haven't even been accepted yet. I'm not sure I want to leave the mothership of HP and go to this crazy place, Apple". Phac said to me, “It’s a crazy place with really, really smart people, and there'll be something to do there that you'll grow”. But to be honest, when I landed there, it was like a step backward in terms of engineering. The engineers were programming the Mac OS and Mac apps on Macintoshes, like, are you crazy? I mean, I just stepped away from my HP workstation with 32 Mb of RAM, a large monitor, and the latest processor, and now I’m being asked to code on this little eight-inch Mac screen with no memory. It was a terrible software environment, and I couldn't do that. I didn't want to. It wasn't intellectually interesting. The upside was when I joined the OS team, and if it were 70 people at the time, I'd be amazed. For meetings, we could all fit on the floor. Everybody knew everybody, and it was small and tight. The opportunity to change the world was there.
Ryan co-led the QuickTime team.
++++
Opus engineer John (JK) Kullmann surveyed the job market.
Opus had built a bunch of cards for different chips, like National’s NS32k, Fairchild Clipper, Motorola’s M86k, and SUN-Sparc. We sold quite a few systems and made a living, but it never got really big. So I started to look around at options. Apple ran full-page trade magazine advertisements, with the headline: ‘Opportunity comes in all shapes and sizes.’
It announced ‘immediate openings’, including Product Design Engineers, Datacom Engineers, and Unix Software Engineers with ‘experience in Unix kernel development, device drivers, utilities, and communications. Send your resume to Department BH-CW15’.
Kullmann continues:
I was sitting at home one day reading the San Jose Mercury News, and I saw a double, full-page spread from Apple advertising jobs, and I remember 11 positions involved Unix. I told my wife, at the time, as my finger went down the page, ‘I could do this and I can do all of this and I could this'. I wasn't boasting, she knew that I'd done these jobs at Plexus, DG, and Opus. However. At that point, to me, Apple was a toy company that made toy computers. But I was curious. ‘Why did they want Unix engineers?’ So I reached out to an acquaintance, Rob Smith, who worked at Apple, and asked him, ‘If I give you a resumé, can you give this to the hiring manager at Apple for the Unix project, for the jobs they advertised?’ He agreed, and I reiterated, 'I'm applying for all of the positions, not individually, but all of them all at once.'
Oreo project manager Ron Johnston recalls:
I was screening all these resumes that were coming in from an ad that we were running with 11 open Unix positions. Rob Smith brings me a resumé from a guy called John Kullmann, and he says, 'This is a friend of mine. He's applying for all of these jobs.' And I said, ‘Well, which one does he want? He said, 'No, you don't understand. He's saying, he can do all of these jobs.' I thought, well, I got to talk to this guy, but first I wanted to check him out. I noticed on the resumé that he had co-founded Opus with Grant Muncie, and I had worked with Grant at HP on my APL project. I was the project leader, and he was one of my team members, so I knew him well. I found his phone number, and called him. I said, ‘This guy John Kullmann, is he the real deal?’. And he said, 'Oh my gosh, yes, he's the real deal. You should hire him if he's willing to come to work for you.'
John Kullmann continues:
A little while later, Rob told me that the project manager, Ron Johnston, had read my resumé and said, ‘I want to talk to this guy who says he can do all these jobs because he is obviously out of his mind’. Ron and I set up a time, and I went into Apple to meet him. After the interview, he hired me.
Johnston concludes:
Turns out John Kullmann, or as everyone calls him, JK, is a unicorn.
Kullman became engineering lead on Project Oreo aka A/UX. Mike Potel adds:
JK is one of those folks who could get anything to work. Further down the road, he is the one who single-handedly ported the Mac to Intel, under the codename Marklar, which eventually enabled the migration of the Mac from PowerPC to Intel. Single-handedly.
+++++++++
Sean Callahan co-created a series of educational games for the Macintosh at the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation (MECC). He attended the 1990 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) at the San Jose Convention Center.
I noticed that Apple was advertising for graphics engineers, so I set up an interview for that week. During a lunch break at WWDC, I met Bruce Leak and a few other Apple people, and they quizzed me on my background. Pretty soon, Bruce had me writing 68k code on napkins.
“Write the inner loop of an 8-bit flip horizontal routine...”
After that initial napkin-coding screening at WWDC, I interviewed with a bunch of other Apple graphics group people. It was a big deal for me because I'd been a long-time Apple fan. In high school, I had saved up paper route money to buy myself an Apple II+ and taught myself 6502 assembly. That's how I got my first real job at Springboard Software doing educational software.
Callahan recalls the impact of the Macintosh on his world.
I remember using it in a store and being amazed by its graphics. The MacPaint lasso tool seemed like magic. When Springboard was switching over to Mac OS development, I taught myself 68k assembly and the OS APIs. The Mac was so cool, and I wanted to learn everything I could about it. Using the MacNosy tool, I disassembled the ROMs so I could see how the OS worked, especially the graphics routines. I learned a lot but also saw that some of the graphics routines weren’t as fast as they could be. So later when I was interviewing at Apple, I had the guts to say ‘I’ve looked at the code and I know how to make it faster.’ I was hired into the Graphics group working on QuickDraw for System 7. And my first assignment? - ‘Go in and optimize the graphics routines!’
It was my absolute dream job.
Callahan became a key programmer in ATG's QuickTime team.
++++++++++
Jean-Charles Mourey graduated from École Polytechnique and was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris.
I was supposed to feel privileged to be in this new school, but I was bored out of my mind. It was years before cell phones became popular: telecommunications at the time consisted mostly of planting telephone poles. As part of our school curriculum, we were expected to do a 9-month internship abroad, usually in the US, often in Silicon Valley. But it was 1985, Silicon Valley was in a crisis, and all the internship opportunities had evaporated. So, with courage and poor English, I started calling the office of Jean-Louis Gassée every day. I didn't know him but he was French at least, so I could speak to him. Needless to say, I never got past his executive assistant. But I persisted. She was very nice about it. Undeterred, the next time I called, I lied and said I was a journalist. He called me back within a day. I quickly confessed my white lie but shared my passion for Apple and my substantial academic qualifications. He offered to fly me out to California for an interview, all expenses paid! I was in shock. My parents were proud.
Mourey became a key engineer on the IIGS.
Excerpt from https://books.by/john-buck/inventing-the-future
