Campus recruiting
Apple missed the chance to hire me two years in a row through campus recruiting at UC Berkeley. In 1989, I was shocked to learn they had locked up the next summer’s internships by September the year before, when I was still working at my previous summer job. I ended up with an internship at Microsoft.
The next year, as I was graduating, Apple’s recruiting system filtered me out. As I later discovered, I failed an exact string match for my major. They looked for CS, and my primary degree was technically Applied Math… in CS. There was huge overlap and I almost qualified for a second degree in CS. In a twist of fate, I had previously dismissed Stanford in 1985 because they didn’t yet offer an undergrad CS major.
Who knows what could have been had I joined Apple; they were in a doldrums. Steve Jobs wasn’t there; he had been fired from his own company, and had started NeXT. The fact that Apple didn’t want Jobs working there either in 1990 made it a bit easier to accept my own rejection.
I was thrilled to attend a big event where Steve Jobs rolled out NeXTStep, which would later form a foundation for macOS and iOS. To me, the NeXT cube looked like a portal into the future, but it was a fringe platform when it was rolled out, and it took an act of faith to purchase one let alone develop software for it.
Undeterred, I took out a significant personal loan to buy the first available NeXT machine, through Stanford, which cost as much as a new car, before I bought a car. Unlike Tim Berners-Lee, I did not then invent the World Wide Web with this NeXT machine.
What did happen was, an awesome recruiter, Cris Wittress at Microsoft, offered me an awesome job, earlier than I expected, and I took it. I would be the first full-time developer on Works for the Macintosh. I would go on to build Microsoft apps that sold well and helped keep the Mac platform viable during its darkest days, so there was something left to save when Jobs returned in 1997. Apple is the biggest company in the world today, but it was at death’s door in the mid 90s.
In an alternate universe, I would have applied to that NeXT Campus Rep position I saw posted, and perhaps gone on to work with Steve Jobs, like Scott Forstall, whose brother Bruce I knew at Microsoft. But I didn’t really see openings at NeXT. I probably should have just reached out.
At this time, Windows 3.0 was about to hit the market. It was called 3.0, but really it was the first version that wasn’t a laughingstock. I’d used it in beta the previous summer, and I knew it would be a game-changer even though it was still years behind the Mac. I figured, working on Mac software at Microsoft was a very safe hedge. The stock was about to split.
The future of the industry as a whole was uncertain, but the next step in my future would be to Microsoft.