Making It Smaller with Steve Jobs

There’s a famous apocryphal anecdote about Steve Jobs’ management style, related via hearsay in the Atlantic years ago:

When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they presented their work to Steve Jobs for his approval. Jobs played with the device, scrutinized it, weighed it in his hands, and promptly rejected it. It was too big.

The engineers explained that they had to reinvent inventing to create the iPod, and that it was simply impossible to make it any smaller. Jobs was quiet for a moment. Finally he stood, walked over to an aquarium, and dropped the iPod in the tank. After it touched bottom, bubbles floated to the top.

"Those are air bubbles," he snapped. "That means there's space in there. Make it smaller."

People enjoy this story not because it proves that shaving a few micrometers off the iPod (did they, actually? who knows) made any difference to anyone other than Jobs, but because it illustrates how Jobs was a cruel vaudevillian who loved to humiliate his employees for disagreeing with him. Really, it doesn’t matter if the iPod could or even should be smaller. What matters is that you should not contradict the Genius, ever. The universe itself is not allowed to contradict the Genius, which probably explains why Jobs was in denial about his cancer treatment for a critical and potentially lethal period of his illness.

I like to imagine Jobs’ minions at this meeting. Which one had to go over and sheepishly pluck the iPod out of the aquarium under Jobs’ pitiless gaze? The most junior engineer present, I assume. The aquarium large and deep, appropriately minimalist. Saltwater, discreet and ultra-quiet filtration system, assiduously cleaned and maintained by a dedicated technician that Jobs never sees. Gravel the color of bleached bone, harsh light, no plants or figurines in diving suits or little treasure chests. Just the gravel and a mated pair of stripey lionfish, bristling with toxic spines. Hovering without moving, tiny fins beating slowly, their black button eyes swivel to watch the junior engineer’s pale, trembling hand groping after the sunken iPod. He knows they could gouge his vulnerable flesh with their spines, injecting him with agonizing venom. But they share their master’s disdain. His entire existence is worth none of the fishes’ nor Jobs’ attention, other than Jobs’ mental note that the aquarium water should be replaced after this person’s sweaty arm has befouled its pH. The junior engineer hooks the iPod in his clawed and spindly grasp and pulls it out of the water. The fish and Jobs are watching, but only barely. Steve Jobs and the fish are forgetting him even as they look directly at him.

As the minions finally leave Jobs’ office, they are silent, turning it all over in their heads. Are any of them quietly furious, blaming each other for all of them looking bad in front of the boss? Will Jobs himself remember this episode when reviewing their work later? How quickly did they incorporate the dropping-in-water test into prototyping workflows? What other tests might Jobs inflict on them next time, there in his office? A crisis of “managing up” consumes their time. When they tell and retell this story until it becomes part of the Steve Jobs mythology, will any of them nod and smile ruefully, while inside nursing a poisonous lifelong grudge?

The junior engineer works late, like they all do. Before returning to his elegant but spartan Bay Area condo, he goes for a swim in the Apple fitness center. This time of night, there’s nobody else around. He floats on his back, then tucks his knees to his chest, sinks in a ball to the bottom of the deep end, where it’s quiet and cool and the pressure calms the pounding in his ears and in his heart. He lets all the air out of his lungs, watching the bubbles rise in a column from his lips, smaller and smaller and fewer and fewer, making it smaller and smaller in his chest, till there’s no space in there at all.