Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 139: 🇬🇧 Why Sean Parent Joined Adobe

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

In this episode, Conor and Bryce close out their conversation with Sean Parent and learn why he left Apple to join Adobe.Link to Episode 139 on WebsiteDiscuss this episode, leave a comment, or ask a question (on GitHub)How To Get Involved With ValDM Sean on TwitterVal Lang on GitHubVal Teams MeetingClick here to join the meetingMeeting ID: 298 158 296 273Passcode: D2beKFWhen: Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:00 PSTVal SlackTwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBryce Adelstein LelbachAbout the Guest:Sean Parent is a senior principal scientist and software architect managing Adobe’s Software Technology Lab. Sean first joined Adobe in 1993 working on Photoshop and is one of the creators of Photoshop Mobile, Lightroom Mobile, and Lightroom Web. In 2009 Sean spent a year at Google working on Chrome OS before returning to Adobe. From 1988 through 1993 Sean worked at Apple, where he was part of the system software team that developed the technologies allowing Apple’s successful transition to PowerPC.Show NotesDate Recorded: 2023-06-29Date Released: 2023-07-21ADSP Episode 137: Sean Parent on Val (vs Rust)!ADSP Episode 138: Sean Parent on Val! (Part 2)C++ On Sea ConferenceAll Sean Parent ADSP EpisodesAdobe Software Technology LabADSP Episode 40: Star Trek vs PowerPC (with Sean Parent)PostScriptJohn WarnockCharles (Chuck) GeschkeSean Parent photo with John WarnockIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

You want to see what kind of hole you will leave when you leave this company? Put your hand in a bucket of water and pull it back out and look in the bucket. That's the hole you will leave when you exit. You are replaceable. And the lead on New Colonel walked up to this EP and handed him his badge and walked out the door. So I would attend the wedding just to hear that. Welcome to ADSP, the podcast, episode 139, recorded on June 29th, 2023. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we finish out our conversation with Sean Parent live from C++ on C2023. This is part three of a three-part conversation.

If you haven't listened to the first two, links will be at the top of the show notes. In this conversation, we chat about a plethora of things, but mostly why Sean Parent left Apple to join Adobe. Yeah, I've been super fortunate in my career in that I've had the opportunity to do a number of successful products. And when I look back, it's like I worked on the transition to PowerPC at Apple. And we were a small team, less than a dozen engineers on the team. And the company was betting big on a partnership with Novell to move to Intel

at the time. And that team had like 200 people. And we smoked them. Okay. How many people were on your team? On our team,

like I said, less than a dozen. So like 10, 11, somewhere right in there. Was this the story that you told in a different episode where like that team got like way fancier offices? Yeah, they had fancy offices and lunches and pool tables. And you guys were like a Skunkworks project.

We were a Skunkworks project. We were the side bet. Yeah, we will link that in the description, folks. If you haven't listened to that episode, this isn't me plugging my own episode this is me plugging an amazing story go link it it'll be the second link after getting involved in val yeah so so on that effort right i kind of got to see like like what a team could do that was kind of all on the same page and directed and moving forward and when when I joined the Photoshop team, I think I was like the sixth person to work on Photoshop. And at the time I joined the team, I was one of four.

I think that's right. I might be off by one or two, somewhere in there. It's 30 years, so forgive my neurons. But that, you know, if you think about what Photoshop accomplished, and now it seems like, well, Photoshop is just a verb. People don't realize, at the time I left Apple, which was a

big established company, to go work for Adobe, which nobody heard of because their number one product was PostScript, which was embedded in printers. And even my parents, I was in my early 20s. So my parents were concerned about my career decisions. And they're like, wait, you're leaving Apple to go to this company called Adobe.

And you're going to work on a product that's about editing photos on a computer. How do you get a photo into a computer there were no digital cameras why did you go why did i go so two reasons so one is apple like i always say i worked at apple between jobs right so i like joined apple right after steve jobs left and i left Apple before Steve Jobs came back. So I worked at Apple between jobs. So when I started at Apple, Scully was in control and things were going reasonably well. And when I left Apple,

Spindler had taken over and the management was mostly out of deck and it was an absolute nightmare. What do you mean out of deck? Deck, the company deck computers okay so uh uh i will will tell a story i'll do this without saying names since it's since it's on a podcast also feel free to say names i don't think we have any listeners is that right brian

yeah yeah yeah the one to close your ears. What are they going to do at this point? What are they going to do? So I worked on the transition from 68K to PowerPC, which was very successful. We were the Skunk Works project. Six months before we shipped, we put out a prototype, and we were in success-failure mode, which meant we put out this prototype and our we were in success failure mode which went we put out this prototype we shipped it to a small number of big customers and those customers said this is amazing we're canceling all of our orders for 68k max sign us up for these and apple was like we don't even know if we're going to ship this yet.

And now if we don't, we're dead. Right. And so, so not only do we have to ship this, we have to ship a complete line of this computer of which we were going to ship one model. Now we're going to ship three models. And, and so, so it was this huge, huge scramble. And the team that did this, we had made a conscious decision early on. Apple was working on a new kernel for their operating system and this new version of the OS, which was known as V1. And we said, we don't think V1 will be there in time for us to ship power pc so we created

something we called v0 okay and we said you know we're gonna do this on our own without you guys a baby step get us there v0 so we shipped v0 power pc and then our team got together and we said you know we still don't think we can make the leap from v0 to v1 so we proposed a project called alberto which was v05 right so if you are familiar with a hair product there was a hair product once upon a time called alberto v05 so this was version 0.5 um so we proposed this and and management at that time said absolutely not everybody has to get on board for v1 and we started bleeding talent because if you don't believe in a product you're not going to work on it and you're going to leave and so so it was bad. We were drawing tombstones on the whiteboards in the hallway and writing names on them of the engineers who left. And so our, uh, our VP

has an all hands meeting and it's a traditional all-hands meeting, everybody in an auditorium, and it's like, oh, rah, rah, rah, you know, we need to do this. Oh, but by the way, everybody tighten your belt because in the next quarter it could suck, so, you know, there will be no budget, which is every all-hands meeting

if you've been in the company for a period of time. But one of the engineers raises their hand at a Q&A session at the end and says, so we're losing all these really good people. What do we do about it? And the VP in charge said, I am so sick and tired of all you engineers complaining and people quitting and thinking that that has any relevance to our business whatsoever. You want to see what kind of hole you will leave when you leave this company, put your hand in a bucket of water and pull it back out and look in the bucket. That's the hole you will leave when you exit. This company receives thousands of resumes every single day.

You are replaceable. And the lead on New Colonel walked up to this EP and handed him his badge and walked out the door. Unsurprisingly. Unsurprisingly unsurprisingly and so i was like i'm done i didn't hand in my badge uh but i had a number of headhunters who had called me and so i called them back and said so what do you have? And one of the headhunters said, you know, there's this position at this company called Adobe. They're pretty small. Very tied with Apple, because if you know the history, it's like, you know, John Warnock and Chuck Getzke had done PostScript at Xerox PARC.

And they tried to pitch it inside of Xerox PARC. And Xerox PARC was like, we don't know what, you know, we're in the business of making copiers. What do printers have to do with copiers? Right. So they let John and Chuck go with the tech and John and Chuck started Adobe and and took PostScript and PostScript would have failed, except they managed to sell it to Steve Jobs and produce the LaserWriter. And that was just before I had joined Apple. And so Adobe was known to me and known to Apple, certainly, but not broadly known in the industry, right? I mean, you create the operating system for a printer that Apple sells. Okay.

How many employees were at Adobe when you joined? How many employees were at Adobe when you joined? Good question. So my employee number is 1469, which means it was less than that. Okay. I heard from one of our HR people that there was a block of 800 employee numbers set aside so that they could reassign them for people who came in through acquisitions, who had early hire on dates through the acquired companies because we obey tenure. So that probably puts me in the first 700 people, something like that. You know, six, 700 people. And so at the time when I joined, I don't know, four or 500 people, maybe tops. It was pretty small. We were in, you know,

one of the buildings, which is now the complex and uh rattling around in there frankly you know it was a small enough company that when you got hired on you got to have have lunch with the with the founders so so i had lunch with with john and chuck on on the day i hired in as one does what's that one does, right? It's also notable that they're John and Chuck to you. Yeah. I mean, if you go on my Twitter feed, I posted a recent picture of myself with John. Yeah, these folks, just in case people don't understand the weight, these folks have lengthy Wikipedia pages. We'll link them in the show notes.

Doesn't Sean have a Wikipedia page? I don't have a Wikipedia page I don't think Sean does, I mean I check every week and so in any case the headhunter said well there's this position at Adobe to work on this product called Photoshop

I actually knew of Photoshop it kind of floated around as an interesting product inside of Adobe and so i i had seen it and i went and i talked with the team and it was just this phenomenal team i mean very small team but it was like wow you know i worked with good people at apple. And I talked with this team and it was just like, these are amazing people. And, and then, you know, I actually got in an argument with, with John, John Warnock at the, at this time, the CEO, the CEO, um, uh, about why he was investing at, at, at investing at the time.

So you're looking at 1993, probably mid-93. So the web is brand new, but it's become fairly apparent that HTML is going to win. And Adobe has this thing called PDF and Acrobat that they have maybe 100 engineers engineers on and Photoshop has four. Okay. And, and so John is pouring money into PDF. At that time, that was a significant investment for a relatively small company to be investing. And so the argument I had with John was, what are you doing? HTML wins, you lose. This is good money after bad. It's a sunk cost

fallacy that you're chasing here. You cannot win. And he was like, no, you are absolutely wrong. He said, you do not looking at all of the governments on of a semi, of manuals, of maintenance manuals for that airplane to the customer, you think that trailer of maintenance manuals for a 747 that a customer is going to look at that in HTML that might be rendered, God knows how, laid out, word wrapped, God knows how, graphics looking like pixelated crap? No. He's like, paper will go away, but it will go away when digital can replace it.

And Adobe is set up because Adobe has the interface to the printer through PostScript and PDF is a declarative form of PostScript. We are the only company set up to capture that layout. And he said, he said, I can invest as much money as i can afford into this because we are the only company who will win in this space and and he was absolutely right and and his passion in his articulate argument is part of what sold me and i was like

i want to go work on this and you know it's like i mentioned my my parents were like how do you get a photo in in into a computer were you arguing with john warlock about this before you had the job yeah yeah so i mean you have to understand like when i got my job at apple i think I might have told this story to you. You told the story where you got in an argument with the interviewer and you thought you lost the job and he called you the next day and it was like, turns out you were correct, sir. Yeah. So, he has a track record for proving his interview was wrong. Was this during your interview with John Warnock?

No, no, I wasn't interviewing with John Warnock, but I was having a conversation with him before I accepted my offer. How did you come to have a conversation with the CEO? Because it's a small company. It's like a startup type of thing. At the time. For folks that are listening now,

Adobe's a big deal. They did well. John was correct. I hesitate to broach a new topic because I really should go make side notes, but I can't not ask. We've never talked about Flash here. But it was obviously a big – I feel like we should table that topic and we'll bring Sean back on, not in 100 episodes, but like in like five or ten. But – because this is honestly heard that before but this is this is amazingly gold like i mean you've told portions of this

stuff before but this is just like we're we're talking to one of like the most senior folks not just in c++ just in the industry and talking about like – like there was an article that I talked about in the Twin Algorithms talk that you were in the midst of getting COVID, which you didn't know at the time but would become to know in a couple days, where Bill Gates got interviewed in some article in 1979. He said, APL was the future. And they described Bill Gates as this guy that was working for this small software company called Microsoft. I interviewed at Microsoft before I went to work at Apple.

And I didn't talk to Bill. But I talked to some pretty senior people. And they made me an offer. And at the time, my answer was like, your offer is all stock and your stock is already overinflated and there's like no salary. And so, no. And this was like 82. So, how many people are going to buy a personal computer? It's probably not going to be a big thing.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, I chalk that up as like career mistakes. My wife had a relative who accepted a position at Microsoft around the same time I turned them down and retired like three years later and lived in Hawaii. Was that the hyper server? That was a different person. No, no, no. So, yeah. So, no.

Somebody who I worked with on the PowerPC project, Eric Trout, he did the dynamic recompiling emulator for PowerPC at Apple. And then he did something called Virtual PC. And he did Virtual PlayStation at Connectix. And I think he might have been involved in Speed Doubler. That might have been Yark Brown. He was also the person responsible for Gmail. So that was at Connectix. And then he went to Microsoft and did the Hypervisor. Hypervisor, yeah.

Yeah. And then, which is Microsoft's virtualization system. So if you run, you know, virtualized Windows instances on servers, or if you're running, you know, Linux under, what is it, Windows? WSL? WSL. That's all Hypervisor-based stuff. Oh, is it, Windows WSL that's all hypervisor based stuff. Oh is it? WSL is built on top of

hypervisor which is what you're calling Eric Trout Yeah, what Eric Trout did Alright, no big deal So yeah, so Eric, who I hired him as an intern from Stanford, it was really Scott Boyd and now he's retired.

And you've never – well, we've got to have you on for multiple reasons now to chat about Flash. But also, I don't think on this podcast you have told the story of interviewing Eric Trout. I mean, I don't know if we want to do that now. No, I think we got to. Because Bryce has got to work on the slides. But folks, stay tuned because I've heard this story and it is – it's a lesson in interviewing and it's just a lesson in so much.

But like – I'm going to make a note of it. I mean I know you know what I'm talking about because you were the person that told me this story. I'm not sure if Bryce has heard it. But we'll save the Eric – probably Eric does not listen to this podcast. Yeah. But maybe you can send it to him if we tell this story because when I listened to that story, I was – oh, it's – I mean, you have so many amazing – I mean, the poor story where Steve Jobs saved you from lawsuits, that takes the cake. But the Eric Trout interview story is also way up there.

So stay tuned, dear listener. Mr. Parent will be back. Yeah, we haven't had him on for like 150 episodes. Actually, that's not true because we don't even have 150 episodes. We haven't had him on in a while. But folks, we've lined up the queue of topics to talk about. Flash, Eric Trout. And you guys will just wait for you know another year or

two years well they troll me on this podcast until you get to hear these stories but but uh i'll tell them no no it won't it won't be a year we'll bring you on to tell these stories then we'll troll you for a year after we don't have a queue if we've got a queue now we're gonna have a cue. If we've got a cue... Now we're going to have to go fly out and like wine and dine him to make up for this slight... That's true, I mean... We definitely owe Sean like a nice dinner at this point because a good chunk of why

people listen to this podcast is because we've had Sean on it. I mean, probably the plateauing of our statistics. He was buying an entire round of drinks last night for the table because he offered to buy me a drink, I think, in compensation for slighting everybody. And that got confused into Bryce's buying a round for the entire table. So it already cost him a bit. Would you like to comment on this, Bryce?

You know what? I have a very expensive girlfriend and everything else by comparison is pretty cheap. Let's hope Ramona is not listening. All right. So I don't even know how to wrap this up. I mean we've – I was trying to parse that and it's like, did you just call your girlfriend cheap? No, no, no.

The exact opposite. If there's one thing Bryce is guilty of, it is not calling his girlfriend cheap. You know, someday she's going to actually come and start listening to these. And I'm just going to be in so much trouble. Connor, you have to do like splice up the Bryce's girlfriend commentary and play it at his wedding. So, you know what's crazy, Sean? While you were saying that, I was literally thinking, you know, he's saying splice up. You know what would be really funny?

If I just put together a compilation. Bryce asked me to speak at his wedding. And then I say, you know, I could say some lovely words about Bryce. But I think I'll let him speak for himself. And then just play. I will have to go back and listen to every single episode. But you know what? I'm really good at listening to things at 2.3x times speed.

And it would probably take me about a month to get through our whole backlog and find every single episode but you know what i'm really good at listening to things at 2.3 x time speed and it would probably take me about a month to get through our whole backlog and find every single episode so it would be worth it just for that yeah there we go so so i would attend the wedding just to hear that ramona's gonna kill me ramona's gonna kill me Ramona is gonna kill me I hope Ramona never listens all right we'll wrap it there I mean we're gonna have you back on to talk about flash to talk about Eric Trout to talk about I mean I think oh man I I think we said this on the podcast a year ago that the time to be a c++ dev has never been more exciting. The time to be a system programmer. Yeah.

Because – C++ dev works. I mean, it's still – it's a huge community. It's an amazing community. So as much as I, like, criticize C++, the community has only grown over the years. And – Even with the pandemic it's amazing how quickly all the conferences like it's amazing that we are once again at a c++ conference

and that that this all picked up again and i hope what happened tonight so we got to interview basically three of the other main c++ podcasts and like I don't know if this will be a regular thing at C++ on scene and Jonathan Mueller and some other people and a couple folks yes that we got little anecdotes from but I just put those in there to make life a little harder for you because now you gotta listen through the recording and figure out exactly

who was who. Yeah the fact that you think I don't already listen through the whole recording and edit it just speaks volumes about what you think goes into producing this. But Bryce doesn't listen to this podcast. My favorite thing that we learned tonight is that JF and Chris, for their podcast, they pay somebody to do the post-production for them. We're going to send it over to Sean. Closing notes, closing thoughts.

We're going to have everything in the show notes, but we'll let you close it out. I'm super easy to find. So I'm, you know, at Sean Parent on Twitter or just search for Sean Parent and I think... He has a website. Yeah, I feel sorry for the other Sean Parents on the planet because I usually snag the

names first. You did hear about the internet first, unfortunately, for all those other Sean parents. Yeah. You discovered Adobe when they were a small company, so unfortunately the other Sean's parents have no hope.

Yeah, so sorry all the other Sean parents. You are out of luck. I own the internet, at least as far as your name is concerned. But yeah, you know, if you're interested thesis idea, we are full of thesis ideas. So, yeah. So, contact us and hit us up and we'll get something going. So, if you're listening to this and you're like, what do I do? Check the show notes. We will have

links to contact Sean, to contact the Val folks, to get involved with Val. It'll all be in the show notes. Anything you want to say before we close out here, Bryce? I really wish I had more time to finish my slides. I mean, this is the beauty of this podcast is that, you know, as much as I criticize Bryce, he could be working on his slides right now. But he understands that this conversation trumps all. So even though we didn't have Sean on for, I don't know, it wasn't 150 episodes, but it was like 50 episodes or something. So once we wrap this up, I i'm gonna tell this amazing story to connor and you're teasing the listener and and we're gonna go get a beer and bryce is not invited because he has to go do his slides so so bryce will never hear this story because we're not

gonna put it on the next podcast. Yeah. That is amazing, folks. We're going to wrap it there. And this is why, you know, Phil didn't really plug his conference well enough. But this is the reason you come to conferences. They talk about the hallway track. You could be at the Best Western Clifton Hotel outside the Lee's Hall. Lee's Hall. That's where the conference is.

The hotel is right next to it 30 seconds away. It is quite the funky hotel. It is. I mean it's under renovations. My room. I gotta say, I'm I think everybody knows I'm a princess when it comes to my travel arrangements. We do all know that. And actually the princess

is the best description I've ever heard of Bryce. This is a good venue. Like, there's some quirks. You don't have all the options that you'd have in a big city. This is a good venue. It's a good location. Yeah, it's been a little bit rainy today.

But, folks, the point is it's not about the venue. It's not about the weather. It's about the fact that if you were at this conference right now, you could be departing from Bryce and joining Sean and I to hear this story that no one else will ever hear on the pod because it's clearly not appropriate to tell on air and we love that for me not for Bryce because he's got to go prepare for a keynote tomorrow morning at 9.15 we'll all be there and by all I mean none of you

you know what that keynote may be at 9.30 alright folks you heard it here first thanks for listening we probably interrupted our Slovenia road trip for three episodes, probably one for the pod and two for Sean. And in three episodes – well, actually one episode from now when I'm saying this because it's the final of the three partitions, we'll be back to the Slovenia road trip. And stay tuned for real-time updates in like September because we have content for like three months now. So, all right.

Good night. Good night, folks. Good night. Be sure to check the show notes either in your podcast app or at ADSPthepodcast.com for anything that we mentioned in today's episode, as well as a link to a GitHub discussion where you can leave comments, thoughts, or questions about today's episode. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed and have a great day. Low quality, high quantity.

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