How an engineer got the attention of Steve Jobs but proceeded to flush that attention down the toilet

Long story short... an engineer gets the attention of Steve Jobs but then proceeds to throw that attention away by being a pest.

He starts pestering the crap out of his Apple contact who was probably just overwhelmed by WWDC and other things. Do not do this. It is like going to bars and trying to pick up women by saying PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE GO OUT WITH ME.

A hacker news commenter on the thread explains it really well:

1. Steve -> Manager: This guy e-mailed me again, does this need to be dealt with?

2. Manager -> Steve: It's a good algorithm, but the guy's been demanding and impatient, and with everyone prepping iOS/iPhone 4 for WWDC, Engineer just hasn't had time to look into it.

3. Steve -> Dude: No interest.

Probably the final lesson is that if you screw this up, don't blog it and try to make it a PR issue for Apple. Because it will only become a PR issue for you. For those with no social graces, let this be a warning.

via news.ycombinator.com

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4 responses
Apart from the story, I am wondering:
why is everyone addressing Jobs as "Steve", and not Mr Jobs? Did I miss something, is he everyone's friend? Is that the only way to get a response?
I like how he kept cc'ing Steve Jobs when he felt like the manager wasn't acting with enough haste. Not cool.
This line was what made them realize this guy might be some yahoo and killed the whole deal: "but not sure my computer will be able to handle the 10x computational complexity."

Heard of EC2?

Nice Blog!