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Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's View from the Top event. My name is Suze King-Liu. I'm the Dean of the College of Engineering here, and it's my pleasure to host this seminar's speaker series, which brings leaders from business and technology and the arts to Berkeley so that our community can hear and learn from them. So today we have our special guest, Craig Federighi from Apple. He's the Senior Vice President for Software Engineering.

But before proceeding further to talk about Craig, I wanted to acknowledge today's student organization, which is co-hosting the event, the Society for Women Engineers. So thank you very much. Also, I'd like to welcome members of the Dean's Society who have taken time out of their busy schedules to join us here today. Welcome. All right, so let me turn back to Craig Federighi, our speaker.

We are proud to note, oh, it's not on the slide here, that he received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences here, and afterwards pursued and received his master of science degree in computer science. So he's a proud Berkeley engineer. So we're really proud to have him join us here to share his personal journey with us. After Craig graduated, he was already an accomplished software engineer. He took on a lot of positions at companies in Silicon Valley, including Oracle, and Next Computer, and Apple.

He's been at Apple. He's taken multiple tours at Apple, and moving up the ranks. And today, he leads all of software engineering for the operating systems for your iPhones, for your iPads, and for the Mac computers. So it's really a significant role. He reports directly to the CEO, Tim Cook.

So I first met Craig this spring, and just to reconnect with him, to tell him about the great things we're doing here at Berkeley Engineering. And we talked about his experience as a student here and also his experience as a leader in industry. And he really had a lot of thoughtful comments and perspectives about engineering education. And so this is why I was really delighted that he agreed to come and share his wisdom with us today. I think he calls it questionable advice, but I think you'll join me in welcoming him to wholeheartedly share his personal journey with us so that we can learn from his experience and his advice.

So please join me in welcoming Craig to the stage.

Hi, So I'm Craig. I'll introduce myself, I guess, a little bit. And I'll start by saying hello. So who am I? My name's Craig Federighi, in fact.

And My name sort of looks like an encryption code you get handed out of your, when you're trying to decrypt your disk or something. It's pronounced roughly like this, Federighi. If you forget it, you can say Fedechini when I was kind of a persecuted freshman in high school. Some people would call me Fedechini, I guess. I was okay with that.

So why am I here? This is a great mystery for me. I think if you, I mean Berkeley, well in an existential sense, it's a huge mystery, but if you look around Berkeley, there are just incredible people. In fact, if you look to your left, and you look to your right, and probably look at your own hands, there are people more interesting and deserving of being on the stage than me, but here I am. So, why am I here?

Here we are, what are we gonna do about this? So I've gotten a question that I think has given me a reason to understand why at least I was asked to be here. Recently in the cafeteria at work, a new college grad who just joined the company came up to me and he asked, how can I become you? Now, needless to say, that's a pretty disturbing question. I thought my wife might have some issues with it.

I wasn't exactly sure what it would mean to me personally when that occurred. But I think what he really meant was, how can I get your job? And I'd be happy working for this young fellow. He seemed pretty nice. So he's really looking for career advice.

He's looking for insights. I guess he was looking for wisdom. In truth, despite my years of going through this journey, I have none of these things to offer you today. I can offer my story and let you derive whatever wisdom from it you can. So we'll get started.

Now unfortunately my recollection of my past is quite hazy. But I did do a little bit of research, you're not like live blogging or something there are you? So I did do some research and uncovered a little bit of historical evidence. And so let's start at the start. How did I get here?

Well, as best I can tell, it started about 13.8 billion years ago. And there was an event. It was called the Big Bang. And apparently, stars formed, decayed, exploded. And eventually, on this planet, about 50, 000 years ago, our species ventured forth out of Africa and into Western Europe.

From there, about 121 years ago, my genetic material migrated and coalesced on this point. So I began then a 40-year lifetime migration. This is actually my life's migratory path. I know what you're saying, wild, wild stuff. This guy's been an adventurer.

That's right. So I could, and in fact, how did I get here? In truth, it was a 90 minute drive this morning. Like an aged salmon heading upstream, I rode up through the river of my life up to here, presumably this afternoon. I'm here to pass on to the next generation and then I guess I presumably I'll find my way back further east, and it'll all end for me there.

So a few more details that might add a little color to my story. So let's start at the start. This is Allegedly me. I was born in San Leandro. Many of you know it's pretty close, just down 580.

When I was 10 years old, I got a cool shirt, for 1. My interest back then, I was really into skiing. I also was into basketball. In fact, I was pretty sure I was gonna be Dr. J.

He was my idol and I was gonna join the NBA. Now, it did not work out. What did happen is there was an after-school program and my mom said, hey son, maybe the NBA is not going to be your thing. You should do this computer class. There are these things called computers.

And they're bringing some Apple IIs around after school. You should do that. And I said, mom, only posers are into computers. Just people who want to seem cool, They go and they do the computer thing. But I went and it was a mind-blowing event.

In fact, there were several hours of like type trying to draw pictures by plotting lines and I thought this is dumb. But then there was a moment at the very end where they had us write this program. How old are you? Input A, print in 10 years, you will be A plus 10. And my mind exploded.

I mean, it was, that was it. I was like this, I know exactly the future now and I am gonna be part of it. It's all about computers. I kid you not, I started, I'd had a little nugget of life savings. It wasn't enough to buy a computer, so I started doing housework and doing weeding and I was doing all these chores because I was gonna buy a computer.

And eventually I did, I bought a TRS-80 color computer, look it up,

6809

processor, decent thing, I couldn't afford an Apple at the time. But I worked, I got jobs, little odd jobs doing programming after I taught myself some things. Eventually I was able to afford an Apple. And then finally in 1984, the Mac came out and I was able to experience the Mac. And it was at that moment bringing together really the humanities and computer science in this way that previously I couldn't fully imagine, that it all really connected for me.

And I decided at that time that someday I would work for Apple. I think it was in junior high at the time. So after this, I went to Berkeley. So that was awesome. I brought another Mac with me.

And eventually, there were more Macs. And then in

1988,

I think it was, Steve Jobs had since left Apple. And he had introduced the Next machine in San Francisco. And he came to Berkeley to kind of give a re-performance of the launch of the Mac. There was no YouTube then. I wasn't going to be able to see that launch online.

But he came to the PSL, and he kind of redid the whole launch of the product and showed off the next cube. And for me, this was just an absolute revelation. I thought it was just incredible. And so I decided, no, I'm not gonna work for Apple. I'm gonna work for NeXT.

So that was my future. In the meantime, coming to Berkeley, of course I had to fit in. So I got an electric guitar, that was totally key. And that's really the only explanation for this. Because now, so the bandana was actually necessary for studying to keep my hair out of my eyes.

If we pan down, you'd see actually the circuit board where in CS 150 we were building a digital answering machine with all these wires connecting it and that's what I was working on apparently with my sunglasses on. Totally unclear. Just for posterity, here's my senior year Berkeley dining card. So that was good stuff. Now I was a very generally pretty shy, socially awkward person so this whole look was pretty key because I could walk down the street and people would just clear to the other side, which says something at Berkeley, right?

That people were like, I don't want to be anywhere near whatever craziness is going on there. So I was at Berkeley, it was a fantastic educational experience for me. After being so into computers and programming from really age 10 on, when I got to Berkeley, it was like, this is everything I want to know. Every class is like, I want to learn more about that. I want to learn more about that.

So incredibly exciting. And not just the computer science classes. I mean, taking philosophy classes and political science classes and business classes. I mean, all of this was just incredibly eye-opening for me. When I wrapped up, most students their senior year were thinking, what are they going to do with themselves?

I had completely neglected to keep track of the fact that I was about to graduate and needed a job. And Fortunately, there was a company that was an incredibly aggressive recruiter. And since I'd done nothing to try to seek a job, I accepted their offer and headed down to Oracle. But the key for me was throughout my late high school and college years, I thought, next thing I'm going to do after I graduate is I got to spend a winter Skiing so I headed out west to Colorado and spent spent the winter doing this kind of stuff but the key was I brought my next computer with me and actually worked remotely from a little cabin. It was like a little ski monk thing.

You'd ski in the morning and then come back and code in the afternoon. But interestingly, I did some of the most, I guess, kind of inventive work at the time, in my time, in this weird environment. So sometimes inspiration comes in strange places. So I headed back and ended up coming back to Berkeley for graduate school in

92

to seek a master's. I brought my NeXT computer with me. I did all my classes there and just through a modem uploaded all my stuff to the school systems. And grad school was great. But after that I was actually able to fulfill my goal and got to join Next.

And then a strange thing happened, because when I was young, I thought I'd be at Apple, but then I decided I wanted to be at Next, and then I'd show up at Next, and then we'd get acquired by Apple. So, back at Apple again. But this was a fantastic period for me. There were so many different problems to work on. And a lot of things I didn't anticipate working on, I got to learn about.

And some of that led to something called WebObjects, like a really declarative user interface kind of environment for building web services. And I did that for a while. But then the whole B2B e-commerce, you all know about the dot-com crash. So before that happened, there was the dot-com bubble and I got to participate in that. I worked for a company called Ariba.

By then I was a management type, I guess, or partly, did a lot of coding, but my job was CTO. Now this is a good gig if you can get it. So I did platform architecture, kind of UI and app design, product strategy, I was sort of the demo guy. So this was good times, but most importantly in this period of my life, I defied all expectations and met a woman, my wife, who agreed to marry me. So this was fantastic.

Now, strangely, after that, this thing started to happen where these kids started to show up. Now, we never quite figured out why this was happening, but eventually it did stop after we made 4 of them. So there's that. And it became a little bit overwhelming. And so after having done a little bit of the CTO kind of semi-executive thing, I actually decided to take a couple years and return to being an individual contributor engineer and did a bunch of open source stuff.

If you go to aribaweb.org, you can probably still see the website I left there over a decade ago. But that engineering writing code is still, you know, kind of my favorite thing to do in my spare time, and it felt great to return to doing that. But after that period, I returned to, or yeah, finally came back to Apple. It was really kind of home for me, and apparently I'm gonna die there. So, I started with Mac OS, and then went on to do iOS as well.

And it's been an incredible opportunity and journey for me there. So what can we learn from all of this? A few possible lessons. So 1 that's very clear is don't move. So wherever you're born, stay there and wait for the industry that you need to erupt right around you and then just seek employment there.

Second lesson, heavy metal. I mean, it's very clear that that is a key element of growth. And neglect looking for a job. If any of you were planning on looking for a job, set that aside. Ski, very important.

And also, pick 1 haircut in the 80s and just stick with it. That was just, It was absolutely, haven't changed my instructions to the barber ever since. So seriously, there are a few things I'd observe that I don't know if these are important or essential, but they are some things that I think seem to be important to me. So how can I get your job? Well, in truth, the key part is first, we'll go with 7 easy steps.

First step is don't want my job. So I didn't want my job. So maybe you shouldn't either. I think the most important thing to do is to focus on doing what you love. If you're worried about where you're going, where this all will take you, if you're too focused on the destination, I think you'll miss the journey.

And when you do what you love, it turns out that the things you do in your spare time. Like on my time, if I have a moment on the weekend, I'm going to be reading things about programming. I'm going to be reading things about software, artificial intelligence, because that's what I love. So it's like, if you do something you love, it's like cheating, because all of your recreational time actually turns into time that helps you develop in your career. So that part is super important.

Second, work with people whose work you admire. I think the thing about me being drawn to Next was I saw this product back in 88 that I said this is, it just spoke to me, this is an incredible piece of work. I need to be, I need to see what it's like to be among the people who can do that kind of thing. And so I just felt magnetically drawn to be among the people who did this kind of work that I really appreciated and to learn from them. And that gets me to number 3, which is pay attention.

It's amazing in life. 1 of my kids actually said to me the other day, they said, you know, I figured out a secret. Like, in class, pay attention. I thought, wow. Because they're like, all the other kids are not paying any attention.

And we have to sit there anyway. Imagine how much you could learn if you paid attention. But during life, I mean, you are, through your working life, through your school life, you're surrounded with all of these opportunities to learn. And not just in your field, not just in the thing that you think you're studying, but all those things peripheral to the field you're studying. There's so many fascinating things to learn and for me I carried around a notebook, paper, and a pencil and was just taking notes all the time.

People thought I was like a wandering reporter or spy or something because I was just constantly jotting things down because there's just so many interesting things. And if you're making use of the time to suck them all in, if you're curious, it really helps. Number 4, and this is kind of related, never stop acting like the new 1 on the team. When you first join a team, and for those of you who've done internships, you get to have that moment. When you first get a job, you show up and no 1 expects you to know anything, and so you get to ask the stupid questions.

You get to say, oh, I don't know anything about that. Can you tell me about that? Why did we do that? I've never stopped being that person. That's such a valuable moment to say, it's OK if I don't know everything.

I can have questions. And if you do, it turns out some of those questions are questions that team probably should have been asking themselves and wasn't. And so if you're asking them, you might get some answers that everybody needs to hear. But also it's that permission to just be learning and learning and learning, because it's not just about being narrow and wanting to be secure in 1 little area. Every adjacency is an area to explore.

And the way you're going to broaden yourself and learn is to just feel the permission to ask the questions all along the way. Another thing is, I see team more important than self. When I've joined projects, I've decided that whatever the team's mission is, whatever we're trying to accomplish, I want to be part of making that happen. I want to do everything that can be done to make that happen. If it's, we're going to go work.

There's a point I joined a team and they were in a point of the release where it was all about bug fixing. All I was going to do for a year was fix bugs, which didn't sound like the coolest thing to do. It turned out to be an incredible learning opportunity. There was a part we had to work on performance. Well, I got to learn about performance because we had to fix the performance of the thing I was working on.

If you become part of the, adopt the mission of the team, adopt that project, you find that there's so many different ways you can help, and along the way, so many different ways you can learn. Where if you're focused more about what does this mean for me, what am I interested in, I think you miss out on all of those opportunities. And I think related to this is this notion of committing for a period of time. I guess I always looked at my career as I'm going to spend 4 or 5 years, I'm going to do this, I'm not going to wake up each morning and say, am I doing the right thing? Should I take a turn here?

Is this my path to where I want to be? Instead, I said, this is what I'm going to do. And my focus is just immersing myself in that thing. Because it'd be like if you got married, and every day you woke up and you said, am I married to the right person? Like, That would not be a good relationship, right?

To have that thought in your head the whole time, super bad. So I do not have that thought in my head. So, but the same thing can happen in work. You see these people so worried about, angsty about, am I in the right job? Am I heading in the right direction?

Make, assess the situation, make a choice. All these choices are imperfect. And then commit for a while. Give yourself the opportunity to really experience it. And then set yourself a deadline and say, in a year or 4 years from now, I'm gonna step back from having done all this and then assess what I wanna do next.

But that certainly has been important to me, both in my sanity and in my ability to really commit in a way that I think allowed me to learn and do good work. So number 7, follow your heart. Cheesy, but it's been super important for me. So there have been numerous, sort of the most important decisions I've had to make. I feel like I made the decision that if you were analytical about it, if you made that, you know, I had an important decision to make and I asked my dad, you know, I'm having trouble, do I do I take this job here or do I go to grad school?

Do I take this position here or do I go over here? You know, when I went to Next, I took a big pay cut to join a failing company. Didn't seem like too smart a move, but I felt, he said, my dad said, make a list, write down all the good and bad of this decision, this decision, add it all up, there you go. I made the list, I obviously shouldn't go work for Next. But when I thought of making the decision on that side of it, I just got a feeling in my gut like, no, I want to be there.

And it turned out there was probably something wise or intuitive about what was drawing me to the right decision, and the ability to listen to yourself in those moments and make those decisions. I think over and over in the most important decisions, that's been super important. And then when you're there, you feel good about it. So And of course, I say all of this, this is 1 story, 1 data point. I mean, let's be honest, be very, very lucky.

So however you figure that out, I haven't cracked the code, but it seemed to happen for me. So That's a little advice. Thank you very much. I think we're gonna do some questions and I'll sit down and we'll see how it goes

All right, so I'll just start out with just a few questions and I'll hand it over for the students in a little while. All right, so that was a wonderful story. Thank you for taking us through your whole life journey and It spanned many years and some miles.

Very, very little geography.

It's wonderful. But clearly, some common themes were Apple. It's amazing. When you were starting when you were 10. And then Berkeley, the connection there, Steve Wozniak, whom you saw, heard, and co-founder of Apple, but also 1 of our alums, so it's fantastic.

So I thought the advice was pretty good. What did you all think? It's not questionable.

That's great. Questionable. Yeah.

And I was just wondering, though, from your experience, what are the important skills that you think are critical for success, as first of all, let's say as an engineer. So, because our audience is primarily made of engineering students today.

Yeah, sure. You know, it's an interesting blend today because I think on the 1 hand, you wanna be deep in a domain, you know, have real expertise, And that takes a lot of hard work solving real problems, spending the time doing that. But I think increasingly and certainly in the environment where I work now, software engineering is completely a team sport. Building things at scale is about building things with lots of people and not just other software engineers building people building things with designers, working with project managers, working with hardware teams, working you know all these other disciplines. And so in addition to being an awesome engineer, communication is incredibly important.

I mean, written communication, verbal communication. Being able to collaborate is super important. Being able to empathize with users, if you're building product software like I do, can you put yourself in the mindset of your customer and think about how they're going to see what you're doing or what they want, what they value, and translate that? And then having the ability as part of collaboration to respect all these other disciplines. You know, I'll say when I was an undergrad, just super focused primarily on computer science, there can be a tendency to see the world 1 way through the eyes of someone who's very analytical and so forth, and to think that these other softer skills are not strong.

And in fact, what you come to appreciate is that you have many blind spots, that that's a narrow point of view. And so being able to respect all of these different kinds of roles and points of view and collaborate effectively with those people is what it takes to actually do a great product as a team. And that's so much of what it's about these days. So that's my primary advice.

Okay, that's fantastic. So soft skills. Yeah. And that's something which you demonstrate very well here, I think. You're very comfortable on the stage speaking, communicating effectively with presentations and just, you know, extemporaneously.

How, were you like that when you were 10 years old? Yeah. Or even when you were a college student?

I don't know. So yeah. How did you develop that skill? Certainly it's been, this has been the strangest part of my journey is that if any, if any of you had ever heard of me before now, it's probably because you know, being on, on stage presenting something in front of a big room of people. And I grew up a very, I think a pretty shy, socially awkward guy.

Certainly didn't get into computer science for the fame element of it. It's not kind of where you think is your path to the stage traditionally. And so the fact things kind of went that way was quite surprising. I did in high school, I actually was a DJ. We had a radio station at my high school.

We had a 10-watt transmitter, which had an 8-mile range. But it was this opportunity for years to just talk, talk on the air. So I gotta think that actually played a role later on with being comfortable communicating with people. But that's why I say those things that you do that don't seem like the central thing in your career, you have your deep area of expertise, but some of these other things, they turn out to maybe play a role that you couldn't have possibly anticipated. And certainly that worked out for me.

And then I also just found that presenting, I think a lot of people get caught up in, I got to write out a script, I got to memorize exactly what I'm going to say. And then that's too hard. I could never succeed at that. My memory wouldn't allow it. And so rather than do something really hard, I just figure if there's something I'm excited about that I want to share, I just try to get up there and be myself and tell the story.

And so if you can get to a frame of mind where you know what you want to get across, and you're willing to just put yourself out there, I think audiences appreciate people who are just willing to be their authentic selves up there.

Right, authentic. So, I found it really interesting that you felt that these soft skills are really important for just an engineer versus a leader. I think clearly as a manager and an executive, you do need those kinds of communication skills and empathy with your customers. What about, so it's great that you mentioned the ability to respect and see different perspectives. So just in general, I know when you and I spoke earlier this spring, we talked about efforts here at Berkeley to foster a culture of inclusion in engineering and to just ensure that everybody has a chance to thrive here rather than just to survive.

How do you think this diversity plays a role in tech, in the tech industry specifically?

Well, I mean it's hugely important, and I know it's an area that, of course, when we look at some statistics, it's an area where the industry could do better, where we'd like to do much better. And that's an important problem to solve because when you think about building the best products, I think the best products come from diverse teams, fundamentally. They come from understanding your customer, and your customer comes from all kinds of backgrounds and experiences and desires and aptitudes. And if the people in the room have a narrow perspective on what the customer wants, what the customer will understand, you're gonna build something that's very narrow. And I found over and over these areas where having the right set of people in the room, it's eye-opening.

You go, well, of course everyone would want this. And someone says, actually, no. Or actually, I really value this. And you're like, really? And you realize how narrow sometimes you can be viewing things if you just have a single viewpoint in the room.

And I mean, this has to do with both culture and what national customs, age, what's currently fashionable or popular of different demographics. I mean, you need this diversity along every dimension will inform you to build the right product. And it's not just understanding the customer, it's also that the diversity of domain backgrounds, of ways of looking at the problem are where you make those leaps. We can spend our time kind of optimizing in our lane, but where the really interesting stuff happens is when you cross the lanes, and that only happens by having this diverse set of disciplines together at the table. So it's super important and we need to do all we can.

I know Berkeley's doing so much to try to solve this, but it's super important to doing good work.

That's great to hear. So I know it's wonderful that you shared your story about your family. And I know 1 of your daughters is here today, Lisa, welcome.

She's a little bigger now.

Yes. And so I'm wondering, have you found it to be helpful to your career to be a parent, or first of all, a husband and then a parent, maybe, in that order?

I guess I have to say yes.

That's great.

Well certainly I bring a certain perspective. You know there's certain kinds of features that suddenly seem much more important to me than they would if I was a single person when it comes to thinking about both what kids want, what families want. There's also an element of just the period of life and being able to focus on work. But work-life balance is a challenge. Well, it's always a challenge.

And it's maybe especially a challenge when you start taking on family. And I have no good advice to offer you on that. I don't do that very well. I've certainly found that today, often, and certainly the devices we all carry in our pockets are part of this, where it's easy to never be away from work. And you have to be away from work, not only for the sake of being with your family, but also that separation from that time where you can be intensely focused on that environment to that time that you let yourself be unplugged from that.

And so if there's a piece of advice I can give you is number 1, sleep. Give yourself time to sleep. I know I see all these t-shirts. I was walking across the campus. Someone had eat, sleep, code, and then sleep was crossed out.

Like that. I just saw that like an hour ago. And I'll say, I mean, there's sort of the legend here at Berkeley, I think, that you can have sort of a sleep or a social life or grades or something, you know, pick 2, pick any 2.

Yes, actually, I think some EECS students a number of years ago determined like a relationship is worth like 3 units. You can either take a course for 3 units or have

a relationship. I was able to optimize that part away completely but I did I did focus on the sleep part and the school part. So it's a huge part of deciding, I mean, at different points in your life, what are you going to focus on and what are you going to give up? And it is certainly true as you get into family, family becomes super important. For me, work was also really important.

And a lot of other things, you focus out to a secondary place.

So do you encourage your team members, the people who work for you, to achieve some kind of work-life balance? I mean, is that?

Yeah, and it's tricky, right? Because sometimes I might be working on a weekend or something. And so I uncover a question. And I'm thinking, I'm going to send an email just because it's Monday morning. They can go do this.

But then you send your question. And then do they feel obliged to, oh, I just got this message. Maybe I should be working right now. And I could probably do better to make clear that it's really when you're at work, you're at work. And when you're not at work, you probably shouldn't be at work.

So that's my advice.

Yes. Actually, I learned from my students that there's a feature, at least for Gmail, you can actually delay so that people don't feel like they have to respond to you like after midnight or over the weekends. It seemed weird, you send

it and then you realize later, can you go back in the outbox and remove it?

It's too late, but now you have the option, just delay the sending. This is great, So I'd like to open up the floor to questions from students, preferably students. Anybody.

1 thing. I work for Apple, but I'm just here as myself. The questions I don't want to answer are things of the form, what's the new iPhone? IPhone

12.

Yes. Or why did Apple make this decision, or blah, blah, blah. Right, My goal here, despite the live blogging that seems to be happening, is do not make any news. So if you have a question that seems like it might make news, please don't ask, because I cannot answer it.

All right, when you, well, have a microphone, And then please introduce yourself, your major, your year, and your question.

Hi, I'm Zoe, I'm a third year undergraduate EECS student. I was just curious, if you had to go back to Berkeley and do it all again, is there anything that you would change? Because we're trying to figure out our lives, too, and would love to know what steps you felt like were valuable and not.

Gosh, it's super hard to say. Because at some level, I appreciate the journey my life went on. And you never know if you change 1 variable, what happened. No joke, I was like a coding monk or something. I mean, the narrowness socially of my life cannot be overstated.

And so in that sense, I feel like, wow, people talk about their college experience in this way of making many more connections on other levels, and I was focused. And so would I have been better off? Have I broadened that? Some of that is just my personality. Probably.

Probably that would have been better. But you might not have that problem that I had. But That would be something, because I was so focused on academics and coding and playing guitar that that was all I had room for. And so the parts of the college experience, I guess I could go back and do it again and just do the social part and forget the academics part. And then I'd even it all out.

Great. Question here.

Hi, my name is Mark. I'm a fourth year student studying mechanical engineering and business. You touched on this idea of inflection points and making decisions following your heart, things like that. Could you give some examples of when you listen to yourself and you're really happy that you did?

Yeah well 1 I mean there are 2 of them that that are I think stand out as a couple of the biggest inflection points and 1 of them was when I I had been at at Oracle and like I say I largely landed at Oracle because they would let me, they'd take me on when I said, I'm only going to work for you for 6 months, and then I'm going to leave and ski. They met that bar. And yet I found myself there. And because the way things developed, there were these opportunities where there was a time when video on demand started to be, and now we all use it all the time, but video on demand started to be a big thing. And it was interesting.

It was new. And I'd done a little grad work in that area too. And there was an idea that I could be part of the project that was going to be the big thing at Oracle. And it was taking off. It was super well-funded, et cetera.

Or I could go fill my dream of working for Next. And I interviewed at Next, and they said, Oracle had been very good to me, and so at Next they said, well, you're really overpaid. And I said, oh, that's a bummer. And so there was this point where it's like, and Next was largely a failed slash failing company, right? They'd gotten out of the hardware business, no 1 was buying the software.

And yet Oracle was going to go big in this space that seemed so promising and emerging. And yet having talked to the 2 teams, met the people, saw what they were working about, there was 1 that I just felt like, I wanna be part of that, I wanna be with them, I feel like I could learn so much. And for me, that's been 1 of the best decisions, certainly in my entire career, to be among those people. I mean, little did we realize then that what we were creating at Next to run in this square foot box was the foundation of what a billion people were going to have in their pockets. But that's where it all went.

And I think maybe there was an element of just what you sense about the people and the work that you can't articulate it to yourself, but you can feel it, and that's part of the attraction. And that was there for me. And the other 1 was the decision to come back to grad school. I'd had in my mind that I wanted to do it. I'd had that I wanted to learn something more.

I'd been in industry a little bit and you know of course they're saying stay stay you know here's a great opportunity for you to do more here and I said you know I mean this one's horrible by the way they they said what would it take for you to stay? And I made the most outlandish, the thing like you make most outlandish set of demands. I won't even state them because they're so ridiculous. I'm like, well, I could do this and this, give me a cut of the profits, and let me work here, and whatever. And I'm like, no, we're going to do this.

And then they came back and said, OK.

Wow.

And so I said, but I wanted to go to grad school. And the horrible part is, so I said, God, okay. So I said yes. And then Monday, school had started, grad school had started, and I didn't show up because I said okay to this job. And I'm sitting there back in my cubicle, and I'm like, I do not want to be here.

I want to go to grad school. And I called up the thing. And I said, can I still come? I've missed a few days of classes. And they said, sure, come on up.

Just start taking your classes again. And I went to grad school. And it was just this feeling of where I wanted to be. And I think, again, I feel like it was the path intellectually and that I wanted to take. And I was willing to listen to that and follow it.

And no complaints. Wonderful.

In the back.

Sir. Hello. My name is Taj. I'm a third year cs student. I wanted to thank you for taking your time and coming out here today.

1 question, I actually have 2 questions. 1 question is what's your favorite aspect of software engineering? Software engineering is comprised of multiple different facets. Like you have AI, machine learning, operating systems, compilers. What drove you to work at operating systems at Apple?

And then I guess what was your favorite? And the second question I have is, how do you combat feeling burnt out? I know you mentioned that you always were really focused on coding and that sort of stuff, but especially as a student here at Berkeley, I spend a lot of days just working, and then that Saturday comes and I'm just like, oh, I feel really burnt out. How do you combat that and continue being motivated to work and stuff?

Yeah, OK, a bunch there. So in terms of sort of what's my favorite thing, I got started when really the way we've programmed the languages, the frameworks, the sort of idioms we use have been really evolving over the years. And early on, I always felt like I loved programming and yet I felt like so much of what we were doing when programming Was so tedious, you know, I think many of us are inherently lazy people. We're always looking for how can I make this easier? And So and then you do way more work trying to make it easier than if you just went and did it, right?

So I've always been drawn to languages, frameworks, tools, things that change the way software is developed to try to get to the root of how do I make something maximally expressive and dynamic. And so I love doing this kind of this kind of development framework work. At the same time I've really come to love interaction design. And when you can think about how you're gonna connect a piece of work to a customer experience. I'm not a good graphic designer at all.

I mean, horrendous. But I enjoy working with them. And I enjoy thinking about that connection between a customer experience we want to create and what that experience can be, and then what's the underlying architecture that could make all of that happen. There's something just fantastic about that. But I'll say generally also with programming, there's something really zen about it.

You can lose yourself for hours in just thinking deeply about a problem, and then when it all comes together, there's just this unbelievable feeling of, I did it. It works. It just undeniably works. There are lots of things where you could have opinions or write an essay and like did you nail it? I don't know.

But you wrote a program and it did the thing. There's no denying it. It worked. And so I just get awesome satisfaction out of that. Now, and I still do, and that's why I took a couple years where I wanted to return back from being in a little bit more nebulous role of high-level leadership and into a role where I'm just sitting down for a day and at the end of the day, I've solved a problem in the most concrete way possible.

And I just felt so good. In terms of burnout, I think it helps to have a diversity of things that you're working on. If there are parts of your day where, or parts of your week where I'm gonna focus on this and I'm gonna go deep, and sometimes there's a certain activation energy to immersing yourself sufficiently to get in that productive zone and really crank some stuff out. So you gotta be willing to go deep and spend that time. But then to be able to spend some time doing some other activities that can still be related to your project, to programming, or something else in your life that exercises a different part of your brain and provides you with different inspiration or involves now I'm working with people in a different way.

Mixing it up is great. And I'll say, for me in my job, it's awesome because I love almost every element of computer science, of computing, in hardware and silicon and all this. And so getting to work at a scale where you're working with the best people in all of those disciplines and being able to touch them all and having that constant diversity of problems you're solving does kind of keep renewing you. You know, you're always learning something new. And I think that's always been part of how I've, what's drawn me into programming is, I'd learn something, I'd think of some, how do I apply this thing I've learned?

I'd come up with a project I want to build, and then you're building the project, and you realize there's something else that you need to learn to do it right. And there's nothing like having a problem to solve and having that, seeking a solution to then give you the hunger to learn and the appreciation for the solution when you're doing it. And that cycle is just so motivating. And with computers, it's so great because you can go try that stuff out and it's not like you're gonna build a bridge and kill people, right? You can go experiment and play and yet constantly be learning.

And so I guess that keeps me renewed.

Excellent. Maybe time for 1 more question.

Hi, I'm Tomas. I'm a third year EECS student. And I'm curious, what made you different from all the other coding monks that are still stuck in their cubicles

40

years later? How did you get to the top of 1 of the best companies?

I have no idea. I mean, I, luck. I mean, I think the things I talked about, I guess, the way it felt to me along the way was I, I guess I had the good fortune of being drawn to some interesting projects, some interesting parts of the industry that maybe at times didn't look like they were necessarily the hot thing, but they were something that turned out to be meaningful. I think I was always focused on, at any given time, trying to solve the right problem for the team. And when you're working on a project and you're devoted to the success of the project and solving all the problems of the project, that's where people, that's like the point that someone said, hey, you should manage this team, when I was an individual contributor, and they said you should manage this team.

I had no aspirations of management at that time, it was super early, it seemed weird, But it was because my focus had been not just my narrow thing, but like, what can I do for the team? What are all the different problems I can solve? They said, oh, you should probably manage it. You seem to have this broader concern for the project. And when I was then managing my team, but I was kind of concerned about how my project fit in with other projects and solving that broader problem and trying to help out here and there, they said, oh, you should lead this collection.

They kept pulling me up. And at some point, I'm like, what are you doing? You're making a big mistake. But it is, I think, if you're not too worried about getting there, but you're just trying to do the job, at times it turns out that people see in you maybe being the solution to a problem they have to solve, which is get something led. So maybe that's it, or maybe it's just, you know, being a high school radio DJ.

I don't know, Hard to say. Hard to say.

Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Craig, for spending time with us and giving us very wise advice and being an exemplar of a Berkeley engineer.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, everybody. We have a gift for you. A gift? Oh.

So we have a gift for you, Berkeley Engineering

shirt, modeled

by our Berkeley Engineering students. Somebody taking a photo? Please. Thank you. Great.

Thank you all for coming,

and go Bears.

Go Bears. And I

hope to see

you at more events later this year. All right, bye bye.