The Medium of Software

Bob Baxley fell for computing at 11, in a friend's bedroom in Dallas, watching a home-built Heathkit computer change the screen with a single keypress. He started in software design in 1990 at Claris, then Apple's software subsidiary, working on the first versions of ClarisWorks. At Yahoo he led the search design team and worked on the original design of Yahoo Answers, which he says was the fastest product in internet history to reach 100 million users at the time. He then led design for the Apple Online Store, joining months before the iPhone was announced, spent two years on the corporate side of Apple Retail, helped build Pinterest's design team, and now leads design at ThoughtSpot, a data analytics company working to put data in more people's hands.

Around 2016, after leaving Pinterest, he hit a real crisis about the industry he'd spent his career in, prompted by questions about social media's role in that year's election. A podcast on Silicon Valley history led him to Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture, which asks why personal computing was invented in Northern California. The answer: a small group around Stanford and Palo Alto saw software as a new medium, a peer to film, music and books, while the East Coast saw computers as counting machines. That reframing gave him his purpose back. He calls himself a practitioner in the medium of software, the way someone else is a filmmaker, and argues software is the most important cultural artifact being made anywhere today. Keep the people on the other side of the glass in mind, he says. If you saw all your users in one place, you'd want to make something great.

He doesn't dismiss the negativity and abuse of the medium, but chooses to put his energy into its potential, and says everyone has to find their own balance. His advice to younger designers, often given through ADPList mentoring, is to get clear on why you want to design. Everyone in the field is smart and talented enough to do something else. His own reason is a sense of obligation to make the online built environment as humane as possible. Yours will be different, but knowing it clarifies the companies, problems and people you want to work with, and makes it easier for a hiring manager to see where you fit.