
1976 letter from Silicon Valley exec calls Steve Jobs 'flaky' and a 'joker' - Scramblejams
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/17/1976-letter-from-silicon-valley-exec-calls-steve-jobs-flaky-joker.html
======
KirinDave
Steve Jobs WAS a flakey joker though.

My father was a senior engineer and manager at NeXT, and I often came to the
office with him as they built their own manufacturing line. I learned to write
my first GUI code on a NeXT Color Station in my father's lab on weekends when
he'd go into work. I got to meet Jobs more than once. I realized early on he
was a strange and scary guy and that I didn't want to be like him.

Surely ya'll have heard the "triangle firing" story from NeXT? A senior
engineer had, as a joke, a triangle up on the wall who's points were labeled
"On time, Complete, Under Budget" and at the bottom, "Pick any two." This is a
slightly cynical take on a pretty famous constraint diagram. Steve Jobs looked
at this and literally fired the guy on the spot for having a "bad attitude."
It didn't matter that "it's a joke."

At Apple, Jobs was famously abusive with his staff, demanding that each one be
able to entertain and interest him even if that was clearly not their job.
It's not a joke to say folks avoided Jobs whenever they could, you could end
up with double workload or pressure on your manager or whatever just because
you couldn't articulate your current work in a compelling way.

Maybe he succeeded because he was these things, but to many people he was a
frightening, tyrannical, capricious person.

~~~
creep
>I realized early on he was a strange and scary guy and that I didn't want to
be like him.

What about your interactions with him gave you that impression? Genuinely
curious.

~~~
KirinDave
At first I thought he was joking about putting me to work at NeXT then I
realized he might not be. When I said I still wanted to go to college he gave
me a look for just a moment like I was an idiot. He never bothered to notice
me again.

Not like I had a choice. Holy crap what would my dad have even done to me if I
had decided not to go to college...

~~~
scarface74
If you had experience at NeXT on your resume before you turned 18, would you
have needed to go to college? Alternatively, what's wrong with working for a
couple of years to see if you really wanted to go to college for CS?

If I had the chance to get a job as a programmer straight out of school, I
might have chosen that and go to school part time.

~~~
KirinDave
I deeply regret not getting a PhD or at least a masters. I'm forever stuck
being a slacker without the real insights my peers with such accomplishments
have. My career is all about being an operator, and as time goes on this feels
more and more hollow.

It's not like most folks even remember NeXT.

~~~
scarface74
If NeXT hadn't been bought by Apple and the operating system hadn't become the
basis of OS X and then the iPhone, it would have been no more than a trivia
question. But since it is running on over a billion devices, I think most tech
savvy people know about it.

------
hari_seldon_
While it is easy to say that it is hard to spot “genius,” it is also important
to note that people grow and change over time. Maybe being called flaky
influenced his growth down the road.

Feedback like this is based on limited interaction with someone at one point
in their life, and I hope that many 21-year-olds mature and find their element
later.

~~~
acomjean
People do learn over time. I remember Steve Jobs (maybe his stanford address)
talking about getting fired from Apple. He said it was a humbling experience
but one he learned from.

Job's wasn't 100% successful in all his products, but he was persistent. Even
the failures didn't stop him from trying the next thing (Lisa, Newton,
eMate[1], Pipin). Even the original mac had lac-luster sales at first.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMate_300)

~~~
simonh
The Newton came long after Jobs left Apple, it was Scully’s thing. The Pippin
was released at the beginning of 1996, while Apple announced the purchase of
NeXT that December.

------
Isamu
joker: true, and TFA points out they launched on April 1, at price point of
$666.66.

flaky: "Told him we'd like to see what they've got — we'd estimate — then
decide. Sounds flaky. Watch it!" Reasonable to me.

Really he was reacting with reasonable skepticism to a true garage startup
with no revenue and a tiny budget. He was concerned about getting paid.

~~~
jandrese
Basically the guy didn't take the bet and lost. It happens. You can't predict
the future perfectly.

It's also important to remember that Apple was an also-ran among the huge
number of companies that dipped their toes into the microprocessor market when
it first appeared. Very few survived. Apple only barely survived. Their status
as a market Juggernaut is a fairly recent change.

------
52-6F-62
Wasn't he just kind of a hippie back then?

Not surprised an ad exec didn't like him in those days.

~~~
tabtab
"Startup" people and "the suits" often don't see eye-to-eye, even today. Paul
Graham describes how Yahoo's "anti hacker suit-culture" did Yahoo in.
(paraphrased)

He wrote: "That's why people proposing to destroy [hacker culture] use phrases
like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there
are worse things than seeming irresponsible. _Losing_ , for example."

~~~
52-6F-62
Wow. Adult supervision. That’s pretty insulting.

Is that from an article or a book? I’m curious to have a look myself.

~~~
tabtab
[http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html)

Yes, Paul Graham is opinionated, for good or bad.

------
Scramblejams
A good reminder that it's difficult to spot genius, whether you're an
experienced VC or just some local printer looking to get paid.

~~~
some_account
Our society doesn't exactly pay attention to anyone who thinks differently.

~~~
robotresearcher
Apple’s famous ‘think different’ campaign is based on the opposite idea. They
used Lennon, Henson, Einstein, Ghandi, etc as examples. They got plenty of
attention for their different ideas.

------
nkoren
It's that whole "first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they
fight you, then you win" thing. Jobs had reached the "laugh" point by then

15 yeas ago, the default position of the space launch industry was to ignore
Elon Musk. He could barely get a laugh. 10 years ago, the industry was
starting to laugh. Unfortunately they were still laughing 5 years ago, at his
_ridiculous_ self-landing rockets -- as if that would _ever_ be a thing -- And
now he has, for all intents and purposes, won. That's just the life-cycle for
this kind of thing.

Of course worth nothing that 99% of the time the Status Quo laughs at someone
or something, it's because that someone or something will never amount to
beans. Ridicule is a universal feature of disruptive innovation -- if nobody
is ignoring or ridiculing you, you're definitely not being disruptive -- but
it correlates much more strongly to failure than to success.

~~~
baxtr
How do you compare Elon Musk to Steve Jobs? I’m genuinely interested. In my
mind, the first has built the biggest profit machine the world has ever seen.
The latter is still experimenting and burning a lot of cash. Sure, both are
quite charismatic.

(I’m not trying to be judgmental here, just trying to find a common measure)

~~~
victor106
I used to be a huge fan of Musk. I still am in some ways. But his recent
behaviour is not worthy of his stature. I am specifically referring to:

1\. Repeatedly failing to keep promises and coming up with excuses, very
unlike Jobs who would not let even his VP's miss a deadline.

2\. His rant on the earnings call with a few analysts who were asking genuine
questions seemed so immature. You could never imagine Jobs would do such a
thing.

3\. His challenge with Buffett about moats and starting a candy company. This
seemed so utterly silly and childish although you could argue he was joking.
But again, I just cannot imagine Jobs talking like a loose character in
public.

FYI:- I am long Tesla stock and think it could still be a great company
although my confidence in that is a bit down at the moment.

~~~
Nomentatus
1) Jobs wasn't wildly off on every technology deadline NeXT ever set itself?
Really?

2) Same "question" \- which was actually just an analyst gainsaying the firm's
estimate, not a question at all - three times in a row as if it hadn't been
answered the first time. It's not childish to refuse incivility. It's childish
to pretend incivility is civility.

3) "Moats" \- actually Network Effects that are typically leveraged as illegal
extensions of market power. (As was the case in question: with Musk refusing
to illegally block the interoperability of Tesla's charging stations.) Musk
felt maybe staying on the right side of the law (enforced or not) might be
cool. You don't. That's nice. This realm of law hasn't been enforced much
since the end of the seventies, but it's still there. The fact that it's
usually grownups who go to jail, doesn't mean it's childish to obey the law.

Why shouldn't Musk start a candy company as his responce to Buffet's chortled
taunt if he cares to? Gotta be more fun than production hell. Or even start a
tunnel company. (He said he was serious re candy. Maybe he likes candy.)

------
Zelphyr
Funny how the phone numbers they wrote down were only seven digits--the area
code was assumed. I still remember parts of the rural area where I grew up
where you only had to enter the last four numbers. The town was so small, the
phone system knew who you were calling just by those last four.

~~~
magduf
There's plenty of rural areas even today where people assume the area code,
and act surprised when someone gives them a different one.

~~~
lttlrck
It happens to me a city of 160000 in California. I have a Boston prefix and
occasionally confusion ensues. I start with 781 which they do not recognize
and so assume I am skipping the prefix and then the number ends up 3 digits
too long :-)

------
sudosteph
Seems to me that he was calling him a Joker because Jobs wanted a service from
them ("catalog sheets") without paying for it or without paying the going rate
("Wanted it for nothing").

Also, I'm not sure if I agree with the transcription in one part. Doesn't seem
to be "Our catalog sheets", but rather "10 (something?) catalog sheets". The
(something) is probably an abbreviation or shorthand. Maybe 10 inch? Or 10
thousand? I really don't understand the context well enough to be sure, but it
seems like the writer thinks he's being unrealistic and asking for more than
he needs for a price that's not realistic. Which would make the "joker"
assessment pretty understandable.

~~~
favorited
Hey, it had worked for him in the past! When he was 12 and needed parts to
build a frequency counter, he looked up Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett–Packard) in
the phone book, called him at home, and talked him into getting the parts for
free. Plus he got a summer internship at HP out of it.

------
mifreewil
Steve Jobs was only 21 in 1976

------
gist
Once again we have a 'lucky sperm' event. Have no idea of the 1000's of others
that were called jokers or derided that went nowhere. And by the way business
back in the 70's was like that. You had to have a certain degree of
respectability to get noticed and be able to get what you needed. I speak from
experience having been there. And Jobs was weird so what. Weird becomes genius
after success and money. Then it's brilliance.

------
DonHopkins
Steve Jobs had poor enough taste to say that pie menus suck! ;)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098179)

It's the 30 year anniversary of CHI’88 (May 15–19, 1988), where Jack Callahan,
Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser and I (Don Hopkins) presented our paper “An
Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus”. We found pie menus to be about
15% faster and with a significantly lower error rate than linear menus! So
I've written up a 30 year retrospective:

This article will discuss the history of what’s happened with pie menus over
the last 30 years (and more), present both good and bad examples, including
ideas half baked, experiments performed, problems discovered, solutions
attempted, alternatives explored, progress made, software freed, products
shipped, as well as setbacks and impediments to their widespread adoption.

Here is the main article, and some other related articles:

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May
15, 2018. Take a Look and Feel Free!

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-
menus-936fed383ff1](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1)

Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat!
That sucks!”

On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress
Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction
was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That
sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!”

I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were
faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were
the best possible menus ever.

But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT
Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and
doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!) Even after he went back to
Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit.
There’s no accounting for taste!

------
donttrack
I used to work for someone who thought he was the new Steve Jobs.

If you can see through the lies and manipulation tactics it can work out but
some people will not get out alive if they can’t adapt.

One thing I noticed was that rude language or sexual references were kind of
used as a calibration technique to try to gauge people. I am sure he did this
and many other little subtle tricks unconsciously as he wasn’t really that
clever. Manipulating people was his talent so to speak and he seemed to enjoy
to have a little puppet theater around where he could play with people as he
pleased.

~~~
kalleboo
> _One thing I noticed was that rude language or sexual references were kind
> of used as a calibration technique to try to gauge people._

[https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...](https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Gobble_Gobble_Gobble.txt)

~~~
donttrack
Exactly this sort of thing is something to watch out for with sociopaths or
whatever the personality classification is called for this type of person.

The reason they do this is to shake you up and monitor your reaction. I don’t
think they know why they do it exactly - it’s just a button they found they
can press and they happen to have a gift that enables them to parse the
response and from that response extrapolate which kind of abuse they can
subject you to to make you dance.

I don’t know what the approproate response to the question would be other than
a straightforward dry yes or no without lifting an eyebrow, but that would
probably be hard without some sort of training as the questions come out of
the blue and even the smallest discomfort you might feel will be picked up by
the person.

------
symmitchry
What are "catalog sheets"? What was Jobs asking for?

~~~
monocasa
Layout and design for a print ad.

------
tabtab
No biggy, as long as we never get a US President like that.

~~~
krapp
Does it count if the reality distortion field is replaced with a reality
denial field?

------
projectramo
Okay, I avoid flaky people too, but what's wrong with being a joker?

------
intrasight
I'm sure he was a flaky joker then.

------
mml
Well, they weren't wrong.

