
You are not Steve Jobs - OafTobark
https://medium.com/editors-picks/9ae1727d2479
======
lutusp
Quote: "Even Steve Jobs wasn't Steve Jobs initially. He only outed himself as
a giant jerk after he had a company that could afford to have a huge turnover,
and he had a pile of minions that hero-worshiped him no matter what he did."

This isn't true. I knew Steve when he and Steve Wozniak were starting Apple,
in the late 1970s, and he (Jobs) was always intolerable -- it wasn't something
that came out after he acquired power. I couldn't stand working with him, so,
even though people at Apple asked me to stay, I wouldn't. (I eventually worked
_with_ Apple on various software projects, but not _at_ Apple.)

Steve Jobs had the worst interpersonal dynamics of anyone I have ever met. All
that proves is that being perpetually rude and having terrible people skills
isn't a deal-breaker in corporate America.

~~~
dm8
I'm not questioning your judgement of Steve's personality. But it surprises me
that person like Steve can be so successful. Moreover, how did he recruit and
manage so many world class developers and designers? Not once. But thrice -
Apple, NeXT and Pixar. What made Steve so successful when everyone who has
worked with him thinks he was a jerk!

I read his stories at - <http://folklore.org/> And he looks inspirational as
well as jerk. But most of these stories are around creation of Mac. By that
time, Apple was quite successful. I'm genuinely curios about how did he manage
to recruit first 10 employees if he had terrible inter-personal skills.

~~~
ary
I can't speak to the recruiting of staff in the early days of Apple or NeXT,
but many of the "world class" people at Pixar got involved before Jobs
purchased the company.

See: [http://www.amazon.com/Pixar-Touch-Vintage-David-
Price/dp/030...](http://www.amazon.com/Pixar-Touch-Vintage-David-
Price/dp/0307278298)

~~~
_Simon
But he had the sense to bankroll and not meddle. He had the courage to let
Lassiter, Catmull and Co. to run things their way, which has produced some of
the finest story telling and animation of the last 100 years. Did _he_
assemble the team? No. Did he help them achieve greatness? I think Pixars
portfolio speaks for itself...

~~~
ShirtlessRod
So even when he doesn't do anything he still gets credit for the end result?

~~~
_Simon
He gets and is due _some_ credit. To insinuate that Jobs had nothing to do
with Pixar's success is wide of the mark.

If what Jobs achieved is so easy, go and do it...

~~~
ShirtlessRod
Not sure where I said what he achieved was easy, but feel free to keep putting
words in my mouth.

Your comment was insinuating that the success of Pixar's portfolio was somehow
a testament to Jobs. Would it really have been any different had they gotten
funding from a completely different source? You even said he didn't "meddle",
so other than a financial investment, any credit awarded him for the quality
of their work should be minimal.

There are plenty of things he can and should get credit for -- we don't need
to retroactively add more.

~~~
_Simon
Get over yourself. Your glib dismissal (incorrectly) assumes that Jobs'
contribution was merely financial and therefore completely without merit. My
comment was that his bankrolling of Pixar, as well as the foresight _not_ to
meddle where he wasn't needed, helped them achieve great things, for which he
deserves some credit. He also handled the business end - negotiations with
Disney etc - that gave Pixar the audience. Since Lassiter has pretty much said
that without Jobs the would be we're they are today says it all. Too many are
far too quick to dismiss what he man achieved in a relatively short time.

------
danilocampos
I'm often frustrated at folks who take the wrong lesson from Steve Jobs.

As this piece describes, they look at the dude and take away that they should
be jerks because that's how things get done. And that's a terrible lesson.

In my read, as a guy who's been following Apple since he was a kid, there's
one principal lesson for leaders and entrepreneurs:

If you care about making exactly what you want, make sure you're the boss.

That's it. You can define the agenda, you can get the right people, you can
motivate them according to your style. You get to win all the design
arguments. You get to slip the deadlines for quality.

You can definitely be a jerk in that context, but you don't have to.

~~~
monksy
I would argue that there are plenty of better, and less publicised, examples
of people who are passionate about their work than Steve Jobs.

~~~
jonnathanson
Steve Jobs is such a striking example because he was highly unusual in the
business world, and especially in the tech business, and because he succeeded
on such a massive scale. He was basically an artist. I don't mean that as a
fawning compliment; I mean that as a description of his personality: for
better and for worse. He was driven by a relentless aesthetic vision, he
worked himself up into near-manic episodes, he was emotionally labile, and he
was perfectionistic.

These are qualities you usually find in the arts. I've worked with and around
writers and directors for most of my career, and I've seen "Steve Jobs" in a
lot of the more successful ones. Consider the example of Stanley Kubrick, or,
more recently, David O. Russell. Now, go watch the infamous David O. Russell
temper tantrum video on YouTube. You could just about substitute Steve Jobs
for David in that video and believe it.

~~~
zjmichen
I don't agree with the idea of the "mad artist," an elite diamond-in-the-rough
character who cloisters himself away on manic episodes of hyper-creativity,
becomes an alcoholic, and emerges with a genius piece of Art.

Art is a slog. Artists are the ones with enough endurance to churn out shit
day after day, refining the best of what they produce. The best artists are
social, because that's where the most ideas flow freely.

Most artists I know (writers, musicians, graphic artists) are like this.
Perpetuating the myth of the great lone genius is elitist, which is a
discriminatory and dangerous ideology.

~~~
rdouble
Most writers I know are unsociable alcoholics, much like the stereotype.

~~~
zjmichen
Well, ok. I suppose anecdotal samples are not the best evidence for either
side. I'd like to imagine that most artists are relatively well-adjusted.

Anyway, that's the kind of world I'd like to live in. Everyone can (and
should) be an artist to some degree. While I do agree with the fairly obvious
point that some people are more talented than others, I reject the idea that
there are "genius artists", spikes of talent on an otherwise smooth talent-
graph.

~~~
mikecane
>>>I'd like to imagine that most artists are relatively well-adjusted.

Keep imagining. But great ones aren't. Go read:

Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by
Kay Redfield Jamison <http://www.amazon.com/Touched-With-Fire-
ebook/dp/B001D1YCM2>

The Outsider by Colin Wilson [http://www.amazon.com/The-Outsider-Colin-
Wilson/dp/087477206...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Outsider-Colin-
Wilson/dp/0874772060)

The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy by
Arnold M. Ludwig [http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Greatness-Creativity-
Controv...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Greatness-Creativity-
Controversy/dp/1572301171)

EDIT to add: Why Jobs stood out is because the closest equivalent to what he
was is a _film director_. But business is not set up to hand out accolades
like Hollywood does. So instead of everyone learning who did what in Apple --
as with film we find out about sound editors, foley artists, etc, etc. -- we
just get the face of Jobs.

------
SurfScore
Its a testament to his legacy that these "You are/not like/dislike Steve Jobs"
articles keep popping up. Jobs is what you call an EXTREME OUTLIER. People
like him come around once every 30 or 40 years. You don't compare outliers to
the mean, because they skew everything.

Nothing anyone ever writes about what to do or what not to do like Steve Jobs
is relevant, because he was so far off from any of the data points we have or
probably ever will have to matter. You get people like this in history; ones
that seemingly do so much wrong yet change the entire world. I don't know if
we'll ever have a concrete explanation for it, but for some reason the bad
things ARE part of the reason for their success.

Another more common example of this is Jim Morrison (or any really good drug
addict musician). Do you have to be a drug addict to be a musician? Of course
not. And I seriously doubt they're gonna start dropping acid at Juilliard. But
somehow there's a few of them that make it work, and I would argue that if Jim
Morrison wasn't a drug addict he wouldn't have been as successful as he was.

If Jobs wasn't such an asshole, he wouldn't be Steve Jobs. There's some mix
assholishness and genius (that he got absolutely perfect) that creates a
legendary figure.

~~~
mturmon
Agree. Pursuing your Morrison analogy: so many artistic and literary figures
are similarly hard to characterize. Polarizing their colleagues and fans,
causing denunciations, feuds, embarrassment. Difficult to compare to anyone
(i.e., outliers, as you say). Think of someone like Norman Mailer, or Gore
Vidal. These people are not role models!

They don't _have_ to be that way, but it's a lot more likely.

After they are gone, asking "were they a good person" is usually not the right
question (unless you were close to them).

If you know them mainly through their work, the right question is, "do you
value their work?" Here's the relevant quote from Auden:

    
    
      Time that with this strange excuse
      Pardoned Kipling and his views,
      And will pardon Paul Claudel,
      Pardons him for writing well.

~~~
exodust
Since when does taking drugs and going to heaps of parties, writing classic
songs, performing in a band, learning and playing instruments, reading and
studying literature, singing, having lots of sex, writing poetry, recording
albums, and inspiring millions make someone a "bad person".

Just in case anyone is unclear, the answer to the question "was Jim Morrison a
good person" is YES.

------
abalone
This reads like sour grapes.

If it really was Steve Jobs's "fault that the MobileMe launch went so poorly"
because of "the system that he created," and her team was really as
"completely kick-ass" as she says it was, then why has Apple had so much
success with so many projects run exactly the same way?

The problem with MobileMe was the engineering management, not the system.

If anything this shows how vulnerable the Apple "system" is to the quality of
the people they hire, and why they spend so much effort trying to hire and
hold on to A-grade people. That just doesn't jive with the tired lore of Jobs
being an asshole all the time. They wouldn't be able to hold on to folks like
they have.

~~~
tomelders
I'm not so sure. Apple hires the best and their evaluations of new candidates
are rigorous, so I doubt they have idiots running things. We all know there's
a lot of the worlds best talent at Apple. But they struggle a lot with the web
services they've tried to create. Mobile me, iCloud, game centre, ping, Maps;
these have all fallen short of Apples promises. It's a repeating pattern that
to me indicates a culture issue inside Apple.

~~~
abalone
If it was a culture issue it would extend to the successful product teams as
well. Those failures point to the people in charge of those groups, not the
Apple culture.

Unless by Apple culture we mean giving people lots of responsibility and
autonomy.. then, yes. But that's also the key to their successes.

~~~
fancyketchup
Is it possible that a culture which is effective at producing "good" outcomes
in one domain is ineffective at producing "good" outcomes in another? Should
managers use the same techniques to manage steelworkers as they do software
engineers?

Edit: steel works -> steelworkers

~~~
abalone
That's a good question, but in this case they're both software engineer
domains. Apple does run some pretty successful online services, like the
iTunes and app stores. If your theory were true they wouldn't be able to do
that. Clearly they do have more problems with services than software/hardware.
But that could be a function of the people at the top, not the management
process, which but most accounts is minimal.

~~~
tomelders
I'd argue that there are a few aspects of providing products and services for
the web that are unique and not relevant to offline software development.

For example, scalability. Most of Apple's problems in this domain have been
associated with scaling. iTMS and the App Store both scaled very well over
time, but you have to consider the size of their audiences at launch. iTMS
launched to a relatively small market of Mac and iPod users. The App Store
launched to a relatively small market of iPhone users. Now that both the OS X
and iOS user bases are significantly larger, Apple has struggled immensely to
launch web services.

When developing for the web, your job is not done until you've released your
product into the wild and figured out where the bottlenecks and weak points
are with a massive user base. Apple's culture of secrecy doesn't facilitate
this part of the process. Until that changes, they will be taking a huge
gamble every time the release a new web service or improve an existing one.
And, as with iClouds Core Data woes, developers who depend on these services
are beginning to lose patience with Apple. This should be a major concern but
it appears, from the outside looking in, that it isn't.

------
JDGM
I didn't think I was going to like this from the opening paragraph but she
quickly won me over. My take away is "You are not Steve Jobs. You are not a
massive arsehole!" - pretty much in agreement with calinet6. However, actually
it's a lot richer than that. I love this paragraph in particular:

"Now, regardless of whether no one in the inner sanctum of dudes-that-Steve-
listened-to-at-the-time told him all the things we told our bosses, or who-up-
the-chain-of-command was not brave enough to suggest we do something not-
Apple-like — this was the system that Steve created. He made himself so
fearful and terrible that an entire group of amazing, talented, hard working
people, ended up getting screamed at wrongfully. It was his fault that the
MobileMe launch went so poorly, not ours."

Even if that's not even remotely true (I wouldn't know), I find it a good
lesson that a boss could be so terrifying that no-one wants to be honest with
them and this flows down the hierarchy to the point of dysfunction. I've heard
of it before, but I like the clarity of explanation this nth time around.

~~~
exodust
Agreed. And I think the article is less about "Steve Jobs" and more about the
lessons to be learned from high-level project difficulties, and the people on
the ground caught up in the line of fire when things don't go to plan. Or,
when blame is unleashed unjustly from management, whose plan was flawed in the
beginning, or whose chain of command failed to notice the red flags raised
along the way.

The other article on her blog is also worth a look, and a good reminder about
communication in the workplace. "How to handle conflict"....
<https://medium.com/career-pathing/a713b75ad9bd>

------
zalzane
Absolutely everything I have read about Steve Jobs paints him as a
narcissistic asshole who is impossible to work with. How is it that he was so
successful and how did apple become the behemoth it is today if the man at the
wheel was so insufferable?

I want to believe that this has only been a recent development and that he
used to be an easier person to deal with in apple's early days, because to be
quite frank the only way I could see such an individual being so successful
with the attitude he had was if he was just riding the coattails of other
forces in the company.

Hopefully someone can enlighten me as to how this kind of person could lead a
successful company when everyone fears him and doesn't question anything he
says.

~~~
nostrademons
"The market pulls the product out of the startup." -- Marc Andreesen [1]

Steve Jobs was remarkably good at finding new markets. And once you've found
one, you can screw up _a lot_ and still succeed. Because at the end of the
day, people want to work on a successful product, and they'll put up with a
lot of shit to do so.

Steve Jobs probably would've been even more successful had he not been so
abrasive; who knows, maybe he wouldn't have gotten thrown out of Apple the
first time and we would've gotten the iPhone 15 years earlier rather than the
Newton. But he got the thing that matters most right, and then pretty much
everything else fell into place despite his flaws.

[1] [http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/the-pmarca-guide-to-
startups/4104...](http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/the-pmarca-guide-to-
startups/410455)

~~~
marknutter
Honestly, I don't think he could have been more successful no matter what he
did. Apple's comeback is easily the most dramatic in the history of business.

~~~
nostrademons
True, but he's also responsible for Pixar and NeXT. NeXT had many of the ideas
of the current Mac a decade earlier, but failed to take off. Whether that's
because the market wasn't ready yet or because Steve failed to manage the
company can't really be answered.

(Also: "most dramatic in the history of business"? IBM was about 3 months away
from bankruptcy when Lou Gerstner took over - it's not a household name now
because their comeback involved pivoting to big-business services, but they're
solidly profitable. Intuit nearly died and all the employees went several
months without salary in its early days, and now they basically own the
accounting-software market.)

~~~
homosaur
I wouldn't give him THAT much credit for Pixar. He had really very little to
do with the product at that company. It was a smart investment.

------
a_p
Steve Jobs was not a "hacker". [‡] He knew almost nothing about computer
languages, computer architecture, and according to Neil Young, he listened to
vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio
quality works (see [2]). Steve did not contribute any original ideas or any
important technological innovations. He claimed during his Stanford
commencement speech that if Macintosh had not included eye pleasing
typography, then computers would never have had typographically pleasing
typefaces (because "Microsoft just copied Apple); this is ludicrous. In fact,
Apple's software patents for digital typography added unnecessary
difficulties. [3] Many people are unhappy about Apple culture of paranoia,
litigation, and features that restrict user's freedoms that Steve created.

Steve is known for having a great sense of design, but it seems that he only
had taste in choosing among the good designs of others. Just look at the yacht
he designed without Jonathan Ive's collaboration. [4]

Many of you may say that I'm missing the point; that his ability to convince
others of what was important and his "vision" is what made him great. My
contention is that he appropriated other people's original ideas, and other
people implemented his modifications. I'll admit that directing such efforts
is not an easy thing to do, and most breakthroughs are improvements upon
others' ideas. But it is very rare for the original creators to be alive and
ignored while the modifier is celebrated with maudlin elegies.

EDIT: The media's treatment of his death, President Obama's statement that he
was a great "inventor", etc. was not his fault. But I think that when the
deaths of people like Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy in the same month as
Steve are ignored, then the world is suffering from a serious case of myopia.
Ignoring Dennis and John while celebrating Steve is like fawning over the
interior decorator with praise about the warmth of a house while ignoring the
carpenter and contractor.

Perhaps I should add that I am being critical of Steve because of an abundance
of articles that did not focus on what he actually contributed, or criticized
only his behavior towards others. Steve did seem to be able to hire, attract,
or motivate as many talented engineers as he did drive away. This is a very
hard thing for a CEO to do, and he deserves a large amount of credit for doing
this. The talent that he helped attract and the products they create are
responsible for Apple's stock price rise and continued profitability since his
death.

[‡] <http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html> (see definition of "hacker")

[1] [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2012/02/01/146206585/ste...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-
way/2012/02/01/146206585/steve-jobs-listened-to-vinyl-at-home-neil-young-says)

[2] <http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html>

[3] <http://www.freetype.org/patents.html>

[4] [http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-
yac...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-yacht/)

~~~
gavanwoolery
I either do not like Steve Jobs, or I feel sorry for him. One of those two.

I do not like to speak ill of the dead, but I also do not like to sugar-coat
things.

Steve Jobs was mentally ill. A lot of people don't like to say that, but that
is what he was. I cannot diagnose his exact condition, but he shared many
traits of the common sociopath -- all except that he was never very charming,
generally speaking. [0] Steve clawed his way to the top, and turned himself
into a god, when all of his talents were really nothing more than hiring the
right people (Steve would have been an _absolute nobody_ if he had never met
Wozniak (or a man of similar talent) to flush out his ideas) -- in fact he
probably would have turned out to be a homeless person (if you had met him at
Atari, you would have thought so). Steve was a bag of ideas -- ideas that were
not original but, to his blessing, very consistent. And as most of us agree,
ideas are only worth the quality of their execution. A lot of people look up
to Steve for this reason - he was a non-engineer who came to rule the tech
world. If he could do it, so could they.

I have no real agenda against Jobs, and I would definitely say that his life
was filled with interesting accomplishments (even if the only accomplishment
was only swindling the world to pay 2x as much for his products). But this is
one man I would never place on a pedestal, because he is not a model human
being.

The only heros I have know humility. Steve Jobs, even in the face of death,
never learned that.

[0] <http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html>

~~~
wsc981
Steve Wozniak about Steve Jobs:

> Jobs was a good husband and father and a great businessman who had an eye
> for details. He said Jobs was a good marketer and understood the benefits of
> technology.

> When it came to Apple's products, "while everyone else was fumbling around
> trying to find the formula, he had the better instincts," he said.

> According to Wozniak, Jobs told him around the time he left Apple in 1985
> that he had a feeling he would die before the age of 40. Because of that, "a
> lot of his life was focused on trying to get things done quickly," Wozniak
> said.

> "I think what made Apple products special was very much one person, but he
> left a legacy," he said. Because of this, Wozniak hopes the company can
> continue to be successful despite Jobs' death.

Source: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/steve-wozniak-
steve...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/steve-wozniak-steve-jobs-
death_n_997533.html)

While you're right that Steve Jobs would have gone nowhere without Steve
Wozniak, the reverse is likely also true. Steve Wozniak had a big doubt on
working on the Apple start-up; the security HP offered him was very tempting.
I don't think the world would have known about Steve Wozniak if Steve Jobs
didn't convince him to leave HP for the Apple start-up.

I agree Steve Jobs might have been a sociopath, but then again, aren't many
higher-up people in other businesses either? I think what mattered for Apple
is that Steve Jobs cared about products most of all - sociopaths at many other
companies only seem to care about how much money they make.

~~~
rodgerd
Woz clearly has a different definition of being a good father to me; I think
spending years in court to deny responsibility for your child pretty much
disqualifies one for that particular praise.

~~~
EduardoBautista
Steve Jobs said that he regretted his behavior during that time. He also later
gave her daughter and her mother enough money to live on and became closer to
her daughter.

------
jdietrich
Warning signs of a dangerous cult:

* The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law. _‪ The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel._ ‪ The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members. _‪ Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities._ ‪ The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society. ‪* The leader is not accountable to any authorities. _‪ The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members' participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group._ ‪ Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished. _‪ The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion._ ‪ Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group. _‪ The group is preoccupied with making money._ ‪ The most loyal members (the "true believers") feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.

Jobs was a cult leader, a pathological narcissist who would do anything to
shape the world in his image. By some billion-to-one fluke, Jobs was right
about nearly everything. His impeccable taste was the driving force of an
entire industry for several decades. You can't emulate an outlier like that,
any more than eating chicken nuggets will turn you into Usain Bolt.

~~~
lcentdx
this sounds exactly like my country's one and the only one political party -
the always great, always glorious, always right CCP.

------
robterrell
As a general rule, if you're a CEO and you find yourself assembling a group of
people who don't directly report to you, so you can tell/yell them how they
failed you... stop yourself.

The people who failed your are (a) your direct reports and (b) you yourself.
Figure out how the correct information didn't get to you, or how you ignored
it, and fix that problem.

There's zero chance a roomful of individual contributors all got it wrong at
the same time -- the only way they all got it wrong was that they lacked the
proper leadership.

------
crusso
I worked at Apple as a contractor after Steve's return. He was in front of me
at the salad bar one day - he didn't cut, was just there ahead of me. I
noticed he piled a huge amount of shredded carrots in his plate... anyhow.

Steve was wearing his usual black turtle neck and blue jeans. He was kind of
leaning forward and I noticed that I could see his underwear since he wasn't
wearing a belt. I seriously pondered, "I REALLY SHOULD GIVE JOBS A WEDGIE".
Sure, he'd be pissed. Sure, my contract would be cut short. But I would be THE
guy who gave Steve Jobs a wedgie. I chickened out and didn't do squat. Missed
my chance for greatness.

~~~
visualR
Lol...be funny if he had STEVE written on his underwear

------
SkittlesNTwix
I believe he was successful in spite of his negative qualities, not because of
them. What I mean by this is that we shouldn't worship his negative traits and
spin them somehow to be positive qualities in a leader, such as some people
have done. He was very much a human being. A highly-intelligent man and
visionary in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right
people, making a lot of good, and a few poor, choices. Don't try to reverse-
engineer his success so as to duplicate it.

------
maxheadroom513
Thank you for writing this. Substitute Steve Jobs -> Tony Fadell and Apple ->
Nest Labs and you've got almost the experience I had.

We have to stop enabling these sociopaths and vote with our feet (immediately)
when this stuff happens.

~~~
calinet6
Agreed, Sociopaths might have extreme qualities which might enable extreme
outcomes, but that doesn't mean we need to enable them. It is overwhelmingly
unhealthy and negative for anyone connected to them. Been there.

------
johnrob
Maybe the title should be "You don't want to be Steve Jobs" instead of "You
are not Steve Jobs".

------
onemorepassword
Most of this article, except the cafeteria anecdote, isn't about Jobs, or
about megalomaniac CEO's in general.

It's about utter failure of middle management, and how they can totally fuck
both sides of the company.

The lesson here is not "don't be an asshole" (although you shouldn't), it's
"don't hire ass-kissing assholes".

~~~
webwright
Disagree. If you kick middle managers in the stomach every time they tell you
something you don't want to hear, they stop being honest with you.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
In which case they should get fired. That's totally unacceptable behavior. If
middle management is more concerned about saving face than delivering honest
reports, it's their problem.

------
danso
Lets not forget that it's hard to imagine Steve being successful if he hadn't
paired with the equally extraordinary Woz. Yes, Jobs got along just fine
without Woz, but only after the Apple ][ gave him enough runway to continue
pushing his vision. Jobs was special, but he still made errors that would've
tanked lesser companies.

It should also be noted that Jobs should be given credit for dragging a
reluctant Woz into the spotlight..their estrangement is to me one of the most
bizarre and saddest mysteries about Apple.

------
CarlTheAwesome
I think pointing out problems directly and efficiently will eventually make
someone a total asshole, and that's what I think Steve Jobs really did.
However, some people(especially those blink-eyed Steve Jobs enthusiastics)
just mistook the whole point. They thought it's being a total asshole making
him efficient and successful, and by being a total asshole will eventually
lead to him/her being an awesome leader of big cooperation. These people
really have to learn some principles of logic before they start to learn
anything from Steve Jobs. Pardon my poor English.

------
Uncompetative
I don't get the point. I am not Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was.

I am me.

Also, all the criticism in this thread that he wasn't a great engineer and
Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy should have been given more coverage in the
press the month he died is naive to say the least. They were both older. He
still had much to do and was the boss of the world's biggest corporation. A
bunch of Hackers on Hacker News won't reckon much on Steve Job's contribution
to their field, but then he never was a hacker! He was a visionary who
appreciated minimalistic design even if this meant that Apple products did
fewer things. He made tech popular for the general consumer by simplifying it
to just the essentials and burying all of the complexities.

Hackers like to have every choice to exploit. That is why they like PCs and
increasingly the Linux OSes. Everyone else that actually wants to get on an
accomplish some creative work just ponies up the money for an Apple and what
extra they pay out on hardware they tend to save on software - MS Office >
iWork.

Choosing which minimal set features to include in a product is harder than
just lumping everything in, but the interface is far less cluttered and
intrusive with less stuff to learn and therefore easier to use - which may not
matter to Hackers like you, but is undoubtedly a factor in Apple's continued
success.

------
Zimahl
The cafeteria anecdote is interesting because I've been in line in a cafeteria
with a billionaire (former) CEO - Phil Knight. Very personable (he certainly
didn't cut in line) and he seemed comfortable in his Nikes and jeans.

Knight built his empire quite differently than Jobs. While it's not great
being a developer at Nike, the company's atmosphere is somewhat laid back.
Things still get done and they make a lot of money doing it.

~~~
yoda_sl
I have been many times in the Apple cafeteria back when Steve was there, and I
never saw him cutting lines as described. I am not saying that it did not
happen, but I will not make it a statement that he was always like that
neither

~~~
jfb
I never saw him cut in line, either; he was always in a hurry, and could be
short, but I didn't see him pull rank, ever. He did almost run me over once.

------
lectrick
> I worked on the MobileMe team

Oh crap, she's already biased. That product was a shit-show from the get-go.
It doesn't matter how devoted the employees were, the reliability and apparent
technical excellence of the product was lacking and that speaks to "poor
programmers". You can be the most devoted employee around, but if you simply
can't do your job well, that's nobody's fault. iCloud, by comparison, works
pretty great.

------
tomelders
A lot of people want to be like Steve jobs, but have neither the balls to
commit the way he did, nor the requisite skills to evaluate like he did. So as
has been mentioned elsewhere, there's just a bunch of mediocre assholes out
there who would be mediocre ass holes wether or not Jobs had ever existed,
only he did, and that validates their shitty behaviour in their own inflated
heads.

------
keiferski
There are equal amounts of "Steve was awesome" and "Steve was an ass" stories.
Conclusion? He was a human being, just like the rest of us.

~~~
tsurantino
I don't know about you but that seems to be an over-simplification. You can
find some pretty strong trends from these stories and, while I'm not quick to
derive value judgment, Steve did exhibit a distinct personality. It's not an
accident that stories like this are, in some sense, predictable.

~~~
rmrfrmrf
Any information you consume about a human being is going to be an over-
simplification. What's really important is making sure that you're staying
critical of the sources of this information.

I also think that you're missing the broader implication of your parent post:
Steve didn't wake up every morning with the intent of embodying some kind of
persona -- he just _was_. Sure, he may have done well to have some training by
an HR expert on how to communicate more effectively, but he was just managing
a company the way that 1) he knew how and 2) in a way that brought Apple
success.

What I admire about Steve's Apple is that it was able to maintain a very clear
vision and point of view despite growing exponentially. Look at huge
corporations like IBM, HP, Microsoft, etc. What are there goals? Go to IBM's
website and try to piece together a vision out of 80000 disparate research
projects. HP makes...computers? printers? calculators? fax machines? cameras?
Microsoft is a maker of operating systems, but are infamous for their
spaghetti-style auxiliary product lines (throw it on the wall and see what
sticks). These are three well-respected companies, and I don't know what the
hell any of the 3 are about. Apple, by contrast? They're about delivering
sleek computing products that are accessible and easy to use. Ask anyone on
the street what Apple's mission is and they'd be able to give you some
variation on good-looking products that are easy to use.

------
cromwellian
As a counterpoint to the "you must be an asshole to be a successful leader"
line of thinking, I put forward Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey, et al. I
don't think one can say they haven't helmed a successful company and commanded
respect, but they are also not infamous for throwing angry tantrums and
yelling at people.

Larry's practically so soft spoken you can't hear him sometimes. :)

------
jokoon
People should try to compare what Bill Gates achieved, and what Steve Jobs
achieved. Bill gates is not microsoft itself, but steve jobs was apple itself.

Jobs's success was thanks to Bill Gates's success. You don't snap and make
iphones without all the experience brought by what microsoft pushed on
computer manufacturers.

Not to mention OSX grew thanks to unix too. objc is still a massive pain in
the ass for many developers, who just want to use C/C++ and forget about objc
stuff NOBODY USE. How come a device which sold so much, wants developers to
use stuff that begins with NS prefixes ? When does ideology got into
technology ? Nextstep is the only piece of sh*t jobs seems to have created,
and that's how he wanted to shove his dick onto nerds.

Jobs was a salesman figure. You now discover that's what our pre ww2 consumer
world likes to buy. Salesmen who looks like the guy who either buy it or make
it. Nothing new here. Stock don't reflect value of something that is aimed at
research and looking for programming talents. People who can apply their
skills onto a market in need to evolve. Please tell me how many traders
actually know what is the industrial difference between all those techs which
depends on the stock they buy.

Learning both programming and electronics is not for everyone. Even today,
there are very few former mechanics who can know how to trade automotive
stocks, but the economy don't care about them.

You can be good at selling differently-sized cars to be more competitive, but
in IT, the possibilities are so far from exploited into the right direction,
it becomes quickly irrelevant to sell cars with the same underlying
technologies.

But all of this is nerd rant. Good luck telling western consumers all of that.
At least in Asia, people are able to understand technology and that might be
why android has so much success. Over there they make the different between
hype and charlatans.

------
ksec
The following has nothing against or for Steve ( which every comment seems to
be focus on ), but a matter of opinion on the problem.

So she has a problem with THE highest chain of Command cutting her across the
queue for lunch?

May be i am the only one who dont see a problem with that. ( If everyone
higher up then you would cut queues then i would have a fxxking problem. )

Engineering Project Manager - I am not very good at those inflated Titles. (
So what's higher up? Senior VPs? ) But that title suggested to me she is
responsible, whether or not some Jerks up there gave Steve a suck up or not.
MobileMe was a disaster. To me it was even worst then the Map problems Apple
have had.

As an Engineering Project Manager, By letting it out, knowingly this is Apple,
which holds an even higher standard then other company. Did she have a go at
Steve or higher up about the launch? Because if not, then she didn't burn the
bridge, someone burnt it for her already.

------
bambax
For a company to be successful it needs vision and discipline.

This is usually done by having a visionary at the head, and a nasty enforcer
just under him. This is how it works at Facebook for example (Zuck + Sheryl
Sandberg). Marissa Mayer used to do the same thing at Google (for a long time,
her main responsibility was saying no to people who wanted to add links to
Google's home page... which is probably harder than it sounds).

What's remarkable about Jobs is that he was _both_. He was the visionary and
the enforcer. There are not many people like that.

And of course, enforcers alone can't do shit. When Jobs was removed from
Apple, the company almost went bankrupt. When enforcers become CEO all they do
is upset people without actually improving the prospects of the company (see
how every single recent news that comes out of Yahoo is some incomprehensible
blunder).

------
thrush
Steve Jobs was a leader above all else. He brought amazing changes to the
world of technology in the only way that he knew. You can speak negatively
because he was extremely abrasive, rude, and disrespectful to some of the
smartest people of the last few centuries, but you can't deny that he was
effective at what he did. His job, or his passion, was to deliver chasm-
crossing products, not to get people to like him.

Perhaps acting like Mr. Jobs is not the most effective strategy in your
company, but if you figure out which strategy is effective, and then pursue
that strategy as passionately and consistently as Mr. Jobs did, then I do not
know how you could fail.

------
acabal
I thought this was going to be about people who took the Steve Jobs route of
design: "I know better than you, you'll use my design and like it, or go to
hell."

People see Jobs' success in design and think they too can be successful by
being merciless dictators of their design vision. Unfortunately 99% of people
don't have Jobs' talent and they end up messing up their projects. (Gnome 3
and Unity, I'm looking at you, though this terrible phenomenon isn't isolated
to those projects.)

37 Signals is also guilty of spreading that mindset, perhaps more so because
they aggressively blog and write about it all the time and because they are
(or at least were) startup darlings.

~~~
annymsMthd
I've been in this situation before. The my way or the highway attitude is a
bad mindset to have when managing engineers. Skilled engineers are free
thinkers and will push back on bad design. If someone says they can write
something better than your spagetti code you shouldn't yell at them or make
them feel inferior. You should allow them to build a system that will be clean
and maintainable for the sake of all engineers that have to work on the
codebase. Good leaders should know humility and when to admit they are wrong.

------
anantzoid
Though Steve may have done many things wrong,stolen designs, mistreated staff,
but how many people know about this? What matters is the result you produce,
not behind the curtain mess. Of course, Steve built Apple 1 without a support
team, so obviously he deserves to be called a hacker. But the biggest
inspiration that one can derive from him is his determination to not stop even
when removed from his own company. Not everyone can go and build another
successful company after being removed from one. The road was tough and you
can't expect a fair play all the time and get success at the same time.

------
jonmc12
imo, the sentiment of this article is better articulated in discussion of his
biography. Not sure why its presented as an edgy opinion. ie,
[http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/be-a-
jer...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/be-a-jerk-the-
worst-business-lesson-from-the-steve-jobs-biography/249136/)

"(Jobs) was not the world's greatest manager," Walter Isaacson said in a
recent interview with 60 Minutes. "In fact, he could have been one of the
world's worst managers."

"Being an asshole was part of the Steve package, but it wasn't essential to
his success."

etc.

------
euphoria83
Cutting line to get food when you are the CEO and have a lot of stuff to get
done is not too bad. Impolite, but not too bad. Think about all the perks that
CEOs have.

Good managements have weak links. You can either gather the courage to get
your message to people who have the strength to listen to you and act on it,
or you can keep cursing your boss and stick to you job.

If the author would have gathered the courage to get her message (discretely)
to a higher-up, she would have been not been remembering that mess-up. She
might have either prevented it, or been fired.

~~~
FireBeyond
That's BS. Have an assistant go get your food. You know, as one of the perks
that you have as a CEO.

~~~
euphoria83
I appreciate your comment.

------
mangler
From Isaacson's excellent biography of Jobs, the one thing I gathered is that
he had taste (turtlenecks and baggy jeans notwithstanding... ok, haven't seen
the yacht either). He bullied a whole company into satisfying his exquisite
taste, and the results are still outstanding. I'll take them even at a small
price premium.

That does not justify any boss being a jerk, but if you have the taste and the
power to bully a lot of people to satisfy that taste, you'll likely produce
something tasty.

------
ricardobeat
Many, if not most of Apple's innovations are not Steve's ideas, but from
someone working under him. He seems to have learned the wrong lesson.

From the outside, the MobileMe fiasco looks like a standard failed software
project, where nobody steps up to say the truth and management doesn't
understand/care what's going on. How a huge group inside Apple got to that
point is anybody's guess (and would probably make for a great lesson in
project management).

------
davesque
I'm a little bit confused that this article has gotten so much attention.

So he was a jerk because he cut in line at the sushi bar? Okay. Maybe you had
to be there, but is it hard to imagine that he might not have had time to wait
in line?

It does sound unfortunate that he shamed everybody for the iCloud launch, but
I'm already inclined to believe that this account was exaggerated if the sushi
bar story is any indication.

------
calinet6
tl;dr: "And that's a damn good thing."

~~~
arbuge
A bit extreme. No doubt he had many warts, but few would disagree that his net
contribution to society was enormously positive.

~~~
andrewljohnson
A great many people seem to think we'd have been better off without Steve
actually. They will tell you Steve/Apple set back the free software movement,
and brought dictatorship to the world of software, when the web used to rule
with anarchic democracy. They would tell you he sells closed devices that
neuter people's creativity, and that the devices are hard to hack or dispose
of.

I think he was a brilliant artist who made technology less imposing.

~~~
vor_
I think a great many other people--mainstream customers who don't read
websites like Hacker News--would argue that they don't care about the free
software movement or hacking devices. They think people using the term
"dictatorship" in reference to computer software are extremists. They just
want Shit That Works.

------
ScottBurson
This puts a really interesting spin on the MobileMe story.

I wonder what would have happened if they had yelled back at Steve while he
was dressing them down.

I also wonder who turned down their request for a more incremental launch. I'm
not enough of an Apple-watcher to know what the org chart looked like, but
could it have been Scott Forstall?

~~~
yoda_sl
No it was not Scott... Scott was too busy with iPhone launch. The VP in charge
was John Martin former Microsoft and Starbucks... he came at .Mac with a bunch
of ex-Microsoft and try to run the place most likely like Microsfot, but even
worst only trying to show nice UX/UI without caring about performance.

Project Managers/Engineers/QA leads did their job and reported to their upper
management (Director and then VP John Martin) but they instead decided to
silence everyone and kick a bunch of engineers out of the group.

------
ishansharma
Looks like many people are learning from the wrong side of coin (that was
Steve Jobs). I am a big fan and have seen almost all his keynotes and read 2
of his biographies and I fully acknowledge that he was a terrible guy
sometimes.

If you have to learn, learn from awesome things that he did in his lifetime,
not being an d*ck!

------
riams
Steve was one of the best product guys this world has seen. The same qualities
that this article complained over, were the qualities that also allowed him to
provide the world with all these gadgets. There's two sides to every coin, and
no one's perfect.

------
itsmeok
1) How can you be in tech and not know Steve jobs, more so given that you work
at apple? 2) Steve was a dick... most of the times, especially when he wanted
his way. nothing new. 3) You gripe should be with spineless middle management,
not CEOs.

~~~
aria
Also, she didn't know what he looked like that particular year. Not who he
was. Some people just have incomplete photo shrines.

------
jkuria
Btw, here's a Wozniak talk that does give Steve a little more credit for his
(Jobs' talents) than much of the discussion here:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WBX6SACViI>

------
shurcooL
Sometimes I wonder how much more productive Apple could be if they used a
language other than Objective-C. Would they be more or less productive and
able to get software/services done more quickly with another language?

~~~
stephencanon
> Sometimes I wonder how much more productive Apple could be if they used a
> language other than Objective-C.

I'm not sure where you get the notion that Apple doesn't use languages other
than Objective-C; good engineers use the right tool for the job, including
assembly, C, C++, python, ruby, javascript, prolog, lisp, perl, ... and
sometimes even Objective-C.

------
michalu
Bloggers giving advice to CEOs. Another hilarious peculiarity of this tech
hype.

------
jakejake
"In my first two weeks of being hired, he cut in line in front of me and a co-
worker at the office cafeteria sushi kiosk."

More than any negative thing I have ever heard about Steve Jobs, this is the
most disappointing to me.

~~~
GeorgeTirebiter
You know, he regularly parked in Handicapped spots too (before he had a
Handicap sticker - which I'm not sure he had when he was really sick, but he
certainly could have qualified for one then).

------
immy
Very ego-less of Steve to have put so much trust in the chain of command.

------
kaa2102
Treating people with respect and motivating folks to do better than their best
are traits of an effective leader. I think we somehow confuse "people-
shaming/screaming asshole" with a good leader.

------
anuraj
Irrespective of Steve Jobs, Mobile Me was a disaster; I don't see how a
delayed launch would have saved what is obviously an ill thought out product.
Product Manager, are you listening?

------
l0c0b0x
I'm sorry, but you worked at Apple (doesn't matter if it had been only for a
week) and you didn't know who it's CEO was? You worked at Apple, and you
didn't know who STEVE JOBS was? or had seen a picture/video of him somewhere?

That does NOT compute!

There are plenty of 'Steve' stories (www.folklore.org) out there. Conclusions
vary from person to person as to what kind of person was Steve Jobs, but most
people wouldn't taken back the time they worked with him/or Apple. Apple's/his
contributions to computer history really outweigh the means it took to get
there. Sometimes it just takes a jerk (most-likely insane), human being to
push people to achieve extra-ordinary things.

~~~
ritchiea
Absolutely absurd. She clearly knew who Steve Jobs was. She probably just
didn't know what Steve Jobs looked like the year she got the job. There are a
great number of people who I know by reputation, know by amazing reputation,
but I have no idea what they look like. I know who Larry Page is, I have no
idea what he looks like. I have a really really vague idea of what Sergey Brin
looks like. But really, who cares what they look like?

~~~
l0c0b0x
She got the job in 2008... My point is, if you were to get a job at xyz
company, wouldn't one of your initial moves be to find out who the major
players were at your new job were/looked-like? What the environment/culture
is? Some research would have suggested that she might expect this kind of
behavior from a certain individual? I don't have to number the many reasons
WHY you would want to do some research, or care to. Why is that absurd?

~~~
wpietri
Knowing somebody's bio photo may not help you when they cut in front of you in
the lunch line. Recognition cues there are very different.

Also, recognition is a lot about context. When you see him in a black
turtleneck on stage, you're primed.

I was once visiting a pal Google and ran across Eric Schmidt. Turns out his
office was right next to a development team. I could have easily picked him
out of a set of photos, but I wasn't expecting him to walk out of a small
office in a random part of the building. It wasn't until he was walking away
that I said, "Wait a minute. Was that..." And that was seeing his face, rather
than the back of his head.

------
vampirechicken
The story about the middle managers not approving ideas that they team was
later excoriated for not having implemented is classic Corporate America.

------
ashcairo
Are there any good counter-examples of uber-successful tech CEOs who
aren't/weren't jerks?

------
squozzer
They say, “Peace, brother.” I say, “Bruise my feelings. Flatten my ego. Save
my job.”

------
gesman
This justifies another book: "The Real Jobs by The Real People"

------
bschiett
Who the fuck is erin caton? No tech background, yet tech manager

~~~
jrockway
Does it matter? The point is the same whether she's a programmer or not.

And she makes it clear in the article that she's a PM, not a SWE.

~~~
bschiett
It does matter a lot, think about it.

~~~
consz
Why does it matter so much? There are tons of articles on the front page of HN
from no-names.

~~~
bschiett
Exactly.

~~~
consz
So you agree that it doesn't matter who the author is?

------
MrBra
and you don't know who you are calling 'you'

------
michaelochurch
My first thought, which may be wrong, is: Steve Jobs being a prick didn't make
him more effective. He was a prick because he was _so_ effective that he had a
+5 sigma trail of early success[0]. Because of his effectiveness, he could get
away with being a prick. Once he'd established momentum, it was "part of his
charm".

[0] Sure, he got fired, but with a net worth of $500 million. Doesn't count.
I'll let you fire me _five_ times for a tenth of that. You can even do it in
public. Hell, even have Donald Trump do it.

While it's arrogant to say this, I think I have nearly as strong a design
sense as him. I honed it studying the German style of board games, and
eventually writing my own games (most were failures, but I learned from them
and got good). I optimized a trick-taking card game (Ambition) to drive out
card-luck. Not an easy thing to do. After years of playtesting and throwing
out things that suck and rebalancing, the damn thing plays well.

I was also a bit "youthful" in my self-promotion, got into some pretty awful
flamewars on Wikipedia. I can't exactly hide that. I was 20. Shit happens. I
certainly understand the mental "edge" that turns top designers into arrogant
people. It's there, and it's part of what drives you to be great, but it also
needs to be checked. Not because it's offensive or morally wrong to be a jerk,
but because it makes _you_ suck. If you're unaccountable for the quality of
your ideas, you'll have bad ones.

When people see Steve Jobs's behavior, they see what someone like me would be
like without a few hefty doses of humility (some deserved, others not) in my
20s. ::shudder::

As a competent-or-better designer, I will say this: you don't have to be a
jerk to get good designs. In fact, often what you do as a design lead is take
in other peoples' ideas, and moderate. If you shut people out (or scare them)
you're losing signal for no good reason. You need all the signal you can get,
because good ideas come from _everywhere_.

I think Jobs had one positive effect, which is that he burned away corporate
bullshit. I'm sure that there was as much politicking under him as under any
charismatic leader, but I think a Jobs-like figure makes it just too
_embarrassing_ to let corporate boondoggles get into the product. I'm sure
there was just as much nastiness as anywhere else, but that the more
successful lieutenants _knew_ that a product that mirrored internal politics
(Conway's Law, applied to design) should be shredded to pieces.

So maybe it does take an asshole figure like Jobs to keep a corporation from
devolving into design-blindness... not because design requires assholes, but
because of what corporations are.

That said, I can't stand the goddamn fake Steve Jobs's who use him to justify
being an asshole. I am closer to Jobs than 99.5+ percent of them and not
nearly as much of a jerk (I have my moments, but I fucking _work_ like no one
would believe on patience.) If you cite Steve Jobs to justify bad behavior
(I've encountered this a million times) then you are an idiot because most
people who behave badly are not Steve Jobs.

~~~
SatvikBeri
I think Steve Jobs being a prick was directly related to his success.

Jobs did many awful things, such as refusing to acknowledge the existence of
his daughter or effectively stealing money from Woz. But that's not where the
perception of Jobs being a jerk comes from-many CEOs have done worse. The main
reason people seem to have found found working for Jobs exhausting is because
he'd always tell you your work was shit.

But the effect of this was that Jobs managed to get top performers to perform
5 or 10 times better. He took 10x people and turned them into 100x. It may
have been exhausting and emotionally draining, but quite a few people report
producing the best work of their lives while working for Jobs.

Can you imagine working with Woz, Jeff Dean, JK Rowling, or Marc Benioff and
telling them their work wasn't good enough and they had to produce work that
was 10x better? And being credible and convincing enough to get them to
believe it?

Obviously, just telling people their work sucks isn't enough. I've worked with
a fairly large number of people, and I've met exactly one who managed to pull
significantly better performance out of me than I could myself. It was
exhausting, but in the end I produced work that was substantially higher
quality _and_ quantity than anything I'd done before (at least outside
academia). Said manager was also considered very abrasive, and people tended
to love him or hate him. And it's not hard to see why-when someone tells you
that the quality of your work is a small fraction of what it can and should
be, it hurts.

Based on reports, it sounds like Steve Jobs was more or less capable of
pulling those kind of performance increases out of anyone, or at least a huge
variety of people. And based on the (very) small sample of people I've seen
who can do the same, it seems like you need to be at least somewhat of a jerk
to pull it off.

(Not to say that pulling great work out of people was Jobs's only skill. He
was also amazing at picking markets and product design, which probably don't
require you to be a jerk.)

~~~
wpietri
Cult leaders get their followers to do all sorts of extraordinary things
through systematic abuse. I've read a number of bios of cult survivors and a
consistent theme is their incredible dedication and accomplishment.

The interesting question to me is whether there are other ways to do great
work. People focus on Jobs and then generalize from their n=1 sample. They
also take the visible correlations and turn them into causation. It's
ridiculous.

Even if Jobs's behavior towards subordinates is related to his success, it may
not be in the way people think. Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless,
and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were
all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was
only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who
was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right.

If we expand the sample size to n=2 and just add another Jobs company, Pixar,
we can see that it's possible to produce an extraordinary amount of great work
without anybody running around being a giant asshole all the time.

~~~
michaelochurch
_Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was
in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal
turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in
charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design
until a product was fucking right._

I think you nailed it.

Most executives in most companies get to bike-shed and do little else. Jobs
actually made bike-shedding the worst job in the company.

Steve Jobs lived in the spotlight more than almost anyone else in this
business, so every assholish thing he did got magnified. What I've heard is
that he was very polarized: sometimes very nice, sometimes very mean. (I'm
that way, so I can relate.) Apparently he was nice to engineers for the most
part; it was the VPs and Directors that he tore to shreds.

Jobs had this whole theory about the VP level being the threshold of
responsibility that is a direct affront on the Effort Thermocline (in that VPs
get _more_ direct scrutiny, rather than, as is more typical, more power that
gives them the ability to hide losses and make themselves invincible).

------
yoster
This lady would be shell-shocked and would need therapy if she ever went into
construction. Not just the "boss", anyone that is not an apprentice will be
yelling, cursing, and putting down your work on a regular basis.

~~~
aria
There's no indication that she couldn't endure the silly dress down, just that
it was a dick thing to do. Also, lady's been through a ton of shit, including
cervical cancer (<https://medium.com/lady-business/67303ff64202>). So yeah, I
think she could handle a little yelling. I'd do a little research before I put
someone down. Guard your ignorance.

~~~
yoster
So she got a std, went through three procedures to get rid of the cancer, and
you think that's a ton of shit? Try telling someone who is going through chemo
if three procedures is a ton of shit. GUARD YOUR IGNORANCE.

~~~
aria
I think the most mature thing to do here is get into a pissing match about
whose cancer is worse rather than just agree that it's all probably worse than
being yelled at. Let's meet under the bridge to discuss.

------
gnnr
Ugh, though instead of through. Proofread

