> I find it likely that Jobs and Page were able to pick up on millimeter & millisecond defects.
Quite possible. It's also possible that Jobs & Page made all kinds of more or less random comments, and people remembered and retold the stories about the times they were strikingly correct.
Third plausible option for the Steve Jobs story: he knew his colleagues very well and just guessed what they did through their body-language. If I was going to pull off something like that on my boss I'm pretty sure I'd act differently than usual, and marketing/business-type people tend to be socially hyper-aware.
We could take that idea to the extreme. Perhaps Jobs knew nothing about technology; he was just highly sensitive to the body language of talented engineers. So he hired top-notch people, and then he yelled at them until he could see that the engineers knew they were doing excellent work.
Quite possible. It's also possible that Jobs & Page made all kinds of more or less random comments, and people remembered and retold the stories about the times they were strikingly correct.
I'd guess the truth is somewhere between the two.