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Comment by jarek | Hacker News Reader

Without expressing an opinion about the value of Apple products, I would be careful about implying a causation between a product's sales and its value or "greatness".

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Fair enough - I was going for an "unbiased" metric. Could have been market cap, stock price, etc.

In a nutshell, my respect goes to the builders and hackers of the world, not the talkers.

Sounds like you're saying your respect goes to the businessmen and marketers of the world, if your primary criteria for greatness are sales, market cap, stock price, etc. Those might sometimes correlate with creativity and technical merit, but they certainly aren't directly measures of it (and often don't correlate).

To put it differently: What has Jobs made in the past 10 years? I don't mean: what have employees over which he's had supervision as CEO made. What has Jobs made? Is he really a "builder and hacker"? My impression of the early days is that he wasn't even then: Woz was the builder and hacker; Jobs was the suit.

The ceo of a company is responsible for success and failure. When I was in the Army, the success or failure of my squad rested with me - I was ultimately responsible.

So, yes, in this case, the guy who took apple from the dumps to one of the biggest consumer devices companies in the world, he gets credit.

That's a pretty weird view, like arguing that a Dean of a science department ultimately gets credit for any important scientific advances his professors make, because he's ultimately responsible for the department's success as a scientific research institution, staffing, funding, construction of buildings, intellectual climate, promotion and compensation policies, etc., all of which are necessary for the research to take place and influence what kind of research is done.

CEOs, and Deans, do of course have influence on success, but I don't think a blanket, "all credit goes to the man on the top" makes any sense. One needs to investigate the extent to which different people actually contributed, i.e. whose contributions were minor, moderate, necessary, etc. Some executives of successful companies deserve a lot of the credit; others don't; depending on why the company succeeded, and what they or other people did.

And if you want to take a real capitalist-agency view, the CEO is merely another employee, and ultimately the owners are responsible for success or failure.

I think the comparison to a dean is superficial, if not disingenuous. How many deans involve themselves in so many details of product creation and strategy? I see very little commonality between the roles beyond sitting at the top of a hierarchy.

I was responding there to the much more general claim krav made that CEOs deserve ultimate credit for the success of successful companies, as opposed to the narrower claim that Jobs in particular does. I wouldn't give Jobs as much credit as most people, but I do agree he is much more hands-on, and thus deserves a lot more credit, than the average CEO (I still wouldn't call him a "builder and hacker", though).

I do think that many CEOs are approximately as involved in day-to-day operations as Deans are, with primary responsibility for the financial/governmental/organizational side of things (budgets, personnel, lobbying), and very little involvement in anything technical. Due to lots of family working in it, I have a decent impression of how much credit CEOs in the oil industry deserve for the success of their companies, and how much knowledge they have of petroleum engineering in even its high-level aspects; the answer in both cases is, not much.

There's a big difference between responsibility and deserving the credit.

I can't speak for academia - it's an island I have no wish to ever visit again.

Great companies or teams aren't happy accidents. They require leadership, vision, and execution. I wouldn't want to work with Jobs - but I admire what he's done. Apple would not be here without his vision and leadership.

On leadership, yeah, I do believe that ultimately, a leader is responsible and accountable. Whether it's the leader of a fire-team in Iraq, the leader of a country, or a four-man startup in Mountain View.

My very personal view: we'd be better off as a society if leaders were held responsible for success and failure. I see too many leaders / ceos / politicians taking credit for success and pointing to anybody but them for failures.

What bothers me about the tone of his statement is that it puts down anybody who doesn't make something "great". Great being narrowly defined as "making a metric ass load of money".

Additionally, he's presuming credit for the work Apple's engineers and designers have done. There is no doubt that Jobs guidance, and decision making has pulled Apple from the ashes. But he's not personally writing up engineering documents or slinging code.

My wife made some meatloaf today for the very first time. I thought it was pretty "great". Does that mean Jobs thinks that she's worth his consideration now? Or only if she puts the recipe out and made a metric ass load of money? I gave her the recipe, should I just take all the credit?

By defining "make" in a way that implies Jobs' participation in the process beyond those normally assigned to a CEO, and conflating credit and accountability with the process of actually "making" something, implies that he gets the credit for the late nights up writing code, testing out production designs, and all the other things that Jobs most certainly did not do is wrong.

If the world worked that way, with people taking credit for other's work, it would make for a pretty shitty place.

I think you are stretching a little here. Jobs (to make sure we are talking about the same "he") never once brought in any mention of money. His point is a fairly common viewpoint: it's easy to tear things apart but much harder to build them; before tearing other people's things apart, try building something yourself first.

I, obviously, can't say what Jobs would consider great. I think that question is meaningless, though. If somebody asked me the same question Jobs asked, the definition of great would be my own.

I took it as an allusion to the phrase "insanely great" for which only one thing fits -- Jobs' own, massively profitable, creations.

You can say the same about Goldman Sachs

Point me toward a CEO who's more intimately involved with their company's products than Jobs.

He tells people what to build. He's very good at it, but he doesn't build things himself. Vision is cheap; negative taste [1][2] is easy; it's the implementation that counts.

I have no problem valuing the industrial engineers who figured out how to make the iPad 13 mm thick more than Jobs who decided it would be 13 mm thick.

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/2taste [2] http://blog.fawny.org/2010/04/12/appletype/

Yes, but who other than Jobs has the authoritas to convince those engineers to make that 13mm a reality?

Unless I am missing a reference in "authoritas", anyone who can fire those engineers.

Right. Seriously -- what did you mean by "authoritas"? Normally, employees, including engineers, do what you tell them to do. Knowing what is possible and borderline possible and when is also an important part of Jobs's skill set, but still is nowhere near actually doing it in my eyes.

Perhaps there's a distinction to be made between building the individual components and building 'the product'. Obviously, Jobs doesn't do the former, certainly not by hand. But he's very much involved in product development throughout the entire design cycle: initial vision, product definition, decisions about integration with other services, constant iteration of software and hardware (this is where he's said to be very hands on, constantly using the product and giving direction), final spec/price points, packaging, and marketing. This creation of a complete product is what has made Apple so successful in the last decade and seems to me to clearly be the 'building' of a product.

Anyway, if vision and negative taste are cheap and easy, why don't more tech companies seem to have them? It doesn't at all seem to me that the trait that makes Apple stand out is that they have engineers that are head and shoulders above the rest of the industry. Not at all. Apple's engineers are good, but hardly unique in their ability to make 13mm thick tablet computers. It's that they have taste and vision and they execute on top of them.

I would say any startup CEO worth their salt. and most cases, esp on HN, they're actually involved in building it, not just telling people that it must be built.

Those unbiased metrics are a good measure of the entirety of a company's or a division's performance, but they tell us little about the product itself in absence of consideration of its marketing, competition, relevant social attitudes, and a plethora of other market factors which to a large degree determine the "success" of a product.

Agreed on more respect for the creators than for the talkers, though.

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