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Comment by cornholio | Hacker News Reader

Jobs comes off as quite an obnoxious dude.

I love the incessant deification of Steve Jobs, regardless of his mistakes, juvenile behavior, and constant stories about his abuse of his staff. In this story Jobs mistakes the wrong person for John Carmack, becomes deeply offended by a silly t-shirt, screams at his staff and slams his hands the table like a 2 year old. But the author is impressed with Jobs and makes him out to be the hero. At my work we would call this a hostile and abusive work environment, but within the Jobs cult of personality it's a net positive.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if anyone else at Apple behaving like Jobs would quickly receive a warning from HR if not shown the door.

For example, You may note that Scott Forstall doesn't work at Apple anymore.

* Scott Forstall doesn't work at Apple anymore*

and neither does software ...

Ouch

> behaving like Jobs would quickly receive a warning from HR if not shown the door

Jobs was constantly called by HR for meetings during late 80's due to his behavior. Source - Steve Jobs book

Yeah, I have interactions with managers all the time where I state my ideas, someone else disagrees and then my boss makes the right call.

For some reason that doesn’t sound dramatic without the possibility of someone being yelled at or fired.

The negatives are over exaggerated, just like the positives. Its ridiculous to reduce someones entire career 20 incidents out of the hundreds of daily interactions over a few decades amounting to > 1million.

Ironically, your approach is no different than the persons you're criticizing. You're also basing your opinion on 1% of the dataset, just a different 1%.

I don't disagree with your assessment but, right or wrong, Steve Jobs was on another level.

Most great leaders have character flaws. Some of them are very obnoxious petty people. See Nick Saban or Michael Jordan.

Steve Jobs pushed people to achieve extraordinary things. My guess is they would not have achieved many of those things without his influence and authority. That's what great leaders do.

But it's true. If you are a selfish narcissistic jerk people remember that too. Maybe more than what you accomplished.

This story, to me, highlights Jobs' notorious ability to change his mind when presented with information that pointed to the right way of doing something, even in the face of social pressure to do otherwise. He could've been more diplomatic about it for sure. But so many people of his ilk don't have that capacity that it makes me think its more a facet of that personality type than a character flaw in particular to Jobs.

There's a fascinating amount of shamelessness and unwillingness to admit when you're wrong, though, if you're willing to drive people 100% in one direction one day and then completely reverse course the next while making it sound like it was their fault.

Completely. You could have had an identical story without the drama, which seems to have been completely due to Jobs. Had you let Carmack talk to the lead engineer for about fifteen minutes, I'm sure he would've come around entirely for objective reasons, rather than because the boss screamed at him.

And this story leaves unanswered the question of why they compromised on a suboptimal architecture in the first place. In my experience, 95% of the time it's due to some other constraint imposed by an executive. E.g., a made-up ship date.

So it's perfectly possible that had the head of graphics gone for what he knew was the ideal solution in the first place, he would have been yelled at by Jobs for that. It wouldn't be the first time that a HiPPO caused a boss to do a 180 and implicitly blame the underlings rather than own up.

That's actually what happened according to the story. The lead admitted that Carmack was right, and then Jobs got angry at the lead for not making a good technical decision from the outset.

Without knowing what were the requirements and why that decision was made, it isn't possible to infer whether the original design was even the ideal solution to the problem stated by the original requirements (see chesterton's fence).

Managers such as steve jobs don't make technical decisions. They specify requirements which then need to be met by the tech guys. This anecdote sounds an awful lot like a manager changing his mind regarding a requirement after he was pointed out a technical consequence.

We also know Jobs could turn on a dime.

It’s entitely possible he previous shot down the correct way because it would take too long for too small a benefit.

That's what I believe as well. To me this whole episode shows an erratic manager being abusive to staff once he was faced with the technical consequences of having imposed a design requirement.

This is certainly possible. But Jobs decision to impose a design requirement earlier (if that was so) might have been excellent given the data he had; when he got more data (or logic) from John, he made a better decision and knew that it would take a big shove to get everybody else to change direction on a dime. It generally does. The anger wasn't necessarily about the previous decision, all sorts of engineering decisions turn out to be "placeholders": it may have been about not being willing to alter course quickly enough, or just intended to ensure everyone knew the direction had changed.

> Had you let Carmack talk to the lead engineer for about fifteen minutes, I'm sure he would've come around entirely for objective reasons

I wish this were true. Yet I've been so many projects around me go months and even years down some very-clearly wrong direction, because the engineering lead refuses to course correct. Typical patterns are:

- The system design attempts to address "future" issues, making it two orders of magnitude more complex than necessary.

- The eng lead wants to "get it right from the beginning." So months later, you have a beautiful CI pipeline, coding standards, base classes, etc, and still no usable prototype.

- Trying to solve all possible use cases, with one system.

- The above, but then focusing on just one use case so narrowly, the rest have to be crammed in.

I could keep going. These are cases when you need a decisive (and technically sharp) manager above to call bullshit and rip the bandaid if necessary.

tldr; People tunnel, and then need to be really jarred before they untunnel.

(but that's not to criticize your details, I love those details.)

If you read some biographies of influential people, they were often very obnoxious and uncaring assholes in person. When the culture is obsessed with personality cults, there is tendency to to worship them or completely dismiss their achievements.

Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Mahatma Gandhi, John D. Rockefeller, ...

Do not forget Jack Tramiel, known for "Jack attacks", "I don't believe in compromising, but winning" and his intense micromanagement where every spending over 1000 USD had to be signed by him and he refused budgets, because they were a "license to steal". What do you think happened when he went on vacation :-)

Except maybe in his testimony, I don't remember that from reading about Bill Gates.

Read Paul Allen memoirs. Bill Gates was a bully and very unprincipled. When co-founder had a cancer, Gates forced him out to cut his share. He also constantly bullied employees and cursed at them. You can also read a lot about his business practices in general. Totally unethical.

Gates has himself admitted himself that he was a bully, so I think we can all agree that he was not a nice CEO.

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