To paraphrase The Dude, Steve Jobs wasn't wrong, he was just an asshole.
It's not exactly uncommon to have the choice between one option that's clearly better technically, and another that's easier to implement with the limited time and resources you have, or more compatible with customers' peculiar needs, or a better fit for now-clearly-unwise decisions made in the past.
And usually you pick the technically inferior decision with a little sigh and a feeling of regret that the right business decision isn't the right technical decision.
But if the CEO has just shouted at you that you have to do the technically right thing ... well, getting shouted at is seldom fun, but it's got to make a pleasant change to be not just allowed but instructed to do whatever it takes to go with the design you think is "ideal".
And I have to say, I think I'd rather work for someone who shouted at me when I'd genuinely got something wrong, but listened to me when I was right than someone who was always polite, but made bad decisions.
Of course this wouldn't work for everyone, and of course it would be better if he was nicer to people, but still...
He was deeply technical. He began his career as a programmer at Atari.
[Edit] Jobs had many traits that would lead a psychiatrist to classify him as sociopathic - not mass murderer type, but the psychological type. For example, his complete lack of empathy towards his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge for a long while. One of the weird traits of sociopaths is that to navigate world that requires understanding of empathy and emotions, an understanding they don't have, they build models of human behavior and can choose to deploy those models when required toward their aims. What's interesting also here is his ability to be singularly brutal to his subordinate, while at the same time be completely empathetic to the customer's view point. Just my amateur psychologist 2c, but that combination of brutality on one side with solicitousness on the other adds weight to my view that he was a high-functioning sociopath.
There might be reasons why he acted like an asshole, but he still acted like an asshole, in my opinion.
If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs got hired at Atari because he showed them a board for some arcade game that Steve Wozniak had designed and conveniently forgot to tell them that he didn't actually design the thing.
I also think I read that Steve Jobs lied to Woz about how much Atari paid him for it so he could cheat Woz out of the money.
I'm pretty sure I read about this in a book called "The Ultimate History of Video Games". [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-Pokemon/...
I think a good firsthand example is a one hour q&a with developers he did in 1997 soon after returning to Apple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ16_YxLbB8
He doesn't necessarily show off deep technical knowledge, but he is able to discuss strategy about technology directly with developers. Managing technology is his competitive advantage.
It's absurd that anyone would.
I think one of his key strengths was the ability to know if someone knew what they were talking about and to recognize outstanding people - in any field. So many Apple stories, from early times to more recent, are about how he always hired the very best people, and then somehow made them do the best work they ever had. I think he could just tell if someone had the fire inside them, and knew how to fan those flames.
IIRC, Walter Isaacson talked about Steve Jobs' childhood -- he struggled with the emotion that he was an adopted child for years. He felt like a total liability for him to have been put up for adoption, that he wasn't wanted. He felt that was an incredibly cruel thing to do to a child.
As a form of "revenge" for being put up for adoption, he denied paternity of his daughter around the same age his parents put him up for adoption, so that he could "experience" what it felt like when the direction of cruelty was reversed (from victim to oppressor).
There are ways to be make a point powerfully without screaming or being rude.
There's the famous Tim Cook story where he gets his point across, but instead of shouting, he's just ice cold:
> ...One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.
> “This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”
> Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/cook_apple.fortun...
I prefer Steve Jobs' shouting, but direct management anytime.
I’m willing to bet everyone else in that room, from that day forward, whenever they heard Tim Cook say “someone should” take charge of a situation that they were responsible for, just said, “I’m on it”, immediately stood up, left the meeting, and made it happen. And that’s a scalable, sustainable, well-oiled machine. The fact that Tim could set that up with a single cold, pointed comment to demonstrate how he expected his staff to respond to him is what makes the story.
The meetings where Tim said someone should do something and someone just did it without any further bureaucracy or follow-up emails about action items or specific allocation of tasks to individual people: those meetings don’t make a good story.
At my last job a director (that eventually became my boss) got angry with me because I called the product I worked on a “piece of shit”. He said while the product was “suboptimal”, my language was offensive. I told him that what I found truly offensive was the millions of dollars a month our company was losing because of this “suboptimal” product, and that no one would let me fix it.
The reaction of the same person should be different if the work environment never had the f- word pronounced though. That would mean trouble.
Uh, yes? I mean, that's only one of the many reasons I wouldn't work in a trading pit on Wall Street, but unless they've just killed someone there's never a good reason to cuss out your subordinates. If it's "just part of the culture," then that culture sucks.