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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

Gates was quite heavily involved in making Microsoft's early products, long before they had '60 to 150 engineers'. In the case of Jobs, the really enduring mystery to me is that despite some seemingly disqualifying personality flaws, he managed to both surround himself with very talented people and get them to do outstanding work together. Once, you could chalk it up to luck but somehow he did it repeatedly.

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Joel Spolsky has a good story about Gates and his understanding of engineering.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

Edit: there's a tl;dr on the particular topic of Gates' engineering skills buried in the story (which I'll quote below), but I encourage everyone to read the whole damn thing because that is how you successfully lead engineers.

tl;dr

"It was a good point. Bill Gates was amazingly technical. He understood Variants, and COM objects, and IDispatch and why Automation is different than vtables and why this might lead to dual interfaces. He worried about date functions. He didn’t meddle in software if he trusted the people who were working on it, but you couldn’t bullshit him for a minute because he was a programmer. A real, actual, programmer."

A fine read ... a piece that teaches us so much about the human side of things that matter in engineering management.

That was quite a bit later. Here's a super-short summary of Microsoft's earliest days.

https://www.wired.com/2011/04/0404bill-gates-paul-allen-form...

He definitely became famous as an executive and captain of industry. But he very much started on the hands-on, nerd side of things.

I found the anecdotes from John Carmack about working with Jobs really interesting in this regard. Apart from being probably very smart Jobs did care a lot about the things they were building, and willing to throw everything overboard if you could convince him that an existing approach was not the right thing to do. It is something many managers or leaders lack IMHO, not willing to do the "right thing" because of politics, market studies or something else.

I didn't get that impression from the Carmack stories at all. If you haven't had a chance before, dig into the early Mac development history at folkore.org. A number of the stories involve the team engaged in some (in hindsight) hilarious and ridiculous effort to humor, misdirect or otherwise manage Jobs in situations that arose primarily from him being profoundly, stubbornly, catastrophically wrong. The eventual resolution never involves Jobs saying 'ok, ok, you lot were right, let's do it your way'.

Interesting, will read up on these. There's ten years difference between early Apple and late Apple Jobs so maybe things were different for Carmack. In the end, Jobs must have been doing something right given his track record.

No doubt! It seems surprisingly difficult tease out exactly what it was, even if you trawl through all the anecdotes, histories and biographies. Perhaps it's simply that his proverbial reality distortion field held for long enough for his collaborators make the unreality reality.

There's also potential reality distortion in the other direction: how much of the early-apple lore has survived untainted by three decades of mythology, never mind the general haze of time (I know I'm telling a story from 2013 that's certainly not gotten more boring over time -- thing were crazy, but I'd not trust my self to be able to gave a 100% accurate account of exactly how crazy)? How much of it is an accurate recollection of what things were like day-to-day, and how much of it is a particularly crazy couple of week before the shareholder meeting that got amplified?

That's a very sensible concern but I think if you've worked in the field in the SFBA for a reasonable amount of time in the last 20 or more odd years, you've almost certainly heard variants of same stories and themes, sometimes from first hand participants.

Even when you allow for the indisputable fact that, say, Herzfeld or Cringley or Isaacson and others are fallible human beings with imperfect recollection and intrinsic biases, the lockstep consistency of the narratives and characterizations is striking.

Yes, he’s a terrible person to try to learn from since his methods of success were so singular. I can imagine running the “Jeff Bezos playbook” but not the Steve Jobs playbook.

>The eventual resolution never involves Jobs saying 'ok, ok, you lot were right, let's do it your way'.

That would be un-becoming of a narcissist and a leader. What he would do, is to do a 180 and claim that it was his idea all along. From a dispassionate point of view this is actually good since all sides of a contentious issue can be fully explored, but it sure feels shitty when someone steals your idea and claims it as his own.

> but it sure feels shitty when someone steals your idea and claims it as his own.

Such is the life of the salaried employee.

There are advantages though, in that you don't have to run with the idea. You can just go home in the evening and be with your kids.

Also, if it turns out to actually be a bad idea it's not your problem either!

because of politics, market studies or something else.

The big advantage Jobs had is that he never had to answer to anyone. It was always "his company". Except when it wasn't of course!

> and willing to throw everything overboard if you could convince him that an existing approach was not the right thing to do

"Strong opinions, loosely held" is a good way to approach many things.

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