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Comment by benwerd | Hacker News Reader

This is how I know I would suck in a company like this. Yeah, it's Steve Jobs - but I find the level of reverence on show in this piece to be a little hard to take. It's certainly revealing of the culture there at the time.

> And when you can get the time for thoughtful reflection on your idea from a visionary like Steve — well, that’s a good day.

Being humble is one thing, but forcing yourself into this kind of fawning emotional servility feels dangerous to me. He was smart; he was lucky; he was a human, like anyone else. I don't think this level of hierarchy is something that I would seek to build at any of my startups, or would hope to support in a startup that I invested in or advised. It just feels unhealthy to me.

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There have been stories outside Apple of Steve Jobs giving incredibly good feedback in a variety of areas and people being glad to have it. Have you considered the possibility that:

1. Steve Jobs was a couple of standard deviations better at this than almost anyone

2. As such, people were glad to get feedback from him

3. Such ability is rare and hard to identify, and so trying to replicate that structure is nonetheless not a sensible idea.

In other words, you're correct in your business practices, but possibly blinded to the fact that Steve actually was very, very good.

He had some priorities that are atypical in CEOs which made him better at making the kind of top-down decisions a lot of companies delegate to committees.

It's not particularly rare to have a decent sense of design, but it's rare for someone with a decent sense of design to be in a position to have the final say on mass-produced tech products. Especially true of the 90s and early 00s when Apple was making huge waves.

He was also a dick to a lot of people and petulant if he didn't get his way.

None of this stuff is mutually exclusive.

Upvoted for "None of this stuff is mutually exclusive". I tend to see a lot of "Steve Jobs was a genius!" vs. "Steve Jobs was a complete asshole!" competing narratives, when I always thought it seemed pretty obvious both were true.

Also, not only is this stuff mutually exclusive, but I think it is also (mostly) orthogonal. I get aggravated when I see or hear folks trying to emulate Steve Jobs' management style and they seem to focus on the asshole part but don't necessarily realize they're missing the genius part (see Elizabeth Holmes).

Like insisting that notes look like a leather bound notebook?

I'm confident he had good ideas. I'm also confident he had plenty of horrible ideas... Just like most intelligent humans.

Like insisting that notes look like a leather bound notebook?

It served its purpose: It introduced millions of people to taking notes on a portable electronic device by making the use of the device familiar and welcoming.

Remember, this is at a time when people had to be taught how to "swipe to open," how to scroll on a touch screen, and how to pinch to zoom. All of this was unfamiliar territory to the masses.

If the iPhone's initial operating system looked like Android's current design, it would have been much harder to get people on board.

(I still have my launch day iPhone. I fired it up a couple of weeks ago, and aside from the horrible pre-retina screen resolution, it was very familiar and comforting.)

“I'm confident he had good ideas. I'm also confident he had plenty of horrible ideas...”

... as you walk along you path you meet a man. 50% if the time he tells you sage advice that makes you a multimillionaire and 50% of the time he tells you sage advice that doesn’t make you richer. What do you value the mans afvice as?

It’s not a cult or a conspiracy when what the other part is selling actually materializes.

Does your evaluation change if, instead of making you fantastically rich his advice makes him fantastically richer?

If everyone has stock options, this isn’t quite true. And not sure about the eningeers, but the execs at Apple seem to be doing pretty well.

How many times can I ask his advice? If many times, I value it at over a half-million dollars a trial.

Sounds like the expected value of his advice is a half multi-millionaire, so yeah you should take it!

Given how much easier I've seen older relatives use iPhones in the skeuomorphic days vs now: I mostly lean towards skeuomorphic being preferable. It's not as fashionable now, but it is way more approachable and unambiguous.

> it is way more approachable and unambiguous.

I agree. My older relatives also have much harder times figuring out where to touch since the fully drawn buttons are replaced by just a text.

If skeuomorphism is the worst sin you accuse him of, he must have been pretty good at what he achieved.

I really don't understand the push against skeuomorphism besides "fashions change." I mean, I get that using so many physical world metaphors could be limiting, but the subsequent shift to everything just being circles, boxes and triangles, without any words, was so much more confusing and unnecessarily faddish in my opinion.

Like insisting that notes look like a leather bound notebook?

Is this objectively worse than the current practice of removing or hiding every visual cue and affordance, leaving the user to guess what they're supposed to be doing?

It seems like most skeuomorphism was at the direction of Scott Forstall rather than Steve Jobs, although Steve certainly allowed it to happen

Like someone else said, you can't talk about that decision without talking about the time and context in which it was made.

People were being introduced to wildly new concepts and it served to anchor people in familiarity.

Today, it's not as useful of an anchor for obvious reasons. Mobile phones and touch interfaces are ubiquitous.

“touch interfaces are ubiquitous.”

I feel old, but honestly this was just, what? 10years ago?! does nobody remember how everyone in the entire mobile industry proclaimed Apple would fails because touch interfaces weren’t tactile. yet today every single phone is basically a copy of the first iPhone just with better chips and random stylistic touches to differenciate?

For a moment, I thought you were referring to the authoritarianism/hierarchy as the “anchor of familiarity” - and everything Steve Jobs did in mass-tech as the “wildly new concepts” - you would still be right in the context of the executives and engineers he led.

he made a mouse with one button

The hype and celebrity worship (even at the time) make it nearly impossible to distinguish the man from his reputation. So in the end, there are few facts you can point to, just an awful lot of opinions.

I mean, you could point to the many products he was involved in, but there are a lot of subjective opinions there too.

There is a vast treasure trove of books, articles, interviews and stories from people that worked with him. Almost all of these include criticism.

Your comment gives the impression you've read none of this and only read meta-commentary. Or that you consider any person's story subjective and non-credible. In which case, what would you call a fact? The same standard would apply to any person.

(I wouldn't include the Isaacson bio, he regrettably focussed very little on Jobs' process.)

Fair enough. Is there anything you particularly recommend reading?

I enjoyed Becoming Steve Jobs. Covered the period of Jobs' return to Apple and also his growth of Pixar. His more mature phase, where he was able to nurturr organizations and had less of the unhinged asshole side about him.

https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Steve-Jobs-Evolution-Visiona...

Haven't read it, but I've heard there is a section of Creativity Inc where Ed Catmull talks about working with Steve and how they operated.

Finally, there's a site that occasionally surfaces here which had stories from the original Mac team. Folklore.org I think? That was a more raw period with more of a mix of immaturity in there.

But all of those have a variety of firsthand accounts.

I enjoyed that book. I recommend it. Details how the Steve Jobs that left Apple wasn't the same as the one that returned, along with the journey of how he got there.

The Pixar stuff in there was really interesting. Creativity Inc has been on my reading list because of that book.

Folklore.org is an excellent site, I loved reading about the early days of the mac and gained a great respect for the first Macintosh team.

In my opinion they really moved the needle on ubiquitous computing for the masses, and did a great job on their first attempt.

> a couple of standard deviations better at this

The crucial thing is that "this" in this case is product management. I'm fine with Jobs being the Caesar Augustus of product; what bothers me is when he starts being touted as the Christ of Business.

Yeah, he just built a business from nothing to huge thrice, including the #1 by market cap company on earth.

Did you forget about the part where he was run out of Apple by its board? And Apple was not the #1 by market cap while he was alive.

It worked though. Apple is the most valuable American company when measured by market cap. That didn’t accidentally happen.

Steve Jobs is the canonical example of why CEOs matter and are well paid.

Steve Jobs is the exception. Most CEOs aren’t that smart.

That didn't happen under Steve though... that happened under Tim Cook.

What if I'm "a couple of standard deviations better" at "giving incredibly good feedback in a variety of areas" too but lack the rest of Steve Jobs' talents so this "rare and hard to identify ability" feels like the only thing I'm really good at? How do I start a career around this?

Well, if you truly have that talent, you can probably be a highly successful consultant. Just start charging people for advice. You could start by offering advice for reviews to targeted high profile clients who need it, then seek referrals.

However, the first question to ask yourself is whether you really have that talent. If no one at all offers to pay, you likely don't. I don't mean you're bad at advice, rather instead that you're just not earth shatteringly good at it. Lots of people are good at advice without being able to build a career specifically around that.

Oh also, to be a highly effective consultant other skills would be required too of course. Empathy, business thinking, etc.

Jobs was only able to build a career around it by building companies around him. That's one way, but not easy, and also he had other talents and compulsions and vices that made his path what it was.

> 1. Steve Jobs was a couple of standard deviations better at this than almost anyone

This is a statistical oxymoron.

Yeah, you're right. I realized it when I came back and reread my comment.

Ah well, no editing now, it's up for posterity.

You mean tautology?

What could "a couple standard deviations better" even mean in the context of evaluating a product?

I would still argue that Apple benefited tremendously from Jobs. How I would hypothesize the benefit came is that a product winds up being a sort-of "single thing", each part coming together to a single experience for the customer. It's a paradoxical situation because a technological device is produced by a series of experts in multiple fields and with so many people involved. In an average company, the unity of the experience tends to be lost in multiple bureaucratic exigencies.

Jobs was able to put together a single (fairly good) vision into a product by having an absolute dictatorship on over the creation process. Hyperbolic "couple of standard deviations" claims aren't necessary. Artistry still is often a matter of one person (or a very small number of people) conceiving a vision. So letting Jobs be the painter drawing with other people talents worked and was better than twenty hands at the paintbrush. But it had the problem that absolute authority can work out to being cultish and abusive. No sure if there's a solution here.

I interpret his tone as one of respect. From everything I have heard and read about the man, he was worthy of respect. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to respect the opinion of people you work for, and to feel proud when they like your ideas.

I think it’s a mistake to think that everyone in a company is on the same playing field, that everyone is equal (not on a human level, but a company level). Companies have leaders, and leaders are in charge. You either accept that and work for them, or you start your own company and you become the leader.

When you accept a job working for someone else, you also accept that you are not in charge.

"Being humble is one thing, but forcing yourself into this kind of fawning emotional servility feels dangerous to me."

Ironically, this attitude may have made you a good candidate to work at Apple.

There are many anecdotes about Steve being blunt with people, in an attempt to figure out who will be honest with him and who is just trying to kiss his ass. He wanted to work with the former, of course. And this is hinted at a little bit in the article.

Maybe, but accusing people you don’t know, accomplished very capable people where were very high achievers even at the time, of ‘forcing’ themselves to be servile is a worrying sign. That’s not what the I got from the article, and I find it hard to see how it could be reasonably interpreted that way. I’d want to be very, very sure of myself before saying that of someone, and I find it difficult to trust the judgement or motives of someone who expresses themselves like that casually.

He's not asking you to trust his judgement. Random hackernews comment!

I understand what you are saying but I have a feeling you react that way because you weren't there and you are reading this disconnected after a lot of time. The fawning does not happen without merit, definitely will not sustain itself over time if its not deserved.

Similar to you thought, to me the most egregious thing is to see startups in san francisco that do something small and things similar to serving mobile ads using the phrase "changing the world" and recruiters trying to project the founder as some kind of visionary. Sure he started the company and its still a small one, lets not get carried away.

The way I think of it is that the brain must explain what the body is doing. If you notice that you're slaving away for weeks to prepare for a demo and you're really stressed about it, and what you're going to do is show the project you're an expert in to a guy who has some knowledge of it and then do what he says - you have to invent a reason for why you're doing this. For me, "I'm doing it for money and to keep my job" completely satisfies. For someone who is above such base notions there most be something higher - Jobs is a genius saint of Design.

> He was smart; he was lucky; he was a human, like anyone else.

And like nobody else, he was personally who made Apple, Macintosh, iPod and iPhone what they were.

In short, he many times proved to really be far from average.

No, he did not individually make those things. That is a phenomenal insult to the HUNDREDS of people that did the hard work of making those products.

He did not alone make them, but he made them they were. He was the one who decided from all the possibilities what will be implemented, how it will look like, how is going to be sold. We can talk about each of the items from the list, and his fundamental influence is provable for each. Without Jobs, all the things from the list would not even happen in the form they happened.

Having experienced this on the passing of a colleague, I think there are an equal mix of people that genuinely feel that reverence and people that talk it up in order to increase their standing, and both of those groups are generally in the minority at any organization (with the exception of cults.)

Point being, most people at Apple probably considered Steve as a person.

Regarding the design review practices, that all sounds like good advice and rather normal when presenting to a time and attention limited audience.

Perhaps thats why you would never build a company like Apple?

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