Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thu2111 | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, I'd be more interested in long-form talks he gave when he was older, after he'd rebuilt Apple. Even though I've read his biography there's a surprising dearth of information out there about topics that seem important, at least if you want to learn management skills from his example.

Take the question of how technical he actually was. The famous books and movies about Jobs hardly cover this at all. There's not even any agreement today about it, look at the contradictory answers to this question:

https://www.quora.com/Was-Steve-Jobs-technical?share=1

And I'm always reminded of this story where he asks about the light well gathering characteristics of CMOS vs CCD:

https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-thrive-in-a-technic...

The biographies that are out there are OK as far as they go, but they're ultimately made by people who are in love with the idea of a humanities student getting rich running a tech company and telling those nerds where to go. They don't explore how he was able to recruit and keep people with strong skills, how he could tell them apart from those who just weren't as sharp. They don't explore how involved he was with at the time radical decisions like the macOS Aqua UI, merging BSD/NeXT/MacOS Classic, what exactly shipped in the first iPhone and so on. I've heard he was very involved with all kinds of minor things like the decision to keep using Objective-C well past its sell-by date, but again, such details come out in scraps here and there.

If you look at other tech firms like Yahoo, after being taken over by people without a strong engineering background they went into decline and failed. Merely being "not a nerd" is hardly sufficient. To match what he accomplished requires skill in deal making, recruitment, retention, skills evaluation, technology, marketing, etc. Yet this story remains largely untold.

There's not even any agreement today about it

There's a lot of revisionist history about whether Jobs understood the tech or not. I believe a lot of it comes from the later-day Woz worship that's been spreading since Mr. Jobs' death.

If you go back and read interviews of the era when Jobs was asked technical questions by technical people, he clearly understood far more than we give him credit for today.

I hear that kind of thing from two types of people: nontechnical people who are looking for a contrarian hot-take, and technical people who subscribe to the "credibility hierarchy" that's correlated to how close you work to the metal. They make fun of that nonsense in the first episode of Silicon Valley and it's probably one of my favorite jokes in the series [1].

1. https://youtu.be/kXQE2uGnR_U?t=19

I'm at a loss for specific examples of Jobs not understanding a piece of hardware or software technology.

He made a lot of bets on the future and what he felt people would want to buy and use. Many worked out and some didn't.

But what are the examples of him allegedly not understanding specific bits of hardware or software technology?

For me, though I certainly didn't agree with all he did, it seemed he had a keen functional understanding of the underlying hardware and software. He couldn't sit down and write some code (which is fine) but he understood the pros and cons and was able to understand and shape where it was headed.

    Take the question of how technical he actually 
    was. The famous books and movies about Jobs 
    hardly cover this at all. There's not even 
    any agreement today about it, look at the 
    contradictory answers to this question:

I'm amazed that there's even a debate about this.

He couldn't sit down and write code, or debug a PCB. That's fine. I don't need or even want my executives to be the best engineers in the house. I want them to respect and understand engineering and work in tandem with us.

Jobs was exactly the right sort of "technical" for management and the C-level: he was able to understand the pros and cons of technical details and, rather often, make good predictions about where things were going.

(He was also frequently a jerk, if not outright abusive, and I don't condone that -- but that's a separate matter entirely from his technical chops or lack thereof)

I can think of plenty of calls he made that I disagreed with. Some were bad calls, period. Other calls were "correct" for what he was trying to achieve, but I didn't agree with what he was trying to achieve. Other times, he was simply too ambitious, pushing some software vision before hardware had quite caught up.

But I've never seen an example of him simply failing to sufficiently understand the hardware or software.

> Take the question of how technical he actually was. The famous books and movies about Jobs hardly cover this at all. There's not even any agreement today about it, look at the contradictory answers

I'm not surprised. Is there even agreement on the definition of technical? How can we know if anyone is technical, let alone Steve Jobs?

Also, his partner was Woz. One has to be a bit more than "technical" to have it make sense to take a design from Woz.

With respect to your last paragraph, that's because Jobs doesn't really fit the mould that we "construct" as humans when trying to understand other people.

In general, tech industry leaders should be able to manage context-switching between technical and non-technical decision-making, but very few leaders can excel at it, if their life were to depend on it. This is why we have very few of them like Andy Grove, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs & Elon Musk.

A lot of engineers do not consider Steve Jobs to be technical partially because he was admitted to study a non-technical degree (unlike Andy, Jeff or Elon) and partially because of the way he is documented to have ripped off engineers he has worked with. The reasoning is if he was capable of doing the work himself, why hire someone else to do it or at least devalue their work in a way he wouldn't like to be treated?

Also in tech, we generally fall into two buckets: technical and non-technical, but Jobs as a person didn't neatly fit into either bucket as evidenced by this description taken from Wikipedia. It aptly describes Jobs in a way that different writers fail to do:

He was described by a Homestead classmate as "kind of a brain and kind of a hippie ... but he never fit into either group. He was smart enough to be a nerd, but wasn't nerdy. And he was too intellectual for the hippies, who just wanted to get wasted all the time. He was kind of an outsider.

This phenomenon, in IMHO, is why a lot of writers explain his contributions from the perspective they are most familiar with. A non-technical writer trying to extol his virtues as a business leader will generally not be qualified to speak about his technical leadership abilities, causing readers to think his technical skills are average at best (or even non-existent, similar to his contemporaries in business). The converse is true.

Well, the other thing is that smart people like Steve Jobs can easily learn new skills and acquire knowledge even after college. He worked in tech for decades, so I'm sure he's read more a few books and/or experimented with tech hands-on :) Heck isn't programming one of those skills that we say you don't need to go college for?

experimented with tech hands-on

And by "experimented," you mean he was employed by Atari as a solder jockey and more. The guy knew tech in ways today's javascript abstractionists could never imagine.

Yes. And there was a story [1] about Steve knew something ( an algorithm? or something to do with Video or colour space ) in great detail that he jumped to question how was certain problem being dealt with before the Engineers got to start his presentation.

And yet people constantly bash Steve Doesn't do any programming. I am willing to bet he knows a lot more about tech than any of the so called "Software Engineers" today.

[1] Sorry I search for a few minutes and couldn't find anything. I remember it was on HN. But all my search query failed. So if anyone knows please post the link.

Your [1] , its here: https://www.quora.com/How-did-Steve-Jobs-thrive-in-a-technic...

Which is a link I actually posted in my question, lol.

Indeed, I thought they might have missed it :)

Yes Thank You. I read the first part of the link and I thought that was not it and skip it.

Turns out it was. My bad. Lesson here: Dont Trust your memory :)

Seemingly little known fact, at least in this forum, is that Steve Jobs authored a fairly technical, albeit short, article in the '70s, entitled "Interfacing the Apple Computer" [0].

[0] https://archive.org/details/interfacing-the-apple-computer

Ed Catmull writes about Jobs’ matured management style in Creativity Inc.

https://www.creativityincbook.com/

I recommend reading a book called Think Simple if you want to learn more about Jobs' business philosophy, it's more of a discussion of his tactics moreso than a memoir or biography.

Thankyou. I will check it out.

Yahoo was failing when their original founders were on board.

You can listen to some of the old Debug podcasts with Nitin Ganatra and Don Melton for some first hand accounts.

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