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Comment by m0llusk | Hacker News Reader

That isn't really true. Steve Jobs was no nonsense, but was most often merely direct rather than rude.

One thing which Steve Jobs did do was go to great length to assemble highly qualified teams for missions that were clearly stated and understood and which all involved agreed were worthwhile even if there might be quibbles over details. The Apple that rescued itself from near death with colorful and fun designs and then released a BSD derived OS was very different from the modern Apple where contributors joust for top status without much if any existential threat.

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Jobs himself was abusive. But in his second stint at Apple, he generally worked through layers of management who bore the brunt of his abusiveness, and oddly enough, for the most part, his managers did not emulate his abusive ways. The two members of senior management that I had a chance to interact with for some time (Bertrand Serlet and Jony Ive) did not at all strike me as abusive.

One of the reasons, I suspect, is that for all his flaws, Jobs was not particularly fond of flattery and imitation, and he did not want to surround himself with mini-mes. I can think of only one member of senior management who could have been described as having somewhat Jobs-like tendencies, and even he was not that close a resemblance.

Next time you see Jony Ive, tell him that it was his fault that I had to work in a hellhole when Apple told me that our team were "guinea pigs" for the new spaceship building. That was all his work. They took my office away and replaced it with a panopticon prison-style environment where everything was glass, with no curtains for the external windows, a black globe surveillence camera right above/next to me. Every 2 minutes someone would walk by, distracting me. I couldn't see my screens because of the windows behind me with no curtains, so I was being blinded by the sun. They didn't even provide a bookshelf for my programming-related books. AND they never once asked me about my experience in that "office." I found three (sorry, but OBESE/UGLY) individuals constantly walking around and pointing at things - I followed them around and those were Ive's employees examining the horrible workplace they were creating. That was all Ive's fault. Then they forced us to be in the "office" every day instead of working remotely like I had for years. In his words, "And I know how we work and you don't!" RIGHT. Well, I left that job after 15 years while in that crap environnment. That's when I lost all respect for Jony Ive.

Direct is basically a euphemism for rude, in that it indicates lack of empathy. It might not intentionally be so, but usually shows that the speaker puts other priorities ahead of the emotional state of the recipient.

One can be both empathetic and direct.

Jobs was highly empathetic, it’s why he was able to understand the customer so well and why he was famous for saying “the customer doesn’t know what they want”.

Understanding someone’s emotional state does not mean you need to coddle them.

I have found that people who harbour opinions like these usually just aren’t very good at realising how bad they are at what they are doing in the first place. So they need the niceness to keep the false assumption that they are not that bad.

Sometimes the emotional state of the recipient is just a function of how grown up they are.

Read his biography. He was abusive and got shit done.

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