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Comment by johnwheeler | Hacker News Reader

It always frustrates me when techies have an irreverence for Steve Jobs, or let his brashness overshadow the value he bestowed upon the world.

Jobs was once asked what distinguishes the ordinary from the great, and he said it boils down to "taste". he also described his job as being "an editor".

instead of adding more and more, he decided what to sacrifice and what to focus on making great. that's a rare quality, especially in tech.

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Appreciate your frustration, but you should appreciate something else in turn: Steve Jobs was an asshole to many, many people for many, many years -- and "Steve stories" abound among the veterans in our industry. Speaking personally, my own introduction to Jobs was being at a friend's house as a kid, and overhearing her father being absolutely screamed at by someone on a speaker phone in his office. I looked at her, alarmed -- and she explained that this was just Steve Jobs, and that Jobs screamed at her father frequently. Her father, it must be said, is Fred Ebrahimi, then CEO of Quark.[0] It took me many years to appreciate that he was likely being screamed at by Jobs -- who was then CEO of NeXT -- because Jobs desperately needed software for the NeXT Cube, and that QuarkXpress was high on the list. (And as relayed in Randall Stross's book on Jobs at NeXT[1], he in fact did much worse than scream at Ebrahimi, stooping to belittle him based on his national origin.)

So yes, I'm afraid you are just going to have to be frustrated; Jobs was -- to put it generously -- complicated: his vision is rightfully lauded, but his conduct should broadly not serve as a model.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(company)

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226316.Steve_Jobs_the_Ne...

I know I’ll get downvoted, but who cares. I know that’s callous but people have too much an aversion of getting yelled at by their bosses nowadays. That’s ego and vanity.

Your response is sad.

Why? Would you rather know where you stand or have your boss put on on a performance improvement plan and marginalize you until you quit? Which is worse?

Who says you have to be belittled and yelled at to know where you stand and what you could do to perform better?

Nobody is saying that, the point is that what Jobs did is no worse than the everyday corporate passive aggressive manipulative stuff that nobody bothers to comment on.

Eh, I disagree. It's not like the anger didn't come with firings. In terms of things I'd like to get - I'd prefer someone doesn't yell and belittle me. If they want to do some corporate jargon speak to say, "you're gonna be fired in 4 weeks and this PIP is really just a formality" then I prefer that over yelling and belittling and then the firing happens anyway.

It's a false dichotomy anyway. Steve could've been a nice person but instead he was an asshole. You're just letting him get away with it because someone else does bad things too. It's like comparing different forms of beheading - end of the day someones head comes off and I'm just saying... it's ALSO an option to not.

> It's a false dichotomy anyway. Steve could've been a nice person but instead he was an asshole. You're just letting him get away with it because someone else does bad things too.

You won’t find anything in what I said that is related to this straw man. Nothing I said excuses his behavior.

It’s also absurd to suggest he got away with anything. He is well known as an ‘asshole’.

My point is that you and others who focus on Jobs are letting everyday passive aggressive corporate asshole behavior go unexamined just because the anger is hidden with a fake veneer of cordiality. Jobs is a scapegoat in this regard.

Steve was no worse than a passive aggressive middle manager. The difference was, he wasn’t fake. To put it another way - he would stab you in the front rather than the back.

I regret I have but one downvote to give; not only is it wrong (and ineffective!) to yell at one's employees, that's also not what happened here: Ebrahimi was the CEO or a partner that Jobs sorely needed, not a report. As it happened, Quark didn't port their software -- and NeXT suffered as a result.

Getting yelled at is not a tragedy. I find it hard to believe that Jobs used racism. He wasn’t a stupid man. The people who worked at NeXT did fine. The people at Quark, not so sure.

Overt acknowledgement of workplace power dynamics are verboten. Yet those dynamics remain. It’s this ugly thing everyone skirts around, and the problem is it makes things even uglier. People acting strange at work and playing politics. What’s sad is people accept that as normal

The asshole yelling is the one with the ego and vanity problem.

If you are constantly yelling, you are either under too much stress or have unresolved psychological issues that requires medical assistance. Jobs probably had both but people did tolerate him because of the business/execution/ideas he had.

Either way, if you yell frequently, you need some assistance.

How can Jobs go to Japanese Zen temples which teach the exact opposite of being a total asshole and yelling at everyone? It's incongruous, he just comes across as entitled and unnecessarily mean in these stories. He could've gotten the same amount out of people by sternly asking, not screaming and demeaning.

He was entitled. I’m sure he did a bit of both asking and screaming.

He set back wages for techies for years, and was a prick to his family & friends (disavowing his daughter, screwing Woz out of money). I don't care if he was the brightest guy on earth, or what "value" he bestowed on the world. He wasn't a good human being. Same goes for Gates.

Gates is borderline criminal

I have never liked Jobs (or even Apple) - even more so after the cult following his death - but nevertheless I would not pretend to know him and to be able to pass a final judgment on him as a human being. Maybe he was an asshole? Maybe he treated people badly? Yet people still worked for him and respected him nonetheless. And if we ever were in his position, would we be worse or better? It's not something we can easily know or guess.

You have to take the good with the bad. Steve and Bill were able to accomplish what they did because of their unique personality quirks. Those same quirks make them not always compassionate or empathetic people. No one is perfect. Steve was who he was. A lot of people who were closest to him seemed very sad that he passed. He must have made a positive impression on them.

Sorry, but disavowing your daughter to not pay child support, or trying to recoup someones shares because they have cancer isn't a personality quirk.

Since it's important to be accurate when you're condemning someone -

Gates never tried to take back Paul Allen's shares. That isn't merely a bit of nuance. It never happened.

The only thing that ever happened was the infamous discussion between Gates and Ballmer, which Allen overheard. Gates offered to purchase the shares in 1983, which Allen rejected. Allen is quite clear about what happened in his book Idea Man.

A detestable conversation by Gates, certainly. And yet Allen checked out of Microsoft in 1982 and kept his enormous fortune from it and Gates never tried to take it from him.

Everyone on HN would spontaneously combust if they were judged by their worst thoughts or conversations, without exception.

They were discussing ways to dilute his shares. Bill tried to buy him out at a much reduced rate ($5 a share). When they went public a couple years later, the share price was $35 on the first day. Either way the whole thing was precipitated because he wasn't being as productive on account of having cancer. Bill likes to say that the relationship was repaired near the end of Paul's life, but at the same time, he wouldn't take or return a call from him when he was on his death bed, which they talk about in the mini-doc "Inside Bill's Brain".

I'm sure some don't give Jobs the credit he's due, but I'd say it's far more common for people to have too much reverence for him. You yourself here have reduced his often outrageous and terrible behaviour simply as "brashness".

I think it's convenient to give a leader all of the credit for what is a massive effort by a massive organization.

I think it's convenient to say that a massive organization is doing well only because of that leader and not, at least occasionally, despite that leader.

Moreover, a lot of educated people understand that graphs have incredibly complex behavior and can't be well understood from the "first" node a stimulus enters through and yet we are quick to laud Jobs for all of the successes of his network; it's like this insane pyramid scheme of credit attribution.

Just because his positives were rare doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that he was a criminal swindler who conspired to cheat workers as his company as well as others out of billions of dollars of wages.

It's not like Apple or these other companies whose executives participated in the criminal conspiracy were struggling at the time, either. They could have paid the salaries required for retention. It was pure, unmitigated greed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

> The defendants are Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay

Don't ever work for any of these firms, and remember that Schmidt and Jobs et al are thieves.

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