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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

There is something about the vocal rejection of mediocrity and bad work that creates some great things. It also attracts young naive geniuses who want to be abused but create greatness. I’ve seen the same in the contemporary art world.

From Gordon Ramsey to Steve Jobs to the film whiplash. People who are very vocal about wanting the best can get it.

And don’t forget. Literally anyone who decides to work with Gordon Ramsey or Steve Jobs knows what they are like. They did it willingly. They aren’t abusing random innocent souls. They are expecting the best from people who decided to work with them.

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I worked for Steve Jobs and I wouldn't say I knew what he was like. I had an outsiders view of what he was, and while there were some stories of his behavior, a lot of the details weren't out there. This was before the world of blogs, Twitter, Gawker or wherever people now share this sort of information.

Once you start working in an environment with a Steve Jobs type, things become complex and conflicted. You feel that you are doing great work, and sometimes you are. A Steve Jobs type will figure out how to motivate you with some percentage of shame, praise, monetary rewards or whatever combination allows them to drive you to generate the results they want.

Saying people want to be abused in pursuit of creating greatness is a vast oversimplification of the dynamics that occur in these types of relationships. It is an interesting dynamic that develops over time and is in general quite unhealthy. I still have Steve trauma to this day! I don't want to equate it with more damaging forms of physical and emotional abuse, but there was damage done.

This is interesting. There are similar "stories" about Elon Musk. Perhaps not quite the same as Jobs, but in the same vein. I've often wondered about this personality type of the emotionally unregulated, genius leader, who gets amazing things done, but can leave a bit of a wake behind them of slightly damaged people (both professionally and personally).

Is this really the only way to get great things done? Or is it just that these individuals get talked about a lot, and meanwhile the well balanced emotionally intelligent leaders are quietly working away, respecting their team and also doing groundbreaking stuff...

Anyway, never seen anyone talk about working for Steve here, so thanks for sharing your insights!

I would hope that the majority of "great" things that are getting done are on teams that are managed in thoughtful, healthy and constructive ways.

The Steve Jobs way of doing things worked in that he was able to motivate small teams of people to generate results quickly to solve problems that were quite difficult. The market both rewarded and punished him for this.

It would be nice to get away from personality cult product development. If there is a process to do this, I am all for it!

> It would be nice to get away from personality cult product development.

I struggle with this moral dilemma constantly. Say if we look at SpaceX/Tesla and their respective impact on space transportation and EVs - does the outcome justify the means if Musk treats his employees badly? (I'm not saying he does - I don't know that - just hypothetically).

Same for Jobs...

Is it morally acceptable to have this kind of personality type in charge if the output of the organisation pushes things forward for a large number of people? I don't mean to debate really whether we consider SpaceX or Apple to have pushed things forward for humanity - but for the sake of this discussion...

I've worked with a lot of business leaders myself who show quite similar traits. From my perspective there is a personality type here that seems to be suited to high risk, leading edge organisations that move fast, cut through the crap, disrupt, and get things done. (But, can treat those around them quite badly).

As a technologist I love the progress created by some of these companies, as a moral human being, I sometimes struggle a bit with the "means".

Your struggle is completely understandable. It goes even deeper with me. I struggle with how people can work for Apple/Facebook/Twitter/Google/Any Company? when you can create charts of the good vs bad impact they have. If one dwells to much on this, it leads to madness.

> I still have Steve trauma to this day!

We have trauma about all sorts of things. The ultimate question in your story is - Would you do it again or not if you had a choice?

I suspect the majority of people who work with these crazy geniuses would want to do it gain despite everything. So there is something of value there above the abuse.

Oof. Such a hard question! It was one of those experiences at the right age, at the right time, where I was able to tolerate the experience. I couldn't do it now at my age and mental state. If I could go back in time, I might try to work with other personalities in technology who also were meaningul to me and could have used the zeal and energy applied to their projects.

This is abuse apologia. The exact same argument could be applied to allow any sort of abusive behavior from sexual harassment to physical abuse to breaking safety laws. Just because someone gives you a paycheck does not mean they get to abuse you mentally, physically or verbally.

I know in the modern world any vocal criticism of anyone is not allowed. Everyone is very fragile apparently. But you can bet you’re missing out on some great work not being produced because of it.

Also my point about voluntary participation still stands. People choose to work for Gordon Ramsey. He’s not abusing random people in the street.

You can give honest feedback to someone without verbally abusing them. In fact, not giving honest feedback can be a form of mental abuse. I'm a strong believer in continuous honest communication, but that doesn't have to be in the form of yelling at someone.

This rejection of vocal criticism as the driver of brilliant creativity is very similar to the "enlightened" rejection of the idea that the greatest accomplishments often come from the darkest places where we're often too afraid to look. Would some of mankind's greatest musicians, such as Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain, and Beethoven, have created their music if they weren't dealing with some tough shit?

> Would some of mankind's greatest musicians, such as Elliott Smith, Kurt Cobain, and Beethoven, have created their music if they weren't dealing with some tough shit?

Would you therefore claim that people should intentionally be subjected to these conditions? I think one can acknowledge that great creativity comes from dark places without celebrating, welcoming, or, worst, inflicting those dark places.

No, of course not. My point is that trying to eliminate the dark places is bad. Dark places happen naturally, we can't really eliminate them. My point is not, as you seem to think, that creating more dark places intentionally is good.

> My point is not, as you seem to think, that creating more dark places intentionally is good.

But that was the context in which we were having the discussion: not about Elliott Smith and the like, but about Gordon Ramsay, who creates such dark places (although of a very different sort from the dark places inhabited by someone with depression), and whether the cost that imposes on the participants is acceptable.

Your point about the voluntary nature is good. Your other point needs work. There are useful ways to communicate someone's failures, and counterproductive ways. The TV Ramsey, for all his entertainment value, is a counterproductive example, despite his partly-fictional nature. Imagine, for a moment, a reality show featuring an amped-up-to-11 Steve Jobs breaking keyboards over developers' heads while shouting creative abuse; would such a program inspire tech CEOs to do better, or worse?

> I know in the modern world any vocal criticism of anyone is not allowed. Everyone is very fragile apparently.

Verbal abuse is not vocal criticism. In fact, calling anyone who stands up against boundary violations fragile is itself an abuse technique.

> But you can bet you’re missing out on some great work not being produced because of it.

Maybe for your own personal definition of great that thinks objectifying people to a function for some ostensible "greater good" is OK.

Maybe other people's definition of greatness necessarily includes not having abused anyone while achieving it. Something something virtue, human excellence, golden mean...

> Also my point about voluntary participation still stands.

For some absolutized romantic sense of free will, you'd be right. Humans don't work that way though. The number of people who go back to self-defeating patterns is a staggering proof to this; addiction relapses, returning to domestic abuse relationships, eating disorders etc. These are not even fringe issue, these are epidemics. Why would an abusive work relationships be any different?

> Verbal abuse is not vocal criticism.

My original post used precise wording that said vocal rejection of mediocrity. Then I was accused of abuse apologism. I never said verbal abuse is ok, I was accused of it though.

You have equivocated verbal abuse with vocal criticism through insinuating what Gordon Ramsey did on TV to be the latter and tying that to a telos of greatness. Then you hedged against criticism with a strawman fragility accusation. What Ramsay does is verbal abuse through and through, not calling it so is abuse apologism at best, and more like gaslighting when considered together with accusations of fragility.

Go back and read your post. You called it abuse.

No idea what you’re responding to and if you’re even responding to the right person.

> But you can bet you’re missing out on some great work not being produced because of it.

Do you really want to articulate the position "I'm sorry you were abused, but I believe that it's OK because of the end product that I got to enjoy"?

Is there any evidence to suggest that people who rise to greatness in abusive environments would not have risen to greatness in an environment that isn’t abusive?

The pyramids were built with slave labor, but that's hardly an argument for slavery.

I believe this is now generally regarded as a misconception, since there are records of the workers being paid. However it can be difficult to tease out the true nature of this work in the historic context, since the way such workers would be paid at the time would likely look like slavery in the modern context (e.g. being paid in grain.) There is also the orthogonal matter of paid/unpaid work, vs forced/unforced work; somebody who is forced to work but is also paid may still be considered a slave.

Those are worthwhile caveats. The reasoning of my point still stands, even if I'm factually in error.

To this day, the movie Whiplash is one of the greatest illustrations of how a demanding mentor can produce tremendous results.

I dunno. It's fiction. It may or may not have any relevance in the real world.

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