Steve Wozniak: Steve Jobs wasn’t a natural-born leader
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Because he was outside of this normal system he made decisions that were baffling, treated people in ways they felt uncomfortable with and achieved things that people thought were out of reach. They seemed out of reach because it was out of reach given the world of possibilities they allowed for themselves but Steve Jobs lived by a different set of rules. Steve Jobs rising to the top and succeeding in a power structure that didn't share his worldview is what makes Steve Jobs truly remarkable.
The concept that leadership can only come from those born with it keeps many competent individuals out of those roles that (especially) tech needs in those roles. Take the inverse approach that is most common - bubbling up the most competent IC or founder (Zuckerberg for example) without any regard for leadership training is one of the biggest issues tech has an industry. You commonly end up technically sound but low-EQ, low-leadership individuals in long term EM tracks who will never leave because the comp is so good. And teams suffer for it.
This impacts everyone though beyond tech. Whenever people "hate their manager," the manager's traits that are hated usually come from a visible lack of leadership capabilities and by extension focused education. However, how possible and pragmatic it is to train every middle manager in leadership without click-through HR slides is a different topic.
Stanley McChrystal's Leaders: Myth and Reality is a great exception. It's by both someone who's done the real deal of leading, but also controls for the above.
It covers a roster of leadership case studies that span personalties, time frames, and situations for the events one has to lead in, or the background of the leader. Examples are like Harriet Tubman/Civil War, Martin Luther/Protestant Reformation, MLk/Civil Rights, Einstein/science in the early 1900's, etc.
It does a very good job of showing that leadership isn't so much a personality and getting a team to a target outcome, but about high EQ and understanding the times, levers/tools, and people involved to build community and drive outcomes. It sort of sounds like I'm saying "it's not A, it's more about.. A" with that sentence. What I mean it it's a skill that grows from understanding nuance and how to leverage it. Not just a personality and focus on outcomes. If you focus on the team and how to resource, empower, and guide it, the outcomes take care of themselves.
Cool examples that stood out were Martin Luther and dealing with the follow-on peasant revolts that his movement started and that he didn't really support (iirc? been a bit of time since I read it), and Einstein and the role his extensive letter writing and his hub/spoke role in the scientific community as they contributed to the breakthroughs of the time from him and his peers.
The other huge part is understanding EQ, and how to deploy it tactically (but not cynically). You can define a basic leader as anyone trying to aggregate the support and resources to get a certain outcome. This often involves external resources and people to do, even if you're a solo operator. In that sense, where the basic leader fails is letting pride and short term wants get in the way of building that required support that requires other people. It's learning to manage the impulse to be right/valued/seen in the short term with valuing/seeing the other in support of ~the midterm... if that sort of makes sense.
Daniel Coleman: Emotional Intelligence is often recommended for this. I haven't read it yet, but plan to.
For a one stop shop, anything about "servant leadership" is a good move to study. Is it discussing resourcing and coordinating for a team and serving as the umbrella from stupid stuff from higher levels of the org? Is it a focus on mentorship and "training one's replacement." Is it elevating consistent performers who support their team and themselves over rockstars that go it totally alone? All usually good signs of a good leadership study. There was a link floating around HN a few days ago about like 40 bullet points for new EMs that hit all this very well.
I sense his manipulative personality (my words, for other's you can substitute "reality distortion field") was always there. I'm not disputing Wozniak of course, but I think Jobs growth was in learning how to channel that personality toward selling product.
Jobs got to where he was because he had a smart friend. But there were a lot of smart people in the Home-brew Computer Club and elsewhere around the U.S. and world — and a lot of friends of these smart people.
Maybe it was a happy accident of history, but I think Jobs was the right person with the smart friend, just looking desperately for "the next big thing".
The Next Big Thing was not, as he found out, "blue boxes". But I bring that up as an example of his entrepreneurism showing itself at an opportunity even before Apple.
Jobs' strength was in how he saw the world. His intuition, ability to imagine the future, inspire others and execute on that vision. Marketing and communications skills then almost felt like a by-product of such rare personality traits. I suggest reading "Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products" or any interviews with Jony where he talks about the interactions they had with Steve.
The level of product and design thinking Steve and Jony had is so outside of some measurable 'data' that engineers often tend to underestimate its importance.
Gee, why don’t their competitors try that?
I was actually trying to make the point that he was exactly positioned because of his personality to find some level of greatness. That that greatness would end up being AAPL is, I claim, the "smart friend".
Jobs, for one, knew better to have smart friends, knew also how to push smart friends to do big things.
I am in no way trying to take Jobs down a notch.
You can dislike the man, but saying that is not fair, he was far from a one hit wonder.
Apple, NeXT, Pixar? those are the ones I recall. Luck won't get you there.
You still need luck to discover opportunities with the correct growth slope in the market gradient landscape, funding landscape, etc. Some of this is intelligence, but it's also "right place, right time" and "who you know".
But you also need the skill and hard work to execute, grit when facing headwinds, and vision to see the gradient landscape as it ascends and unfolds into the stratosphere. You have to be adaptable. Future thinking, but realistically grounded in implementable plans with a pragmatism for building things the market will want, avoiding the traps your biases may set up for you.
Jobs had all of this.
But just to be pedantic with your list, NeXT's success is debatable and not likely to have happened at all if Apple had not happened first. And from what I've read, Pixar did its best when Jobs got out of the way and let them do what they wanted to do: make films, not hardware, not software as Jobs imagined.
he got out of the way and became disney's biggest shareholder in the same deal...
when talking about Job's nose for success that's a big detail skip around.
the deal with NeXT left him with control over the board of directors on Apple.
I don't like him and I don't like how Apple operates in the developer's landscape, but I HAVE to acknowledge that what Jobs touched turned into gold.
The lessons Steve learned at NeXT enabled the huge success of his second tenure at Apple.
A person that is likeable by investors (someone with big, crazy ideas/promises, temper, charisma, good self-advertising skills), and that investors can internally justify handing money.
This is also how someone like Musk can exist.
The only reason he's lauded as a leader is that he made a lot of money... which is also easier to do if you have a lack of empathy and ethics.
Had he tried to become an Aircraft Engineer or a Doctor, he might get filtered out but he and Woz ventured into an unestablished field that was about to boom. There were no filters to keep him out and though he lacked a scholar formation he was exceptionally brilliant and managed to walk the path better than the most.
Peter Thiel says "competition is for losers". I think Steve Jobs is an example of it. Even if Steve Jobs said he was competing, Apple rarely competed and won on equal terms under Steve Jobs. He had always maintained a startup mentality, instead of making better phone than Nokia he would make something that no one at Nokia or anywhere else even dreamed of. IMHO, his leadership style was exactly what it takes to drive bunch of brilliant people into the jungle where the great riches are hidden but he was no match to Tim Cook as a CEO.
To this day, When I listen to his old interviews etc. I'm hypnotised by the clearness and the flow of his mind. It's probably because he was one of those who made what we have today but if you forget that for a moment he sounds like a time traveler from the 2000s explaining the value of computers to regular folks from the 70s.
What an extraordinary man.
When someone says “I’m very competitive,” I hear that they want to live inside boxes created by other people.
That is a very nice way of putting it. Thank You.
The interesting thing about the iPhone is that people assume that was always the vision when in fact it was an idea that evolved and matured through the R&D process. Just as Android started out as a camera OS and pivoted to smart phones, the iPhone started out as a tablet, which was already a market that Apple, Microsoft and many others had several attempts at cracking.
It's very easy to assume someone is brilliant if you assume they didn't go through the same iterations that everyone else did. Iterations of trial and error before hitting upon brilliance.
Jobs was great at marketing. He had some great people work under him. But he also had plenty of swing and misses too. I would say perhaps he was better at pivoting failures early than most CEOs but I don't think that's true either.
As with every idea, it must have evolved as people worked on other stuff. In the case of iPhone, we know how it came to existence, it is a story told countless times.
Didn't Nokia had R&D department? Of course they did and I'm sure that they also had brilliant designers and engineers who did amazing work. They simply lacked a Steve Jobs to weed out and steer their work to make it whole. In my opinion, Nokia failed due to poor leadership but not poor talent. Once Nokia was gone, the talent pool in Finland transformed and once again managed to do great things and be a hotspot.
In fact, my argument is that Steve Jobs never competed with Nokia. In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced a new type of device that no one else was making. Sure, they had some functionality overlap with some devices but it was completely new thing and everyone rushed to abandone whatever they are doing and started competing with Apple a few years later.
Nokia was in this disorganized place where symbian was still making them money being "good enough" but increasingly clearly not the future, they didn't want to fully commit to Maemo, and meanwhile they were still doing well in the feature phone business. That's 3 platforms and no clear winner for the flagship.
I get the impression that internal competition combined with not enough coherent vision was what did them in.
That and hiring Elop, but so much was already in bad shape before that.
That’s not overstating things either.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, apple has knocked a few out of the park in ways nobody else has been able to. With style, with panache.
what's more, Microsoft still dominate Apple for desktop OSs and Google still dominate Apple for mobile OSs too.
Apple have made some quality products but they're not uniquely brilliant.
Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time (Steve Ballmer reaction*)
Although they make great objects of desire, Toyota is no Tesla, Nokia is no Apple.
Wozniak is acting like an ex partner probably because he owes his entire identity to Jobs, an identity that he enjoys but perhaps coming from an ex he never liked, maybe he's seeking catharsis.
Perhaps feeling indebted to a bully who he never recovered from, not being able to reach that peak again on his own, is the reason why we get these interviews from him where he says these things about Jobs. Who knows.
Some pictures from inside, including one concept integrated with a telephone handset: https://twitter.com/jamesthomson/status/798542140435480576
Folks have a tendency to overlook the inevitability of certain technologies. The light bulb, for example, was going to happen regardless of whether or not Edison's lab came up with it. There were tons of people pursuing it. You could say the same thing about the airplane, the telephone, phonograph etc. Tons of competition and prior art for each thing existed at the time of the thing we identify in retrospect as "the invention". The singular-genius model of invention is essentially never correct.
As smartphones go, the iPhone's specific instantiation was remarkable, but the idea was in the gestalt. Apple had shipped the ROKR already, and lots of people (myself included) looked at the then-current color iPod and said "boy, it would be great if this were my phone, too". So there was lots of speculation about the idea, years before it became real. It wasn't at all surprising that a smartphone would emerge. Jobs even made a joke about it during the original iPhone launch presentation (there was a photoshopped iPod with a rotary dial on it).
That's not to say that there weren't lots of innovative things about the iPhone, just that the claim that "no one ever expected" it isn't really true.
You have a higher probability of being rich if your ancestors "owned the land" first. Similarly, you have a higher probability of being rich if you "created" the market.
Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.
But the land was always there, and we were always going to continue miniaturizing computers. How big a slice of the pie is fair?
Full text here: https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/george-progress-and-povert...
Blurbs from famous people who enjoyed it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty#Notable_r...
edit to add because a link to a book is not a discussion:
> Owners deserve some piece of the pie for stewarding the land well, and innovators deserve some piece of the pie for playing a difficult role in the march of technology.
Landowners "deserve" all the value that comes out of their "stewardship" (i.e. improvements, developments, labor), and none of the value that is inherent to the land or location (i.e. the value of being located in a city center, or the value of natural resources). In practical terms, this would mean a just policy is one that levies zero taxation on anything the owner does on the land, and levies a full tax on the value of natural resources and locational advantage inherent to a plot (calculable as the market clearing rental value of the land minus any developments).
The same holds for having ideas first. Inventions are insightful combinations of natural facts, but they are closer to discovery than true creation (we don't create the laws of physics that underlie every patentable mechanism). To lay exclusive claim to a discovery and wield it as a tool to fight competitors is anti-progress. All inventors have the claim to the fruits of their labor, but not at the exclusion of any other independent human to have and utilize ideas of their own.
One can think of an organisation as 'development' on top of land (the market). So Apple has organised (against the 2nd law of thermodynamics) a collection of companies that moves chips and aluminum and glass into a box in a store near me.
That is a form of development / improvement of the 'land' (laws of physics, existence of GSM networks?). There is certainly nothing 'natural' about the capital structure of companies in the USA that ensures some people become billionaires, nor even that for profit companies are the right way to organise. Although I might be a fish trying to explain away water there.
I get the feeling that if Swardley maps might be useful in laying out a taxation policy we are going down the wrong route however, as I seem to be arguing that each 'layer' from land to transport netowrks to digital networks needs to be accounted for to get the fair level of taxation.
> So Apple has organised (against the 2nd law of thermodynamics) a collection of companies that moves chips and aluminum and glass into a box in a store near me. [...] That is a form of development / improvement of the 'land'
Exactly right. Which is why none of those improvements should be taxed. They are the product of human labor, to which the laborer has full rights. It is only the common natural resources which an organization monopolizes at the exclusion of others that should be taxed. A tax on such limited resources is in effect a fee that they pay for the private utilization of a public good. Ownership of high value locations is one example, intellectual patents are another. If you squint, a carbon tax is another example.
It doesn't have to get as complicated as Wardley maps. You don't need to account for every layer of improvement in the network of modern business, because no improvement should be taxed. You only need to answer "is this the product of human ingenuity and labor, or is this a natural common good that is owned to the exclusion of anyone else?"
This is the polar opposite of a VAT. You don't want to tax "value add", you want to tax "natural resource use"!
Google's search is a utility with far less squinting
Is an Aqueduct natural common good? Is the water flowing through it? what happens with open source software?
I kind of get where you are trying to draw the line but I think we have progressed so far above "just land"
Not the online store. The land taken up by their supply chain, offices, and datacenters is all they are excluding others from using.
> Google's search is a utility with far less squinting
It's a valuable service, but because the service was built by humans, it should belong fully to those who built it. I don't see a justification for taxing the output of someone's labor just because it is popular. What they should give back to society is what they have taken from society, again the land that their office buildings and datacenters take up.
There is a more nuanced point about the natural monopolies of certain businesses due to network effects and economies of scale, but it's better to read the book for a full treatment, I can't do it justice.
> Is an Aqueduct natural common good?
I don't see why. It's built by human hands, designed by human engineers. The land the aqueduct takes up, and the reservoir of water it draws from are natural common goods, of course.
> what happens with open source software?
Software is very interesting. It is the output of labor clearly, but ideas are part of the public domain (ideas are there in nature to be discovered, anyone can discover an idea). If you package a set of open ideas into a service, I don't think anyone else has a claim on that service than you.
> I kind of get where you are trying to draw the line but I think we have progressed so far above "just land"
Land is not just land. "The term land embraces, in short, all natural materials, forces, and opportunities". Land is one of the three unique factors of production, along with labor and capital, it is everything that is not the product of human labor. (Labor is labor, and capital is the stored product of labor put to use to create more wealth)
They co-created GSM! Both the specification and then deploying the first GSM network too. Nokia basically invented how cell phones work. I'd say that was little more involved than taking something that was already available.
Which is ironic because the iPhone was exactly what you described about Nokia: existing technology. Apple did a fantastic job putting it together. The form, feel and entire UX is top notch. But Apple didn't invent new technology to create the iPhone - they very much stood on the shoulders of giants.
> Steve Jobs (Apple) did something no one ever expected, knew, or supported at the time
The iPhone was far more evolutionary than the first ever cell phone. By the time the iPhone was in development there was already smart phones, feature phones, PDAs and tablets on the market that lead some weight about what worked and what didn't. There were design documents published about UX too. And thus there were a few similar devices in R&D from different companies at the time, all converging on a similar UX as the iPhone. So I'd argue the iPhone was only unexpected if you weren't already paying attention to the way the market was heading.
> *Wozniak is acting like an ex partner probably because he owes his entire identity to Jobs, an identity that he enjoys but perhaps coming from an ex he never liked, maybe he's seeking catharsis. Perhaps feeling indebted to a bully who he never recovered from, not being able to reach that peak again on his own, is the reason why we get these interviews from him where he says these things about Jobs. Who knows.*
That's a grossly unfair comment. In fact, at risk of being blunt: it's ridiculous and petty.
If you want to understand Woz a little more then I'd suggest you read into what Woz is doing with his time now and why he left Apple.
Nokia phones went one way, iPhone went a different way.
Right. Good at deciding, throwing weight behind even a wild and dramatic choice (like his sort of pirate-captain-and-pirate-crew with the original Mac team) and committing.
And then unusually brave at cutting losses or finding a new use for failures. He cut a hell of a lot of losses when he returned to Apple.
But in interviews he was also sort of a student-philosopher of decision-making. Witness the clip on this page, with Jobs talking about being taught about not interfering with brand design (in this case the NeXT brand) by Paul Rand:
https://www.logodesignlove.com/next-logo-paul-rand
You can see that made an impression on him and probably got absorbed into his sort of precision-anecdote-driven way of communicating his ideas.
(The other thing I like about this clip is seeing Jobs talking quite personally about someone he admires)
When Jobs returned to Apple, how much of it was from when he left?
Aka Blue Ocean product/market strategy.
Basically, rather than being a shark swimming in a ocean that is colored red from the blood of all the other sharks competing, you leave and find a blue ocean.
Sounds good on paper but sometimes that market is much smaller, and/or just being the first-to-market doesn't guarantee you'll be successful.
He certainly spent a lot of time thinking about his own thoughts; trying to express them, trying to revise them. Like he was his own life's work in a way. It's a skill in itself isn't it?
This oversells what Apple did and undersells just how much Nokia dropped the ball. Nokia wasn’t blindsided by the iPhone or touch screen interfaces. They knew about touchscreen interfaces and actively chose not to persue it. “Because people want tactile keyboards” essentially they Listened to much to their own engineers who were in love with blackberries. While Apple mindlessly perused a vision that notably had already failed them once in the Newton, and which every business major would say was a suicide mission “because the iPhone will canibalice the iPod market”.
The reason Nokia failed was because management was just horribly bad. Not only did they have 500 different models of phones with every team competing internally, the were proud of it.
Apple went out with “we have one phone and one phone only” at that time. And Nokia engineers laughed them off saying “how the hell will they ever complete with us, they have just one phone!?”, and of cause they also laughed at the price point, saying that trying to sell expensive phones in North America was concept that was dead at birth. No, to them true market dominance was to sell cheap phones in India and China.
On the engineering side, that point in time was also when Nokia had extremely shitty software, again this wasn’t a mistake, they were proud of it. The N95 had like 4 different menu systems to reach the same screens. The iPhone didn’t do much before it had the web and apps, but it was simple, people intuitively understood it. But Nokia didn’t care. They didn’t even consider Apple a competitor even after iPhone started to gain popularity. They didn’t care about the high end market segment and only cared about Google as a competitor.
> treated people in ways they felt uncomfortable with and achieved things that people thought were out of reach.
The biggest misunderstanding about leadership from people and orgs who don't appreciate that it's a science vs. an art is that to do the impossible, to stretch orgs and do it in unorthodox fashions, that "make people uncomfortable," the Jobs-isms that made him awful part has to come along with it.
This is just patently untrue.
Where this trope comes from is understanding a bit more about toxic leadership. Toxic leaders tend to excel. They're very talented. They can produce. The thing is: they do it by shredding their teams. If the incentives are right and the feedback loops are a certain way, they'll rise all the way to the top (and possibly stay there) just on the back of their product/production sense, with a history of angry teams, colleagues, partners and "a rep." Just like jobs. That's all there is to it.
What's happened is the growth of a narrative, in part via posts like this to be respectfully candid, that the toxic stuff has to come with the unothordox/visionary leadership stuff. It really does not. Kevin Mandia (showing up in another thread today on HN) is a good counter-example. If it's a stretch to compare Mandia vs. Jobs, and it definitely is outside of a lab setting, look at the Google founding team's reps vs. Jobs, or the netscape crew vs. Gates.
Why this screed - leadership is important, and it's a science that goes beyond running on pure charisma or pure talent. Tech must learn it better.
The person using this tactic may cynically thinks its just a game of words, and the other side really doesn't genuinely hold the views they communicated; so they too will "play that game"... or to add another layer of cynicism: they are fully aware of their minimization, but want to reframe such that other readers interpret the original speaker as playing semantic games, and nothing is real.
You'll notice it a lot, once you start looking for it.
Leadership is a science, most people suck at it without training except for the very gifted few. The good news is you can train on it.
Because a norm exists of believing leadership is a "have it or not" vs. a "have it or train it" skill like any other, second order effects like toxic leadership being mistaken for difficult but acceptable genius are common. The whole industry suffers for it.
In the same way a horrible design pattern might work but will make your app a nightmare to maintain, in the soft sciences like leadership understanding these "architectural differences for similar outcomes" come down to understanding the semantic differences - well what really is "toxic" in a toxic leader. What are the traits of that? Are they repeatable? Doesn't make it any less true to state though as the science is sort of settled on a lot of this.
To mirror some of the snark in this response, once you start looking, you'll see clear leadership style, which can be taught, and their impacts everywhere you look (transformational leader, servant leader, toxic leader, transactional leader). I'm not saying the OP is playing semantic games, but I'm saying the OP doesn't understand how leadership works under the hood and as a science.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30601390
edit: I've realized what may have cause the confusion: I ought to have said "parent" rather than "op" in my first response - oops!
You’re not really making your point whatsoever. You’re just vaguely alluding to unspecified science.
Why is this? It's because exactly what I said above. The right feedback loops and the right incentives, they'll keep rising.
Science can be discovered here, to start: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C31&q=tox...
To talk to your implied point more with an edit - the real question becomes how do orgs excel if they're not doing the slash and burn technique that seems to get rewarded in the economic system we have. For what it's worth, this is a great question to ask.
There are similar continual questions/counterpoints like yours re: toxic leadership instead about leadership and ethics. Aside from the occasional Enron, there really doesn't seem to be much accountability for doing bad in the corporate world, or more commonly it's dealt with a mucky in-between ground of virtue signals/corporate activism and employee support groups internally that's pretty easy to spot and very distasteful because it feels so surface and hypocritical.
Short answer - not being a toxic leader does not mean failing at producing a good product, standing up for oneself/beliefs and related candor, and general aggressive pursuit of an outcome with a bias for action. It gets difficult to find these types out in the wild, but that's sort of my point. It's hard to learn how to do this, and there isn't a good training pipeline either, so prior to pointing out "here's a great example of a non-toxic, transformational leader who ships great products and wins at corporate life," we're still by and large at the stage of "hey, there are other ways to do this, stop idolizing Jobs to start." It's also important not to idolize the individual behind the leader. Someone can lead teams and be great to work for, but they might be really awful in their personal life. Jobs is an interesting example of this as well oddly enough.
That said, counterpoints you're basically asking for proof of do show up in the wild. If you've ever worked for someone who was (a) great to work for and with and (b) had the vibe just passing through your team onto some serious success in tech, those types tend to fit the bill of non-toxic, transformational leaders. Zelensky is another example of someone really grokking this well. I haven't worked for Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, but some of what he signals seems to fit the transformational, non-toxic bill and it'd be interesting to learn more about his day-to-day style. Google founders in their later iterations are good examples possibly. Anyway, lots of practical and academic resources out in this direction.
I have doubts: leadership is a hot iron where laissez faire approaches are favoured. The cite from Kawasaki that he was "unpleasant and always scary" would surely give a today's Steve Jobs a date with HR.
A leader like Steve would be today called "toxic" and probably never promoted at all.
If he was running the company, HR would just bury the issues.
We see this all the time in unicorns. The founder is no longer the right person as it transitions to bluechip and it takes a different skillset. In my mind Cook and Sculley are equivalent, they are operations people able to run large startups independent of their egos and feelings. Larry and Sergei did something similar when they brought aboard Eric Schmidt to run Google.
People like this have some intuitive knowledge of the world that is right, and they know it. They don’t get wiser or more clever over time, they just are. Same as musical or chess prodigy children.
Almost all of these people are assholes by definition, because you can’t be a 27 year old genius and have certainty in yourself without it.
That certainty and genius also usually brings a big following, because most people want to follow people like this because they create things bigger than themselves.
Its also a very high risk life path. For every Steve Jobs there’s 100 geniuses who probably die without ever getting famous. Or they die at 27 like cobain, winehouse or avicii.
He's the biological child of a Syrian muslim immigrant and an American of Armenian descent.
And then he's adopted into a sort of purely American life.
There's a whole lot of outsiderism to unpack there, and while he adored his adopted parents he seems to have struggled with his own fatherhood roles etc.
He was aloof and had a sort of paradoxical relationship with conformism -- he was consistent to his own personal design (the wardrobe full of identical outfits, the repeated leasing of the same kind of car) -- but rejected the conformism of others.
Really a lot of his manner -- including some of his more sociopathic traits -- could be explained by early disruption in life. He had quite a tough start.
But if anyone else consciously adopts that specific affectation they are definitely trying to rip you off. It's a tell.
He was outright abusive in many of his relationships and interactions, professional and personal. We shouldn't tip-toe around that fact.
Anyway, we went to a section of a building that I had never been to before and a conference room with no windows. When we were led in there were detailed notes all over the wraparound white boards — what features to be demoed, what order. All sorts of notes and annotations (and also sticky notes?) added to the items on the whiteboards. Something like a conspiracy theory nut's HQ, ha ha. There were machines lined up against a wall on long desks running the software to be demoed, people scurrying around (designers? marketing types?). (I believe that Phil Schiller was there — the only time I have been in a room with him.)
Jobs was not there when I was there, but this room/show was all about Job's keynote.
It amazed me the degree to which this was a major operation, not at all an after-thought (not that I think anyone would expect that of an Apple keynote presentation).
Yeah, we lowly engineers were brought in to look at a specific issue they were seeing with the OS in the demo. I don't think we were expected to fix it, maybe we offered a suggestion on how to work around it?
Related: I was told by my manager (so this could be bullshit) that Jobs never went off script. Never. Everything you saw on stage, every step of a demo, was exactly planned that way — was rehearsed precisely. A single "ad-lib" in a demo of course could have exposed a hitherto-not-seen bug that would be hugely embarrassing. But Jobs was very good at following a script he had helped create, make it look natural.
I had also heard (so this could also be bullshit) that a 2nd machine was set up behind the stage and someone was stepping through the demo at the same time Steve was. If something locked up Steve's machine, in an instant the displayed hardware could be switched to the 2nd demo machine with only a small skip of a beat. I am not aware that it was ever needed.
I guess my take away is that Steve Jobs worked very hard at being Steve Jobs. If he made it look easy then — it worked.
And the backup machine was once used in an OSX keynote presentation.
The only presentation I've seen where I think Jobs went off the script was when the 3G and wifi went down in Moscone and the demo phone couldn't open Facetime, IIRC. Telling a bunch of journalists to stop live streaming went about as well as you could imagine.
Your example starts at 0:18
Edit: Some more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6n-zw8L_84 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnVUvW42CUA
It’s crazy what a small thing this is that people just don’t consider. We have this conversation with the sales team all the time, helping them prepare all their demos and pre-can as much as possible (eg instead of building a report in real time, just save the parameters and open your saved version).
Inevitably they veer off script for no real reason and then complain that they found a bug in a feature that they tried for the first time live in a demo.
This is very much in line with the idea that magic tricks work because the audience can't fathom that the magician would go to such lengths to set up their trick:
> Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.
From a previous posting on HN about the magician Teller: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/teller-reveals-h...
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s...
After our successful 2.5 seconds, they wheeled in a trolley of champagne. I never found out what would be on the other trolley...
I also did my first presentation (voluntary) in 7th grade on the solar wind (we could chose our topics like "our pet", "my favorite book"). And I did theater group while studying at university as well.
I learned to manage my nervousness.
But the most important part I learned from theater and presenting from an early age on was that to be really good, to be able to make it look easy, make it look natural, make the audience feel what I feel - to be able to do that, that was hard work. Preparation. Knowing your lines. Working, working, working and also constantly asking for and receiving feedback and adapting. While not loosing your personal take on it out of sight. Not making it generic - staying true to yourself and laying something personal into it.
Imho you can only confidently improvise and regularly perform well, if the basics just flow. If you don't need to think about, what comes next. If you can confidently get into that flow.
To me - this is what theater taught me: Work hard to make it look easy. This not only applies to public speaking but to a lot of things in life imho.
As my director put it, "If you're nervous, the audience will be nervous with you."
Engineers don’t undervalue this skill, many are just not good at it (and can’t get good at as easily as they can get better with technical skills). It is more of a selection bias in the sense that people who did well technically but were not great communicators would pursue engineering as a career vs others. These days, when the money is good enough that many more people pursue careers in (software) engineering, those who see the career as a refuge aren’t so common anymore.
It also seems like many engineers start neglecting their tech skills and their social skills get better. Of course, that's often part of a concerted effort to improve... but often it does seem that the technical skills suffer at least somewhat. Sometimes it doesn't even seem that they're doing different work (more management stuff).
Correlation isn't causation. Hurt social skills could also lead to more interest in technical work. ALOT of SWEs aren't interested in people management for that reason, and its a blessing that FAANGs allow people to advance on IC tracks (though still developing some communication skills are necessary as your level rises).
As for if practicing social skills hurts technical skills, well, it is taking away time from practicing them so there should be some negative effect. A full time people manager often simply doesn't have much time to apply their technical skills as much as they'd like.
I notice this even in the short term. Sure you could work on both (and most devs are now), and it could just be how people spend time developing their skills, but I feel there was something more there. I felt a growing disconnection from normies that went away when I changed my habits.
In the short term it would be like an acute thing that wore off in a few hours to a few days. If I was doing it long term, it would last longer. Maybe it's in my head. I don't think everyone is effected.
I feel the same way with deep social interaction, but diving deep into technical work usually is invigorating, so I guess I can't really empathize. My hardest days at work are full/half day morale events :).
I count myself relatively lucky that although I'm very autistic-y and not-normal by regular standards, I'm quite social and communicate for a nerd. I like writing, I like explaining things. Albeit in a self-serving way, I think.
Communication is mainly down to two things: how you present yourself, and how you are interpreted by others. Theater helps with the first, and learning empathy helps with the second. Pair it with a book like "Crucial Conversations" and it's surprising how effective you can be.
If Steve Jobs was coming up today, could he have owned leetcode and tech interviews, would he have gotten a CS degree, could he have succeeded in a start-up today? Could many of us here in tech now have done what he did?
My point is: Maybe we don't have to fetishize individual people so much. Maybe the conditions around them, the timing of their career, the timing of their personal viewpoint, was simply a set of lucky circumstances. Maybe there exist a few hundred individuals in any given time with the potential, and it takes that last bit of random chance to make them the famous one over the others.
As you've said luck is a very very important factor. As you get lucky, you tend to continue getting lucky because the more chips (capital) the cost of failure or unlucky runs is a lot lower than somebody about to be knocked out of the tournament.
Playing tight (risk averse) or loose (risk tolerant) or mania (risk indifferent) can yield very different outcomes and often professionals adjust their appetite for risk throughout the tournament.
Similarily, yes Steve Jobs got lucky and because he kept getting lucky he was in a position to make other bets without really suffering vs someone who bootstraps their business and exposed to the fluctuations of the market is going to have a tough time.
Nassim Taleb explains this better but to me the biggest shock when I started playing poker was, how much of an impact it's made no my perception of randomness and risk.
it really made me feel how out of control the world really is and as Charlie Munger said it the best, it is envy that drives capitalism.
You can cross the street with your eyes closed and (depending on the street) survive most of the time. Doesn't mean it was the right call.
Not all of his ideas worked out. But he had a very high success rate.
Doing leetcode and tech interviews is not what a young Steve Jobs would be working on today; a young Steve Jobs today would be working on something that most of us wouldn't bother with because we don't see the potential.
I think it's impossible to say this confidently. Like many successful people, he simply could have made a series of fortunate decisions that mostly boiled down to luck and timing.
I'd consider this, at best, waiting by the goal for the puck to be passed so he can flick it in behind the goalie, and then being good at raising his arms in triumph. Did Gretzky wait for the assist, or was his brilliance that he himself could make tremendous opportunities and then flick it in as well? At least "visionaries" like Elon and Bill Gates coded up solutions themselves when they needed to.
The path to success is deceptive, if you directly follow your objective you don't get there except for easy problems. Exploration and seemingly useless ideas are stepping stones to success, but you can only tell in hindsight. For example, neural nets go directly to the target, they follow the gradient to the desired outcome - that's their main limitation. Evolution on the other hand can sidestep these hard problems, but the price is much trial and error.
I think Steve was one of these explorers who in hindsight were right.
If Steve Jobs was coming up today, could he have owned
leetcode and tech interviews, would he have gotten a
CS degree, could he have succeeded in a start-up today?
The main difference between then and now is that the tech landscape is so much more mature. "Two guys in a garage" can potentially shape a brand new industry (like microcomputers in the 1970s) but would not disrupt a zillion dollar industry today.
However, broadly speaking, their approach works in general. The pairing of a "visionary and showman" (Jobs) and "genius-level engineer" (Woz) can be really effective. I think most successful small partnerships work this way. Not all of them change the world like Apple, because world-changing revolutions just don't come along that often. Jobs+Woz were a great partnership who happened to catch a really great wave.
I liked it more than the Isaacson biography.
A local football coach was giving a talk and said "a lot of people want things, but very few people are willing to do what it takes".
The message was that the opportunities are out there, and it might be surprising how few people are reaching for it / doing what it takes to get it so quit worrying about imaginary "better" folks who likely aren't even trying.
The older I get the more I realize that's true.
The beauty of Jobs in my eyes is his ability to take what was in front of him and refine it until his liking.
How do you do that? You become a world class communicator even if you can't describe what you want and you have to "see it to believe it". The reality is that you know what everyone wants because you are playing the role of "absurdity" against the "voice of reason".
I think to work on your communication skills, one of the best ways to do so is through comedy improv classes, ToastMasters, twitch streaming, making youtube videos, work presentations, and even theater. You have to be willing to put yourself in front of other people and fail time after time to then get good enough to be comfortable and confident whenever you do it.
> [Jobs] wasn’t really capable, engineering wise, you know, computer hardware, software
That's (almost) like Hawking saying you aren't a great physicist. I wonder how much Jobs was motivated by Woz's excellence in engineering.
At the time, Jobs was alive and getting all the accolades (and Apple was flying high), so it seemed justified in my mind that Woz should want to say, "Hey, what about me?"
(At the same time, I am comfortable that history will remember each of us as we deserve to be remembered.)
If you read "iWoz" I think he puts it all down in ink there. (But I don't know that I would recommend "iWoz", I found it fairly boring — but perhaps because I had heard it all before.)
I think his floppy disk controller for the Apple II was pretty widely recognized as real stroke of genius.
>The Apple II disk controller, designed six months after the Apple II itself was complete, was Steve Wozniak's crowning achievement. His five chip disk controller card out-performed competitive controllers that were four times as expensive by shifting most of the responsibilities from hardware to software.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
The difference is that those people don't spend decades on bad mouthing others. Also the difference is Sophie Wilson does astonishing things all the way until today.
Everyone says Wozniak is humble, but someone nastily putting others down with "those were skills Jobs had to develop to compensate for not being a particularly skilled computer engineer" is not humble in my book, but passive agressive and toxic. I at least would not like to work with a person that talks bad about others all the time. This is a rule when I hire people, if they talk bad about their current employer, they will talk bad about me in the future.
Not sure I'd use it as an example of something "magic".
It cost more than the computer it came with and was almost as slow as a tape deck. For no better reason than the Commodore marketing department thought it should be.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_1541#Throughput_and_...
IMHO Woz is genius, Jobs was probably a genius too of a different kind but in the end it doesn't really matter.
To paraphrase Aurelius badly, you'll be lucky if anyone remembers you long after you're dead and even then they won't remember the real "you" anyway. So stop worrying about it.
Not that I can remember my 1541 being rubbish.
"Not sure I'd use it as an example of something "magic"."
It had a 6502 CPU in it and when we run code on the 1541 and detached the cable and it did still run, it felt magic to me. Because it was forty years ago, I can't remember all the details but I think there was a copy program on two drives that run without the c64.
"and was almost as slow as a tape deck."
No it wasn't. When I loaded a game from tape, it was more: Start game, have lunch, play game (I really started loading before lunch quite often). With the disk drive it was: Load, Play. Most people used a fast loader on top of that (Can't remember but I do think I had an Action Replay, but it might that I had one for my A500).
"It cost more than the computer it came with"
That was the case with quite some floppy drives, e.g. the floppy drive to my Amstrad CPC back in the 80s costed as much as the computer too (and contrary to the 1541 I don't think it had a general purpose CPU in it).
[Update] It looks there is a fast loader from 2020 that can do 19k/sec just as an AppleII on a 1541, so it doesn't seem like it's the hardware https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Transwarp
https://ilesj.wordpress.com/2014/05/14/1541-why-so-complicat...
Anyway; that's just my observation. My take is no one's natural-born leader. Of course some traits such as good looks help but most of the foundational aspects that matter such as communication, critical decision making, recognising and seizing moments are skills just like any other and need to be practiced.
I haven't tried Toastmasters, but I hear it's a great way to practice speaking to groups
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
Oh, and by the way, OS 9 Platinum was the high point of interface design. :)
One example that comes to mind: https://youtu.be/oNC8LEj5X4U
Steve Jobs and his teams made a lot of the right decisions. It’s evident in the way that Steve Jobs can talk about topics like what is covered above, topics that we take for granted today and have accepted into our lives. Jobs would talk effortlessly in a matter-of-fact manner, years and sometimes a full decade before the ideas had matured. It’s really incredible to look back at in retrospect.
Leaders are taught.
Though I have a sneaking, unscientific suspicion that good leaders may have some neural advantage in theory of mind -- I wonder if they are better at it generally but also better at maintaining and exploring theory of mind for multiple people at once.
A good leader knows what you have already demonstrated you can do, knows what you can't do, and knows how to help you see what you could do. And they can do this with a team of people, including identifying those who have some of this skillset and can be delegated to.
Frankly I am not sure any of this is Jobs, who was very capable of refining ideas but also capable of abandoning them, and who also had some slightly sociopathic traits; he was OK making enemies in the moment, OK telling people exactly what he thought of people bluntly, OK brutally criticising work. And then just as OK going back to those people and starting again with them.
I think Wozniak is right that Jobs had to learn to be a leader, but his fundamental technique in what I have seen seems to be the ability to decide and to re-decide.
I once worked for someone in the UK who had worked for Jobs (albeit with one seemingly rather hapless, permeable management level inbetween). He told a few stories and the impression I get is that Jobs didn't care who saw his temper, but didn't bear grudges, particularly, except against bad concepts. If you were incompetent, you were gone, but that was the end of the ill will.
Funny how vocal and frequently critical Woz has been since Steve Jobs died.
Funny how vocal and frequently critical Woz has been since Steve Jobs died.
"...This is what Steve Jobs did about the fact of how he tricked his best friend into working all night long for several days and then cheating him out of his paycheck. This proved to be only the first offense in a long litany of his penchant for pettiness and pointless cruelty.
The friend that I am talking about is Steve Wozniak, him and Jobs were working at Atari, one of the first video game consoles which revolutionized the video game market. The owner of Atari at the time was its actual founder by the name of Nolan Bushnell.
The first game that came out was “Pong,” a classic which many people remember. Due to its high success, Bushnell thought of making a sequel that would be only a single-player and call it “Breakout” in 1975.
...For this project, Bushnell was thinking of tasking Steve Jobs to be in charge and take care of the project. Jobs was considered (at the time) a low-level Atari technician with huge potential. As this game was expected to be much better than its predecessor, Jobs recruited Steve Wozniak, who was known on the market as the better engineer. ..
Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for quite some time at that point. They both were working towards the Apple 1 which would follow to become the most iconic computer around the world for four long years so they got to spend a lot of time together.
The way that Atari worked was by offering a monetary bonus for every chip fewer than fifty that was used when building a game. Wozniak was ecstatic when Jobs asked him to help with this big project.
This is when Jobs started to lie to Wozniak in order to use him for his expertise. He told Wozniak that the deadline was four days and that he had to use as few chips as possible. The truth is that Jobs was given a whole month for this project, not four days.
Jobs never told Wozniak about the bonus for using fewer chips and the four-day deadline was self-imposed by Jobs, as he needed to get back to his commune farm to help bring in the apple harvest. It is imperative to mention (for those who are not aware) that Steve Jobs came from a very poor background.
Wozniak was working for Hewlett-Packard at the time as well, so he had to balance his main job as well as this project. So he would end up going to his job in the day time and spending most of the night working on “Breakout”. The only thing that Steve did was implementing the required chips, making sure that there were less than fifty chips. Their herculean efforts succeeded, as they finished the game in four days and only using forty-five chips.
When payday came, Steve Jobs only gave Wozniak half the pay, he kept the rest of his pay as well as the bonus for himself. Wozniak only found out about this ten years later..."
https://historyofyesterday.com/steve-jobss-dark-past-55a9804...