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Comment by arrrg | Hacker News Reader

I also don’t quite get it. Firing that designer would not increase my trust in the design leadership.

It would seem thin skinned, skittish, cruel, deeply immoral and evil, leading me to lose a lot of trust, feeling as though creating a culture of fear is the goal. That behavior seems completely incomprehensible to me, especially since you need to have an extremely tortured reading of that e-mail to read it as an attack on Apple. It’s simply so extremely weird and wrong to do that. It also seems completely ineffective. What’s the intended effect here?

I’m not sure what the general vibe here’s on that, but it seems abhorrent to treat people that way.

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Artists are a petty and vindictive culture, since value is subjective and there's no profit for being pretty good but not the annointed winner.

Genuine question, do you know any artists? This isn't the case generally; certainly amongst ordinary working visual artists - who are demonstrably open minded, centred, and interpersonally engaged. I can't speak to Damien Hirst level centimillionaires, who represent an invisibly small fraction of working artists.

Apologies for nitpicking but the prefix you're looking for is hecto-. The prefix centi- means 1/100 [1], implying that Damien Hirst has only $10,000 to his name, starving artist level wealth!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi...

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire

It’s really funny because centi- means both hundredth and hundred. And it’s a doublet of hecto!

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/centi-

Right, like bimonthly and biweekly.

Millionaire is not an SI unit, so centi- is not an SI prefix here.

All the designers I know are awesome at being open and responding to outside inputs.

I work as a user researcher and in general designers tend to be the very best, both at showing a real interest and investing themselves into the research and also at incorporating the results.

Designers tend to have a real interest in improving their designs and getting clarity on things they themselves may be uncertain about.

However, I’m not working in the context those people talked about there work in. (Also, UI design, not hardware design. So not very comparable.)

Art may be subjective but product design is not. We have a whole host of ways to measure success at it.

I feel it’s a mistake to conflate art with design. While related they are separate disciplines.

Maybe that is the reason why design sucks so much nowadays (in nearly every domain of technology). Design is much more objective and measurable, while personal aesthetics aren't.

Vindictive? Artists? BS. You're clearly extrapolating on an unfounded assumption. I'm an adult art student getting a BFA as part of a career change and have known hundreds of artists and designers over the years. Firstly, there is no unifying culture among even large subsets of artists, let alone artists in general. Secondly, claiming that artists in general are vindictive is flat-out absurd.

I took it to mean artists/designers in a corporate setting where it's a bit more cutthroat.

More likely to be the corporate setting than the designers.

I had no idea the originator of the Bondi Blue iMac was Danny Coster. I'd always assumed it wss Ive.

Interesting he managed to take all of the credit for it.

From the media you’d think he and Steve Jobs were the only two employees and responsible for 100% of any success.

It’s much easier to personify a monolith under a specific individual. Tesla is only Musk. Gas prices and inflation are only because of Biden. The list goes on.

I think you really captured the somewhat unspoken reality of it.. When you are a leader, things that go right are credited to you (Jobs, Musk) but when things go wrong, you get the blame (Biden).

Of course the world is more nuanced than that but the power of narrative combined with the romance of “leadership” and you end up playing a high-risk, high-reward game

Beyond never having heard anyone conflate the terms 'artist' and 'corporate designer,' the sentiment would still be wrong. I've worked in corporate software projects as a developer, designer, support person, project manager, QA engineer, and even IT/Ops guy and would rank designers, on a whole, somewhere near last in terms of likeliness to be vindictive. Sales? Management? Even support? Sure.

You can have vindictive jerks in any job, but considering that design's fundamental purpose is to empathize with people and manifest that it some medium, vindictive people tend to filter themselves out.

At a certain type of design-centric company the culture shifts, and divas are both created and elevated to a degree that you don't see elsewhere. Most companies don't tolerate that sort of artist/designer because they're obnoxious and generally horrible people (and they don't work well with others so unless the culture is one that prioritizes them over everyone else they tend to flail and fail pretty quickly) but here and there you'll find pockets where they thrive.

I think you're absolutely right that in general artists are not like that. It's a few bad apples, and for the most part they don't ever have much opportunity to do damage because it takes an exceptionally weird company to enable them.

Well aware of the conspicuous minority that comprise that (stereo)type, but you can levy similar charges against any knowledge job from engineering to academia to the priesthood and I highly doubt those sorts of people are more highly represented in art than most other professions.

well said

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