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Hear hear. You make a point that is true as the day is long - one which nobody wants to hear.

Not long ago I became a boss and tried to be a textbook good one: paying generously, being generous in general (e.g. vacation/sick days on the honor system), being a real sweetheart, asking nicely, giving credit, supporting their initiatives, giving control… My employees were smart, capable, and hard-working, so I should trust them. So I thought.

I ended up having to fire all of them.

When they freelanced for me before I hired them, they were on the ball and contributing. Then I made the mistake of hiring them and it all went to shit. They were not contributing anything like the kind of value I paid them for, wasting my time & money, generally spoiled, ungrateful, and clearly contemptuous of me and what I asked of them, never considering my position as the person responsible for their salaries and keeping the company alive.

Somehow I accidentally led them to believe that they were "partners" in decision-making, even though they had none of the risk. Not that they acted like partners, of course. But they came away with the idea that it was "our" business, and proceeded to do jack all with it except act entitled.

And when I fired them, they were shocked. They apparently spent quite a lot of time bitching about me to other people (while not doing their jobs) but were caught completely unawares that the feeling went both ways. Shocking.

I certainly have learned a valuable lesson:

When you're a driven, exacting person, you have to either hope you will find somebody just like you (fat chance!!) -- or you have to make them. And the making of a driven, exacting person from the outside is never going to be pleasant for the one being made. (And no matter how much better it makes them, they will whine about it.)

What are the chances that the "beleaguered" employees Jobs upset would have done work half as good without a cruel taskmaster? Pretty low, based on my experience.

Me, I have to admire somebody who can keep the pressure on another person and force them to do great work. I don't have it in me.

You should give a good instance / concrete example of what your previous employees did that demonstrates your provided view...

1. It entertains us even more!

2. Half the time it turns out the problem is really with the person talking (there is a reality distortion field turned on).

Here's a couple of telling examples: I asked one of them to read a book on improving customer service and give me a report with 3 suggestions for what we could do. It never happened. Asked her to call a company to arrange the purchase & delivery of glass whiteboards. Never happened.

This is not hard stuff.

When my partner was VERY sick and yet we had a major server problem, and he went into the office to fix it -- telling them he was on his way -- both employees expressed anger at him for kicking them out after they had left the house & were on their way. (They didn't want to catch his virus.) This is despite the fact that this server problem meant we weren't able to charge customers. The most obnoxious one bitched later about the cleanliness of the office -- apparently my sick partner left Theraflu packets lying about in the kitchen.

She also made derogatory comments about the way I wrote the copy on the site, after I clearly told her it was a matter of branding.

When I held a meeting on "how we could work together better," one of the employees had the gall to tell me "Sometimes you hover." This is the employee who failed to complete basic tasks. I told her, "If I hover, it's because I don't feel like I know what's going on. You could give me more updates." Of course, the real reason I hovered was because the work didn't get done. (And trust me, I didn't start off hovering -- I don't have the time and energy to waste on it, that's why I fired them.) I probably should have just reamed her out right then -- maybe that would have clarified things. But I don't think I should have to tell somebody something so obvious.

Naturally, when I would walk around our teeny tiny office, every time I went over to this employee's desk, she'd have Facebook up.

The few times the employees did come up with an idea, I praised them and told them to make it happen. We'd sit and make plans, I'd outline what I wanted to see, and when I wanted to see it, but "somehow" they never kept it up.

I'm sure I'm not the ideal boss. Obviously I spoiled them and led them to believe they were more important & more critical than they were. Nevertheless, I never yelled, never criticized in public, never did any number of "bad boss" things that might have actually gotten me what I wanted. I tried to accommodate them and be gentle. Instead, I had to fire them. Sad.

> The world needs more people like him: true leaders who will stand up for their convictions, no matter what the cost.

The true costs of these peoples' behavior is never on themselves.

I think you make a good point. People who are so convinced of their own rightness frequently turn into destructive monsters. But I also think that there's a difference between standing up for your convictions by insisting that people make a product right and standing up for your convictions by inflicting active harm on people.

The people of Apple could have quit. Many of them did. I suspect that the ones who remained felt the trade-off was acceptable. And Jobs didn't use his power to pursue people and inflict pain on them, so his dictatorial process had very clear limits.

When you're trying to realize a vision, compromise ruins everything. That said, not all visions deserve to be realized, and sometimes compromise avoids a lot of hurt. Jobs's hurt was not especially severe, and his vision was astonishing, so in his specific case I think it was justified; that ruling doesn't extend to everybody else who wants to push relentlessly towards a goal, because many goals are horrible and many pushes are just as bad.

"I don't think it's fair to blame him for his behaviour."

Then who should we blame?

even if the cost is other people? your last statement is a dangerous stance.

It's a greater good kind of thing. Eisenhower, Patton, Roosevelt won WW2, but were directly responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands. In most case people no their chances when they decide to work under these kinds of people.

I think that's different. Steve Jobs' innovative use of fonts in the early Macs wasn't squashing an alliance of tyrants bent on world domination...

(Assuming that his behavior was necessary to the quality of the product (an assumption neither Steve nor his biographer were willing to make)):

He didn't "kill" them. He hurt their feelings.

Weigh a few bruised egos versus hundreds of millions of people with delightful, time-saving devices. As the book points out, yes, there is a real and measurable cost to wasting people's time with a badly designed device. And there is a benefit to delighting people.

I see a lot of people fixated on the, let's face it, pretty mundane human costs, unable to see what he actually accomplished. I don't want these people to be leaders, and in my opinion we are in a worse position when these people become leaders. They harm the rest of us because they cannot overcome their fixation on a few pitiable people to see the larger picture.

That's a pretty clear way of looking it.

The problem I have is that these attitudes are fragile. If you have a monarch, for example, with complete control over a country and who has tons of money and doesn't need to ask for permission, he can build a great nation of he's a good person.

When he dies and his son, who's an asshole but equally determined and powerful, takes over, now you have a bad situation.

Fortunately Steve Jobs wasn't in such control. But the point is that, yeah, if someone that determined and set in their ways and they're right...awesome!

But when people are like that and they're wrong, which happens a lot...god damn it's not good.

So I guess the question is whether this sort of "riskiness" is good? Like, when you win a horse race it's badass. The other 9 times out of 10 when you lose it sucks. Is that the human behavior we should model ourselves after? Interesting...

There are tons of behaviors which are great if you're right and bad if you're wrong. Should we never stand up for what we believe in? Should we let others decide things because we might be wrong?

And keep in mind that bad people won't care about these arguments. Only good people with reasonable and healthy self-doubt will be convinced to make less of an impact, and that's the opposite of what we should want.

I'm not at odds with your opinion, I agree. My point is that a lot of other fragile attitudes impact the person holding them. But a cavalier attitude like with Jobs or people set on having an impact on the world is fragile in that it can impact many others. That's the only concern with me.

I should have qualified the last statement. I was mostly thinking about how Jobs' was unequivocally indifferent to hurting people's feelings, taking their opinions into consideration or firing them for being what he deemed incompetent.

Specifically I wanted to contrast between populist politicians and business leaders who'd rather save face and avoid admitting to mistakes.

As someone mentioned in this post all he did was hurt people's feelings. Boo hoo!

Pretty sure the Foxconn suicide casualties didn't just have hurt feelings.

I'm amazed people still trot this out. Foxconn has more employees than many mid-sized cities. Their per-capita suicide rate is lower than that of China as a whole. They make electronics for many of the big consumer electronics manufacturers, not just Apple.

I tried to post a reply last night from an iPhone app but it didn't go through. Maybe if it had my Karma would not have gone from 11 to -10...

Anyway, the reason I'm "trotting this out" is because to say all he did was hurt feelings is ignorant. He hurt feelings and perpetuated a supply chain with a lot of negative elements to it. And no, Apple is not the only company doing it. But I'm looking at some of the negative elements Steve Jobs had. Yes, he was rude to people. Also, he took part in a labor practice that I think is messed up, personally. That's all.

What does that have to do with Apple?

Suicide rates in populations around the world is much higher than you think. [1] The media don't report on them generally (if they did, there'd be more stories about them than horrific car crashes that the news outlets report on).

Car crashes in the US kill 40,000 people per year [2], and the US has a suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000. With a population of 300 million, that's over 300,000 suicides in the US per year. 260,000 more than car crashes. Does that surprise you? What do the media report? Car crashes!

Given the number of Foxconn employees [3] (over 1 million) and the average suicide rate in China (13.8 per 100,000 per year), that's potentially 138 suicides of Foxconn employees per year.

Wired did an article on the suicides, there were 11 of them [4], to paraphrase the article "The nets went up after the 11th jumper took their life in less than a year.".

So there were another 127 people to kill themselves to get up to the national average in that year. The whole issue was a load of FUD. I bet you own heaps of junk that was made in China in factories with worse conditions. If you live in a first world country, it's inevitable.

You my friend, in Jobs' parlance, are a bozo!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_ra... [2] http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146212,00.html [3] http://www.zerohedge.com/article/foxconn-employees-exceed-1-... [4] http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/ff_joelinchina/all/1

> Car crashes in the US kill 40,000 people per year [2], and the US has a suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000. With a population of 300 million, that's over 300,000 suicides in the US per year. 260,000 more than car crashes. Does that surprise you? What do the media report? Car crashes!

Your math is off by 10x. 11.1 per 100k * 300M/100k = 33,000 not 300,000.

The rest of your comment is still valid.

there were 18 attempted suicides

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_suicides

those suicides were still associated with work conditions at foxconn, regardless of whether the suicide is higher in the general population.

Why should suicide attempts count? They can't be compared to the rate in the general public -- most suicide attempts don't succeed. More importantly, even if you did count them as successful, there'd need to be another 119 suicides for Foxconn employees to be up to the general population's rate of suicide.

That means, conservatively, that people who work at Foxconn are 7x LESS likely to commit suicide than in the general population.

11x LESS likely if you don't do intellectually dishonest things as counting attempts as successful suicides.

People also kill themselves over Tamagotchis. Suicidal people find a reason. So unless there's actually evidence of a higher-than-normal rate of suicide, the whole line of argument is a red herring.

Downvoted. I was with you (and had upvoted your earlier posts) until the last sentence.

And why is that worthy of a downvote? Suicides aren't valid negative things? I am not against Steve Jobs. But to say all he did was hurt feelings is ignorant. He hurt feelings and perpetuated a supply chain with a lot of negative elements to it. And no, Apple is not the only company doing it.

?? It wasn't your post I was replying to!

You're comparing a semi-controlled environment (Foxconn) to entire fucking society. That's some pretty shoddy statistics to say the least.

Hitler exemplifies your last statement beautifully. The world needs people who stand strong with their ideas but constantly think about others and be open-minded. And not douchebags.

Yes, you just Godwinned on Hacker News. You need an Internet Time Out.

Pretty much everyone knows about the whole Nazi = bad thing. So, because so many people know about it, I'm pointing to an example where the original commenter's ideal behavior went wrong. Godwin and Glenn Beck just threw "Hitler" around to get a reaction. That's not what's going on here.