Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
From everything I've read in the last twenty years, there was not one single facet of Steve Jobs' life in which he was not a bully.
I prefer not to mythologize (very good) products of billion dollar companies too much, even if they could stand on their own.
In the cartoon, a gun was pointed at Daffy's head - and he managed to lay a golden egg.
Can a miracle be justified?
The ethical question is: if it's a genuine miracle (say, a discovery or invention that breaks new ground or was previously thought to be impossible), can the duress be justified?
I don't think it makes any sense for 1 single person to decide if the price paid was small, simply because they don't know what actual price was paid (in terms of suffering).
Also, it sounds to me that's you're assuming that's a necessitated price to pay, which I don't believe is true (but I don't have any examples either).
Fresh graduates may not realise they are being treated badly, lacking a frame of reference. Immigrants may be on a visa where they have no choice but to put up with it or leave the country.
Locals who've been around a bit, who know their discipline, the proven (local) best of the best? They don't stay on teams led by bullies.
aren't credible because they became so successful that they're now millionaire executives
Yes that's what I'm saying. The statement of two men who stood at the top of the ladder about the man who put them there immediately after that man has died is absolutely not credible in regards to judging how that man treated regular workers. At all.
Jobs could be a bully, it's well documented. Pixar wasn't somehow immune to this behavior.
You've painted a utilitarian, partisan viewpoint: that the cultural and technological significance of Pixar outweighs any negative experiences of staff. The two are not easily comparable. How do you quantify them, what's the denominator? Jobs didn't have a crystal ball, he couldn't know Pixar would succeed. What was his calculus? How did he determine the trade-offs between success and bullying? Finally, cultural/tech significance is most certainly possible without putting staff through negative experiences.
They make that choice everyday they chose to keep working for it.
I see what you're saying, I just don't understand how it promotes a healthy discussion here.
Jobs wasn't out there hurting civilians on the streets. You want to see a real bully, go to Ukraine and see what Putin is doing to civilians.
Being slightly earlier to market and with a little more style is what made him a business juggernaut. But I don't think being first really means all that much when it comes to an ends justifying the means conversation.
Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.
I think this is a reasonable perspective, and you could be right, but you could be wrong too. We don't get to run an experiment on this one. There are obviously huge things Jobs did that I take issue with (I hate the copyright and DRM crap in Apple Music, for example, and the whole patent war with Samsung was terrible), but at the same time, he grew up decades before me and I got the privilege of living in a world he helped created. Who knows where the world would be without him pushing it.
> Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.
I think we may be able to get to a world where we can have that, but not in today's world, IMO. There's still far too much evil and not enough infra for truth, that if the good people don't push much harder than the bad and indifferent, we may never get there. Of course, not something we can test, just have to discuss and place our bets.
Unless you are the one of course.
How do you mean by "behaved like a feudal lord"?
Admittedly not read up on Jobs (sacrilege in this venue, I know), so I'm struggling to understand why he who pays the piper calls the tune is somehow objectionable.
Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean it's ok.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012806/http://alvyray.co...
Frankly, it's ex post facto justification by false entailment. I don't buy it.
Quit making excuses for "brilliant assholes" and start demanding better.
What does this even mean in the context of the story from TFA? The "impediment" was one of his employees getting a competing job offer, and the "irreparable damage" was...having to actually pay someone as much as they'd be valued elsewhere? That's not a reasonable way to behave, and masking it in impersonal language doesn't somehow make it more reasonable.
> [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012806/http://alvyray.co...
So if someone spent for example 44*10^9 dollars on some venture, would it still be ok to be jerk, or would it be counterproductive to viability of such investment?
I forget the author, but someone famous once noted, "The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. The unreasonable man adapts his environment to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men."
Like any quote, there's a hint of truth to it and also not applicable in ALL situations.
By "total control", do you mean well beyond the boundaries of labor law? In my mind, I'm admittedly inclined to interpret this color as a consequence of the music stopping at an unprofitable creative house with an internal culture of unabashed freedom on someone else's dime.
Maybe I just need to read the books mentioned by the parent sometime.
You have a boss and you have a meeting with your boss to make a decision about including a new feature you've coded up a prototype for, into a product that is going to be released in a year. You demo it, and it goes mostly OK but there are some hitches.
You boss has several ways of responding. One way could be to call you an idiot, a stupid idiot who's wasting everybody's time. The other way would be to provide a more polite way of saying that the feature might not be ready yet and could use some refinement.
Multiple employees of Jobs reported this sort of behavior (screaming, belitting, etc):
"""Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were “fucking dickless assholes."""
""" He shouted, "You guys don't know what you're doing. I'm going to get someone else to do the ads because this is fucked up."""
"""A few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on the Xerox Star team. "Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?"""
"""When Steve had to make cutbacks at Pixar, he fired people and didn't give any severance pay."""
"""“How old were you when you lost your virginity?" he asked. The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?” “Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs changed the subject. “How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled, “The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward technical question.”""
"""To address the problem, Jobs gathered the MobileMe team in Apple's auditorium and asked: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" When the team gave their answers, Jobs replied, "Then why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
Jobs then fired the MobileMe boss on the spot and replaced him with Eddie Cue."""
I think Jony Ive pinpointed it: """I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, "But I don't stay mad." He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn't stay with him at all. But, there are other times, I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that."""
The only question is: if Jobs hadn't been an asshole, would the computing world have come so far so fast, and does that justify his behavior?
How can we be objective about subjective things when we can't even be objective by objective things?
That job tends to be virtually impossible as companies launch a transformation then reject each individual change as "this is fine" or as a sacred cow.
If, to survive, you must change many things quickly, some decisions will be wrong, but that's why you iterate.
Let's not get carried away here.
"According to the American Cancer Society, for all stages of pancreatic cancer combined, the one-year relative survival rate is 20%, and the five-year rate is 9%."
And don't forget, Steve Jobs died in 2011, which means treatment was being received for years prior. That's 12+ years ago.
Did his choices hasten his death? At least one oncologist thinks that "the end result would probably have been the same"[1]:
"Had he been operated on then, would most likely would have happened is that Jobs’ apparent survival would have been nine months longer but the end result would probably have been the same. None of this absolves the alternative medicine that Jobs tried or suggests that waiting to undergo surgery wasn’t harmful, only that in hindsight we can conclude that it probably didn’t make a difference. At the time of his diagnosis and during the nine months afterward during which he tried woo instead of medicine, it was entirely reasonable to be concerned that the delay was endangering his life, because it might have been. It was impossible to know until later—and, quite frankly, not even then—whether Jobs’ delaying surgery contributed to his death. Even though what I have learned suggests that this delay probably didn’t contribute to Jobs’ death, it might have. Even though I’m more sure than I was before, I can never be 100% sure. Trust me when I say yet again that I really, really wish I could join with the skeptics and doctors proclaiming that “alternative medicine killed Steve Jobs,” but I can’t, at least not based on the facts as I have been able to learn them."
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-lawsuit-idUS...
Even by then most of those same companies had already settle another case that included ending those agreements:
https://www.cnet.com/culture/doj-settles-no-recruit-claims-a...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
In the rest of the world Steve Jobs / Apple would have been in a bigger trouble just from the start of the emails.
Here’s one recent comprehensive labor report, for example. https://files.mutualcdn.com/ituc/files/2022-ITUC-Rights-Inde...
My father once worked at an electronics contracting firm. One of his co-workers who was in charge of purchasing parts was masterful while on the phone with suppliers. He drove a very hard bargain and often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices. Bullying or business?
Both.
Being an arse, and becoming resistant to arseholes on the other side, can become an arms race in some sectors. It tends to break down after a while, when people on the supply end start “sacking” customers because they get enough business from the others that they can be choosy, then the cycle begins afresh.
Bullying. Full Stop.
This behavior gets people thrown out of restaurants and bars. If I ever catch someone treating one of my employees like that, and the employee is caught like a deer in the headlights because it is a big deal, I have absolutely no qualms stepping in and firing the client representative on the spot (clients can get back into our good graces by swapping representatives with apologies). I don't care how big the client is (I also perform receivables management to ensure no client is ever put into a position where they can threaten my book of business).
I've been told once by a purchasing manager after speaking with a client's company counsel that I drive a hard but fair bargain. Happy repeat clients to this day. We respected each other without anyone resorting to toddler-teenager tantrums during the negotiations.
When dealing with wait staff, hotel staff, valets, pool cleaners, all the way to CIO's and boards of directors, bullying is never acceptable. That you attempt to put a patina of respectability upon it by making it "just business" is also unacceptable. It's extremely disrespectful and rude, not to say the lowest, crudest, ugliest, low-cognitive effort form of negotiating. Negotiating to me is another communications channel conveying valuable information about how your culture reacts when the stakes are high, time is short, and actionable information sparse. Just like in a critical production down outage.
When bullying in business is your SOP, the network effects of positive collaboration powered by increasingly pervasive technology advancing upon us will deliver far more attenuated benefits to you than your competitors.
Business
> often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices
Bully
I worked for a guy who had built a business from his kitchen table to 90,000 sq ft building employing 100 people.
He was on vacation and met up with a long-time supplier of a material he used in his products, and after dinner one night the supplier told him he'd be increasing his prices by some large amount. They had a huge argument, and as soon as he came home he started a new plan. He'd make the material himself.
He found a person with a Phd in that field, bought the necessary equipment, and started producing his own polyurethane foams. After another 10 years, he found his own customers and was making more money reselling the foam than he was using it in his own products, and ended up selling the company to a chemical conglomerate for tens of millions of dollars.
Another fun fact: this guy would do all of his drawings in Microsoft Paint. Architectural drawings, product designs, everything. Blew my mind. He would fly tutors in for the week as he tried to learn AutoCAD, Solidworks, etc, but he hated them all.
Suppose I go up to some person I know and say "Give me $100!". They politely decline. I become aggressive and shout and swear at them. Eventually they give in, as a result of which I am $100 richer and they are $100 poorer. I take it we can all agree that this is not reasonable behaviour. (Perhaps it's even criminal; I guess it depends on the exact nature of my shouting and swearing.)
I don't see how such behaviour becomes any better when it's done in pursuit of corporate gain rather than individual gain.
You might say: ah, but it's understood that this sort of thing is part of the game: it's just what happens when people negotiate with one another. Maybe that's true, but I don't think that's any justification. In some cultures it's been "part of the game" that if two men both fancy the same woman then they fight one another and maybe one of them dies. In some cultures it's been "part of the game" that if a man dies his living wife is burned to death on his funeral pyre. Something can be customary but also harmful.
Sometimes you hear people talking about what an awful thing "capitalism" is. That's not a popular sort of opinion around these parts, but I think this is the sort of thing that fosters such opinions: the idea that nothing can be really bad if it is motivated by the search for profit. To hell with that. Yes, some things motivated by profit are bad. And yes, from what you say your father's co-worker's behaviour was one of those things.
That could wind up in a bidding war that could end up affecting many employees and salaries going up a lot. That's a lot of lost money for Apple, which makes Steve Jobs mad. Additionally, some employees would still be lost in the war, slowing down Apple development.
>Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
I think it's implied that the employee wouldn't find out. I think Steve Jobs would be more angry if Google revoked the offer and blamed it on Steve Jobs than if Google went forward with the offer.
I think this is just shrewd business.
They did poach a huge chunk of the safari team. They then did launch a competing browser and aggressively pushed that browser globally. They forked the mainline project of WebKit and created blink - for reasons relating to Chrome product roadmap. It was a big deal when they did it.
But Jobs predicting this is what they were up to and calling google and complaining they are poaching a whole team from Apple. Is bullying?
Which CEO wouldn’t be upset at an entire core team being targeted by a competitor? It’s not price fixing, it’s not illegal (to be upset or to call another ceo and complain).
How would you feel if you were actively looking for another job and the CEO of your company repeatedly called one the the companies that was going to give you an offer to yell at them and try to intimidate them with threats of "war" into not hiring you?
That sure sounds a lot like bullying, even if you don't think it is bullying, it is certainly an illegal business practice. This isn't just my opinion, but that of the DOJ and the court.
While that case was settled without a trial, I'll note that the judge took the rare step of rejecting the first settlement agreement because Apple and Google didn't pay enough.
This want “an individual looking for a job”. This was a google going after an entire team.
Honestly everyone has the bullying round the wrong way here. Steve jobs was an ass in this instance, but his actions are likely 99.9% of other CEOs actions
Some places have made those illegal or greatly restricted them, hopefully that will spread.
> This want “an individual looking for a job”. This was a google going after an entire team.
It was google trying to hire ~3 internal recommendations. From the emails it sounds like for the main hiring prospect was potentially more interested if all 3 got offers and was also already looking at offer from other companies. I don't specifically see anything about it being an "entire team", so I'm curious where you got that from.
> Steve jobs was an ass in this instance, but his actions are likely 99.9% of other CEOs actions
I think the 99.9% number is a bit too high (and certainly hard to source). I do think you are correct that this (and other) illegal business practices are extremely common among CEOs, especially in companies of this size. Though I think CEOs of companies of this size are usually quite a bit more circumspect in how they go about it.
Again, the legal way to approach this is to make the developers an offer of better projects (which is sounds like Apple tried), money or other perks to make the job attractive. A volatile CEO who did what Jobs did here would probably count against that (if the employees knew what he did.)
I think Steve Jobs is motivated by money here.
Don't not consider that Sergei and Larry are not just as motivated by money as Steve, and trying to tap into leverage potential developed elsewhere, because it's a way to 'do more stuff that also makes more money'.
It's 'small scale hardball' between CEO's and that's mostly it.
Drama. The 'Young and Restless of the Valley', Tuesday afternoons @ 2pm.
If he called up a competitor and complained about them undercutting prices on competing products, and threatened "This means war", would you be explaining how tolerating competitive bidding is bad for the company? Everyone knows that, and knows, I thought, that the only legitimate response is "Tough shit."
The last great Steve Jobs keynote was 2010, the iPad announcement. Any 25-30 year old founders nowadays would have been, what, 15 years old? Maybe there were a few enraptured tweens watching that stream, locking in a dream of being just like Steve Jobs that day, but at some point he's just another old dead guy to any new startup founders.
Bill Nguyen: The Boy In The Bubble
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3229299#3230401
https://www.fastcompany.com/1784823/bill-nguyen-the-boy-in-t...
>“I never use anyone else’s products but my own. I literally don’t think there’s anything to be learned from other people’s stuff,” says Nguyen.
>And then, that very night, everything came crashing down. Color execs started noticing that users were quick to rate the app a measly one or two stars out of five–nails in the coffin, given an oversaturated app market that was spawning more than 1,000 new apps a day. The problem was simple: In order for Color to work, many users had to be in a similar location, but since Color hadn’t widely seeded the app prelaunch, users arrived to a social network that resembled a ghost town. “I wanna see that pitch deck,” ranted influential tech blogger Robert Scoble. “It must have had some magic unicorn dust sprinkled on it.” A mock satirical pitch deck began circulating around tech circles, spoofing Color’s attempt to capitalize on every web 2.0 cliché: “People. Colors. Apps. Cats. Bacon. Organic. Bieber. Mobile. Social. Local. Pivot.”
He spent his whole professional career bullying people and repurposing their ideas into pretty amazing products.
I mean, yes, and I say this without any intention of minimizing or justifiying, but: Which of the leaders/founders of firms at that scale and success do you imagine do NOT have a history of bullying?
A certain amount of what we might call "force of personality" is required to get something off the ground.
Once it succeeds, these people live their lives in a place where there is an enormous power and wealth differential between them and everyone around them.
Those two factors will absolutely put you at risk for shitty behavior, I suspect.
This is very much in the interest of employees, but not in the interest of companies. So companies have a motivation to implicitly (legal) or explicitly (illegal, slap on the wrist punishment) cooperate to keep wages somewhat fixed. One way to do this is to not proactively "poach" each other's employees. If you hire a Bob, I won't actively try to recruit Bob - though I will extend him an offer if he, himself, proactively approaches me.
2 years after this email exchange, you had this [1]. A Google recruiter tries to poach an Apple employee. Steve contacts Google, Google responds that the recruiter will be "terminated within the hour", and Steve responds with a smiley face. They were sued over this [2] and "punished" with a fine that can't even be called a slap on the wrist. Now they do the same, but more cleverly. But having recruiters just spam everybody with endless recruitment offers, they can claim to be competing yet those recruitment offers become meaningless.
[1] - https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
P.S. if it was a race to the bottom, consider that only 1.5% of the labor force works at minimum wage.
To avoid this, companies use various tricks to fix wages such that they don't have to pay even the highest valued employees more than a fraction of the value they actually bring to the company, and thus can get away with huge profits.
To illustrate this with an extreme scenario, assume that all of Apple's work relied on a single engineer's designs. If Google and Apple were to compete on who can hire that engineer, Apple would be willing to pay almost all the way up to their entire revenue to that single engineer, as in this contrived scenario, if they lose him, they lose all of their revenue. So, Google and Apple would be racing to the bottom, offering ever more extravagant salaries to this magical engineer until they couldn't pay him and make a profit at all anymore.
So you pay them $3m a year? Now there's zero profit, so nothing to invest in expanding the team, improving your services services, hiring more developers, growing the businesses, funding new projects for that developer and all the other employees to work on. Oh, by the way you owe $20m to your investors that put down the capital to get the business off the ground in the first place. How are you going to pay them back? Also, maybe you could have hired another developer and they might have done just as good a job, which is also true of everyone else in the business.
Finally, if you do up the pay of the developer say $1m a year, what happens if the product gets eclipsed in the market or the developer moves on to another product nowhere near as profitable. Now they're working on something bringing in a lot less, but they're still costing you a million a year.
Even Facebook has had to lay people off when the market demand for $500k genius coders cooled a little recently
FAANG salaries and RSUs are pretty much the perfect compromise between labor and capital IMO. The only way I'd change things would be to move toward fewer hours per week, possibly with widespread fixed-bid consulting and health benefits not tied to employment
Obviously, software engineering teams aren't as dramatically interdependent as a bridge where the departure of any one member causes the entire structure to collapse, but they also don't live in the perfect balance where the value of the whole exactly equals the sum of the marginal value/cost of each member. As a result, there's no one number for the "value" of an individual engineer that both represents their negotiated wage and is viable for the company to pay without going bankrupt.
The document came to light in a lawsuit which Apple, Google and others eventually settled. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
You may or may not agree that that is reasonable, but it certainly is not exceptional and does not make Steve Jobs look like a bully.
As long as the stock keeps going up, hagiographies
LMAO. Yes. And a bad person.
Isaac Newton was one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of history, inventor of the telescope, father of Newtonian mechanics, and a key figure of the Enlightenment. Yet he considered that scientific work of lesser importance, spending much of his effort studying the occult, biblical interpretation, and alchemy.
Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective.
It seemed to work for Jack Parsons. And many other very creative people.
But 44 billion wasn't an unreasonable price at the time the amount was offered, which was immediately prior to the stock market collapse of early 2022. And most of the TSLA stock he sold to acquire Twitter was sold at near to its market peak. Effectively he swapped some overpriced TSLA for some overpriced TWTR.
I mentioned this on an Elon thread and an SBF thread, and it fits here also. When people are so rich and powerful, it's often their own hubris that takes them down.
Average people tend to at least care about their own children. Jobs treated his own appallingly badly.
Not to mention how many parents think assault (smacking) is a "just punishment". It actually achieves the opposite of what it purports, i.e. more violence and disobedience as soon as the children grow large enough to hit back.
And then there is the peculiar acceptance in the USA of male genital mutilation for many non-Jewish children.
We are still in our infancy with parenting.
Dennis Ritchie as an example deserves way more respect than Jobs the buffoon.
But if you make "pop" devices to be sold to the layman, you are great in the public eye.
It turns out that's all it takes to be popular (and unfortunately, for all their wisdom in other areas, so many tech folks fail to grasp that nuance).
Ritchie did excellent work, but a world filled with nothing but computers that worked like C and UNIX do would be a harsh and inhuman place.
Bit difficult seeing how he died of cancer in 2011.
He was just a capitalist. That's how capitalism works, by definition, i.e. extracting the most surplus-value from the workers (in this case the Apple employees). Increased their salaries (i.e. making a "better offer") would have decreased the surplus-value extracted by Jobs, hence why he was angry.
Capitalism is[0] "huh, even greedy people can be useful, because their greed is best served by supplying other people's needs".
[0] or, I should say, some forms of it are, because Laissez-faire died with the New Deal as hard and for the same reasons as USSR-style Communism (the economic system not the dictatorship)
Please don't think that people let $ Billions go one direction or another because of the genteel rules of white collar world.
Steve is doing his job and leaning in to protect his talent.
Just imagine conversations between coaches in sports.
It's probably just 'tough talk', but it's also firing up a warning flare as if to say 'don't do this' etc.
Depending on what he did after that, it could get ugly practically or legally ... but this is mostly just a CEO doing his job.
From that point on the game theory is fairly obvious and the rest is a question of style. May as well get angry; sometimes it works. It isn't optimum behaviour but at that level it'll be quite common. There aren't a lot of strategies to choose from. Call it bullying if you like, but realistically once this sort of money is involved something different is happening to what goes on in playgrounds. These people are well insulated from any emotional consequences or threats to their comfort. For a label like 'bully' what matters is how Jobs treated people he had actual power over.