Is he just a bully?
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.
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."