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Comment by jrowen | Hacker News Reader

What's amazing to me is how some people continually try to minimize him. The proof is in the pudding. He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward. Very few people are able to do that. Any time someone says "oh he just," it says more about their own insecurity than him. Yeah he had a lot of help, yeah he had personal relationship issues, he's not a god, but I don't understand why some people refuse to appreciate what he accomplished. It's a limiting "hater" mindset. (This is not necessarily entirely directed at the above post [which did kind of strangely come around]).

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1. They have zero understanding of business, they have zero understanding of how hard it is to run a successful business.

2. They have minimal people management experience, which means they never understood how hard it is to recruit top talent, retain them, all while molding them into something much better.

3. They also have zero sales experience and talent. As if trying to convince people to buy could be automated by their software ( Google ).

4. They have little understanding of Marketing. How to market their product to the outside world.

5. They have no understanding of how PR works.

6. They have little understanding of "real world". Zero interest rate, easy access of money, and bull market for the past 15 years meant most never been through a recession.

HN used to be full of entrepreneur, after all it is a forum for startup. And its pro-business stand is why on Wiki it is still listed as alt-right. And yet somehow all of that were gone.

After seeing Elon fail upward I have to agree.

> Very few people are able to do that.

All kinds of idiots have done that: Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and even Donald J. Trump have all proven capable of not mucking up if they've got enough help.

When you strip away Jobs' great council of advisors, amazing industry connections and production value, you're left with a guy. Kinda like how without the marketing and software, an iPhone just becomes a computer again. It's a vulnerable fact to accept, but denying it doesn't make us closer to understanding how humans or iPhones work. The hunger for knowing what made Jobs special left us foolishly vulnerable to worshiping him. A man with a big company is still a man, and if that man is an asshole then we shouldn't preach the opposite to respect their vision. Same goes for Walt Disney or Elon Musk - a futurist can still be deeply wrong in their beliefs. Many are, which is why their ideas are so grand in the first place.

So, let's appreciate the good parts and use the bad as a cautionary tale. Both sides of his life give us plenty to teach from.

I don't think I can agree with this take.

> He assembled the top talent to produce the best products that pushed our experience with technology forward.

Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do, what made Jobs special is that he did that while still actually giving a shit about the quality of the product his company produced. "Oh, he just" is less a way of dismissing jobs than it is a way of saying "hey assholes, you could be more like Jobs if you just actually gave a fuck".

> Assembling top talent is something a lot of people could do

Absolutely not. First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard. Then you have to convince them to come work for you. Top talent is not always just motivated by money alone, so how do you attract them? Then after you hire them you have to retain them, which is also hard, because you have to understand what they are building, and inspire them.

It's one of the hardest things any leader will ever have to do. Jobs said as much repeatedly. Older Jobs lavished credit onto his teams because he knew very well how hard it is to put them together and keep them together. And if you can manage to acquire them, and if you can manage to retain them, you have to then manage them as an individual and in function with a lot of other people that will inevitably clash at times (egos, conflicting ideas/visions/paths, whatever it may be).

Assembling top talent is something very few can do. Assembling it and then keeping that talent together and getting it to work in some manner of harmony, almost nobody can do that, it's an extraordinarily rare skill.

> Older Jobs lavished credit onto his teams because he knew very well how hard it is to put them together and keep them together.

He sure knew how to keep people together!

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-woz...

That’s really another facet of this that shows what a uniquely talented leader he was: top talent wants to work both with and for top talent. It says loads about Jobs’ strengths that he got so many absolute geniuses to work for him for years.

> First you need the ability to recognize top talent. That's already super hard.

Yeah that's exactly why Jobs never did that. Nobody has to "recognize top talent" to assemble it.

He knew that talent likes a good challenge without being micromanaged. The talent becomes top talent when they overcome the challenges and accomplish something new and exciting. You retain them by maximizing their autonomy. That's all.

Steve Jobs did that. He hired A+ players. See here: https://talentrust.com/blog/how-steve-jobs-got-the-a-players...

You need to have a vision that top talent believes in, in order to retain them.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fj0hpsJvrko

You can either listen to what he's literally saying, or just be impressed by his rhetoric.

He says pretty bluntly they: "... were not necessarily those seasoned professionals, but who had at the tips of their fingers and in their passion the latest understanding of where the technology was and what we could do with that technology"

So, basically find young people with tons of enthusiasm for their career, put them all together on a team, and let them sort themselves out. It's naturally much easier to find motivation than "top talent". There's nothing special about that strategy and he's not the first to think of it. Like he says, "the vision" is all the managing he does, but let's be honest there are plenty of great engineers who don't really have an opinion on their work beyond how free they are to do it and experiment. They don't have to give a rat's ass about what their boss wants to deliver it anyway.

You are hearing portions that you want to hear. Yes, he did not necessarily want seasoned professionals, but you missed the bit before that: "we wanted people that were insanely great at what they did...." Steve Jobs did not build insanely great products by hiring morons.

Also: "Leadership is having a vision, being able to articulate that so that people around you can understand it, and getting a consensus on a common vision".

> Steve Jobs did not build insanely great products by hiring morons.

If you watch the rest of the video I linked it's pretty clear that Apple probably did hire and fire plenty of morons that the engineers would weed out (specifically mentioned is the Macintosh team).

The reason hiring is more difficult today vs then isn't because Steve Jobs was so great, but because the internet has brought upon the doorstep of every business a flood of highly motivated drones who don't know what they're doing and will only bother learning if they're getting paid to do it. The demise of entry level jobs and other cost cutting is partially to blame as well.

I guess the modern solution is contract-to-hire so there's some kind of buffer between the horde out there and the workplace you're cultivating.

It was never about the technology it was always about what the technology can do for us. This point of view is often hard for engineers or the actual people developing the technology.

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