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Comment by bruckie | Hacker News Reader

> Do you think Jobs was a hands-off idea man who let others sweat the details?

Very much not the case.

I was on the iPod software team 15 years ago, and let me tell you, we got plenty of detailed feedback from periodic "SJ reviews". My manager (a line manager of a small team) went to those meetings and came back with lots of very specific things we needed to change.

One year (fall 2008) Steve was going on vacation to Italy for a week or two, and asked for a development version of the iPod shuffle we were working on to take with him on the trip. (We were terrified, because it wasn't really ready for that level of scrutiny.) That was at a time when the iPhone 3G and the original iPad were also under development, and yet we got a bunch of feedback on the humble little iPod shuffle when he returned.

He really was in the details, to an astonishing degree, and not just for the headline products, either.

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I consider him one of the true titans of the tech industry. It is easy to ignore their flaws and wax poetic, so I always try to understand the full human with all their flaws. The flaws are almost essential to their strengths. As a whole though, these human beings moved the entire tech universe through force of personality, will, and intelligence. It’s a short list. Gates, Bezos, Jobs, Page/Brin, Zuck, — what they accomplished was never obvious or a given when they were doing it. It’s easy to see the business at present. There are also “sub-Titans” as I call them that were instrumental. But the execution at that level requires so many long hard years of consistently good decision making and vision it is very hard to not admire those parts of them.

The iPod has never been surpassed in my opinion. I refurbished one and still use it to this day. I think having a clear vision for it was critical for that.

This seems to just re-enforce that he was an ideas man.

I've yet to hear a story where Jobs was the one who discovered the fix, only stories that he pointed out the things that needed to be fixed.

He's lauded as a visionary, not as an engineer. And all the stories about him are about him pushing others to realize his vision.

Edit: Lots of people seem to disagree with me, but then pointing out how he was an extremely skilled ideas man. Perhaps that term has too much negative connotation for Jobs' visions (ideas) to be associated with?

Being able to point out the right things that need to be fixed is an important skill. Most people can tell when something is off about a product but can't tell you exactly what it is.

You can easily identify the wrong thing as the problem then end up trying to hide a symptom instead of fixing the problem. Medicine is notorious for treating symptoms when the underlying problem is usually related to something else like diet or (lack of) exercise.

You can also completely fail to identify an obvious problem such as the games where you end up stuck and having to Google how to progress because the game is poorly designed. This poor design isn't going to be obvious to anybody working on the game every day because they designed and already know the solution but it would come up if somebody else played the game and got stuck.

I'm not saying that it's not an important skill. I am saying it's not a technical skill.

Realizing that the iPod had to be thinner was a visionary idea. Making the iPod thinner was a technical feat.

One had the idea, the other had the technical ability (even if they had given up before Jobs pushed them harder).

Nobody's claiming that he was a programmer. From what I've read, though, he had a very keen sense of design and product. Here's an anecdote: https://www.folklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html

I think "ideas guy" doesn't capture this. He had big ideas but also was super particular about details.

(Which doesn't justify being a prick, to be certain)

I used to think very similar to you, I mean Woz was the engineer! Jobs didn't build or design the ipod. But I have since worked with product managers, both good and bad. I have worked in companies and on products with a good vision and a poor vision. Being able to get a good idea for a product, envision that product, and guide people through the whole process of building that product and keeping that vision through everything is very difficult and is a useful skill.

Maybe the lines are more blurry, but design, marketing, and product are not just “ideas.” I’m not going to weigh in on what Steve contributed, but it’s perfectly plausible that he did so without writing code or holding a soldering iron.

Not to say ideas guys aren’t prevalent, but for all his faults I would argue that Jobs wasn’t one of them.

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