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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".

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It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.

Surely there must be some counter examples. Collison brothers at Stripe ?

I guess you never worked at Stripe.

I don't think it requires being an arsehole. Just being firm. That doesn't require arseholery.

People will call someone who doesn't bend to the status quo an asshole.

No. Not necessarily.

There's plenty of people described as 'quiet and polite, but firm' or some similar variations.

What founders / CEOs can you name described by those qualities?

I'm not sure you need to restrict yourself to these. You can also look at eg political leaders.

Lee Kuan Yew is one example that comes to mind immediately. Warren Buffett might be a good example from the world of business.

(Your favourite search engine or chatbot is probably more than happy to give you a steady stream of other examples.)

I don't know, maybe he wouldn't raise his voice, but I can't imagine it would be fun to be a subordinate of LKY at the moment he decided you were wasting his time.

The original comment was:

> People will call someone who doesn't bend to the status quo an asshole.

That's very different from not suffering time wasters.

Warren Buffet is a very carefully crafted “aww shucks” persona. He’s spent megabucks inventing it and keeping it safe. And I lose the argument because I cannot find the article from a decade ago that really dug into it. Either SEO has vanished it or he has it removed.

Many personas are carefully crafted. Including some of the jerks' personas.

As long as Warren Buffett keeps it up to his underlings and business partners..

Digital's Ken Olsen is probably one of the most relevant examples. Though it probably helped that Olsen was largely working with the grain at DEC, building digital playsets which engineers themselves loved, rather than constantly forcing them to adopt a non-technical consumer's perspective.

Both your statement and IshKebab's are true.

Skill issue. There are other ways to get those results, but being an asshole is the lowest-hanging, and is nearly free if the people around you don't have the self-respect to walk away.

I disagree. Point to a centibillion+ company that isn’t fronted by a toxic asshole.

Or the incentive aligned.

This is really what it is.

Not just that, but the strong leader needs to ensure that it can be fixed.

Yelling at a rank-and-file to unfuck some random system, then not giving them any time, resources, or tools to fix it is just being a dictatorial dickhead.

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