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Comment by bennyg | Hacker News Reader

Everyone has flaws. MLK, Jr. was a terrible womanizer but nobody brings that up because it, rightly so, shouldn't taint his civil rights legacy.

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In the case of MLK, his womanizing activities were quite separate from his civil rights work. Steve Jobs very much got to the top by screwing over people. He was mean at work. And frequently did illegal things. There's a good argument to be made that were it not for him conspiring to prevent competitors from poaching employees, we'd be able to make more at our work places. I will absolutely never respect him for his streak of immoral/illegal acts. Wozniak is of course more the hacker we should look up to.

Some platitudes and quotes can be removed from the person who said it and still be valid. I think if the quotes from this interview were attributed to some random dude in 1996, that they would be just as valid as coming from Jobs. For some reason people play the opposite of "appealing to authority" to disparage the knowledge because of who it came from. That's intellectually dishonest to me.

What? I did not say that Jobs was not a smart businessman, that's not what I'm contending. His quotes in this article are probably very valid and prescient, none of this is what I take issue with. I'm just saying he was a bad person who frequently did illegal and immoral things, and thus he shouldn't be the person we should look up to. Wozniak is a better role model figure for us all.

Blue boxes were illegal too. I just think it's foolish to look at somebody's actions and apply that as reason to like/not like other actions.

Nobody is actually doing that. If anything, you're making the argument that because he did some good acts, his other actions can't be criticized.

No, I'm saying it's foolish to criticize an action based on other actions. Criticize an action on its own merit. I think it's a slippery slope to start saying you won't look up to someone because one subset of actions of theirs is bad. If that's the case then nobody should look up to anybody for there are certainly reprehensible actions littered over everyone's past.

At no point has anyone said that X, Y or Z action was meaningless because he e.g. disowned his daughter for the first half of her life. Someone didn't understand how anyone could dislike Steve Jobs, a couple of reasons why were given, and now you are basically asserting that Steve Jobs is beyond criticism because all humans have skeletons in their closets. Do you see the problem?

Whether or not you should look up to Steve Jobs is up to you. Examine the facts about him and then decide whether he is a role model for you. He isn't an infallible role model to everyone by default just because he was successful or in the public eye, nor should he be.

I never asserted that haha. I was basically replying to this line above:

    > I will absolutely never respect him for his streak of immoral/illegal acts.

That just seems foolish to me, since tons of other people garner respect despite worse immoral/illegal acts. That's it. There's nothing else to read into my statements.

> were it not for him conspiring to prevent competitors from poaching employees, we'd be able to make more at our work places

So Apple, Google, Adobe and one other company agreed to not poach employees from each other and get into an expensive wage war. I don't see how that's automatically bad and here's why:

In the dotcom booms, salaries skyrocketed unchecked. During the bust, MANY people got laid off... with a certain salary expectation, which hampered them. I dated someone like this, she spent 6 months going into CC debt trying to swallow the pill that she just wasn't going to make again what she made as a marketer at the height of the first dotcom boom. She literally refused to accept the market rate for herself.

All Jobs, Schmidt etc. did is prevent people from being paid unreasonably (and unsustainably) high salaries. And we're already talking comfortable 6 figure salaries, here. You know what would happen if these were allowed to rise unchecked? The guys at the top would eventually get laid off at the first sign of a downturn. And their "net income" would likely be the same as if they never had their pay unsustainably raised to begin with.

An arms race is no good for anyone.

> we'd be able to make more at our work places

So that's bullshit. EVERYONE gets paid market rate, more or less. Anything else is not sustainable or requires someone being fooled indefinitely, which is impossible (unless they are a fool to begin with).

Ok let's take your argument "You know what would happen if these were allowed to rise unchecked?" in the opposite direction. Your premise is rise of salaries should be checked. Now let's say once those salaries were checked by companies by promising not to hire each other engineers, if those companies decided well let's reduce the salaries of our own engineers since they are not going to get a better deal elsewhere anyways. Very soon those salaries will be plummeting because of this agreement between the companies. You contradict yourself by the end when you say "EVERYONE gets paid market rate" It is NOT market rate if all companies in the market got together and decided not to offer higher wages to someone to incentivize them to come work for them. That is what a CARTEL would do but with lower wages.

I... don't disagree. And I lean libertarian (which is to say, things should remain unchecked). I'm just saying that in this particular instance, it may not have resulted in as "net" a bad, as is being suggested.

The beauty of free markets (when they actually work) is that the unchecked salaries would have been corrected by the market when they reached an unsustainable level (like it did in the previous dot com bust). Regarding people who refuse to face reality that their prior salary is not reflected in current market rates, well that's the person's own problem and can't be taken into consideration in arguing for suppressed wages via cartel behavior. Personally I would like to get the maximum money I can get for the work I'm doing. :)

I think you are referring to the smear campaign orchestrated by the FBI.

I know not if he did commit adultery but many of accusations were tenacious at best, and in the main downright misleading to the general public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.#Allega...

It's crap to say "everyone has flaws" as if every flaw is equally bad, and in that way dismiss any criticism of Jobs, although I realize we're on Hacker News, so undoubtedly anything critical of Steve Jobs will be downvoted to oblivion. Try the comparison with Christopher Columbus instead — do you think he was a great man with flaws like everyone else?

In any case, I don't think Steve Jobs is in the same league as MLK.

There's a difference between disowning your child and riding your workers to the brink versus being rude to somebody at the supermarket. Nobody's saying the iPhone isn't a great achievement, it's just not surprising that some people don't like Jobs as he was a pretty terrible person (personally and professionally.)

The postscript on disowning Lisa was that he reconciled with Lisa in her teens, she lived with him and he paid for her studies at Harvard. Yes, he was an asshole for rejecting her when he was younger but if he was a terrible person in his 20s, he was less so later in life.

To be fair, he was accused of being a terrible womanizer by the same FBI who was trying to destroy and discredit him.

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