Ask HN: Boss with Steve Jobs Complex

I have no way of knowing whether your project is destined for failure. But to me that would be almost irrelevant - if I had a boss who humiliated people (publicly or privately), I'd be looking for work elsewhere. I wouldn't have put up with that kind of abuse even from Steve Jobs himself.

I have read so many stories of tough personalities like this who chew out their people publicly, yet in the process achieve greatness for themselves, their teams, and their products. I supposed I would have accepted this if I were working for Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Steve Ballmer, so I keep wondering if I should just suck it up and grind on.

But coding-to-vision rather than coding-to-design/spec seems so inefficient. Is this common?

"I have read so many stories of tough personalities like this who chew out their people publicly, yet in the process achieve greatness for themselves, their teams, and their products."

Honestly, this doesn't sound like that kind of guy. From what you described, he's "all hat and no cattle" (as they say in Texas).

thank you for your thoughts on this. -going crazy

I'd agree with parent, don't put up with humiliation; however, I don't necessarily consider harsh criticism humiliation: it depends.

That said, about your coding-to-vision thing: it sounds like he's just unable to dedicate the time to define the UX in detail. That's understandable, as a manager it's essential to delegate.

However, defining the product (scope, features, UX, …) is a core part of the business, and needs involvement from management (business strategy), customers/salespeople (market fit: have you talked to your customers yet?), designers and coders.

So, maybe do as much as you can for him (on paper or whatever), and when you're ready present the screens to him in a quick 10 minutes briefing.

If he still feels like you're wasting everybody's time, make him a business case based on past experience; ie. "Defining the UI would've cost us _this_ much in time, charging ahead has cost us _this_ much in time: we're losing money and wasting time."

If he still won't see the light, it's pretty much doomed.

Most assholes are just ordinary average assholes. Great assholes are the exception and occur at no greater frequency than great non-assholes in the general population.

How successful were the developers that got chewed out? :)

I've unfortunately been in the position of your boss in the past. In some of my early product management/project management roles, I would wave my hands write a few emails, one-pagers and expect the developers and designers would grok the vision and build something beautiful. Surprisingly, in my first experience, the outcome was wonderful -- the product was beautiful. At that time, I was naive and vainglorious enough to believe that the reasons for it were my 'vision'. The actual reason was a team of world class ux designers, visual designers and developers, who understood what I needed and created the product. The creative vision was theirs. So in some sense your boss is right, he doesn't have a unicorn team who can translate his day dreams into product.

On the other hand he is also profoundly wrong. Skip a few years, and I started up on my own, and could no longer afford those unicorn designers and developers. Now mere vision was no longer sufficient, I had to deal with actually firing up Photoshop and Illustrator and going from there all the way to writing HTML/CSS/JS, even the backend python for a prototype (Fortunately, I've always loved coding.) The learning was profound. Translating vision(even your own, leave alone others') into attractive product is a difficult skill that every serious product owner must understand. And they can only do so by doing (they may never master it). I'm not anywhere as good as those unicorn UX/devs I worked with in the past, but I compensate for it somewhat with, meticulous communication, verbal discussions, wireframes, mocks, sketches, functional prototypes, whatever, to get the product I want. Then I iterate the hell out of it by getting feedback. Learning to interpret subtle signs of friction in a users' experience was hugely valuable. The results have been good though slow.

If your boss is refusing to acquire the requisite translation skills, you will need to acquire them (and you will probably be the gainer in the bargain)

My advice to you here is to do the following:

1. Ignore the public shaming, if possible, and focus on your boss's message. Iterate on design concept despite his demeaning you for mistakes. It may eventually make you the unicorn developer/designer. At the very least even if you realize you don't have a talent for design, you will understand where your own limits lie.

2. Understand that the kind of people your boss is looking for do exist. They are not easily found, and are usually very expensive. So help your boss find one if possible. Learn from these people.

3. When you've gotten these skills, please email me your resume. :-) (Just kidding)

Maybe, maybe not.

I worked with a guy as a contractor where he swears he was a Steve Jobs. Realistically, all he was is a guy with lots of ideas and no follow thru. So he wasn't a Steve Jobs at all and most all his visions totally violated good design principles. When I would point that out he would say because his thoughts were visionary and not yet known.

Yea, and I fart unicorns dancing and rainbows.

In the end, you have to evaluate for yourself, but in general if people don't have a loyal following, but expect that type of respect they are no Steve jobs. I have had some AMAZING leaders, and they inspired us to do great things. They would never spend only 4 hours on a project they believed in, and they would expect more from us. I am not saying you should quit tomorrow, but I personally refuse to help feed anyones ego like this.

And I am sorry, the idea of just doing it without getting some design guidance seems really stupid. I know the stuff we read about Jobs says he didn't need mock ups etc, but I totally think that is BS. He was a smart ass guy who likely had tons of mock ups before he ever said go to the next step. Reading his book, he commissioned projects and prototypes that showed design but weren't yet functional (IIRC), so no that isn't a Jobs type mentality, that is a God mentality and is just idiotic.

BTW no real leader publicly humiliates his team, it is counter productive. Yes some great visionaries have done it, but in todays world we know that is a bad idea and to nurture not humiliate people, so its just BS. BUT that doesn't mean you don't push them hard (which can be a fine line) and demand better from everyone.

"Idea guys" are mostly useless: the people that want credit for "thinking of something" and kick back while everyone else works. More often than not, they're deluded and "in love" with "their" "great" ideas that deny reality in high-def cognitive dissonance. (They're usually wantrepreneurs or enterprise busywork titles.)

What set SJ apart was positive value (being right more often than not, building people up to produce better work products than they thought the could, a determined direction, actual vision) on balance outweighing negative traits (histrionic tantrums, treating employees like shit, generally acting like an asshole).

A cautionary note: If someone is going to play the eccentric jerk role, they'd better be actually right nearly always and bring metric fucktons of net positive value by the containership-full to the business, staff, customers, partners and other stakeholders.

Totally agree.

I've had to deal with this exact situation in the past, and I went through the same rationale.

My experience: you wind up constantly iterating, hoping for small "wins" - where the expectations of your PM matches something you've produced. But these are far and few in-between.

You need world-class people who've lead projects to save and push things forward. The success of the project depends on whether you have someone on the team who's willing to stand up and push their own vision, and whether your PM is willing to budge. You WILL have to do mockups to some fidelity, just realize that your PM won't appreciate the work and the complexity that goes into it.

I've lead design & PM at several startups & I can basically tell straight-out, that building without a design, wireframe, or at the very least a written spec is completely inefficient & it's likely that you will have to rebuild this all later. Basically every company I've worked had a similar process in place (often lead by the CEO) - this process does not scale & it will cause technical debt to your engineering team.

For all I know, this guy may actually be some product visionary, but why isn't he telling this vision to designers to create the mocks so the intricacies are worked out before it gets to build? Is it because he doesn't believe this process would move quick enough?

Also, one huge flag for me is that not once in your post did you mention that his "vision" was based off feedback of users. This is the most important task of a product manager (collecting user feedback & filtering it back to engineering). In the past, I've also had hunches about how things should work & I've proven myself completely wrong either after asking users or in usability tests on the build I designed.

Remember, Steve Jobs was designing products for the average person - not a lot of startups target such a blanket market & most are targeting some subset niche. You really need to be a voice for the users you're targeting.

I had similar experience, however in my case I built what my boss wanted. And he was happy. I managed this not by magic, but the beginning of my story looked strikingly similar to yours. And, of course, the project didn't fail.

So yeah, his method is not _that_ wrong. But there's a catch: in the beginning he was really interesting in pico-iterations. So not only I was doing, but every hour or so we were discussing what the screen looked like, going to the lengths of adding fake buttons that did not do anything, but helped to reason about the application.

After few years (you read it right), we no longer needed to talk a lot about what the company needed. Usually he would point to a problem to be solved, what he would like to see, and the development team managed to fill the gaps.

More recently, in another company with another boss, at a certain point she appraised the team for not really having to fill the gaps of understanding for the team: she spit a vision and we do it in our way. Every iteration she validates it, and of course ask for changes. Pretty average.

I think the real problem in your case is the attitude : public scolding and humiliation. For this, I have two alternatives.

If you are vested with stocks or somehow protected by some strong contract, and believe in the idea, the solution is to bark back. Abusive behavior are always multiplied by lack of balance and checks.

If you are just a developer, with zero personal benefits than compensation, the solution to your problem is quitting. Suddenly. Even if you do not have another job in sight.

The reason of this sudden quit is to ensure you halt the damage to you well being while staying in this company. The damage is and will be there: days you don't feel like working, arriving very late and leaving very soon, avoid opportunities, apathetic feedback when approached by people etc etc. In the right intensity, even depression. (well if you're in US you might want to actually get depressed and ask for compensation in court. Probably will give you more money).

Good luck.

Thank you for your thoughts. I think pico-iterations would be wonderful, and that is the big problem -- we meet twice a week (he has dedicated 4hrs a week and sometimes not even that.) Way too much time goes by before we test whether the build-out matches the vision. This makes it more disheartening because there is often so much wasted work.

However, I'm glad this worked out well for you -- I am going to try to split the 4hours more evenly, perhaps into at-least a daily review. Part of the problem is he seems to think we are all wrong in requiring all these reviews, rather we should simply implement the vision rather than just talking about it over and over.

I think you should work through the details with your team and own the project and defend your decisions. He can only humiliate you if you believe what he is saying. There are people you just can't please, however, that is how he is pushing you to be great. That is probably why he is successful.

To be honest I have never received even 4 hours per week from a manager, on a consistent basis. You need to manage him like he is upper management or a client, he will ask the impossible, not tell you how to succeed, and expect everything.

Build what he needs, and persuade him as to why it is great. He wont express the details because even he doesn't really know.

You're lucky that your boss at least has a vision.

true that :)

Does he at least give feedback? Is it useful? Do the other team members work on this project for a similar amount of time? If not, you need to have a manager that has more time to dedicate to you and give the support needed. If the project is behind schedule, mention it to stakeholders or higher management.

@theandrewbailey yes, he does give feedback, about once every several days. However, three days of coding can be wiped out with one piece of feedback. This is frustrating since it could have been nipped earlier on during a design session. Is it common for people to code-to-vision rather than code-to-design?

It doesn't really matter the methodology used, but there is always (should be?) some written design, requirements, or specification somewhere. I've only ever been on "corporate" type projects where lots of stuff has been defined in advance. I find it really nice, because I can focus on implementing things, not designing, envisioning, or winging things. While malleable to some extent, it's not like a new concept could be inserted.

It might also help to know who this product is for. Is it a B2B/internal or B2C project?

@theandrewbailey -- regarding how much other team members devote to the project, the rest of us work 40 to 50 hours a week. This is to be expected since a 10 minute vision takes 100x the time to actually code out and make functional. But to be honest, we are all putting in less and less productive time, as the whole process seems so inefficient and wasteful.

>Is this project destined for failure?

Probably. You should probably have a heart to heart with this guy and tell him how you feel without evasions or minced words.

In the end you're a professional, and professionals don't need to tolerate bad behavior on the part of an employer.

How can a Project Manager boss around the requirements and judge the implementation - that is a job of a Product Manager and Dev or Design managers? Project Managers should mostly focus on the team finishing projects on time - like an Agile coach.

You are in a shitty situation. Focus on finding a great job, and avoid investing emotionally in this one.