Comment by not_that_noob
8 years ago
What Jobs does here is truly impressive, for the following reasons:
* he listens carefully to the customer - not just pretend, but truly understand the issue from the customer's point of view
* he then allows his engineering manager to present the counterargument - to understand what the current situation is
* he's able to then follow the back and forth of what is presumably a highly-technical conversation. Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation.
* he then makes the call - you'd be surprised by how rare the simple ability to make a quick decision is
* he then has the power to make the internal team do what is required - again, you'd be surprised how in some companies internal teams ignore or subvert the leadership's directions
What this incident shows is his singular ability to listen to customers, conceive of the ideal product in his head and make the team deliver it. That explains a lot of his success.
PS None of this should be construed as absolving any of Jobs' negative personality traits.
It didn't seem to me like he followed the back-and-forth so much as he just cut off his own guy, screamed at him, and humiliated him in front of one of the most legendary programmers in the world.
To paraphrase The Dude, Steve Jobs wasn't wrong, he was just an asshole.
I wonder whether in fact the Apple engineer was glad to have official permission from the boss to do the Right Thing.
It's not exactly uncommon to have the choice between one option that's clearly better technically, and another that's easier to implement with the limited time and resources you have, or more compatible with customers' peculiar needs, or a better fit for now-clearly-unwise decisions made in the past.
And usually you pick the technically inferior decision with a little sigh and a feeling of regret that the right business decision isn't the right technical decision.
But if the CEO has just shouted at you that you have to do the technically right thing ... well, getting shouted at is seldom fun, but it's got to make a pleasant change to be not just allowed but instructed to do whatever it takes to go with the design you think is "ideal".
I think you might have hit upon why Steve Jobs was so successful despite seemingly having poor social skills "being an asshole": his product/business decisions were very good.
And I have to say, I think I'd rather work for someone who shouted at me when I'd genuinely got something wrong, but listened to me when I was right than someone who was always polite, but made bad decisions.
Of course this wouldn't work for everyone, and of course it would be better if he was nicer to people, but still...
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To take it one step further -- I wonder how likely it is that a fairly smart programmer, who has showed enough managerial aptitude to become an engineering director, might drop words like 'ideal' in front of Jobs to get the marching orders they wish they had.
yes yes yes
Yeah - he could have been nicer. No question. But notice his guy didn't quit. People who worked for him seemed to actually admire his ability to be dedicated to the product and make decisions based on what was best for the product. That's pretty rare. And it was not personal with Jobs - he was just so upset that reality differed from the ideal.
He was deeply technical. He began his career as a programmer at Atari.
[Edit] Jobs had many traits that would lead a psychiatrist to classify him as sociopathic - not mass murderer type, but the psychological type. For example, his complete lack of empathy towards his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge for a long while. One of the weird traits of sociopaths is that to navigate world that requires understanding of empathy and emotions, an understanding they don't have, they build models of human behavior and can choose to deploy those models when required toward their aims. What's interesting also here is his ability to be singularly brutal to his subordinate, while at the same time be completely empathetic to the customer's view point. Just my amateur psychologist 2c, but that combination of brutality on one side with solicitousness on the other adds weight to my view that he was a high-functioning sociopath.
Steve Jobs was not deeply technical, nor was he ever a programmer. And in a way, that makes his accomplishments even more impressive.
I think one of his key strengths was the ability to know if someone knew what they were talking about and to recognize outstanding people - in any field. So many Apple stories, from early times to more recent, are about how he always hired the very best people, and then somehow made them do the best work they ever had. I think he could just tell if someone had the fire inside them, and knew how to fan those flames.
Jobs was not deeply technical.
If I remember correctly, Steve Jobs got hired at Atari because he showed them a board for some arcade game that Steve Wozniak had designed and conveniently forgot to tell them that he didn't actually design the thing.
I also think I read that Steve Jobs lied to Woz about how much Atari paid him for it so he could cheat Woz out of the money.
I'm pretty sure I read about this in a book called "The Ultimate History of Video Games". [1]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-History-Video-Games-Pokemon/...
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I can’t help reading your first paragraph as what someone might say when a boyfriend is abusing his girlfriend: “He could’ve been nicer, but notice the girl didn’t leave.”
There might be reasons why he acted like an asshole, but he still acted like an asshole, in my opinion.
Jobs was a known quantity, though. I don't think you became a senior manager at Apple during his career if you didn't accept the risk of being emotionally abused from time to time.
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You can’t infer empathy from someone’s outward behaviors. People can do terrible shit and feel awful about it at the same time.
> Jobs had many traits that would lead a psychiatrist to classify him as sociopathic - not mass murderer type, but the psychological type. For example, his complete lack of empathy towards his daughter, who he refused to acknowledge for a long while.
IIRC, Walter Isaacson talked about Steve Jobs' childhood -- he struggled with the emotion that he was an adopted child for years. He felt like a total liability for him to have been put up for adoption, that he wasn't wanted. He felt that was an incredibly cruel thing to do to a child.
As a form of "revenge" for being put up for adoption, he denied paternity of his daughter around the same age his parents put him up for adoption, so that he could "experience" what it felt like when the direction of cruelty was reversed (from victim to oppressor).
Steve was an asshole, but an amazingly smart, perceptive and brilliant one. He listened, realized that there needed to be a change and told the team to take care of it. It is clear that it could have been handled nicer but, it was Steve. You got the whole package good or bad. For the most part he got it right, delivery not withstanding. I was privileged to have known him, even if he was an ass.
Clearly, it made an impression. I wish everyone took software as seriously as Jobs did and shouted at others when a point needed to be made. Say what you will about a shouting boss not being nice or fun to work for, but I think getting shouted at undeniably makes you more attentive to an issue than if steve had tried to instruct him calmly.
It worked for Steve, for sure, but it's definitely not the only way.
There's the famous Tim Cook story where he gets his point across, but instead of shouting, he's just ice cold:
> ...One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.
> “This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”
> Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/cook_apple.fortun...
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The most powerful reaction I've ever seen from others to someone in power was a little old lady that quietly thanked everyone who was doing the correct thing. Which caused deep shame and reflection in all of us not doing the correct thing.
There are ways to be make a point powerfully without screaming or being rude.
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How is being passionate about making the right decision being an asshole? He didn’t call his engineer any names, he criticized he decision.
At my last job a director (that eventually became my boss) got angry with me because I called the product I worked on a “piece of shit”. He said while the product was “suboptimal”, my language was offensive. I told him that what I found truly offensive was the millions of dollars a month our company was losing because of this “suboptimal” product, and that no one would let me fix it.
That is the kind of honesty that I'd hope my employees would grace me with instead of sugarcoating and telling me things I want to hear. IMO that director is an idiot.
First hand accounts of 20 year old conversations are likely over dramatized, but I find a first hand account to be much more credible than someone reading a first hand account and deciding the first hand account just got it totally wrong.
We don't know the specifics of the work environment there. I mean if you were working on a trading pit on Wall Street would be offended when your boss/co-workers yell at you "f- off" or "get the f- out"?
The reaction of the same person should be different if the work environment never had the f- word pronounced though. That would mean trouble.
> We don't know the specifics of the work environment there. I mean if you were working on a trading pit on Wall Street would be offended when your boss/co-workers yell at you "f- off" or "get the f- out"?
Uh, yes? I mean, that's only one of the many reasons I wouldn't work in a trading pit on Wall Street, but unless they've just killed someone there's never a good reason to cuss out your subordinates. If it's "just part of the culture," then that culture sucks.
Wow, to me this read completely differently. More like a primadonna, making knee jerk judgments and contemptuously bandying about his authority.
The impressive character was Carmack.
Any CEO who makes a blue box and pranks the Pope with it is ... atypical. (more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box#History)
God, I miss the mythos of Steve.
That's about Steve Wozniak (who actually made the product that made Apple great) though, not Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak seems like a great person. Steve Jobs... not so much.
A playful joke like that would land someone in prison for a decade today.
Interesting. I've read it more like he winged it by following his gut which told him there is a person here who has utmost respect of people he trusts, so he should probably follow that lead.
> Most CEOs would at this point defer to their technical person's opinion, as they would be unable to follow such a nuanced conversation.
I mean, he has had almost complete knowledge of the stack along the years. Whereas a lot of CEOs just get in large companies at some point of their life because a new CEO is needed.
In the story, Jobs acts as a rational ( screaming aside) adult. Is there anything else?
Without knowing the details, I'm curious if Jobs made the decision based on a deep understanding of the issue, or if he just trusted John more than the Apple engineer.
It sounds like he made the call immediately after the Apple engineer admitted Carmack’s solution was “ideal”. That may have been the culmination of Carmack making the more convincing points (not recounted in TFA) but the fact that Jobs pounces on this admission and ends the back and forth immediately seems like that is a big part of what he was looking for or how he made up his mind.