Comment by not_that_noob
8 years ago
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/...
I've heard both of those stories from multiple places. I don't know exactly how you'd define "technical," he clearly wasn't a strong engineer, but I have heard multiple examples of him managing technical things. I remember around the same time he was known for memorizing chips and vendors very very well that he could source them very cheaply.
I think a good firsthand example is a one hour q&a with developers he did in 1997 soon after returning to Apple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ16_YxLbB8
He doesn't necessarily show off deep technical knowledge, but he is able to discuss strategy about technology directly with developers. Managing technology is his competitive advantage.
Not the OP but I don't define "technical" as "being able to manage technical things".
It's absurd that anyone would.
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.
Eventually you have to join the club to not get a split personality?!
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).