You are not Steve Jobs - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/editors-picks/9ae1727d2479 <comment><USER2> Quote: "Even Steve Jobs wasn't Steve Jobs initially. He only outed himself as a giant jerk after he had a company that could afford to have a huge turnover, and he had a pile of minions that hero-worshiped him no matter what he did."

This isn't true. I knew Steve when he and Steve Wozniak were starting Apple, in the late 1970s, and he (Jobs) was always intolerable -- it wasn't something that came out after he acquired power. I couldn't stand working with him, so, even though people at Apple asked me to stay, I wouldn't. (I eventually worked _with_ Apple on various software projects, but not _at_ Apple.)

Steve Jobs had the worst interpersonal dynamics of anyone I have ever met. All that proves is that being perpetually rude and having terrible people skills isn't a deal-breaker in corporate America.

<comment><USER3> I'm not questioning your judgement of Steve's personality. But it surprises me that person like Steve can be so successful. Moreover, how did he recruit and manage so many world class developers and designers? Not once. But thrice - Apple, NeXT and Pixar. What made Steve so successful when everyone who has worked with him thinks he was a jerk!

I read his stories at - <http://folklore.org/> And he looks inspirational as well as jerk. But most of these stories are around creation of Mac. By that time, Apple was quite successful. I'm genuinely curios about how did he manage to recruit first 10 employees if he had terrible inter-personal skills.

<comment><USER4> I can't speak to the recruiting of staff in the early days of Apple or NeXT, but many of the "world class" people at Pixar got involved before Jobs purchased the company.

See: [http://www.amazon.com/Pixar-Touch-Vintage-David- Price/dp/030...](http://www.amazon.com/Pixar-Touch-Vintage-David- Price/dp/0307278298)

<comment><USER5> But he had the sense to bankroll and not meddle. He had the courage to let Lassiter, Catmull and Co. to run things their way, which has produced some of the finest story telling and animation of the last 100 years. Did _he_ assemble the team? No. Did he help them achieve greatness? I think Pixars portfolio speaks for itself...

<comment><USER6> So even when he doesn't do anything he still gets credit for the end result?

<comment><USER5> He gets and is due _some_ credit. To insinuate that Jobs had nothing to do with Pixar's success is wide of the mark.

If what Jobs achieved is so easy, go and do it...

<comment><USER6> Not sure where I said what he achieved was easy, but feel free to keep putting words in my mouth.

Your comment was insinuating that the success of Pixar's portfolio was somehow a testament to Jobs. Would it really have been any different had they gotten funding from a completely different source? You even said he didn't "meddle", so other than a financial investment, any credit awarded him for the quality of their work should be minimal.

There are plenty of things he can and should get credit for -- we don't need to retroactively add more.

<comment><USER5> Get over yourself. Your glib dismissal (incorrectly) assumes that Jobs' contribution was merely financial and therefore completely without merit. My comment was that his bankrolling of Pixar, as well as the foresight _not_ to meddle where he wasn't needed, helped them achieve great things, for which he deserves some credit. He also handled the business end - negotiations with Disney etc - that gave Pixar the audience. Since Lassiter has pretty much said that without Jobs the would be we're they are today says it all. Too many are far too quick to dismiss what he man achieved in a relatively short time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm often frustrated at folks who take the wrong lesson from Steve Jobs.

As this piece describes, they look at the dude and take away that they should be jerks because that's how things get done. And that's a terrible lesson.

In my read, as a guy who's been following Apple since he was a kid, there's one principal lesson for leaders and entrepreneurs:

If you care about making exactly what you want, make sure you're the boss.

That's it. You can define the agenda, you can get the right people, you can motivate them according to your style. You get to win all the design arguments. You get to slip the deadlines for quality.

You can definitely be a jerk in that context, but you don't have to.

<comment><USER8> I would argue that there are plenty of better, and less publicised, examples of people who are passionate about their work than Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER9> Steve Jobs is such a striking example because he was highly unusual in the business world, and especially in the tech business, and because he succeeded on such a massive scale. He was basically an artist. I don't mean that as a fawning compliment; I mean that as a description of his personality: for better and for worse. He was driven by a relentless aesthetic vision, he worked himself up into near-manic episodes, he was emotionally labile, and he was perfectionistic.

These are qualities you usually find in the arts. I've worked with and around writers and directors for most of my career, and I've seen "Steve Jobs" in a lot of the more successful ones. Consider the example of Stanley Kubrick, or, more recently, David O. Russell. Now, go watch the infamous David O. Russell temper tantrum video on YouTube. You could just about substitute Steve Jobs for David in that video and believe it.

<comment><USER10> I don't agree with the idea of the "mad artist," an elite diamond-in-the-rough character who cloisters himself away on manic episodes of hyper-creativity, becomes an alcoholic, and emerges with a genius piece of Art.

Art is a slog. Artists are the ones with enough endurance to churn out shit day after day, refining the best of what they produce. The best artists are social, because that's where the most ideas flow freely.

Most artists I know (writers, musicians, graphic artists) are like this. Perpetuating the myth of the great lone genius is elitist, which is a discriminatory and dangerous ideology.

<comment><USER11> Most writers I know are unsociable alcoholics, much like the stereotype.

<comment><USER10> Well, ok. I suppose anecdotal samples are not the best evidence for either side. I'd like to imagine that most artists are relatively well-adjusted.

Anyway, that's the kind of world I'd like to live in. Everyone can (and should) be an artist to some degree. While I do agree with the fairly obvious point that some people are more talented than others, I reject the idea that there are "genius artists", spikes of talent on an otherwise smooth talent- graph.

<comment><USER12> >>>I'd like to imagine that most artists are relatively well-adjusted.

Keep imagining. But great ones aren't. Go read:

Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison <http://www.amazon.com/Touched-With-Fire- ebook/dp/B001D1YCM2>

The Outsider by Colin Wilson [http://www.amazon.com/The-Outsider-Colin- Wilson/dp/087477206...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Outsider-Colin- Wilson/dp/0874772060)

The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy by Arnold M. Ludwig [http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Greatness-Creativity- Controv...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Greatness-Creativity- Controversy/dp/1572301171)

EDIT to add: Why Jobs stood out is because the closest equivalent to what he was is a _film director_. But business is not set up to hand out accolades like Hollywood does. So instead of everyone learning who did what in Apple -- as with film we find out about sound editors, foley artists, etc, etc. -- we just get the face of Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Its a testament to his legacy that these "You are/not like/dislike Steve Jobs" articles keep popping up. Jobs is what you call an EXTREME OUTLIER. People like him come around once every 30 or 40 years. You don't compare outliers to the mean, because they skew everything.

Nothing anyone ever writes about what to do or what not to do like Steve Jobs is relevant, because he was so far off from any of the data points we have or probably ever will have to matter. You get people like this in history; ones that seemingly do so much wrong yet change the entire world. I don't know if we'll ever have a concrete explanation for it, but for some reason the bad things ARE part of the reason for their success.

Another more common example of this is Jim Morrison (or any really good drug addict musician). Do you have to be a drug addict to be a musician? Of course not. And I seriously doubt they're gonna start dropping acid at Juilliard. But somehow there's a few of them that make it work, and I would argue that if Jim Morrison wasn't a drug addict he wouldn't have been as successful as he was.

If Jobs wasn't such an asshole, he wouldn't be Steve Jobs. There's some mix assholishness and genius (that he got absolutely perfect) that creates a legendary figure.

<comment><USER14> Agree. Pursuing your Morrison analogy: so many artistic and literary figures are similarly hard to characterize. Polarizing their colleagues and fans, causing denunciations, feuds, embarrassment. Difficult to compare to anyone (i.e., outliers, as you say). Think of someone like Norman Mailer, or Gore Vidal. These people are not role models!

They don't _have_ to be that way, but it's a lot more likely.

After they are gone, asking "were they a good person" is usually not the right question (unless you were close to them).

If you know them mainly through their work, the right question is, "do you value their work?" Here's the relevant quote from Auden:

      Time that with this strange excuse
      Pardoned Kipling and his views,
      And will pardon Paul Claudel,
      Pardons him for writing well.

<comment><USER15> Since when does taking drugs and going to heaps of parties, writing classic songs, performing in a band, learning and playing instruments, reading and studying literature, singing, having lots of sex, writing poetry, recording albums, and inspiring millions make someone a "bad person".

Just in case anyone is unclear, the answer to the question "was Jim Morrison a good person" is YES.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reads like sour grapes.

If it really was Steve Jobs's "fault that the MobileMe launch went so poorly" because of "the system that he created," and her team was really as "completely kick-ass" as she says it was, then why has Apple had so much success with so many projects run exactly the same way?

The problem with MobileMe was the engineering management, not the system.

If anything this shows how vulnerable the Apple "system" is to the quality of the people they hire, and why they spend so much effort trying to hire and hold on to A-grade people. That just doesn't jive with the tired lore of Jobs being an asshole all the time. They wouldn't be able to hold on to folks like they have.

<comment><USER17> I'm not so sure. Apple hires the best and their evaluations of new candidates are rigorous, so I doubt they have idiots running things. We all know there's a lot of the worlds best talent at Apple. But they struggle a lot with the web services they've tried to create. Mobile me, iCloud, game centre, ping, Maps; these have all fallen short of Apples promises. It's a repeating pattern that to me indicates a culture issue inside Apple.

<comment><USER16> If it was a culture issue it would extend to the successful product teams as well. Those failures point to the people in charge of those groups, not the Apple culture.

Unless by Apple culture we mean giving people lots of responsibility and autonomy.. then, yes. But that's also the key to their successes.

<comment><USER18> Is it possible that a culture which is effective at producing "good" outcomes in one domain is ineffective at producing "good" outcomes in another? Should managers use the same techniques to manage steelworkers as they do software engineers?

Edit: steel works -> steelworkers

<comment><USER16> That's a good question, but in this case they're both software engineer domains. Apple does run some pretty successful online services, like the iTunes and app stores. If your theory were true they wouldn't be able to do that. Clearly they do have more problems with services than software/hardware. But that could be a function of the people at the top, not the management process, which but most accounts is minimal.

<comment><USER17> I'd argue that there are a few aspects of providing products and services for the web that are unique and not relevant to offline software development.

For example, scalability. Most of Apple's problems in this domain have been associated with scaling. iTMS and the App Store both scaled very well over time, but you have to consider the size of their audiences at launch. iTMS launched to a relatively small market of Mac and iPod users. The App Store launched to a relatively small market of iPhone users. Now that both the OS X and iOS user bases are significantly larger, Apple has struggled immensely to launch web services.

When developing for the web, your job is not done until you've released your product into the wild and figured out where the bottlenecks and weak points are with a massive user base. Apple's culture of secrecy doesn't facilitate this part of the process. Until that changes, they will be taking a huge gamble every time the release a new web service or improve an existing one. And, as with iClouds Core Data woes, developers who depend on these services are beginning to lose patience with Apple. This should be a major concern but it appears, from the outside looking in, that it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I didn't think I was going to like this from the opening paragraph but she quickly won me over. My take away is "You are not Steve Jobs. You are not a massive arsehole!" - pretty much in agreement with calinet6. However, actually it's a lot richer than that. I love this paragraph in particular:

"Now, regardless of whether no one in the inner sanctum of dudes-that-Steve- listened-to-at-the-time told him all the things we told our bosses, or who-up- the-chain-of-command was not brave enough to suggest we do something not- Apple-like — this was the system that Steve created. He made himself so fearful and terrible that an entire group of amazing, talented, hard working people, ended up getting screamed at wrongfully. It was his fault that the MobileMe launch went so poorly, not ours."

Even if that's not even remotely true (I wouldn't know), I find it a good lesson that a boss could be so terrifying that no-one wants to be honest with them and this flows down the hierarchy to the point of dysfunction. I've heard of it before, but I like the clarity of explanation this nth time around.

<comment><USER15> Agreed. And I think the article is less about "Steve Jobs" and more about the lessons to be learned from high-level project difficulties, and the people on the ground caught up in the line of fire when things don't go to plan. Or, when blame is unleashed unjustly from management, whose plan was flawed in the beginning, or whose chain of command failed to notice the red flags raised along the way.

The other article on her blog is also worth a look, and a good reminder about communication in the workplace. "How to handle conflict".... <https://medium.com/career-pathing/a713b75ad9bd>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Absolutely everything I have read about Steve Jobs paints him as a narcissistic asshole who is impossible to work with. How is it that he was so successful and how did apple become the behemoth it is today if the man at the wheel was so insufferable?

I want to believe that this has only been a recent development and that he used to be an easier person to deal with in apple's early days, because to be quite frank the only way I could see such an individual being so successful with the attitude he had was if he was just riding the coattails of other forces in the company.

Hopefully someone can enlighten me as to how this kind of person could lead a successful company when everyone fears him and doesn't question anything he says.

<comment><USER21> "The market pulls the product out of the startup." -- Marc Andreesen [1]

Steve Jobs was remarkably good at finding new markets. And once you've found one, you can screw up _a lot_ and still succeed. Because at the end of the day, people want to work on a successful product, and they'll put up with a lot of shit to do so.

Steve Jobs probably would've been even more successful had he not been so abrasive; who knows, maybe he wouldn't have gotten thrown out of Apple the first time and we would've gotten the iPhone 15 years earlier rather than the Newton. But he got the thing that matters most right, and then pretty much everything else fell into place despite his flaws.

[1] [http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/the-pmarca-guide-to- startups/4104...](http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/the-pmarca-guide-to- startups/410455)

<comment><USER22> Honestly, I don't think he could have been more successful no matter what he did. Apple's comeback is easily the most dramatic in the history of business.

<comment><USER21> True, but he's also responsible for Pixar and NeXT. NeXT had many of the ideas of the current Mac a decade earlier, but failed to take off. Whether that's because the market wasn't ready yet or because Steve failed to manage the company can't really be answered.

(Also: "most dramatic in the history of business"? IBM was about 3 months away from bankruptcy when Lou Gerstner took over - it's not a household name now because their comeback involved pivoting to big-business services, but they're solidly profitable. Intuit nearly died and all the employees went several months without salary in its early days, and now they basically own the accounting-software market.)

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't give him THAT much credit for Pixar. He had really very little to do with the product at that company. It was a smart investment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Steve Jobs was not a "hacker". [‡] He knew almost nothing about computer languages, computer architecture, and according to Neil Young, he listened to vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio quality works (see [2]). Steve did not contribute any original ideas or any important technological innovations. He claimed during his Stanford commencement speech that if Macintosh had not included eye pleasing typography, then computers would never have had typographically pleasing typefaces (because "Microsoft just copied Apple); this is ludicrous. In fact, Apple's software patents for digital typography added unnecessary difficulties. [3] Many people are unhappy about Apple culture of paranoia, litigation, and features that restrict user's freedoms that Steve created.

Steve is known for having a great sense of design, but it seems that he only had taste in choosing among the good designs of others. Just look at the yacht he designed without Jonathan Ive's collaboration. [4]

Many of you may say that I'm missing the point; that his ability to convince others of what was important and his "vision" is what made him great. My contention is that he appropriated other people's original ideas, and other people implemented his modifications. I'll admit that directing such efforts is not an easy thing to do, and most breakthroughs are improvements upon others' ideas. But it is very rare for the original creators to be alive and ignored while the modifier is celebrated with maudlin elegies.

EDIT: The media's treatment of his death, President Obama's statement that he was a great "inventor", etc. was not his fault. But I think that when the deaths of people like Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy in the same month as Steve are ignored, then the world is suffering from a serious case of myopia. Ignoring Dennis and John while celebrating Steve is like fawning over the interior decorator with praise about the warmth of a house while ignoring the carpenter and contractor.

Perhaps I should add that I am being critical of Steve because of an abundance of articles that did not focus on what he actually contributed, or criticized only his behavior towards others. Steve did seem to be able to hire, attract, or motivate as many talented engineers as he did drive away. This is a very hard thing for a CEO to do, and he deserves a large amount of credit for doing this. The talent that he helped attract and the products they create are responsible for Apple's stock price rise and continued profitability since his death.

[‡] <http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html> (see definition of "hacker")

[1] [http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2012/02/01/146206585/ste...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo- way/2012/02/01/146206585/steve-jobs-listened-to-vinyl-at-home-neil-young-says)

[2] <http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html>

[3] <http://www.freetype.org/patents.html>

[4] [http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/innovation/steve-jobs- yac...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/21/tech/innovation/steve-jobs-yacht/)

<comment><USER25> I either do not like Steve Jobs, or I feel sorry for him. One of those two.

I do not like to speak ill of the dead, but I also do not like to sugar-coat things.

Steve Jobs was mentally ill. A lot of people don't like to say that, but that is what he was. I cannot diagnose his exact condition, but he shared many traits of the common sociopath -- all except that he was never very charming, generally speaking. [0] Steve clawed his way to the top, and turned himself into a god, when all of his talents were really nothing more than hiring the right people (Steve would have been an _absolute nobody_ if he had never met Wozniak (or a man of similar talent) to flush out his ideas) -- in fact he probably would have turned out to be a homeless person (if you had met him at Atari, you would have thought so). Steve was a bag of ideas -- ideas that were not original but, to his blessing, very consistent. And as most of us agree, ideas are only worth the quality of their execution. A lot of people look up to Steve for this reason - he was a non-engineer who came to rule the tech world. If he could do it, so could they.

I have no real agenda against Jobs, and I would definitely say that his life was filled with interesting accomplishments (even if the only accomplishment was only swindling the world to pay 2x as much for his products). But this is one man I would never place on a pedestal, because he is not a model human being.

The only heros I have know humility. Steve Jobs, even in the face of death, never learned that.

[0] <http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html>

<comment><USER26> Steve Wozniak about Steve Jobs:

> Jobs was a good husband and father and a great businessman who had an eye > for details. He said Jobs was a good marketer and understood the benefits of > technology.

> When it came to Apple's products, "while everyone else was fumbling around > trying to find the formula, he had the better instincts," he said.

> According to Wozniak, Jobs told him around the time he left Apple in 1985 > that he had a feeling he would die before the age of 40. Because of that, "a > lot of his life was focused on trying to get things done quickly," Wozniak > said.

> "I think what made Apple products special was very much one person, but he > left a legacy," he said. Because of this, Wozniak hopes the company can > continue to be successful despite Jobs' death.

Source: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/steve-wozniak- steve...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/06/steve-wozniak-steve-jobs- death_n_997533.html)

While you're right that Steve Jobs would have gone nowhere without Steve Wozniak, the reverse is likely also true. Steve Wozniak had a big doubt on working on the Apple start-up; the security HP offered him was very tempting. I don't think the world would have known about Steve Wozniak if Steve Jobs didn't convince him to leave HP for the Apple start-up.

I agree Steve Jobs might have been a sociopath, but then again, aren't many higher-up people in other businesses either? I think what mattered for Apple is that Steve Jobs cared about products most of all - sociopaths at many other companies only seem to care about how much money they make.

<comment><USER27> Woz clearly has a different definition of being a good father to me; I think spending years in court to deny responsibility for your child pretty much disqualifies one for that particular praise.

<comment><USER28> Steve Jobs said that he regretted his behavior during that time. He also later gave her daughter and her mother enough money to live on and became closer to her daughter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Warning signs of a dangerous cult:

* The group displays excessively zealous and unquestioning commitment to its leader and (whether he is alive or dead) regards his belief system, ideology, and practices as the Truth, as law. _ The leadership dictates, sometimes in great detail, how members should think, act, and feel._  The group is elitist, claiming a special, exalted status for itself, its leader(s) and members. _ Members are expected to devote inordinate amounts of time to the group and group-related activities._  The group has a polarized us-versus-them mentality, which may cause conflict with the wider society. * The leader is not accountable to any authorities. _ The group teaches or implies that its supposedly exalted ends justify whatever means it deems necessary. This may result in members' participating in behaviors or activities they would have considered reprehensible or unethical before joining the group._  Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished. _ The leadership induces feelings of shame and/or guilt in order to influence and/or control members. Often, this is done through peer pressure and subtle forms of persuasion._  Subservience to the leader or group requires members to cut ties with family and friends, and radically alter the personal goals and activities they had before joining the group. _ The group is preoccupied with making money._  The most loyal members (the "true believers") feel there can be no life outside the context of the group. They believe there is no other way to be, and often fear reprisals to themselves or others if they leave (or even consider leaving) the group.

Jobs was a cult leader, a pathological narcissist who would do anything to shape the world in his image. By some billion-to-one fluke, Jobs was right about nearly everything. His impeccable taste was the driving force of an entire industry for several decades. You can't emulate an outlier like that, any more than eating chicken nuggets will turn you into Usain Bolt.

<comment><USER30> this sounds exactly like my country's one and the only one political party - the always great, always glorious, always right CCP.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> As a general rule, if you're a CEO and you find yourself assembling a group of people who don't directly report to you, so you can tell/yell them how they failed you... stop yourself.

The people who failed your are (a) your direct reports and (b) you yourself. Figure out how the correct information didn't get to you, or how you ignored it, and fix that problem.

There's zero chance a roomful of individual contributors all got it wrong at the same time -- the only way they all got it wrong was that they lacked the proper leadership.

</comment><comment><USER32> I worked at Apple as a contractor after Steve's return. He was in front of me at the salad bar one day - he didn't cut, was just there ahead of me. I noticed he piled a huge amount of shredded carrots in his plate... anyhow.

Steve was wearing his usual black turtle neck and blue jeans. He was kind of leaning forward and I noticed that I could see his underwear since he wasn't wearing a belt. I seriously pondered, "I REALLY SHOULD GIVE JOBS A WEDGIE". Sure, he'd be pissed. Sure, my contract would be cut short. But I would be THE guy who gave Steve Jobs a wedgie. I chickened out and didn't do squat. Missed my chance for greatness.

<comment><USER33> Lol...be funny if he had STEVE written on his underwear

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I believe he was successful in spite of his negative qualities, not because of them. What I mean by this is that we shouldn't worship his negative traits and spin them somehow to be positive qualities in a leader, such as some people have done. He was very much a human being. A highly-intelligent man and visionary in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right people, making a lot of good, and a few poor, choices. Don't try to reverse- engineer his success so as to duplicate it.

</comment><comment><USER35> Thank you for writing this. Substitute Steve Jobs -> Tony Fadell and Apple -> Nest Labs and you've got almost the experience I had.

We have to stop enabling these sociopaths and vote with our feet (immediately) when this stuff happens.

<comment><USER36> Agreed, Sociopaths might have extreme qualities which might enable extreme outcomes, but that doesn't mean we need to enable them. It is overwhelmingly unhealthy and negative for anyone connected to them. Been there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Maybe the title should be "You don't want to be Steve Jobs" instead of "You are not Steve Jobs".

</comment><comment><USER38> Most of this article, except the cafeteria anecdote, isn't about Jobs, or about megalomaniac CEO's in general.

It's about utter failure of middle management, and how they can totally fuck both sides of the company.

The lesson here is not "don't be an asshole" (although you shouldn't), it's "don't hire ass-kissing assholes".

<comment><USER39> Disagree. If you kick middle managers in the stomach every time they tell you something you don't want to hear, they stop being honest with you.

<comment><USER40> In which case they should get fired. That's totally unacceptable behavior. If middle management is more concerned about saving face than delivering honest reports, it's their problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Lets not forget that it's hard to imagine Steve being successful if he hadn't paired with the equally extraordinary Woz. Yes, Jobs got along just fine without Woz, but only after the Apple ][ gave him enough runway to continue pushing his vision. Jobs was special, but he still made errors that would've tanked lesser companies.

It should also be noted that Jobs should be given credit for dragging a reluctant Woz into the spotlight..their estrangement is to me one of the most bizarre and saddest mysteries about Apple.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think pointing out problems directly and efficiently will eventually make someone a total asshole, and that's what I think Steve Jobs really did. However, some people(especially those blink-eyed Steve Jobs enthusiastics) just mistook the whole point. They thought it's being a total asshole making him efficient and successful, and by being a total asshole will eventually lead to him/her being an awesome leader of big cooperation. These people really have to learn some principles of logic before they start to learn anything from Steve Jobs. Pardon my poor English.

</comment><comment><USER43> I don't get the point. I am not Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was.

I am me.

Also, all the criticism in this thread that he wasn't a great engineer and Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy should have been given more coverage in the press the month he died is naive to say the least. They were both older. He still had much to do and was the boss of the world's biggest corporation. A bunch of Hackers on Hacker News won't reckon much on Steve Job's contribution to their field, but then he never was a hacker! He was a visionary who appreciated minimalistic design even if this meant that Apple products did fewer things. He made tech popular for the general consumer by simplifying it to just the essentials and burying all of the complexities.

Hackers like to have every choice to exploit. That is why they like PCs and increasingly the Linux OSes. Everyone else that actually wants to get on an accomplish some creative work just ponies up the money for an Apple and what extra they pay out on hardware they tend to save on software - MS Office > iWork.

Choosing which minimal set features to include in a product is harder than just lumping everything in, but the interface is far less cluttered and intrusive with less stuff to learn and therefore easier to use - which may not matter to Hackers like you, but is undoubtedly a factor in Apple's continued success.

</comment><comment><USER44> The cafeteria anecdote is interesting because I've been in line in a cafeteria with a billionaire (former) CEO - Phil Knight. Very personable (he certainly didn't cut in line) and he seemed comfortable in his Nikes and jeans.

Knight built his empire quite differently than Jobs. While it's not great being a developer at Nike, the company's atmosphere is somewhat laid back. Things still get done and they make a lot of money doing it.

<comment><USER45> I have been many times in the Apple cafeteria back when Steve was there, and I never saw him cutting lines as described. I am not saying that it did not happen, but I will not make it a statement that he was always like that neither

<comment><USER46> I never saw him cut in line, either; he was always in a hurry, and could be short, but I didn't see him pull rank, ever. He did almost run me over once.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> > I worked on the MobileMe team

Oh crap, she's already biased. That product was a shit-show from the get-go. It doesn't matter how devoted the employees were, the reliability and apparent technical excellence of the product was lacking and that speaks to "poor programmers". You can be the most devoted employee around, but if you simply can't do your job well, that's nobody's fault. iCloud, by comparison, works pretty great.

</comment><comment><USER17> A lot of people want to be like Steve jobs, but have neither the balls to commit the way he did, nor the requisite skills to evaluate like he did. So as has been mentioned elsewhere, there's just a bunch of mediocre assholes out there who would be mediocre ass holes wether or not Jobs had ever existed, only he did, and that validates their shitty behaviour in their own inflated heads.

</comment><comment><USER48> There are equal amounts of "Steve was awesome" and "Steve was an ass" stories. Conclusion? He was a human being, just like the rest of us.

<comment><USER49> I don't know about you but that seems to be an over-simplification. You can find some pretty strong trends from these stories and, while I'm not quick to derive value judgment, Steve did exhibit a distinct personality. It's not an accident that stories like this are, in some sense, predictable.

<comment><USER40> Any information you consume about a human being is going to be an over- simplification. What's really important is making sure that you're staying critical of the sources of this information.

I also think that you're missing the broader implication of your parent post: Steve didn't wake up every morning with the intent of embodying some kind of persona -- he just _was_. Sure, he may have done well to have some training by an HR expert on how to communicate more effectively, but he was just managing a company the way that 1) he knew how and 2) in a way that brought Apple success.

What I admire about Steve's Apple is that it was able to maintain a very clear vision and point of view despite growing exponentially. Look at huge corporations like IBM, HP, Microsoft, etc. What are there goals? Go to IBM's website and try to piece together a vision out of 80000 disparate research projects. HP makes...computers? printers? calculators? fax machines? cameras? Microsoft is a maker of operating systems, but are infamous for their spaghetti-style auxiliary product lines (throw it on the wall and see what sticks). These are three well-respected companies, and I don't know what the hell any of the 3 are about. Apple, by contrast? They're about delivering sleek computing products that are accessible and easy to use. Ask anyone on the street what Apple's mission is and they'd be able to give you some variation on good-looking products that are easy to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> As a counterpoint to the "you must be an asshole to be a successful leader" line of thinking, I put forward Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey, et al. I don't think one can say they haven't helmed a successful company and commanded respect, but they are also not infamous for throwing angry tantrums and yelling at people.

Larry's practically so soft spoken you can't hear him sometimes. :)

</comment><comment><USER51> People should try to compare what Bill Gates achieved, and what Steve Jobs achieved. Bill gates is not microsoft itself, but steve jobs was apple itself.

Jobs's success was thanks to Bill Gates's success. You don't snap and make iphones without all the experience brought by what microsoft pushed on computer manufacturers.

Not to mention OSX grew thanks to unix too. objc is still a massive pain in the ass for many developers, who just want to use C/C++ and forget about objc stuff NOBODY USE. How come a device which sold so much, wants developers to use stuff that begins with NS prefixes ? When does ideology got into technology ? Nextstep is the only piece of sh*t jobs seems to have created, and that's how he wanted to shove his dick onto nerds.

Jobs was a salesman figure. You now discover that's what our pre ww2 consumer world likes to buy. Salesmen who looks like the guy who either buy it or make it. Nothing new here. Stock don't reflect value of something that is aimed at research and looking for programming talents. People who can apply their skills onto a market in need to evolve. Please tell me how many traders actually know what is the industrial difference between all those techs which depends on the stock they buy.

Learning both programming and electronics is not for everyone. Even today, there are very few former mechanics who can know how to trade automotive stocks, but the economy don't care about them.

You can be good at selling differently-sized cars to be more competitive, but in IT, the possibilities are so far from exploited into the right direction, it becomes quickly irrelevant to sell cars with the same underlying technologies.

But all of this is nerd rant. Good luck telling western consumers all of that. At least in Asia, people are able to understand technology and that might be why android has so much success. Over there they make the different between hype and charlatans.

</comment><comment><USER52> The following has nothing against or for Steve ( which every comment seems to be focus on ), but a matter of opinion on the problem.

So she has a problem with THE highest chain of Command cutting her across the queue for lunch?

May be i am the only one who dont see a problem with that. ( If everyone higher up then you would cut queues then i would have a fxxking problem. )

Engineering Project Manager - I am not very good at those inflated Titles. ( So what's higher up? Senior VPs? ) But that title suggested to me she is responsible, whether or not some Jerks up there gave Steve a suck up or not. MobileMe was a disaster. To me it was even worst then the Map problems Apple have had.

As an Engineering Project Manager, By letting it out, knowingly this is Apple, which holds an even higher standard then other company. Did she have a go at Steve or higher up about the launch? Because if not, then she didn't burn the bridge, someone burnt it for her already.

</comment><comment><USER53> For a company to be successful it needs vision and discipline.

This is usually done by having a visionary at the head, and a nasty enforcer just under him. This is how it works at Facebook for example (Zuck + Sheryl Sandberg). Marissa Mayer used to do the same thing at Google (for a long time, her main responsibility was saying no to people who wanted to add links to Google's home page... which is probably harder than it sounds).

What's remarkable about Jobs is that he was _both_. He was the visionary and the enforcer. There are not many people like that.

And of course, enforcers alone can't do shit. When Jobs was removed from Apple, the company almost went bankrupt. When enforcers become CEO all they do is upset people without actually improving the prospects of the company (see how every single recent news that comes out of Yahoo is some incomprehensible blunder).

</comment><comment><USER54> Steve Jobs was a leader above all else. He brought amazing changes to the world of technology in the only way that he knew. You can speak negatively because he was extremely abrasive, rude, and disrespectful to some of the smartest people of the last few centuries, but you can't deny that he was effective at what he did. His job, or his passion, was to deliver chasm- crossing products, not to get people to like him.

Perhaps acting like Mr. Jobs is not the most effective strategy in your company, but if you figure out which strategy is effective, and then pursue that strategy as passionately and consistently as Mr. Jobs did, then I do not know how you could fail.

</comment><comment><USER55> I thought this was going to be about people who took the Steve Jobs route of design: "I know better than you, you'll use my design and like it, or go to hell."

People see Jobs' success in design and think they too can be successful by being merciless dictators of their design vision. Unfortunately 99% of people don't have Jobs' talent and they end up messing up their projects. (Gnome 3 and Unity, I'm looking at you, though this terrible phenomenon isn't isolated to those projects.)

37 Signals is also guilty of spreading that mindset, perhaps more so because they aggressively blog and write about it all the time and because they are (or at least were) startup darlings.

<comment><USER56> I've been in this situation before. The my way or the highway attitude is a bad mindset to have when managing engineers. Skilled engineers are free thinkers and will push back on bad design. If someone says they can write something better than your spagetti code you shouldn't yell at them or make them feel inferior. You should allow them to build a system that will be clean and maintainable for the sake of all engineers that have to work on the codebase. Good leaders should know humility and when to admit they are wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Though Steve may have done many things wrong,stolen designs, mistreated staff, but how many people know about this? What matters is the result you produce, not behind the curtain mess. Of course, Steve built Apple 1 without a support team, so obviously he deserves to be called a hacker. But the biggest inspiration that one can derive from him is his determination to not stop even when removed from his own company. Not everyone can go and build another successful company after being removed from one. The road was tough and you can't expect a fair play all the time and get success at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER58> imo, the sentiment of this article is better articulated in discussion of his biography. Not sure why its presented as an edgy opinion. ie, [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/be-a- jer...](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/11/be-a-jerk-the- worst-business-lesson-from-the-steve-jobs-biography/249136/)

"(Jobs) was not the world's greatest manager," Walter Isaacson said in a recent interview with 60 Minutes. "In fact, he could have been one of the world's worst managers."

"Being an asshole was part of the Steve package, but it wasn't essential to his success."

etc.

</comment><comment><USER59> Cutting line to get food when you are the CEO and have a lot of stuff to get done is not too bad. Impolite, but not too bad. Think about all the perks that CEOs have.

Good managements have weak links. You can either gather the courage to get your message to people who have the strength to listen to you and act on it, or you can keep cursing your boss and stick to you job.

If the author would have gathered the courage to get her message (discretely) to a higher-up, she would have been not been remembering that mess-up. She might have either prevented it, or been fired.

<comment><USER60> That's BS. Have an assistant go get your food. You know, as one of the perks that you have as a CEO.

<comment><USER59> I appreciate your comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> From Isaacson's excellent biography of Jobs, the one thing I gathered is that he had taste (turtlenecks and baggy jeans notwithstanding... ok, haven't seen the yacht either). He bullied a whole company into satisfying his exquisite taste, and the results are still outstanding. I'll take them even at a small price premium.

That does not justify any boss being a jerk, but if you have the taste and the power to bully a lot of people to satisfy that taste, you'll likely produce something tasty.

</comment><comment><USER62> Many, if not most of Apple's innovations are not Steve's ideas, but from someone working under him. He seems to have learned the wrong lesson.

From the outside, the MobileMe fiasco looks like a standard failed software project, where nobody steps up to say the truth and management doesn't understand/care what's going on. How a huge group inside Apple got to that point is anybody's guess (and would probably make for a great lesson in project management).

</comment><comment><USER63> I'm a little bit confused that this article has gotten so much attention.

So he was a jerk because he cut in line at the sushi bar? Okay. Maybe you had to be there, but is it hard to imagine that he might not have had time to wait in line?

It does sound unfortunate that he shamed everybody for the iCloud launch, but I'm already inclined to believe that this account was exaggerated if the sushi bar story is any indication.

</comment><comment><USER36> tl;dr: "And that's a damn good thing."

<comment><USER64> A bit extreme. No doubt he had many warts, but few would disagree that his net contribution to society was enormously positive.

<comment><USER65> A great many people seem to think we'd have been better off without Steve actually. They will tell you Steve/Apple set back the free software movement, and brought dictatorship to the world of software, when the web used to rule with anarchic democracy. They would tell you he sells closed devices that neuter people's creativity, and that the devices are hard to hack or dispose of.

I think he was a brilliant artist who made technology less imposing.

<comment><USER66> I think a great many other people--mainstream customers who don't read websites like Hacker News--would argue that they don't care about the free software movement or hacking devices. They think people using the term "dictatorship" in reference to computer software are extremists. They just want Shit That Works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> This puts a really interesting spin on the MobileMe story.

I wonder what would have happened if they had yelled back at Steve while he was dressing them down.

I also wonder who turned down their request for a more incremental launch. I'm not enough of an Apple-watcher to know what the org chart looked like, but could it have been Scott Forstall?

<comment><USER45> No it was not Scott... Scott was too busy with iPhone launch. The VP in charge was John Martin former Microsoft and Starbucks... he came at .Mac with a bunch of ex-Microsoft and try to run the place most likely like Microsfot, but even worst only trying to show nice UX/UI without caring about performance.

Project Managers/Engineers/QA leads did their job and reported to their upper management (Director and then VP John Martin) but they instead decided to silence everyone and kick a bunch of engineers out of the group.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Looks like many people are learning from the wrong side of coin (that was Steve Jobs). I am a big fan and have seen almost all his keynotes and read 2 of his biographies and I fully acknowledge that he was a terrible guy sometimes.

If you have to learn, learn from awesome things that he did in his lifetime, not being an d*ck!

</comment><comment><USER69> Steve was one of the best product guys this world has seen. The same qualities that this article complained over, were the qualities that also allowed him to provide the world with all these gadgets. There's two sides to every coin, and no one's perfect.

</comment><comment><USER70> 1) How can you be in tech and not know Steve jobs, more so given that you work at apple? 2) Steve was a dick... most of the times, especially when he wanted his way. nothing new. 3) You gripe should be with spineless middle management, not CEOs.

<comment><USER71> Also, she didn't know what he looked like that particular year. Not who he was. Some people just have incomplete photo shrines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Btw, here's a Wozniak talk that does give Steve a little more credit for his (Jobs' talents) than much of the discussion here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WBX6SACViI>

</comment><comment><USER73> Sometimes I wonder how much more productive Apple could be if they used a language other than Objective-C. Would they be more or less productive and able to get software/services done more quickly with another language?

<comment><USER74> > Sometimes I wonder how much more productive Apple could be if they used a > language other than Objective-C.

I'm not sure where you get the notion that Apple doesn't use languages other than Objective-C; good engineers use the right tool for the job, including assembly, C, C++, python, ruby, javascript, prolog, lisp, perl, ... and sometimes even Objective-C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> Bloggers giving advice to CEOs. Another hilarious peculiarity of this tech hype.

</comment><comment><USER76> "In my first two weeks of being hired, he cut in line in front of me and a co- worker at the office cafeteria sushi kiosk."

More than any negative thing I have ever heard about Steve Jobs, this is the most disappointing to me.

<comment><USER77> You know, he regularly parked in Handicapped spots too (before he had a Handicap sticker - which I'm not sure he had when he was really sick, but he certainly could have qualified for one then).

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Very ego-less of Steve to have put so much trust in the chain of command.

</comment><comment><USER79> Treating people with respect and motivating folks to do better than their best are traits of an effective leader. I think we somehow confuse "people- shaming/screaming asshole" with a good leader.

</comment><comment><USER80> Irrespective of Steve Jobs, Mobile Me was a disaster; I don't see how a delayed launch would have saved what is obviously an ill thought out product. Product Manager, are you listening?

</comment><comment><USER81> I'm sorry, but you worked at Apple (doesn't matter if it had been only for a week) and you didn't know who it's CEO was? You worked at Apple, and you didn't know who STEVE JOBS was? or had seen a picture/video of him somewhere?

That does NOT compute!

There are plenty of 'Steve' stories (www.folklore.org) out there. Conclusions vary from person to person as to what kind of person was Steve Jobs, but most people wouldn't taken back the time they worked with him/or Apple. Apple's/his contributions to computer history really outweigh the means it took to get there. Sometimes it just takes a jerk (most-likely insane), human being to push people to achieve extra-ordinary things.

<comment><USER82> Absolutely absurd. She clearly knew who Steve Jobs was. She probably just didn't know what Steve Jobs looked like the year she got the job. There are a great number of people who I know by reputation, know by amazing reputation, but I have no idea what they look like. I know who Larry Page is, I have no idea what he looks like. I have a really really vague idea of what Sergey Brin looks like. But really, who cares what they look like?

<comment><USER81> She got the job in 2008... My point is, if you were to get a job at xyz company, wouldn't one of your initial moves be to find out who the major players were at your new job were/looked-like? What the environment/culture is? Some research would have suggested that she might expect this kind of behavior from a certain individual? I don't have to number the many reasons WHY you would want to do some research, or care to. Why is that absurd?

<comment><USER83> Knowing somebody's bio photo may not help you when they cut in front of you in the lunch line. Recognition cues there are very different.

Also, recognition is a lot about context. When you see him in a black turtleneck on stage, you're primed.

I was once visiting a pal Google and ran across Eric Schmidt. Turns out his office was right next to a development team. I could have easily picked him out of a set of photos, but I wasn't expecting him to walk out of a small office in a random part of the building. It wasn't until he was walking away that I said, "Wait a minute. Was that..." And that was seeing his face, rather than the back of his head.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> The story about the middle managers not approving ideas that they team was later excoriated for not having implemented is classic Corporate America.

</comment><comment><USER85> Are there any good counter-examples of uber-successful tech CEOs who aren't/weren't jerks?

</comment><comment><USER86> They say, "Peace, brother." I say, "Bruise my feelings. Flatten my ego. Save my job."

</comment><comment><USER87> This justifies another book: "The Real Jobs by The Real People"

</comment><comment><USER88> Who the fuck is erin caton? No tech background, yet tech manager

<comment><USER89> Does it matter? The point is the same whether she's a programmer or not.

And she makes it clear in the article that she's a PM, not a SWE.

<comment><USER88> It does matter a lot, think about it.

<comment><USER90> Why does it matter so much? There are tons of articles on the front page of HN from no-names.

<comment><USER88> Exactly.

<comment><USER90> So you agree that it doesn't matter who the author is?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> and you don't know who you are calling 'you'

</comment><comment><USER92> My first thought, which may be wrong, is: Steve Jobs being a prick didn't make him more effective. He was a prick because he was _so_ effective that he had a +5 sigma trail of early success[0]. Because of his effectiveness, he could get away with being a prick. Once he'd established momentum, it was "part of his charm".

[0] Sure, he got fired, but with a net worth of $500 million. Doesn't count. I'll let you fire me _five_ times for a tenth of that. You can even do it in public. Hell, even have Donald Trump do it.

While it's arrogant to say this, I think I have nearly as strong a design sense as him. I honed it studying the German style of board games, and eventually writing my own games (most were failures, but I learned from them and got good). I optimized a trick-taking card game (Ambition) to drive out card-luck. Not an easy thing to do. After years of playtesting and throwing out things that suck and rebalancing, the damn thing plays well.

I was also a bit "youthful" in my self-promotion, got into some pretty awful flamewars on Wikipedia. I can't exactly hide that. I was 20. Shit happens. I certainly understand the mental "edge" that turns top designers into arrogant people. It's there, and it's part of what drives you to be great, but it also needs to be checked. Not because it's offensive or morally wrong to be a jerk, but because it makes _you_ suck. If you're unaccountable for the quality of your ideas, you'll have bad ones.

When people see Steve Jobs's behavior, they see what someone like me would be like without a few hefty doses of humility (some deserved, others not) in my 20s. ::shudder::

As a competent-or-better designer, I will say this: you don't have to be a jerk to get good designs. In fact, often what you do as a design lead is take in other peoples' ideas, and moderate. If you shut people out (or scare them) you're losing signal for no good reason. You need all the signal you can get, because good ideas come from _everywhere_.

I think Jobs had one positive effect, which is that he burned away corporate bullshit. I'm sure that there was as much politicking under him as under any charismatic leader, but I think a Jobs-like figure makes it just too _embarrassing_ to let corporate boondoggles get into the product. I'm sure there was just as much nastiness as anywhere else, but that the more successful lieutenants _knew_ that a product that mirrored internal politics (Conway's Law, applied to design) should be shredded to pieces.

So maybe it does take an asshole figure like Jobs to keep a corporation from devolving into design-blindness... not because design requires assholes, but because of what corporations are.

That said, I can't stand the goddamn fake Steve Jobs's who use him to justify being an asshole. I am closer to Jobs than 99.5+ percent of them and not nearly as much of a jerk (I have my moments, but I fucking _work_ like no one would believe on patience.) If you cite Steve Jobs to justify bad behavior (I've encountered this a million times) then you are an idiot because most people who behave badly are not Steve Jobs.

<comment><USER93> I think Steve Jobs being a prick was directly related to his success.

Jobs did many awful things, such as refusing to acknowledge the existence of his daughter or effectively stealing money from Woz. But that's not where the perception of Jobs being a jerk comes from-many CEOs have done worse. The main reason people seem to have found found working for Jobs exhausting is because he'd always tell you your work was shit.

But the effect of this was that Jobs managed to get top performers to perform 5 or 10 times better. He took 10x people and turned them into 100x. It may have been exhausting and emotionally draining, but quite a few people report producing the best work of their lives while working for Jobs.

Can you imagine working with Woz, Jeff Dean, JK Rowling, or Marc Benioff and telling them their work wasn't good enough and they had to produce work that was 10x better? And being credible and convincing enough to get them to believe it?

Obviously, just telling people their work sucks isn't enough. I've worked with a fairly large number of people, and I've met exactly one who managed to pull significantly better performance out of me than I could myself. It was exhausting, but in the end I produced work that was substantially higher quality _and_ quantity than anything I'd done before (at least outside academia). Said manager was also considered very abrasive, and people tended to love him or hate him. And it's not hard to see why-when someone tells you that the quality of your work is a small fraction of what it can and should be, it hurts.

Based on reports, it sounds like Steve Jobs was more or less capable of pulling those kind of performance increases out of anyone, or at least a huge variety of people. And based on the (very) small sample of people I've seen who can do the same, it seems like you need to be at least somewhat of a jerk to pull it off.

(Not to say that pulling great work out of people was Jobs's only skill. He was also amazing at picking markets and product design, which probably don't require you to be a jerk.)

<comment><USER83> Cult leaders get their followers to do all sorts of extraordinary things through systematic abuse. I've read a number of bios of cult survivors and a consistent theme is their incredible dedication and accomplishment.

The interesting question to me is whether there are other ways to do great work. People focus on Jobs and then generalize from their n=1 sample. They also take the visible correlations and turn them into causation. It's ridiculous.

Even if Jobs's behavior towards subordinates is related to his success, it may not be in the way people think. Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right.

If we expand the sample size to n=2 and just add another Jobs company, Pixar, we can see that it's possible to produce an extraordinary amount of great work without anybody running around being a giant asshole all the time.

<comment><USER92> _Perhaps his abuse of engineers was valueless, and that the win for Apple was in him abusing management rivals so they were all afraid of playing the normal turf games. Or maybe his prickishness was only needed to get him back in charge of Apple as chief tastemaker, a CEO who was willing to spend on design until a product was fucking right._

I think you nailed it.

Most executives in most companies get to bike-shed and do little else. Jobs actually made bike-shedding the worst job in the company.

Steve Jobs lived in the spotlight more than almost anyone else in this business, so every assholish thing he did got magnified. What I've heard is that he was very polarized: sometimes very nice, sometimes very mean. (I'm that way, so I can relate.) Apparently he was nice to engineers for the most part; it was the VPs and Directors that he tore to shreds.

Jobs had this whole theory about the VP level being the threshold of responsibility that is a direct affront on the Effort Thermocline (in that VPs get _more_ direct scrutiny, rather than, as is more typical, more power that gives them the ability to hide losses and make themselves invincible).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER94> This lady would be shell-shocked and would need therapy if she ever went into construction. Not just the "boss", anyone that is not an apprentice will be yelling, cursing, and putting down your work on a regular basis.

<comment><USER71> There's no indication that she couldn't endure the silly dress down, just that it was a dick thing to do. Also, lady's been through a ton of shit, including cervical cancer (<https://medium.com/lady-business/67303ff64202>). So yeah, I think she could handle a little yelling. I'd do a little research before I put someone down. Guard your ignorance.

<comment><USER94> So she got a std, went through three procedures to get rid of the cancer, and you think that's a ton of shit? Try telling someone who is going through chemo if three procedures is a ton of shit. GUARD YOUR IGNORANCE.

<comment><USER71> I think the most mature thing to do here is get into a pissing match about whose cancer is worse rather than just agree that it's all probably worse than being yelled at. Let's meet under the bridge to discuss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Ugh, though instead of through. Proofread</comment>


Data Positivism Since World War II (2018) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.columbia.edu/~mj340/HSNS4805_12_Jones.pdf <comment><USER2> To anyone who upvoted this: can you explain what you found interesting about it? I read the entire thing and found it to be rather rambling with no clear point. I'm trying to keep an open mind though, so I'm interested to hear some context or another view that might make it more clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> For me, this was the key paragraph (the paper is basically a history of how the second "culture" mentioned here came to predominate in data science):

"In 2001, the renegade statistician Leo Breiman described 'two cultures' of using statistical models 'to reach conclusions from data.' The first 'assumes that the data are generated by a given stochastic data model.' The second 'uses algorithmic models and treats the data mechanisms as unknown.' This essay sketches the diverse sources of this second algorithmic culture, one stemming more from an engineering culture of predictive utility than from a scientific culture of truth."

As an historian, I was also interested by the part in the conclusion that drew a parallel between recent conceptual shifts among historians of science and data scientists.* Plus I just think it's cool that historians are now starting to really dig into the intellectual history of machine learning in the same way that they study, say, the history of biology or physics.

*This passage: "For at least three decades, professional historians of science have pushed against a vision of science modeled on theoretical physics; we now celebrate the diverse forms of knowledge focused on the careful empirical study of particular things. Exponents of data-focused computational science have a sur- prisingly similar evolution. Just as history of science embraced the study of the particular as it disconnected from a Cold War prioritizing of theory, the data sciences moved beyond the aggregates of mathematical statistics to draw upon granular data sets to characterize particular things—individual people, diseases, films. In a key manifesto celebrating the 'unreasonable effectivenessof data,' three Google researchers argued in terms that echo humanist denun- ciations of reductionist knowledge: "sciences that involve human beings rather than elementary particles have proven more resistant to elegant mathematics." Something else is needed. 'Perhaps when it comes to natural language proces- sing and related fields, we're doomed to complex theories that will never have the elegance of physics equations. But if that's so, we should...embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effective- ness of data.'"

<comment><USER3> That second culture being instrumentalism, which has a very long wikipedia page. I didn't enjoy reading the article, because it's overly vague, inflated with intellectualism, but it's interesting to know that a non-instrumentalist mindset was dominant before WWII, changed by the practical needs of the military. I never thought about it, that there could be a different way to think about data, a more theoretical, less practical-application driven outlook.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumentalism)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Or, how US upper class culture became one of mindless empiracism suffering replication crises and unable to do the imaginative long-term planning that requires confidence in theory.

<comment><USER5> Yeah except ... Market Driven Empiricism won over Soviet marxist theory driven socialist control. Not to forget enormous social progress from civil rights to lgbt rights.

<comment><USER4> Hey, at least you understand I was contrasting with German philosophical traditions. Now Hayek and probably others in the Austrian school were also wary of empiricism, and what we have in the US is neither free market or welfare state, but some zombie compromise which has much of the downsides of both.</comment></comment></comment>


Rate my startup: Product Place Me - <AUTHOR> http://productplaceme.com/

<comment><USER2> I like the color scheme. Just wanted to throw that out there.

Also a nice marketplace ... the question will be how you execute it from now. So far you've got a nice press kit page. I would say your next problems are:

1\. chicken & egg problem 2\. how to contact PR people

You should just focus on solving 1 and 2 before they start. The way to solve #1 is to let people sign up and be CONTACTED (push) when there is a match.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. I wanted to go with something that wasn't blue.

I'm open to any and all ideas on getting the ball rolling-- thanks for that one.</comment></comment>


California tax officials blast Blue Shield in audit - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-blue-shield-audit-20150705-story.html#navtype=outfit

<comment><USER2> TLDR: Blue Shield, a non-profit, have been amassing profit to acquire Care1st which is a for-profit health insurance for 1.2 billion. CA tax auditors check the books for the last 7 years and claim that Blue Shield willfully kept the profits from returning to physicians/customers. Now Blue Shield will lose their tax exempt status.

<comment><USER3> Reading a little deeper into the article, they actually are prohibited from distributing any assets to private persons (shareholders, physicians). Yet even the CEO claimed otherwise at one point.

As a nonprofit they should have taken their surpluses and used them to offer low cost health plans or other social benefits. Instead they just hoarded the cash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "In a scathing audit, state tax officials slammed nonprofit health insurer Blue Shield of California for stockpiling "extraordinarily high surpluses" — more than $4 billion — and for failing to offer more affordable coverage or other public benefits."

</comment><comment><USER5> Did not even know Blue Shield was non-profit.

<comment><USER6> So is Kaiser, which also surprised me.

<comment><USER7> Did you know Kaiser was the first insurance company/medical group? [1] They are the root of America's current problems with insuring everyone, although at the time I don't know if they knew it would come to the mess we have today.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente)

<comment><USER8> Wikipedia says they operate in eight states, so I'm not sure how they're the root of a problem outside those states.

<comment><USER7> They were the first insurance company in the US. They started the inflated insurance practice of policies, group benefits, plans, network rates, etc.. The seed the grew into the national insurance racket we have today.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bram Cohen explains the Fast Extension proposal for BitTorrent  - <AUTHOR> http://forum.bittorrent.org/viewtopic.php?pid=384#p384 <comment><USER2> Given the significant changes made in the fast extension, maybe it should have a cooler name like "BitTorrent 3000".

</comment><comment><USER3> The reason Bram sees next to no comments on the Fast Extension is because it is more or less accepted as a standard already. It does numerous good things, patches several holes in the original spec and is fairly easy to implement with a fallback to the old protocol.</comment>


WiFi Backscatter – Connecting RF-Powered Devices to the Internet (2014) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://iotwifi.cs.washington.edu/ <comment><USER2> Looks like a great proof of concept, but I wonder whether the off-the-shelf WiFi devices will need to support some sort of protocol to enable this to work? I didn't see anything in the video about how they specifically integrate with WiFi, but I'm assuming there will need to be some sort of broadcast and then response read. Either way, very interesting project from both a software and electronics point of view.

<comment><USER3> There's a company in Montreal commercializing this technology, www.wavelite.net, maybe they can answer your questions!

<comment><USER4> This particular work, requires forcing transmission of CTS-to- self to avoid transmission by nearby stations. The effect of the tag on the signal strength/ CSI can be measured at software level. Both enforcing the CT-to-Self and measuring the impact on CSI should be doable in software level and on the off the shelf APs. The downside of this method is low range, and low data rates, at Wavelite, we are leveraging the same backscattering concept, where we use off the shelf routers with no software modification, and using a separate device (a cellphone or laptop or router)as the receiver. Here is a link to a demo video: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wprRR7LhPNwy07JjDlB0Hv804D7...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wprRR7LhPNwy07JjDlB0Hv804D7tLoMW/view)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is interesting. I wonder whether in the domestic apartment, the wifi signal carries most energy density (Watt/volume) or whether there are more fruitful bands to explore, such as

\- 50Hz radiating power cables (especially heavy current like for the oven or water heater)

\- socket transformators (the old ones, not thinking of switching power supplies as your smartphone charger has it)

\- cellular networks (especially the waves emitted by mobile phones in the same room)

In principle, exploiting these signals is like operating solar cells but optimized for other frequencies in the electro-magnetic spectrum.

<comment><USER6> IIRC backscatter works by frequency pulling to a free channel, so for mains frequency the inductor would have to be huge. DARPA was working on some low frequency tech which might be of aid though.

<comment><USER7> Would you kindly post links towards the DARPA work?

<comment><USER6> [https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/AMEBAProposersDay_FINAL.PD...](https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/AMEBAProposersDay_FINAL.PDF)

<comment><USER7> Thanks ganzuul

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Reminded me of this →

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16883447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16883447)

and this

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14611399](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14611399)

</comment><comment><USER8> (2014)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for pointing that out. There is more current work from the same faculty which shows how far the research has come:

Towards Battery-Free HD Video Streaming [http://batteryfreevideo.cs.washington.edu/](http://batteryfreevideo.cs.washington.edu/)

Discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16881946](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16881946)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I thought there was a big part of this article missing. but turns out that the youtube embed isn't over https so the browser blocked it :/

<comment><USER11> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snZWgAZqo2c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snZWgAZqo2c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wouldn't this only work if the receiver has a low strength from the router, and so the backscatter device can use its antenna to "reflect" more signal to the receiver? What happens if the receiver already sees 100% signal strength from the router?

<comment><USER4> The backscatter node is not necessarily used for hopping purpose, since it is ultra low power in operation, it can be used for data transmission where life time is a bottleneck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This isn't backscatter. More like active modulated reflection.

</comment><comment><USER14> The authors of this original paper have been leading this work on backscatter and even have a long range backscatter system that gives ranges of a kilometer. They also have a startup commercializing backscatter.

[https://www.jeevawireless.com/](https://www.jeevawireless.com/)

[http://longrange.cs.washington.edu/](http://longrange.cs.washington.edu/)</comment>


Hackers & Hookers Costume Party - <AUTHOR> http://mhj.tc/post/64882806597/hackers-hookers-costume-party-how-dumb-can-you

<comment><USER2> This is just incredibly dumb and disrespectful. I'm hoping this gets enough attention that people start calling them out.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Official Response: [http://snag.gy/9XOHE.jpg](http://snag.gy/9XOHE.jpg)

<comment><USER3> Can someone provide a translation from Garble to English?

My hope is that the party was a troll -- a bunch of hyper-hormonal "hackers" would show up, not see any "hookers", and stop to re-evaluate their assumptions about the world.

<comment><USER4> I'm paraphrasing a bit, but here's your translation: "Yes, we confirm this is a misogynistic party hosted by assholes. We are upset that people are upset about it, so we're blaming them instead of apologizing properly."</comment></comment></comment>


The legacy of Ada Lovelace (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.1843magazine.com/intelligence/cracking-coder <comment><USER2> Not really that influential in the early years of computing, though. As with Turing, she came to popular attention long after the technology had progressed beyond her point.

(The real history of early computing is more like "OK, we can do arithmetic and logic with gears, relays, or tubes, but we need a cheaper memory device." Memory devices were a long struggle in early computing. Things tried in the early years: lots of tubes (huge and very expensive per bit), paper tape (slow), mechanical wheels (expensive and very slow), rotating wheels of capacitors (small), mercury delay lines (messy, hard to keep in sync, temperature dependent, slow), magnostrictive delay lines (same problems as mercury delay lines but less messy), Williams electrostatic storage CRTs (expensive, but the first real random-access device), magnetic drums (slow), magnetic tape(slow, but big), and finally magnetic core memory (fast, random access, but expensive). Then came RAM, and 128 bits per chip, and 1K per chip, and 4K per chip, and 16K per chip, and 64K per chip...)

</comment><comment><USER3> If you are interested in the subject and also like good comics, there's an amazing book:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thrilling_Adventures_of_Lo...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thrilling_Adventures_of_Lovelace_and_Babbage)

The Introduction:

"Lovelace– The Origin"

[http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the- origin-2/](http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/)

The book also has a lot of real historical information, nicely interwoven in the comics with the footnotes and end-notes, and they are a joy to read too.

<comment><USER4> I've literally just finished reading this today. Wonderful book, beautifully made. Now we just need a broadway opera on the subject.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stephen Wolfram's post about Ada Lovelace:

[http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the- tale-o...](http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada- lovelace/)

Is actually surprisingly substantive, and addresses (among other things) the correspondence between Lovelace and Babbage while she was working on the Appendix.

</comment><comment><USER6> Actually we do have _real_ female computer heroines like Grace Hopper which will do just fine.

<comment><USER7> Lovelace's algorithms were only first published in 1953, so empirically speaking she is very little more than a symbol, how to do these things were already reinvented and deployed in common use by then. Computing would have gotten just fine without her algorithms (but maybe her cheerleading babbage was important). Hopper's invention of the concept of a compiling language is arguably huge and she really was the first to do it and obviously it made a difference.

I would go so far as to say that I suspect the idea of a compiling language cames more easily from a female perspective than a male perspective of the era/discipline.

"Nobody believed that I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> margaret hamilton was another highly influential woman software engineer; she directed the team of software engineers that wrote on-board flight software for the apollo missions.

she was just awarded presidential medal of freedom.

interesting article she wrote on the concept of "development before the fact"

[http://www.htius.com/Articles/Inside_DBTF.htm](http://www.htius.com/Articles/Inside_DBTF.htm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(scientist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_\(scientist\))

</comment><comment><USER9> The Computer History Museum in Mountain View has a great exhibit on her.

[http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/](http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/)

</comment><comment><USER2> (Duplicated, and I didn't submit it twice. Second time in the last week that's happened.)

<comment><USER10> Sorry; it's a bug that shows up occasionally.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051657](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13051657) and marked it off-topic.</comment></comment>