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Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

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Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#221

Post by simondotau »

enos_feedler wrote: post #208
simondotau wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of incredibly smart people think and do incredibly stupid things. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of history, inventor of the telescope, father of Newtonian mechanics, and a key figure of the Enlightenment. Yet he considered that scientific work of lesser importance, spending much of his effort studying the occult, biblical interpretation, and alchemy.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for 44B

I would agree that it was stupid for Musk to buy Twitter at any price.

But 44 billion wasn't an unreasonable price at the time the amount was offered, which was immediately prior to the stock market collapse of early 2022. And most of the TSLA stock he sold to acquire Twitter was sold at near to its market peak. Effectively he swapped some overpriced TSLA for some overpriced TWTR.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#222

Post by mshake2 »

ben_w wrote: post #214
mshake2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the two options are "Pixar exists, but some employees were treated unfairly" or "Pixar never exists", I will choose the first. Whether or not there are other options is not a hypothetical I care about, I am interested in thinking about the morality of ends vs means of this scenario.

You're suggesting an unreal scenario, so the thought experiment isn't going to do much good, IMO. Each employee gets to make that call themselves, "do I want to be treated badly?" Fresh graduates may not realise they are being treated badly, lacking a frame of reference. Immigrants may be on a visa where they have no choice but to put up with it or leave the country. Locals who've been around a bit, who know their di…

It's not an unreal scenario at all. It's entirely plausible that a company falls apart when lacking the specific motivators and pressures that Jobs brought, and therefore never really exists in the first place. What's unreal about that?

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#223

Post by vanviegen »

mshake2 wrote: post #193
afroisalreadyin wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also my impression after reading Isaacson's biography and Creativity, Inc. At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.

Seems like a small price to pay to assemble the most innovative animation studio that would bring joy to millions of people for decades.

”Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#224

Post by citizen-stig »

mshake2 wrote: post #209
endorphine wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it's "a small price to pay" depends on each and every individual that paid the price. I don't think it makes any sense for 1 single person to decide if the price paid was small, simply because they don't know what actual price was paid (in terms of suffering). Also, it sounds to me that's you're assuming that's a necessitated price to pay, which I don't believe is true (but I don't have any examples either).

If the two options are "Pixar exists, but some employees were treated unfairly" or "Pixar never exists", I will choose the first. Whether or not there are other options is not a hypothetical I care about, I am interested in thinking about the morality of ends vs means of this scenario.

It is easy to choose for others, isn’t it?

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#225

Post by breck »

mshake2 wrote: post #193
afroisalreadyin wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also my impression after reading Isaacson's biography and Creativity, Inc. At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.

Seems like a small price to pay to assemble the most innovative animation studio that would bring joy to millions of people for decades.

Amen brother. He was not a "bully". He was a coach. A tough coach. Anyone could have walked away. No one was being forced to work at a top .1% company in the world. If you were there it's because you wanted to be do your best work and be part of the best. You wanted to make the world a better place. You believed in the power of these devices to do good, and to fight evil.

Jobs wasn't out there hurting civilians on the streets. You want to see a real bully, go to Ukraine and see what Putin is doing to civilians.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#227

Post by tsimionescu »

WalterBright wrote: post #187
somenameforme wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pure capitalism", or "war" as Steve Jobs put it in one of his emails, is a race to the bottom in terms of company profits because of countless scenarios like this. I want employee X because he will bring $Y value to me, so I can technically pay anything below $Y for him. But then your company also has similar logic. If we simply aggressively compete then these cost of any employee, who has a skillset where supply Th…

It's not a race to the bottom. It's a race to the point where Supply&Demand curves intersect. P.S. if it was a race to the bottom, consider that only 1.5% of the labor force works at minimum wage.

You completely misunderstood. In an idealized free labor market scenario, the wages of the scarce specialist employees would go up to the point that Apple or Google could barely make a profit. The race to the bottom is on profits, not wages. Just like small businesses typically compete on sales price until they only have a trickle of a profit.

To avoid this, companies use various tricks to fix wages such that they don't have to pay even the highest valued employees more than a fraction of the value they actually bring to the company, and thus can get away with huge profits.

To illustrate this with an extreme scenario, assume that all of Apple's work relied on a single engineer's designs. If Google and Apple were to compete on who can hire that engineer, Apple would be willing to pay almost all the way up to their entire revenue to that single engineer, as in this contrived scenario, if they lose him, they lose all of their revenue. So, Google and Apple would be racing to the bottom, offering ever more extravagant salaries to this magical engineer until they couldn't pay him and make a profit at all anymore.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#229

Post by hawski »

mshake2 wrote: post #219
ggm wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your words speak for themselves. No distortion needed. The question stands.

If the question is "Is the limited bullying and serfdom of 40 people (the original Pixar team size) justified by bringing joy to billions of people (more accurate than millions) for decades (and likely a lot longer)?" Then I answer yes. I think that's a small price to pay.

I think you overestimate net joy brought by Pixar. Some people watched a movie and were entertained for the duration of the movie, some were moved by it and it lead to a couple of hours worth of joy more. Some did not understand the message in the movie and just liked colorful pictures. Yes, there were a couple of movies, but not like tens or hundreds. In the end those movies would not have the success they enjoyed without powerful marketing and distribution machine. Those movies were also used as a vehicle to sell overpriced toys.

I prefer not to mythologize (very good) products of billion dollar companies too much, even if they could stand on their own.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#230

Post by pcwalton »

gghffguhvc wrote: post #127
bluehorseray wrote: post #5

It would be pretty cool to have Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin fighting over you as an employee, wonder who it was.

Probably Dave Hyatt.

For what it's worth, the moment I read the letter I also pretty much assumed it had to be Dave Hyatt. (Source: worked at Mozilla from 2009 to 2020; Silicon Valley browser dev is a fairly small world.)
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