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Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

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Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#301

Post by jcampbell1 »

causi wrote: post #155
pm90 wrote: post #57

I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?

Is he just a bully? From everything I've read in the last twenty years, there was not one single facet of Steve Jobs' life in which he was not a bully.

He was willing to be a bully anytime it benefited Apple’s customers. He seemed quite predictable but unusual that he could care about Apple and it’s customers and be completely indifferent to the feelings of the people in his immediate vicinity.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#302

Post by simonh »

tsimionescu wrote: post #227
WalterBright wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

The thing is the idealised situation never actually exists. Let's say a developer builds a product that brings in $10m a year. How much do you pay them? You need to factor in that actually 10 designers, artists and product managers also contributed to the design and functioning of the product. Then there's the 5 people in IT support, 2 in QA, 3 in customer support, the office staff and security, the finance people, payroll, marketing, distribution, etc. Maybe it actually costs $7m a year to run all of that.

So you pay them $3m a year? Now there's zero profit, so nothing to invest in expanding the team, improving your services services, hiring more developers, growing the businesses, funding new projects for that developer and all the other employees to work on. Oh, by the way you owe $20m to your investors that put down the capital to get the business off the ground in the first place. How are you going to pay them back? Also, maybe you could have hired another developer and they might have done just as good a job, which is also true of everyone else in the business.

Finally, if you do up the pay of the developer say $1m a year, what happens if the product gets eclipsed in the market or the developer moves on to another product nowhere near as profitable. Now they're working on something bringing in a lot less, but they're still costing you a million a year.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#303

Post by rsfern »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #291
pm90 wrote: post #57

I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?

A bully? It's business. If he can get Google to not hire people just by being tough on the phone that's a win. Costs almost nothing. My father once worked at an electronics contracting firm. One of his co-workers who was in charge of purchasing parts was masterful while on the phone with suppliers. He drove a very hard bargain and often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices. Bullying or business?

> drove a very hard bargain

Business

> often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices

Bully

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#304

Post by djbebs »

citizen-stig wrote: post #224
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.

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

The employees made that choice for themselves when they chose to start working for Pixar.

They make that choice everyday they chose to keep working for it.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#306

Post by belter »

pm90 wrote: post #57

I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?

"16 Examples Of Steve Jobs Being A Huge Jerk" - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?inte...

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#307

Post by justinjlynn »

metaphor wrote: post #292
andrewflnr wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a jerk is always bad. The only difference is that people who aren't "paying the piper" don't get away with it for very long before someone throws them out. Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean it's ok.

Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole. [1] https://web.archiv…

I mean, the argument is essentially one of "sure, he may have been completely awful, but it all worked out so, if we assume that's the reason things worked out (ignoring the myriad other factors and pure luck) then we suppose that, however they had acted or the damage caused, they were right to do so. The ends justify the means - even if we can't tell for sure or not that by those awful means we arrived at those desired ends."

Frankly, it's ex post facto justification by false entailment. I don't buy it.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#308

Post by breck »

jjeaff wrote: post #282
breck wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

You talk as if Jobs brought us innovation that never would have arrived without him. In reality, he was able to get it to us a year or two earlier and maybe with a little more style. Being slightly earlier to market and with a little more style is what made him a business juggernaut. But I don't think being first really means all that much when it comes to an ends justifying the means conversation. Given the choice,…

> You talk as if Jobs brought us innovation that never would have arrived without him. In reality, he was able to get it to us a year or two earlier and maybe with a little more style.

I think this is a reasonable perspective, and you could be right, but you could be wrong too. We don't get to run an experiment on this one. There are obviously huge things Jobs did that I take issue with (I hate the copyright and DRM crap in Apple Music, for example, and the whole patent war with Samsung was terrible), but at the same time, he grew up decades before me and I got the privilege of living in a world he helped created. Who knows where the world would be without him pushing it.

> Given the choice, I'll take the product not made under duress, even if I have to wait a bit longer.

I think we may be able to get to a world where we can have that, but not in today's world, IMO. There's still far too much evil and not enough infra for truth, that if the good people don't push much harder than the bad and indifferent, we may never get there. Of course, not something we can test, just have to discuss and place our bets.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#309

Post by josefx »

ilyt wrote: post #285
1123581321 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is far from the worst. It typically rates behind European nations and ahead of much of Asia-Pacific, Africa and the Middle East. Here’s one recent comprehensive labor report, for example. https://files.mutualcdn.com/ituc/files/2022-ITUC-Rights-Inde...

"We have better protection laws that some regimes and 3rd world countries!"

Fine print: Said regimes may or may not have been the result of us sending military and weapons to kill any and all possible human rights movements and keep slave labor going.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#310

Post by fifilura »

DonHopkins wrote: post #147
neffo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is sort of interesting is this thread (sort of) suggests they might have been looking at the Mozilla renderer at the same time as the Webkit one. I wonder if the licensing (MPL?) would have allowed that fork to happen. That everyone ended up going with Webkit is a bit sad imo.

Mozilla was in no shape to run on mobile or embedded devices (and still isn't afaik), while WebKit ran quite nicely on mobile and embedded devices, thank you. And as we all know, Android is as important to Google as iOS is to Apple. So there was really no chance of either of them (or any other of the many companies interested in mobile and embedded devices, like TomTom for example) ever building on top of Mozilla/xul…

The irony here is that the person was in many parts responsible for creating XPCOM at Mozilla which was a major reason for the bloat, jumped ship to Apple/Safari at the early stages.

I remember a rigorous article where he dissected Mozilla vs Webkit and explained by why the latter was superior (= less abstractions and no XPCOM). I wouldn't be surprised if that article was the basis for the decision to not go with Mozilla at Apple.

Nothing to be held against him for sure, if you have been in this business for this long you are sure to have created stuff that you realize was not optimal. Particularly over-abstractions.

Also I would not be surprised if it is that person they are talking about in the mail conversation.

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