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Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

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Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#351

Post by ineedasername »

onethought wrote: post #136
ineedasername wrote: post #107

>”So a compromise would be to continue with the offer we have made (to [REDACTED]) but not to make offers to any of the others unless they get permission from Apple.”* This is just so absolutely shitty behavior. It’s bamazing they were willing to talk about it so openly in email format. You get to be so great at your job only to risk being blackballed by hush hush non compete handshake agreements? Unions don’t go nea…

I mean, you took it out of context the line before said: I don’t think we should change our hiring policy based on this. The line after said: let’s discuss before you make other offers.

I think the context does not support your response. Because while they may have stated that it shouldn’t change their hiring practices, the rest of the conversation fully indicates that it did or would in fact be a consideration in their future hiring practices. So what they stated as far as hiring practice policy does not match up to what they said their practices might be going forward. There is a mismatch here. I of course do not know from what is presented how that actually played out. Whether or not the hiring practice policy of not changing the policy is what prevailed, or whether or not they did in fact render hiring decisions on the basis of the implied noncompete agreements that may have been made.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#352

Post by Firmwarrior »

simonh wrote: post #302
tsimionescu wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, p…

Man, I hope some six-figure Bolsheviks read this comment and think about it. It's really not as simple as people like to think to try and pay you workers millions

Even Facebook has had to lay people off when the market demand for $500k genius coders cooled a little recently

FAANG salaries and RSUs are pretty much the perfect compromise between labor and capital IMO. The only way I'd change things would be to move toward fewer hours per week, possibly with widespread fixed-bid consulting and health benefits not tied to employment

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#353

Post by majani »

swyx wrote: post #25

> Basically, [Steve] said "if you hire a single one of these people that means war". what realistically could steve jobs have done here? its not like he had any legal power to prevent his guys going over, and if he wanted to poach from google just to spite google it’d just be a stupidly expensive affair

It's trivial for a big corporation to kick off a trivial lawsuit to bury you in legal fees

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#354

Post by knuckleheadsmif »

I had the pleasure of having dinner around 1990, with my team of 6 from Apple, at Steve’s Woodside residence with Steve trying to recruit us into coming to NeXT. One of the team alerted Apple lawyers and Steve started the evening reading a non-poaching letter from Apple’s lawyers to Steve.

That out of the way the dinner was mainly an evening of Steve asking a lot about Apple as it became obvious he still was emotionally invested in the company.

None of us went to NeXT.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#355

Post by _zzaw »

gghffguhvc wrote: post #157
_zzaw wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyatt never worked for Google—he's still at Apple as far as I know. Might be that Google ultimately retracted their offer, but knowing Steve, Hyatt would probably not have remained at Apple no matter what happened. I don't have any inside info here, but I'd be willing to bet Darin Adler was one of those other REDACTEDs. He was an early Safari guy, as well as tech lead for Mac OS 7 and worked at General Magic, so Goog…

I still think the main one was Dave Hyatt. Ben Goodger (referenced in those emails) worked on V0.6 of Firefox that Dave started. Ben was founding team at chrome just before these emails (see his LinkedIn for dates). Dave was instrumental on WebKit for Safiri. Chrome picked WebKit too. Dave was also that good and was well known to Steve. I also think parakey was the startup referenced as his other option (Blake Ross a…

Hyatt was honestly the first name that came to my mind, and in fact I had to look him up to be certain that he didn't move to Google. I guess I assumed that if it was Hyatt, he'd no longer be at Apple, since it sounded like the person in question wanted to leave, but who knows—maybe Apple got him to stay?

Steve Jobs was obsessed with loyalty, so I figured that anyone applying for a job at Google would be dead to Apple as long as Jobs was there. Hyatt was one of these guys who even Jobs would probably have hesitated to blacklist, though, so maybe it really is him they're referring to here, and he ultimately remained with Apple.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#356

Post by advisedwang »

0xbadc0de5 wrote: post #278

Dear management: By the time an employee is interviewing and receiving offers, it's almost always too late. Whatever issue(s) led to their pursuit of other opportunities probably won't be resolved by simply matching an offer and will certainly be exacerbated by trying to torpedo their efforts.

It wasn't really about that one employee (or even the whole team). That is one leader saying to another "don't do this or we'll be force to actually compete on how much we pay employees" (ie "go to war")

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#357

Post by tabtab »

afroisalreadyin wrote: post #181
causi wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I remember Isaacson's interview of Woznick, and The Woz stated he felt Jobs could have done most of the great things he did without being a jerk. In other words, the jerkiness appeared to be a quirk and not a business tool from Woz's perspective. But then again, the Woz often didn't understand the marketing side of things, according to some of his critics.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#358

Post by appel »

rubyfan wrote: post #46

Reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George Steinbrenner (Yankees) and Jonny Tyler (Tyler Chicken) get into an argument over George Costanza and start negotiating a deal. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Tspdoouns

Completely unrelated but that YouTube ID is (mildly) interesting in that it's almost pronounceable.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#359

Post by andrewflnr »

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…

"Tradeoff" implies you have to choose, like there's no way to have power without being a jerk. This is demonstrably false. It's just hard.

Quit making excuses for "brilliant assholes" and start demanding better.

Re: Sergey Brin: Irate Call from Steve Jobs

#360

Post by saghm »

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…

> 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

What does this even mean in the context of the story from TFA? The "impediment" was one of his employees getting a competing job offer, and the "irreparable damage" was...having to actually pay someone as much as they'd be valued elsewhere? That's not a reasonable way to behave, and masking it in impersonal language doesn't somehow make it more reasonable.

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