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27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

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Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#101

Post by FullyFunctional »

signatoremo wrote: post #19
smackeyacky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though. I feel like he eventually got smart but he got very, very lucky first. We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO

> but he got very, very lucky first. Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes. Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iP…

Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#103

Post by baazaa »

p-e-w wrote: post #7
anonreeeeplor wrote: post #3

Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve. The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist. This was my experience in (large co). I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 pe…

Another reason why today's corporations love teams and flat hierarchies is because they turn "responsibility" into a post-modern concept that fluidly adapts to mean everything or nothing. One day the boss is the boss, the next day nobody is accountable for anything, and decisions are really just the magical synergy of team dynamics.

The notion of 'culture' does this. It's a meaningless term. No-one ever says 'we fixed the business culture but the company still isn't delivering', because the culture is always inferred from the results. So as a concept it has no explanatory power whatsoever; it only obfuscates, providing a convenient cover for incompetent managers who can say dumb things like 'culture is hard to change'.

I work in the public service where accountability has been transformed from a concrete thing (who is responsible for this?) to a 'value'. So the org chart is set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, the processes are set-up so no-one is accountable for anything, but if you point this out managers will retort that it doesn't matter, because what's really important is that everyone personally commits to the value of accountability which in turn will create a culture of accountability. They've replaced performance reviews with workers writing about how much they embrace accountability (of course the absence of genuine reviews helps ensure no-one can be held accountable for poor performance).

I'm increasingly of the opinion that any manager who talks at length about culture is a moron. It's a fuzzy catch-all that can be invoked to explain anything without understanding anything, of great value to the modern manager who typically understands nothing.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#104

Post by theaussiestew »

anonreeeeplor wrote: post #93
whatshisface wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes sense until you consider that the world (and any team) is "sprinkled" with a lot more narcissists and know-it-alls than geniuses!

I personally have known several people. They are not narcissists. They are literally 100x talent. One of them built out a half dozen hit games, doing all the art and programming for one employer which represented half the companies profit. Then he left, started a 30 person company, got frustrated, quit and built another game entirely from scratch doing all the art direction and sold millions then retired. One person.

Care to share this person's personal website?

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#105

Post by pintxo »

magicalhippo wrote: post #65
mettamage wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if you ask them about this discrepancy and how they view it. Personally, I find it weird, but wonder how they'd justify the 1.5x expense.

Guess it's different over in the states, but my boss said the cost to the company is roughly 2x the salary. This includes taxes (not income tax), pension and such. So 1.5x would be a steal in comparison.

2x sounds like it includes non-billable employees like assistants, HR, accounting etc. A 100% overhead is probably quite common.

Pure employee costs are more in the 1.2 - 1.3x range (Europe). That is 30% on top of the gross salary for employer taxes, health insurances etc.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#106

Post by jen20 »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #101
signatoremo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but he got very, very lucky first. Which period are you referring to? Because he got fired from a company he founded, that’s the ultimate humiliation. It’s hard press to say Jobs was given free passes. Compaq piggybacked on IBM’s success. Not much of vision there, and ended up being swallowed by HP. Apple is the most valuable company today, in large part thanks to Jobs’s vision and execution (iMac, iPod, iPhone, iP…

Apple very nearly catered. Nobody would be quoting Job had that happened (NeXT was dying too which is why Apple could buy it). There is a crazy amount of survivor bias here.

The quote could equally have been about Pixar, another wildly successful company of which he was the CEO.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#107

Post by smackeyacky »

kragen wrote: post #18
smackeyacky wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody else got to fail as much as Jobs and kept getting free passes though. I feel like he eventually got smart but he got very, very lucky first. We could all be Jobs level if we had the sandboxes he was gifted in the 1980s Rod Canion from Compaq was always a better CEO

i am not a fan of jobs but i don't see how you can look at his career and see a string of failures. breakout, apple ii, lisa, macintosh, laserwriter, next, pixar, ipod, iphone, ipad. he was an asshole who cheated and abused other people to manipulate them into realizing his visions, but he manipulated them successfully . astoundingly successfully actually

In the 80s it was an astounding success with the Apple ][ then it all went to shit funded by that machine. He didn’t invent the LaserWriter.

Jobs was great at seeing the potential of tech but he was a terrible CEO until NeXT fell to pieces and he learned some humility to go with that famous reality distortion field.

Canion is so underrated. Unlike Jobs he simply kicked IBM in the nuts and redefined the entire computer business.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#108

Post by rightbyte »

chii wrote: post #47
quickthrower2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I admit I was sometimes carried. In creative work this is bound to happen. All people firing on all cylinders and coordinating well is a rarity in creative work. It might work in a kitchen or sailing boat though.

There's several types of "carrying". You have the type where one person is the visionary, is capable, but doesn't have the patience to do the grunt work and only wants to do the most prestigous or "important" shit. They do it well, but expect the rest of the team to do the thankless stuff. This is the type i hate, and i rather not have them. The other type is someone who is self-less, and just does the work regardles…

Ye. "Super stars" are often just people that stampede the other devs. Like, working together is so inefficient in bigger teams that someone let loose will appear very productive, but he is slowing down everyone else.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#109

Post by stuckkeys »

fxtentacle wrote: post #23
anonreeeeplor wrote: post #3

Corporations, at their root, are an arbitrage on the fact that other corporations follow the bell curve. The entire goal of salaries and “teams” in my experience, is to ENSURE that high performers get diluted and averaged in with mediocre performers so the company can pretend the high performers don’t exist. This was my experience in (large co). I have seen situations where a single IC is dragging a division of 30 pe…

That's why I incorporated a tiny company. Sometimes, companies will interview me and then when I tell them my salary expectations, they usually pretend to be offended and refuse by arguing that it would destroy the salary structure inside their company. But that doesn't really mean anything because many of them are happy to book my consulting company at 1.5x that salary afterwards.

I am interested also. Would love to tune in and learn. I am desperate.

Re: 27 years ago, Steve Jobs said the best employees focus on content, not process

#110

Post by tomjakubowski »

tucnak wrote: post #102
aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Americans need to stop making up pathetic "laws" on the go. Americans? “Derek Price, who was a British physicist [...]”

[flagged]

we fought a whole war over this you know
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