181–190 of 314 posts
Nothing more need be said, really. This is the very definition of character and integrity.
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Jobs is a designer. Using existing pieces to create a good product. While this is an important skill to have, it is nothing I would idolize someone for, moreover, Jobs only was capable of focussing on design because countless Wozniaks did the plumbing (and really awesome hacking). This is _division of labor_. You just cannot build products alone. While Jobs did his job, he certainly was arrogant and a few times too o…
Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point. And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products? We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they,…
The willingness of members of our profession to believe and repeat this bit of absolute nonsense is one of the primary reasons our industry is such a shitshow.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point. And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products? We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they,…
> But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness. Oh please. There are 7 billion people in this world. This hero worship has got to stop. By your own admission he was a complete arsehole. His 'vision' was who he could exploit. Look at how he treated Woz. That's not the actions of a visionary, that's the actions of an egomaniac who discovered a route to power.
I don't think I worship Steve Jobs, nor do I think he's a hero. But I don't think anybody can second guess what he accomplished in his many careers. If it had just been the Apple, we could have ascribed that to Woz. Or the Macintosh, we could have suggested Raskin was the key, Or Next was all about Avie Tevanian, or Pixar was all about Lassiter, Or iMacs all about Jonie Ives, or iPod all about Fadell, or Apple 2.0s resurgence all about Tim Cook, iOS was all about Forstall, or the iPhone/iPad...
But, there's a common thread to all of those creations - and yes, behind all of them were massive collaborations of incredibly talented people, lead by inordinately brilliant designers, engineers, and architects - but in the center, unreasonably demanding and pushing, was Jobs.
That's all I think we need to give him credit for, but no less.
For those who haven't yet, I'd highly recommend reading "Steve Jobs", the biography by Isaacson. It portrays pretty much all of these events like Woz describes them, and is a very complete portrait of Jobs. Woz' status at HP as referenced isn't really covered, but his actions during the Apple I and II launches are pretty complete. EDIT: I'd like to point out that this book covers everything, up to Jobs death, and is…
folklore.org, a site maintained by Andy Herzfeld, also has some good tidbits about the rest of the Apple and specifically the Mac team.
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Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point. And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products? We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they,…
> But Geniuses/Leaders - they come but once in a lifetime, and we admire them for that uniqueness. Oh please. There are 7 billion people in this world. This hero worship has got to stop. By your own admission he was a complete arsehole. His 'vision' was who he could exploit. Look at how he treated Woz. That's not the actions of a visionary, that's the actions of an egomaniac who discovered a route to power.
To me at least, what makes Jobs most interesting is what he achieved despite being an asshole and how that played out. He undoubtedly was a thoroughly unpleasant individual and people who worked with him will queue around the block to tell you that, but he also, coming from a pretty low baseline, turned Apple into the largest company in the world by getting many of those same people who will tell you he's an asshole to build genuinely great products.
The most interesting people are rarely one thing or the other - that's what makes them interesting.
I thought Ashton Kutcher was robbed of a career defining performance by a director and a writer who didn't give a shit about anything.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ashton-kutcher-steve-j...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point. And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products? We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they,…
> Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another. The willingness of members of our profession to believe and repeat this bit of absolute nonsense is one of the primary reasons our industry is such a shitshow.
A Network engineer who is a 'Hero' and can never go on vacation, is worth much less than a network engineer who has built an environment that any random Taos CCIE can come in and manage with a couple days cross training.
Ironically, from that perspective, the more fungible [1] a network engineer is, the more valuable they are.
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> Sadly (speaking as one) - technologists are for the most part fungible, you can swap out one for another. The willingness of members of our profession to believe and repeat this bit of absolute nonsense is one of the primary reasons our industry is such a shitshow.
There is always room for differentiation at the top, either as an architect, or leader - but (speaking of my own profession) - I've never actually seen an environment where any particularly network engineer wasn't replaceable. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a first class network engineer is that they leave behind an environment that is well documented, designed to industry standards, and is pretty much resistant ou…
The fact that you see such a stark difference between a first-class network engineer and the work of lesser mortals is proof that they aren't fungible.
I'll also point out that you have, perhaps unintentionally, changed the topic from design to maintenance. We're talking about product creation. Some people like to pretend that all the design happens in the head of the person with "designer" on their business cards. But anybody who has spent time in a team making great products knows that everybody is involved in design. It can't be otherwise, because design happens at the intersection of desire and possibility, and the technologists know the possibility space more deeply than anybody else can.
That a well-designed network can be easily maintained is demonstrates the great design skills of that first-class network engineer. That there are long periods in a network's life when design skills aren't needed isn't proof that technologists are interchangeable; it's proof that they aren't.
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The short version is that Siracusa recommends "Infinite Loop" by Michael Malone as the best single source for Apple history prior to the return of Jobs, and he says that the post-return material in the Isaacson book (ie, everything unique that it offers) is poor and/or limited.
Siracusa and short version are not things that go together and long may this last. The only tolerable thing about my daily commute is listening to him discuss his pet peeves. File systems, TVs, programming languages, the Minecraft install process (great episode) ebook formatting etc. He must be interesting to know as there are very few things he appears just accept and use without pondering improvements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Jobs is a designer. Using existing pieces to create a good product. While this is an important skill to have, it is nothing I would idolize someone for, moreover, Jobs only was capable of focussing on design because countless Wozniaks did the plumbing (and really awesome hacking). This is _division of labor_. You just cannot build products alone. While Jobs did his job, he certainly was arrogant and a few times too o…
Anybody who worked anywhere near Jobs will observe he was one of the biggest assholes around. I know quite a few people who worked in, or near his sphere - and they are all pretty consistent on this point. And yet, who else in modern history has driven as many companies to such such success, and lead the creation of so many great products? We had a ton of the NeXT machines at my university, and I still believe they,…
As somebody who was an early NeRD (NeXT Registered Developer) and helped start one of the NeXT User Groups, I don't think I would call NeXT a successful company. It created some great technology for its day, but it was an ongoing commercial failure. Nobody would buy the hardware, so they killed that early. By the end they were killing off the OS and going in the direction of being a set of Windows development tools.
It was only that Apple wanted Jobs that saved them, that and Steve's enormous ego, which demanded he bring NeXT along. At the time, Apple could have bought Be and I expect it would have gone as well or better. Remember, it took them 3 years to get a new OS out the door, which is a long time in market-land. And really, the NeXT stuff didn't make a giant difference; it wasn't until the iPod that Apple really took off.
It's worth noting that Steve Jobs's major skill, aside from yelling at people until they designed something that he liked, was marketing. Jobs was incredibly good at selling himself. When weighing his "genius", I think it's worth looking at the extent to which his public image has been shaped by his own skill in self-promotion, and the fact that his company made something that a lot of people directly use and love.