Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bitwize 3447 days ago
I see Musk as more of a Bushnell/Woz hybrid. He knows his shit technically, which is why good people want to work with him. Jobs knew how to delegate knowing his technical shit to others though.
3 comments

Steve Jobs' contributions came from from his leadership and marketing chops, but he also had pretty good technical knowledge for a CEO. I mean, he got his start designing circuit boards at Atari.
Jobs was a true polymath. He knew enough about hardware design, software engineering, typography, music, pretty much any relevant subject that he could work well with experts in those fields and synthesise their efforts together into whole products.
Well, he got his start passing of Woz's circuit board designs as his own at Atari. Even he conceded that.

I do think his technical knowledge was probably higher than most give him credit for, however.

A lot of his best insights required technical knowledge - adopting Ethernet, SCSI, Mach kernels, BSD userland, object oriented programming, Postscript, TrueType fonts, WebObjects (and Java server, while ditching it on the client), html5 (over Flash)
Were they his personally formed insights or did they come from talking to the right people?
Even then it would be 'known unknowns' to him as compared 'unknown unknowns'. It is big deal considering we just saw Marissa Meyer who was at center of creation of a web scale system proved out of depth at slightly different web scale system.
Jobs wrote the Atari game brick breaker. So like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk he does have a technical background.
Not really. He was contracted to do it, but subbed all the actual engineering work to Wozniak then essentially lied to Wozniak about how much that work was worth.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...

My mistake. I was under the impression it was another game, asteroids.
As the story goes, Wozniak was actually the primary (or maybe even sole?) implementer on that project:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...

Pretty sure Woz wrote Breakout, with er ... "assistance" from Jobs.