[scarface74]

There is a maxim that the only things that matter in business are results and relationships. If you have those two things going for you, you can get anything done.

I am a developer, but it surprises me how many developers don’t get that. Geeks canonize Woz and say that he was the success behind Apple, but geeks are a dime a dozen. We can look at what Jobs accomplished without Woz and what Woz accomplished without Jobs as a case study.

Jobs got results because of his relationships. He could get anyone on the phone and get things done. No one else could have picked up the phone and called Gates and made the deal he made in 1997 that saved Apple (not the money, the promise of continuing to support Office on Mac). He was able to negotiate with the music industry in 2003 and the mobile carriers before the iPhone came out and completely usurp their power.

Most of the targets of Jobs wrath weren’t afraid of losing their jobs and stuck around because they didn’t have an alternative. Good developers in the right market can get a job before their last check clears.

They stayed because they believed in the vision. If I had a choice between working on the original iPhone and writing yet another software as a service CRUD app, I know which one I would have chosen.

But when the dust settled, I would have put that on my resume and wrote my own ticket to work almost anywhere.

[hhas01]

"I am a developer, but it surprises me how many developers don’t get that."

99% of software developers are the absolute dumbest smart people you could ever meet. On the plus side: this makes them very simply to beat, even without any sooper l33t c0ding ski11z. Just learn to do all the stuff that they don’t think matters—like talking to and listening to and learning from your users—and you’ll easily wipe the floor with the lot of them.

[scarface74]

Even worse is when I see developers toil year after year at a company, working late hours for 2-3% raises wondering why their hard work is not being appreciated and not only getting paid below market value but seeing new employees coming in making more than them (been there done that).

They ask me why would “their” company do that to them. My simple answer - because you let them. It took me awhile to get it, but for the last 10 years, I’ve changed jobs 5 times for greener pastures, compared to keeping one job for 9 years previously.

I’ve had to develop interpersonal skills to punch above my weight to get things done at a level that my title alone wouldn’t have accomplished.

[gscott]

If you keep a job for a long time at one company, using the same platform, techniques, and not progressing with your skills you really will be stuck there forever and will be locked in forever. I found that to be the case for me.

[scarface74]

Yes, you become an “Expert Beginner”.

https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...

[cma]

> We can look at what Jobs accomplished without Woz and what Woz accomplished without Jobs as a case study.

Not really fair, Wozniak was in a plane crash resulting in head injuries and 5 weeks of "anterograde amnesia" (inability to create new memories). It is possible he was never the same as an engineer.

[scarface74]

It's not meant to disparage his talent. All of the stories of Woz before and after his crash seem to make it obvious that he didn't have the desire to be great businessman, he just wanted to be a geek. I doubt that he ever had to skill to be a great businessman.

Again that's not meant to be an insult either. I personally have no desire to start a business or even be in management. Software development provides me with the comfortable balance of not disliking what I do, it's not stressful and it pays me well enough to be more than just comfortable.

[captain_perl]

That's my theory about Woz also.

He was as brilliant as the Sun before the crash, and not only designed optimal hardware, but also wrote Apple BASIC and designed the floppy controller software. Sounds easy today, but his work was all pre-Internet.

Around that time in Silicon Valley, there were several private plane accidents. A lot of flush engineers bought planes and treated them like snowmobiles. Nowadays the professional safety culture extends down to even private flights.

[scarface74]

Just to clarify, Woz wrote Integer Basic for the really early Apples. Microsoft wrote AppleSoft Basic.

[cmacaskill]

Doug Leone, the head of Sequoia, said during a Stanford keynote "if your first two engineers aren't A+, you're screwed, you will never recover."

Steve used to say that great engineers are 10x the average and there are a few who are 100x and crucial to hard projects. He did everything he could to find them.

[scarface74]

And there is an opposite anecdote. Twitter was horribly architected early on, wasn't scalable. and was always displaying the "fail whale". They got users, kept the VC's happy, made money and rearchitected the entire system.

You'd be surprised how many companies survived without great engineers but with great salesmen.

[philwelch]

And that's partly why Twitter is a 34 billion dollar company while Facebook, their primary competitor, is a 619 billion dollar company.

[ppseafield]

Facebook wasn't exactly a performance king either. Their PHP codebase became a liability, leading them to create the HipHop compiler, HipHopVM, Hack, and other tools specifically for dealing with PHP and MySQL. Internally their first chat client had performance problems as well, leading them to rewrite it. They also no only had performance problems (and battery drain issues!) with their mobile interfaces, but also in controlled experiments intentionally broke pages to test their users' resulting behavior.

So I don't think I would ascribe the valuation difference to beginning engineering chops.

[SatvikBeri]

According to Adam D'Angelo (first CTO of Facebook, obviously a biased source) Facebook was able to implement features much faster than MySpace, which was a major competitive advantage for them. "I remember talking to an engineer who worked at MySpace who told me about how they had this huge list of regular expressions to try to prevent cross site scripting attacks, and whenever there was a new one they would make a new regex to try to fix it, rather than sanitizing html the right way."[0]

[0]: https://www.quora.com/Does-a-good-engineering-culture-matter...

[philwelch]

Facebook didn't crash all the time when people tried to use it, which was a major competitive advantage over Friendster, at the time.

[samstave]

Friendster was too consumed with being led by a womanizing partier IIRC, which set the tone there... (this is anecdotal hear-say-info, so I could be wrong)... but as I recall it, they were too concerned with partying at the time to pay attention to what they were on the precipice of.

[gowld]

Facebook engineering started as hacks, but they aggressively recruited top talent as soon as it got funding to grow past Zuck.

[scarface74]

And it still ranks #174 in market cap. In relationship to Facebook it may not be successful, but in relationship to all of the startups by people who had "great ideas" but could not execute on the business side, it's doing well.

[philwelch]

If it wasn’t for a particular reality-show-star-turned-President using it as his primary means of communication, Twitter would be dying by now.

[oblio]

I highly doubt that. It's way more likely that Facebook's business model is better.

[philwelch]

It’s easier to change your business model when you’re not drowning in technical debt.

[cwyers]

I wouldn't say that Twitter survived; I would say that whether or not Twitter survives is right censored.

[djur]

I don't understand what "right censored" means.

[wpietri]

This is a weird thing to say given the number of relationships he ruined by being an abusive jerk. (I also think the "good developers can get a job" line ignores the way people get psychologically bound to abusive situations. It's like the "she can leave any time" response to domestic abuse.)

Look, for example, at the way Jobs cheated Wozniak out of money early on. [1] That's not what I'd call "good at relationships". I'd call that manipulative and exploitative.

[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar...

[scarface74]

Why is it weird? Knowing how to build relationships with and inspire people that matter and bulldoze your way over people when needed may not be moral but it can be effective. I am not arguing whether he was a saint.

"If you expect the world to be fair with you because you are fair with them, it is like expecting a lion not to eat you because you did not eat the lion"

[kashyapc]

I see where you're coming from. That said, I definitely don't think Jobs "needed" to stab Wozniak in the back there. He still could have shown better moral scruples and be effective. They're not mutually exclusive.

More people who blindly worship Jobs should learn about these back stabbings as well.

[JudasGoat]

It seems from this discussion that the skills needed to be successful in buisness inovation are in opposition to those I find needed to have a sucessful and happy life. Honesty, compassion, life/work balance. Is there a good exception to that rule?

[hhas01]

This is business.

Know your worth, do not undersell yourself, learn by others’ errors, and always—ALWAYS—get it in Writing.

[eropple]

"This is business" excuses shitty behavior.

If the most important thing to you is not to be decent to others, you live poorly.

[scarface74]

Don’t take it as condoning the action of Jobs, but accepting how the world is and act accordingly when you’re on the other side.

Knowing that the lion is not going to be fair to you, means you need to run from the lion and not sit there and get eaten.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

There are plenty of businesspeople in my circle at least who are decent people who wouldn't dream of doing this to a partner or even an employee. As an owner of a small business I include myself in that group. Being an asshole isn't "business" - it's just being an asshole.

[sumedh]

> This is business.

I dont think Woz got that memo, he assumed his friend would not betray him.

[wpietri]

I just refuse to call manipulation and abuse of other people "building relationships". That is a positive term for a behavior that is decidedly not positive. We don't say, "Gosh, Hitler was just super at building relationships with the German people." And no matter how tightly a domestic abuse victim is psychologically bound to the abuser, we don't compliment the abuser on relationship-building skills. It's like saying Hannibal Lecter was great at sourcing cuts of meat. It's technically true in some sense but puts a positive spin on a behavior that's harmful to others.

[handsomechad]

But Hitler truly was great at building relationships with the German people. Depending on the context you can interpret that as spin but to me it is also a factual statement, to rise to power from relative obscurity at that level requires being excellent at the art of social skills / climbing, aka politics.

[wpietri]

It is technically true in some sense, but only if you use a very broad meaning for "relationship". In particular, Hitler and the German people were in a parasocial relationship, not any real human connection. I think it's also incorrect in anything other than a technical sense to call it a relationship when it's rooted in manipulation and deception.

[scarface74]

And isn't that to some degree how all political leaders work?

[lern_too_spel]

Not only that, but look at the way he bullied other Silicon Valley companies into enteringing no-poach agreements with his companies (threatening some with IP litigation), depressing software engineer wages for years.

[scarface74]

I’m definitely not condoning the no poach agreements, but he wasn’t bullying poor helpless startups - the other companies were Adobe, Google, and Intel. Only Adobe could have been considered at a financial disadvantage to the other three and even they could have gone nuclear and threatened to stop producing software for Apple and put them at a disadvantage.

The smoking gun email came out in 2007. Google was actually a larger company back then. Apple was in no position to bully Google.

[lern_too_spel]

You've left out quite a few companies from your list that joined the agreement and also forgetting companies he threatened that didn't join, like Palm. What he did was evil and reduced overall innovation in the sector, just for Apple's gain.

[scarface74]

I missed the three companies that were not part of the lawsuit since they settled individually - Pixar, Lucasfilm and Intuit.

But why was he the only evil one and not the CEOs of Google, Adobe, and Intel.

But still the idea that Jobs was the mastermind “bullying” these other companies instead of all of them being equally responsible doesn’t pass the sniff test. And one of those companies - Pixar was also run by Jobs at the time.

[lern_too_spel]

> But still the idea that Jobs was the mastermind “bullying” these other companies instead of all of them being equally responsible doesn’t pass the sniff test.

That's exactly what the documents that came up in discovery showed. Not only does it pass the sniff test, but it passes the legal test too.

https://money.cnn.com/2014/08/11/technology/silicon-valley-p...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/angry-over-employee-...

> But why was he the only evil one and not the CEOs of Google, Adobe, and Intel.

I never claimed he was. Still, measuring evilness on a scale, the one who proposed the no poach agreement to the others and tried to force it on unwilling other companies is clearly far more evil than the rest.

> And one of those companies - Pixar was also run by Jobs at the time.

How does that matter? In a world without illegal collusion, a graphics expert could be poached from Apple to Pixar or vice versa and make more money. What matters is that Jobs instituted his illegal program at all his companies, and that is evil.

[epicureanideal]

Or the "he can leave any time" response to domestic abuse.

(My point is, it's not gender specific. The research shows that abuse happens both ways and happens a very similar amount for either gender.)

[scarface74]

Yes, and I was also at a company that didn’t appreciate me and gave me menial raises for 9 years. I stayed for a lot of (bad) reasons, one of which is that I let my skills decay. I vowed I would never make those two mistakes again - letting my skills be out of step with the market and never getting paid less than I’m worth.

[wpietri]

It is gender specific: https://ncadv.org/statistics

Less so than it used to be, in that women now more often have the financial means to leave, but still gendered.

That isn't surprising to me, in that a lot of the psychology of abusers is clearly patriarchal. E.g.: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling-ebook/dp...

That is not to discount abuse against men, of course. Indeed, most of the people facing Jobs's abuse were surely men. But the trope I'm referring to is pretty clearly gendered.

[epicureanideal]

Without some evidence, I don't think NCADV is a neutral source. (See their blog, https://ncadv.org/blog, where they post opinions on unrelated or very indirectly related matters. This is not a research organization but a political organization.) I've seen plenty of actual published, peer reviewed papers that show near equality of violence between the sexes and sometimes even more violence against men by women. I've seen plenty of advocacy groups claim hugely stacked ratios of violence against women, which is not what I see in scientific research. (If someone looks I'm sure a few articles can be cherry-picked that do that, but not a majority of them.)

Not that Wikipedia is a reliable source, but they do have citations anyone interested could look into, and they seem similar to the numbers I saw in my own reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence_against_men

However, even on NCADV, I see "1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men have been victims of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.1" That's a somewhat skewed ratio but I wouldn't call it a one-sided gendered issue. And I suspect the reason that only 1 in 7 men have been victims of "severe" violence is that men are harder for women to significantly injure, and women are easier for men to significantly injure, so you would assume women would be more often worse injured even assuming both are aggressors in a similar number of situations and using the same amount of aggression, with difference in outcomes for their victims due to their difference in strength.

[pkaye]

> If I had a choice between working on the original iPhone and writing yet another software as a service CRUD app, I know which one I would have chosen.

So those are the only choices there are? There are a lot interesting things than working on the iPhone and a CRUD app.

[Animats]

I know someone who worked on the original iPhone. As soon as it shipped, he quit. He didn't like being yelled at by Jobs.

[scarface74]

It’s not about what’s “interesting”, it’s about being able to put something on your resume that lets you write your own ticket for the next few years.