Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gonehome 2754 days ago
I've seen this kind of strange behavior elsewhere with less famous people who are in charge of companies.

People who don't regularly interact with them seem to act strange around them (which isn't that surprising if they're not seen that often and they're in charge), but the weirder thing to me is that all the supporting staff around the leader also acts strangely and seems to make it worse.

It reminds me of the story when Carmack had a demo and one of Jobs' support staff said they couldn't use it because "he doesn't like blood". When Jobs heard it was Carmack he said it was fine.

Something about it feels weird.

2 comments

> When Jobs heard it was Carmack he said it was fine.

That seems less like the kind of "aura of reverence" you're talking about, and more like a respect for another creative person who makes carefully-considered choices (and perhaps a knowledge that most people in the audience for the demo know the artist and also respect them.)

Even if you don't agree with someone's tastes, if those tastes are a coherent part of a polished work, and you value the work itself, then you'll tend to let your aesthetic disagreement slide.

For a different concrete example: when the average movie director puts a weird sex thing in their movie, it sticks out in a way that makes you wonder whether they have a fetish and wanted to indulge it—and that breaks the verisimilitude of the work, lessening its impact. If, on the other hand, a director like David Lynch puts a weird sex thing in their movie, it's usually a critical element that fits the tone of the work, and doesn't break verisimilitude at all. It doesn't really matter whether David Lynch likes a given weird sex thing; it would still be a part of the work even if he didn't, because it belongs there.

Blood belongs in Carmack's games, in a way that means you'll tend to appreciate the bloodiness for its contribution to the overall tone of the game, even if you don't like blood.

Yeah that makes sense to me - my comment was more about how the support staff acted like "oh we can't do that - he wouldn't like that" when it turned out to be totally fine when interacting with him directly.

I'm not sure if that's a thing with Jobs and people being afraid of him, but I've seen similar stuff where people around the person act like they're delicate or everything requires special consideration when interacting with the leader.

The story is that Jobs was put off by Carmack's t-shirt (a smiley face with a bloody bullet hole in it). But they had a discussion, Carmack was critical of some of Apple's technical decisions, and Jobs listened and ultimately took Carmack's side. Jobs then yelled at one of his senior engineers.

https://www.facebook.com/JamesHBlack/posts/10156560054277932

I think that’s a second story - I remember reading about both.
Oh, you're right:

When I was preparing an early technology demo of Doom 3 for a keynote in Japan, I was having a hard time dealing with some of the managers involved that were insisting that I change the demo because “Steve doesn’t like blood.” I knew that Doom 3 wasn’t to his taste, but that wasn’t the point of doing the demo.

I brought it to Steve, with all the relevant people on the thread. He replied to everyone with: “I trust you John, do whatever you think is great.”

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=2146412825...