[metaphor]

> At Pixar, he behaved like a feudal lord because he pretty much owned the place and they relied on his money to keep the lights on.

How do you mean by "behaved like a feudal lord"?

Admittedly not read up on Jobs (sacrilege in this venue, I know), so I'm struggling to understand why he who pays the piper calls the tune is somehow objectionable.

[jjeaff]

You can own something without pettiness and employing someone does not give you total control over that employee. In my mind, a feudal Lord is someone who wants everyone to know and acknowledge they are in charge and demands exacting obedience.

[metaphor]

Still not quite making the link between "feudal lord" and "pettiness" (both seem equally subjective/vague).

By "total control", do you mean well beyond the boundaries of labor law? In my mind, I'm admittedly inclined to interpret this color as a consequence of the music stopping at an unprofitable creative house with an internal culture of unabashed freedom on someone else's dime.

Maybe I just need to read the books mentioned by the parent sometime.

[a9h74j]

Perhaps "petty dictator" for connotations (a would-be not an absolute dictator). We might or might not have many too-distant impressions of what ancient feudalism involved. For example, I have heard suggested that it was a system fundamentally characterized by reciprocal obligations upward and downward (including a kind of labor law?). Abused no doubt, but not lawless.

[dekhn]

Here let me explain it with concrete examples. Let's say you're a smart engineer, you know how to write code and make things happen and you have pretty good idea of what users seem to want or need.

You have a boss and you have a meeting with your boss to make a decision about including a new feature you've coded up a prototype for, into a product that is going to be released in a year. You demo it, and it goes mostly OK but there are some hitches.

You boss has several ways of responding. One way could be to call you an idiot, a stupid idiot who's wasting everybody's time. The other way would be to provide a more polite way of saying that the feature might not be ready yet and could use some refinement.

Multiple employees of Jobs reported this sort of behavior (screaming, belitting, etc):

"""Jobs stormed into a meeting and started shouting that they were “fucking dickless assholes."""

""" He shouted, "You guys don't know what you're doing. I'm going to get someone else to do the ads because this is fucked up."""

"""A few weeks later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on the Xerox Star team. "Everything you've ever done in your life is shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?"""

"""When Steve had to make cutbacks at Pixar, he fired people and didn't give any severance pay."""

"""“How old were you when you lost your virginity?" he asked. The candidate looked baffled. “What did you say?” “Are you a virgin?” Jobs asked. The candidate sat there flustered, so Jobs changed the subject. “How many times have you taken LSD?” Hertzfeld recalled, “The poor guy was turning varying shades of red, so I tried to change the subject and asked a straightforward technical question.”""

"""To address the problem, Jobs gathered the MobileMe team in Apple's auditorium and asked: "Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" When the team gave their answers, Jobs replied, "Then why the fuck doesn't it do that?"

Jobs then fired the MobileMe boss on the spot and replaced him with Eddie Cue."""

I think Jony Ive pinpointed it: """I once asked him why he gets so mad about stuff. He said, "But I don't stay mad." He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn't stay with him at all. But, there are other times, I think honestly, when he's very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don't apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that."""

The only question is: if Jobs hadn't been an asshole, would the computing world have come so far so fast, and does that justify his behavior?

[metaphor]

Thanks for all that.

[andrewflnr]

Being a jerk is always bad. The only difference is that people who aren't "paying the piper" don't get away with it for very long before someone throws them out.

Just because you can get away with it doesn't mean it's ok.

[metaphor]

Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012806/http://alvyray.co...

[justinjlynn]

I mean, the argument is essentially one of "sure, he may have been completely awful, but it all worked out so, if we assume that's the reason things worked out (ignoring the myriad other factors and pure luck) then we suppose that, however they had acted or the damage caused, they were right to do so. The ends justify the means - even if we can't tell for sure or not that by those awful means we arrived at those desired ends."

Frankly, it's ex post facto justification by false entailment. I don't buy it.

[keneda7]

Not the person you responded to but I find it an interesting situation. I agree with you that jobs (from what I've read) seems to be awful but at the same time I don't believe theft is okay. If I pay someone to do a job and they choose not to do the job after taking my money they have stolen my money. I am not okay with that. In this case jobs invested in them. It was clearly enough money to give him power over them. He had an agenda, they decided they didn't like the agenda and weren't going to do it his way and he came in and cracked heads (in an awful way probably). They can choose not pick his way, but BEFORE they take his money. Once they take the money they are obligated to do it his way or give the money back in my opinion.

[justinjlynn]

Jobs paid that money for the business as it was at the time of sale - not for what he wanted it to be in some theoretical future - and he got precisely that. The theft analogy doesn't hold because the deal was completed upon transfer of the organisation. There could be no theft, only the inability to meet the expectations Jobs placed on their employees - for which I'm sure many were fired. That's the only prerogative Jobs purchased when they purchased - and were delivered - ownership of the organisation. That is to say, they bought - and were given - the decision making power over who to hire or fire and for what reasons. Nothing more, nothing less.

[sobkas]

> Playing devil's advocate, I'm honestly not sure how I'd behave if I dropped a $10 million personal fortune[1] (1986 dollars; $27.2 million buying power today) for controlling stake in a venture and execution wasn't going as I had envisioned. Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole.

> [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20050427012806/http://alvyray.co...

So if someone spent for example 44*10^9 dollars on some venture, would it still be ok to be jerk, or would it be counterproductive to viability of such investment?

[andrewflnr]

"Tradeoff" implies you have to choose, like there's no way to have power without being a jerk. This is demonstrably false. It's just hard.

Quit making excuses for "brilliant assholes" and start demanding better.

[saghm]

> Being a "jerk" might strike me as an acceptable trade-off if that meant it got targeted impediments out of the way without irreparable damage to the whole

What does this even mean in the context of the story from TFA? The "impediment" was one of his employees getting a competing job offer, and the "irreparable damage" was...having to actually pay someone as much as they'd be valued elsewhere? That's not a reasonable way to behave, and masking it in impersonal language doesn't somehow make it more reasonable.

[michaelcampbell]

I've never been a fan of Jobs or Jobs' Cultists for exactly that reason, but... there is room for jerks. If everyone got along, no progress would ever be made.

I forget the author, but someone famous once noted, "The reasonable man adapts himself to his environment. The unreasonable man adapts his environment to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men."

Like any quote, there's a hint of truth to it and also not applicable in ALL situations.

[VieEnCode]

Just look at the current state of Twitter if you want a further illustration of the issues with capricious feudal tech lords.

[ithkuil]

Interestingly not everybody seems to take away the same lession from what's happening at Twitter. I keep reading from people who say that finally now people can focus on what matters and are not allowed down by lazy people, yadda yadda. Some even claim that Twitter now works faster for them and is generally better.

How can we be objective about subjective things when we can't even be objective by objective things?

[Terretta]

Executives paid bucketloads to come in and lead a Transformation™ can only dream about the empowerment of actually making changes that Musk is enjoying.

That job tends to be virtually impossible as companies launch a transformation then reject each individual change as "this is fine" or as a sacred cow.

If, to survive, you must change many things quickly, some decisions will be wrong, but that's why you iterate.