Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means?
Hey, you don’t have to tell me, I quit immediately after the project, after bouts of both verbal and physical violence. I left likely tens of millions of future earnings behind as a result. But there’s simply no question that the guy was a visionary. I personally saw many other examples of crazy abusive behavior and I don’t believe the ends justify the means.
I've never worked in such an environment myself but I imagine it feels something like soldiers feel following a leader who feels like he knows what he's doing. It's the feeling of shared hardship and shared experience and it creates culture of driving to follow the leader.
I imagine Elon Musk (at least used to, not sure if he still does) cause the same experience in employees. That's the sense you get when you read books like "Liftoff" that document the early days of SpaceX.
I don't think people spray painting parts no one in the public will ever see feel like their leader is on the ball. They probably feel like they're at the whims of an unreasonable narcissist who can erase their weekend and generally make them miserable for no reason whatsoever.
“When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
You're suggesting asking people to work into the night to make an aesthetic change that will benefit no customers, that will not make the workplace friendlier or more productive, and that you may never even lay eyes on again, is craftsmanship? I would suggest its authoritarian control for it's own sake. To make people work to your arbitrary and unknowable criteria for no other reason than to exercise your power over them and to make them understand that that is your arrangement together.
Additionally silver brackets aren't inferior, like plywood. This is more like the craftsman chewed you out for using Phillips screws instead of flatheads for your table, because the craftsman feels that Phillips are for bookcases and flatheads are for tables.
Well, it can be looked at in more ways than one. Maybe he was just a jerk, or perhaps he was giving an object lesson. Details matter and the boss was paying attention. You decide.
I did. Steve Jobs is survivorship bias at its finest. I've met and interviewed plenty of "detail orientated" bosses and not all of them create trillion dollar entities.
> Maybe he was just a jerk, or perhaps he was giving an object lesson.
1. There is no legitimate reason to make a server rack a different color.
2. Making people work until 3am isn't a lesson. It ignores all studies that suggest that depriving people of sleep makes them less productive.
Moving an icon 10 pixels...okay maybe I get it. There is some practical utility in that for an end-user and it teaches development teams the importance of why the details matter. However this is probably my biggest gripes with the stories about Jobs. My interpretation is that he was inconsistently diligent and was only detail orientated for "details matter" sake, but not always the right details.
Well, moving an icon a few pixels is also a purely aesthetic choice, just like changing the color of your house, the thickness of a header bar on a web page, the color of your office walls, or the color of a server rack. As with all aesthetic choices, there is someone who will think there is "no legitimate reason" to make those changes. There is someone else who will disagree. And yes, many detail oriented bosses are not successful, but Jobs actually did create a trillion dollar entity so I think this is more than just a survivorship bias. But he's controversial, so I get it if you disagree.
> moving an icon a few pixels is also a purely aesthetic choice
It's not. Aesthetics are actually a design principle: "Beautiful products/objects are perceived as easier to use and more valuable than ugly ones. Even if it is not true!" Since no one is actively looking at server racks there is no opportunity for the color to even play a factor.
> And yes, many detail oriented bosses are not successful, but Jobs actually did create a trillion dollar entity so I think this is more than just a survivorship bias.
Huh? You literally just defined survivorship bias. If only one party (Jobs) survives a large party ("many detailed oriented bosses"), then that's a survivor, and you're bias to thinking that would led that party to success is because of the same characteristics as the others that didn't.
Yet, he asked a group of software developers to paint a data center rack mount because "it wasn't acceptable" and made people work until 3am (even though numerous studies state that this doesn't make people more productive). One can call him "visionary" all they want, but the work environment he created doesn't sound exactly utopian. Do the ends really justify the means?