8 ms·

Would Steve Jobs’ have been tolerated these days, in a post #MeToo era? Now, I am definitely not accusing him of sexual harassment. But hand-in-hand with that,

Would Steve Jobs’ have been tolerated these days, in a post #MeToo era? Now, I am definitely not accusing him of sexual harassment. But hand-in-hand with that, the culture seems to have shifted towards pressuring bosses of public companies and organizations to be less abusive in a range of domains. Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today? (Assuming he didn’t mellow or adapt with age.)

PretzelPirate 6y ago
Even ignoring the specific movement, hopefully we all pressure our bosses to be less abusive (no abuse is acceptable). I could never work for Steve Jobs because I wouldn’t have put up with his ridiculous behavior and would have walked. Part of the situation that lead to the MeToo movement was power, and Steve Jobs had a lot of power over people who worked for him. This was something I knew since starting my career, and worked for the last ten years to make sure no one (other than governments) has so much power over me that I have to listen to them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- crazyjncsu 6y ago
  The problem is when “no abuse is acceptable” and at the same time we continue to redefine these types of terms to apply to lesser and lesser offenses. I personally am tired of working at a firm where everyone has a voice that they’re always using.
  - PretzelPirate 6y ago
    Can you list some examples of these “lesser and lesser” offenses? I’m a manager, I treat my employees with respect, and no one has ever complained about me abusing them. I’d like to know how “small” these claims are getting.
    - shuckles 6y ago
      I could imagine having to demo on Saturday and needing to work all day to incorporate feedback by Sunday would be called abusive, even at small startups, these days.
      - PretzelPirate 6y ago
        If that’s not something the employee agreed to up front and they aren’t compensated for it, it may very well be abuse of the employer-employee power dynamic. Asking an employee to suddenly work all weekend when they don’t have the expectation and potentially aren’t in a situation to say no would certainly be considered an abuse of power (what if they miss their kid’s birthday). I coach all of my employees that they own their time. I can’t ask them to work late or work more days, because I don’t own them. It is my job as a leader to ensure that their time is protected, and I’ve pushed back on management multiple times when last minute changes were requested and my team would need to work more to fill that request. I put myself in the line of fire and say that I don’t have the capacity in my team to fulfill that without cutting work. I ask my team to tell me if I ever overstep and they feel uncomfortable saying no when they really want to. I also encourage all of my employees to interview outside the team/company so they know their worth and understand that they have the ability to leave if they ever feel our power dynamic is being abused and I don’t do anything to fix it. Leaders can effectively manage teams and deliver on vision without abusing the employer-employee power dynamic. It makes leadership more difficult since you have less flexibility in the capacity of your team (capped at 40 hrs/week and can’t suddenly expand to 80 hrs/week), but it makes for better teams and happier people.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      I can give you an example that I witnessed back when we were still in the office pre-COVID. Someone was making copies at the copy machine. Another person made a joke comment about him running off copies of his resume. A harmless remark that's been made millions of times in thousands of offices for as long as copy machines have existed. The next day the commenter got hauled into HR for "harassment."
      - 6y ago
- mikepurvis 6y ago
  Isn't part of it that Steve was able to sell people on his vision though? So it's not just that he had power in the way that a judge has power or a school principal has power— those are powerful figures that you submit to because the alternative is punishment. Rather, he had power in the way that a beloved family member has power. People wanted to please him because they had bought into what the vision was and how their piece of the puzzle fit into making it a reality. Was there abusive stuff going on there? Absolutely! And there's almost certainly some overlap here with other cases (actress submits to famous film executive because it's part of his "creative process"), but I don't know if the current/recent reckoning would do much to prevent a small, dedicated technical team from overworking themselves and tolerating abusive management practices in service of a new charismatic, visionary leader like Jobs apparently was.
radu_floricica 6y ago
The real question isn't if he could have lasted or had to adapt. The real question is if the next Steve Jobs will be able to do the things the old one did, while avoiding post-progressive pitfalls.
- bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
  Elon seems to do fine
  - jansan 6y ago
    Elon is different. People called and still call Jobs a jerk (as James Gosling in his interview with Lex Fridman). Elon shows erratic behavior from time to time, but I do not think people would call him a jerk.
    - andrewshadura 6y ago
      A lot of people actually do
    - cyberlurker 6y ago
      I think his transphobic and downplaying covid tweets got him called a jerk. Oh and the pedophile accusation against that guy that rescued the kids from the cave. I think he was a jerk for that one. I still respect him though.
    - zokula 6y ago
      Elon is a mini Hitler.
  - radu_floricica 6y ago
    Elon also started many years ago. Paypal was a couple of decades ago.
biddit 6y ago
> Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today? Not sure I've seen many (any?) instances of his abusive behavior being celebrated in my 30 years of following him. Certainly some awe over how scary he was. I've often thought it amazing that he was as successful as he was despite his terrible behavior.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  One generation's "drive" and "focus" is another generation's "trigger" and "abuse."
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
cultus 6y ago
There definitely would have been pressure to change. I highly doubt he would ever have been cancelled, though. Nothing he did ever rose to anywhere near that kind of level, except for possibly aspects of his family life. Jobs was brilliant product guy, but verbal abuse never helps teams become more productive. All that he did was in spite of his temper.
freehunter 6y ago
Abusive/abrasive bosses are still celebrated today. Jeff Bezos runs a company where employees urinate in bottles because they aren't given time for a bathroom break and asks employees in meetings "why are you wasting my life". Tim Bray has some stories to tell about AWS too. Elon Musk abuses his employees, his shareholders, his companies, and everyone else on Twitter nearly every time he opens his mouth. It's almost cheating to mention Elizabeth Holmes. Same with Travis Kalanick. I think Jobs would be thought of exactly the same if he were around and in his prime today: a very controversial figure who produces amazing work but has his fair share of detractors for a number of reasons. Remember, Steve's behavior was barely tolerated by a large number of people. He was hated by many, loved by many, merely tolerated by most.
x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
#MeToo concerns sexual abuse in the workplace. I'm not sure why you thought it was necessary to cite that as your milestone marker, and then back out to talking about abuse in general.
- cyberlurker 6y ago
  #MeToo also had that disturbing element of liberal, feminist icons being the sexual abusers all along. (Harvey Weinstein) I think the parent is using #MeToo as a catch-all for intolerance of any alleged abuse of power and cancel culture in general. And as others have mentioned Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are doing fine, so no Steve Jobs would have probably been fine in the current time.
  - sib 6y ago
    Although Jeff has definitely moderated his approach significantly over time. Not sure OG Jeff would be as fine today as modern Jeff is.
  - jboog 6y ago
    Who thought Harvey was a Feminist OR liberal icon? This is post-hoc revisionist history by people with political motivations. He was a small fry Dem donor compared to the real money. No idea at all where "feminist" comes from, seems to have no basis in reality.
    - cyberlurker 6y ago
      He was a long time and well known Democratic donor and hosted a fundraiser at his home for Obama in 2012, which Obama attended. Admission was $36,000 a person. That’s not small fry. See below comment on feminist. I don’t think he was one, but the image of being one was knowingly cultivated.
      - jonhendry18 6y ago
        That doesn't make him a feminist icon.
Razengan 6y ago
Elon Musk is basically Jobs 2.0 and he’s doing fine.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I would, uh, say Musk is not doing fine. Among other things, he got his company investigated by the FCC for basically no reason at all. Jobs had his moments but when he went crazy, he didn't go nearly as crazy as Musk, at least not in public. To be fair, Jobs also didn't have a Twitter account. I don't know why, but that seems to do weird things to people.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    Musk is probably worse than Jobs, and he has fairly well-known talent retention problem ascribed directly to his personal behaviour, but both Tesla and SpaceX are doing exceptionally well. There's always someone next in line.
- grishka 6y ago
  Pavel Durov tho... he's visionary but his expectations became too unrealistic lately. I wonder what happens to Telegram now that the SEC stopped that ICO. Loved to work with him while he was sane.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
These people still exist. They run some of the major tech companies that produce products tech people love. The difference is that top engineers have more options these days. They can choose to move into a high paying job at Google or Facebook where they don't have to deal with abusive relationships with the CEO. Instead, companies with abusive CEOs attract people with high ambitions who don't yet have the skills and resume to walk into an easier, high-paying job. The CEO (ab)uses the ambitious, early-career people to extract as much work as possible before they burn out. The employees use the grind to level up their skills and resume to pivot into a better job later. I worked for one such company early in my career. Turnover was high. It was basically a pipeline that either led to burnout or a cushy, high-paying job elsewhere if you could survive the abuse long enough to get an impressive resume out of it. The catch is that none of us wanted to talk about how terrible the working environment was, because it would only devalue those lines on our resume. So instead we kept quiet and let everyone assume the famous tech company and CEO we worked for were actually amazing places to work. Anything else would be self-sabotage. It's a strange cycle.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  How'd you like Amazon? I have a good friend who worked there during the 90s and wrote a shitload of the backend ordering system. She went on to work at Google as Director of Site Reliability Engineering. She has since moved on from that.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
wpietri 6y ago
His golden aura would have been dented for sure. Like a lot of abusive people, he did very well when he could control the flow of information. But social media is undermining that. However, I think it depends a lot on where in his career arc this transition happened. If he had been caught out early on, it could well have kept him from rising. Imagine the Twitter furor if a rising exec got caught cheating his business partner, for example. [1] Of course, it could have gone the other way; his conscious manipulation of his image [2] could have led him to be less abusive, or at least better at concealing it. But if it came later, once he was head of Apple, I doubt it would have mattered much. He was already notoriously an asshole. [3] People will accept a lot as long as the money keeps rolling in and the asshole seems irreplaceable. [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-bonus-267711 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve-jobs-personality-shift-as-apple-co-founder.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve-jobs-... [3] E.g., this from 2011. https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> Assuming he didn’t mellow or adapt with age. He did mellow with age, though. The Steve Jobs biography actually latched onto this as a key narrative element—a way to construct Jobs's personal arch—and I do believe it's genuine based on everything else I've read about the guy. And it's notable that Jobs only really reached his zenith in these later years. The original Macintosh had a splashy launch, but sales began dwindling pretty quickly[1], and NeXT never had much commercial success before Apple bought them. My admiration of Jobs is really for the person he was in his last decade. He was a visionary long before that, of course, but ideas are relatively cheap, and Jobs couldn't execute. Jobs was, to be sure, certainly still a demanding figure at the end of his life (and I would not have wanted to work for him), but I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have him beat. 1: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_End_Of_An_Era.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&characters=John+Sculley https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
ralfd 6y ago
It is interesting to note though that despite all his faults Jobs had very long, sometimes decades long, extremely fruitful work relationships. Woz, Andy Herztfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Avie Tevanian, Bertrand Serlet, Phil Schiller, Jony Ive... etc. And at Pixar too. Such high caliber people wouldn't stay around if it was so terrible or there was no redeeming quality. The linked post by Blaine Garst is _glowing_ proudly of having worked with Steve Jobs and the all star team he assembled. Quote: "great minds collaborating and challenging each other to succeed. With the best CEO on the planet." The "challenging each other" maybe the important point. If you are a normal dude it is easy being intimidated by a big ego. But if you are an A-player you can hold your ground? Maybe it was even the case that engineers, who are focused on objective technical details/goals and having a thick skin, dealt best with Jobs?

PretzelPirate 6y ago

Even ignoring the specific movement, hopefully we all pressure our bosses to be less abusive (no abuse is acceptable). I could never work for Steve Jobs because I wouldn’t have put up with his ridiculous behavior and would have walked. Part of the situation that lead to the MeToo movement was power, and Steve Jobs had a lot of power over people who worked for him. This was something I knew since starting my career, and worked for the last ten years to make sure no one (other than governments) has so much power over me that I have to listen to them.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
crazyjncsu 6y ago
The problem is when “no abuse is acceptable” and at the same time we continue to redefine these types of terms to apply to lesser and lesser offenses. I personally am tired of working at a firm where everyone has a voice that they’re always using.
- PretzelPirate 6y ago
  Can you list some examples of these “lesser and lesser” offenses? I’m a manager, I treat my employees with respect, and no one has ever complained about me abusing them. I’d like to know how “small” these claims are getting.
  - shuckles 6y ago
    I could imagine having to demo on Saturday and needing to work all day to incorporate feedback by Sunday would be called abusive, even at small startups, these days.
    - PretzelPirate 6y ago
      If that’s not something the employee agreed to up front and they aren’t compensated for it, it may very well be abuse of the employer-employee power dynamic. Asking an employee to suddenly work all weekend when they don’t have the expectation and potentially aren’t in a situation to say no would certainly be considered an abuse of power (what if they miss their kid’s birthday). I coach all of my employees that they own their time. I can’t ask them to work late or work more days, because I don’t own them. It is my job as a leader to ensure that their time is protected, and I’ve pushed back on management multiple times when last minute changes were requested and my team would need to work more to fill that request. I put myself in the line of fire and say that I don’t have the capacity in my team to fulfill that without cutting work. I ask my team to tell me if I ever overstep and they feel uncomfortable saying no when they really want to. I also encourage all of my employees to interview outside the team/company so they know their worth and understand that they have the ability to leave if they ever feel our power dynamic is being abused and I don’t do anything to fix it. Leaders can effectively manage teams and deliver on vision without abusing the employer-employee power dynamic. It makes leadership more difficult since you have less flexibility in the capacity of your team (capped at 40 hrs/week and can’t suddenly expand to 80 hrs/week), but it makes for better teams and happier people.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    I can give you an example that I witnessed back when we were still in the office pre-COVID. Someone was making copies at the copy machine. Another person made a joke comment about him running off copies of his resume. A harmless remark that's been made millions of times in thousands of offices for as long as copy machines have existed. The next day the commenter got hauled into HR for "harassment."
    - 6y ago
mikepurvis 6y ago
Isn't part of it that Steve was able to sell people on his vision though? So it's not just that he had power in the way that a judge has power or a school principal has power— those are powerful figures that you submit to because the alternative is punishment. Rather, he had power in the way that a beloved family member has power. People wanted to please him because they had bought into what the vision was and how their piece of the puzzle fit into making it a reality. Was there abusive stuff going on there? Absolutely! And there's almost certainly some overlap here with other cases (actress submits to famous film executive because it's part of his "creative process"), but I don't know if the current/recent reckoning would do much to prevent a small, dedicated technical team from overworking themselves and tolerating abusive management practices in service of a new charismatic, visionary leader like Jobs apparently was.

radu_floricica 6y ago

The real question isn't if he could have lasted or had to adapt. The real question is if the next Steve Jobs will be able to do the things the old one did, while avoiding post-progressive pitfalls.

bodhiandpysics1 6y ago
Elon seems to do fine
- jansan 6y ago
  Elon is different. People called and still call Jobs a jerk (as James Gosling in his interview with Lex Fridman). Elon shows erratic behavior from time to time, but I do not think people would call him a jerk.
  - andrewshadura 6y ago
    A lot of people actually do
  - cyberlurker 6y ago
    I think his transphobic and downplaying covid tweets got him called a jerk. Oh and the pedophile accusation against that guy that rescued the kids from the cave. I think he was a jerk for that one. I still respect him though.
  - zokula 6y ago
    Elon is a mini Hitler.
- radu_floricica 6y ago
  Elon also started many years ago. Paypal was a couple of decades ago.

biddit 6y ago

> Would his behavior as been as tolerated or celebrated if he was still around today? Not sure I've seen many (any?) instances of his abusive behavior being celebrated in my 30 years of following him. Certainly some awe over how scary he was. I've often thought it amazing that he was as successful as he was despite his terrible behavior.

reaperducer 6y ago
One generation's "drive" and "focus" is another generation's "trigger" and "abuse."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

cultus 6y ago

There definitely would have been pressure to change. I highly doubt he would ever have been cancelled, though. Nothing he did ever rose to anywhere near that kind of level, except for possibly aspects of his family life. Jobs was brilliant product guy, but verbal abuse never helps teams become more productive. All that he did was in spite of his temper.

freehunter 6y ago

Abusive/abrasive bosses are still celebrated today. Jeff Bezos runs a company where employees urinate in bottles because they aren't given time for a bathroom break and asks employees in meetings "why are you wasting my life". Tim Bray has some stories to tell about AWS too. Elon Musk abuses his employees, his shareholders, his companies, and everyone else on Twitter nearly every time he opens his mouth. It's almost cheating to mention Elizabeth Holmes. Same with Travis Kalanick. I think Jobs would be thought of exactly the same if he were around and in his prime today: a very controversial figure who produces amazing work but has his fair share of detractors for a number of reasons. Remember, Steve's behavior was barely tolerated by a large number of people. He was hated by many, loved by many, merely tolerated by most.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago

#MeToo concerns sexual abuse in the workplace. I'm not sure why you thought it was necessary to cite that as your milestone marker, and then back out to talking about abuse in general.

cyberlurker 6y ago
#MeToo also had that disturbing element of liberal, feminist icons being the sexual abusers all along. (Harvey Weinstein) I think the parent is using #MeToo as a catch-all for intolerance of any alleged abuse of power and cancel culture in general. And as others have mentioned Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are doing fine, so no Steve Jobs would have probably been fine in the current time.
- sib 6y ago
  Although Jeff has definitely moderated his approach significantly over time. Not sure OG Jeff would be as fine today as modern Jeff is.
- jboog 6y ago
  Who thought Harvey was a Feminist OR liberal icon? This is post-hoc revisionist history by people with political motivations. He was a small fry Dem donor compared to the real money. No idea at all where "feminist" comes from, seems to have no basis in reality.
  - cyberlurker 6y ago
    He was a long time and well known Democratic donor and hosted a fundraiser at his home for Obama in 2012, which Obama attended. Admission was $36,000 a person. That’s not small fry. See below comment on feminist. I don’t think he was one, but the image of being one was knowingly cultivated.
    - jonhendry18 6y ago
      That doesn't make him a feminist icon.

Razengan 6y ago

Elon Musk is basically Jobs 2.0 and he’s doing fine.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I would, uh, say Musk is not doing fine. Among other things, he got his company investigated by the FCC for basically no reason at all. Jobs had his moments but when he went crazy, he didn't go nearly as crazy as Musk, at least not in public. To be fair, Jobs also didn't have a Twitter account. I don't know why, but that seems to do weird things to people.
- nmfisher 6y ago
  Musk is probably worse than Jobs, and he has fairly well-known talent retention problem ascribed directly to his personal behaviour, but both Tesla and SpaceX are doing exceptionally well. There's always someone next in line.
grishka 6y ago
Pavel Durov tho... he's visionary but his expectations became too unrealistic lately. I wonder what happens to Telegram now that the SEC stopped that ICO. Loved to work with him while he was sane.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

These people still exist. They run some of the major tech companies that produce products tech people love. The difference is that top engineers have more options these days. They can choose to move into a high paying job at Google or Facebook where they don't have to deal with abusive relationships with the CEO. Instead, companies with abusive CEOs attract people with high ambitions who don't yet have the skills and resume to walk into an easier, high-paying job. The CEO (ab)uses the ambitious, early-career people to extract as much work as possible before they burn out. The employees use the grind to level up their skills and resume to pivot into a better job later. I worked for one such company early in my career. Turnover was high. It was basically a pipeline that either led to burnout or a cushy, high-paying job elsewhere if you could survive the abuse long enough to get an impressive resume out of it. The catch is that none of us wanted to talk about how terrible the working environment was, because it would only devalue those lines on our resume. So instead we kept quiet and let everyone assume the famous tech company and CEO we worked for were actually amazing places to work. Anything else would be self-sabotage. It's a strange cycle.

cbozeman 6y ago
How'd you like Amazon? I have a good friend who worked there during the 90s and wrote a shitload of the backend ordering system. She went on to work at Google as Director of Site Reliability Engineering. She has since moved on from that.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

wpietri 6y ago

His golden aura would have been dented for sure. Like a lot of abusive people, he did very well when he could control the flow of information. But social media is undermining that. However, I think it depends a lot on where in his career arc this transition happened. If he had been caught out early on, it could well have kept him from rising. Imagine the Twitter furor if a rising exec got caught cheating his business partner, for example. [1] Of course, it could have gone the other way; his conscious manipulation of his image [2] could have led him to be less abusive, or at least better at concealing it. But if it came later, once he was head of Apple, I doubt it would have mattered much. He was already notoriously an asshole. [3] People will accept a lot as long as the money keeps rolling in and the asshole seems irreplaceable. [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-bonus-267711 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve-jobs-personality-shift-as-apple-co-founder.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/06/steve-wozniak-on-steve-jobs-... [3] E.g., this from 2011. https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

> Assuming he didn’t mellow or adapt with age. He did mellow with age, though. The Steve Jobs biography actually latched onto this as a key narrative element—a way to construct Jobs's personal arch—and I do believe it's genuine based on everything else I've read about the guy. And it's notable that Jobs only really reached his zenith in these later years. The original Macintosh had a splashy launch, but sales began dwindling pretty quickly[1], and NeXT never had much commercial success before Apple bought them. My admiration of Jobs is really for the person he was in his last decade. He was a visionary long before that, of course, but ideas are relatively cheap, and Jobs couldn't execute. Jobs was, to be sure, certainly still a demanding figure at the end of his life (and I would not have wanted to work for him), but I think Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have him beat. 1: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=The_End_Of_An_Era.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date&characters=John+Sculley https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

ralfd 6y ago

It is interesting to note though that despite all his faults Jobs had very long, sometimes decades long, extremely fruitful work relationships. Woz, Andy Herztfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Avie Tevanian, Bertrand Serlet, Phil Schiller, Jony Ive... etc. And at Pixar too. Such high caliber people wouldn't stay around if it was so terrible or there was no redeeming quality. The linked post by Blaine Garst is _glowing_ proudly of having worked with Steve Jobs and the all star team he assembled. Quote: "great minds collaborating and challenging each other to succeed. With the best CEO on the planet." The "challenging each other" maybe the important point. If you are a normal dude it is easy being intimidated by a big ego. But if you are an A-player you can hold your ground? Maybe it was even the case that engineers, who are focused on objective technical details/goals and having a thick skin, dealt best with Jobs?