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I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better
by pm90 4y ago
I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey?
Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this?
- neycoda 4y agoNope, Steve Jobs, like most elitists, think the free market only applies to their whims.
- ProAm 4y ago> Is he just a bully? LMAO. Yes. And a bad person.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoI think it’s simpler than that. He was an average person. Had a lot of business acumen, particularly well timed vision (after a bunch of poor timing), then he was a really successful guy who was just as flawed as the rest of us.
- throwaway82388 4y agoI think I understand your larger point, but whatever corrections or amendments need to be made to the myth of Jobs, the idea that he was in any way average shouldn’t be one.
- chc 4y agoThe dude basically chose to die of treatable cancer in his 50s because he just didn't like the idea of getting medical treatment. That's one of the most odd behaviors I've ever heard of.
- simondotau 4y agoPlenty of incredibly smart people think and do incredibly stupid things. Isaac Newton was one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of history, inventor of the telescope, father of Newtonian mechanics, and a key figure of the Enlightenment. Yet he considered that scientific work of lesser importance, spending much of his effort studying the occult, biblical interpretation, and alchemy.
- loganc2342 4y ago“Stupid” isn’t the word I would use for following your interests rather than what others would like you to do
- simondotau 4y agoStupid is the word I would use for discovering that you have pancreatic cancer and then believing the best course of action is to reject effective medical treatment and "cure" it with an all-carrot diet. Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective.
- SyzygistSix 4y ago>Stupid is the word I would use to posthumously describe the interests of Isaac Newton. I admit that it would have been difficult to recognise the stupidity of occult studies in 18th century England, but we can certainly apply that label with the benefit of a modern perspective. It seemed to work for Jack Parsons. And many other very creative people.
- simondotau 4y agoCorrelation is not causation. There are many very creative people and uncreative people with many diverse quantities and qualities of stupidity.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoIn terms of him being a bully? He was pretty average a person. That’s the only point. Just a normal run of the mill jerk, maybe a bit eccentric about it, but could’ve been dozens of people I knew growing up. Whatever other life accomplishments don’t make him a remarkable jerk. Just a well known one.
- alasdair_ 4y ago> He was an average person. Average people tend to at least care about their own children. Jobs treated his own appallingly badly.
- refulgentis 4y agoYou'd be surprised
- irrational 4y ago50+% of parents are bad? I don’t believe that.
- p1esk 4y agoI do
- mangosteenjuice 4y agoDepends how you define "bad". High-functioning people with abusive childhoods tend to perform quite well under capitalism. Low-functioning victims of childhood abuse end up in prison.
- HeckFeck 4y agoJust sit in public and you'll see parents threaten and humiliate children for the smallest things. It's baffling. The effects of these actions add up and we call it "mental illness". Not to mention how many parents think assault (smacking) is a "just punishment". It actually achieves the opposite of what it purports, i.e. more violence and disobedience as soon as the children grow large enough to hit back. And then there is the peculiar acceptance in the USA of male genital mutilation for many non-Jewish children. We are still in our infancy with parenting.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoIt’s amazing to me what is being read into “average” here. I mean he was mere mortal, flaws and all. No better than John Lennon, who was also historically remarkable, and similarly a shitty dad.
- thefz 4y agoWhat disappoints me the most is that people treat him as an inventor, when he invented nothing, his engineers did. Dennis Ritchie as an example deserves way more respect than Jobs the buffoon. But if you make "pop" devices to be sold to the layman, you are great in the public eye.
- shadowgovt 4y agoYes, because you gave the people what they wanted. It turns out that's all it takes to be popular (and unfortunately, for all their wisdom in other areas, so many tech folks fail to grasp that nuance). Ritchie did excellent work, but a world filled with nothing but computers that worked like C and UNIX do would be a harsh and inhuman place.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nigamanth 4y agoThe fact that his own company fired him just shows how bad of a bully he is. The power probably went to his head when he got there, I'd like to see how he gets bullied by someone tbh.
- pjc50 4y ago> I'd like to see how he gets bullied by someone tbh. Bit difficult seeing how he died of cancer in 2011.
- eyelidlessness 4y agoSteve Jobs was a ruthless, envious asshole. He reacted this way inside Apple. The fact that Apple did as well as it did was despite this being a pretty well known central part of how the business was run.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago[flagged]
- rib3ye 4y ago[flagged]
- bloodyplonker22 4y agoThese kinds of people will tell you that anybody who invented anything and made money is a "wage thief". Everyone, watch out for that terminology.
- astrange 4y agoAnyone working there at the time made approximately a zillion dollars from stock compensation, so it doesn’t seem like it worked.
- dang 4y agoCould you please stop posting ideological battle comments to HN? They're tedious and not what this site is for, regardless of which flavor you favor. This is not a comment on the topic at hand—I'm just noticing that you've been posting a lot like this lately, and it's been a problem for a long while as well. You're clearly using HN primarily for ideological battle, and are way over the line at which we ban accounts—see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... for past explanations. I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted good things, but if you keep doing this we're going to have to. Curious conversation and ideological battle are incompatible. Therefore we have to pick one. We pick curious conversation. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wahnfrieden 4y agoThanks for the fair warning. I've accounted for your past warnings. I see popular discussion that appear as ideologically informed as my own, yet slide by as status quo positions, which motivated me to add balance to conversation. However I now understand your policy on taking ideological stances too frequently (even if other frequent ideologues don't appear so due to status quo positions). I'll heed this.
- nikanj 4y agoHe was a dick. And there was a strong trend around 2010-2015ish that essentially said "Jobs was a dick and a genius. Therefore I must act like a dick, to prove that I'm a genius". So many startup CEOs acting like assholes to prove they're revolutionary visionaries.
- neilv 4y agoDoes Theranos getting investigated, circa 2015, mark the end of that period?
- saalweachter 4y agoHonestly it's probably more time than anything like Theranos. The last great Steve Jobs keynote was 2010, the iPad announcement. Any 25-30 year old founders nowadays would have been, what, 15 years old? Maybe there were a few enraptured tweens watching that stream, locking in a dream of being just like Steve Jobs that day, but at some point he's just another old dead guy to any new startup founders.
- dotancohen 4y agoI think that Oracle was well-known as being proudly led by One Real Asshole Called Larry Elison long before Steve Jobs was ever called a dick.
- ec109685 4y agoThey had a mutual non compete going. Here’s another instance where a cold recruiting email was “against policy”: https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543?s=20 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543?s=...
- ununoctium87 4y agoHad?
- fabianhjr 4y agoe-mails were released as part of an antipoaching lawsuit (wage supression/wage theft); Apple, Google and others settled. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-for-415-million/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-... https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-lawsuit-idUSKBN0KO2RG20150115 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-google-lawsuit-idUS... Even by then most of those same companies had already settle another case that included ending those agreements: https://www.cnet.com/culture/doj-settles-no-recruit-claims-against-tech-companies/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/doj-settles-no-recruit-claims-a... https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-six-high-tech-companies-stop-entering-anticompetitive-employee https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
- alexchantavy 4y agoI’m not sure how the laws work but from reading that justice.gov link, anti poaching agreements are illegal and are actually enforceable, right?
- fabianhjr 4y agoAnd that is in the infamous anti-worker US; though I think you meant unenforceable (the companies wouldn't be able to use the legal system to enforce them) In the rest of the world Steve Jobs / Apple would have been in a bigger trouble just from the start of the emails.
- Thorrez 4y ago>I don’t understand Jobs’ logic here. Is he just a bully? If Google makes such a great offer that his employee will leave him, shouldn’t he try to make a better offer, or meet with the employee instead of calling Sergey? That could wind up in a bidding war that could end up affecting many employees and salaries going up a lot. That's a lot of lost money for Apple, which makes Steve Jobs mad. Additionally, some employees would still be lost in the war, slowing down Apple development. >Say he did get the offer canceled. How would this employee feel about working for a CEO that does this? I think it's implied that the employee wouldn't find out. I think Steve Jobs would be more angry if Google revoked the offer and blamed it on Steve Jobs than if Google went forward with the offer.
- rlt 4y agoThat's a long way of saying: yes, he's a bully.
- onethought 4y agoBullying google… I don’t think that’s a thing even if you’re Apple. I think this is just shrewd business.
- ivalm 4y agoIllegal business practice
- bdcravens 4y agoMore a matter of bullying his employees by proxy.
- jjulius 4y ago"Shrewd business", bullying, tomato, tomahto.
- onethought 4y agoBullying implies a power imbalance. This is google we are talking about. They did poach a huge chunk of the safari team. They then did launch a competing browser and aggressively pushed that browser globally. They forked the mainline project of WebKit and created blink - for reasons relating to Chrome product roadmap. It was a big deal when they did it. But Jobs predicting this is what they were up to and calling google and complaining they are poaching a whole team from Apple. Is bullying? Which CEO wouldn’t be upset at an entire core team being targeted by a competitor? It’s not price fixing, it’s not illegal (to be upset or to call another ceo and complain).
- holografix 4y ago> Is he just a bully? He spent his whole professional career bullying people and repurposing their ideas into pretty amazing products.
- 28304283409234 4y agoSo....a bully.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- somenameforme 4y ago"Pure capitalism", or "war" as Steve Jobs put it in one of his emails, is a race to the bottom in terms of company profits because of countless scenarios like this. I want employee X because he will bring $Y value to me, so I can technically pay anything below $Y for him. But then your company also has similar logic. If we simply aggressively compete then these cost of any employee, who has a skillset where supply < demand, will rapidly approach the value they bring to any company - which can be immense. And simultaneously the profit of our companies will approach zero. This is very much in the interest of employees, but not in the interest of companies. So companies have a motivation to implicitly (legal) or explicitly (illegal, slap on the wrist punishment) cooperate to keep wages somewhat fixed. One way to do this is to not proactively "poach" each other's employees. If you hire a Bob, I won't actively try to recruit Bob - though I will extend him an offer if he, himself, proactively approaches me. 2 years after this email exchange, you had this [1]. A Google recruiter tries to poach an Apple employee. Steve contacts Google, Google responds that the recruiter will be "terminated within the hour", and Steve responds with a smiley face. They were sued over this [2] and "punished" with a fine that can't even be called a slap on the wrist. Now they do the same, but more cleverly. But having recruiters just spam everybody with endless recruitment offers, they can claim to be competing yet those recruitment offers become meaningless. [1] - https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543 https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1443263744906305543 [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
- exitb 4y agoWhen I read the original question, I thought that yes - he was essentially a bully, but he probably didn't think of himself as one. But that smiley face - he must have felt at least somewhat like a bully just then.
- WalterBright 4y agoIt's not a race to the bottom. It's a race to the point where Supply&Demand curves intersect. P.S. if it was a race to the bottom, consider that only 1.5% of the labor force works at minimum wage.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- causi 4y agoIs he just a bully? From everything I've read in the last twenty years, there was not one single facet of Steve Jobs' life in which he was not a bully.
- nigamanth 4y agoThey were competing, to Jobs it could've looked like either Apple or Google was going to stay alive. It is natural for people to threaten competition and I guess not like your competition?
- piyush_soni 4y agoYou mean it's natural for CEOs to literally threaten other CEOs?
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago[dead]
- afroisalreadyin 4y agoThis is also my impression after reading Isaacson's biography and Creativity, Inc. 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- roenxi 4y agoHis job is to create an environment where Apple makes a lot of money. If strategically important employees go from Apple to Google, Apple is quite likely to make less money. From that point on the game theory is fairly obvious and the rest is a question of style. May as well get angry; sometimes it works. It isn't optimum behaviour but at that level it'll be quite common. There aren't a lot of strategies to choose from. Call it bullying if you like, but realistically once this sort of money is involved something different is happening to what goes on in playgrounds. These people are well insulated from any emotional consequences or threats to their comfort. For a label like 'bully' what matters is how Jobs treated people he had actual power over.
- loganc2342 4y agoAs for how he treated people he had actual power over, I would call the label of “bully” quite appropriate
- paganel 4y ago> Is he just a bully? He was just a capitalist. That's how capitalism works, by definition, i.e. extracting the most surplus-value from the workers (in this case the Apple employees). Increased their salaries (i.e. making a "better offer") would have decreased the surplus-value extracted by Jobs, hence why he was angry.
- ben_w 4y agoIt's deeper than capitalism, power-acquisition is such a fundamental part of agents that it's part of the problem space for "how do we pre-emptively prevent an AI dystopia?" Capitalism is[0] "huh, even greedy people can be useful, because their greed is best served by supplying other people's needs". [0] or, I should say, some forms of it are, because Laissez-faire died with the New Deal as hard and for the same reasons as USSR-style Communism (the economic system not the dictatorship)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- seydor 4y ago> Is he just a bully? As long as the stock keeps going up, hagiographies
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoA bully? It's business. If he can get Google to not hire people just by being tough on the phone that's a win. Costs almost nothing. My father once worked at an electronics contracting firm. One of his co-workers who was in charge of purchasing parts was masterful while on the phone with suppliers. He drove a very hard bargain and often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices. Bullying or business?
- SyzygistSix 4y agoI thought you were supposed to buy them good bourbon and take them golfing/to the strip club, not yell at them.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoSteaks and strippers. A relative of mine asks if there's a Ruth's Chris in the area and if there isn't then he is not interested.
- krainboltgreene 4y agoBullying, easy. What a wild question.
- dspillett 4y ago> Bullying or business? Both. Being an arse, and becoming resistant to arseholes on the other side, can become an arms race in some sectors. It tends to break down after a while, when people on the supply end start “sacking” customers because they get enough business from the others that they can be choosy, then the cycle begins afresh.
- yourapostasy 4y ago> One of his co-workers who was in charge of purchasing parts was masterful while on the phone with suppliers. He drove a very hard bargain and often shouted and swore at suppliers to extract the best prices. Bullying or business? Bullying. Full Stop. This behavior gets people thrown out of restaurants and bars. If I ever catch someone treating one of my employees like that, and the employee is caught like a deer in the headlights because it is a big deal, I have absolutely no qualms stepping in and firing the client representative on the spot (clients can get back into our good graces by swapping representatives with apologies). I don't care how big the client is (I also perform receivables management to ensure no client is ever put into a position where they can threaten my book of business). I've been told once by a purchasing manager after speaking with a client's company counsel that I drive a hard but fair bargain. Happy repeat clients to this day. We respected each other without anyone resorting to toddler-teenager tantrums during the negotiations. When dealing with wait staff, hotel staff, valets, pool cleaners, all the way to CIO's and boards of directors, bullying is never acceptable. That you attempt to put a patina of respectability upon it by making it "just business" is also unacceptable. It's extremely disrespectful and rude, not to say the lowest, crudest, ugliest, low-cognitive effort form of negotiating. Negotiating to me is another communications channel conveying valuable information about how your culture reacts when the stakes are high, time is short, and actionable information sparse. Just like in a critical production down outage. When bullying in business is your SOP, the network effects of positive collaboration powered by increasingly pervasive technology advancing upon us will deliver far more attenuated benefits to you than your competitors.
- jasmer 4y agoAt the level of talent and exceptionalism, and with the amount of money involved ... it's a battle. Please don't think that people let $ Billions go one direction or another because of the genteel rules of white collar world. Steve is doing his job and leaning in to protect his talent. Just imagine conversations between coaches in sports. It's probably just 'tough talk', but it's also firing up a warning flare as if to say 'don't do this' etc. Depending on what he did after that, it could get ugly practically or legally ... but this is mostly just a CEO doing his job.
- ubermonkey 4y ago"Is he just a bully?" I mean, yes, and I say this without any intention of minimizing or justifiying, but: Which of the leaders/founders of firms at that scale and success do you imagine do NOT have a history of bullying? A certain amount of what we might call "force of personality" is required to get something off the ground. Once it succeeds, these people live their lives in a place where there is an enormous power and wealth differential between them and everyone around them. Those two factors will absolutely put you at risk for shitty behavior, I suspect.
- belter 4y ago"16 Examples Of Steve Jobs Being A Huge Jerk" - https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?international=true&r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10?inte...
- tinus_hn 4y agoPoaching other companies’ star employees is obviously appreciated by no one. That’s why there are non compete clauses etc. You may or may not agree that that is reasonable, but it certainly is not exceptional and does not make Steve Jobs look like a bully.
- amanaplanacanal 4y agoIt’s certainly appreciated by the poached employee!
- v0idzer0 4y agoThere’s a bit of a “gentlemen’s agreement” around poaching in a lot of industries. It’s not uncommon for execs to scold each other over it. Nobody wants to start a poaching war so there’s incentive to be polite on both sides.
- 93po 4y agoIt's awful that there is collusion between companies to prevent these workers from getting compensation based on actual market forces. If they care so much about poaching then they need compensation that strongly rewards tenure and pays enough that they won't be tempted to leave. I don't know if this behavior is illegal but I feel like it should be.
- abecedarius 4y agoIt is.
- 93po 4y agoIs it actually illegal if nothing happens as a result? Or if the fine is less than the amount of money saved by doing it?
- ano-ther 4y agoSounds like Jobs is reminding them of their non-poaching agreement. https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/source-apple-and-google-agreed-not-to-poach-workers https://techcrunch.com/2009/08/07/source-apple-and-google-ag... The document came to light in a lawsuit which Apple, Google and others eventually settled. https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-settle-anti-poaching-lawsuit-for-415-million/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...