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Comment by kutkloon7 | Hacker News Reader

While I think Steve Jobs was a huge dick and doesn't deserve all the praise he gets, I do think that his one quality was to be harsh about things in an honest way.

When an engineer spent a week overworking to be able to boot a system, he is the one guy that will say it is not enough and needs to go faster. That he had no respect for others, and considered his will the only important things probably helped quite a bit in enforcing his vision.

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Couldn't this be said about most founders of most failed startups?

In revisionist history, if the founder was persistent and the product achieved a product-market fit, it was a vision. If the founder was persistent, and the product did not achieve product-market fit, it was a delusion and toxic work environment.

I think there's a bit of a false dichotomy there. Some engineers are willing to work in a harsh, toxic environment if they think the founder isn't delusional and is actually onto something. I presume that's how Apple employees felt.

People are willing to put up with authoritarian assholes if they think their vision is worth implementing.

> If the founder was persistent, and the product did not achieve product-market fit, it was a delusion and toxic work environment.

survivor bias.

One thing I've noticed in my life is that people first look at the conclusion and then come up with an explanation.

The explanation is just a story, not an actual prediction.

Yeap. This right here.

It's an entirely different story for companies like Microsoft. Microsoft is more of a nerds/engineers company. When I start my powershell, it takes 15+ seconds and regularly crashes. I don't think Steve Jobs would be too fond of it.

It probably did, but that same pattern of behavior, minus the luck (and people like Wozniak) would just be a story of personal failings. They only seem like the active ingredients to success because we're examining them in hindsight, and want to believe that we can reduce the very complex to the very simple.

He was also harsh in a dishonest way, picking the pockets of his business partners and employees.

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