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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

I find the ":) Steve" just disgusting. Someone got terminated and everybody gets a pat on their back. Well done everybody.

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I'm immediately skeptical of anyone I meet in the tech industry who doesn't think Steve Jobs was an absolute raging asshole. Yes, he accomplished some interesting product shipments. But the number of direct first person anecdotes of him being a complete dick to people is too great to ignore.

I'm writing this from a Macbook Air. One of the reasons why I use MacOS is because it's based on the NeXT heritage. There was some amazing stuff there. But Steve was just not a nice person.

And why does he have to be nice to the people around him? To be a leader, he needs to say things other people can't say, or won't say. He is brutal, yes, but without this brutality, the products or teams or the company would be mediocre. Everyone is happy with nice words, but nice words don't always get you nice products and results.

I know it's part of corporate lore but I'd like to see some evidence that you have to be "brutal" for your company or products not to be mediocre.

A leader can be brutally honest, relentless about quality and ethical, all at the same time.

Nearly all great leaders in history can be described as "not a nice person".

It doesn't redeem them. Nor does it redeem Jobs. But being an asshole doesn't, in any way, diminish one's outsized impact on society.

Depends on what he was known as an asshole for. For one, what he did to his daughter's mother puts him a bit past the "only tips 5%" end of the scale of assholery.

He used the handicap parking space just because he wanted to.

I wonder if he was nicer than Ghenghis Khan.

Why are you disgusted?

I am disgusted because someone made an inconsequential mistake, got fired for it and a CEO is happy about it.

People get fired for violating policies. A CEO is happy that the issue is handled. What's the problem with that? You can sue if the policy is illegal, but before the lawsuit settles, it is not.

Don't push your current ideology back on historic matter. Whether something is illegal is dynamic and dependent on the era. Smoking weed would get you in jail not too long ago. So is that right or wrong? Things are not always black or white. Stay open-minded

That this wasn't legal was not some big surprise or innovation in law in the "historic" times of 2007 either. (indeed, according to evidence from the case Schmidt explicitly mentioned not discussing the policy by email to not create a papertrail).

There's nothing to be open minded here. A person got fired because they violated an illegal policy, that was illegal the moment Google and Apple started their collusion, not when they were sued for it.

A "policy" that was almost certainly never written down because it was highly illegal.

It's not even a mistake. They tried to recruit a presumably well qualified person, that they had every legal right to recruit. Fired for literally trying to do their job.

How do you know it's inconsequential mistake?

How do you know person was not very well aware of the policy, and while their colleagues did adhere to it, the person in question did not, and attempted to benefit themselves financially/whatnot by breaking the said policy?

Why do you think ":)" === CEO is happy about a person getting fired?

That's why I asked "Why are you disgusted?" (thanks for downvotes everyone while asking a simple question)

It might be fair to be "disgusted" that CEOs put a policy forbidding cold outreach to competitors employees (but I personally wouldn't use such an emotional word)

But I don't get why you feel disgusted about a different thing and why you expect a CEO of a multibillion company with thousands of employees care about a random person in another company breaking another company policies and getting fired for it?

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