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Comment by mshake2 | Hacker News Reader

If the two options are "Pixar exists, but some employees were treated unfairly" or "Pixar never exists", I will choose the first. Whether or not there are other options is not a hypothetical I care about, I am interested in thinking about the morality of ends vs means of this scenario.

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It is easy to choose for others, isn’t it?

"Steve took a chance on us and believed in our crazy dream of making computer-animated films; the one thing he always said was to simply 'make it great.' He is why Pixar turned out the way we did and his strength, integrity, and love of life has made us all better people. He will forever be a part of Pixar's DNA."

You're quoting the top two Pixar executives, and from immediately after Jobs' death as well. How about someone who isn't a millionaire?

aren't credible because they became so successful that they're now millionaire executives

Yes that's what I'm saying. The statement of two men who stood at the top of the ladder about the man who put them there immediately after that man has died is absolutely not credible in regards to judging how that man treated regular workers. At all.

A legendary animator and director, both who helped found Pixar with Jobs, aren't credible because they became so successful that they're now millionaire executives?

Jobs didn’t found Pixar; it spun out of George Lucas’ world and works and Jobs bought into it when it was several years old, even several years with the name Pixar. The Wikipedia article is self contradictory as its first paragraphs talk as of hee were a as founder, but hee was a much later major investor.

So far I haven't seen a counter experience from you about how Jobs treated the "regular workers" at Pixar, so as I see it, it's a quote from people who were close to what happened versus the absence of a counter experience.

Oh please. Googling "steve jobs bully pixar" reveals at least one story of horrible behavior directed toward regular staff members.

Jobs could be a bully, it's well documented. Pixar wasn't somehow immune to this behavior.

You've painted a utilitarian, partisan viewpoint: that the cultural and technological significance of Pixar outweighs any negative experiences of staff. The two are not easily comparable. How do you quantify them, what's the denominator? Jobs didn't have a crystal ball, he couldn't know Pixar would succeed. What was his calculus? How did he determine the trade-offs between success and bullying? Finally, cultural/tech significance is most certainly possible without putting staff through negative experiences.

The thought experiment doesn't depend on Jobs knowing or not.

The employees made that choice for themselves when they chose to start working for Pixar.

They make that choice everyday they chose to keep working for it.

You're suggesting an unreal scenario, so the thought experiment isn't going to do much good, IMO. Each employee gets to make that call themselves, "do I want to be treated badly?"

Fresh graduates may not realise they are being treated badly, lacking a frame of reference. Immigrants may be on a visa where they have no choice but to put up with it or leave the country.

Locals who've been around a bit, who know their discipline, the proven (local) best of the best? They don't stay on teams led by bullies.

It's not an unreal scenario at all. It's entirely plausible that a company falls apart when lacking the specific motivators and pressures that Jobs brought, and therefore never really exists in the first place. What's unreal about that?

The unreal part is there being only two options. Most dichotomies are false.

I addressed why the hypothetical is limited to two options, and taking a subset of plausible scenarios does not reduce the plausibility of the selected scenarios.

P(a) = 0.1, P(b) = 0.1, P(c) = 0.8, "Oh, let's only look at cases a and b".

Yes, because a and b represent a specific combination I said I was interested in exploring. What you've shown doesn't lower the plausibility of those scenarios. Are you being intentionally contrarian or is there a reason why you are trying to muddy a simple thought experiment?

That makes it unreal. It changed the environment too much to exclude it. Ignoring it breaks stuff. I'm not saying thought experiments are bad — do them often myself — I'm saying my response to get thought experiment itself is: it can't work like that (riffing of an unrelated but recent comment from yesterday where I'm the one doing the thought experiment as an existence proof, it's a "spherical cow in a vacuum" model).

It's not a nonsensical "spherical cow in vacuum" thought experiment to say "Pixar exists but some employees are treated bad" vs "Pixar doesn't exist". If you think that it becomes impossible for a rational mind to weigh those two choices, then there's no point in me continuing this discussion with you.

If Pixar didn't exist, the same people would do the same (or close enough) work under a different brand. Quite possibly with each other. That's as distinct as two identical dice placed in no specific order, i.e. not. Ergo, not a realistic scenario.

No, not at all. Environment and the group of people they’re working with plays an enormous role in the work people do.

Are you claiming that only new grads and immigrants fearful of deportation worked at Pixar?

Depends on how much of Jobs' current reputation is accurate vs. mythologising.

Jobs was a well-known sociopath but also people of the highest talent level fought to work for him because he was a great executive

The problem is abusing employees isn't a mean. It seemingly made it more difficult to reach that end.

I don't understand how this dichotomy can be useful to you. Even for "ends vs means" the answer isn't always white-or-black.

I see what you're saying, I just don't understand how it promotes a healthy discussion here.

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