Hacker News Reader

Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

more people need to be like Woz and we need more Jobs in the world. Jobs was a person who bullied through the ego centric system and paved a good single way forward.

Remember when MS office did not include a pdf outputter because they didn’t want to hurt adobe’s feelings? Remember that? Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs? Who went nuclear on all of those analytics companies because they put analytics without declaring it?

Jobs caused a lot of divorces with the iPhone. He did! But he cut through people’s ego like scissors and in a creative field that can happen a lot. He didn’t have ego though.

View on HN

> Would that have happened with a bully like Jobs?

To assume that ms wasn't headed by bullies requires a striking ignorance of ms' history.

You made me lol. Microsoft’s feats of assholishness and bullies is pretty legendary.

> He didn’t have ego though.

False. Steve Jobs had a massive ego and was by no means a saint. He got a girl pregnant and tried to skirt the responsibility. That's not someone with no ego.

Steve Jobs was also a genius and his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence.

Someone can be both a genius on the one hand and a total shithead on the other. That's called being human. <3

I met Jobs as a high schooler at Westfield Valley Fair with a "Programming in Objective-C for iPhone" book in hand during like the iPhone 3G era, and he refused to sign the book lol

He was a textbook narcissist. They're all about ego.

And Apple would never have existed without him.

True, I'm not saying that. I'm sure without a big ego you won't succeed as a big businessman. I'm just saying he was a very typical narcissist and as such his ego would have been important to him (which is what the thread discussion was about). I didn't state any moral judgment there (though I do have one which I elaborated on elsewhere)

> I'm sure without a big ego you won't succeed as a big businessman

I agree. Unconfident people will never take the personal risks needed to get big.

and in fact many unconfident people feel its somehow immoral to feed their ego in this way

Having confidence isn't necessarily a good thing of course.

Neither is 'getting big'.

A lot of politics and industry is made up by vacuous people selling hot air these days. Too much confidence, too little respect and knowledge.

People even more confident than the egoists can have the very same feeling.

> his bullying pushed a lot of people to excellence

A story about Chuck Yeager. He did a stint as squadron commander in the Korean War. When he arrived at the airbase, he watched the squadron land. Afterwards, he called all the pilots together, got a bucket of paint, and marked off two lines across the runway.

He said the pilots were doing sloppy landings and would now land between the two lines. The pilots protested, saying that was impossible. So Yeager got in a jet, took off, circled the airfield, and touched down exactly at the midpoint between the lines.

The squadron pilots got the point.

Yeager wanted his pilots to survive combat, and that meant being perfect pilots every time. If I was a pilot, I'd be glad to have a squadron leader like that in command, even if he was a total asshole.

I think you'll really enjoy watching "12 O'Clock High" with Gregory Peck.

I'm still trying to find a reasonably priced copy of the book.

I've seen it several times. I have an ancient crumbly paperback of it.

My dad, 32 missions over Germany in a B-17, said it was representative of how things were.