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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

That's sort of straight obvious.

Basically because if somebody like Steve Jobs doesn't have a Steve Wozniak to build things for him in the start he is more or less a arrogant egoistic tantrum throwing hippie kind of a guy whom nobody would like to deal with.

You meet a genius co-founder like Steve Wozniak very very rarely.

Nearly every program manager is a lesser version of Steve Jobs, that is how authority looks cool and glorified. Giving an impression that the manager is automagically creating success out of thin air while a engineer somewhere pushing 19 hr daily schedules to make it happen doesn't count or is irrelevant.

Steve Jobs reminds of Peter Keating from Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead'.

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Steve Jobs is the visible topic! You don't have to bring up Woz or any of the other countless engineers to still admire his genius-- you don't have to be an engineer to be a genius-- and common ignorance about the nuance of the story doesn't make for an incorrect story. Of course there were other brilliant people involved, and they are celebrated, without qualification, in the circles which understand their work.

Is it tiresome to hear about Jobs? Yeah, I'm over it. But you know what's worse are the people coming back with the idea that the managers are all leaches. You don't work in a vacuum. You are not capable of accomplishing it all on your own. And guess what? Steve Jobs was capable of things that most people are not.

Criticize him for taking the aesthetic and not the architecture from PARC. Criticize him for creating locked platforms and eschewing FOSS. Criticize him on any number of substantive topics, but don't let's bog down every moment of cultural hero worship just because they didn't choose the guy with our job title. The engineers get their time.

>>>Steve Jobs reminds of Peter Keating from Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead'.

Seriously? You think Hank Rearden developed Rearden Steel without all of the efforts others had first made in steel? Dagny inherited her damn railroad. She didn't create it. Richard Halley didn't invent music. John Galt was working in a damn auto factory. He didn't invent autos nor the idea of an engine. Midas Mulligan was a goddammed banker. He didn't invent currency or the idea of stored value.

Wow that's fairly insulting and not really an appropriate comparison at all. Peter Keating was anything but an arrogant egoist, and he bent over backwards to please the people he dealt with (his superiors at least)

At the end of the day what Peter Keating did was because of how people reacted to him.

Tell me that using the dealer trick to not have a license plate is somehow not the same childish level of vanity that you would expect of a successful manchild.

Eh, what's wrong with the dealer trick? He has the ability to do it, the law is written that way...what does it matter?

Irrespective of whether or not the dealer trick is right, your argument is unconvincing.

A non-exhaustive list of things which the law allows for and which many people have the ability to do:

* Call you names * Give you projects that are doomed to fail * Place you on a team which will drag you down * Use you as a scapegoat for the failure of a project * Use KLOC as a metric of performance * Show you the finger at a traffic light

And yet we don't approve of these things. Something being lawful is the bare minimum, not the gold standard.

None of those provide value. I think you're confusing a hack that only takes advantage of the government in a context where the government takes advantage of us and that's meant to provide value ultimately to someone else.

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