Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs

http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/25/michael-dhuey-apple-engineer/

by bond • 15 years ago

136 46 15 years ago

ugh4• 15 years ago

“He was not filtered with his input. If he was in a meeting that was boring him, he would be blunt. He’d say, ‘I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.’ And we would. He didn’t suffer a fool.”

Uhm, that's considered being blunt? I would call that being good at leading a meeting. Saying when information (or so detailed information) is not needed is crucial and necessary in order to keep meetings tight amd relevant.

wccrawford• 15 years ago

a : abrupt in speech or manner b : being straight to the point : direct

So yeah, that's exactly what blunt means.

Don't be confused by all the people who think bluntness is automatically rude. It's not. Those people just have really tender feelings and can't handle the truth. They need to have it sugar coated.

ugh4• 15 years ago

“Blunt” has different connotations for me, rudeness seems like a part of it. Saying “I don’t need to see this, let’s move on.” seems just honest to me, not blunt. “I’m bored by this, why do you tell me all this crap?” would be something I would be willing to call blunt.

But yeah, being honest (or blunt, if you will) is something I’m perfectly alright with. I want the people I’m working with or for to be like that. I’m not so crazy about rudeness, but if that quote is accurate Jobs wasn’t rude (at least in those situations).

ScottBurson• 15 years ago

Those people just have really tender feelings and can't handle the truth.

This is perhaps unnecessarily blunt :-)

I agree that bluntness is not automatically rude. Indeed, to me, the whole purpose of using the word "blunt" in this way is to draw an important distinction between outright rudeness and behavior that risks being insensitive but does so for a constructive purpose.

Nonetheless, I think some confusion about the meaning of the word is understandable.

pavel_lishin• 15 years ago

Depends on what the meeting is about, and what was boring him. If it was something crucial that needed to be discussed, that's crap. But if the purpose of the meeting is to inform him about something, then of course - skip the parts that don't matter.

jrockway• 15 years ago

I've never in my life attended a meeting where someone has been willing to say this. It's just "not done".

My solution is to just not go to meetings. The recap at my desk later will contain as much information and will only take 30 seconds.

ugh4• 15 years ago

I don’t really have a lot of work experience but this happened at meetings both when I was an intern (though not as often as I would have liked) and I have this professor who is really fond of asking people to leave details out and only present the big picture (and I appreciate that very much). We met regularly to present the progress of our thesis and he knows how to keep it tight and relevant for everyone.

Maybe this has something to do with culture? All that happened to me in Germany and it doesn’t seem extraordinary to me.

absconditus• 15 years ago

Unfortunately the corporate world has become frequent, long, useless meetings. It is rare that anything is accomplished during them, more and more people attend them, and no one questions them (everyone complains in private). The best skill to have in the modern corporate world is getting along with other people, not getting things done.

TomOfTTB2• 15 years ago

I'm glad they mentioned NeXT and how much of a failure it was. There's a meme developing where people treat Jobs like he lived a charm life of constant victories but that really isn't the case. When I started High School people were telling Steve Jobs jokes in Usenet. He was the fallen genius who never lived up to his potential (the Mac was all but dead at this point and Apple was licensing the OS in a desperate attempt to save it)

In that way I think the story of Steve Jobs is one of the most inspirational for people. Almost everything people associate with Jobs today are things he did after his 40th birthday. Even the Mac (OSX is really NextSTEP repackaged)

In an industry that obsesses over people in their 20s there's a lesson to be learned there.

pohl• 15 years ago

What wouldn't I give to have my own failure of the magnitude of NeXT. As a business they merely survived, but to create as much system software value as they did (and during the dark ages of operating system monopoly, no less) and be able to use that value to acquire the dying husk of Apple for a negative 430 million or thereabouts...not bad, really.

jodrellblank• 15 years ago

How was Next a failure? 11 years from start to being acquired for 400M 1996 dollars is not "failing".

syncopate• 15 years ago

I wonder if NeXT was really that much of a failure, considering that ultimately today we use many of it's software technologies. I used to be a NeXT programmer and am always amazed how much of it is still there today in OS X..

wslh• 15 years ago

With this line of reasoning Xerox PARC was a completely success and every "seed" that lives today in the human history too. But business success metrics are very cynical and NeXT was a business failure.

ori_b• 15 years ago

NeXT was a great software success. It was also a great business failure.

fabulous• 15 years ago

Steve sold NeXT to Apple for $400 Million. You're some guy with a blog.

What are you so smug about?

TomOfTTB2• 15 years ago

Are you kidding? I'm not smug. I'm saying Jobs is probably the most amazing success story in the history of technology and he did it after an age where most people would write him off and after experiencing a significant failure. The point I was making was you shouldn't write people off because of age or past failures.

The fact that he came back from a low makes him more impressive not less.

I mean, if you want to make Jobs into a super hero than go right ahead. But if you want to learn from him you have to look at what he actually went through and the truth is he had lows.

As for NeXT being bought for $400 million even Jobs himself would have to admit that's not the end he would have preferred. And though I was too young to remember exactly I'm pretty sure the whole venture was a net loss even with the $400 million.

steveb• 15 years ago

Jobs failed multiple times early in his career!

1980: Apple III released, bombs and is killed in 1984

1982: Jobs is kicked out of the Lisa Project, joins the Macintosh project

1984: Mac released. It is overpriced and has tepid sales.

1985: Kicked out of Apple

1989: First NeXT cubes released. They are overpriced and see slow sales

1991: NeXTStation released. NeXT still has tepid sales.

1993: NeXT hardware cancelled, OS ported to multiple other platforms with little success. Only the Intel port survives. Releases OpenStep for Windows.

1996: NeXT is bought by Apple.

For over a decade he had a string of public failures to match every success.

Nowadays Apple hits home run after home run and disrupts multiple industries. Imagine how much he learned from each failure.

masklinn• 15 years ago

> For over a decade he had a string of public failures

I'm not sure if NeXT's history is a failure or the building of a foundation. Something similar happened with Pixar: Steve bought it in 1986, Toy Story was released in 1995.

Before TS, Steve had already sold the hardware side of Pixar, the staff had to be cut in half, and Jobs was still wondering whether he should resell Pixar in 1994.

sorbus• 15 years ago

> A little known-fact Dhuey recalls is that Jobs has hearing loss.

> “When we did the iPod we had to make sure it would be loud enough for Steve to hear the music,” says Dhuey. “We had to balance his need for volume with a French law against things that were too loud."

Well, that explains a lot. It's a pity that Jobs needing to have music louder to be able to hear it has led to a generation of people who are getting hearing loss from having their music turned up too loudly.

jerf• 15 years ago

Uh, no. That problem predates Apple's entry into the space by decades.

If you want to get down to the real root cause, the root problem is biological; the human ear's damage threshold is significantly lower than its pain threshold. That's not an easy problem to solve.

dvdhsu• 15 years ago

No wonder Steve didn't like Flash: it made the MacBook Pros run extremely hot, and instantly kicked the fans up to full throttle.

dpkendal• 15 years ago

Not only this, but I've read stories that in the early days of his return, you could get into an elevator with him and not have a job any more when you got out. If he asked you what you did and you said marketing, you were out. If you were an engineer on a misguided technical project, also out.

Jobs had respect for the engineers who had slogged over many years, squeezing all the life and functionality they could out of the classic Mac OS under the direction of misguided marketers who innovated by writing a feature list then implementing it, rather than by seeing if it was technically feasible then writing it.

He had no respect for the marketing people who came up with these bullshit feature lists and bullshit adverts and bullshit product lines and encouraged ridiculous R&D projects. (Taligent, Copland, HyperCard 3, etc.)

lurker142• 15 years ago

I refer you to this example of demanding a feature with no regard for feasibility: http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&s...

idlewords• 15 years ago

I was really hoping this would be an article about flatulence.

joely• 15 years ago

Since Jobs was gone from Apple in 1985 what was his role in the Macintosh II, which didn't come out for 2 more years? Not a question that should be left to suspension of disbelief. And the iMac came out in 1998, but Steve was working on it at Apple in 1985 – in the Macintosh II building? To paraphrase Col. Kurtz: "Journalism? I don't see any journalism here."

And one more thing™, Dhuey is the one with a tin ear if he doesn't understand that fans are anathema to Jobs' aesthetic.

Duff• 15 years ago

Being close to any "VIP" type executive, politician, etc is often awkward.

I had the bad fortune of being in an environment where I found myself in the sights of a psychotic, two-bit political appointee from time to time. Not fun.

chulipuli• 15 years ago

I would have loved an elevator ride with him. The man is quite smart, and a resilient entrepreneur.

WalterBright• 15 years ago

Not a problem for me, I always take the stairs!

Why Apple employees avoid getting in the elevator with Steve Jobs

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