Let's just be frank: If Jobs was in charge, everyone that remotely touched that app would pulled into a room, berated and told how fucking dumb they are, and told to pack their shit and find another job. Remember, he was obsessive about the first calculator app and hand-tuned it to his liking, so it's not hyperbole to suggest that he would be fucking livvid. [1]
Asshole, but perfection requires assholes. Apple is regressing. Their products are too expensive to tolerate regression.
>Let's just be frank: If Jobs was in charge, everyone that remotely touched that app would pulled into a room, berated and told how fucking dumb they are, and told to pack their shit and find another job.
Let's just be frank: there were TONS of BS issues like that under Jobs all the time, regardless of whether he was obsessive about this or that particular app.
Grandparent isn't trying to condone the practice of berating employees but to demonstrate how Apple under Steve Jobs would've been much more likely to catch these kinds of screwups before production and much less likely to tolerate them once they occurred. The means of correction are less important than the standard of quality which was effectively enforced.
So against we have Brian Goldman, MD. And for, we have Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and pretty much every other tech/entrepreneur darling of the 20th century. I'm pretty sure the results speak for themselves here.
A relative's phone calls got disconnected very regularly until she covered the antenna with tape.
If nobody in the real world had any issues with it nobody would have discovered it in the first place.
You didn’t answer the question, but I’ll go ahead and suggest that you are motivated to create good software, not by a fear of being yelled at, but rather something else. Maybe you think the product you are making is of actual value, and are proud of it. Maybe you want to impress your boss with the quality so you can get a raise. Maybe you don’t want to be fired.
In any case, I would be shocked if there was anyone, anywhere that thought: “you know, I would have put in the effort, but I knew even if I screwed up, no one would verbally abuse me, so why bother?”
Just my opinion, but I would reckon no software has ever been made better by verbal abuse. Jobs succeeded in spite of it, not because of it. Going on a tirade is something egomaniacs do when they can’t control their temper, not an effective motivational strategy.
A rhetorical question that has only one answer doesn't really require an answer.
Do you seriously think anyone would answer "yes i love getting yelled at"? If yes, then I'm done here. If no, then ask yourself why you asked that question. it's a rhetorical question to control your narrative, which has nothing to do with what GP said. GP never said it's a good thing to yell at others, and neither did I. You're the one who turned it into this narrative for the sake of your argument.
If I'm at the sort of job where I get yelled at for doing my job as I saw fit, I will be motivated in the future to find a better manager.
But then again, I'd never block user input to play an unnecessary animation on my own initiative, so I must have been doing that because my manager told me to do it, or because I wasn't given enough time to do the job properly. So if I got yelled at in that situation, I'd wait to see if I was fired, and quit if I was not. Management by loud, abrasive, dominance-displaying histrionics is not something I can work with, ever.
Every company gets one freebie, where I go above and beyond the call of duty to make the kind of software that I am proud to stand behind. If that effort is not rewarded or recognized, and explicitly encouraged to continue, I fall back into line and do exactly as I am told thenceforth--no more, no less. I won't offer my opinion unless it is requested, and I won't go looking for extra things to do to improve the code base. If that freebie is actually punished or reprimanded, I start looking for other jobs. What I have found is that few companies are interested in doing anything well, or even technically correct. They desire extremely consistent mediocrity. They don't want a hand-crafted hamburger made from fresh-ground chuck and crisp, juicy vegetables; they want a McDonald's hamburger with exactly two pickle slices and one pinch of minced onion.
Anyone that yells at a grill cook for making a gourmet burger instead of the McDonald's standard probably shouldn't be hiring trained chefs and assigning them to the grill. But worse, anyone that yells at their grill cook because they put a third pickle slice on the burger--an extra pickle that was asked for, or even demanded--probably should not be in charge of anything, much less a bunch of grill cooks.
Fear of getting yelled at is actually fear of having to navigate the awful interview process all over again, while pretending to care about my current job long enough for an offer to come in. I avoid doing my work badly mostly because I don't want to be a person who does bad work. If I ever do bad work, it's because I was told to do it that way--or maybe yelled at to do it that way--and I hate every shortcut and kludge, even as I am typing them into existence. At that point, I am already mentally out the door, only sticking around until that paycheck can be replaced by a check from somewhere else. Yelling is bad management, and bad management motivates me to leave.
Nobody is defending management which abuses employees for failing to meet quality standards. But yelling at employees is not the only way to indicate disapproval of work which does not meet quality standards, and the fact that Apple has not been maintaining quality standards is a black stain on current management that Steve Jobs never would have allowed in his company.
Apple shouldn't model Jobs's management style and go back to yelling at workers, but its entire corporate ethos depends on keeping Jobs's quality standards. If those standards are gone then Apple's brand will surely die.
And the bumpers aren't proof of anything except perhaps marketing; they could have just decided that the cost of giving everybody free bumpers was cheaper than any brand damage they might otherwise have sustained.
Asshole, but perfection requires assholes. Apple is regressing. Their products are too expensive to tolerate regression.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/macintosh-calculator-2011-10