POSTED BY

Rob Beschizza

AT 11:47 AM
Friday January 2, 2009

Fire

apple

Ex-staffer: Jobs wandered Apple's halls with "flame thrower" after MobileMe fiasco

mobileme.jpgBritain's Guardian has a "Life inside Apple" article from a former staffer, Chuq von Rospach, whose experiences of the secretive firm were mostly positive. It's got some funny moments, too, such as the atmosphere following the release of Apple's half-baked replacement for .Mac.

When Apple released it, it simply wasn't ready. ... To people who wondered how what the atmosphere would be like inside 1 Infinite Loop, I said: "Just imagine Steve Jobs wandering the hall with a flame thrower in hand, asking random people 'do you work on MobileMe?'"

I never had Steve's flamethrower aimed at me, although I came close a couple of times; all in all, I was close to getting my butt fired three times – and all three times, I probably would have deserved it. I do know friends who did. It wasn't always pleasant – but one thing I give Steve credit for is he held himself to the same high standards he held those around him. He is a perfectionist, and that's what makes him successful and what made Apple succeed. But that kind of perfectionism isn't easy, and isn't done with gentle criticism.

Apple is a place where you work hard, but you get rewarded, and you help create things that are special.

He left for new challenges.

Enjoying the show, avoiding the flamethrower [Grauniad]

1

16 Comments

theawesomerobot

#1 – 1:12 PM January 2, 2009

A lot of tech companies could use a CEO like Jobs. (not to mention many other currently failing American industries)

Rather than hanging out in his giant office and counting his money or jetting around on company retreats (which I'm sure he does a bit of) he's walking the halls yelling at people to fix things.

Sure people a lot of people aren't going to be your best friends for it, but parenting a company can be like parenting kids - sometimes you have to be the bad guy so things will get done. Pal around with your employees too much and they'll slack off - ignore them and all hell will break loose.

TotalForge

#2 – 1:25 PM January 2, 2009

Even before its appearance in 'Mystery Men', Apple employees feared the Blamethrower.

Brandon West

#3 – 2:04 PM January 2, 2009

@1 If he was really doing his job/being involved, why wasn't the yelling done before the broken product was released?

I much prefer smart delegation as opposed to micromanaging CEOs with their hands in a thousand different pots. Places like Google seem to be quite successful with that philosophy.

AirPillo

#4 – 2:32 PM January 2, 2009

I'm guessing the "flame thrower" is a metaphor, here... otherwise that would be even more of an interesting story.

Imagine the headline:
"Steve Jobs arrested, charged with armed intimidation"

Maneki Nico

#5 – 3:33 PM January 2, 2009

I imagine it was a lot like this:

Who’s to blame?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aod3Atesmq8

claud9999

#6 – 4:12 PM January 2, 2009

I have it on good authority that the project (program?) manager in charge of MobileMe got shown the door. Nothing like holding management to account. Wish more large companies (and large bureaucracies) actually held top-management to account for errors.

I've heard horror stories about Jobs going on a tirade at NeXT during its slide right before the holidays. Probably a good thing Apple generally holds off on major launches 'til after the new year.

LogrusZed

#7 – 4:48 PM January 2, 2009

This guy sounds like he has Stockholm Syndrome.

Yeah Steve Jobs raped me a few times, but he's a great man and I'm sure I deserved it. Long live the SLA!

OM

#8 – 5:00 PM January 2, 2009

...It's going to be really a fun time when Jobs finally croaks, because you're going to see at least a dozen tell-all books about his being a stark-raving coke-headed lunatic with all sorts of short stories and novellas about his going through the (cr)Apple HQ, mentally harassing and/or physically threatening his employees. Cults of Personality usually fall totally apart when the Personality in question is no longer around to retaliate, and the new regime has seen fit to eliminate whoever said Personality's right-hand henchman was.

Q: if Jobz is Stalin, who's his Beria?

Anonymous Anonymous

#9 – 7:45 PM January 2, 2009

They must be making TONS of money and have awesome sweet benefits to put up with a boss yelling at you like that. Or be brainwashed Apple cultists.

The boss yelling at his employees is an artifact of the old "company man" system, where the employee put in his 30+ years, and as long as he was loyal and marginally competent was guaranteed a steady job an a generous pension when he retired. Back then it made a lot of sense not to piss off the boss.

Nowadays, the company is likely to indiscriminately drop employees the first sign of its stock price going down, and 401Ks or RSPs have replaced the company pension, that any kind of obsequious behavior is definitely misguided. And an boss better make damn sure he shares the same race, sex, and sexual preference of the people he is yelling at an humiliating, otherwise he is going to end up with a multi-million dollar discrimination & harassment lawsuit pretty quick.

Once of the only benefits of our highly unstable and insecure form of modern capitalism is that you definitely don't have to take shit from some douchebag on a power trip.

artbot

#10 – 9:28 PM January 2, 2009

This was an interesting read, but I'm sorry, little to nothing that Apple is doing or has done is "changing the world". It may appear that way to Apple employees, press release evangelists, and tech-whores, but it's just more iJunk to fuel America's obscene obsession with products with planned obsolescence. So they have a neat GUI and you like your iPhone because it lets you completely disengage from the world around you 100% of the time now, but it's just stuff. "Change the world"? Puh-leeze.

My wife worked there years ago and her description was basically of a hell-hole where megalomaniacal group managers did their best to intimidate their subordinates so as to appear a team player to Jobs. Sure sounds awful to me - it was to her.

And the GUI and mouse were invented at Xerox PARC, not Apple.


Trent Hawkins

#11 – 11:20 PM January 2, 2009

I have a feeling that this will encourage hundreds if not thousands of Managers to become bigger micro managing and blame spreading douche bags then ever.

Someone needs to add a disclaimer: "only competent and creative people may handle this blamethrower".

Jack

#12 – 1:16 AM January 3, 2009

Trent, you might have a point but technically speaking it's not a manager's job to be a "friend" to anyone they manage. It's tough job but it's one that's guaranteed to taint the way people view you. And define what a friend really is if you are a manager.

Also, MobileMe is a flashback to the horrible pre-Steve Jobs days of Apple where they would have infomercials and ridiculous machine designations that somehow made a Performa seem like less of a computer than a PowerMac. I mean, just look at the logo. It's horrid! Whoever decided to force that into existence deserves to be fired. It's so out of line with Apple's vision that it's like it's an entity from another dimension.

zuzu

#13 – 9:00 AM January 3, 2009

Trent, you might have a point but technically speaking it's not a manager's job to be a "friend" to anyone they manage. It's tough job but it's one that's guaranteed to taint the way people view you. And define what a friend really is if you are a manager.
The role of a manager is to empower the people being managed to do their jobs as well as they can. It's basically like being a butler and managing the house -- keeping everything running smoothly for the people living/working inside, and handling all visitors leaving their calling cards accordingly. Real management has nothing to do with bossing people around.

OM

#14 – 1:15 PM January 3, 2009

"They must be making TONS of money and have awesome sweet benefits to put up with a boss yelling at you like that. Or be brainwashed Apple cultists."

...There has to be a psychological reason why someone would put up with a boss like that. Then again, Bob Kratchet put up with Ebeneezer Scrooge for at least seven years, right?

dimmer

#15 – 3:20 PM January 3, 2009

"They must be making TONS of money and have awesome sweet benefits to put up with a boss yelling at you like that."

A boss who gives a shit? Hard to find. A boss who knows wtf he's talking about? Harder still. As an ex-employee who had face time with Steve (both good and bad) I can say, totally, that working for and with Steve is a great thing. Best boss I ever had and probably ever will have.

Jack

#16 – 1:10 AM January 4, 2009

Well, on topic the thing that makes Steve Jobs unique is he was truly there from day one and knew what was happening. Maybe not as intensely as Wozniak, but he clearly was on the pulse of the things...

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