Some of the smartest people I've met work in sales. You don't have to be an engineer to be smart.

Agreed. It's easy for engineers to assume because they have a deep understanding of a complex topic, that it is a good proxy for assessing general intelligence.

Such assessment is a good proxy for a certain kind of intelligence only, because intelligence itself exists on a fairly wide spectrum, it is not a binary trait.

The problem is that the average salesperson is pretty ignorant, even about the probuct he's supposed to sell and the target audience to sell to. Encountering a great salesperson is a rare occurrence in life, encountering a more or less average one is very common.

Same with programmers or anything else.

The problem is the baseline STEM disciple looks on the baseline biz/marketing graduate with disdain like they took an easy route out.

'proper' Engineering (MECH/AERO/CIVIL/EEE) is full of memes about this mindset.

CS is just as bad.

Most decent engineers loose this mindset after freshman year but many go on to see them selves as the MVP department of whatever business.

In some ways I think Startup culture fights against this because it's really obvious at small team scale how different skill sets are needed.

The absolute best in any field including fast food cook is probably as intelegent as any other field. However the average really can be meaningfully different based on self selection. HR for example really does not attract the best and brightest.

Sales is an outlier because compensation for the best can be really good. So, it's got a large group of very talented people and many far less so.

There's always the difficulty of being able to recognise that as a lamen. Mediocre sales people are often transparent to anybody who listens to them and is able to ask questions. A mediocre engineer "blinds with science" and is very hard to identify without some amount of specialist knowledge.

Of course, never said it's not. Are people reflecting from themselves, or what is this about?

Classic programmer narcissism

Possibly just ignorant. Most people have never/will never be in charge of large budgets.

A normal consumer with a normal job is only really going to encounter the lower end of the field.

Only today’s nitpicking culture could ever create an impression that Steve Jobs wasn’t intelligent. He basically created modern computing. The thought that he was just a snake oil huckster is lunacy.

> He basically created modern computing.

Whooaa, that's quite a stretch.

'Modern Computing' was happening with or without Steve Jobs. He certainly was an exemplar visionary that put the right parts together at the right time.

But, he did not create or define. Technological progress has it's own immutable momentum.

Perhaps a better expression is that he helped popularize computing.

I would again push back on that.

He did introduce a class of devices/products but Apple and Computational machines are not two concepts I associate.

The Windows OS has done more. My point being... yes he's a genius but in terms of Marketing, Business and seeing where the hockey puck is going.

He excelled at selling to desires, but look at the 'real computers' Apple has produced in recent years.

I shared the same ignorant view until I saw with my eyes what really happened. Everything done in the early 2000s was done by Apple first(and for the most part really well) as much as I hate to admit that. All Windows did was copy much of the functionality(and did a terrible job at it). If you go through the Keynotes during Steve Jobs return to Apple from 1999-2002 you can see WiFi coming out at least 1 year before anyone, high quality, performing laptops with good battery life and WiFi before anyone. Take a look at the OS X Aqua interface[1](which hasn't changed much even to this day) coming out 1 year before even XP. Lets not even forget the failure of Vista. It took almost a decade for something even close to come out on Windows.

Spend hours and hours going through the unedited version of history and judge for yourself. You can see the birth of many industries(Youtube-Mac Streaming, Google Search - Sherlock) in those keynotes and its refreshing to see it done so well. I'm not saying Jobs succeeded at all these things, but he definitely saw these things way way before anyone.

[1]https://youtu.be/auXc0tgdJSo?t=8m43s

Dude...that sounds a lot like a "no true scotsman" line of argument. if by "real computers" you mean devices for programmers to train ML models, then yeah, Apple is pretty lacking, if by "real computers" you mean devices which operate end-user facing software, well, the spectrum widens enough to show you why Apple is approaching a trillion dollar market cap.

put another way, a lot of the _reason_ that companies like facebook and google are doing any computation in the first place is because of the level of data and interaction that people are doing on devices made by apple. You are welcome to make a distinction between a Cray and a MacBook pro, bu it is kind of pedantic.

If sending emails and browsing Facebook is 'computing' then you're right.

If being able to create the 'end use software' on these devices, then again you're right.

If these devices are little more than portable web browsers, computing ?

Wrong, not a stretch.

It’s an interpretation, on what all but the extremes on either side can agree is a subjective inquiry in the first place. Also, a bit of a futile and misguided one if used to minimize other’s contributions in the field.

But for the same reason, it’s folly to discount Jobs as not a, if not the, closest thing to a creator. This is true despite engineers’ immutable/incorrect belief that actually creating product value + building working software = changing the world is inevitable, this video proves otherwise (back room computing vs actually empowering operations using computing) and reminds us that real artists ship.

Had Steve not, who knows what computing would look like 2008-2018, but it’s certainly not a stretch to posit that it’d look a whole lot different, which is what it seems gg99 was saying.

Are you conflating 'computing' and consumption of screen time?

Windows has done far far more in terms of being a platform for computational work.

> He basically created modern computing.

Incorrect. Perhaps this was just your attempt at humor, but it couldn't possibly be further from the truth.

> The thought that he was just a snake oil huckster is lunacy.

That someone is intelligent does not prevent them from also being a snake oil huckster. As a matter of fact, intelligence will make you the best snake oil huckster.

I read his biography by Isaacson. He was a fascinating person, extremely smart, a keen sense of design and a (self-taught) ability for sales. He was most definitely a boss I wouldn't have wanted to work for though, because he was an extreme narcissist.

Smart and terrible person don't exclude each other.

I don't know, I'd rather be an early Apple's employee or part of the first iPhone team, witnessing a major new chapter of computing, than a comfortable developer in a comfortable setting.

True! And, this was change the world kind of stuff — it wasn’t being “mean” for the hell of it, it was being “mean” in the pursuit of a vision. It doesn’t excuse “being mean,” but it’s far different than having some jackass middle manager at some consulting firm yelling about TPS reports.

It’s like the drill sergeant phenomenon— harsh leadership can have a place when attempting to forge ahead in a difficult mission as it often motivates the team to accomplish more than would normally be considered comfortable (or even healthy.)

An asshole boss on a mission is far preferable (to me,) than a “nice” boss driven by nothing other than maintaining the status quo.

Asshole bosses maintaining the status quo — now that genuinely sucks.

>True! And, this was change the world kind of stuff — it wasn’t being “mean” for the hell of it, it was being “mean” in the pursuit of a vision. It doesn’t excuse “being mean,” but it’s far different than having some jackass middle manager at some consulting firm yelling about TPS reports.

I don't think the meanness helped in creating the vision. They're two entirely separate things

>An asshole boss on a mission is far preferable (to me,) than a “nice” boss driven by nothing other than maintaining the status quo.

I'll agree on that, but still my experience has been that the bosses that extracted the most work from their employees were the ones that could give praise where it was due. I think Apple made it in spite of Steve Jobs character flaws, not because of them.