First, it's awesome that these are live-streamed and publicised.

Second, I didn't hear anything unreasonable in that meeting. SW has a reputation for ego, but honestly this particular extract just sounds like frustration with buggy/messy documentation. I mean, the fact that the CEO is personally going through documentation is telling in itself.

I agree. If that seems ego driven, then you shouldn't be working in a professional environment. It's not even so much frustration as just getting to the bottom of the issue and resolving it.

I don't know why you're bending over backwards to excuse it.

It's toxic. He's being nasty. He could say everything he does without the snapping, blowing up at questions, dramatic sighs, 'oh boy's. It's all so incredibly passively aggressive.

And that's actually the worst bit! It's hard to call him out when he's not explicitly calling them 'idiots' or something. It's like it's some kind of plausible deniability of being horrible to people.

But I don't know these people and maybe they're all fine with it. And Wolfram is paying the bills so it's his style if he wants.

Rather than admit that the red, undocumented third parameter was a mistake they seemed to make all sorts of rationalizations for why it’s wrong (“It’s new”, “I thought it was fixed”, etc.) rather than just saying “You’re right, that’s a bug. We’re fixing it.” Why were the employees waffling around the fact that it actually is a problem? Calling them out on their justifications and excuses isn’t being toxic or nasty, it’s called being a professional who takes pride in the work they put out to the public.

Either it's a flaw in the engineers (lack of social skills to admit a mistake accurately) or in the working climate (fear of unreasonable repercussion make the engineers defer disclosure of failure). I'm undecided. Eitherway it seemed surprisingly inefficient way of communicating.

I only watched a few minutes but I didn't see anything objectionable. I was getting annoyed at the people he was talking to. It seems to me, you either know what the answer is so state the answer and the evidence, or you don't, so state that you don't know and express your plan to find an answer and return with it.

Once I hurt my back, had to drive for three hours, park far away, hadn't eaten all day, and when I stopped at a restaurant, having hobbled there with my bad back from a distant parking spot, the hostess was absent for ~5 minutes and when she finally showed up she was distracted and talking to other people multiple times while I tried to get an answer to how long the wait would be and if I could get served. So far, I've lived a fairly easy life, and I've always tried to be polite and even keeled - but in that moment of discomfort, tiredness, hunger, and disrespect, I genuinely wanted to be rude to the hostess.

The point of the digression is, I imagine that's what being the CEO is like, only it's not once. It's every day. And the more committed you are, the more hours you subject yourself to this kind of thing. You just want things well documented, bugs fixed, quality high, you want people to answer questions etc. When you've been dealing with this all day for decades - I can see how easy it would be to be a bit impolite.

I guess "toxic" is pretty subjective. Personally, I draw the line at personal insults. You might draw the line a little earlier.

As is “nasty”, “snapping”, “blowing up at”, “dramatic”, and “passive agressive.” Oh, and let’s not forget “horrible.”

Have you ever dealt with bad docs? Seriously!!!

Can you link to a bit you consider toxic and nasty? I went in expecting to hear him sound like he was reading out a Linus Torvalds email but I couldn't find anything like that.

Yup, and at the end he even says good work and acknowledges that he knows it's taken a lot of work to get to this point.

It's not professional for a mentor to take out his frustration on employees. I'm not saying I never get frustrated with poor quality work, but I don't see it as helpful taking out that frustration on someone. Better things I can do: 1. Figure out how to inspire quality with positive reinforcement. 2. Eliminate blockers to quality. 3. Automate quality checks so I'm not even reviewing code unless it already passes a certain QA level. Sometimes people are broken and that's fine. Let them go instead of beating up on them. But very often it is the processes that are broken and you should be fixing those instead of trying to fix people.

I think this video highlights as a leader being the 'bad guy' in a meeting because they are demanding excellence to a specific vision/goal and their subordinate's output isn't meeting their expectations.

There are no personal attacks, just critiques on the thought process, output and plan (or lack of planning), all of that is fair game. The dev(?) even admits at ~25:40 that they should be taking notes and fixing what is pointed out.

There's a bit of passive aggressive hierarchy conflict at play but it doesn't go that far IMO. Tone mostly goes back to relaxed ... could be friendlier but alas.

This is crazy. He is the CEO of an 800 person company and the people talking to him sound like they are completely unprepared for the conversation. Of course the third argument needs to be fucking documented! Their response should have been "yes, this is a clear bad, we'll fix the documentation by tomorrow's meeting." Not just sit silently on the call while the CEO has to go do it themselves.

The people there sound like I did on my thesis progress reports after I had been out drinking with friends. As much as I was ready to hate on Wolfram given his reputation, he's completely justified about his complaints, and he's being professional about it.

I see nothing "toxic" about this conversation, as others have mentioned. He is completely focused on the work; there are no personal attacks. The main interlocutor sounds like he is taking things personally.

Frankly a good CEO would not tolerate this bullshit or promote people like this. My guess is people there are promoted on technical merit alone which means that there must be a lot of smart fucking people there but with obviously poor task execution skills.

It's obvious that these people are not stupid and understand that interfaces need to be documented. They are instead confused. I've had micromanagers like SW before, and have been confused many times at the state of something precisely because the micromanager took it upon themselves to "do it themselves" on the fly, just like SW did here.

Admitting that it's clearly bad and saying you'll fix it by tomorrow would be a neverending pursuit, because the micromanager's meddling is constant and touches everything.

No doubt somebody else will now be confused that this third parameter is suddenly documented when it was a task delegated to them, and somebody else is confused because they were told to deprecate the parameter.

The difference between a micromanager and a detail-oriented manager is the micromanager tells you how to do it, the detail-oriented manager tells you what to do. I only see detail orientation here. Even the string to describe the API was written by Wolfram even after he asked for suggestions. I’d expect them to jump in and commit to fixing it themselves.

Interesting stuff, here's a recent one, if anyone is interested they are reviewing some new blockchain related methods and they walkthrough the methods. Not everything is clear to everyone, it's refreshing to see a very smart, CEO level person, logically step through new concepts/code.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYcH0IngWxs

I have somewhere between 5–20% comprehension of what they're talking about in a technical sense but found the conversation from 4m31s (as you've linked) to ~10m45s utterly fascinating.

Oh boy. If people think this is an example of being unacceptably direct and gruff, I need to reexamine the way I talk during technical discussions.

I've always thought it best to just cut straight to the core of issues like he's doing. I suppose it's a jerk move to corner people into admitting they're wrong even when it's obvious. Maybe there's a nicer jedi-mind way to do it.

Oy, I'm fascinated that this is publicly available, but kind of horrified if I was one of the developers on this public "con call"!

Thanks for the amusement, I'm left with the distinct impression that if everyone on that call were in the same room it would have gone a lot better.

His staff didn't even seem engaged in the subject.

From the article:

"Often I’ll do a meeting where I have lots of people in case we need to get their input. But for most of the meeting I don’t need all of them to be paying attention (and I’m happy if they’re getting other work done)."

So they're not paying attention because he enjoys having excess people on calls and wasting their time.

Sounds like torture. The CEO wants you on the call, probably won't need you, and you're supposed to feel comfortable disengaging when he's berating coworkers about a missing third argument in a function's documentation.

If that's what he's arranging, then its his own self-created dysfunction.

The people on that particular call didn't even seem to know what they were talking about half the time though. It's entirely possible that they're both asked to passively participate in oversubscribed meetings and neglecting to do their jobs creating further frustration.

> and I’m happy if they’re getting other work done

It seriously doesn't sound like he's happy when he snaps at them to unmute and start responding!

you know what's insane about that video? the CEO of a 100 (200?) person software company is writing docs. but then again i'm not surprised that wolfram is a micromanager.

Attention to detail is not micro-managing. In fact, it's very very good thing and you should have respect for people at CEO level having this kind of care, understanding and passion for their products. It's kind of thing that makes Steve Jobs, the Steve Jobs.

Especially as documentation is kind of the core value proposition of Mathematica

The article says 800. I can't imagine what it would be like, to be part of a machine of 800 people basically set up to cater to the whims of one overlord.

Every company is set up to cater to the whims of one overlord. Then there is a group who can change the overlord. Most effective companies are dictatorships with a fairly reasonable dictator.

I don't think I necessarily agree. While having one person who has complete control and effectively focuses a business to the correct decisions and technical goals is super effective, part of that effectiveness is getting the rest of the business on the same mindset as you and giving employees room to add their technical nous to the work.

The criticism leveled (which I do not actually any insight to the truth of) is that essentially people have to follow his "whims" and are micromanaged, which does not bring out the best of employees and can be very stifling.

But that said, I don't know the truth of that criticism.

Two words: Larry. Ellison.

The way you say it is like you're saying that Documentation should be second class, not just that it is anyway. Keep in mind that the software in this particular case, is software used mostly for the API, so the Documentation is front and centre.

Very much so. The documentation is the specification, so it's not merely writing the documentation, but writing the specification.

Another interesting tidbit that plays into this...the syntax coloring is programmatically derived from the documentation (yet another consequence of the documentation being the specification). This wasn't mentioned in the meeting because most or all of the participants already knew this, but it's an important part of the subtext of the discussion.

Speaking as an insider who wasn't present at that particular meeting, but has been present in some other live-streamed meetings.

And I quote...

> Usually we (which quite often actually means me) will write documentation for a function before the function is implemented.

Reminds me of this Sir Issac Newton quote:

> Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

This is a Howard Newton quote. I think you're confusing it with "F = ma".

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/07/18/tact/

Do you have a source for that?

That does not sound like Newton ar all.

If you google “Newton” Google attributes it to Issac Newton on the side bar, seems like it must be wrongly attributed unfortunately. Thanks for correction.

Maybe mastery doesn't imply usage

Hearing this coming from Newton is surprising, given his infamous feud with Leibniz over which of them invented calculus.

Not really. People can have ideal ideas that don't match their own lived reality. And the Newton / Hooke feud is probably more interesting and relevant, than the Leibniz one (given that was entirely of Newton's making).