So are a lot of people who invested(gambled) early in Bitcoin and Tesla, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from them just because they managed to make a lot of money.
But if you design and developed several successful tech products in your career, I think people should at least listen because it's a pattern rather than just luck.
>and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them
So is Taylor Swift, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from her.
When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver successful products repeatedly, like Erich Schmidt or Steve Jobs, not one trick ponies like Woz who managed to get lucky once in a completely different era, then coast the next 50+ years on past glory giving speeches.
Again, I really like Woz as a person, he's my spirit animal, but that doesn't mean he's correct and in tune on the status of the tech market, the challenges people and entrepreneurs will face today. His experience being a HW tinkerer in his garage in the 1970's isn't relevant anymore today. The world has changed massively since then.
A more modern day woz would be Palmer Luckey of Anduril. Love him or hate him he's more up to date on what the industry rewards today if you want to be a garage tinkerer made billionaire entrepreneur founder than Woz.
> When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly...
For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.
If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit. Bring some logic into the discussion and stop fishing for points.
This is a discussion that started about preparing for the future and has spawned multiple[2], fluid threads[3] of conversation[4] that aren't quite in line with "predicting and preparing for the future", some even with their own throwaway responses unrelated to "the topic"[5]. Should we lambast the person who posted the Lisp joke, too?
This particular conversation chain is about how one measures success, which I've discussed with logic in a separate[0] response. Future success looks different for all of us, and there are a wide variety of ways for us to get wherever those goals are.
>If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit.
Oh, no snark was intended. OP asked a question on a public forum and started getting snarky themselves[1] towards people who shared their subjective response, and my intent was to point out that it's OK for us all to view success differently.
>... stop fishing for points
Is this not snark based on your own assumption that I care about meaningless internet upvotes?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235299
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235315
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234258
[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234631
"When it comes to jobs, I'd rather listen to a business wizard from 2011 than a technical wizard from 1981" is hardly contentious, but if people liked hearing "AI has changed the world and you're all fucked", the students wouldn't have been booing in the first place.
Honestly, if you don't like what Eric Schmidt was saying, you should have a long hard think about whether unchecked capitalism is really as great as advertised.
The Apple II was Woz, the Mac was okay but mostly got shepherded into what it was by the other Apple leadership, the Lisa was a flop, Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby, NeXt went nowhere until the Apple acquisition.
The guy had somehow managed to make a successful career out of shipping very opinionated, interesting, and cool products that were commercial failures. If you were going purely by commercial performance you would not have picked him, you’d be picking him based on that ineffable reality distortion field of his that makes you BELIEVE everything he’s doing will change the world.
The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.
In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.