Ask a Senior (professional)

On Steve Jobs:

Steve [Jobs] can look at any product, and he can tell you exactly what’s wrong with it. You could drive a garbage truck up in front of his house… and he would tell you 7 things that are wrong with the garbage truck, and if you fix them, you would have the greatest garbage truck that ever existed.

Steve [Jobs] has always hired really great people to work around him. People who are really confident. So that he can yell at them and tell them what they’ve done wrong, and they don’t take it personally They recognize the wisdom in what he’s saying without being too self-conscious.

On leading a team:

Here’s what I believe: If you hire really good people, then they also expect everybody else to be really good, and they’ll hire really good people, and they will mentor people and bring them up to be great. If someone is not very good, they tend to hire people who are not as smart as they are, so that they can order them around. I have always made an effort to hire people who are smarter than me, and do exactly what they tell me to do.

What I believe is that what you tolerate becomes your job. If you put up with people who are not doing their job, then your job becomes compensating for their shortcomings.

– Aaron Hillegass, of The Big Nerd Ranch on The Pipeline Episode 57.