I would love to work for such an obnoxious prick. I am tired of all of the incompetents in the corporate world who just try to get along with each other while accomplishing little or the startups producing yet another "social" site.
You might want to look into how it was like to work for neXt. There were more than a few layoffs during that phase of Jobs' life. Jobs had about a decade where he pretty much seemed like a failing prick until Disney funded Toy Story and start the second successful era of Jobs.
I'm pretty firmly of the opinion that Jobs' #1 asset was his Reality-Distortion-Field, anyone standing too close to him would get caught in it, it seems.
And yet there are people who followed him from Apple to NeXT and then came back to Apple, like Bud Tribble and George Crow. And people who went along from NeXT to Apple, or Pixar to NeXT to Apple. And people who were laid off from NeXT when they stopped making hardware, like Jon Rubenstein, who joined Apple in the Jobs era.
For being a prick, he seems to have managed to attract some long-term loyalty.
I think pricks are better-tolerated when they are trying to achieve something their underlings think is worthwhile and unique.
This is so very true. The tinkering the article talks about didn't strike me as anything new or special because i do it every day in my job as a programmer. What i did get out of the article was this:
