1998 Steve Jobs.Interview for In the Company of Giants
“The worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me.”
“在面试中，最糟糕的事情就是和我意见一致。”
In the 1990s, when Steve was running NeXT and Pixar, two Stanford Business School students won a lunch with him at a charity auction. They later interviewed him for a book profiling business leaders in technology.
在 1990 年代，当史蒂夫在运营 NeXT 和皮克斯时，两名斯坦福商学院的学生在一次慈善拍卖中赢得了与他的午餐机会。他们后来为一本关于科技领域商业领袖的书采访了他。
Steve Jobs: You’d better have great people, or you won’t get your product to market as fast as possible. Or you might get a product to market really fast, but it will be really clunky and nobody will buy it. There are no shortcuts around quality, and quality starts with people. Maybe shortcuts exist, but I’m not smart enough to have ever found any.
史蒂夫·乔布斯：你最好有优秀的人，否则你无法尽快将产品推向市场。或者你可能会很快将产品推向市场，但它会非常笨重，没人会买。没有任何捷径可以绕过质量，而质量始于人。也许存在捷径，但我没有足够聪明去发现任何。
I spend 20 percent of my time recruiting, even now. I spend a day a week helping people recruit. It’s one of the most important things you can do.
我花 20%的时间在招聘上，即使现在也是。我每周花一天时间帮助人们招聘。这是你能做的最重要的事情之一。
Q: If finding the A players is so important, how can you tell who is an A player and who isn’t?
问：如果找到 A 类人才如此重要，您如何判断谁是 A 类人才，谁不是？
Steve Jobs: That’s a very hard question. Ultimately there are two paths. If a candidate has been in the workplace for a while, you have to look at the results. There are people who look so good on paper and talk such a good story but have no results behind them. They can’t point to breakthroughs or successful products that they shipped and played an integral part in. Ultimately the results should lead you to the people. As a matter of fact, that’s how I find great people. I look at great results and I find out who was responsible for them.
史蒂夫·乔布斯：这是一个非常困难的问题。最终有两条路径。如果候选人在职场上待了一段时间，你必须关注结果。有些人在纸面上看起来很好，讲得也很动人，但背后却没有任何结果。他们无法指出突破或成功的产品，而他们在其中发挥了重要作用。最终，结果应该引导你找到合适的人。事实上，这就是我找到优秀人才的方法。我关注优秀的结果，然后找出谁对此负责。
However, sometimes young people haven’t had the opportunity yet to be in a position of influence to create such results. So here you must evaluate potential. It’s certainly more difficult, but the primary attributes of potential are intelligence and the ability to learn quickly. Much of it is also drive and passion—hard work makes up for a lot.
然而，有时年轻人还没有机会处于能够创造这种结果的影响力位置。因此，在这里你必须评估潜力。这确实更困难，但潜力的主要特征是智力和快速学习的能力。很多时候，这也与动力和热情有关——努力工作弥补了很多。
When you recruit, you’re rolling the dice. No matter what, you’re rolling the dice because you’ve only got an hour to assess the candidate. The most time I spend with somebody is an hour, and I must then recommend whether we hire the person or not. Others will recommend, too, so I won’t be the only one, but I’ll still have to throw my vote in the hat.
当你招聘时，你是在掷骰子。无论如何，你都在掷骰子，因为你只有一个小时来评估候选人。我与某人相处的最长时间是一个小时，然后我必须推荐我们是否雇用这个人。其他人也会推荐，所以我不会是唯一的，但我仍然必须把我的票投进去。
Ultimately it comes down to your gut feeling. Your gut feeling gets refined as you hire more people and see how they do. Some you thought would do well don’t, and you can sense why. If you study it a bit you might say, “I thought this person was going to do well, but I overlooked this aspect,” or, “I didn’t think this person would do well, but they did and here’s why.” As you hire people over time, your gut instinct gets better and more precise.
最终，这归结为你的直觉。随着你雇佣更多的人并观察他们的表现，你的直觉会不断被磨练。有些你认为会表现良好的人并没有做到，而你能感受到原因。如果你稍微研究一下，你可能会说：“我认为这个人会表现良好，但我忽视了这个方面，”或者，“我没想到这个人会表现良好，但他们做到了，原因在这里。”随着时间的推移，你雇佣的人越多，你的直觉就会变得更好、更准确。
Over time, my digging in during an interview gets more precise. For example, many times in an interview I will purposely upset someone: I’ll criticize their prior work. I’ll do my homework, find out what they worked on and say, “God, that really turned out to be a bomb. That really turned out to be a bozo product. Why did you work on that?” I shouldn’t say this in your book, but the worst thing that someone can do in an interview is to agree with me and knuckle under.
随着时间的推移，我在面试中的挖掘变得更加精准。例如，在面试中，我会故意让某人生气：我会批评他们之前的工作。我会做功课，找出他们做过的项目，然后说：“天哪，那真是个失败的项目。那真是个糟糕的产品。你为什么要做那个？”我不应该在你的书中说这个，但在面试中，最糟糕的事情就是有人同意我并屈服。
What I look for is for someone to come right back and say, “You’re dead wrong and here’s why.” I want to see what people are like under pressure. I want to see if they just fold or if they have firm conviction, belief, and pride in what they did. It’s also good every once in a while to really piss somebody off in an interview to see how they react because, if your company is a meritocracy of ideas, with passionate people, you have a company with a lot of arguments. If people can’t stand up and argue well under pressure, they may not do well in such an environment.
我所寻找的是有人能立即反驳并说：“你完全错了，原因如下。”我想看看人们在压力下的表现。我想知道他们是屈服还是对自己所做的事情有坚定的信念、信仰和自豪感。偶尔在面试中惹恼某人也是好的，以观察他们的反应，因为如果你的公司是一个思想的精英制度，拥有充满激情的人，你的公司就会有很多争论。如果人们在压力下不能站出来并进行良好的辩论，他们可能在这样的环境中表现不佳。
Q: What do you think your weaknesses are when it comes to management?
问：你认为在管理方面你的弱点是什么？
Steve Jobs: I don’t know. People are package deals; you take the good with the confused. In most cases, strengths and weaknesses are two sides of the same coin. A strength in one situation is a weakness in another, yet often the person can’t switch gears. It’s a very subtle thing to talk about strengths and weaknesses because almost always they’re the same thing.
史蒂夫·乔布斯：我不知道。人是一个整体；你必须接受优点和缺点。在大多数情况下，优点和缺点是同一枚硬币的两面。在一种情况下的优点在另一种情况下可能就是缺点，但通常人无法切换思维。这是一个非常微妙的话题，因为优点和缺点几乎总是同一回事。
My strength probably is that I’ve always viewed technology from a liberal arts perspective, from a human culture perspective. As such, I’ve always pushed for things that pulled technology in those directions by bringing insights from other fields. An example of that would be—with the Macintosh—desktop publishing: its proportionately spaced fonts, its ease of use. All of the desktop publishing stuff on the Mac comes from books: the typography, that rich feel that nobody in computers knew anything about. I think that my other strength is that I’m a pretty good judge of people and have the ability to bring people together around common vision.
我的优势可能在于我一直从人文学科的角度看待技术，从人类文化的角度看待。因此，我一直推动那些将技术引向这些方向的事物，通过引入其他领域的见解。一个例子是——在麦金塔上——桌面出版：它的比例间距字体，它的易用性。所有麦金塔上的桌面出版内容都来自书籍：排版，那种在计算机领域没有人了解的丰富感觉。我认为我的另一个优势是我对人有很好的判断力，并且有能力将人们聚集在共同的愿景周围。
Q: Well then, when are your strengths—judgment of character and liberal arts perspective—your weaknesses?
问：那么，什么时候你的优势——对人品的判断和人文学科的视角——会变成你的弱点？
Steve Jobs: In certain cases, my weaknesses are that I’m too idealistic. [I need to] realize that sometimes best is the enemy of better. Sometimes I go for “best” when I should go for “better,” and end up going nowhere or backwards. I’m not always wise enough to know when to go for the best and when to just go for better.
史蒂夫·乔布斯：在某些情况下，我的弱点是过于理想主义。[我需要]意识到，有时候最好是更好的敌人。有时候我追求“最好”，而应该追求“更好”，结果却一无所获或退步。我并不总是足够明智，知道何时追求最好，何时只追求更好。
Sometimes I’m blinded by “what could be” versus “what is possible,” doing things incrementally versus doing them in one fell swoop. Balancing the ideal and the practical is something I still must pay attention to.
有时候我被“可能是什么”与“实际可能是什么”所蒙蔽，逐步进行与一次性完成之间的选择。平衡理想与实际是我仍需关注的事情。
Q: In terms of going for the best, you have a widely held reputation of being extremely charismatic—someone who is always able to draw out the best in other people. How have you been able to motivate your employees?
问：在追求最佳的方面，你有着广泛的声誉，被认为极具魅力——总是能够激发他人最佳表现的人。你是如何激励你的员工的？
Steve Jobs:Well, I think that—ultimately, it’s the work that motivates people. I sometimes wish it were me, but it’s not. It’s the work. My job is to make sure the work is as good as it should be and to get people to stretch beyond their best. But it’s ultimately the work that motivates people. That’s what binds them together.
史蒂夫·乔布斯：嗯，我认为——最终，激励人们的是工作。我有时希望是我，但不是。是工作。我的工作是确保工作达到应有的标准，并让人们超越他们的最佳状态。但最终，激励人们的是工作。这就是将他们团结在一起的原因。
Q: Yet in the case of the Macintosh, you got tremendous output from people. Regardless of the type of work, not everybody can elicit that type of commitment.
问：然而在 Macintosh 的案例中，你得到了来自人们的巨大反馈。无论工作类型如何，并不是每个人都能引发那种承诺。
Steve Jobs:Well, I’m not sure I’d chalk that up to charisma. Part of the CEO’s job is to cajole and beg and plead and threaten at times—to do whatever is necessary to get people to see things in a bigger and more profound way than they have, and to do better work than they thought they could do.
史蒂夫·乔布斯：嗯，我不确定我会把这归结为魅力。首席执行官的工作部分是劝说、恳求、乞求，有时甚至威胁——做任何必要的事情，让人们以比他们之前更广阔和更深刻的方式看待事物，并做出比他们认为自己能做得更好的工作。
When they do their best and you don’t think it’s enough, you tell them straight: “This isn’t good enough. I know you can do better. You need to do better. Now go do better.”
当他们尽力而为而你认为还不够时，你直截了当地告诉他们：“这还不够好。我知道你能做得更好。你需要做得更好。现在去做得更好。”
You must play those cards carefully. You must be right a lot of the time because you’re messing with people’s lives. But that’s part of the job. In the end, it’s the environment you create, the coworkers, and the work that binds. The Macintosh team, if you talk to most of them—a dozen years since we shipped the product—most will still say that working on the Mac was the most meaningful experience of their lives. If we’d never shipped a product they wouldn’t say that. If the product hadn’t been so good they wouldn’t say that. The Macintosh experience wasn’t just about going to camp with a bunch of fun people. It wasn’t just a motivational speaker. It was the product that everybody put their heart and soul into, and it was the product that expressed their deep appreciation, somehow, for the world to see.
你必须小心地打这些牌。你必须经常正确，因为你正在干涉人们的生活。但这就是工作的部分内容。最终，决定一切的是你创造的环境、同事和工作。麦金塔团队，如果你和他们大多数人交谈——自从我们发布产品已经过去了十多年——大多数人仍然会说，参与麦金塔的工作是他们一生中最有意义的经历。如果我们从未发布过产品，他们不会这么说。如果产品没有那么好，他们也不会这么说。麦金塔的经历不仅仅是和一群有趣的人一起去露营。这不仅仅是一个激励演讲者。这是每个人倾注心血的产品，也是那个以某种方式表达他们对世界深切感激的产品。
So, in the end, it’s the work that binds. That’s why it’s so important to pick very important things to do because it’s very hard to get people motivated to make a breakfast cereal. It takes something that’s worth doing.
所以，最终，工作是连接的纽带。这就是为什么选择非常重要的事情去做是如此重要，因为让人们有动力去生产做早餐的谷物是非常困难的。这需要一些值得去做的事情。
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