Demanding people

In case you haven't checked the blog in a while, I was in Shenzhen for an Exhibition, The 10th China Public Security Expo. I was part of the team to show off our IP integration of Public Announcement System, CCTV System, and Access Control System.

The show lasts from Tuesday to Friday, with Monday for setup. As with all demo, technical problems only arise last minute. the PA system integration to the rest of the platform didn't work because of software integration problems.

My boss'es reaction is, "fix it before the exhibition opens".

That was close to 10pm on Monday the setup day.

My co-worker and myself were thinking that it was an unrealistic and unreasonable request. The software was written by an consultant a couple of hundred miles away, we have no internet access at the expo to transfer files, everything has to be done in the hotel and then tested again on site.

In the end, we managed to have the consultant (a teacher in an university) work over-time to fix the bug. Everything works on Tuesday, with the only problem of us not having enough sleep and quality of our presentation suffers a little as a result.

I used to hate my boss for doing that: giving us insane deadlines and telling us just to do it and leave us hanging in there without support. I don't anymore, after reading an article on how Steve Jobs operate:

“This feels like crap!” Steve growled at the engineer from the industrial design department. He repeatedly plugged and unplugged the headphones from the pre-production iPod and looked as if he might fling it across the room. “...these headphone jacks all have to be replaced by tomorrow” he continued.

Tomorrow was October 22, 2001, one day before the introduction of Apple’s new digital music player, known as P68, but soon to be christened ‘iPod’.

You can read the whole article Here.

Eventually the ear-phones problem was fixed, along with a dozen other minor details that Steve Jobs deemed unsatisfactory.

That is when I realize, that demanding bosses are completely different animal from unreasonable ones. With demanding bosses, you work harder to do what you only though you couldn't. There's a thin line between the two, but they are totally different, and who's to say Steve Jobs isn't a good leader?