Jobs had great instincts for products and a willingness to create new products that would eat established products and revenue streams. He was second to none at seeing what technology could be used for and putting teams in place that could create consumer products with those technologies and understanding when the technologies weren’t ready yet.
Look at what Apple achieved under his leadership and what it didn’t achieve without his leadership. Being dismissive of Jobs contributions is either a bad faith argument or one out of ignorance.
I think it's important to point out that Jobs could recognize nice UX choices, but he couldn't author them. He helped prune the branches of the bonsai tree, but couldn't grow it. On that he leaned on intellects far greater than his own, which he was pretty good at recognizing and cultivating. Though in fact he alienated and pushed away just as many as he cultivated.
I think we could do better as an industry than going around looking for more of that.
I used to broadly believe that Jobs-types were over-fluffed charismatic magnets myself by hanging out in these places until I started working and found out how useful they were at doing things I couldn't or didn't want to do. I don't think they deserve more praise than the underlying technical folks, but that they deserve equal praise. Sort of like how in a two-parent households, different parents often end up shouldering different responsibilities but that doesn't make one parent with certain responsibilities the true parent.
If we're stuck with the definitions of success and excellence that are dominant right now, then, sure, someone like a Jobs or a Zuck or whatever, I see why people would be enamored with them.
But as an engineer I know I have different motivations than these people. And I think that's what people who make these kinds of arguments are drawing on.
There is a class of person whose success comes from finding creative and smart people and finding ways to exploit and direct them for their own ends. There's a genius in that, for sure. I am just not sure I want to celebrate it.
I just want to make things and help other people who make these things.
To put it another way, I'd take, say, Smalltalk over MacOS, if I have to make the choice.
Engineer was building a calculator app, and got a little tired of the boss constantly requesting changes to the UI. There was no "UI builder" on this system so the engineer had to go back and adjust everything by hand, each time. Back and forth they went. Frustrating.
"In a flash of inspiration," as the story goes, the engineer parameterized all the UI stuff (line widths, etc.) into drop-down menus, so boss could fiddle with it instead of bothering him. The UI came together quickly thereafter.
https://www.macfolklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html
Engineers are great at solving problems given a set of constraints. They are not necessarily all that good at figuring out what constraints ought to be when they are given open-ended, unconstrained tasks. Jobs was great at defining good constraints. You might call this pruning, and if you intended that pejoratively then I think you're underselling the value of this skill.
