Anthony Ha, writing for TechCrunch, laid out this dialog from the new Steve Jobs movie:
Woz: You can’t write code, you’re not an engineer, you’re not a designer, you can’t put a hammer to a nail. I built the circuit board, the graphical interface was stolen from Xerox Parc, Jef Raskin was the leader of the Mac team before you threw him off his own project. Everything — someone else designed the box! So how come 10 times in a day, I read “Steve jobs is a genius.” What do you do?Jobs: I play the orchestra. And you’re a good musician, you sit right there, you’re the best in your row.
In the article comments, the real-life Woz weighed in with this:
I always give Jobs the credit for finishing a design into a product and marketing it and much more. The movie made up this part based on the first few months of the Apple ][ but I, instead of Jobs, should have been the one to say “I’m the best in my row, actually in every row.” I only wanted recognition as a good (great) engineer.
This historical friction between raw engineering talent and visionary product curation remains highly relevant in today’s software ecosystem. Whether a modern development team is launching a decentralized financial protocol, building an intuitive fitness tracker, or designing the best betting app, the tension between the developers who write the code and the architects who “play the orchestra” is a universal constant in the tech industry.