Yup. If you had to point to the singular "bad guy" at Commodore, it was Irving. I interviewed with him when I was interviewing to be the CTO and recognized pretty quickly that he was the kind of executive that didn't like people who worked for him to be more competent than he was. Had a great discussion with a 4 star general who was friends with my Dad about people like that.
Pretty standard stuff, a bit about my background, what I thought of Commodore and the people I had met so far, If I could change one thing at Commodore what would it be (I responded with my belief that the Amiga was the future of Commodore and some stuff about "workstation for the masses", I was at Sun at the time). What was memorable to me wasn't so much what he asked or we talked about as it was about his body language when I expressed approval or how impressed I was by things others on his staff had done. You would expect "pride" but I got "irritation?" I had very little experience dealing with people like that and it was confusing. Later research and observations led me to believe he was irritated by people that excelled.
I just attended the Vintage Computer Festival in NJ last weekend. There was a talk at the end with a bunch of former Commodore employees (Commodore was based near Philadelphia). One of the speakers (old british guy) told a story about Mehdi Ali (https://tinyurl.com/9uubz3ba), how a software developer from Psygnosis gave him advice on how the Amiga could be better. He took it as being critical of him, and got extremely angry. This is something I've noticed before, is that the personality of the leader somehow propagates to the personality of everyone under them, defining the culture of the company.
