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"No, I'm never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It's my job for life. It's the best company because it's so good to engineers...Engineers—bottom of the org chart
by Aqueous 7y ago
"No, I'm never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It's my job for life. It's the best company because it's so good to engineers...Engineers—bottom of the org chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next hot products for the company."
I love Woz, but this strikes me as being a quite naive thing to say. Engineers weren't "bottom of the org chart." They are the lifesblood of a company like HP. HP is nothing without engineers. So the idea that they were nice to engineers - well, it was in the same way that other companies are "nice to engineers," totally self-serving in a mutually beneficial way.
- RandallBrown 7y agoWozniak was pretty naive back then. Jobs took advantage of him a lot of times before, during, and after starting Apple.
- birdyrooster 7y agoAnd from what I can tell, that is the meat and potatoes of Silicon Valley and engineering organizations in general. Find newcomers who don't know their own worth and push them as far as they are willing to go. Without seniority it's hard to convert hard work into commensurate pay.
- yitchelle 7y agoNot necessary only applicable for newcomers. I have had colleagues who are with a company for so long that they don't have a clear understand what their market value is, and suffered when they changed.
- soperj 7y agoWozniak wasn't naive, Jobs was just a shitty person.
- graeme 7y agoI think he meant bottom in the sense that he wasn’t managing me. If you’re above the bottom of an org chart by definition you have people reporting to you. He’s saying HP was different in that it listened to technical people with no direct reports. It didn’t only listen to managers.