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Steve Jobs' first boss: 'Very few companies would hire Steve, even today'
- kami8845 14y agoIn other news: Grey-haired dude from long-ago bigs himself up for hiring someone who is seen as a bad employee. "I was smarter back then than all y'all are today." Also missed the chance to buy 33% of Apple for 5k, with Apple now being valued at 425 billion USD.
- davidroberts 14y agoI'm not sure Steve Jobs would be such a great employee anyway. He was born to lead, not follow. To innovate, not bend himself to someone else's vision. Invest in him? Yes. Hire him? Hmmmmm. Maybe not.
- lalos 14y agoDon't forget some companies are big and old enough to no longer have the initial vision and can differentiate into other markets with employees that are leaders like Steve. Maybe a good example would be Eisner with Disney
- icpmacdo 14y agoRereading his biography today I came to the exact same conclusion.
- pekk 14y agoIf you can't think of any way to use someone today with the skills of Steve Jobs, the fault might not lie with the person who has those skills.
- kamaal 14y agoEven as a founder of a company, Steve Jobs is by large not of much use without somebody like Steve Wozniak.
- ritchiea 14y agoAnd is Steve Wozniak more than a career engineer without Steve Jobs? I think it's more accurate to say they are both exponentially more valuable in tandem than solo.
- 47uF 14y agoAnd Steve Wozniak isn't of much use without computers. I guess that makes him pretty useless as a programmer.
- talmand 14y agoExcept for the fact that Wozniak is mostly known for building a computer, not programming it.
- phaus 14y agoA grown man that throws tantrums, belittles subordinates, and never admits when his company has made a mistake is not what I would call a born leader.
- mikecane 14y agoGo read the biography of Harry Cohn, one of the founders of Columbia Pictures.
- gngeal 14y ago"A grown man that throws tantrums, belittles subordinates, and never admits when his company has made a mistake is not what I would call a born leader." So, one could easily compare him with Stalin, Hitler, and other people like these who happened to have similar habits? Well, the life story of well-adjusted sociopaths...
- chongli 14y agoThat's exactly what I'd call a born leader. These types of people do not show any weakness and refuse to compromise on their vision.
- phaus 14y agoAll three of the attributes I listed are weaknesses. Born leaders don't often lose their temper in front of subordinates. You should read "How to Make Friends and Influence People" It contains quite a few examples of what true leadership is.
- untog 14y agoThe only thing that worries me about bringing focus to stuff like this is that people will walk away with the reverse impression- that if they're unhireable it must mean that they're just like Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs could be many things. Inspired is one of them. An asshole is another. Just because people think you're an asshole doesn't automatically mean you're inspired.
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- untog 14y agoI'm concerned assholes won't see assholeish behaviour as a bad thing, and instead see it as proof of their genius. I am partially concerned for them, but mostly concerned for those of us that have to work with them.
- pekk 14y agoI'm worried about your impression that if you don't like someone, they can't do interesting things as Jobs did. Who is actually "unhireable"? And even if they are, does that mean they cannot accomplish anything? Are you in charge of deciding who will never amount to anything?
- untog 14y agoThey could well do interesting things, as Jobs did- I'm not saying they can't. I'm more trying to say that there is no guaranteed connection between the two, in the same way that wearing black turtlenecks isn't going to make you any more enlightened either.
- pitchups 14y agoThis reminds me of PG's essay about startups - where he says that all great ideas look like really bad ideas in the beginning. Like black swans, the next big thing, and the person to create the next big thing seem to share the trait of not being easy to predict or spot.
- weisser 14y ago"Bushnell, now 70, could have reaped even more from his relationship with Jobs if he hadn't turned down an offer from his former employee to invest $50,000 in Apple during its formative stages. Had he seized that opportunity, Bushnell would have owned one-third of Apple, which is now worth about $425 billion -- more than any other company in the world." Surprised Jobs would have offered so much of Apple, even in the formative stages, for $50k (which surely translates to much more money than $50k is today). It is interesting to consider how that would have changed the control/direction of Apple.
- corporalagumbo 14y agoAn iMac with vintage wood panelling?
- Swannie 14y agoBut this is wrong. The $50k would have gone through many dilutions. He may have owned 1/3 of Apple. There is no way that today he would have 1/3rd. That said, it does raise the question: if he had gone in to Apple, would Jobs have ever left and started NeXT and Pixar???
- Hitchhiker 14y agoEarly stage investing provably cannot be as rational as most try and make it to be. When a group tips and looks like a good score is about to emerge.. the score-keepers have to increment the score ( i.e. give investment ) as that is about the only function they serve. " Finally, I'd like to once again talk about investment management. That is a funny business because on a net basis, the whole investment management business together gives no value added to all buyers combined. That's the way it has to work. " - Charlie Munger When people rejected or passed on .. at that point in time .. it would have been entirely rational to do so. I am not certain even Mr.Jobs knew how time would turn.
- dmk23 14y agoI do not understand why anyone would find this quote surprising, controversial or even newsworthy. Employees operate within the rules established by their employers - they have a boss and are expected to be a "good solider" to support objectives of their company / business unit... People like Steve Jobs are successful because of their audacity to disregard the rules and make their own. These are entirely different mindsets and skillsets. Employees are given direction, entrepreneurs set the direction. What I find a lot more interesting is that quite a few startup founders act like employees rather than leaders - constantly asking (explicitly or implicitly) for approval of others. Look around and see if you can recognize people who care about the opinions of press/investors/advisors/peers more than achieving product/market fit followed by revenue/profitability/growth.
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- keefe 14y agoYou don't actually have to be that much of a soldier at most places and most places today, imho, would hire steve jobs. I have a day job and my personal ventures and the bottom line is if you do your job, nobody cares. I think the vast majority of successful leaders also had a successful period working on someone else's project beforehand.
- kamaal 14y agoThat's sort of straight obvious. Basically because if somebody like Steve Jobs doesn't have a Steve Wozniak to build things for him in the start he is more or less a arrogant egoistic tantrum throwing hippie kind of a guy whom nobody would like to deal with. You meet a genius co-founder like Steve Wozniak very very rarely. Nearly every program manager is a lesser version of Steve Jobs, that is how authority looks cool and glorified. Giving an impression that the manager is automagically creating success out of thin air while a engineer somewhere pushing 19 hr daily schedules to make it happen doesn't count or is irrelevant. Steve Jobs reminds of Peter Keating from Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead'.
- gmu3 14y agoWow that's fairly insulting and not really an appropriate comparison at all. Peter Keating was anything but an arrogant egoist, and he bent over backwards to please the people he dealt with (his superiors at least)
- batgaijin 14y agoAt the end of the day what Peter Keating did was because of how people reacted to him. Tell me that using the dealer trick to not have a license plate is somehow not the same childish level of vanity that you would expect of a successful manchild.
- halcyondaze 14y agoEh, what's wrong with the dealer trick? He has the ability to do it, the law is written that way...what does it matter?
- arjie 14y agoIrrespective of whether or not the dealer trick is right, your argument is unconvincing. A non-exhaustive list of things which the law allows for and which many people have the ability to do: * Call you names * Give you projects that are doomed to fail * Place you on a team which will drag you down * Use you as a scapegoat for the failure of a project * Use KLOC as a metric of performance * Show you the finger at a traffic light And yet we don't approve of these things. Something being lawful is the bare minimum, not the gold standard.
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- Alex_MJ 14y agoOptimal Founder/CEO != Optimal Employee
- mathogre 14y agoNo one would hire him today. Companies are risk averse, given the current economic/political climate. If you can't produce and "fit in", don't bother submitting your resumé.
- wyclif 14y agoIt's possible that nobody would hire an unknown Steve Jobs now, but it really doesn't matter. Jobs wasn't an employee, he was a founder. Founders don't have to concern themselves with getting hired.
- mikecane 14y ago>>>Founders don't have to concern themselves with getting hired. But they still have to do things like pay rent, buy food, buy clothes, buy tech. Those things take money. And money is usually gotten from a job. The point is, Jobs wouldn't have even been able to get a job to survive first. That old guy sweeping floors in McDonald's today? Did you ever stop to think what led him there? (For the Rand worshipers out there, how was Galt employed at Taggart Transcontinental?)
- wyclif 14y agoThat's a nice way to strawman what I said, but I was talking about hiring, not buying stuff, income, or money. Here's the thing: Steve Jobs did not have to get hired, in the employee sense, because he founded his own company.
- mikecane 14y agoSure he needed to get hired. Otherwise he wouldn't have sought any job to begin with. Strawman, my foot!
- talmand 14y agoI don't see it necessarily as a strawman since it is essentially true, as he did have jobs leading up to Apple. Keep in mind that he founded his company with funding, it's not as if he founded the company and was instantly making enough money to survive with. One could make the argument that even a founder is "hired" when he requires somebody else's money to make it happen.
- sGrabber 14y agoYou might be the best as an individual but if you are not a team player, the probability of succeeding is minimal. Team members complement each other to make successful products/companies or any relationship
- sgloutnikov 14y agoI will never forget. The day Jobs died, Al Alcorn was giving a talk at San Jose State University for my Computer History course. He took about 15-20 minutes before the talk and shared many inside stories from the Atari days about Jobs. Truly remarkable stuff. As he put it, "I was the only boss he ever had". I am sad that his stories got cut out from the recorded lecture, maybe because he said a lot of colorful things :) Here is a short post talk interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odcXGIQuxAg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odcXGIQuxAg And, the talk itself (5th one in the list), plus many other interesting ones from computing legends if anyone wants to check them out: http://www.sjsu.edu/at/atn/webcasting/archives/fall_2011/hist/Computing/ http://www.sjsu.edu/at/atn/webcasting/archives/fall_2011/his...
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- JumpCrisscross 14y ago"Bushnell, now 70, could have reaped even more from his relationship with Jobs if he hadn't turned down an offer from his former employee to invest $50,000 in Apple during its formative stages." $50 000 in 1976, the year Apple was founded, had the purchasing power of over $200 000 today. Without the benefit of hindsight he probably made a sensible, if unlucky, decision.
- Lerc 14y agoHe is 70 now, Probably hasn't gone hungry in that time and he has taken on a decent number of fascinating projects in his lifetime. Cash only makes a difference in the event of a tie-break, and I think he's ahead of most.
- stuffihavemade 14y agoPlus, who's to say he wouldn't have cashed out at some point during the downward spiral in the 90's?
- Cardeck1 14y agoThe sad, harsh reality is, no one would hire Steve Jobs today or almost no one.Why?Because times have changed (In a bad way).We live in a world full of arrogance, stupidity and ignorance.We no longer think how to change the world but how to make a lot of money. Steve Jobs was a non-technical guy.We have 1 million topics on HN bashing these guys for 1 million reasons.Even on this one we have engineers talking about the same thing over and over. How about being realistic at least once. We do not give these people any chance of working with us.Because we are so arrogant these days that we think the world belong to us and only we (programmers/engineers) can change it. We cannot find a Steve Jobs when we are not willing to risk at all.How many of you helped a non-technical guy building a project without asking for a huge amount of money or 100% equity?Probably not many.Most of the help consists of telling the guy to find a cofounder or to quit the project.Not one programmer/engineer would say "hey you know what, you're crazy but I'll help you" or any other similar line. The truth is we do not own the world and we are not all-knowing. We can be all-star programmers and yet have crap ideas.Nothing is set in stone.Someone out there is always better than you.And history shows us that small things count. Unbelievable things come from unexpected places. I am not saying that every non-technical guy is a Steve Jobs because I had my own failures with these guys and yes, it's incredibly frustrating.But those were bad selections.A risk I was willing to take.I helped a non-technical guy with a startup 4 years ago.He had a weird idea and he asked me to help him in exchange for a fixed sum of 350K. He came to me with a damn paper and pen to talk about his idea. He had no money to hire a programmer only an ambition that could move mountains.And after 6 months I received the money in my account...the startup was a success...and that's when I changed my mentality. So in conclusion, if we want to see a Steve Jobs, we have to take risks.Otherwise let's continue flipping the coin and wait for it.
- mikecane 14y agoWell, the other thing to consider about Jobs + Wozniak is that they were young at the time. The young are more apt to take risks -- and they were also friends with mutual interests beyond just computing. Did Jobs tend to use Wozniak? Yes. But Wozniak had to be willing to go along on the ride. Also, being young, they had their parents to still fall back on, whereas if you're older and being asked to take a risk, you have to consider the web of financial and personal obligations that have grown up to ensnare you. EDIT: Typo killed.
- michaelochurch 14y agoThe problem is that no one would hire Steve Jobs as a subordinate, but he was an evident great hire for a decision-making role, even then. People like him usually get filtered out before they get high enough to use their talents, though. In fact, Jobs is the opposite of what corporations promote, which explains a lot about them.
- talmand 14y agoI would like to know what traits you believe he showed that would make him a great hire for a decision-making role early in his career.
- michaelochurch 14y agoLack of deference to authority, independent mindset.
- talmand 14y agoI would debate whether those traits make for sure-fire great decision making. That sounds more like the kind of guy you stick in the corner by himself and let him go at it to see what he comes up with. A person with a lack of deference to authority may not be good at maintaining his authority. Being of an independent mindset may not mix well with a team.
- pjungwir 14y agoSort of OT: Michael, have you read Managing the Professional Service Firm by David Maister? He writes powerfully about economics, incentives, and culture as they relate to management. I think his book would give you a lot to think about, and you'd find plenty both to learn and to argue against. His focus is a "firm" structured on the partner/associate model. I'd love to see more people thinking about and experimenting with that model for software developers. I think it offers many similarities to what you admire about Github and Valve. And perhaps it is a model where Steve Jobs could find a place.
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- mikecane 14y agoNewsFlash: The older Steve Jobs would not have hired the younger Steve Jobs today.
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoWe are all good at recognising our younger selves. We might not like them, but we can recognise them
- mikecane 14y agoYes. And our older selves are more likely to "contain" our younger selves because we know how bad we once were.
- rmrfrmrf 14y agoIt's really insulting to reduce a human being to some kind of archetype incapable of adapting to a situation. Steve was a bright guy -- I'm sure that if he ever found himself in a position where he needed to apply as an employee of a company, he would know how to 'play the game' and adapt to the situation. Also, I'm sick of hearing people downplay Jobs' role in Apple and giving Woz all of the credit (although I'm not surprised; I'm assuming that many introverted code monkeys here aspire to be the unsung hero co-founder of a company). It's the same shit I hear about how the Beatles would be nothing without George Martin or LSD. It should go without saying that these revolutionary things (i.e. Apple and the Beatles) are products of both serendipitous events AND the surrounding cultural context. Yes, if you remove one piece of the puzzle, OF COURSE the end-result will be different. But what makes it a moot point is that the converse is also true -- George Martin would be nothing without the Beatles, and Woz would be completely unheard of if it weren't for Steve Jobs.
- talmand 14y agoI agree except for your last comment where you do the very thing you complain others are doing with Jobs. You downplayed Woz's contributions by implying that he would have done nothing exceptional unless Jobs was there to hold his hand. Except that Woz is credited with developing the Apple I by himself but I suppose he would have just tossed the thing in the bin if not for Jobs.
- microtherion 14y agoCome to think of it, Steve would have been nothing without LSD either :-)
- michaell2 14y agoIMHO it's strange that we are discussing hiring Mr reality distortion field for a technical position here. If he were reincarnated and looking for a job now, he would probably go into sales. What do they care more about in sales, team playing or closing contracts for new leads? Then there is the "motivational speaking", another fruitful and remunerative area of endeavor for this sort of people :)
- talmand 14y agoI would have said he was in sales from the beginning and he focused on tech, of which he had a background.
- Vinnix 14y agoAs much as I appreciate the opinion, I just don't think it is valid. Outliers shouldn't reflect everyone...