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Steve Jobs' First Boss: 'Very Few Companies Would Hire Steve, Even Today'
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Mercury News reports that Nolan Bushnell, who ran video game pioneer Atari in the early 1970s, says he always saw something special in Steve Jobs, and that Atari's refusal to be corralled by the status quo was one of the reasons Jobs went to work there in 1974 as an unkempt, contemptuous 19-year-old. 'The truth is that very few companies would hire Steve, even today,' says Bushnell. 'Why? Because he was an outlier. To most potential employers, he'd just seem like a jerk in bad clothing.' While at Atari, Bushnell broke the corporate mold, creating a template that is now common through much of Silicon Valley. He allowed employees to turn Atari's lobby into a cross between a video game arcade and the Amazon jungle. He started holding keg parties and hiring live bands to play for his employees after work. He encouraged workers to nap during their shifts, reasoning that a short rest would stimulate more creativity when they were awake. He also promised a summer sabbatical every seven years. Bushnell's newly released book, Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent, serves as a primer on how to ensure a company doesn't turn into a mind-numbing bureaucracy that smothers existing employees and scares off rule-bending innovators such as Jobs. The basics: Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebrate failure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during the day; and don't shy away from hiring talented people just because they look sloppy or lack college credentials. Bushnell is convinced that there are all sorts of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today. The problem is that corporate managers don't recognize them. Or when they do, they push them to conform rather than create. 'Some of the best projects to ever come out of Atari or Chuck E. Cheese's were from high school dropouts, college dropouts,' says Bushnell, 'One guy had been in jail.'"
Few companies are willing to hire anyone today.
God spoke to me
Steve Jobs would have made a lousy employee.
This space available.
Why take a chance on hiring an outsider if your management isn't supportive?
It's a quick way to turn into an outsider yourself.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
He'd laugh himself out of the door if he showed up for a job today.
I wouldn't hire him.
I'd let him vote for me though.
was a remnant of the blue sky investment days when credit was abundant and people had relevance. His vision doesn't fit well with the master slave aristocratic paradigm we have today. Increasingly stifled by the death of the garage start-up and freedom in general, his last gasp attempt at empowering productivity for the masses was to get a phone, string a bunch of sensors onto it and let the people make of it what they could - the app store.
Make sure to hire a few grumpy old men to keep things in balance. Or increase our social benefits so we can stop looking for a job. That, or expect more age discrimination lawsuits. If you're going to make us work longer, you damn well better have a decent job for us.
A liberal arts major from a small liberal arts school who dropped acid and traveled to India to meditate and ate a diet of nothing but fruit... Why wouldn't they hire him?
The corporate mindset is all about conformity. That's a bad reason they wouldn't hire Jobs today. But here's a good reason... When one guy makes the entire rest of the staff's life a living hell. Nobody could do it all an a stinker like Jobs is no exception... A poison pill is a poison pill... And Jobs was a pill.
Ive done quite innovative stuff (datamining/meme manipulation) for the past fifteen years but few companies want to hire me, so Ive done contracting for the past eight years. Most companies pay lip service to innovation but few truly recognize it or desire it.
Managers advance by minimizing risk, not by innovating.
Thats just the nature of business and people.
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Look at past successes to see that one die roll that won in the corporate world of selecting employees who turn out to be diamonds in the rough is as crazy as
looking at the past performance of 65536 (~sixty-five thousand = 2^16) brokers each of whom makes one of the binary bets of heads/tails on 16 binary events and then being surprised that one of them got all 16 bets rights, and 120 got 15 out of the 16 bets right.
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Sometimes it's pretty random, and looking for reason in fluke choices won't get you far. As for that betting example, go look at the Binomial distribution. Also see http://www.skepdic.com/perfectprediction.html where they use an example of 100 letters, whereas they would be better off having a power of 2.
The best explanation of the "stock market prediction scam" is at http://totse2.com/content.php?163-The-Old-Stock-Market-Prediction-Scam .
michaelochurch has blogged about open allocation and problems with "why you?" cultures and concave vs convex that is probably related.
I'm going to show this to my boss. Maybe she will provide a keg, strippers and an occasional boong.
I make it a policy not to hire dead guys.
"Weeding out naysayers" is a advice that should be applied very carefully IMHO. Anybody who's worked around engineers and been on slashdot a while can get the point - there are plenty of guys who never heard an idea they didn't hate, who only ever see problems and never opportunities. On the other hand, I imagine a few level-headed and empowered naysayers could have done a lot of good at Enron and Bear Stearns. I am not sure if there is really a principled way to tell the difference defeatists and prophets though. I spent a good part of this morning reading Sundown in America, and the reader replies to it, and trying to decide whether the guy is loony, or America is doomed.
I'm not sure he used the term "outlier" purposefully, but it is telling in our era of data-driven everything. We will always have middle-of-the-curve people if we live only by data-driven metrics. It will allow us to make safe decisions, but it sure seems to be a waste of human resources.
What comes first, finding a teacher or becoming a student?
you don't need very much creative thinking relative to the amount of painstakingly boring work that needs
to be done to make a product.
the creative people often:
are not very good at the boring work
fight with each other about stupid shit
have unrealistically high standards
are just a pain in the ass in general
given that the market doesn't want me to stray very far from the status quo, tell me why I need more than zero or one creative
person?
If your plan for success is to find the next Steve Jobs and con him into a deal where he does the work and you get the profits, wake up and smell the coffee. It would be easier for you to become a Steve Jobs than to hire one.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A jerk in a suit, especially with an 'old-boys' network, however, would get hired instantly
Nothing for/against Jobs per se (I didn't know him), but it seems like the jerk part doesn't seem to be a problem with many managers and top level executives. A jerk who would drive employees to the brink of exhaustion would be welcome.
And to be fair the manager/executive is not hired to improve moral - short term gains outweigh employee happiness nowadays. It is easier to motivate employees to work hard by being a scary control freak, than by being a kind and caring person who looks out for you. Especially when times are tough and it isn't easy to get a job. And this mentality filters down - if my boss's boss screams at him, he vents at me.
The problem is cultural. 2 weeks of vacation is the norm in certain parts of the world - money is seen by many (especially the younger crowd) to be the deciding factor in taking any job. A consumerist mentality only compounds the problem.
The man hasn't worked a day in his life.
...I've learned to shut my fucking mouth and let science projects explode spectacularly.
Nobody seems to want to hear about potential risks and dangers that teams must take into account. And yet, they're of course completely shocked when shit goes up in flames.
Well, everybody wins. I get a sense of smug self-satisfaction, and non-term thinkers get to keep failing. Damned if I know why it brings them such joy, but whatever floats their boats. (Caveat: Your hull should be intact if you have a boat. This is not something that can be fixed "after going public". Your boat will FUCKING SINK.)
now days college credentials are a joke and the old college system has become to much of on one size fit's all as well to many people are going to it.
Now days there is to much theory and way to much filler and full classes. also lot's of BS required classes jobs dropped out due to the required classes and took classes as a drop in.
required classes like PE should not be the college price level or time frame.
Did you just compare Steve Jobs to Abraham Lincoln, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Albert Einstein?
I see The Church of Apple is still going strong.
Hiring practice went from trying to find someone that can come in, learn the job, and be a employee that can in the future build and run the company to companies expect you to know exactly what they need from your experience. Sorry, each company is different. The culture is different, getting people to work productively and happily together isn't the same at every company. Knowing how to do something is only part of the employee. Knowing how the company wants it done, how that fits into the strategy and growth, how to work with the company culture that has developed over time with the employees you will be working with, and becoming invested in that company is the other part. Businesses anymore think work X at company Y is the same as work X at company Z. It's not. Sometimes the right employee is one that can learn the job, fit in, and do the work. Just because someone knows how to do something doesn't mean they'll work in your company. People are not cogs. For examples, see NFL football and Pontiac.
Only issue is 90% of what is out there are contract/temp jobs. Pretty much slavery with no benefits. Then again you do get paid more than normal workers, and it can be a foot into the door for full time employment with benefits.
Is the same as groupthink. You need naysayers.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Atari is only the second company I know of that offers a sabbatical after 7 years, the first being Intel.
you may be on to something
capthcha=guiding?
Was it Bushnell or someone else who essentially forced the creation of Activision by being a douche? The way I heard it (or remember that I heard it) is that Atari wouldn't give a cut of sales, wouldn't promote the identity of programmers, etc. So a few guys from Atari left and formed Activision (sad me. I used to know their names without looking up in wikipedia). So did this happen while Bushnell was at the helm or after they were sold to WB?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
An interview question at Atari, from TFA: "What is the order of these numbers: 8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2?"
Any idea, anyone?
Dude, Steve Jobs tooks Pixar where it went, from an in-house digital effects firm for ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) into what it became: a Hollywood powerhouse that took in Lasseter and made Toy Story and other blockbusters.
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Sure Canon invented the m.o. drive in the NeXT machine; I made no claim that Jobs invented it. Jobs didn't invent USB even though he put it into the iMac fruit-colored all-in-one '040 machines that ran system 7 or 8. Jobs didn't invent firewire but he put those into Powerbooks and Powermacs. Jobs didn't invent ethernet but he created ethernet dongles for 68040-based Mac IIci machines. He may not have invented those things, and he didn't invent the macintosh, but he was the prime mover behind the creation and marketing and success of those things on consumer-grade hardware.
3. F.U.! Read what I wrote. I never said he wrote unix. He incorporated Mach and Posix into NeXT, designed the use of the NeXT-step GUI interface, and pushed for the integration of the dsp chip into easy to use software APIs and allowed for programmers to access the hardware in a useful way.
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He was an excellent overseer, and a slave-driver, and an ego-maniac, and an asshole. That's how he got things done. My point was that selecting for the same traits in someone else will more likely get you 50-70% of those traits: the external expresed phenotypes, like jack-assery. Selecting for those external traits will most likely not get you an employee that will star-ship rocket your company into the world of success.
What with those hacked motorola cpu's.
Too. Not to. You should have spent more time in college. Or in your case, attended highschool.
I've been beaten down at work for so many years I just wish every night that I don't wake up in the morning.
It's almost comical. But Albert Einstein couldn't get a job when he graduated with his physics degree. His dad died thinking Albert was a total failure.
Can you imagine Einstein going through countless interviews and still being unemployed.
Einstein ended up getting the most boring job ever at that time: a patent clerk. His job was easy and gave him infinite time to sit at his office and think.
That infinite boredom turned out to be a perfect platform for conceptualizing and testing his theories.
I've written multiple books, done award-winning work, and have sterling recommendations/references from people that can say all kinds of fabulous stuff about me. But all of my best work in life has been done in the contracting/consulting space, where I was basically a lone wolf.
Virtually every time a company has hired me, they have immediately put me in a box.
Step 1: Refuse to allow him to use his own tech tools/toolchains crafted over years and with which he is fabulous and familiar.
Step 2: Make sure that there's no allowance for him to do intense/creative work on his own daytime schedule; meetings are mandatory and if that means that the only time left for actual work is during hours when his brain isn't at its best, oh well.
Step 3: Lock him into a narrow chain of hierarchy/command so that he can't ever talk directly to the role players that he needs in order to directly get things done; instead, ensure that he's always stuck playing telephone through many organizational layers and that his immediate contact has an MBA and doesn't ever understand what he's saying.
Step 4: Evaluate him immediately (always too early) and on a linear progress model with synthetic "benchmarks," whether or not any of this matches the natural trajectory of the task at hand or not, so that instead of doing great things in the best way, he's working to "hit benchmarks" in ways that often interfere with the actual work, either slowing it tremendously or significantly reducing the potential of the final outcome.
Step 5: Take away any physical and psychological comfort and idiosyncrasy that enables him to act naturally and think clearly; dictate dress, office layout and organization, hours, speech and communications channels, venues, and characteristics, so that he's not even himself most of the time when he's working for you (you know, the self that did the great work that you want to have).
Step 6: Toss assorted new tasks and underlings into his lap that have no relationship to what he was actually hired to do and/or his actual area of expertise, ensuring that he'll spend more and more time doing stuff for which he is not the optimal laborer, again taking away from the work that you actually hired him to do.
Step 7: Undervalue or refuse to value at all any research work, preliminary design/development work, or anything that isn't clearly "making product" and "hitting benchmarks" and be sure to stop by the desk every ten minutes and remind him that he wasn't hired "to do that" but instead to "produce."
Under conditions of "employment" this has happened to me so many times that I hesitate to accept "employment" now and prefer to consult instead. I'm tired of seeing excitement turn into bewilderment of the "He came so highly recommended!" sort after just about every last thing that makes the best work that I've done possible (the work that they wanted to see done again, on their time) was methodically written out of my work life.
Too many MBAs and HR drones out there in the corporate world that are really only comfortable seeing other MBAs and HR drones buzzing about the office, wondering why nobody outside of management and HR seems to be "getting anything done."
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Einstein did his work the same way everyone else did. Also got published in papers and built on ideas other people had.
Laughed out of establishment science? Hardly.
Taken with a grain of salt the size of a sedan? Sure.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
One new law. You may not ask to see anyones TRW unless you are providing at least 2000.00 in credit. no other purpose is permited. You may not ask for a resume unless the salary is over 65k a year. and oyu employment application can only ask 5 questions including name address last place employed social security number
And if it pays under 30k a year all you cans ask is address, social security and name..
This is pretty much how I was hired 40 years ago.
than many at the corporations with whom I work imagine to be fair.
I lose the stability and benefits that come with employment—but I gain productivity, the satisfaction of a job well done, and control over my own work life.
Call it whatever you want. But two of my current relationships have asked to put me on the books, with a raise, benefits, a great title, and a nice office. I've told them no in both cases—much to the surprise of one CEO. Instead, I continue to teach at the local university and offer my services on a contract, remote-work, you-pay-me-and-stay-out-of-my-way basis.
Again, call it what you want. Works for me, and for my clients—despite their desire to bring me in-house.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Finding The Next Steve Jobs: How to Find, Hire, Keep and Nurture Creative Talent
Bushnell is convinced that there are all sorts of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today. The problem is that corporate managers don't recognize them. Or when they do, they push them to conform rather than create.
The underlying assumptions are WRONG. Most companies are NOT interested in finding any creative talent, nor are they interested in any unconventional people.
In my experience, most companies just want cheaper worker who do not make waves and will just bend down and work. Their managers like to TALK ABOUT finding talent, or finding creative/unconventional people, mainly because it is what their stockholders expect to hear, and partly to make it sound like they are working hard, and also partly to make their cheap workers think that their managers actually care when they work hard.
The fact is, most companies managers just want to keep the status quo and rake in their bonuses. Any creative or unconventional worker is threat to their status quo, and that's why even if those people were hired, they would be pushed to "conform rather than create".
ACTION speak louder than words. See what companies really DO, rather than what they TALK about, to infer what they really want.
If you are the next Steve, go ahead and start your own company, no existing company will want you.
Oliver.
. The basics: Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebrate failure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during the day; and don't shy away from hiring talented people just because they look sloppy or lack college credentials. Bushnell is convinced that there are all sorts of creative and unconventional people out there working at companies today. The problem is that corporate managers don't recognize them. Or when they do, they push them to conform rather than create.
All good advice that MIGHT work. Or might backfire tremendously. It is the same mentality - no one got fired for choosing IBM/Microsoft/Google.
If you actually try to apply this principle, I believe it will lead to a loss in productivity in general. Outliers are just that - outliers. Listing a few big-names and saying that these guys made it despite their lack of credentials/oddness shouldn't cloud the fact that for a majority of people with lack of credentials is because they are not competent. That is like saying XYZ was a great researcher despite doing poorly in school, so colleges are losing a lot of talented individuals because they don't give people with C- average full scholarships. Given a limited time to hire or monitor people, it is easier/faster to just weed out people for trivial (or not so trivial) reasons.
Also, most jobs don't require really talented individuals. If you are just good enough, it suffices. Do you need a superstar in most jobs? No (it won't hurt, but isn't really essential to keeping the door open and the company growing). However, a single jerk who doesn't conform can lead to bad feelings in a group. Yes, you might lose something special they bring. But not doing it would almost certainly lead to problems. Unless you have other jerks who can give as good as they can take. Put them together and you would get a dysfunctional group.
Some kind
You do not need a TRW you dont need a resume under 65 k a year, you dont even need an application under 30 k a year.
40 years ago I walked on a construction site asked if they needed help they told me what to do. at lunch if they liked my work they got my social security number name and address that was it no one once of idocracy like we have now.
I started my own business mostly to fight against these type of business and people You are all so pretentious you all make me sick.
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Is it at all possible that the technical community allows him to rest in peace instead of trying to exploit his name for page hits and SEO?
Spoken like somebody who never went to college and is bitter because of it.
The theory is why people go to college rather than to a vocational school. And those "BS required classes Jobs dropped out of" are breadth requirements so that you don't wind up incapable of learning a new field later on. What's more, they help give students some perspective on what they're doing. If anything there aren't enough of them required.
The real problem is that we have people being encouraged to go to college that don't need or want that kind of education. If you go to a good school, the standards are still there, it's just that we have more crap schools now than we used to have, and believe me, there's a reason why not all degrees give equal weight.
you hired me wrong.
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man." -- George Bernard Shaw
Have gnu, will travel.
what about jobs with a minimum age or need CLD?
I haven't seen one of his lunatic rantings all day. Did he overdose or something? I hope he's okay!
We finally got his meds adjusted. Sorry it took so long but he didn't have medical insurance so we had to cheap out and use some old, expired vet tranquilizers.
But he's better now.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Isn't productivity from a dead guy zero. Why would anyone hire a dead guy?
All I can think of is a new movie called Weekend at Steve's.
Jobs didn't invent USB even though he put it into the iMac fruit-colored all-in-one '040 machines that ran system 7 or 8.
iMacs initially had G3 processors; everything with 68040 chips had been discontinued before he came back. (And it was MacOS 8.1 that they started out with, IIRC)
Jobs didn't invent ethernet but he created ethernet dongles for 68040-based Mac IIci machines.
The Mac IIci had a 68030, and it didn't have any built in ethernet support at all. You're probably thinking of the AAUI port on the Quadra 700. And he was long gone from Apple when that stuff came out.
And the main thing I'd object to was this:
- the first optical drive on consumer hardware (it was magneto-optical however)
Bullshit. The NeXT cube was not consumer hardware. The thing cost $6500 and was initially only sold to the higher ed market. When they finally hit the retail market, they were priced at $10,000 and were about as big a flop as the similarly priced Apple Lisa.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
THIS is why he's doing it & proof of it, here -> http://interviews.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3585927&cid=43295193 when others pointed out Jeremiah Cornelius forgot to submit one of the "first post spams" (masquerading as myself, by posting as AC & using some old posts of mine or other b.s. he put up), & JC mistakenly submitted one of the impersonations of myself as his registered 'luser' name here on /. forums.
Pretty pitiful actually, but like every up to no good idiot does? He screwed up & submitted it under his registered 'luser' name here, instead of his ac submittals he's been doing.
* Jeremiah Cornelius: DO YOURSELF, and the rest of us, A GIANT FAVOR MAN: Seek professional psychiatric help!
(Since Jeremiah Cornelius obviously can't get over the fact he made a spelling error on what it is HE ALLEGEDLY DID FOR A LIVING? That's not MY fault... it's HIS!)
Lastly - considering the fact you're posting "ac" too AGAIN JC? Please - give us a break: Grow up! Your childish attempts @ "discrediting me" are WEAK... and, so are you: Especially in your 'projecting' your issues with drugs.
APK
P.S.=> I seriously must have dusted JC (in his mind @ least) for his BAD spelling error & it "got his goat"...
I.E.-> Catching what he claimed to do as a job, for YEARS he left "PENETRATION" (correct) spelled as "PENTRATION" (incorrect) on his resume on LinkedIn & I pointed it out as he & his friends trolled me as usual (webmistressrachel, gmhowell, & crew (probably ALL JC no doubt using alterate emails or TOR to do it as a possible - I've caught "them & theirs" doing it before, ala Barbara, not Barbie = TomHudson (same person))).
So THAT is what has gotten his goat in a technical debate & his "geek angst" could only come up with *trying* to "impersonate me" in every news thread on /. for the month of March 2013 so far!
(Just to attempt to 'discredit me' as a spammer here obviously)
Doing so, by posting that "$10,000 challenge" &/or reposts of my old posts on hosts file value to end users into EVERY SINGLE NEWS ARTICLE POSTED on /. ...
It's all I can think of that *might* cause such a mentally troubled 'reaction' like the Jeremiah Cornelius is doing & there's NO QUESTION he's the one doing this spamming of nearly every posted article masquerading as myself...!
... apk
H.R. would flip if they got someone with a resume with "liberal arts" and conservatives in forums bash all students for being so stupid as to not major in accounting, engineering, HR, etc.
HR would then look for gaps in employment and experience. Steve Jobs mailroom at 7.25 take it or leave it!
It is not management folks who is filtering these people out. It is all the HR weenies robots who know nothing about the job requirements. Only word by word verbatim match by resume to file on its Taleo program.
They are machines who scan and look with in 5 seconds in a keep or throw awhile pile etc. Steve Jobs would not be hired unless he had some experience. After Atari they would not give a shit but he would not be a manger. Remember good old Stevie boy does not have creative manager/genious on his resume. Just programmer. So pay him exactly the same etc.
http://saveie6.com/
One new law. You may not ask to see anyones TRW unless you are providing at least 2000.00 in credit. no other purpose is permited. You may not ask for a resume unless the salary is over 65k a year. and oyu employment application can only ask 5 questions including name address last place employed social security number
And if it pays under 30k a year all you cans ask is address, social security and name..
This is pretty much how I was hired 40 years ago.
Right while employers all got robbed by hiring conman and criminals and lazy slackers. Not people you want to work for you and could cost you your business if you are mom and pop shop or restaurant.
http://saveie6.com/
Promotion is rapid during a war, and favours bold warriors.
Promotion is slow during peacetime, and favours bureaucrats and political manipulators.
"Make work fun; weed out the naysayers; celebrate failure, and then learn from it; allow employees to take short naps during the day...."
Yeah, that's going to happen. What will happen is that management will read the book and only remember the parts which reinforce what they already want to do. Maybe like pay you a dollar a year so you will be more like Jobs.
It will be like when managment studied Japanese manufacturing methods and came away with loyalty to the company and suchlike to be the key. The lifetime job security and loyalty of the company to the employee aspects of Japanese corporate culture went in one eye and out the other.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I figured somebody would bring Android into this. People need to understand that iOS users and Android users are different crowds, at least the ones that care about more than basic smartphone functionality.
The quality difference between your average iOS and Android app has a lot to do with the differences in target markets, but yes, Android tends to have more app quality issues. This isn't to say there aren't an awful lot of crappy iOS apps out there as well.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Clearly a foolproof business method.
Dude, Steve Jobs tooks Pixar where it went, from an in-house digital effects firm for ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) into what it became: a Hollywood powerhouse that took in Lasseter and made Toy Story and other blockbusters.
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Sure Canon invented the m.o. drive in the NeXT machine; I made no claim that Jobs invented it. Jobs didn't invent USB even though he put it into the iMac fruit-colored all-in-one '040 machines that ran system 7 or 8. Jobs didn't invent firewire but he put those into Powerbooks and Powermacs. Jobs didn't invent ethernet but he created ethernet dongles for 68040-based Mac IIci machines. He may not have invented those things, and he didn't invent the macintosh, but he was the prime mover behind the creation and marketing and success of those things on consumer-grade hardware.
I love revisionist history.
- The majority of PCs had USB in them prior to the iMac all-in-one computers.
- Ethernet was hardware and software around before the dongle created for the IIci.
- Firewire was heavily pushed by Apple and Steve Jobs, but it only found a niche market in video editing.
USB and Ethernet would have succeeded in the personal computer space with or without Apple. Firewire would have died on the vine a lot sooner than it did.
I refused to borrow money to pay for school and wasn't poor or stupid enough for FAFSA. Bitter? You bet your ass. It's taken me the better half of a decade to overcome the discrimination thrust on me by the "Expected Family Contribution". These days, I pay for classes with a salary while I listen to degree mill outputs whining about their inability to find a job.
People who paid a lot of money for an education love to talk shit about Khan Academy & Wikipedia, but at least I can discharge my donations to Wikipedia in bankruptcy court. Grade inflation, & degree inflation are rampant. Getting my BS while surrounded by kid's who didn't have to work for it will continue to be a trial. Nobody has ever bothered to ask me if I have lamb skin, and I don't want a job where its required. But I'll be damned if I'm going to be deprived of the experience or the achievement by a government with so little moral legitimacy left to stand on.
As far as allegorical evidence:
I had the opportunity to take a class with a new teacher who believed in weighting test scores higher than homework. It took less than 3 weeks of pissing and moaning from the students who were failing at meritocracy-based metrics before he started giving out shovel loads of assignments to allow these kids to dilute their bad grades with "group study". I went from top of the class to middle of the pack almost over-night because I had to work full-time while these shit heads were "collaborating" in the library.
It's all total bullshit, but the concept of getting a stipend to do research instead of paying for it out of pocket is too appealing to be deterred.
nowadays there a more and more reasons to follow an english class
your racist jew aren't ya?
I disagree. I went to college when a "new" program was being rolled out (when Java and Flash were new)... what did they do?
They took the CS course and replaced two courses in each semester with flash and java. So instead of learning C/C++ we learned Java 1.1 and Macromedia director.
What makes me angry about it, is that all the filler courses that had not only no bearing on anything (yes math does, and maybe english and organizational behavior...) but it basically revealed that their CS program was just their Business Management program with with programming tacked on to begin with.
Unfortunately the only way you're actually going to learn anything with these short-sighted college programs is by taking one that isn't on a new technology, but an old one. Today you're still better off getting the Computer Science program than anything having to deal with Java or Flash. Flash is no longer being used on mobile devices and Java is next. Java may still be used on server backends but it's all but vanished on the client-facing end.
I agree.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I didn't get that at all from what he (aussersterne) wrote.
Maybe your thinking is indicative of the problems and challenges he face(d/s) in his career?
Yes. Apple pushed its "AppleTalk" technology and discourage the TCP/IP stack. I had a IIci and it
was a nightmare to get it to talk TCP/IP. But MS had the same problem. In a way, it was the internet
(not HTTP, but ftp, gopher, et. al.) that drove both MS and Apple to take TCP/IP seriously.
What kind of people did Jobs tend to hire? Could two Steve Jobs work together productively?
From one Mac fan to another, your memory of 90s Apple is terrible. Are you 20?
Yeah... Compare Android's Google Maps to iPhone's Apple Maps. Sure, iOS has waaaay better apps
Speaking as the owner of a decently-sized company, and a responsible adult, I can say with certainty that work is not supposed to be a frat party, and throwing lunchtime keggers for your employees does not make them more creative or more dedicated workers.
Yes, it's important to provide a comfortable working atmosphere for your employees, and to be flexible to the needs of your employees should they have life circumstances they need to deal with. But, a completely slack environment void of rules and expectations only leads to organizational chaos.
Back when I used to do "conventional" hiring, I interviewed a lot of "Steve Jobs" types - the arrogant, entitled, indignant type that was more concerned about the frat party and with there being no rules or structure than with the diligent exchange of productivity for compensation. More often than not these would be people who had high expectations of my company, but expected me to have low expectations of them. I was just to take what they were willing to give me and be happy about it.
Those kinds of people, the ones who are in it for "what can you do for me today?" are absolutely toxic to an organization in my experience. I'd much rather hire the altruistic "what can I do to help my teammates succeed?" type.
Apple fan boys seem to have issues with spelling seem.
Go to a better school, in all the years I've been in college, I've never had even a single class where that happened, the appropriate action is to talk with the dean, because that isn't normal at any school I know of.
I love how all the (high rated) posts here are about companies 'thinking outside the box' and 'needing to recognize talent' etc.
The fact is, the title could just as well have been "Steve Jobs' success was extraordinary; complete assholes STILL generally not preferred as employees, coworkers, or bosses."
Let's be honest, yes, Steve Jobs' success was extraordinary - whether that's a combination of talent or luck, is your call. But he was an asshole, and 99.9% of the time, assholes really aren't great to work with or for. HE wasn't great to work for, he was still a dick, it's just that he was successful.
-Styopa
Yeah... Compare Android's Google Maps to iPhone's Apple Maps. Sure, iOS has waaaay better apps
Google Maps? Isn't that the operation that recently lost track of all the rivers in Germany?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I used to have your attitude. I wanted to learn all the technical stuff and do my own thing. 10 years later, I'm very proficient at what I wanted to do but guess what? 8-10 versions of a dozen softwares I've used have changed/ became obsolete. I now realized if they just taught me the pure technical side, I'd be even more pissed off at my college degree. Looking around the industry now, all I see is a cookie-cutter pattern off of each others' ideas. I can't get enough of history and theory to innovate, or at least leapfrog the competition by several factors. I see trends and outsmart them. Learning theory taught me how to think and I can open any code and translate it to whatever language I need, not because I understand the language per se, but I understand the fundamental ideas behind all of them. College gave me a built-in Rosetta Stone.
If you can't appreciate it now, I'm sure you will later. I know I did.
1% skills,4% image and 5% cost reduction and 90% opportunity control. Prove otherwise.
He was an asshole his entire life.
if a poster insults someone else's intelligence while misspelling their own post, you might be on Slashdot
Siri can't fix everything...
You may not ask for a resume unless the salary is over 65k a year.
I would raise that to reflect a HOMEOWNER WAGE based on no more than thirty percent of disposable income going to a mortgage, indexed for inflation. Compel the Fed to republish M3. As long as I am registered with Selective Service (liability to military service is the wellspring of all citizen responsibility) I am entitled to such information.
Just saying ... a creative person doesn't stop being who they are when they turn (insert age your current personal prejudice inclines you to ).
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
What the fuck college did you go to that had mandatory PE?!?!?!?!?!?!
In Soviet Russia, Steve Jobs hires you!
Wait...
weed out the naysayers
Weed out lawyers who say you can't do that and the accountants who say you can't afford to do that.
celebrate failure, and then learn from it
Lost 500 million due to bad investments and hiding risks? No problem! Bonuses to everyone, all the way to the middle management! Lets learn to predict stock and equity markets perfectly next time.
, 'One guy had been in jail.'"
Thomas Watson Sr. was hired in 1914 at the future IBM as he was about to go to jail for a year. So nothing new there.
Who drives in rivers? Seriously?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
It was. Then Nolan sold to Warner Communications for $32M, and they promptly ran it into the ground.
No one mentioned Android until you did.
burn the heretic!
(or at least make him install the latest version of QuickTime)
History provides plenty of examples of evil men who acquired power and used it to get lots of things done.
What I don't understand is why Jobs' actions are acceptable to his fans.
-Lod
I call bullshit on this: "open source software (Mach, BSD, GNU compiler) created by others, which he then promptly attempted to make proprietary and whose licenses he attempted to violate."
Team, Team, Team. .... Team!
Team, Team, Team, Team, Team, Team.
Team, Team
The majority of PCs had USB, but what used it? A couple of webcams. That's it. I know I had a motherboard from that era that was recalled due to faulty USB ports. I didn't even bother to get it replaced because...nothing used USB. Intel was pushing it, so it was there...but unused.
Peripheral manufacturers did not release anything of consequence using the USB interface until the iMac. Then all of a sudden, we had bondi blue printers, zip drives, CD burners etc (of course most of them worked on PCs as well).
USB also needed to be on the majority of PCs *and* the iMac to succeed. That way, they could target both platforms with 1 interface. The iMac led the way and the PCs finally got some use out of the USB port.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
No one likes to speak ill of the dead I guess. I read an interview with Bushnell a decade ago were he says that Jobs was a slacker who stunk up the place (as in literally stunk up the place because he didn't bathe). The only thing Jobs accomplished at Atari was the Breakout hardware design which pretty much everyone now admits was actually done by Wozniak in his spare time and Jobs took the credit for. Maybe the "something special" Bushnell saw in Jobs was his brilliant friend?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
I'm a tug pilot, you insensitive clod!
Who drives in rivers? Seriously?
People using navigational devices. All the time. Either they or the programmer can't tell the difference between a bridge and a ferry.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
"You're the entitled, self-righteous college kid who thinks he deserves a corner office and a company Porsche on his first day of work, and a pat on the back and a promotion every time he accomplishes even a meager task."
They make me sick too. All those fancy language and communications skills. Phooey to that, I say!
What the fuck college did you go to that had mandatory PE?!?!?!?!?!?!
http://cornellsun.com/node/54517
still has the swim test.
If you lose humanity on the way, can it still be called a success?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Damn You, Autocorrect!
I'm willing to bet for every Steve Jobs out there, there's a thousand more like him who will never make it very far in a given company more than a year or two, never to get a promoted or otherwise recognized because they're considered too "eccentric", too abrasive, or simply an asshole because he has a critical eye and little tolerance for idiots. Problem is, too many corporate cultures are afraid of hearing the truth about why they suck, then years later they wonder why their assets are being liquidated in a bankruptcy auction because they lacked courage.
I see it all the time. I'm not a Jobs 'fanboi' by any stretch... don't own a single Apple product. Just not my cup of tea, but I have a lot of respect for what he built and how he did it early on until the corporate 'yes men', lawyers and accountants nearly drove Apple into the ground.
on a subconscious level they saw the threat he posed to their own position and how hard it would be to control someone like that
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Casteism
Your comment threshold is set too high, otherwise you would have seen the comment I replied to.
Write failed: Broken pipe
Sorry. I used to have my comment threshold set all the way down so I could see everything. I just got sick and tired of scrolling past that wall of text and links that seemed to be posted on every single thread.
I love revisionist history.
- The majority of PCs had USB in them prior to the iMac all-in-one computers.
You obviously do. Inside is the key word - most PCs had USB on the Intel motherboards but no actual ports. And the reason was because there was no real support in any PC OS.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.