Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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?
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.
I never knew that I could add this stuff to my resume! Thank you!
Data mining= Facebook stalking. Lots of google searches.
Meme manipulation = made cat picture caption funnier than the last guy. IMHO
Anyone with the gumption to claw their way out of an unmarked grave deserves an interview at the very least.
He'd laugh himself out of the door if he showed up for a job today.
Well, I guess Apple has a policy not to hire dead people, so yes.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I was trilled to make minimum wage, $4/hour, programming a PDP-11 in Fortran IV.
But think of what you saved by not needing a dominatrix.
Bullshit statistics and make-believe data department.
Ah, he's a SAP consultant.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I don't know about it being the worst years since WWII, the 1970's were sort of crappy too.
Or maybe I'm just remembering the shag carpet and the fake wood paneling?
I'm a tug pilot, you insensitive clod!