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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.
- the first commercially usable mexapixel display with 24-bit color
- UNIX based underneath with a pretty interface on top, NeXT-Step, also the precursor of OSX
- the first optical drive on consumer hardware (it was magneto-optical however)
- a NeXT machine was the workbench upon which Tim Berners Lee was able to program the beginning of the WWW=world wide web and HTML language and HTTP protocol
Jobs also started up Pixar which gave him his entree into hollywood connections. Jobs was flung down quite a few times and built his own way back up. Good luck finding someone with that level of arrogance and that level of actual capability and that level of chutzpah.
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.
To be completely fair to history, he didn't start Pixar he acquired them. And, their management said that they succeeded in spite of him, because they ignored everything that he told them to do. The only time he ever really shined was at Apple. And, the only time Apple ever shined was when he was there.
1. He started Apple 1 and made hundreds of millions.
2. He started Next and made hundreds of millions.
3. He bought a small company named Pixar and made several billions.
4. He went back to Apple 2 and made hundred of billions.
Once is luck. Four times, the man has something, and if people can't see what it is, they don't have it.
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.