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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.'"
... 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. ...
This point is actually brought up quite directly in Susan Cain's book titled "Quiet". It's not so much about "naysayers" (because both introverts and extroverts can be such), but is about the fact that introverted folks tend to put more effort into thinking about the (both positive and negative) effects of something, compared to extroverts who tend to dive in head-first and hope for the best. There were a good number of introverted folks giving Enron (and others) level-headed advice, with all the warning signs provided -- all of which was ignored (by extroverts who controlled things); both Enron and Bear Stearns were both mentioned.
The reason I mention her book is because it sheds an enormous amount of light on the exact attitude, thought process, personality type, and even lifestyle, that the United States (and to some degree Canada as well) has come to expect from its citizens ("workers") -- it's expected that everyone be extroverted and that nobody ever question anything. All our systems (social, economical, educational, governmental, you name it) are designed solely to support the extroverted attitude and thought process -- especially from the moment we enter kindergarten. Introversion isn't awarded in any way, it's shunned. Once this evidence is presented to you (with hundreds and hundreds of facts to back it up), it really changes how you view American life/society/etc.. It's actually amazingly depressing, because it proves that everything, right dow to our very core, is money-driven rather than neutral/balanced or even improvement-driven.
Captcha: remorse.
I other words, the "team" member shouldn't be part of a team, or use tools and methods that others in the organization are familiar with, or even show up to work when the rest of the "team" needs him to be there.
In other words, I'm going to bitch and complain and end up doing dead-end contract work because under normal circumstances I wouldn't be able to hold a job for longer than 6 months anyway.
Yes, we real professionals know your type. 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. But, in reality, that you think you need to work at a specific time of day and under your own terms to be creative is not a demonstration of your genius, but rather of your mediocrity.
The company situation you describe does not exist outside of Hollywood and the Dilbert strip. That's how I know your post is complete and utter whining bullshit.
AC seems exactly right to me, based on what I remember of "Apple Confidential." In fact, if memory serves me right, Jobs was trying to get Sculley fired when Sculley was out of town, and Jean-Louis Gassee warned Sculley of the attempted coup.
So when Apple was looking to buy a company for the next generation Mac OS, Jobs had a very personal motive to get Apple to buy NeXT instead of Be (as Gassee was the president of Be, and in negotations to sell Be to Apple). That, and he got Apple to buy NeXT at a time when he was considering investing his own (and Larry Ellison's) money to take over Apple. Instead, he got paid to do it, and got the guy who executed the move fired.
Jobs was great at many, many things... but he wasn't exactly a nice guy, or--from everything I've read--the kind of guy you'd want running anything when he was forced out of Apple. I think even Jobs would admit it was probably good for him (and Apple) in the long run.
You seem pretty angry. You haven't provided any details on the sort of IT work you do, but you should probably be aware that the entire field isn't outsourced to India. The companies I've worked for over the last 14 years (yeah, I'm getting old at 32) hardly employ any overseas employees. My current employer has offices in London, but they're not staffed by outsourced employees. I'm earning good money, especially considering the fact that I'm in Texas (moved here for the job), and am able to support a wife and two children with only my wages. I'm also a high school dropout toting a GED for my educational experience, unless you count unrelated technical training from my time in the Navy. My current job title is "senior Linux engineer," and I greatly enjoy my work.
Attitude goes a long way in any company, and this counts double if you're looking for a new job. If your attitude stinks, you're probably going to have a rougher time than others. Shouting about your intelligence doesn't help matters any. Maybe it's also worth noting that the most talented people in this industry tend to have history that is either devoid of a college education, or had majors completely unrelated to computer science. The difference is their passion for the work and their willingness to constantly learn on their own. Innate intelligence is only the base requirement for a lot of this stuff; the rest is simply dedication.
Good luck. If you're honestly looking for a change, reply to this with more information on yourself, and maybe I can lend a hand with putting your resume in front of someone.
Write failed: Broken pipe