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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.
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?
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 .
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.
- 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.
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
> Why does everyone forget that he was pushed out when Scully cam on board?
Actually, he was pushed out of the Lisa project first, then took over Macintosh from Jef Raskin. He had a definite plan for where Macintosh should go, and if sales had kept up, he might have had a shot at staying in control. Instead, because he was in denial about sales performance, Scully came up with his own plan to salvage the situation. Jobs disagreed and bad-mouthed Scully around Apple. They fought for control and Jobs basically made an ultimatum to the board: him or me. The board said "him."
Technically Jobs wasn't fired, he was just stripped of all managerial duties, but effectively they gave him no choice but to leave.
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.
...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.)
Let me address a few comments in your post. 1. Pixar was founded Lucas Group, and then later spun off as sep corp with an investment from Steve Jobs. 2. Canon invented that drive, and the Next was hardly consumer hardware and was not marketed with consumers in mind. 3. Next would have tanked without Ross Perots money. So maybe we owe Ross Perot for OSX. Jobs was a great driving force behind Apple an Next, but he wrote no code, nor did he invent Unix, he was just an excellent overseer. He is was a great salesman and marker. But an asshole.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
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.
Anyone with the gumption to claw their way out of an unmarked grave deserves an interview at the very least.
And for publicly-traded companies who answer to Wall Street, their primary concern is with hittin the analysts' magic quarterly numbers. So they can't take a chance on someone like Steve Jobs. He may represent the remote possibility of a big bonanza down the road but the manager may not be there to see it if he misses the next couple of quarterly "numbers".
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
Yeah, and his cool box was built out of a whole bunch of technologies (Objective-C, Smalltalk, MVC, DisplayPostscript, WYSIWYG) and 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. I can't actually think of a single major technical contribution of NeXT. Steve Jobs was a talented product designers, but he had no scruples.
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.
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.
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.
You misunderstand his point. He is talking about people who are too risk-averse to allow their employees to try anything too radical or creative. Not that he is saying to weed out anyone but yes-men.
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
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.
I agree.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
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.
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.
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.
Um...the stories those guys have told in things like The Pixar Story & other interviews contradicts that. IIRC, Catmull & Lasseter both being very complimentary of him & how many/most others wouldn't have fostered the ultimate success. Early on, Pixar kept burning cash & Jobs kept writing checks - without really interfering. Hire smart people, give great tools & the freedom to create and get the heck out of the way.
Vote Quimby.
I'm a tug pilot, you insensitive clod!