Why Steve Jobs Couldn’t Find a Job Today

And then, a few years later, you'll hear about this super successful company run by some guy called Steve Jobs, and you'll be kicking yourself for not getting in on the ground floor of his operation.

Except that you couldn't recognize that kind of success early unless you had experience investing in that kind of person.

And you'd only hear about his smashing success, not the long hard road fraught with peril and failure that he travelled in order to arrive where he is today.

Nothing comes for free.

Think back to all of the most quirky, creative, interesting, boat-rocking people you've worked with or met. It's not a universal rule that these folks aren't very good at the "people" side of the equation...but a lot of them aren't. Furthermore, a lot of them have a marked distaste for toeing the party line. They derive more energy from challening assumptions than from accepting them. Or from reinventing the wheel, instead of using the wheel they've got on hand. They get bored or disgruntled very quickly if they're not being stimulated or challenged.

These traits might make for good startup founders, but they don't often correlate with corporate success. Especially at large, traditional, non-tech corporations. In such companies, politics rules the day. Your skill as a politician -- your ability to navigate the waters, network with the right people, kiss the right ass, and sell internally -- is what gets you ahead. Your inability to do so will prevent you from climbing as quickly, or as far, as the savvier operators.

Companies say they want more creative leaders, but all incentives are set up to reward politicians. At the same time, a lot of "creative" folks opt out of the game in the first place -- either through ineptitude at it, or through an avowed distaste for it. It's unfortunate, but it's true in many, many, many cases.

If there's any grand, karmic justice in the whole equation, it's that -- in theory, at least -- the more forward-thinking and "creative" companies will win out in the marketplace. Those companies that choose to be ruled by innovation, by results, and not by politics should outperform the companies that choose not to recognize (or even to suppress) their innovative thinkers. It's not as cut-and-dried as this, of course, but that's what those of us disheartened by these articles should hope for in the long run.

Also, it's simply political. When you have shareholders who all hold different beliefs and levels of risk-aversion, things get messy.

Lookup the german Samwer brothers for example...

edit: hate to be down-vote curious, but I would be interested to hear if someone has been rejected from Apple for having a poor GPA.

I've interviewed with Apple and nobody asked about my degree or GPA. It was the most on-topic job interview I've ever had. No weird brainteasers or annoying FizzBuzz questions. Just questions directly relevant to the position I was interviewing for. I have a handful of friends who work there who never finished college or have degrees in something irrelevant, like philosophy. Guys like Mike Matas and Mike Lee did not have degrees. The head of iTunes did not go to college at all.

That is how things work: if you have vision and you want to do something new and innovative, big corporations such as Apple are not the place to work for. They need just very smart people (hopefully not willing to rock the boat) to execute the existing plan.

I'm not saying that all of these companies don't have vision or innovation: the point is that positions requiring vision and initiative are already taken.

And if you try something new, you might get in trouble (just imagine somebody at Research in Motion suggesting to build phone similar to iPhone in 2005).