No company would ever hire Steve Jobs | Hacker News Reader

No company would ever hire Steve Jobs

techzone360.com

14 pointsstevenleeg7 comments

The author is right that Jobs wouldn't get hired, but he also misses a larger point. No company, including Apple, would hire someone like Steve Jobs - nor should they.

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Branson--these aren't employees, they're founders. Founders take risks, look for big opportunities, work insane hours, and lead to places others might never go.

Employees, even executives, need to make the vision happen. You want people to be empowered to look for opportunities and take risks within the boundaries set for them, but if you have a company filled with Steve Jobses, they're going to either sink the ship going off in different directions, or leave and start their own companies.

Hiring a Steve Jobs as your CEO after he or she has already proven themselves is one thing - hiring a Steve Jobs at age 22 to work on your business is entirely another.

Rubbish article. The main reason Jobs and Gates wouldn't get an interview at Microsoft or Google according to the author is because they didn't graduate college.

What the author doesn't mention is why they didn't graduate college, and the reason is because they pursued the development of their own companies that would eventually make them billionaires. What a stupid line of reasoning to draw. If Gates or Jobs did not start Microsoft and Apple and instead concentrated on obtaining relevant degrees, you cannot conclude that they still would have failed in their careers.

I don't really see what point the author of this article is even trying to make.

Yes, Gates would have graduated and gotten a job anywhere. But Jobs quit college after 1 semester and then wandered around for a while. He would not have gotten a job outside of a hippie coffee shop.

Except Jobs did get a job at Atari. The article even mentions this, but hand waves it away as though it didn't count. He also had a job at HP in high school. That's where he met Woz.

Think about that for a moment…if you look at Steve’s background and took it against engineering-centric hiring practices, the CEO of the decade couldn’t get a job as a secretary let alone in management.

Conversely, the type of person described in the article that "no one would hire", would also be the last person in the world looking for an interview with a large tech corp, it's a two way street.

> A running joke in the tech industry is that most of the CEOs wouldn’t know how to use most of the products they sell.

I would say that's the difference between a CEO who was a founder and a CEO that was brought on late in the game.

The founder-ceo's, like Gates and Jobs, are the ones that basically earned their spots by knowing their products well and being completely consumed by their company.

The is a story that Mitch Kipor (Lotus founder) submitted resume's the of some the first employees/founders (including his own perhaps?) with some names changed to disguise them - and they didn't make it through HR.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com