Early Apple Employees Said They Would Never Work With Steve Jobs Again
In fact, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently revealed that many early Apple employees said they would never work with Jobs again given the chance, according to a recent interview.
Wozniak said the following when speaking with Allison Bauter of the Milwaukee Business Journal earlier this week:
Steve Jobs had a lot of these questionable things, like some of my very best friends in Apple, the most creative people in Apple who worked on the Macintosh, almost all of them said they would never, ever work for Steve Jobs again. It was that bad. I'm shocked.
Wozniak continued to say that in the earlier days of Apple, Jobs was younger and wasn't as mature, so he would push people to get products out before they were ready to capture mass markets. Here's what he said in the interview:
I think he learned a lot from that. He respected people though, who were very, very brilliant.
Not only did Jobs respect very talented engineers, but he also highly regarded those who were brave enough to stand up to him, according to Wozniak.
He would directly confront people and almost call them idiots. But you know what? When they confronted him back and told him why they were right in understandable forms, he was just testing and learning...and he would respect those people and give them high privileges in the company... That was one thing he did respect - someone who believed enough in their own ideas to speak for him, not just shut up and be shy around him.
Jobs liked to test people. In his biography of Jobs, Walter Isaacson wrote that the then-Apple CEO would ask job candidates strange and inappropriate questions during interviews. One candidate got so flustered that he left mid-interview.
Check out the full interview with Wozniak below.