> An early showdown came over employee badge numbers. Scott assigned #1 to Wozniak and #2 to Jobs. Not surprisingly, Jobs demanded to be #1. “I wouldn’t let him have it, because that would stoke his ego even more,” said Scott. Jobs threw a tantrum, even cried. Finally, he proposed a solution. He would have badge #0. Scott relented, at least for the purpose of the badge, but the Bank of America required a positive integer for its payroll system and Jobs’s remained #2.
Isaacson, Walter (2011-10-24). Steve Jobs (p. 83). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.
I actually never finished the book because Jobs, as a character, was just too inscrutable. And I don't mean in the interesting, complicated ways that humans generally are. The abrupt shift from brilliant leader and visionary to petulant asshole child is understandable, even at the start of Apple -- he was just 21, after all. But the emotional/personality swings pretty much continue through his entire life, and it was just too bewildering for me to fully empathize with Jobs. Maybe if other CEOs were as highly scrutinized as Jobs we'd see the same kind of inexplicable complexity? As it stands, I enjoyed iWoz (albeit it was written as an autobiography) much more than the Jobs' biography.
That's the fault of the biography, which refuses to ever analyze him and seems to not even notice when he's changed. Not the only thing it didn't notice - check out how often people are blatantly misquoted, like where Bill Gates supposedly claims a disk drive has "too low latency".
Seems like the actual event right before coming back to Apple, where he mysteriously becomes an amazing CEO, is when he met his wife.
Or indeed where Bill Gates claims that the purchase of NeXT technologies were just "warmed up UNIX" and was "never really used" by Apple. Isaacson failed to fact-check anything Gates said, and a lot of it was demonstrably, factually, objectively false.
Yeah, I wonder how much of the aloofness of the book had to do with the writer, Steve Jobs's personality, the unique and prominent place Steve Jobs has in tech history, and the unusual circumstances and deadline of the book (i.e. in his final days, and the rush to publish within a short time of his passing).
One passage that stuck out to me in which Isaacson clearly pressed present-day Jobs on his personal viewpoint was bringing up the episode in which Jobs, according to Woz and Bushnell, cheated Woz out of his bonus for building the Breakout game:
> Astonishingly, they were able to get the job done in four days, and Wozniak used only forty-five chips. Recollections differ, but by most accounts Jobs simply gave Wozniak half of the base fee and not the bonus Bushnell paid for saving five chips. It would be another ten years before Wozniak discovered (by being shown the tale in a book on the history of Atari titled Zap) that Jobs had been paid this bonus.
> “I think that Steve needed the money, and he just didn’t tell me the truth,” Wozniak later said. When he talks about it now, there are long pauses, and he admits that it causes him pain. “I wish he had just been honest. If he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends.” To Wozniak, it showed a fundamental difference in their characters. “Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t understand why he would’ve gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another,” he said. “But, you know, people are different.”
> When Jobs learned this story was published, he called Wozniak to deny it. “He told me that he didn’t remember doing it, and that if he did something like that he would remember it, so he probably didn’t do it,” Wozniak recalled.
> When I asked Jobs directly, he became unusually quiet and hesitant. “I don’t know where that allegation comes from,” he said. “I gave him half the money I ever got. That’s how I’ve always been with Woz. I mean, Woz stopped working in 1978. He never did one ounce of work after 1978. And yet he got exactly the same shares of Apple stock that I did.” Is it possible that memories are muddled and that Jobs did not, in fact, shortchange Wozniak? “There’s a chance that my memory is all wrong and messed up,” Wozniak told me, but after a pause he reconsidered. “But no. I remember the details of this one, the $ 350 check.” He confirmed his memory with Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn. “I remember talking about the bonus money to Woz, and he was upset,” Bushnell said. “I said yes, there was a bonus for each chip they saved, and he just shook his head and then clucked his tongue.”
This passage, early in the biography, cast a negative pall over Jobs's personality in my mind. He's in his final years, and not only is he facing death, but he's experienced success so far beyond the first Apple days and his name will likely be much more well-known and remembered than Woz's. Assuming that Jobs isn't actually right, what purpose does he have to perpetuate this mistruth? Why couldn't he just own up to it, to say something like, "Yes, back in those days I did things I regret, and I regret even more that I did it to my future business partner, Woz, one of the [insert superlative] men I've had the pleasure to work with"? But no, he had to keep denying it until his near-death, even slagging on Woz as if Woz was some lazy bullshitter who sat on Jobs' coattails.
The episode as recounted by Isaacson at least ends with something that reflects well on Woz (as if Woz's honest reputation needed more bolstering). In fact, I think Woz, in his characteristically honest and straightforward way, has the best description of Jobs' legacy:
> Whatever the truth, Wozniak later insisted that it was not worth rehashing. Jobs is a complex person, he said, and being manipulative is just the darker facet of the traits that make him successful. Wozniak would never have been that way, but as he points out, he also could never have built Apple. “I would rather let it pass,” he said when I pressed the point. “It’s not something I want to judge Steve by.”
Yeah, I could have skipped the book and rewatched 'Pirates Of Silicone Valley' and imagined Steve pitching a fit and crying more often. Both were quite kind to him in their depiction of his eccentricities, IMO.
As a side note, reading through all of Folklore.org is a great way to kill a few hours next time you have a free evening. I'm pretty sure I've read through all of it 2-3 times at this point, but there's part of me that wants to read through all of it again. It's basically just a collection of Apple anecdotes, mostly about the development of the first Macintosh. I'm sure it was hard at times, but it does sound like a fascinating project to have participated in.
In the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, there is a scene where WoZ doesn't really care about the employee number but Steve does. That seems most likely to me having read iWoz too.
In a corporation, just about everyone is considered an employee of the company (in the legal sense), including major shareholders who do work at the company, as Jobs and Woz did. It's part of the protections provided by incorporation.
Yup, thats why you can take with a grain of salt when someone says something like "We'd like to pay you more, but startup just isn't profitable enough", that doesn't mean the owner isn't taking a nice salary away from the place.
'Member of the Technical Staff' was traditionally the only job title at Bell Labs; it didn't matter if you were a technician or director, you had the same job title.
