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In the 1980 I began work for a computer start up in Orange County California as a production line worker, for some months. When the shipping guy, who was unreliable, didn’t show up for work for several days, he was terminated, or at least that was the word that made the rounds. I asked my boss if I could give the job a try; he said that he would talk to the supervisor of that department. She was pretty desperate and agreed, probably against her better judgment. In that job I had the opportunity to view up close the people and the mentality that fueled the computer industry, in its beginning stages. It took some time for my boss to trust me, and to relax about whether I was reliable and trustworthy. I was reliable, in the way of the people pleaser. After I established myself, I won the President’s Award two times in a row, and a promotion to shipping supervisor. This gained me entree to management: I dined and drank in the homes of the executives of the company, attended the 5 o’clock drink time in the Marketing Department, and the informal parties that the Big Boss held every couple of weeks at local bars, and the parties, in house, to celebrate the unprecedented growth of the company. As a valued member of the team, I viewed, up close, the engineers who ran the company in professional and nonprofessional contexts. The executives and partners of the company were all men, this was their second try at a startup, as the first had failed, so they were particularly cautious. There were layoffs at the company almost every six months due to business fluctuations. There were also changes in Materials Management executive staff almost every year. This was a particularly volatile environment for all lower level employees, layoffs could happen any time.

But let me discuss the politics, the interpersonal skills, and the rampant paternalism of the managers. Their politics were purely reactionary, wedded to a faith in the Free Market, a reflection of the triumph of Reaganism and its addiction to a basterdized Social Darwinist ethic. They were engineers who solved engineering problems brilliantly, but whose interpersonal skills were at the zero mark. They were, as individuals and in toto, utterly irascible, unyielding, in their rightness on any issue, which were not usually engineering problems, but problems of human interaction, that cannot be solved by intransigence. The Managers policy on wages was to  pay the lowest possible wage, this was a non-union environment, and that plus the fear of losing our jobs kept us, as employees, in line and uncomplaining. The notion of the Entrepreneur was just reaching it high point, as a matter of faith in the Free Market Ideology, so these men fancied themselves as part of a new class of Market Mandarins: some of them manifested an insufferable smugness, as the occasion of the celebration of successes led to many short but self-congratulatory speeches.

There was one vexing problem that plagued the company for some time, until the V.P. of Materials Management was taken out of the company in handcuffs. There was rampant drug use throughout the company. Cocaine use was rampant throughout the company, in fact one of the custodial staff was selling on the premises: one needed only to let it be known what was needed, tender the cash, and your drugs were provided.Secrataries would leave lines of coke, in the ladies room, in the Marketing Department, for each other.

The death of Steve Jobs brought all these memories back, as the media are filled with encomiums for him. A friend of a friend worked for Mr. Jobs and had a different opinion of him, which doesn’t quite meld with all the praise. This brought back my memories of working for entrepreneurs, whose self-concepts were probably very similar to that of Mr. Jobs. It’s probably best to entertain, enjoy the long view, as the close-up is problematic, even deeply troubling.

Political Observer