This week for my website design class we have been asked to write an essay about a movie we watched, Pirates of Silicon Valley. The question and my essay are below.

Money aside, which of these individuals would you prefer to work with or for? Why?

Some of the greatest technology ever created, the computer. The invention of the personal computer is particularly interesting and is outlined in the movie, Pirates of Silicon Valley. The film switches back and forth between the lives of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as they work to create the world’s first personal computers, and how they are connected in following the same dream. While the story unfolds we see how both of these men treat their employees and how they act as employers.

In the movie Bill Gates makes me laugh. He is so nerdy and socially awkward. I like him because of this, he seems so awkward that I don’t feel threatened by him or anything, he just seems adorable. The thing is he is so driven and working so hard to get what he wants that he does some things I don’t like. He yells and steals. I personally work best with encouragement, not yelling, so working for Bill Gates wouldn’t work well for me. He also steals information from Steve Jobs, and essentially steals from the guy who he buys the monitor from. While I don’t like either of these things I appreciate that while he is working toward his goal he doesn’t leave his friends behind. He isn’t a one man show working for solely his own benefit.

On the other hand there is Steve Jobs. He is very different from Bill Gates, but at the same time, very similar. They are the same in that they both yell and steal. Steve Jobs took computer programming from Xerox, while the guys in charge of Xerox in New York allowed this it was still basically stealing the information. He also yells, a lot. He was a slave driver when it came to creating new Apple computers. His employees would be working 70 hour weeks and he would go around yelling at them in the middle of the night not being satisfied with their work. This is definitely not a work environment I could deal with. Yelling at me to work is one thing, but yelling at me to work in the middle of the night while I’m working and doing as much as I can is so not going to work. Besides these things which make Steve Jobs similar to Bill Gates there are also things that make them different. While Steve Jobs was working his way to the top he was only worried about himself. He left behind his best friend Steve Wozniak, his girlfriend and his daughter Lisa. This is not behavior I respect in a human being, much less an employer. On top of that he is rude and holds grudges. His grudge against IBM led him not to hire someone, just because he had previously worked there. This guy was qualified and hadn’t done anything wrong but Steve Jobs was disrespectful, I could never deal with this rudeness.

Honestly I wouldn’t want to work for either of these men. I know that I could never put up with working for Steve Jobs as he is portrayed in the movie, and so by process of elimination I would have to choose Bill Gates. For me Bill Gates is just the lesser of two “evils”.