I said, "No, I'm never going to leave Hewlett-Packard. It's my job for life. It's the best company because it's so good to engineers." It really treated us like we were a community and family, and everyone cared about everyone else. Engineers—bottom of the org chart people—could come up with the ideas that would be the next hot products for the company. Everything was open to thought, discussion and innovation. So I would never leave Hewlett-Packard. I was going to be an engineer for life there.
- Steve Wozniak, interviewed by Jessica Livingston in "Founders at Work"
HP is so far from the founders' ethos that hearing people talk about the old days is like looking at pictures of Beirut before the civil war. I have friends who still work for HP, and it's an amazingly toxic environment with absolutely no concern for good engineering or quality products. I honestly think Fiorina and Hurd would have been delighted if they had the ability to fire every engineer in HP and outsource all product development to China.
The really interesting engineering that happened at HP was all spun off as Agilent in 1999. What's left is just your garden variety technology company that does a lot but doesn't seem to do any of it very well.
- Steve Wozniak, interviewed by Jessica Livingston in "Founders at Work"
http://www.foundersatwork.com/steve-wozniak.html
How sad that it's come to this.