Steve Jobs has passed away, but Apple employees will remember him fondly. When Jobs left Apple in August, he had one of the highest approval ratings for a chief executive by his employees, as documented by Glassdoor.com.
Roughly 97 percent of Apple employees approved of Jobs at the time of resignation, according to nearly 1,000 Apple employee reviews on the company rating site. Apple itself has a 3.7 employee satisfaction rating on a five-point scale, Glassdoor.com reports.
But did Apple employees really love working for Steve Jobs, the man, or did they endure his famous impatience with anything less than perfection because Steve Jobs, the visionary delivered such stellar products and bottom-line success?
Jobs has long been regarded as an inspirational figure, but he has also built a reputation over the course of his 35-year career in Silicon Valley as an extremely demanding leader, if not an outright tyrannical one at times.
It may be that Jobs has changed his management style over the years even as his portrayal in the popular culture remained stuck depicting him an obsessive control freak, as was the case in a recent episode of Comedy Central's South Park that pilloried Jobs and the controversy over Apple's location tracking technology.
Yet it also seems likely that in recent years, far fewer Apple employees actually interacted with Jobs than in the past. His health issues kept him from Apple's campus for long stretches of time, while the growth of Apple's retail operations around the world meant the company was employing Apple Store staff that worked far from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
Perhaps it became easier for employees to give their stamp of approval to a CEO they rarely saw even as their company was churning out success after success, than it had been for those early Apple employees who experienced Jobs' legendary tirades up close.
It certainly would have been interesting to see what Jobs' employee approval rating was back in the early 1980s, when he reportedly alienated several key members of Apple's product development team and clashed with co-founder Steve Wozniak.
Still, for all of Jobs' reputation as a difficult man to work for, he has been equally adept at attracting employees who share his vision and fierce sense of loyalty to Apple and is mission. They don't call them "fanboys" for nothing, and per Glassdoor.com's ratings, it's pretty clear that a whole bunch of them have worked for Steve Jobs over the years.
Editor's Note: This piece originally ran when Steve Jobs resigned from Apple in August.