Employee No. 8
[Via Daring Fireball]

Chris Espinosa, on the 34th anniversary of his official start day at Apple:

Steve Jobs had been paying people out of the company checkbook, and not all that regularly. So Scotty lined folks up to make an official payroll. He picked employee number 7 for himself because he wanted it, and allocated the other 10 or so people in a nominally fair order. (I’m going to skip the legendary story of whether Steve Jobs is number 0 or 2 because I wasn’t there and have no direct knowledge.)

The reason I got number 8 was that Scotty did this in the middle of a weekday, and I didn’t get out of high school until 2:40. By the time Randy Wigginton and I got there the first five numbers were taken, so we got 6 and 8 respectively.

[More]

Espinosa has been at Apple since the beginning. But what is interesting in his story is that Steve Jobs, even though he left Apple for NeXT for 12 years, actually has a longer term of service at Apple than Chris.

Well, sure, for a while there when Woz and Jobs and Bill and Dan and Randy had all left I was clearly the senior employee. But when Apple bought NeXT in 1997, two interesting things happened. When Apple acquires another company, HR sets the employees’ date of hire at Apple to their date of hire in the acquired company. So Steve’s start date at Apple would have been the date he founded NeXT, which was immediately after he resigned from Apple in 1985. But since that was within 6 months of when he left Apple, span of service credits him for his first eight years, and he ends up having a start date more or less coincident with the day of incorporation, January 17, 1977.

He was gone for over a decade but technicalities mean he has the longest term of service at Apple.

Apple. No matter how long you’ve been away, if you come back its like you never left.