From these beginnings... Steve Jobs' First Job
I found Jobs' job application to Atari as an 18 year old. He uses all lower case, self-describes as an English Lit major with no phone number, but skilled in digital design, computers and calculators. He hung out in the lobby of what was a one-year-old startup at the time, until Pong creator Al Alcorn hired him as a technician.
The misspelling of Hewlett-Packard, where he interned at age 12, and the reference to design engineering sounded like he was channeling the Woz's skills on his application. So I asked Woz about this since Jobs didn’t do any digital circuit design as far as I knew.
Woz replied (with nuance preserved for posterity): “You are correct. Steve Jobs was never near a design engineer. He was technician level from high school electronics on. He was an intern at HP but never spoke of design there.
I drove Jobs to Reed. The reason he went in other directions than engineering, at Apple, was because from the start he knew he could never be a real design engineer. He saw what I could do.
There is a mix in how he describes himself but he could have moved towards becoming an engineer as some of us do. There is a difference between reading an app sheet and assembling something or adjusting settings, and actually designing such things from the ground up.”
Some context from Wikipedia: "In September 1972, Jobs enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. After just one semester, Jobs dropped out of Reed College without telling his parents... Jobs said: "If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts." In 1973, Steve Wozniak designed his own version of the classic video game Pong and gave the board to Jobs. According to Wozniak, Atari only hired Jobs because he took the board down to the company, and they thought that he had built it himself."
It reminds me of a discussion I had many years ago with Bill Gates, who marveled at Jobs' successes: “Most people lose that fire in the belly as they age. Except Steve Jobs. He still had it, and he just kept going. He was not a programmer, but he had hit after hit.”
Jobs named his first son Reed.