Biography | Pat Gelsinger — The Technician Job He Took at Eighteen

People treat Gelsinger's Intel years as a long climb that began in a design lab.

The first badge was for a quality-control technician.

In October 1979, at eighteen, he left the Lehigh Valley for Santa Clara and joined Intel as a technician II, one step above the bottom of the ladder.

It was his first airplane trip. A recruiter had interviewed top Lincoln Tech graduates during a technician shortage and flown him west.

The campus a visitor sees now is the later headquarters at 2200 Mission College Boulevard, anchored by the Robert Noyce Building.

Intel had already been in Santa Clara for years by 1979. The exact bench he first stood at is gone inside a campus that has been rebuilt around it.

He wanted off the tester side of the table. Intel's tuition program paid for the rest of the education while he kept the job.

A bachelor's in electrical engineering from Santa Clara University followed in 1983. A master's in electrical engineering and computer science from Stanford followed in 1985.

The 386 team put him on as design engineer number four. The 486 made him the architect.

Thirty years after this hire he would leave for EMC, run VMware, and come back as chief executive.

The return story only works if you start with the 1979 technician post, not with the title he later held in the same buildings.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Cody Glenn / Web Summit, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.