[eesmith]

Hewlett and Packard were relatively low on the asshole scale, at least for their employees. [1]

Early support for company health insurance, flextime, work-from-home, free coffee breaks, decentralized decision making, etc.

See the HP Memory Project at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org for some of the stories. ("Jim Catlin's Packard Story" and Packard's 11 rules, "Bill Hewlett and the HP Medical Plan" for their anonymous payment for medical bills for an employee's premature baby, etc.)

The padlock story at https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/john_minck/inside_h... is also pretty well-known, and used as an example of promoting institutional trust.

Packard's support for apartheid profits keeps him definitely on the scale.

[1] Probably better if you were a white male not as subject to the "mixture of machismo and misogyny" of early HP - https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/barbara_waugh/barba... .