Company Employee Increase during the first ten Years

The Bar Chart below shows the number of employees working at HP from 1939 to 1949. Harvey Zieber was the first full-time employee hired by Bill and Dave in 1940. Three more were hired in 1941 and two more the following year, giving a total of 8 at the end of 1942. The war time fast growth is clearly shown with a rise to 45 people in 1943, 137 and 144 respectively in 1944 and 1945. Many of these employees were women who had joined the company as war-production workers. Most of them left the company after the war was over. Dave Packard comments on this critical period in his book "The HP Way":

We managed to retain our key people, however, and the slowdown gave us the opportunity to seek out and attract some good technical people to the company. We were especially interested in some of the engineers who had worked during the war with Fred Terman at Harvard's Radio Research Laboratory and at other war-related research labs. As it turned out, we were able to hire Ralph Lee, Bruce Wholey, Art Fong, Ray Demere, and Howard Zeidler. And some time later, George Kan and Horace Overacker. These engineers were instrumental in developing some much-needed new products during the critical postwar period... and in the longer run, filling essential positions within the company.