So you can have the experiences as described in the article across all areas of the company with everyone staying in line and still doing their 'best work'?
Seems unlikely, doesn't it? I suspect it's not true. This guy clearly wasn't producing his 'best work'. The rest of the team, from his description, doesn't seem very competent.
Does your question presuppose that everyone is somehow magically doing their 'best work'? If so, do you have any evidence of that? Lots of companies get by with shitty cultures and low-productivity employees.
It’s a long, rambling post with some fairly vague and difficult to falsify accusations. I have no connections to Apple (other than as a consumer), but I could not wade through the article enough to determine if I thought there was an actual smoking gun.
I suspect the story would be much more powerful if it were 1/5 as long and stuck to the material facts.
Yeah, I wanted to read it more carefully but it seemed to be a long litany of real or perceived psychological abuse. Maybe I too missed a smoking gun.
What I read described an Apple that is completely alien to me. I have never seen or even heard of anything even remotely like this team or the behavior described.
I have a friend who recently left Microsoft after a decade and a half. He'd completely drunk the Kool Aid but ended his experience at the company facing more than a year of abuse from a new manager and senior engineer. Very similar to this long post about Apple, unfortunately. He and a couple of other people on his team tried to move to different teams, but despite a long history of excellent work, everyone was treated by the rest of the company like they were toxic waste.
Nobody thinks that their company is like this until they're on the other side of it. In my friend's case, it was only in retrospect that he saw patterns of toxic behavior from management.
I haven't seen this sort of outright abuse, but I've definitely experienced firsthand at multiple companies a situation where a newcomer needs a ton of tribal knowledge in order to do their job, but the newcomer's team members get miffed every time they're asked a question. So then the newcomer ends up having to do way too much work on his/her own the hard way, it makes everything way harder and less effective, and before too long they're branded a "low performer" and it all goes downhill from there.
It happened to me at Microsoft, and later it ALMOST happened to me at Apple. Fortunately, at Apple I knew what was going on that time and I just badgered my irate teammate and bullied him into giving me all the info I needed. (Or went around him when I could, since I was lucky that the rest of the team was a lot easier to work with in that respect) He was a nice guy, but he'd get visibly annoyed every time I asked him a question. Either the answer was patently obvious, or the question was unanswerably difficult.. Later on, that teammate left and a new one came onboard with a ludicrous number of really dumb questions, but I just swallowed my bad attitude and did my best to patiently and nicely answer them.. and sure enough, after a couple of months he was fully up to speed.
Also, even more fortunately, when things were going badly at Microsoft I had a decent savings account built up and a lot of self confidence/stubbornness, enough to say from a place of complete conviction "I'M not the problem; this whole org is a steaming pile of shit!" no matter who told me otherwise. I feel really bad for the author of TFA, because I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to have the type of screwed-up, mercenary attitude it would take to get through his experiences unscathed.
I totally agree. I'm working on a system now that is the most complex I've ever worked on - managed K8s, OperStack, bare metal - all the provisioning, build and test infrastructure (dealing with nested virtualization, DinD, integrating build tools into tools that do things as low level as PXE boot servers). There's a huge amount of tribal knowledge required and I struggled with this.
Thankfully my manager was open to questions, and patient, it was me "not wanting to be a bother". But I had a meeting with my manager's manager and he talked about how stupid he felt, and understanding that no-one would feel like I was an "anchor" asking the "silly" questions of "Why do we / don't we ..." and persisting through that because everyone had been there.
> "You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental problems."
"perceived psychological abuse"?!? What the heck, the sociopathic person who said that stupid ass thing should have been fired on the spot, apparently he/she still is a manager at Apple.
> long litany of real or perceived psychological abuse. Maybe I too missed a smoking gun.
Its staring you in the face. How can anyone be allowed to pull off half of that shit? I mean if you are _knowingly_ causing someone to take beta blockers, you've got to have a long hard look at yourself.
I have made mistakes, fortunately early in my career. I made a colleague cry, I thought it was a "bit of fun" but I was being a horrid shit. I don't shout at work anymore. Its a sign that I've lost the argument, failed to see reason, or more often just plain wrong.
To allow others to cause people to cry or shout is frankly unforgivable. Especially if they are senior and its aimed at a young'un. Yes, they might be annoying, or a dipshit. but its up to you to guide them or move them on. Not play with like a cat with a half dead bird.
in short: enigneers don't let other people be abusive dicks.
Even if the rest was vague enough (and it only would be if this was a very common set of experiences), there was a screenshot of a 1-on-1 meeting time and room, so the anonymity ship has sailed.
The main villain - the sr. director with bad breath - predicted this and got his subordinate - a manager - schedule the meeting. Later he stopped by and replaced that manager. In other words, he can claim he has never been to that meeting.
If this story realistically describes what happened, I would expect Apple HR can identify who wrote it (Muslim with a student OPT visa, specific request to do no previous work experience, reported issues with the export license, and a case like this)
If there were tens of similar cases, we would have heard of more.
Someone has to speak out first and it has to get a ball rolling. Stuff like this can be hidden for decades before coming to light, if ever, see e.g. #metoo with prominent examples like Epstein and Spacey.
Apple's culture of silence works well enough that employees are self-censoring. You do hear a few stories now and then, but often constrained to IS&T or from non-engineering orgs:
What kind of smoking gun are you looking for? Given that Steve Jobs was partly famous for his capriciousness in how he treated people I imagine his example set a baseline of acceptable toxic behavior in the company so it’s not unreasonable for me to imagine that a team like this could emerge given the apparent lack of oversight by HR and upper management and all the secrecy and isolation between teams that Apple is famous for.
I think this has a lot to do with it. I worked at Apple for four years, and the most successful (promoted) managers all tried to emulate the managerial attributes they believed Steve embodied: Hard nosed, demanding, callous, ridiculing failure, and they all thought they had his product sense too. They attempted to be Steve-clones all the way up the chain to Craig (who was actually a really decent guy, and didn't, at least to me, act like a Steve-clone himself). They were consistently rewarded for this behavior, so that kind of behavior became known as the way to go places at Apple. I remember having [careful] conversations with my manager where I essentially asked, "Do I have to be a raging asshole to get rewarded here? Because that's all I see--raging assholes get the promotions and equity refreshes."
There were other managers who were not toxic, and knew how to develop a team and reward/motivate them, but most of them stagnated and never went anywhere promotion-wise.
I also found the place very clique-y. There was definitely a small in-group, with the rest in the out-group, and it seemed to have nothing to do with tenure, seniority, or level. They would have their own private off-sites to do who knows what. I think they called it Top-100 or something while I was there. Everything was siloed and secret so you could never be sure.
EDIT: Reading the article, I see the cliques were specifically mentioned. I have no doubt the author is for real.
Here's the thing you need to know about experienced abusers (note: often narcissists): They know how to "play the game", and what to do.
They know that when it comes to the illegal stuff - you do it off-the-record. Then it just become "he said, she said", which is very difficult to prove.
They are experts at gaslighting, which ties in with the point above. Not only can the invalidate your claims about (difficult to prove) verbal abuse, but they can actually turn it against you, by claiming that you're obviously mentally unstable / hearing things due to workload / not fit for the job / etc.
Especially for narcissists, they tend to be very good at forming networks and friendships which benefit them - and in turn can produce cliques like this.
They know what buttons to push in the organization, to cover their own ass, and make the other party look incompetent. This includes creating extensive paper trails, frequent meetings to establish some opinion on a person, and what not.
Prolific abusers are hard to catch because they are very good at it, and because they create (or join) environments which are chaotic, and tie in multiple people on the abuse (whether want it or not - pretty much in the same way that bullies in school rarely do the bullying themselves, but form groups to do it).
In this case, it's even worse - because there's such an extreme imbalance of power. On one side you have a fresh hire, without any permanent VISA, completely dependent on the job. On the other side, you have established bullies in clique, with decades of employment in the company.
And not only that - it all happened within a company that enforces a strict culture of non-disclosure. It's hard to go public with information which may include explicitly confidential work/data.
It's the only way to tell the story. Of course it's an uncomfortable read, how could it be different? IMHO this should be indeed picked up by a journalist though. It's not an engineer's job to write catching stories.
Unlike others, I actually find this story fairly believable.
When I first joined Apple, straight out of college - a good program, top three in the country - I was abused similarly. I joined a team that was on a project behind schedule.
Our manager was a brusque, no-nonsense sort of dude. But he clearly had anger problems. On the team were 2 senior engineers, me, and a junior engineer that had just completed his internship and was on a work Visa.
As the project got closer to the deadline, and the scope increased, the manager got agitated. In our team meetings, he would start yelling at us. People down the hallways would stare at us with those "looks." In our 1:1s he told us we might not have a job if our product doesn't ship on time (we were competing with another internal team to beat them to the punch.)
The two senior engineers decided they'd had enough and quit the team. The manager told us to work overtime (no overtime pay, but we had to for fear of our job). He promised us that if we did it that we would get a month of vacation on him, and that he could secure it for us.
The product released. After countless nights of overtime we did it. Our manager left, our guarantee of a month of vacation evaporated, and for the next three months, us two junior engineers were left on 24/7 primary/secondary on-call for a critical service. It was a nightmare. Calls at 3 AM, 6 AM, on weekends.
Our manager got a promotion and is fairly high up at Apple now.
Horrible experience. I left for a new company that pays me nearly double.
Sadly, you can fill in the blank with any FAANG company with this story. I’ve heard it a thousand times. Toxic management. Sorry you went through that, sorry that was your first taste of engineering out of college. Glad you stuck with it.
It’s a tough spot to be. Do you roll over and do the job your being yelled at to do even though you know any concessions are BS? Or like the senior folks, do you walk? It’s a really hard choice.
Does anybody really want to be “the person who criticizes his or her managers,” in an official on-the-books capacity, in a context where your job is already being threatened?
> Does Apple not have manager feedback mechanisms?
My manager left me out of the first review cycle, but at the end of the second review cycle I did leave a review of the manager. By this time he had left our team though. I don't think it did anything as he continued to rise through the ranks.
Not to speak for the OP, but cross-team HR situations at Apple don't exactly play well. I don't think jumping the chain of command so to speak to contact a manager's manager ever actually works.
I don't think so. I've worked at other FAANG companies which had these sorts of posts written about them, and I've witnessed plenty of situations that I would call "abusive".
But what I read in this article was beyond the pale. I never felt like anybody adjacent to any of my roles might have cause to fear for their physical safety. Reviews were used as political tools and occasional sources of psychological abuse, sure, but people still got marched out quickly if they stopped acting like empathetic human beings towards their peers.
It's hard to say, because Apple is a huge corporation. It would be wrong for the takeaway to be "all of Apple is like this." But it should call into question "how much of Apple is like this?" and "how many more stories are there like this?" because I guarantee you that this author is not the only one who has experienced this at Apple, and there may be elements of its secrecy-obsessed, top-down culture that are common factors which contribute to it.
Because of a general understanding of how the world works, how businesses are, how western businesses are, people and so on.
Same way if a told you some politician was sexually assaulting his pages, you woulnd't assume this is representative of congressmen and pages in general...
I don't have recorded minutes of their interactions or other such hard proof.
This is fairly obviously true, FAANG's are large companies so lots of strange things happen even if they on average are great. I worked at Google for 10 years, and had 10 great years there with very little negative to say. That was true for almost anyone I knew. But there was a mailing list "yes at Google" for these kind of stories so other can see that it does happen even if most of us thought it was great. Most of the targets in the unfortunate stories were woman or minorities.
I've never read anything even half as terrible as this story on Yes At Google. I'm not saying shitty things don't happen, but I'd like to believe that such shittiness would not fly at the G.
I had friends experience what I think was way worse at Google. Don't really feel comfortable sharing, but lets say it more or less always involved power games and/or sexual harassment. Worst one was probably a combination. Google was/is great, but sadly not for everyone.
I mean Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal worked at Google when they did their career ending stuff.
Rubin's career-ending stuff was being accused by a woman he had been in a relationship with and was in a custody battle with of something that could never be proven and which he strongly denied. It was career ending only due to the western culture that women are always believed, even sans evidence and when there are obvious reasons to not believe it (e.g. years having passed with the supposed victim having made no complaints, right up until there was some sort of power struggle).
> Typically to visa workers who are easily exploitable due to their precarious status in the country.
This is the key point about this experience to me. The fact was that without the visa situation, the author would have had many more choices. Unfortunately, it seems like the lack of viable alternatives was taken advantage of to the hilt (and presumably the author wasn't the first or last employee so affected).
Some companies have a more open and transparent review process. I'm not sure if it would help with a clique, but at least people have to put information in writing which when push comes to shove can be verified. And, reports can review their managers. If your management chain doesn't care then yes, senior people walk.
You can put just about any company in the "Apple" role here. A bad manager anywhere can cause a workgroup to turn toxic. I've seen it happen literally everywhere I've ever worked, though luckily only 1st hand at one location. (Actually there was one exception: working at a Barnes & Noble during college. I'd heard horror stories about other locations while I was there, but the store I worked at was run by an extremely good manager who cared for her employees and fostered that attitude in her assistant managers as well. It was also the most profitable store in the region, probably not a coincidence)
Any large corporation that gets remotely near the headcount as Apple will have enough variance across team cultures that there will inevitably be cesspools of toxicity, true. But there's still the question if certain orgs foster a higher or lower standard across the org, and what factors contribute to it.
That’s true, I’ve seen toxic situations happening in other teams like those described here at several employers that were otherwise good places to work.
Sometimes it’s down to a particular manager, but sometimes it can just be the consequences of a bad decision taken further up the food chain. This can leave a team in a no-win situation where even a good team lead can end up in a mess with no good options. I was at one employer where this happened and the team lead in question fell on his sword and quit rather than beat his team to death. I ended up taking on some of his responsibilities and team members and got some additional resources to deal with the re-org, so it worked out well for the team members and the company. It also gave me my first taste of management. It cost the guy his job though, which was grossly unfair. Not many mangers would have the guts and integrity to do something like that, and even if they did there’s no guarantee it would actually benefit the team. They could just be replaced by a tyrant.
The only answer is to be open and honest about what you think and principled in your own actions. Call out bad behaviour where you see it and say when you see mistakes being made. If you aren’t prepared to do so, why should anyone else? Too many people silently tie the line and keep quiet and then wonder why these things spiral out of control and end in disaster. It’s because nobody said anything or did anything about it. We have to be prepared to take responsibility for calling out what’s happening around us and what we do about it as employees. It’s not somebody else’s problem, it’s our problem. Don’t be afraid of losing your job, it may well happen but jobs come and go. Having principles carries a cost, but one I think is worth paying.
I disagree. There are many large, profitable companies (>50k people) who don't need public or media attention to fire the whole managerial line-org once abuse is discovered and then hold several workshops for all senior employees and managers detailing out what exactly is acceptable in the workplace and what is not.
In-fact you don't get your bonus if you don't attend these workshops and score in these tests. HR regularly queries all low-level employees about their work/life balance and other other work-place issues and regularly sends feedback to senior management. Actually senior management even regularly has meetings with entry-level employees with team leads and management sent away from the room to obtain proper assessment.
But then this is a German company and not a US one. I will never work for a US MNC in my life after the bad experience I had early in my career.
It’s not a hard decision. You unquestionably walk away from a situation like this. If your interactions with the team are going this poorly, walk immediately. There’s nothing to be gained from trying to hang on in a situation like this. This person should have walked much earlier.
It’s agonizing how much broken US immigration policy plays a large role in forcing talented people who have decided to join our country to feel like this isn’t an option for them. We owe them much better.
Not sure why you refer to the US immigration policy, this is how it works essentially everywhere. In the UK, for example, you get around 60 days to find a new job or you have to leave the country. https://iasservices.org.uk/tier-2-visa-termination-employmen...
I am not saying that the immigration policy is not broken or broken, I am simply stating the fact that other countries literally do the same.
If you're on a H1 (or some of its cousins here) and you lose your job, you have no option to even try to find another. Your legal status in the US is coupled to that job, not just any job.
Are you sure that is correct?
According to results from googling you get 60 days to find a new job if you got laid off from H1B job.
https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/05/steps-after-an-h1b-layoff....
Ps: to someone who downvoted, what don't you agree with?
You are right that I overstated this. You do have a window to try to find a new job. However, the new employer will need to be willing to sponsor a new H1B visa, and will need to get their part done within a fairly narrow timeframe.
I agree that this is not an impossible scenario. But I also have a strong feeling that it's not a particularly likely one either.
Absolutely, my point was that this system is essentially everywhere, in one way or another, there is no need to say "US", since it's not USA specific system.
Honestly, at Microsoft, I've never seen a situation like this, and I have worked in something like 15 roles now.
That might also be, for better and worse, why Microsoft folks have such long tenure at the company. Its honestly a great place to work compared to these shit shows.
I would suspect that finding out how many employees throughout the hierarchy have been there for a long time may be a good way to find a good company. The company I work for got acquired a couple years ago by a much older and larger company, and it usually feels like anyone you talk to has been there for 15, 20, even 30 years. I've yet to have a single issue with someone in that part of the parent organization, even though helping my group out isn't something they have been told to do.
My employer is like this - I'm the second newest person on my team and I've been here for 9 years. It's a great place to work and quite difficult to be hired here.
To quote the old Tom and Jerry cartoon, "Don't you believe it." I could tell you comparable hair-raising stories I witnessed there over a couple of decades.
I agree, in 15 years at MSFT I've had mostly good experiences. The worst I've seen could only be described as "mildly annoying".
If any manager behaved like the article described, I don't see how the team would get anything done, plus their MSFT poll score would quickly get them into trouble.
I've seen it happen, multiple times, at Microsoft. Additionally know 2nd hand of dozens of other instances of abuse, career sabotage, and scorched earth management.
Have been fortunate that the instances I was involved in directly, I was prepared, had extensive documentation, and my position (and my colleagues) were more valuable than the perpetrators, so they were swiftly shown the door.
At the end of the day it's the same at every large company. HR protects the business, not the employee. They don't protect the victim, they protect the more valuable resource.
Big difference is that other FAANGs have much less secretive inside culture. That of course doesn’t prevent abuse, and horrible experiences will happen everywhere. But it’s much easier to hide and develop pockets of abuse if everything you work on is top secret.
I've never been able to understand why Apple thinks they need to be so secretive. Most other companies do just fine without pretending that they're working on life-changing secrets that are worthless if they are leaked.
1. Being able to reveal something new and surprising leads to a flurry of good press. Failing that, constant rumors about what they are working on is like free advertising.
2. Keeping something a secret until it is shipping gives competitors less time to react/plan.
3. Preventing your employees from publicly discussing what they are doing may make it harder to know whom to poach, and harder for folks who want to leave to sell themselves.
4. It is useful as a cultural tool: it brings employees together in sharing a secret, creating an in-group/out-group dynamic; it gives product launches a kind of mystery, makes them something special for employees to watch together and celebrate together.
5. It helps Apple keep control of the framing of a product and the narrative around its launch.
So they're making it hard to leave, creating a distinctive in-group and air of mystery, and clamping down on information to maintain strict control of the narrative.
I can't help but notice that some of these are the same reasons why cults are often so secretive.
Sure. I think there are some pretty deep parallels.
The company had been really successful. That makes it easy to trust the leadership and believe they know best.
If you’re changing the world and doing the best work of your life, maybe that’s worth making sacrifices for (overtime or whatever).
On the bright side, I’m not sure there’s any equivalent of the malevolent, sexually abusive stuff we see in cults. Hard to complain about being a well-paid engineer with good benefits, etc.
Have worked at two FAANG companies, and neither would tolerate even a hint of such behavior.
It's an open secret in silicon valley that you work at apple for one of the three reasons:
1. You didn't know better
2. Were a fan/fanboi.
3. That was the best you could do (for whatever reasons).
Every time something negative about Apple gets posted here, I see this typical response - oh, they all do it. Stop with this nonsense.
9 years at Google and I've never heard of anything this bad here. I'm sure there are cases, and while I've been in unpleasant teams myself with crappy arrogant team leads who got away with dubious personal behaviour because of their engineering genius, the kind of obvious outright hostility and abuse would described by people here... well, I am pretty sure it would lead to some serious sanction.
I could be wrong and just lucky tho.
FWIW my wife worked at Apple in a non-engineering role for almost a decade about ten years ago, and I can completely see how this kind of dysfunction could happen in that company. Pressure cooker environment.
Some extra tidbits that didn't make it in because the edit timer ran out:
- Despite the big release and herculean efforts, both of us were paid a fraction of our target bonus. This was the day I decided to move jobs.
- I eventually grew some balls and told Apple to (a) pay me 2.5x during overtime (b) hire SREs for this critical service, or (c) go fuck themselves. They chose (c), which worked alright because our service was pretty stable.
- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
- Only my first manager at Apple was an asshole. My last manager was a kind and genial person.
I got an offer from Apple. The hiring manager told me "You worked at a startup before, you'll have no problem working overtime". I didn't end up taking the offer.
I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!". That appears to mean that you will work in a small team, putting in unsustainable hours, but not receive the financial reward that a successful startup could provide.
I've worked in several startups, and occasional death marches are unavoidable. They don't work month in and month out. But enduring that kind of life for just salary is nuts.
The other notable thing about “just like a startup but in a big company” (often for startups which have been acquired) is the frequent claim that the startup will be left alone by the rest of the company. Every single process and incentive is against that remaining true.
Maybe in some cases you can hope for the acquired startup to be the pet project of the acquirer’s founder/CEO?
> I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke."
Sure... but you may still come in and find "this project has been nixed". Upside is that you may still have a 'job' in the bigger company, but everything you worked on may be thrown away, you may lose whatever political power your project had, etc. Certainly there's an 'immediate safety net' issue of "you may have a paycheck next week", but doesn't address any of the emotional stuff that goes along with "we'll have a scrappy startup mentality!"
I had been in something similar - not quite a 'startup in a large company' situation, but similar. And... we hit a "hey, this project is being shut down, and there's no other budget in the company for this team". So.. the company itself was still going OK - everyone else kept rolling along - but a handful of us were effectively cut adrift for a bit. Some were able to be assigned to other internal teams, some weren't.
At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts.
Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.
> I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!"
Imho it's frequently used to falsely motivate junior/inexperienced into working crazy hours that they might get some financial or other rewards like a startup.
My frank response would be something along the lines of "I'm going to ask you a question, and how you respond will likely determine if I work here, 'Are you self selecting for incompetents or doormats?'" Their response to this question would probably tell you most of what you want to know about working at that company.
Yeah, you can do this when you have several equally good offers in your pocket. Meaning you're good enough to be picky. What would be your response if you don't feel you're better than all others who applied for this position?
There’s nothing wrong with choosing a job that you know are going to expect all-nighters, probably un compensated all-nighters - but make sure you choose it knowingly instead of pretending it’s an office hours job. It’d be a rare job in video game production that didn’t involve crunch time, and if you want to work in those roles you can, so long as you accept/embrace that. If you’re the sort of person for whom 2-3 months a year of crunch time is going to destroy your relationships/family/mental health, you should probably choose a different industry. There are lots of 9-5 ish coding jobs that involve zero or minimal outside-office-hours work. Don’t fool yourself I to pretending your “dream job” is one of those if there are obvious (or even subtle) red flags that it’s not.
Actually, I just realized I can't relate to this concern. I've never had a situation when someone asked me to work extra. In every job I've ever had I was expected to get things done, and no one ever cared when I do it as long as I do it by a deadline, or by a sprint review, or by a demo day, etc. More often than not it was me who were setting those deadlines for myself, just because I'm ambitious, and I like to impress others, and I like being promoted. Besides, I could never work 9-5. I usually accomplish little in terms of actual work during those hours. Occasionally I get into the zone late at night, without any distractions. That's when I feel most productive, and that's when I do most of the work. Another thing is, I either work on something I love, or I work for a very decent salary. In both cases, I feel fine working extra hours.
To be honest, I appreciated the honesty. Lots of companies would not ask such a question because they would be afraid of scaring people off. Blizzard can afford to be very picky about their candidates, and they were surprisingly blunt about the work environment. If I was single, I probably would not have cared - Blizzard was always one of my dream companies to work at.
You should have just said no sir I wont have any problem working overtime and my rate is 2.5x for overtime hrs, you wont have a problem paying for that you're a rich company.
I completely agree, sure if you’re into a feature and on a roll in a startup keep going but if you’ve reached a good point to stop no need to cause yourself stress!
I've never had a startup that hasn't roped me into a production support on-call for a month or more in addition to regular duties. Under 10 engineers, 50 engineers, 500+ engineers: they've all done this.
If something goes catastrophically wrong at 1am, caused by some unforeseen bug in the code, who fixes it? Who diagnoses that an issue flooding the logs is not an issue with your software but something else down the line?
I think it makes sense to have an on-call rota. Some people do it for a week or so. Cycle it through the team.
There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues.
The disconnect seems to be that it isn't mentioned before the offer. If the employee is expecting normal hours but finds out after the fact that the employer actually demands more on-call than was initially discussed, how could that be interpreted as anything other than a bait-and-switch?
We fix it when we see it's broken, which isn't going to happen at 1am local time. If we have a distributed team the odds are better it gets fixed sooner. The world keeps spinning and there's always another bug to fix, it's not worth losing literal sleep over.
> There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues
"Thank you for calling. Our normal business hours are ..." works for the rest of the business world, there's no reason it can't work for you. You can always sell 24h tech support for more money, or make products that don't break in the middle of the night by not relying on systems and designs that are likely to fail spectacularly in the middle of the night.
That doesn't work if gmail goes down. Or netflix. Or an ISP. Or any product that is primarily used by people outside business hours, e.g. xbox live. "Sorry several million people couldn't play games this weekend, the outage was outside normal business hours."
But I bet the people working on those don’t say their employer unexpectedly “roped me into a production support on-call”.
If a role isn’t advertised as having responsibility outside regular office hours, bait and switching people into regularly working outside 9-5 type hours should not be allowed. And “not allowed” with serious enough financial teeth that companies right up to FAANG size would care, or at least that employees leaving/fired from bait and switching employment hours would end up feeling satisfied with their payouts.
If you need uptime guarantees, hire people letting them know up front so they can choose to accept or reject that work. You don’t (or at least shouldn’t) get to drop that responsibility on people who never signed up for it in the first place.
Other fields don’t release new version of their product every few days. Oncall for things that are always changing is very hard to be done by people who aren’t ones making those changes. You need formal release process and expecting training for each change. That’s not how 99.99% of internet businesses work.
I'll note that only the largest of those companies had this deployment style. The rest were either ~quarterly (with client pressure to slow that down) or weekly/monthly (agile-ish).
I think the only one with a formal release process was the quarterly release outfit, and even that was due to single-client risk.
This was the first thing that really shocked me at my first job (startup in SF back over a decade ago). The attitude that what we're doing really matters, and if something was found broken on the weekend we'd get a call and have to come into the office. Fucking absurd hubris all throughout SV.
if the only thing that mattered is some system being down not making some suit money, and mgmt has no respect for the work, it doesn’t matter. i work to feed myself not because it matters.
Very little of what most people do "matters" from a certain point of view. But everyone has to eat and there are plenty of products that make money that might not "matter" but offer jobs. We can't all work for Tesla or SpaceX.
Agreed: well-run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.
I've worked at 3 startups (5th employee, 16th employee, 2nd employee).
The first one had 80 hour weeks and burned me out after a year. The company had enough capital to stay in business, but never went anywhere, and my shares were washed out in subsequent funding rounds.
The second had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for six years. A fair-to-middling exit to Broadcom.
The third one had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for 3 years. A great exit to Google.
Working overtime at a startup here and there can have an emotional reward, as a small team works together with enthusiasm to bring something to market. Yes, this can be abused by bad management and planning, and often is, but .. it's an entirely different beast from demanding overtime out of employees at a large profitable company where poor planning and under-resourcing are not really excusable.
> - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
I think this close, but a little off. Work hard only on what matters. Join the high visibility projects and work hard on the important parts. "Nobody notices" -> that's up to you. Document and demo your achievements every few weeks.
Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP. Never, ever wait for "things to improve". So many times after I switched jobs, I said to myself "Man, why didn't I leave sooner?"
> Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP.
I agree with this but you have to understand that it's very difficult and frightening for an inexperienced new grad or someone on a green card to do. These groups are also unfortunately the most exploited.
I do not understand why someone w/ a green card needs to be afraid of being fired. Isn't the whole point of it to firm up your status as someone who is allowed to stay on indefinitely with very few conditions, one of them being % of year spent in the US, plus not committing certain serious offences (felonies?)
That is true. The parent probably meant to say Visa not Green Card. I can definitely relate to the feeling of being "stuck" in a bad situation while on a Visa and/or while waiting for a green card to be processed. It's such a huge relief when you finally get that freedom to move around in the job market.
I am sure he meant people on a work visa, whom the employer had applied for and are waiting to get a green card. The process can take from 2 to 10 years, so you are at the mercy of the employer during that time- where abuse often worsens because of the power leverage.
At least in large companies it can be pretty hard to actually find the good teams among all of the noise. I've tried to keep my eyes open for them but haven't had any luck yet.
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard.
As with most things in life, there are places where it matters and places where it doesn't matter. If someone's a junior employee working in a big company, it's likely that they don't have the necessary experience to figure out whether hard work matters in their position. That's an important risk to be aware of. But the opposite advice, avoiding hard work, is also risky. (And not a good habit to cultivate in the long term of course.) If you're not sure which position you're in, and you don't trust your more experienced coworkers to tell you honestly without punishing you for asking, then putting in some amount of hard work with the goal of finding out is a pretty good start.
I don't know. Work fairly, certainly. Work hard... what's the point?
So in some cases you want to fast track your advancement in a direction that you like and this possible through this method, and you actually can work hard, so in this case take the chance if you want to. But that kind of situation is quite rare, I think.
Also certainly do not appear to be working too lightly. But also do not appear to be working extremely hard if it is not the case.
And remember, the (perceived) results are more important than actually working hard. It can be very unfair sometimes, because e.g. if you have to maintain and add features in a legacy codebase, (poor, but that's common) higher-ups may be uninterested with your difficulties caused by the spaghettis of your predecessors, but well life is just unfair I guess :P
I think it really depends on the person. It's a very common problem for people to procrastinate or drag their feet on the parts of their job that they don't particularly like. (Just like most students drag their feet doing homework they don't like.) But no job (or school program) is ever 100% fun stuff, and being able to delay gratification and get the unpleasant parts done is a super important life skill that not everyone has. For a lot of people, maybe most HN readers, this is basic stuff that they nailed in high school and never had a problem with after that. But I'm not sure that's the majority experience.
- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
This has been my experience as well. Nowadays I work hard only while most of the following are true:
- I'm making top dollar (good salary + equity value is high)
- Work is interesting (something new to learn, or challenging, or both)
- My home life is not going great (there are ups and downs, and working hard during the downs is a pretty decent way of coping)
I absolutely do not work hard if any one of the following is true:
- Project Manager is applying pressure.
- People who do not deliver value have been promoted over me.
- Manager/Technical leadership has repeatedly ignored my advice and leanded the team in hot water (cutting corners to make arbitrary timelines, only to incur high support costs or maintenance costs later)
- Performance Management is not occurring at the company (underperformers are not thrown out, or, worse, promoted).
- Company is not doing well (equity value is down).
- Salary has not kept pace with market (i.e., nothing more than 3-4% raises per year).
- There is an over-reliance on junior people and they start calling the shots, thereby making my hard-won experience useless to the team.
Wow, Great List! The last one (juniors calling the shots) really hit home; when I worked in <automobile industry>, I was ultimately standing on the shoulder of midgets.
The worse part? As a CS grad, I knew how to do better, but: nobody with the power to change things understood how or why what I was suggesting was better(!).
I've long thought about this afterward, and concluded it's that 'my world' (which includes a lot of experience, and facility with Math) required me to study a lot and learn a lot; and these 'coders' simply did not have the background to understand what I was trying to teach them. I would have had to fill in several semesters in order to get my points across. Yes, I left. (And yes I tried simplifying - but that only goes so far.)
It's very prevalent in this industry. Newbies cost less and there is usually a lot of mundane work that needs doing, so they comprise the majority of any average team. Even more so in established or mid-size companies where the sudden expansion or huge existing base necessitates a lot of grunt work. Sadly, there is also a trend of managers bending over backwards to please newbies (otherwise the hiring pipeline is thought to dry up; also, it's easier to hand out raises that appear larger if pay is lower) which exacerbates the situation.
I'm curious, what kind of things did you learn in your cs curriculum that applies to that job, and the other coders didn't have?
I'll precise I'm not being sarcastic, genuinely curious. My math background could be better and I'm planning on improving that, but it would be for personal satisfaction as it's not hurting my work (legal tech). But maybe it is, you don't know what you don't know.
Sounds like you're an algorithms guy, and the other coders didn't have the background needed for understanding their use?
I'm self taught, and for many years didn't know about algorithms, big-O notation, and similar. You can do a lot of stuff without that knowledge, but there are definitely some areas that require it.
Just to add to the list. Keep a paper trail of all communications between you and your line management or any other colleague. Especially abusive communications. It will look really bad when you read these out aloud at a HR meeting for them.
Hiring Newbies to call the shots becoming a cost saving pillar that eroded work culture at Boeing is one of those things that indirectly contributed to the recent debacle.
Is a bean counter still heading Boeing? Technology companies really need to be run by technologists first, businessmen second. It's fine to have a COO handle the nitty-gritty of running the company, but the vision and culture need to be set by a technical person and should be very technology-focused in general.
I can only agree. Shareholders get +10%. Employees get nil.
It is expected that we do at least 15 - 25% overtime without compensation. Project manager promises everything the client asks for. Even if they know we cannot in any universe deliver this without massive overtime. At the same time they introduce new mandatory processes to follow costing additional time.
Performance management is a joke. Employee development non existent. Promotion and raises have nothing to do with performance. If managing directors do not like you, you are out of luck as they ultimately decided on your salary, promotion and bonuses.
I am still there because I can only switch jobs after Sept 2021 for private reasons.
After that it is jobhunting season.
If anyone is of the opinion that you do not deserve adequate pay, can be bullied by project managers or others - do yourself a favor and look for another company that does value you.
Large consulting firms seems to operate this way, being basically a pyramid with endless layers of non-programming "Enterprise Architect Solution Expert". I've had folks tell me explicitly when joining these firms post-grad that their goal was not to code in two years.
You're thinking of Agilent. Also Accenture didn't change their name due to Enron. It happened before the scandal (so quite lucky for them!) Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting were involved in a legal tussle which required them to change their name...
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/business/worldbusiness/IH...
That’s just not true. Arthur Andersen originally spun off its consulting arm into “Andersen Consulting” under a global holding company. AA did accounting, AC consulting.
AC paid AA 15% of its profits every year. But AC was growing far faster than AA, so AA started growing another consulting arm, which was against the contract.
AC partners claimed contractual breach, and as part of the separation settlement had to change their name and distance themselves from the brand.
This was lucky given what happened with AA’s reputation later.
Here is another AC story for you: I worked at a bank in the late 90s, on a crunch y2k project that was instigated because AC knowingly installed a non-y2k compliant set of core systems in about 1997, and didn't pass on the vendor's warnings about y2k to the bank management.
The AC project (which ran about 93-97) went kinda rogue, the bank management lost control of the situation. The AC project managers kept bringing in more AC consultants and told the bank management not to worry, everything was good. They were heavily customizing a non-y2k version of the vendor's software, and the vendor warned project management that they were customizing this in ways that would prevent future support and patches, but AC project management covered this up.
Eventually the vendor contacted the bank CEO directly and said "what are you going to do about the y2k issue, we are concerned". CEO: "What y2k issue?"
The bank had to go live with what they had, fire and blacklist AC and burn tens of millions of $$ to re-start the project to deliver exactly the same thing, but using a y2k-compliant version as a starting point, and removing as much customization as possible so they could take future vendor patches.
Wow. That's ridiculous.
Problem with non y2k version was exactly what? Just compatibility with year 2000 to be recognized as valid year? Thanks for replies all!
Arthur Anderson used to be one of the Big 5 accounting firms along with Deloitte and Touche, KPMG, Price Waterhouse and Ernst&Young.
I was briefly at an Indian subsidiary of EY(those days, the Big 5 weren’t allowed to operate by themselves without partnering with a local chartered accounting firm) because only certain firms could do bank audits and I wanted the experience at one if the Big 5. KPMG was known for its entertainment industry accounts. I picked E&Y for manufacturing and I think I ended up with an international cement conglomerate account. The Big 5 clearly decided who gets what industry. They operate like a cartel. They also had consulting divisions. AA after Enron simply focused solely on consulting and IT.
They are all ‘special’ kinds of hell. Just different flavors. AA/Enron scandal was a big deal and was the only talk for days and days and days.
[..] Andersen was responsible for checking the accounting of energy company Enron. The energy company went down with great noise because of shoddy accounting. Trouble came for Andersen as they had approved this accounting. After learning the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun an investigation of Enron’s accounting, orders were given at Andersen to destroy thousands of documents and e-mail messages. These illegal acts resulted in a conviction, which made it impossible to act as a public accountant for American stock exchange funds. Andersen decided to hand in its licenses before the SEC would withdraw them.[..]
[..] On appeal for the destruction of the files, Andersen was acquitted and there was no formal objection to the continuation of the audit practice. However, almost all employees had left due to the obscure practices. The practice had changed hands and the name would always be linked to this scandal. The few employees that stayed, worked on litigation arising from past audits, as well as pension issues and few other matters. Also there still is another firm which reminds us of the existence Andersen, namely Accenture. Accenture started off as the consultancy part of Andersen, which split off just in time, before the scandal happened.[..]
I think this is a case of culture clash between USA, where "overtime exempt" is a thing, and most of Europe, where it is required to be paid (of course, there are cases where people end up being pressured... or like me, forgot to log the overtime hours despite secretary going around with the sheet).
Of course that only applies to people working on employment contracts, not those who got seduced by "B2B" :|
It’s supposed to work both ways - I work 60 hours this week with the implicit understanding that I work 20 next week. Sure, I don’t get OT pay, but I can abide by that as long as it all balances out to 2000 hours at the end of the year.
That said, the abuse of the exemption system is arguably a pandemic in the US.
The problem is that unlike with proper overtime protection, it's just an implicit understanding that is in no way guaranteed.
Overtime laws generally allow taking the hours worked back as PTO. The only thing is that usually there are limits to avoid running everyone ragged with no end.
I even had to look for what it means to "be exempt".
> Exempt employees stand in contrast to non-exempt employees, which are paid minimum wage and overtime above the standard 40-hour workweek.
Wow if I had heard this in a random bar discussion I would called it complete and utter bullshit. The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.
In my country the overtime pay is mandatory by law and it is also constrained to be a minimum of 75% more than the normal wage.
Btw it is also mandatory to enjoy your (minimum of) 23 days of holidays per year; no exchanging for other perks or money, like some comment mentions above.
FYI, it goes both ways. An exempt employee chooses their own hours. If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.
> If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.
This is false. First, the relevant rule that is kind of like that is the “salary basis” rule, which doesn't apply to all exempt employees; for instance, it does not apply to “Computer professionals who are paid on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 per hour.”
Second, even for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, they can be subject to workplace conduct rules requiring a set schedule and be subject to disciplinary dock for failing to comply with that conduct rule. The structure of the dock needs to make sense as a disciplinary dock and not be a de facto shift to non-salary pay, but there is absolutely no rule in US federal labor law that “an exempt employee chooses their own hours”.
> This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise
That letter doesn't deal with even the question of what effects the status of exempt employees, since it deals with rules applicable to, and I quote from the letter itself, “salaried non-exempt employees.”
Even so, while it finds the specific conduct being addressed was prohibited, it articulates a rule similar to the one I discuss for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, stating that, “an employer may take a disciplinary deduction from an employee’s salary for willful
absences or tardiness or for infractions of major work rules.”
But the employer chooses what needs to be done and the time frame for completion. You can choose whatever hours will let you complete the assigned work. Just complete it or you're fired.
From my contract, there is no overtime pay. Overtime has to be given as free time within a specific amount of time after the overtime occurred.
But for any rolling period of x timeunits (don't want to be too specific obviously) I have a specific amount of hours of overtime that the company doesn't need to compensate in free time. In my case this is ~20% of my regular time in ever rolling period.
But up to a maximum amount of overtime hours per year. This max amount is short of 10% of my yearly hours.
So in the end I have to accept about 10% overtime just already compensated with my contract.
No overtime payment specified in mine, either. The usual thing is to "fall back" to what the law says, and that's what I've seen mostly everywhere. Maybe in other sectors this is negotiated differently, though; apart from the grounds laid by law, a set of sector-specific collective agreements might have been set up in the past for different sectors, further improving or detailing their particular work conditions.
Overall, workers are given a lot more protection than what I feel there is in the US, and that percolates into the common culture and the expectations. Then we get surprised when seeing what happens in other places :-) (both ways)
Look for another job. Developers have enough leverage in the job market that there's no need to put up with bad working conditions unless they want to.
This is a common problem. It doesn't work to do great work and expect others to notice. You've got to promote yourself and your work. Nobody is going to do it for you.
Without much experience in the industry, I would say that both perspectives are important:
The person most invested in your success is you, so leverage that and promote yourself.
But you absolutely deserve management and teammates who celebrate your accomplishments and help you get rewarded for them.
Discrimination and prejudice also affect this—it’s probably hard to advocate for yourself if your management just doesn’t believe you’re capable for some reason—but I’ve generally found solace in the synthesis of both attitudes.
Fight for yourself, but find people who fight with you. Maybe put it like this: if you yourself were a people manager, wouldn’t you want to advocate for your reports?
This is generally true, however in a toxic workplace being effective might set you as a target for doomed projects or envy - even sabotage. You may see people getting promoted by threatening to leave rather than doing good work. You can't assume good intent in every situation sadly.
When I switched to a different team a year ago, I talked with my ex-manager and asked what he considers be strengths and weaknesses. I found the answer quite funny because it was a random sample of mostly minor things. It showed my that my manager has actually no clue what I'm doing all day. He is a nice guy and wants to be a good manager but that is harder than it looks.
His biggest criticism was that 20 months earlier, I skipped him and addressed his bosses boss for some bureaucratic thing. I find that argument reasonable but it showed me that he was not aware of the full context. Either I never explained it to him or he forgot. The context is: At that time I was in a special two week task-force team where his bosses boss was officially involved as Scrum Master. As such he was officially responsible for impediments. The impediment was: We either get this bureaucracy thing out of the way today or I'm unable to participate in the task-force anymore. Given the urgency and him being our Scrum Master, I found skipping levels the right thing to do.
This why the stereotypical sociopath go-getter/politican/evil-business man claim credit for everything, all the time, and blames everyone else for any failure.
>The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
I dunno - I worked hard, especially early in my career and people noticing lead to four new jobs, two of which included substantial pay/benefit raises. Then again more than a bit of that hard work was on cross-organizational teams; I wasn't acting solely in my direct organizational unit.
So hard work can pay off if you are doing it somewhere it is visible by others. Getting involved in working groups outside of your company, even if you have to do it after hours, is a great way to network and help others notice your work ethic.
I see far too many people who burrow into their current organization and then just bitch about it without doing something about it. If people can't see you they won't be able to recognize your work.
This isn't directed at you but just a general observation - if you don't like your current organization, get proactive and do something about it. I have little sympathy for people who just complain without doing anything.
Agree. Not always easy to be rewarded within a company. However, others will notice you do good work (assuming you can make it visible) and they’ll be a great resource when seeking next positions.
I can empathize with your story. I once landed what I thought would be my dream job at my dream company. I quickly discovered that the position was open because all of the previous team had quit due to the extreme toxicity.
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard
Be careful about getting jaded and cynical. This is far from a universal truth in the tech industry. I've hired a few ex-FAANG who had burned out and become cynical on work altogether. We had to let them go because their negativity was dragging everyone down.
A similar thing can happen to people who go through difficult divorces. If they let themselves become cynical, they start believing that marriage is a doomed institution and that all members of their ex-spouse's gender are equally terrible people and such. It can become very counterproductive to moving on.
The last few jobs I’ve had were glowing from the interviews and believe me I asked some very tough questions I hoped would be revealing enough without torpedoing my candidacy.
Every one of them: as soon as I started, the foundational person of the team quit, you know the guy or gal who burned themselves out building the process. Fixing all the cruft and actually trying to unfuck everything but leaving scant documentation because the mountain of technical debt rivaled the heights of K2?
As a result I had to “drink from the water hose” constantly. And this is something I am absolutely sick of doing, and no team should tolerate it.
It’s happened so often I’m beginning to wonder a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent (I’ve had companies straight up lie about things like attrition and retention) or b) if I just have some kind of gravitational pull for companies that are running people out the door.
I'll be honest, my default perspective is to expect filibustering and non-answers from all but the actualized and self-aware teams, who if reading this thread and many, many others like it, and lived experience are anything reliable: are less common than their frustrating counterparts.
You can use that to make your decision then. Both filibustering or a non answer in this case are as good as a negative answer for what you want to figure out with it.
If you're the type of person that can only "work hard" due to being driven by needing the project to be completed and as best as it could possibly be, then maybe working for MegaCorp is not the best idea. Seems to be you'd be much better suited for a start-up (hopefully with prospects of major funding).
If you're the type that doesn't want to work very hard and just there for a paycheck, then you are probably more suited for working at MegaCorp.
Getting these out of wack makes for unhappy working conditions.
> - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
This depends a lot on the situation/company. It is definitely true that in many cases it doesn't make sense to work hard. However there are situations where hard work is rewarded. Those are just probably quite rare situations after all.
>- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
This. And the intrinsic metric does not necessarily align to the company's until much further down the road or sometimes not at all. Hard lesson for me to learn after a score at the same company and the health insurance stays the same regardless.
Stuff like this is why I refuse to work at large companies. Shit does happen at smaller companies, for sure, but it seems like larger companies are just that much more dysfunctional that I don't want to take the risk.
I've been on both sides of the BigCo fence, and in my experience, the small companies I've worked at have been much more dysfunctional than the alternatives. A BigCo is usually a loose conglomerate of smaller fiefdoms; -much- the sanity level in your team depends on your immediate boss and coworkers. If you luck out and find the right bunch, you're set. A small company is usually a larger fiefdom than a BigCo team, and self-selects for certain bodily orifices, doormats and complexity junkies.
> I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices
What I learned people that spend all their time working don't have time for the social engineering needed to get ahead. Also a lot of people that focus heavily on social engineering make bank on passing dirt on their coworkers to upper management.
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
Exactly this. Unless your manager has a history of giving raises and/or promotions to YOU for doing your JOB then do not assume, ever, that they will give you anything for overworking to chase a carrot on a stick.
That said if they have a history of recognizing and appreciating your work, and compensating you for extra effort, then by all means feel free to put some sweat into the work. That's a good relationship.
My rule of thumb whenever starting a new job is - Work hard for the first year, but almost never overtime. Do my job, and do it well, but don't kill myself. If manager recognizes the good work, and gives me a raise, I'll talk to them about incentive based objectives, and that I'm willing to work over time if there's a reward structure. Or, that I'm happy to continue at my 9-5 pace if that's working for them. Point is - always wait for them to make the first move. If they don't, either accept the 9-5 work for the pay, or move on to another employer that does value incentive based (bonus) salaries.
> Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
This is the most important lesson I learned working at the fruit company. That and never have a long commute.
I now work at a place that's ten minutes door-to-door in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon. I took a pay cut to achieve that (I live in East Bay), but maybe the new wfh culture post-COVID will open up more possibilities.
Anyway, point being that I've decided that my job is second to my happiness.
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard.
I knew of one company, a pair programming shop doing the sort of financial software where bugs could get very expensive. To maximize quality, they had firm rules about all code requiring a pair, and that barring emergencies, everybody had to go home on time. It worked; they had very low bug rates.
They told me about a new employee they had, somebody who'd come from a company where performative overwork was valued. He'd stay until the wee hours, coding up a storm, expecting people to be impressed. In the morning, they'd thank him for his enthusiasm, revert the commit, and do the work again with proper pairing, testing, etc. I never heard what happened to the guy, but I imagine he pretty quickly unlearned his bad habits. That or he quit and went somewhere he could feed his heroism addiction.
In contrast, I remember a long-ago 6-month contract a major online auction company starting with e and ending with Bay. I was on some internal mailing list where I'd get promotion announcements. Every fucking one of them included a dramatic story about how the person had egregiously overworked themselves. The code was of course a giant fucking mess. It was simultaneously the result of tired idiots who never cleaned up and also the cause of so many bugs and schedule issues that people had to dramatically overwork themselves to hit arbitrary managerial deadlines.
What's their social? would be a good follow-up too.
I'm not sure you understand that Apple could bury this person's career and numerous companies only need one phone call to let this person go. Please understand that you're creating an attack vector that is too great for this person to reveal.
The picture the author included has enough information for an outsider to piece together their organization. The fact that it includes a meeting time and room would be enough for Apple to figure out who it was, just by looking at who booked it. Unfortunately, they probably are already in a position where Apple knows exactly who they are, and perhaps their colleagues do too.
> The picture the author included has enough information...
I'll refrain from the sarcasm. Although...it's very appealing.
Is exApple-anon (OG comment that I responded to protect the obvious attack vector) the same as limono (HN submission)?
Do you have evidence of this? I hope you certainly don't believe that they are the same person in a 100,000 person organization. This would be terribly assumptive.
I don't believe limono's questions were malicious but I wanted to make it clear why the questions were inappropriate.
I’m sorry, I’m not following your comment. I had interpreted the one I had originally responded to as “please don’t dox this person” to which I was responding “the pictures in the article are enough to dox the person already”. I am not quite sure how ‘limono or ‘exApple-anon come into this; FWIW I would doubt that they are or that ‘limono is even the person that wrote the article on Medium.
I know from my own personal experience that Apple doesn't care. This person could go right back to a different department and get a new contract if the opportunity exists.
Information Systems & Technology. They're mostly contractors that are hired to build and work on Apple's internal tools and infrastructure.
Buzzfeed News has an excerpt [0] from Alex Kantrowitz's book Always Day One [1], which contains interviews with former employees that describes the dynamic.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I did all of three months in that org, attempted to switch to iCloud, got blocked, then quit and went back to my old company. Fuck that shit straight to hell.
Yeah, really. My last contract was with Apple Online Store which was part of IS&T. IT WAS HORRIBLE. I wasn't working at the time (because of my previous mistreatment by Apple) and my "friend" was a manager in the org and he had a contract for me. It supposedly involved development with microservices, Docker, Ansible, etc. Turns out, he was a pathological liar and that was just his pet project that went nowhere from day 1. He would go out and vape weed in the parking lot every day. I ended up working 9 months just documenting the infrastructure of the AOS on their internal wiki as an "IT consultant". The real reason the other managers said that I was hired as a consultant (not developer) was to fix their broken organization. 80% of the workforce was VISA and they acted like they feared for their lives. I was asked to gather information from managers throughout the department and they would ignore my emails and keep postponing meetings until months later. They knew my contract would just expire so they did not care. They shoved everyone into bullpen cubicles and teams were using conference rooms as offices for their entire teams. Booking a conference room for a meeting or just to make a private phone call was impossible. I had no office - I had to sit on a bench in the hallway, or sit in a woman's office who was actually in another woman's office (who was out on maternity leave). The second that office door shut, my manager and his hiring manager would mock their senior tech lead (who was just doing his job properly), and start gossiping about other mid-level managers non-stop. The level of hostility in the org was amazing.
That was almost as bad as my previous 15-year stint with Apple where I started with my dream job and ended up 15 years later in the same organization being told "You should be thinking about your career" by a new director (who was actually a professionally trained diplomat) because they were going to stop shipping the software I worked on for 15 years. They don't just do layoffs because of the liability. I watched other competent senior engineers and managers be treated the same. They removed all of my areas of responsibility and then claimed that I wasn't doing anything, but still forced everyone to show up every day (instead of working remotely, as we had been doing). For the first time, we had daily standup meetings where the manager would just call in to make sure we were present. In that case, they had told us that we were going to be "guinea pigs" for the new Apple spaceship building. Not once did anyone ask me about my opinions regarding the new work environment. They had me in a shared "office" with other perturbed individuals who only wanted to complain about the situation. I was surrounded by glass walls, put at a "desk" with a glossy monitor with windows (no blinds!) behind me so I couldn't even work once the sun started reflecting off of my monitor. One engineer (who now had to commute every day from Carmel to Cupertino) grabbed a patio table's umbrella and propped it up against the window because of the lack of curtains/blinds. I had to watch people drink beer on the patio in the bezel of my monitor because of the reflection. Directly to my left was a black globe security camera always in my peripheral vision, annoying me. I started calling sick because of this crap, and my sick days were maxed out and weren't accruing anyway, so why not. Eventually I just had to leave, like everyone else. All of this after working HARD for 15 years and even winning an Emmy award with my work. And when I came back to Apple for that contract for the online store, that was even worse and the job was all based on lies from the manager.
Let's just say that I do not display my 10-year glass trophy from Apple or the Emmy award, they mean nothing to me and are in a cabinet somewhere. I just sit and laugh at stories about engineers running into the glass walls/doors in the new building, so m...
I suspect there is more to this individual’s story, but IS&T is truly horrible. It’s full of fiefdoms built on tier 1 consultants (H1-Bs who are treated horribly).
Apple Retail and IS&T clash horribly, projects run over by years and tens of millions of dollars. Seating is beyond inadequate. There is very little very that is redeeming about IS&T, especially when compared to the other organizations within Apple (Apps, iOS, macOS, coreOS, hell, even iCloud).
I also worked for Apple and I had a very similar experience. Management was brutal and abusive from my immediate manager to all the way up to and including the VP level. For example even though vacation hours were accrued I never got to use them unless I wanted to endure the verbal backlash of abandoning the team and my responsibilities. When the holidays came around the director would email everyone reminding us there's a stipend for working through the holidays but in reality it pays less than our normal salary and was a means to justify not taking time off. A variant of Stockholm syndrome made me appreciate the clever design of having a convenient cash out vacation days button.
In the end the team was meet with a hostile takeover; everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss. A good number of people ended up leaving the company shortly after that.
One more thing, you can also include me as another data point for getting pay doubled after leaving Apple.
> everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss
I worked for Apple before Jobs died. He'd frequently have several teams working on the exact same thing, in secret, and then pick the team that met his goals the best. Sometimes the "losers" would be merged into the "winning" team, but never treated well by the winners.
Gosh - I hope that isn’t a prerequisite to greatness?
How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’
Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?
I suspect that abusive behavior is an optimal strategy if you're working for abusive people. Organizations tend to be set up such that people like the people in power succeed.
Jobs was a notorious jerk [1] [2] [3], so it's not surprising that similar behavior is what gets promoted.
Steve Jobs died from being a jerk, to himself, because he refused to take his doctor's advice about his diet and pancreatic cancer. A reality distortion field only works so long.
The exact diet matters a metric shitton, because Jobs' hubris cost him his life, if instead he had realized he did not, in fact, know everything, he might still be alive.
Pancreatic cancer eats sugar for-fucking-breakfast. [1] He was eating nothing but fruit, and even though fructose release is regulated in its binding with fiber, its still sugar.
If Jobs had eaten nothing but bacon, steak, and eggs, we might still have him around. I forgot what folder my bookmarks are in, but there's scant - but compelling - evidence to support that a sugarless diet high in protein and fat quite literally starves pancreatic cancer.
For most larger companies an engineer salary, or any human labour for that matter, is very cheap. FAANG could pay 10x more if they had to, but they don't have to because no one else pays more.
I think this is due to the exponential payoff in a success scenario. Especially in high tech where certain initiatives can have a “winner take all” effect. I find it completely unsurprising that internally the tech giants function like a cluster of startups competing against each other.
Capitalism is based on the idea of transplanting the survival of the fittest paradigm into the economy and that’s exactly how I’d expect it to look in practice. Especially as progress accelerates and massive wins become both scarcer and more impactful at the same time.
Internal competition on the same project shows a lack of confidence from management... it literally shows they don't know what to do, and are just throwing spaghetti at the wall, or aren't confident in their skills to get something deployed with what they choose. It's not solid leadership, it's dissonant.
It also sets people against each other, creates better-than-you mental heirarchies between equal workers where non are necessary, and is essentially friendly fire in the workplace. I've never seen this end well.
Capitalism isn't just economic natural selection either, it favors those with capital, and especially the most of it, and is easily exploitable by them to tip the playing field in their favor against their competition and those below them. Your analogy is bad in both cases; natural selection means one side dies, which is not what's being described here, and is not good for one side anyway, and capitalism is not as good as cooperation anyway. The latter is far more efficient.
I disagree that (internal) competition unequivocally leads to better-than-you mindset. If done properly, in an open and sharing mindset – one might call it scientific, with expectations and criteria defined up front and with the projects objectively compared against the criteria, then it will work. I have also this work. It takes effort to come up with criteria and metrics beforehand but that is what makes it different from throwing spaghetti at the wall .
First and foremost, a safe (team) environment. This has to be created over time and there are few shortcuts.
In addition, for each experiment you need: a defined time window, up front criteria by which to judge the results, optionally form solution ideas together, give all teams the same amount of time and opportunity, after the experiment is finished each team presents their solution in a fact based manner in perspective of the criteria. After this the teams rotate and see what they can improve on their original solution with the remarks and information from the other tracks. After this decide together or with an informed captain which solution to continue. After this there should be no hard feelings, no personal consequences. Each team should be treated equally because they all contributed to the end goal. This is what will give you a fair competition and help create team safety.
This can be done on all kind of levels, between one day for something small and two/four weeks for the bigger challenges. Making it bigger than this will incur a lot of stakes/vested interest.
Software projects often operate in high-uncertainty scenarios. Best approach may often only be "obvious" in hindsight. It's not irrational to do it in parallel/ in several teams - in fact, I'm surprised it's not happening more often.
>Internal competition on the same project shows a lack of confidence from management...
I'd disagree, internal competition (like it or not, and yes it doesn't sound fun and often doesn't feel great or fair) can be a very effective motivating strategy. And management is used to using this with sales teams, everyone in sales is always competing with each other. It's never fair, they'll have unequal markets, for example, but the competition is incredibly motivating. When I was in sales long ago, the drive to be the best and regarded as such was even more motivating than just getting more commissions. It's dog eat dog but for better or worse it works.
I often hear that about capitalism, but then the caricatural opposite is the survival of the unfit. It is quite visible when swathes of our economy that are not put on any kind of competitiveness (the DMV) end up dropping standards beyond bottom.
We need a balance in between, and we are living in this balance: We are not on either extreme side of this spectrum, the reality is more mild than all-or-nothing, and the non-fittest can still work for a less performing company and be happy with their life. It is just the temptation of big corporations with big incentives that makes some engineers too eager to work for a bad company.
Because often time to market is more important that R&D costs or tech debt for the success of a company. If you win the market, the profits will compensate for the additional R&D costs, and you can release increments to address the tech debt. Customers actually appreciate this, as they are constantly looking for better, newer versions of the product.
If money isn't part of the equation, this may actually be the best approach.
During the 2007 financial crisis I worked at a bank that had to develop risk software really fast to comply with regulations and prevent disaster. They had two teams work on the same project and once a winning team emerged, they killed of the other. But the result was used for only a year or two, and replaced by a long term solution which was developed by yet another team in parallel.
As the saying goes, in software development, we can control speed, cost and quality, but only two at the same time.
This is not a bad solution, as long as the teams are on the same side (and know it too). I strongly believe that toxic culture is neither needed nor useful, ever.
By having leaders who want this and who know how to achieve it. It is simply a matter of principles and trust (both ways). Granted, I have only seen this in companies up to 100 employees... :shrug:
I know more than one famous scientist who does this. Multiple postdocs working on the same project. Whomever gets there first gets a Cell-Science-Nature paper. The other(s) get nothing.
Probably a very common abusive management style at high levels in many industries.
The personal/political aspect aside, I can think of multiple projects that could have benefited from an approach like this.
I'm often astonished by the inefficiency of project delivery, particularly in large companies.
Teams spending months building sub-systems from scratch, where there is an off the shelf(sometimes open source) tool that will do the same job and better.
Man years of work going into chasing trends like "serverless" or "microservices" for no real reason, when a monolith running on a server, could be delivered in a fraction of the time and probably do a better job than what ended up being built.
I'm convinced that paying two teams to work on the same project would often cost less than paying for the huge teams and cost overruns I've seen.
Interesting theory. If you pay 2 teams A and B to work on the same project, and B finishes in half the time it would have taken A, you really didn't spend anything extra did you?
It isn't a zero knowledge style. It is an experimental, or knowledge-acquiring style. To employ that approach most effectively it makes sense to have competing teams with purposefully different styles.
It's a manager who has decided understanding the nature of the work is beneath him, when he can deploy someone else's money to wind up some insects that will run around doing the work for him and watch them struggle against each other. Literally zero knowledge, before, during and after.
When whatever result appears they will not analyze the meaning of what happened beyond punishing some insects and rewarding others.
I disagree, such an approach completely desensitizes the human aspect of work and treats the people working as commodities that are expendable.
Engineering is hard, teams might need to go through multiple iterations/generations to get the desired results. A better investment would be to develop the right engineering culture rather than Team A vs Team B duking it out.
Funny how people keep flagging these comments for speaking the truth about working in big tech. People seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. The rosy dreams will never mesh with reality
It only is that way because we make that way. There's no law in the Universe dictating that people are spendable, it's part of a system, a myth we created and live on.
Don't get too cocky against someone that has a more humane view of what's valuable to be human. Get a grip that reality has very many shades of grey.
At the same time, can't this make it harder for members of the different teams to become friends with each other -- in a way, they are competitors, not coworkers. And maybe they'd be worried about getting fired if they "lost"? That could cause some of them to start looking for other jobs? Or some could feel bad, get demotivated. And other weird side effects.
What could be ways to avoid such things
How did this work out at Apple? When you were there
The unfortunate thing is that if not for the social/political side, this would be a good approach. I would be happy to be on one of many teams doing parallel implementations if at the end one codebase won but no people lost.
Wow reading all these stories about Apple really is eye-opening, as I've only usually heard these types of things about Amazon before.
I say that because I work for Amazon, and my work environment is pretty bad by my standards (my team cuts a lot of corners, we are given unrealistic deadlines by upper management, our on-call is paged at least 10 times a week, we have a huge backlog of tickets and bugs that we can never prioritize, and it is overall a very stressful environment.) I guess it can always be worse...
I think for most people the question is whether there are reasons to think Apple's internal environment fosters this kind of behaviour.
You can imagine a company of that size has a huge number of teams, some where everything is just dandy, some with terrible issues like yours and the author's.
But is there something corporate-wide about Apple that makes you think what you went through was common, or the opposite (ie that you were unlucky)?
The secretive nature of their product development and the supposed "allure" of being an employee there seem like they would combine to enable particularly douchey forms of management.
The internal culture was influenced by Steve Jobs. He was widely known for being an asshole who also happened to be an excellent salesman with a really good design sense.
Exactly--Jobs was a raging asshole, and that became what the managers looked up to as the example of what brings success. During my time there, the assholes were the ones rewarded and promoted, and thus became the promoters, and the people with a shred of decency and empathy who just wanted to be good and do good work were marginalized and not rewarded. It's up and down the chain from VP level down to the first level managers.
That isn't really true. Steve Jobs was no nonsense, but was most often merely direct rather than rude.
One thing which Steve Jobs did do was go to great length to assemble highly qualified teams for missions that were clearly stated and understood and which all involved agreed were worthwhile even if there might be quibbles over details. The Apple that rescued itself from near death with colorful and fun designs and then released a BSD derived OS was very different from the modern Apple where contributors joust for top status without much if any existential threat.
Direct is basically a euphemism for rude, in that it indicates lack of empathy. It might not intentionally be so, but usually shows that the speaker puts other priorities ahead of the emotional state of the recipient.
Jobs was highly empathetic, it’s why he was able to understand the customer so well and why he was famous for saying “the customer doesn’t know what they want”.
Understanding someone’s emotional state does not mean you need to coddle them.
I have found that people who harbour opinions like these usually just aren’t very good at realising how bad they are at what they are doing in the first place. So they need the niceness to keep the false assumption that they are not that bad.
Sometimes the emotional state of the recipient is just a function of how grown up they are.
Jobs himself was abusive. But in his second stint at Apple, he generally worked through layers of management who bore the brunt of his abusiveness, and oddly enough, for the most part, his managers did not emulate his abusive ways. The two members of senior management that I had a chance to interact with for some time (Bertrand Serlet and Jony Ive) did not at all strike me as abusive.
One of the reasons, I suspect, is that for all his flaws, Jobs was not particularly fond of flattery and imitation, and he did not want to surround himself with mini-mes. I can think of only one member of senior management who could have been described as having somewhat Jobs-like tendencies, and even he was not that close a resemblance.
Next time you see Jony Ive, tell him that it was his fault that I had to work in a hellhole when Apple told me that our team were "guinea pigs" for the new spaceship building. That was all his work. They took my office away and replaced it with a panopticon prison-style environment where everything was glass, with no curtains for the external windows, a black globe surveillence camera right above/next to me. Every 2 minutes someone would walk by, distracting me. I couldn't see my screens because of the windows behind me with no curtains, so I was being blinded by the sun. They didn't even provide a bookshelf for my programming-related books. AND they never once asked me about my experience in that "office." I found three (sorry, but OBESE/UGLY) individuals constantly walking around and pointing at things - I followed them around and those were Ive's employees examining the horrible workplace they were creating. That was all Ive's fault. Then they forced us to be in the "office" every day instead of working remotely like I had for years. In his words, "And I know how we work and you don't!" RIGHT. Well, I left that job after 15 years while in that crap environnment. That's when I lost all respect for Jony Ive.
It's hard to know what's going on in every corner of a company as large as Apple, but open harassment certainly would not fly in our particular organization. Our team alone has engineers belonging to 4 different religions I know of (and obviously quite a few not identifying with any particular religion), and I've seen at least Christians, Hindus, and Muslims promoted to management.
>>but open harassment certainly would not fly in our particular organization.
Can't comment much on Apple. But as a Muslim I've seen this in quite a few places. Both in India and the US.
It's not even that much a company thing as much as it is a personal thing. Some people are just bigoted and don't like you. In fact the very sight of your existence disturbs them very deeply. And yeah, if you are better than them, it just makes the problem more worse. It's like they have to now deal with the realization deep down that they inferior to the person they hate.
Mostly Muslims just move on, because we have bills to pay, and families to support. Over long periods of time, it's not really possible to fight these political battles every time you have bigots around you.
I've also known cases when things are proven beyond doubt and the HR is likely to take action on the bigot, they start citing excuses like 'mental health' and 'personal preferences'.
You can't win this, there are going to be these kind of people anywhere you go. You just leave them to their state, and move on.
I can't vouch for a complete absence of hidden prejudice, and I'm sure sometimes things happen that people perceive as discriminatory (e.g. on team outings, not everybody automatically remembers the vegetarians when picking restaurants, and one person's jocular lunch banter might be stepping on the trunk / kicking the cross of another person's deity of choice, etc).
There is a big difference between this and not getting promoted by a manager who just promoted an easily identifiable inferior performer belonging to their own religion/caste. Or they praising that kind of a guy in every team meeting, or sending out appreciation emails for trivial stuff. It becomes more than obvious they building a case to promote their people.
I've even gotten cold stares for using the office budgets for books, Why do people like you have to read books and get better than us?
Many times it's subtle, but some people are just living through bigotry day in and out. They just can't stand you. And it becomes visible easily.
I've read lots of workplace complaints and talked with lots of different people about their workspace experiences and this persons description rings hollow in many places. You are crazy if you think a publicly traded company the size of Apple would tolerate religious discrimination or anything like what is described in this post.
Double so for Apple who has gone woke. I'd expect a white Christian to get hazed LONG before anyone would even THINK of harassing a Muslim at Apple.
> (we were competing with another internal team to beat them to the punch.)
What this intentional? I worked at a company that similarly had three projects that were "competing" with each other, unofficially. It was more like three different teams working on a spellchecker, all with different upper engineering management VPs or directors vying for more influence in the organization. Many other teams standing by were not choosing what project to integrate with because we didn't know which would be completed first (or if they made a choice, it was because VP / director told them they had to).
In any case, it seemed silly, and worse, it revealed a lack of vision or leadership in upper management to just choose one of these projects instead of having multiple people working on the same thing, which would inevitably lead to two projects being canned and some number of engineers feeling demoralized and quitting.
Ianal. I think Apple broke a bunch of laws in your case you should be compensated for your overtime or at least the promised vacation, plus legal cost and a compensation for the abuse.
With a bit of fantasy, one could infer narcissism or cocaine abuse from some parts of the story: the childish ever-moving meeting with subsequent blaming of the victim, all the while ignoring that there were other managers (i.e. non-victims) being annoyed by the same ever-moving meeting.
> In our 1:1s he told us we might not have a job if our product doesn't ship on time (we were competing with another internal team to beat them to the punch.)
That sounds like behavior I've seen in banks - more the "competing with other teams" than straight job threats.
It's baffling. If I'm a company, the idea of having more than one team doing the same thing in order to try to beat the other down strikes me as not just counter-productive, but expensive and evidence of a broken hierarchy and culture.
> It's baffling. If I'm a company, the idea of having more than one team doing the same thing in order to try to beat the other down strikes me as not just counter-productive, but expensive and evidence of a broken hierarchy and culture.
Depends... If you have the resources, multiple team can achieve the same result in many ways, one possibly being vastly superior than others. If you look at large companies like IBM or Oracle, this internal innovation is often stifled by "we have whale clients X Y and Z, ask them what they want and implement that".
That said though, it can lead to duplication of efforts and pretty much the same result done twice (once for the finished product, and once for the almost finished product by team B). If you're apple with billions of dollars that you don't know what to do with, this is a viable and useful strategy (also employed by Amazon AFAIK).
Maybe I’m just too jaded, but this is how I assume all big tech companies operate. The people that win get the results, even if it means being a massive piece of shit and treating your employees like garbage.
In fact, I would wager that not a single VP or higher at any major tech co isn’t a self-serving, backstabbing asshole. You simply don’t get into those types of positions on merit alone. You need to play the game.
That type of environment, where it’s almost impossible to do good work because you constantly need to be watching your own back is so unappealing to me that I can’t fathom why anyone with self worth would work at a FAANG. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know yet, but Blind exists, and it’s more horror stories than not.
Not having to deal with office politics and deranged managers is worth a hell of a pay cut imo.
The experience can vary wildly at those companies, sometimes while still holding the same role. I’ve seen people shifted from amazing transformative mentoring managers to gaslighting managers that counted lines of code as a key metric in performance reviews right before directly claiming they didn’t in team meetings.
I have a friend who went through this two times. (Second time was "shame on me").
One problem was that he worked with a lot of H1-B coworkers. So management would push, and they feared for their ability to stay in the country, and when he got there, people would just just suck it up. His first day, calls at 1am 2am 3am. He left.
So a year later they cajoled and talked him into another job. He was given assurances and when he got there, basically the same culture slapped him in the face again. sigh.
I hope Tim Cook sees this and takes swift action to make things right with you, hold others accountable, and ensure processes are changed to prevent this from ever recurring.
To defend Apple’s image as a progressive, innovative, diverse, compassionate company that values its employees and is a great place to work. Even if he does not care at all about this person, he at least has huge reasons to not want articles like this circulating among major programmer forums.
Talk to a workers compensation attorney. If this job was less than five years ago, don’t delay. It cost nothing! The attorney gets 15% when they settle the case.
No evidence needed. Let the lawyer deal with that stuff. In California, the evidence is what a QME says it is. A medical report is the evidence. The QME will look at all medical records and make a determination.
Is Apple known for having high salaries? I was under the impression (possibly wrongly, I've never worked for Apple) that they underpay their engineers, relying on the engineers' desire to work for them because of their brand.
Shows how terrific output can be achieved with abuse and slavery of youth. You only need to look at the Pyramids of Egypt to know that it really pays off for the folks at the top. These corporate overlords really need to be brought down several pegs. Please break up Apple.
:( sorry that this happened to you! So much of a good job experience is on the project and the manager it seems. I hope to join Apple one day but youth ear stories helped me temper my resolve because I know a) don’t meet your heroes, and b) this is similar to high stress places like Amazon or Netflix that I’ve heard about. :/ But f, all of that, I’m glad you got out and are happy. I had a similar experience although at a very much just a microcosm of a place where when I left I had some legit trauma (PTSD) but I’m all good now.
Teams competing with another team seems to hurt the whole “it just works”, no? Wouldn’t it be better if teams collaborated? Competition will do wonders for delivery of projects sure but it has all sorts of negative externalities.
About 10 years ago I was interviewing at Apple (Cupertino office) for a software architect level position for iTunes. So I'm sitting alone in cold conference room, waiting for the last interview with hiring manager. Finally middle-aged lady comes in with very serious impression on her face and first thing she says is: "So, tell me why are you dreaming about working at Apple?". That moment I realized it's not going to be good cultural fit :) When I rejected the offer their recruiter was very insistent on getting the answer whether it was the money or not. They never ever contacted me again.
Another funny thing I remember from that experience is that they gave new hires t-shirt which says "Journey is the reward". So it's not "Money is the reward" but some mythical "journey". Apple is so full of shit.
This sounds like an absolutely terrible experience. I hope that a decent writer or journalist takes this story on board and digs a bit deeper. Companies’ internal behaviour should absolutely be of public interest.
This is a case where a good journalist could do wonders - to synthesize this beyond the extensive length and to force Apple to investigate and respond. IANAL but it sounds like some of this could get near a workplace harassment suit too and publicity could attract pro-bono representation, especially in the current anti-tech political climate. It'd also validate some of this, as this thread is already littered with doubters of the story. While I generally believe most of this, I think a full picture adds a lot more teeth to some of the crucial parts here.
Any journalist reading this - please engage with this person and help them.
Honestly, I want to believe anything we get out of companies and people's experiences, but this really feels... off. Maybe it's the writing, but it _feels_ like an Apple hater who never worked at the company wrote a false exposé just for the sake of it.
There is something about one person being in a beehive of drama, but at the same time confusing ordinary office politics with "nepotism" or constantly conflating Apple policies and national policies (the so-called "Muslim Ban" etc) or taking what might be honest advice "Quit before you're fired" as some sort of threat. In other words, when one person's short experience contains more complaining than I've made in my entire life--especially when that one person is dealing with a massively deep-pocketed and "woke" corporation--there's indeed something very off about it. This person is almost certainly going for the big bucks.
Honestly why do people think that cannot happen at Apple ? That kind of thing can happen in any company. Apple is thousands of employees, it only requires a few bad people to create a situation like that.
I'm not sure though, creating a post like that is the best thing. I don't know what exists in the US, but in France, you can sue your employer for free (You don't even need a lawyer), and if you are able to show a few emails showing abuse, there is like almost 100% chance the company will loose
EDIT: To the people who downvote me, seriously why ?
From this and a few other random posts I've seen on Blind and Hacker News, the closed/secretive nature of Apple seems to allow it to happen more frequently than at other companies.
Apple also varies, culturally, pretty widely between departments. It's not always the case that abusive behaviour under one VP -- or good treatment under a different one! -- is extrapolate-able to other organizations.
Sunlight is a disinfectant. With transparency, even the largest most aloof company has to grapple to some degree with poor PR and public shaming. Amazon is well-known for having a toxic work culture even beyond its fulfillment centers, thanks to Amazon employees speaking out. And having a high-profile voice- a Tim Bray, a Susan Fowler, is also invaluable. As of yet, there isn't an equivalent to Apple, probably because its culture is so secretive that people readily self-censor themselves about what goes on in the company.
I think Tim Bray is going a great service, but I don’t see any ‘disinfecting’ going on.
I would like to believe sunlight is a disinfectant, but I have yet to see that in the corporate world.
I think the only real ‘disinfectant’ would be the CEO realizing that it’s worth making things better for its own sake, and not just because of bad press.
You're not wrong; we've seen Amazon try to wriggle out of their bad press by simply hiring armies of posters to tweet and blog positive propaganda, rather than actually fixing issues. Sunlight isn't enough, but I still think at least it's one step in the right direction. Better that Amazon has a poor work reputation than no one know about its abuses.
I don't think it has to do purely with visibility outside the company. Visibility within the company is just as, if not more, important. A common theme I've noticed regarding this in stories from Apple is people covering up/scapegoating failing projects by lying to management, creating fake reports, fabricating data, etc. The con seems able to be kept up for a long time because there is only one person you need to fool or convince to not care.
At the less secretive companies I've worked at, where there are many-to-many dependencies and interactions, you'd never be able to get away with something like that because people will freely talk/collaborate/associate with people without going through management. Or people would just look at your source code and see that it's all smoke and mirrors.
Many bad posts about IS&T as well. I swear I've seen at least two very similar posts to the OP about Apple (maybe even written by the same person) although I'm having trouble finding it.
It’s less about disbelief than it being unacceptable.
If the company can be the biggest and most profitable, and build the best products, it sure as hell can figure out how it expects people to be treated, since there is already such a culture of controlling what information is leaked to the public.
Edit: I hold Apple to a special standard because it creates some of the best products that I pay a premium for. I expect the people and culture to be no less and unimaginable best of breed like the M1 chip and the A14 chip.
There is a tendency to give Apple a pass among the big companies. They sell actual products instead of you, the user('s data). Their logistical chain does not rely upon a system of (often fellow American) warehouse workers who are pushed to the breaking point. [The developing world workforce that actually assembles their products- that's another story, but bogus hoaxes like Mike Daisey's only add confusion and make their supply chain working conditions seem more innocuous than critics claim.] They don't actively contribute to the disruptions and dysfunctions in our society that social networking have brought us. Somehow just by being less apparently bad, people assume that means they're more automatically good. But that's a fallacy; the badness can exist elsewhere, and given a culture of secrecy and silence, can be readily hidden.
They're also hip, maintain some level of underdog cachet, and folks like their products. People wish they could be that, and tend to give a pass to the things they idolize.
You might also imagine that inside a company made of money, there's no need for anyone to be a jerk.
They were clear underdogs in the 90s, and it's maybe only in the last decade or so that they've been in dominant mega-corp territory. I'm sure a lot of people still carry associations from that older time that haven't been completely extinguished.
Yes, that's what I was alluding to "the developing world workforce." For whatever reason, despite reoccurring reports about worker abuses from Foxconn/Wistron, Apple often gets a pass in the discourse- possibly because those workers are out of sight, out of mind.
This is a cursory and opinionated, unfounded claim saying 'never' and 'boring'. Who are they to decide beforehand about something that doesn't even exist yet, based on a highly subjective matter (boring)?! Also this 'never' thing is just a joke, have they measured the goodness of comments on voting and resulted in 100% 'no good'? This kind of 'reasoning' about vote comments is pretty empty, equals to saying: 'because I say it so!' :/
Knowing the reasons is quite important in fact. Part of the discussion and understanding, learning.
I happen to think the opposite. I know it's unpopular.
Downvoted posts are distinct markers that shape our experience. But we're warned to not discuss it; the very thing that controls how we see and what we see (or not see). Apparently that's boring.
Voting systems create echo chambers. Most people vote based on subjective agreement, not on objective quality. We need to be aware of that, and discuss it. Just my opinion, which I'm wary to post but will anyhow.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading
Until HN has something other than just downvoting this isn't true.
If I make a point that doesn't fit the HN groupthink, and it gets downvoted without response, I always mention it because I know people linger around the thread and I want to challenge their assumption that my point is so false as to not deserve specific counterargument.
This will be a year-long, if not decade-long process.
The UK will probably be reasonably ok on its own, I don't imagine things will suck too much for the UK after Brexit. So what would be the incentive for rejoining the EU?
Plus if the UK does decide it wants to rejoin, this time it probably will get 0 exemptions, or close to it. I think it might get some as it's a big economy and it's geostrategically important, but definitely not as many as it used to have.
Without a major external or internal shock for the UK, it probably won't rejoin the EU during our lifetimes.
> Please follow the site guidelines and don't complain about downvotes—all it does is lower the signal/noise ratio. Everyone gets downvoted. It doesn't matter.
> Honestly why do people think that cannot happen at Apple ? That kind of thing can happen in any company. Apple is thousands of employees, it only requires a few bad people to create a situation like that.
That's mind boggling, especially since all accounts paint Steve Jobs as being an massive asshole manager, and company culture gets set by examples at the top.
That is a common but very shallow take on Steve Jobs management. Yes, there are instances of him being abrasive, but he led some very successful tech development efforts which involved getting people to come together around difficult goals. Remember that for most of his second period of management Apple stock went for around 12-25 a share and it was hard to hire good engineers because it was common knowledge that Apple was doomed.
An example of how direct, involved management clashes with traditional corporate style came up right after Steve Jobs returned. He would walk around the offices, knock on doors and introduce himself, and ask what people were working on. Those who were fully engaged were kind of jealous that others had a chance to talk with the top manager directly in such a way. Oddly enough, most of the long term Apple corporate types reacted very badly to this. They stuttered and could not summarize what they were actually doing. In every case I was aware of these employees left the next day in absolute shock and horror, sharing with everyone just how mean Steve Jobs was. But I was there and observed some of these encounters myself and all he did was drop by, casually introduce himself, and ask about what people were working on. For some and those who stayed at that time that was actually pretty cool hierarchy flattening behavior but for corporate climbers it was an inconceivable breach of protocol.
Perhaps it's a case of cargo culting. His confrontational, often personally insulting behaviors were retained, but not his ability to bring people together.
> That is a common but very shallow take on Steve Jobs management. Yes, there are instances of him being abrasive, but he led some very successful tech development efforts which involved getting people to come together around difficult goals.
He might have had other talents that compensated (at a corporate level) for the damage from his asshole behaviors, but it seems pretty clear that he was, in fact, an asshole. Not all those stories are from the workplace, that second link is all about how he treated his daughter.
The issue here is how does having an asshole like that at the top affect the rest of the company's culture and the behavior of the other managers?
> I don't know what exists in the US, but in France, you can sue your employer for free (You don't even need a lawyer)...
In the U.S. there are many employment lawyers who will represent harmed employees on contingency, meaning that they will only be paid if the case results in a judgment or settlement for the employee. An individual can technically sue without a lawyer but that is usually a terrible idea.
In such situations always gather evidence and hire a lawyer. HR are there to protect the interest of the company, you need someone that you employ to protect your interest.
In many European countries the presence of unions isn't optional, it's compulsory above a company size threshold for example. It doesn't mean employees have to be part of it, but it has to be present.
^ +1
to support this, just a couple of months back there was a huge mess with N26 (the neo-bank) trying to prevent its employees from unionizing and how they actually did it.
At least where I live (Norway) your employer doesn't have a say in whether you're organized or not, and wouldn't necessarily know if you are – but you'd typically have an elected representative in companies of a certain size or with a certain number of employees.
Lawyer? Isn't the most effective thing just to quit and look for another job. Maybe you can milk some money out of the company with a lawyer, but you are going to pay mentally by investing your brain to that issue. It is better to focus elsewhere.
> ... you are going to pay mentally by investing your brain to that issue.
The purpose of the lawyer is so that you don't have to invest your brain in that issue. Your lawyer can deal with the intricacies of court procedures and employment law while you move on with your life.
There may also be a moral duty of injured employees to sue their employer because corporate behavior won't change if they don't. Letting the company get away with it is like letting a rapist or child molester get away with it. There will almost certainly be future victims so if someone can put a stop to it, they should.
This is really sad and I can't imagine going through that. I think we've also heard time and time again that HR is not out to protect you but rather the company. I understand that this is this person's first job but they should have understood that this is not normal behavior. You should always put your (mental) health first and seek other forms of employment, even if you are on a visa, if this type of abuse is occurring.
No way to say if this is a legit story, but I have seen this kind of thing at Intel, a subsidiary of comScore and a subsidiary of Siemens.
Toxic workplaces exist, and toxic teams within divisions exist.
When I saw this stuff, I was too young and inexperienced to recognize bad behavior and recognize my own power to go fish for something else. I did not have immigration issues to think about though, which adds a whole other dimension to getting stuck in something like this.
One time I saw this guy in the company softball league charge the pitcher over whether a pitch was a strike or a ball. It was absolutely not okay and the senior manager in the division said the guy was a "teddy bear" and "had kids" and that I needed to drop it.
I learned later that he was a major producer in sales engineering for the company's leading product.
Sometimes you get unlucky and are placed in a group like this. Powerful engineers probably have more control during the interview stage, and some companies can be good at getting rid of bad behavior. However results and loyalty can outweigh bad behavior.
Something that people should think about is their ability to manage emotional barriers. This isn't something I was taught growing up, but I hope young people are more familiar about asserting these today.
If people take advantage of you in your personal life, and you have the bad luck of being placed into a workplace with predatory personalities, they will take advantage of you there. Since that is your livelihood, it can be scary.
I'd advise people who experience toxic workplaces or think that they are in them to consider whether they themselves are lacking in the ability to assert their own boundaries and act on those assertions when they are broken repeatedly.
If you are not able to do this, use your health insurance to seek professional help because you'll need this ability in professional and personal environments for the rest of your life. Better to learn about yourself now than later.
If you don't have health insurance, there are communities on reddit and elsewhere that support people dealing with emotional abuse. Which is basically what this stuff is. You can learn a lot by reading and anonymously participating in these communities.
If at all possible get professional help even if it means cash out of pocket, because your mental health is among the most valuable investments you can make.
Nation states and adversaries can also fabricate these stories, especially since the damage to western brands is best done at the root - attraction of talent and sowing doubts.
On the other hand, it sounds believable that these things happen in a big Corp like Apple.
Not trying to be conspiratorial, just to keep in mind - what you see on HN should be taken with a clear headed mind that some of this public information isn’t verified by a reputable newspaper with any anon source.
"I'd advise people who experience toxic workplaces or think that they are in them to consider whether they themselves are lacking in the ability to assert their own boundaries and act on those assertions when they are broken repeatedly."
If that is what you took from my post, you’re mistaken.
People should not be emotionally abusive. But they are. They attain positions of power.
Through reflection you may come to realize they are among people you consider friends or family.
You can’t “fix” them, but you can learn how to handle or avoid them.
Sometimes, if a person looks inward and into their past they will find a pattern of people who have taken advantage of them.
If that’s the case there may be work to do, like:
- confront these past abuses
- recognize those that are ongoing and how to navigate them
- build and practice skills in recognizing and dealing with new toxic people going forward
Life is hard and we get taught things unevenly.
It is not a wrong to be ignorant of an important life skill.
And even when you have read all of the evidence and logic needed to recognize and change your circumstances, some wait far too long, or never do.
I do not blame folks in these positions, my heart goes out to them. Because I have been there.
edit:
I did not expect this chain to get the attention it did. And I had to look up victim blaming, because it sounds awful and I needed to understand if I got this wrong. I make mistakes.
I'm not going to try and further explain myself. If folks do not like this feedback, they may leave it. I will accept that some of my advice may be problematic. I'm not a therapist and I crafted these posts in the same speed and style I comment on technology platforms.
This is honestly not a subject I want to go into greater detail about today. I hope the empathy behind my words shows through and wish anyone in any toxic situation at home or work the best.
Sounds like the kind of person who wouldn't last long in jail. "Hey you really shouldn't let him steal your peach cobbler. You need to push back." and gets his ass shived nine times.
The poster you're responding to is dispensing advice on how to handle and escape from predators. Accusing them of victim shaming is wrong, and you're just siding supporting the predators by doing so. It's good advice.
"to is dispensing advice on how to handle and escape from predator"
No - his advice of 'applying assertion' is definitely wrong in this context, where the advice should be 1) leave or 2) bend like a reed in the wind and avoid avoid avoid. Reacting to antagonizing - even if the victim knew how to do it, would likely yield more blowback - and more likely, the victim would have no idea how to assert themselves.
The situation is not like 'physical assault' where you have nothing to lose from fighting back.
Inability to pushback is not a function of decision or character, it's a function of the crazy power dynamic.
If the victim had US citizenship, it would have been much easier to hold ground, for example.
Because that's exactly what you're saying. It's abusive because you're not in control. When you say there is something the victim can do to stop the abuse you're saying they're in control therefore it's not abusive. It's not abuse if you can say, "no" and it stops.
> Sometimes, if a person looks inward and into their past they will find a pattern of people who have taken advantage of them.
If someone has moved one far enough from the original trauma in order to work towards self-development, that's good advice to them. But in this case, they are still dealing with the fallout. Your advice is extolling them to work on themselves rather than trying to bring the perpetrators to justice and seek restitution from those who did them wrong. In other words, you're placing burden on the wronged rather than focusing on those who wronged them. That's victim blaming.
I think bredren is oversimplifying a bit but not victim-blaming. Bullies choose their victims and they choose situations where their victims are unlikely to succeed in seeking justice. The article provides a clear example: if an junior manager wants a scapegoat to cover-up a failure, an immigrant on a limited visa is just perfect.
"I'd advise people who experience toxic workplaces or think that they are in them to consider whether they themselves are lacking in the ability to assert their own boundaries and act on those assertions when they are broken repeatedly."
This is terrible advice.
It's not a matter of 'character' that people cannot act, it's a matter of power.
The entire situation is due to a messed up power dynamic.
If the staffer was not deathly afraid they may have been able to do all sorts of things otherwise not possible.
I have to ask, why is it so hard to criticize or show Apple in a negative light on HN?
If this was a post thrashing Google, it would already have over 300 upvotes, and "necessary" comments how there are already people who are "de-Googling" their life...
I mean there are already skeptic comments regarding the author's intentions and experience?
The fact is that out of all FAA(M)NG companies, work experience in Apple is by far the least known online, some might even say it has tendencies with a cult...
I suspect if this were Google there would be similar skepticism about an anonymous unverified story that offers a threat at the end. There is too much bullshit out there on every topic, and it’s usually much more believable if you attach your name and reputation to a story (which is why it’s good to “believe women”, while still verifying).
Apple is a big target with a decades of history in online advocacy debates. It’s not hard to criticize Apple on HN, every Apple thread has significant critiques. There are often defenders too, however, which is also fine.
There are many articles and comments on HN critical of Apple. Read the vitriol over the 30% App Store cut, accusing them of being a minority and yet simultaneously monopoly producer of smartphones, the MBPro keyboard fiasco (which was absolutely shitty on Apple’s part), the glued-in batteries, the touchbar, the removal of ports, soldered-in RAM, etc. I don’t particularly think Apple gets a pass here. This article is garnering skeptics in part by being a James Joyce-ian barely coherent account of slights that read as a mix of real and imagined.
Apple gets its share of critics as it has since its inception, but it also gets its share of loyalists where the rest of FANG don't. One quickly notices that in discussions there as much of a knee-jerk impulse to defend Apple, as there is to bash the company. Even your comment reveals an abrupt dismissal of the OP's testimony, impugning the character of its author.
I intended primarily to impugn their ability to tell a coherent, readable story, which is a necessary pre-condition for forming a judgment about the contents.
That's your subjective take. The author's account reads like one of a trauma survivor, and is complete with details, quotes, and bolding for emphasis. Those who refuse to consider alternate viewpoints will have made their judgements, even if they have never been on the inside. So be it. But it is absolutely reprehensible to dismiss a victim's testimony in bad faith as "barely coherent account of slights that read as a mix of real and imagined". Shame on you.
Just remember that HN is all about tribalism. The show is more important than the substance. You’ll need to fall in love with performance art if you want your points to be known. And language, for that matter.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing, personally. People are allowed to hate google but not apple, and vice versa.
But! You’re also dead wrong. The story is substantive enough that we’re both reading it. Most of the top comments are echoing the story. And we’re all having a nice round of “managers suck.”
Because when people's belief systems are threatened, they react as if they are being personally attacked.
Apple's cult following is treated as a religion by its fans. I see this with religions or cults that attack others who criticize them with similar tactics: denial, obfuscation, manipulation, deflection, shaming, name-calling, threats, etc.
Aside from technical criticisms - which the tech community in HN values and encourages, a different and recent example is that of long time labor abuses. The initial articles have not gathered enough attention, but once they did, you start to notice some user burying and flagging. They have just recently resurfaced due to more evidence being discovered.
There's no shortage in anti-Apple articles, because they're an industry leader and a beloved brand, and media loves controversy. However it also seems like for whatever reason, discussions on those stories seem to attract as many knee-jerk Apple defenders as Apple critics, while stories bashing Amazon or Facebook or Google tend to involve everyone agreeing more or less that they're bad or at least not as good as they used to be.
Maybe partly this might even be because Apple's focus is selling actual products you can hold and keep in your home (and not become monetized by) as opposed to being an abstract software program or service. It's easier to be surprised and delighted by real products.
There are areas like this in every company, from 8 person businesses to large corporates.
For those who find themselves in one, the biggest stress comes from the fact it’s hard to leave. The abusers know this, of course, and they know that the more abuse they pile on, the harder it gets to leave.
There is no easy answer, but I’ve seen it done to many people and those who’ve come out of it okay are those who just left. They had to get another job, yes, but in many cases the company where the abuse occurred is no longer having fun when the victim leaves, so they’ll just respond to a reference request with ‘yes they worked here from X to Y with this title’ and you’ll never have to deal with them again.
This is a sad story not only because of just how toxic that team/department was, bur also because it sounds exactly like one where you're set up to fail the moment it's decided you're placed there.
The 'colleagues' in this story sound like they got themselves into a cushy position where they could coast off of the hard work and hopefulness of a new hire, drain them to the point of complete burnout, and then either fire them or let constructive dismissal take its course while they wait for fresh meat.
The things a group of nasty individuals can do when put together is truly saddening, and I hope the author of this post finds a better job where they are treated as a human being.
I must try and understand my bias towards certain tech companies. When somebody says something bad about Facebook I instantly believe, but for some reason I had to really dig into this Apple engineer and it took me longer to believe them. Truth is harder to discern than I had thought.
At most big companies firing people is a lengthy process. Also firing someone under 12 months into their first "real" job after graduating looks very bad.
It's hard from an HR perspective and it's something that a lot of managers just don't want to have to deal with. I remember in a former life, a number of problem people--not ill-intentioned but just couldn't do their jobs--who only got forced out as part of one or the other layoffs that happened over the years.
partly its a pain in the arse to fire someone, but also its useful to have a scapegoat about to blame. Also if I take the story at face value, I think there is some level of enjoyment they took in tormenting the OP
In my mind the reputation of Facebook is that it's more employee friendly and customer hostile, but Apple is more employee hostile (thinking about Steve Jobs stories) and customer friendly.
No longer true. Devices repairing cost are going up, with way less free repair as good gesture than they are used to. Retail stuff are pushed for selling AppleCare+ and new devices when a repair could have been done.
None of these to me is customer centric. They are profit centric.
I personally believe smaller companies and huge companies will be more prone to this. There's less accountability and ability to monitor and punish abuse and toxicity towards both extremes.
I've been bashing Apple about BatteryGate a few times. You know, where they hid information from their customers in a way that benefitted their sales. They were sued and they settled. Which is basically admitting guilt, as these lawsuits are never lost by corporations (they either drag them out forever or if there too afraid of what losing implies, they settle).
Each time I'm downvoted.
The Apple Shiny Aluminum Corporate Distortion Field.
Batterygate looks bad, but the technical reason of the battery not being able to supply enough current for the CPU to run at full speed without crashing makes sense, so I think it's mostly a case of communicating the change poorly.
It's called plausible deniability. They're not stupid.
Why would we ever trust the messaging of a company that:
1. Has removed the headphone jack claiming there wasn't enough room inside the phone for it.
2. While "accidentally" deciding to sell a $150 pair of wireless earbuds just as they removed the previous accessory.
3. Now has removed the charger, claiming that they want to reduce pollution.
4. While almost all their equipment is not reparable (which is much, much worse for the environment!).
5. And also "accidentally" introducing a $40 wireless charger just as they removed the old charger from the box.
Repeat ad nauseam.
Which one is more likely?
1. They had an internal meeting where they had to choose between
A) shut up and have people replace their phones, so more $$$
B) say something, deal with angry customers, best case scenario make $0, worst case scenario have to spend some $$$
and they chose A), cause, you know, corporation + $$$.
2. They couldn't figure out how to communicate the issue and its trade-offs correctly? The company that invests probably billions in carefully designed marketing?
Oh, and assuming you're right.
Why are they losing the lawsuit? Why do they have to pay tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars? Why are they being sued in Europe, too?
It's the third time I'm having the same discussion here :-)
Apple Shiny Aluminum Distortion Field, I'm telling ya!
> I think it's mostly a case of communicating the change poorly.
Deliberately. The technical reasons are irrelevant. If Apple had slowed down the phones and shown a notification that said "Phone running in reduced mode. Replace your battery to restore full performance." they would be acting ethically. Hiding it was unethical and they deserved their fine and more.
Great marketing isn't just about an individual product -- it's about your entire brand. It influences the way people perceive your company as a whole, how they feel about it emotionally. And Apple's marketing is second to none.
Treatment described is is just small step towards workspace equality. Apple lobbies against Uighur forced labor bill, so they should start treating employees in the US much worse, not better.
Just keep this in mind - Anon stories like this needs to be verified by a reputable journal, newspaper, etc. Medium or Twitter doesn’t do the due diligence. Nation states can fabricate this easily. Not saying that is indeed the case, I’m asking people to stop looking at places like Substack and Medium as a source of truth, especially Anon posters.
WSJ did so much diligence with the Theranos story. Years. They’ve also released a book explaining what went into their analysis and how they approached taking down a big dog like Theranos. Not saying Apple is same as Theronas, mind you; the point is that newspapers such as WSJ do thorough investigations compared to some random anon account on Medium.
I’ve just become increasingly aware of misinformation after this the US elections drama. I take everything with a grain of salt.
It’s very important to understand the worst that can happen in a situation. If they fire you, ok that will suck and be painful, but important to maintain perspective. They can’t kill you.
These people and these companies and jobs aren’t worth all this. Stand up for yourself and look out for yourself because nobody else is going to.
My wife -- not a current or ex-Apple employee -- had a very similar experience as this, at a different company and in a different geographical location than Apple.
It's unfortunate that workplace abuse is so easy to do and hard to fix. She called their bluff when they told her they could easily replace her, after she spoke up about the treatment. They were shocked that she would actually leave. I was so proud of her.
Some people enjoy causing mental distress in others, from the report they were not busy with work, so they wanted some other games to keep them busy. Similarly people enjoy hurting others and pain, e.g. sadomasochism
They'd already fired the previous person and an intern. At some point it stops looking like the worker's fault and starts being very clear the problem is the manager. In fact sometimes the way toxic managers like this are removed is when a decent manager notices that sort of trend.
You can’t fire an employee at any time in California without good reason. You need to build a case against the employee, that’s why they were put on a PIP.
Either way the manager is insane in this story so I’m not sure what their motivation is.
Not sure why you think this. You can fire anyone whenever you want for any or no reason in the state of California. The only exceptions are when you have a written or implied contract that makes you not “at-will”. The best way to be an exception to “at-will” in California is to be paid in advance.
If you think giving out clearly incorrect legal advice that ignores the rules of at-will employment isn’t going to cost anyone who follows it dearly, go for it.
This dude claims to have a PhD but writes like a 12 year old. For example, just read this paragraph:
> There was no code repository for our project and the page that was listed as the project page only had script names in it but no code was linked. For example, you could see name of the scripts such as garbage.py but there was no code! ...
and honestly think about the type of person that would write like that
The tough part about FANGs is that being so large, the quality of your manager is basically the sole determining factor of your experience there and yeah you’ll see a few bad apples, no pun intended.
I’ve personally landed crap managers at 2 of the FANGs, both the worst managers I’ve had in my career by a long shot. I’ve also seen fantastic managers at one, and uh, mediocre at best but well intentioned at the other.
839 comments
[ 1.5 ms ] story [ 437 ms ] threadDoes your question presuppose that everyone is somehow magically doing their 'best work'? If so, do you have any evidence of that? Lots of companies get by with shitty cultures and low-productivity employees.
I suspect the story would be much more powerful if it were 1/5 as long and stuck to the material facts.
What I read described an Apple that is completely alien to me. I have never seen or even heard of anything even remotely like this team or the behavior described.
Nobody thinks that their company is like this until they're on the other side of it. In my friend's case, it was only in retrospect that he saw patterns of toxic behavior from management.
It happened to me at Microsoft, and later it ALMOST happened to me at Apple. Fortunately, at Apple I knew what was going on that time and I just badgered my irate teammate and bullied him into giving me all the info I needed. (Or went around him when I could, since I was lucky that the rest of the team was a lot easier to work with in that respect) He was a nice guy, but he'd get visibly annoyed every time I asked him a question. Either the answer was patently obvious, or the question was unanswerably difficult.. Later on, that teammate left and a new one came onboard with a ludicrous number of really dumb questions, but I just swallowed my bad attitude and did my best to patiently and nicely answer them.. and sure enough, after a couple of months he was fully up to speed.
Also, even more fortunately, when things were going badly at Microsoft I had a decent savings account built up and a lot of self confidence/stubbornness, enough to say from a place of complete conviction "I'M not the problem; this whole org is a steaming pile of shit!" no matter who told me otherwise. I feel really bad for the author of TFA, because I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to have the type of screwed-up, mercenary attitude it would take to get through his experiences unscathed.
Thankfully my manager was open to questions, and patient, it was me "not wanting to be a bother". But I had a meeting with my manager's manager and he talked about how stupid he felt, and understanding that no-one would feel like I was an "anchor" asking the "silly" questions of "Why do we / don't we ..." and persisting through that because everyone had been there.
Do you call this:
> "You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental problems."
"perceived psychological abuse"?!? What the heck, the sociopathic person who said that stupid ass thing should have been fired on the spot, apparently he/she still is a manager at Apple.
Its staring you in the face. How can anyone be allowed to pull off half of that shit? I mean if you are _knowingly_ causing someone to take beta blockers, you've got to have a long hard look at yourself.
I have made mistakes, fortunately early in my career. I made a colleague cry, I thought it was a "bit of fun" but I was being a horrid shit. I don't shout at work anymore. Its a sign that I've lost the argument, failed to see reason, or more often just plain wrong.
To allow others to cause people to cry or shout is frankly unforgivable. Especially if they are senior and its aimed at a young'un. Yes, they might be annoying, or a dipshit. but its up to you to guide them or move them on. Not play with like a cat with a half dead bird.
in short: enigneers don't let other people be abusive dicks.
If there were tens of similar cases, we would have heard of more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804607
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12502336
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994
There were other managers who were not toxic, and knew how to develop a team and reward/motivate them, but most of them stagnated and never went anywhere promotion-wise.
I also found the place very clique-y. There was definitely a small in-group, with the rest in the out-group, and it seemed to have nothing to do with tenure, seniority, or level. They would have their own private off-sites to do who knows what. I think they called it Top-100 or something while I was there. Everything was siloed and secret so you could never be sure.
EDIT: Reading the article, I see the cliques were specifically mentioned. I have no doubt the author is for real.
Worse, at the time of writing this is the second highest response!
e: at least the comment got reshuffled while I wrote that, seriously though..
It's not the job of junior engineers from foreign countries to write perfect Medium posts.
Also the article was chock full of facts, there were facts in every sentence.
They know that when it comes to the illegal stuff - you do it off-the-record. Then it just become "he said, she said", which is very difficult to prove.
They are experts at gaslighting, which ties in with the point above. Not only can the invalidate your claims about (difficult to prove) verbal abuse, but they can actually turn it against you, by claiming that you're obviously mentally unstable / hearing things due to workload / not fit for the job / etc.
Especially for narcissists, they tend to be very good at forming networks and friendships which benefit them - and in turn can produce cliques like this.
They know what buttons to push in the organization, to cover their own ass, and make the other party look incompetent. This includes creating extensive paper trails, frequent meetings to establish some opinion on a person, and what not.
Prolific abusers are hard to catch because they are very good at it, and because they create (or join) environments which are chaotic, and tie in multiple people on the abuse (whether want it or not - pretty much in the same way that bullies in school rarely do the bullying themselves, but form groups to do it).
In this case, it's even worse - because there's such an extreme imbalance of power. On one side you have a fresh hire, without any permanent VISA, completely dependent on the job. On the other side, you have established bullies in clique, with decades of employment in the company.
And not only that - it all happened within a company that enforces a strict culture of non-disclosure. It's hard to go public with information which may include explicitly confidential work/data.
Unlike others, I actually find this story fairly believable.
When I first joined Apple, straight out of college - a good program, top three in the country - I was abused similarly. I joined a team that was on a project behind schedule.
Our manager was a brusque, no-nonsense sort of dude. But he clearly had anger problems. On the team were 2 senior engineers, me, and a junior engineer that had just completed his internship and was on a work Visa.
As the project got closer to the deadline, and the scope increased, the manager got agitated. In our team meetings, he would start yelling at us. People down the hallways would stare at us with those "looks." In our 1:1s he told us we might not have a job if our product doesn't ship on time (we were competing with another internal team to beat them to the punch.)
The two senior engineers decided they'd had enough and quit the team. The manager told us to work overtime (no overtime pay, but we had to for fear of our job). He promised us that if we did it that we would get a month of vacation on him, and that he could secure it for us.
The product released. After countless nights of overtime we did it. Our manager left, our guarantee of a month of vacation evaporated, and for the next three months, us two junior engineers were left on 24/7 primary/secondary on-call for a critical service. It was a nightmare. Calls at 3 AM, 6 AM, on weekends.
Our manager got a promotion and is fairly high up at Apple now.
Horrible experience. I left for a new company that pays me nearly double.
It’s a tough spot to be. Do you roll over and do the job your being yelled at to do even though you know any concessions are BS? Or like the senior folks, do you walk? It’s a really hard choice.
Does Apple not have manager feedback mechanisms?
Hah-ha!
My manager left me out of the first review cycle, but at the end of the second review cycle I did leave a review of the manager. By this time he had left our team though. I don't think it did anything as he continued to rise through the ranks.
But what I read in this article was beyond the pale. I never felt like anybody adjacent to any of my roles might have cause to fear for their physical safety. Reviews were used as political tools and occasional sources of psychological abuse, sure, but people still got marched out quickly if they stopped acting like empathetic human beings towards their peers.
Yes, but while I believe it happened just like that, it's too beyond the pale to be representative of Apple at large.
Looks like a particularly, close knit toxic team + gaslighting above levels about the new recruit.
Why?
Same way if a told you some politician was sexually assaulting his pages, you woulnd't assume this is representative of congressmen and pages in general...
I don't have recorded minutes of their interactions or other such hard proof.
I mean Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal worked at Google when they did their career ending stuff.
So yes, this does happen. Typically to visa workers who are easily exploitable due to their precarious status in the country.
This is the key point about this experience to me. The fact was that without the visa situation, the author would have had many more choices. Unfortunately, it seems like the lack of viable alternatives was taken advantage of to the hilt (and presumably the author wasn't the first or last employee so affected).
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/27/is-uber-...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-death-idUSKCN0XP383
Sometimes it’s down to a particular manager, but sometimes it can just be the consequences of a bad decision taken further up the food chain. This can leave a team in a no-win situation where even a good team lead can end up in a mess with no good options. I was at one employer where this happened and the team lead in question fell on his sword and quit rather than beat his team to death. I ended up taking on some of his responsibilities and team members and got some additional resources to deal with the re-org, so it worked out well for the team members and the company. It also gave me my first taste of management. It cost the guy his job though, which was grossly unfair. Not many mangers would have the guts and integrity to do something like that, and even if they did there’s no guarantee it would actually benefit the team. They could just be replaced by a tyrant.
The only answer is to be open and honest about what you think and principled in your own actions. Call out bad behaviour where you see it and say when you see mistakes being made. If you aren’t prepared to do so, why should anyone else? Too many people silently tie the line and keep quiet and then wonder why these things spiral out of control and end in disaster. It’s because nobody said anything or did anything about it. We have to be prepared to take responsibility for calling out what’s happening around us and what we do about it as employees. It’s not somebody else’s problem, it’s our problem. Don’t be afraid of losing your job, it may well happen but jobs come and go. Having principles carries a cost, but one I think is worth paying.
In-fact you don't get your bonus if you don't attend these workshops and score in these tests. HR regularly queries all low-level employees about their work/life balance and other other work-place issues and regularly sends feedback to senior management. Actually senior management even regularly has meetings with entry-level employees with team leads and management sent away from the room to obtain proper assessment.
But then this is a German company and not a US one. I will never work for a US MNC in my life after the bad experience I had early in my career.
It’s agonizing how much broken US immigration policy plays a large role in forcing talented people who have decided to join our country to feel like this isn’t an option for them. We owe them much better.
I agree that this is not an impossible scenario. But I also have a strong feeling that it's not a particularly likely one either.
That might also be, for better and worse, why Microsoft folks have such long tenure at the company. Its honestly a great place to work compared to these shit shows.
If any manager behaved like the article described, I don't see how the team would get anything done, plus their MSFT poll score would quickly get them into trouble.
Have been fortunate that the instances I was involved in directly, I was prepared, had extensive documentation, and my position (and my colleagues) were more valuable than the perpetrators, so they were swiftly shown the door.
At the end of the day it's the same at every large company. HR protects the business, not the employee. They don't protect the victim, they protect the more valuable resource.
1. Being able to reveal something new and surprising leads to a flurry of good press. Failing that, constant rumors about what they are working on is like free advertising.
2. Keeping something a secret until it is shipping gives competitors less time to react/plan.
3. Preventing your employees from publicly discussing what they are doing may make it harder to know whom to poach, and harder for folks who want to leave to sell themselves.
4. It is useful as a cultural tool: it brings employees together in sharing a secret, creating an in-group/out-group dynamic; it gives product launches a kind of mystery, makes them something special for employees to watch together and celebrate together.
5. It helps Apple keep control of the framing of a product and the narrative around its launch.
I can't help but notice that some of these are the same reasons why cults are often so secretive.
The company had been really successful. That makes it easy to trust the leadership and believe they know best.
If you’re changing the world and doing the best work of your life, maybe that’s worth making sacrifices for (overtime or whatever).
On the bright side, I’m not sure there’s any equivalent of the malevolent, sexually abusive stuff we see in cults. Hard to complain about being a well-paid engineer with good benefits, etc.
Have worked at two FAANG companies, and neither would tolerate even a hint of such behavior.
It's an open secret in silicon valley that you work at apple for one of the three reasons: 1. You didn't know better 2. Were a fan/fanboi. 3. That was the best you could do (for whatever reasons).
Every time something negative about Apple gets posted here, I see this typical response - oh, they all do it. Stop with this nonsense.
I could be wrong and just lucky tho.
FWIW my wife worked at Apple in a non-engineering role for almost a decade about ten years ago, and I can completely see how this kind of dysfunction could happen in that company. Pressure cooker environment.
I really hope you will go public about this experience and share it, Apple aren’t the “virtuous” company as they pretend to be.
- Despite the big release and herculean efforts, both of us were paid a fraction of our target bonus. This was the day I decided to move jobs.
- I eventually grew some balls and told Apple to (a) pay me 2.5x during overtime (b) hire SREs for this critical service, or (c) go fuck themselves. They chose (c), which worked alright because our service was pretty stable.
- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
- Only my first manager at Apple was an asshole. My last manager was a kind and genial person.
Yes I've worked for a startup. Yes I did long hours. Yes I learned that's not sustainable and not a good way to make things work.
So, no, I won't do it again.
I've worked in several startups, and occasional death marches are unavoidable. They don't work month in and month out. But enduring that kind of life for just salary is nuts.
Maybe in some cases you can hope for the acquired startup to be the pet project of the acquirer’s founder/CEO?
I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke."
Sure... but you may still come in and find "this project has been nixed". Upside is that you may still have a 'job' in the bigger company, but everything you worked on may be thrown away, you may lose whatever political power your project had, etc. Certainly there's an 'immediate safety net' issue of "you may have a paycheck next week", but doesn't address any of the emotional stuff that goes along with "we'll have a scrappy startup mentality!"
I had been in something similar - not quite a 'startup in a large company' situation, but similar. And... we hit a "hey, this project is being shut down, and there's no other budget in the company for this team". So.. the company itself was still going OK - everyone else kept rolling along - but a handful of us were effectively cut adrift for a bit. Some were able to be assigned to other internal teams, some weren't.
At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts.
Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.
Imho it's frequently used to falsely motivate junior/inexperienced into working crazy hours that they might get some financial or other rewards like a startup.
Well run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.
I think it makes sense to have an on-call rota. Some people do it for a week or so. Cycle it through the team.
There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues.
> There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues
"Thank you for calling. Our normal business hours are ..." works for the rest of the business world, there's no reason it can't work for you. You can always sell 24h tech support for more money, or make products that don't break in the middle of the night by not relying on systems and designs that are likely to fail spectacularly in the middle of the night.
Lots of products need uptime guarantees.
But I bet the people working on those don’t say their employer unexpectedly “roped me into a production support on-call”.
If a role isn’t advertised as having responsibility outside regular office hours, bait and switching people into regularly working outside 9-5 type hours should not be allowed. And “not allowed” with serious enough financial teeth that companies right up to FAANG size would care, or at least that employees leaving/fired from bait and switching employment hours would end up feeling satisfied with their payouts.
If you need uptime guarantees, hire people letting them know up front so they can choose to accept or reject that work. You don’t (or at least shouldn’t) get to drop that responsibility on people who never signed up for it in the first place.
I think the only one with a formal release process was the quarterly release outfit, and even that was due to single-client risk.
Sounds to me like you've malloc'd all of memory.
I've worked at 3 startups (5th employee, 16th employee, 2nd employee).
The first one had 80 hour weeks and burned me out after a year. The company had enough capital to stay in business, but never went anywhere, and my shares were washed out in subsequent funding rounds.
The second had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for six years. A fair-to-middling exit to Broadcom.
The third one had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for 3 years. A great exit to Google.
I think this close, but a little off. Work hard only on what matters. Join the high visibility projects and work hard on the important parts. "Nobody notices" -> that's up to you. Document and demo your achievements every few weeks.
Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP. Never, ever wait for "things to improve". So many times after I switched jobs, I said to myself "Man, why didn't I leave sooner?"
I agree with this but you have to understand that it's very difficult and frightening for an inexperienced new grad or someone on a green card to do. These groups are also unfortunately the most exploited.
At least in large companies it can be pretty hard to actually find the good teams among all of the noise. I've tried to keep my eyes open for them but haven't had any luck yet.
As with most things in life, there are places where it matters and places where it doesn't matter. If someone's a junior employee working in a big company, it's likely that they don't have the necessary experience to figure out whether hard work matters in their position. That's an important risk to be aware of. But the opposite advice, avoiding hard work, is also risky. (And not a good habit to cultivate in the long term of course.) If you're not sure which position you're in, and you don't trust your more experienced coworkers to tell you honestly without punishing you for asking, then putting in some amount of hard work with the goal of finding out is a pretty good start.
So in some cases you want to fast track your advancement in a direction that you like and this possible through this method, and you actually can work hard, so in this case take the chance if you want to. But that kind of situation is quite rare, I think.
Also certainly do not appear to be working too lightly. But also do not appear to be working extremely hard if it is not the case.
And remember, the (perceived) results are more important than actually working hard. It can be very unfair sometimes, because e.g. if you have to maintain and add features in a legacy codebase, (poor, but that's common) higher-ups may be uninterested with your difficulties caused by the spaghettis of your predecessors, but well life is just unfair I guess :P
I think it really depends on the person. It's a very common problem for people to procrastinate or drag their feet on the parts of their job that they don't particularly like. (Just like most students drag their feet doing homework they don't like.) But no job (or school program) is ever 100% fun stuff, and being able to delay gratification and get the unpleasant parts done is a super important life skill that not everyone has. For a lot of people, maybe most HN readers, this is basic stuff that they nailed in high school and never had a problem with after that. But I'm not sure that's the majority experience.
This has been my experience as well. Nowadays I work hard only while most of the following are true: - I'm making top dollar (good salary + equity value is high) - Work is interesting (something new to learn, or challenging, or both) - My home life is not going great (there are ups and downs, and working hard during the downs is a pretty decent way of coping)
I absolutely do not work hard if any one of the following is true: - Project Manager is applying pressure. - People who do not deliver value have been promoted over me. - Manager/Technical leadership has repeatedly ignored my advice and leanded the team in hot water (cutting corners to make arbitrary timelines, only to incur high support costs or maintenance costs later) - Performance Management is not occurring at the company (underperformers are not thrown out, or, worse, promoted). - Company is not doing well (equity value is down). - Salary has not kept pace with market (i.e., nothing more than 3-4% raises per year). - There is an over-reliance on junior people and they start calling the shots, thereby making my hard-won experience useless to the team.
The worse part? As a CS grad, I knew how to do better, but: nobody with the power to change things understood how or why what I was suggesting was better(!).
I've long thought about this afterward, and concluded it's that 'my world' (which includes a lot of experience, and facility with Math) required me to study a lot and learn a lot; and these 'coders' simply did not have the background to understand what I was trying to teach them. I would have had to fill in several semesters in order to get my points across. Yes, I left. (And yes I tried simplifying - but that only goes so far.)
I'll precise I'm not being sarcastic, genuinely curious. My math background could be better and I'm planning on improving that, but it would be for personal satisfaction as it's not hurting my work (legal tech). But maybe it is, you don't know what you don't know.
I'm self taught, and for many years didn't know about algorithms, big-O notation, and similar. You can do a lot of stuff without that knowledge, but there are definitely some areas that require it.
I work for a company belonging to Accenture.
I can only agree. Shareholders get +10%. Employees get nil.
It is expected that we do at least 15 - 25% overtime without compensation. Project manager promises everything the client asks for. Even if they know we cannot in any universe deliver this without massive overtime. At the same time they introduce new mandatory processes to follow costing additional time.
Performance management is a joke. Employee development non existent. Promotion and raises have nothing to do with performance. If managing directors do not like you, you are out of luck as they ultimately decided on your salary, promotion and bonuses.
I am still there because I can only switch jobs after Sept 2021 for private reasons.
After that it is jobhunting season.
If anyone is of the opinion that you do not deserve adequate pay, can be bullied by project managers or others - do yourself a favor and look for another company that does value you.
Large consulting firms seems to operate this way, being basically a pyramid with endless layers of non-programming "Enterprise Architect Solution Expert". I've had folks tell me explicitly when joining these firms post-grad that their goal was not to code in two years.
AC paid AA 15% of its profits every year. But AC was growing far faster than AA, so AA started growing another consulting arm, which was against the contract.
AC partners claimed contractual breach, and as part of the separation settlement had to change their name and distance themselves from the brand.
This was lucky given what happened with AA’s reputation later.
(Source: I worked there in that time period)
Not that Accenture doesn't have enough scandals on their own. So they are by far not the clean guys in this tale.
I remember the German "Berateraffäre" just to state one example.
The AC project (which ran about 93-97) went kinda rogue, the bank management lost control of the situation. The AC project managers kept bringing in more AC consultants and told the bank management not to worry, everything was good. They were heavily customizing a non-y2k version of the vendor's software, and the vendor warned project management that they were customizing this in ways that would prevent future support and patches, but AC project management covered this up.
Eventually the vendor contacted the bank CEO directly and said "what are you going to do about the y2k issue, we are concerned". CEO: "What y2k issue?"
The bank had to go live with what they had, fire and blacklist AC and burn tens of millions of $$ to re-start the project to deliver exactly the same thing, but using a y2k-compliant version as a starting point, and removing as much customization as possible so they could take future vendor patches.
I was briefly at an Indian subsidiary of EY(those days, the Big 5 weren’t allowed to operate by themselves without partnering with a local chartered accounting firm) because only certain firms could do bank audits and I wanted the experience at one if the Big 5. KPMG was known for its entertainment industry accounts. I picked E&Y for manufacturing and I think I ended up with an international cement conglomerate account. The Big 5 clearly decided who gets what industry. They operate like a cartel. They also had consulting divisions. AA after Enron simply focused solely on consulting and IT.
They are all ‘special’ kinds of hell. Just different flavors. AA/Enron scandal was a big deal and was the only talk for days and days and days.
Slightly dated.. 2018: https://riskmagazine.nl/article/2018-03-19-how-the-big-five-...
[..] Andersen was responsible for checking the accounting of energy company Enron. The energy company went down with great noise because of shoddy accounting. Trouble came for Andersen as they had approved this accounting. After learning the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun an investigation of Enron’s accounting, orders were given at Andersen to destroy thousands of documents and e-mail messages. These illegal acts resulted in a conviction, which made it impossible to act as a public accountant for American stock exchange funds. Andersen decided to hand in its licenses before the SEC would withdraw them.[..]
[..] On appeal for the destruction of the files, Andersen was acquitted and there was no formal objection to the continuation of the audit practice. However, almost all employees had left due to the obscure practices. The practice had changed hands and the name would always be linked to this scandal. The few employees that stayed, worked on litigation arising from past audits, as well as pension issues and few other matters. Also there still is another firm which reminds us of the existence Andersen, namely Accenture. Accenture started off as the consultancy part of Andersen, which split off just in time, before the scandal happened.[..]
Is this still a thing as a developer in the western world?
If any of my managers proposed this, I would laugh, then say "ah wait, you're serious?", and then laugh some more.
Of course that only applies to people working on employment contracts, not those who got seduced by "B2B" :|
That said, the abuse of the exemption system is arguably a pandemic in the US.
Overtime laws generally allow taking the hours worked back as PTO. The only thing is that usually there are limits to avoid running everyone ragged with no end.
> Exempt employees stand in contrast to non-exempt employees, which are paid minimum wage and overtime above the standard 40-hour workweek.
Wow if I had heard this in a random bar discussion I would called it complete and utter bullshit. The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.
In my country the overtime pay is mandatory by law and it is also constrained to be a minimum of 75% more than the normal wage.
Btw it is also mandatory to enjoy your (minimum of) 23 days of holidays per year; no exchanging for other perks or money, like some comment mentions above.
This is false. First, the relevant rule that is kind of like that is the “salary basis” rule, which doesn't apply to all exempt employees; for instance, it does not apply to “Computer professionals who are paid on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 per hour.”
Second, even for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, they can be subject to workplace conduct rules requiring a set schedule and be subject to disciplinary dock for failing to comply with that conduct rule. The structure of the dock needs to make sense as a disciplinary dock and not be a de facto shift to non-salary pay, but there is absolutely no rule in US federal labor law that “an exempt employee chooses their own hours”.
This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/2006...
Yes.
> This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise
That letter doesn't deal with even the question of what effects the status of exempt employees, since it deals with rules applicable to, and I quote from the letter itself, “salaried non-exempt employees.”
Even so, while it finds the specific conduct being addressed was prohibited, it articulates a rule similar to the one I discuss for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, stating that, “an employer may take a disciplinary deduction from an employee’s salary for willful absences or tardiness or for infractions of major work rules.”
But for any rolling period of x timeunits (don't want to be too specific obviously) I have a specific amount of hours of overtime that the company doesn't need to compensate in free time. In my case this is ~20% of my regular time in ever rolling period.
But up to a maximum amount of overtime hours per year. This max amount is short of 10% of my yearly hours.
So in the end I have to accept about 10% overtime just already compensated with my contract.
Overall, workers are given a lot more protection than what I feel there is in the US, and that percolates into the common culture and the expectations. Then we get surprised when seeing what happens in other places :-) (both ways)
The term for this is “at will employment” and in most started it is the default law.
Meaning that your employment can be terminated by the employer for any reason or no reason at all, without notice.
As in, security coming to your desk and escorting you through the door.
Look it up.
This is a common problem. It doesn't work to do great work and expect others to notice. You've got to promote yourself and your work. Nobody is going to do it for you.
I've seen too many people become embittered waiting for someone else.
Without much experience in the industry, I would say that both perspectives are important:
The person most invested in your success is you, so leverage that and promote yourself.
But you absolutely deserve management and teammates who celebrate your accomplishments and help you get rewarded for them.
Discrimination and prejudice also affect this—it’s probably hard to advocate for yourself if your management just doesn’t believe you’re capable for some reason—but I’ve generally found solace in the synthesis of both attitudes.
Fight for yourself, but find people who fight with you. Maybe put it like this: if you yourself were a people manager, wouldn’t you want to advocate for your reports?
His biggest criticism was that 20 months earlier, I skipped him and addressed his bosses boss for some bureaucratic thing. I find that argument reasonable but it showed me that he was not aware of the full context. Either I never explained it to him or he forgot. The context is: At that time I was in a special two week task-force team where his bosses boss was officially involved as Scrum Master. As such he was officially responsible for impediments. The impediment was: We either get this bureaucracy thing out of the way today or I'm unable to participate in the task-force anymore. Given the urgency and him being our Scrum Master, I found skipping levels the right thing to do.
I dunno - I worked hard, especially early in my career and people noticing lead to four new jobs, two of which included substantial pay/benefit raises. Then again more than a bit of that hard work was on cross-organizational teams; I wasn't acting solely in my direct organizational unit.
So hard work can pay off if you are doing it somewhere it is visible by others. Getting involved in working groups outside of your company, even if you have to do it after hours, is a great way to network and help others notice your work ethic.
I see far too many people who burrow into their current organization and then just bitch about it without doing something about it. If people can't see you they won't be able to recognize your work.
This isn't directed at you but just a general observation - if you don't like your current organization, get proactive and do something about it. I have little sympathy for people who just complain without doing anything.
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard
Be careful about getting jaded and cynical. This is far from a universal truth in the tech industry. I've hired a few ex-FAANG who had burned out and become cynical on work altogether. We had to let them go because their negativity was dragging everyone down.
A similar thing can happen to people who go through difficult divorces. If they let themselves become cynical, they start believing that marriage is a doomed institution and that all members of their ex-spouse's gender are equally terrible people and such. It can become very counterproductive to moving on.
Every one of them: as soon as I started, the foundational person of the team quit, you know the guy or gal who burned themselves out building the process. Fixing all the cruft and actually trying to unfuck everything but leaving scant documentation because the mountain of technical debt rivaled the heights of K2?
As a result I had to “drink from the water hose” constantly. And this is something I am absolutely sick of doing, and no team should tolerate it.
It’s happened so often I’m beginning to wonder a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent (I’ve had companies straight up lie about things like attrition and retention) or b) if I just have some kind of gravitational pull for companies that are running people out the door.
Nothing wrong with asking the average tenure of people on the team imo, that is something you can frame in a way less likely to make them lie.
I've only ever heard that phrase as 'drinking from the fire hose', I didn't know that even a water/garden hose was considered too much.
I think I need to find a better ... career (?)
If you're the type that doesn't want to work very hard and just there for a paycheck, then you are probably more suited for working at MegaCorp.
Getting these out of wack makes for unhappy working conditions.
This depends a lot on the situation/company. It is definitely true that in many cases it doesn't make sense to work hard. However there are situations where hard work is rewarded. Those are just probably quite rare situations after all.
This. And the intrinsic metric does not necessarily align to the company's until much further down the road or sometimes not at all. Hard lesson for me to learn after a score at the same company and the health insurance stays the same regardless.
YMMV.
What I learned people that spend all their time working don't have time for the social engineering needed to get ahead. Also a lot of people that focus heavily on social engineering make bank on passing dirt on their coworkers to upper management.
Exactly this. Unless your manager has a history of giving raises and/or promotions to YOU for doing your JOB then do not assume, ever, that they will give you anything for overworking to chase a carrot on a stick.
That said if they have a history of recognizing and appreciating your work, and compensating you for extra effort, then by all means feel free to put some sweat into the work. That's a good relationship.
My rule of thumb whenever starting a new job is - Work hard for the first year, but almost never overtime. Do my job, and do it well, but don't kill myself. If manager recognizes the good work, and gives me a raise, I'll talk to them about incentive based objectives, and that I'm willing to work over time if there's a reward structure. Or, that I'm happy to continue at my 9-5 pace if that's working for them. Point is - always wait for them to make the first move. If they don't, either accept the 9-5 work for the pay, or move on to another employer that does value incentive based (bonus) salaries.
This is the most important lesson I learned working at the fruit company. That and never have a long commute.
I now work at a place that's ten minutes door-to-door in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon. I took a pay cut to achieve that (I live in East Bay), but maybe the new wfh culture post-COVID will open up more possibilities.
Anyway, point being that I've decided that my job is second to my happiness.
I knew of one company, a pair programming shop doing the sort of financial software where bugs could get very expensive. To maximize quality, they had firm rules about all code requiring a pair, and that barring emergencies, everybody had to go home on time. It worked; they had very low bug rates.
They told me about a new employee they had, somebody who'd come from a company where performative overwork was valued. He'd stay until the wee hours, coding up a storm, expecting people to be impressed. In the morning, they'd thank him for his enthusiasm, revert the commit, and do the work again with proper pairing, testing, etc. I never heard what happened to the guy, but I imagine he pretty quickly unlearned his bad habits. That or he quit and went somewhere he could feed his heroism addiction.
In contrast, I remember a long-ago 6-month contract a major online auction company starting with e and ending with Bay. I was on some internal mailing list where I'd get promotion announcements. Every fucking one of them included a dramatic story about how the person had egregiously overworked themselves. The code was of course a giant fucking mess. It was simultaneously the result of tired idiots who never cleaned up and also the cause of so many bugs and schedule issues that people had to dramatically overwork themselves to hit arbitrary managerial deadlines.
It was a valuable lesson to me, the coding version of the Allegory of Long Spoons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_long_spoons
Ever since I've done my best to work at places where sanity is rewarded and drama discouraged. And to bend things in that direction as I'm able.
I'm not sure you understand that Apple could bury this person's career and numerous companies only need one phone call to let this person go. Please understand that you're creating an attack vector that is too great for this person to reveal.
I'll refrain from the sarcasm. Although...it's very appealing.
Is exApple-anon (OG comment that I responded to protect the obvious attack vector) the same as limono (HN submission)?
Do you have evidence of this? I hope you certainly don't believe that they are the same person in a 100,000 person organization. This would be terribly assumptive.
I don't believe limono's questions were malicious but I wanted to make it clear why the questions were inappropriate.
Buzzfeed News has an excerpt [0] from Alex Kantrowitz's book Always Day One [1], which contains interviews with former employees that describes the dynamic.
[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/always-d...
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52027218-always-day-one
That was almost as bad as my previous 15-year stint with Apple where I started with my dream job and ended up 15 years later in the same organization being told "You should be thinking about your career" by a new director (who was actually a professionally trained diplomat) because they were going to stop shipping the software I worked on for 15 years. They don't just do layoffs because of the liability. I watched other competent senior engineers and managers be treated the same. They removed all of my areas of responsibility and then claimed that I wasn't doing anything, but still forced everyone to show up every day (instead of working remotely, as we had been doing). For the first time, we had daily standup meetings where the manager would just call in to make sure we were present. In that case, they had told us that we were going to be "guinea pigs" for the new Apple spaceship building. Not once did anyone ask me about my opinions regarding the new work environment. They had me in a shared "office" with other perturbed individuals who only wanted to complain about the situation. I was surrounded by glass walls, put at a "desk" with a glossy monitor with windows (no blinds!) behind me so I couldn't even work once the sun started reflecting off of my monitor. One engineer (who now had to commute every day from Carmel to Cupertino) grabbed a patio table's umbrella and propped it up against the window because of the lack of curtains/blinds. I had to watch people drink beer on the patio in the bezel of my monitor because of the reflection. Directly to my left was a black globe security camera always in my peripheral vision, annoying me. I started calling sick because of this crap, and my sick days were maxed out and weren't accruing anyway, so why not. Eventually I just had to leave, like everyone else. All of this after working HARD for 15 years and even winning an Emmy award with my work. And when I came back to Apple for that contract for the online store, that was even worse and the job was all based on lies from the manager.
Let's just say that I do not display my 10-year glass trophy from Apple or the Emmy award, they mean nothing to me and are in a cabinet somewhere. I just sit and laugh at stories about engineers running into the glass walls/doors in the new building, so m...
I suspect there is more to this individual’s story, but IS&T is truly horrible. It’s full of fiefdoms built on tier 1 consultants (H1-Bs who are treated horribly).
Apple Retail and IS&T clash horribly, projects run over by years and tens of millions of dollars. Seating is beyond inadequate. There is very little very that is redeeming about IS&T, especially when compared to the other organizations within Apple (Apps, iOS, macOS, coreOS, hell, even iCloud).
In the end the team was meet with a hostile takeover; everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss. A good number of people ended up leaving the company shortly after that.
One more thing, you can also include me as another data point for getting pay doubled after leaving Apple.
I worked for Apple before Jobs died. He'd frequently have several teams working on the exact same thing, in secret, and then pick the team that met his goals the best. Sometimes the "losers" would be merged into the "winning" team, but never treated well by the winners.
How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’
Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?
Jobs was a notorious jerk [1] [2] [3], so it's not surprising that similar behavior is what gets promoted.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-1...
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
Pancreatic cancer eats sugar for-fucking-breakfast. [1] He was eating nothing but fruit, and even though fructose release is regulated in its binding with fiber, its still sugar.
If Jobs had eaten nothing but bacon, steak, and eggs, we might still have him around. I forgot what folder my bookmarks are in, but there's scant - but compelling - evidence to support that a sugarless diet high in protein and fat quite literally starves pancreatic cancer.
[1] https://jeccr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13046-019-....
Maybe he didn’t want to be around..
Capitalism is based on the idea of transplanting the survival of the fittest paradigm into the economy and that’s exactly how I’d expect it to look in practice. Especially as progress accelerates and massive wins become both scarcer and more impactful at the same time.
It also sets people against each other, creates better-than-you mental heirarchies between equal workers where non are necessary, and is essentially friendly fire in the workplace. I've never seen this end well.
Capitalism isn't just economic natural selection either, it favors those with capital, and especially the most of it, and is easily exploitable by them to tip the playing field in their favor against their competition and those below them. Your analogy is bad in both cases; natural selection means one side dies, which is not what's being described here, and is not good for one side anyway, and capitalism is not as good as cooperation anyway. The latter is far more efficient.
Any guidelines? What to think about
In addition, for each experiment you need: a defined time window, up front criteria by which to judge the results, optionally form solution ideas together, give all teams the same amount of time and opportunity, after the experiment is finished each team presents their solution in a fact based manner in perspective of the criteria. After this the teams rotate and see what they can improve on their original solution with the remarks and information from the other tracks. After this decide together or with an informed captain which solution to continue. After this there should be no hard feelings, no personal consequences. Each team should be treated equally because they all contributed to the end goal. This is what will give you a fair competition and help create team safety.
This can be done on all kind of levels, between one day for something small and two/four weeks for the bigger challenges. Making it bigger than this will incur a lot of stakes/vested interest.
> After this the teams rotate and see what they can improve on their original solution
Interesting idea
I'd disagree, internal competition (like it or not, and yes it doesn't sound fun and often doesn't feel great or fair) can be a very effective motivating strategy. And management is used to using this with sales teams, everyone in sales is always competing with each other. It's never fair, they'll have unequal markets, for example, but the competition is incredibly motivating. When I was in sales long ago, the drive to be the best and regarded as such was even more motivating than just getting more commissions. It's dog eat dog but for better or worse it works.
I often hear that about capitalism, but then the caricatural opposite is the survival of the unfit. It is quite visible when swathes of our economy that are not put on any kind of competitiveness (the DMV) end up dropping standards beyond bottom.
We need a balance in between, and we are living in this balance: We are not on either extreme side of this spectrum, the reality is more mild than all-or-nothing, and the non-fittest can still work for a less performing company and be happy with their life. It is just the temptation of big corporations with big incentives that makes some engineers too eager to work for a bad company.
Time to market trumps everything.
As the saying goes, in software development, we can control speed, cost and quality, but only two at the same time.
And no one is afraid of "losing" and worried about problems that might cause? (Eg getting fired, even if managers say won't happen)
Probably a very common abusive management style at high levels in many industries.
I'm often astonished by the inefficiency of project delivery, particularly in large companies.
Teams spending months building sub-systems from scratch, where there is an off the shelf(sometimes open source) tool that will do the same job and better.
Man years of work going into chasing trends like "serverless" or "microservices" for no real reason, when a monolith running on a server, could be delivered in a fraction of the time and probably do a better job than what ended up being built.
I'm convinced that paying two teams to work on the same project would often cost less than paying for the huge teams and cost overruns I've seen.
Then the "zero knowledge" psychopathic management style doesn't seem so smart.
No knowledge is going to be acquired that way.
It's a manager who has decided understanding the nature of the work is beneath him, when he can deploy someone else's money to wind up some insects that will run around doing the work for him and watch them struggle against each other. Literally zero knowledge, before, during and after.
When whatever result appears they will not analyze the meaning of what happened beyond punishing some insects and rewarding others.
Or until they accidentally burnt down the office building. You're right, doesn't seem so smart
Don't get too cocky against someone that has a more humane view of what's valuable to be human. Get a grip that reality has very many shades of grey.
Running two teams against each other just screams of waste/bad management in my opinion.
What could be ways to avoid such things
How did this work out at Apple? When you were there
I say that because I work for Amazon, and my work environment is pretty bad by my standards (my team cuts a lot of corners, we are given unrealistic deadlines by upper management, our on-call is paged at least 10 times a week, we have a huge backlog of tickets and bugs that we can never prioritize, and it is overall a very stressful environment.) I guess it can always be worse...
You can imagine a company of that size has a huge number of teams, some where everything is just dandy, some with terrible issues like yours and the author's.
But is there something corporate-wide about Apple that makes you think what you went through was common, or the opposite (ie that you were unlucky)?
You can ask the same about all the large techs.
That's Apple.
One thing which Steve Jobs did do was go to great length to assemble highly qualified teams for missions that were clearly stated and understood and which all involved agreed were worthwhile even if there might be quibbles over details. The Apple that rescued itself from near death with colorful and fun designs and then released a BSD derived OS was very different from the modern Apple where contributors joust for top status without much if any existential threat.
Jobs was highly empathetic, it’s why he was able to understand the customer so well and why he was famous for saying “the customer doesn’t know what they want”.
Understanding someone’s emotional state does not mean you need to coddle them.
Sometimes the emotional state of the recipient is just a function of how grown up they are.
One of the reasons, I suspect, is that for all his flaws, Jobs was not particularly fond of flattery and imitation, and he did not want to surround himself with mini-mes. I can think of only one member of senior management who could have been described as having somewhat Jobs-like tendencies, and even he was not that close a resemblance.
Perhaps you don't owe Steve Jobs et. al. better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here. Much better.
You're actually more than welcome to delete the account, aren't you guys supposed to allow that anyway under GDPR (for Europeans at least)?
Can't comment much on Apple. But as a Muslim I've seen this in quite a few places. Both in India and the US.
It's not even that much a company thing as much as it is a personal thing. Some people are just bigoted and don't like you. In fact the very sight of your existence disturbs them very deeply. And yeah, if you are better than them, it just makes the problem more worse. It's like they have to now deal with the realization deep down that they inferior to the person they hate.
Mostly Muslims just move on, because we have bills to pay, and families to support. Over long periods of time, it's not really possible to fight these political battles every time you have bigots around you.
I've also known cases when things are proven beyond doubt and the HR is likely to take action on the bigot, they start citing excuses like 'mental health' and 'personal preferences'.
You can't win this, there are going to be these kind of people anywhere you go. You just leave them to their state, and move on.
I've even gotten cold stares for using the office budgets for books, Why do people like you have to read books and get better than us?
Many times it's subtle, but some people are just living through bigotry day in and out. They just can't stand you. And it becomes visible easily.
I doubt he will care, reflected at how he manages PR when accused of international labor abuses.
Provided the article is now deleted, it seems someone cared, though in a different way :/.
What this intentional? I worked at a company that similarly had three projects that were "competing" with each other, unofficially. It was more like three different teams working on a spellchecker, all with different upper engineering management VPs or directors vying for more influence in the organization. Many other teams standing by were not choosing what project to integrate with because we didn't know which would be completed first (or if they made a choice, it was because VP / director told them they had to).
In any case, it seemed silly, and worse, it revealed a lack of vision or leadership in upper management to just choose one of these projects instead of having multiple people working on the same thing, which would inevitably lead to two projects being canned and some number of engineers feeling demoralized and quitting.
That sounds like behavior I've seen in banks - more the "competing with other teams" than straight job threats.
It's baffling. If I'm a company, the idea of having more than one team doing the same thing in order to try to beat the other down strikes me as not just counter-productive, but expensive and evidence of a broken hierarchy and culture.
Depends... If you have the resources, multiple team can achieve the same result in many ways, one possibly being vastly superior than others. If you look at large companies like IBM or Oracle, this internal innovation is often stifled by "we have whale clients X Y and Z, ask them what they want and implement that".
That said though, it can lead to duplication of efforts and pretty much the same result done twice (once for the finished product, and once for the almost finished product by team B). If you're apple with billions of dollars that you don't know what to do with, this is a viable and useful strategy (also employed by Amazon AFAIK).
In fact, I would wager that not a single VP or higher at any major tech co isn’t a self-serving, backstabbing asshole. You simply don’t get into those types of positions on merit alone. You need to play the game.
That type of environment, where it’s almost impossible to do good work because you constantly need to be watching your own back is so unappealing to me that I can’t fathom why anyone with self worth would work at a FAANG. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know yet, but Blind exists, and it’s more horror stories than not.
Not having to deal with office politics and deranged managers is worth a hell of a pay cut imo.
One problem was that he worked with a lot of H1-B coworkers. So management would push, and they feared for their ability to stay in the country, and when he got there, people would just just suck it up. His first day, calls at 1am 2am 3am. He left.
So a year later they cajoled and talked him into another job. He was given assurances and when he got there, basically the same culture slapped him in the face again. sigh.
I hope Tim Cook sees this and takes swift action to make things right with you, hold others accountable, and ensure processes are changed to prevent this from ever recurring.
Is Apple known for having high salaries? I was under the impression (possibly wrongly, I've never worked for Apple) that they underpay their engineers, relying on the engineers' desire to work for them because of their brand.
This is what Microsoft did, and later admitted it was bad for the products and users and teams.
Is there any research on the topic? Or in-depth post on Microsoft's strategy at the time?
Another funny thing I remember from that experience is that they gave new hires t-shirt which says "Journey is the reward". So it's not "Money is the reward" but some mythical "journey". Apple is so full of shit.
Any journalist reading this - please engage with this person and help them.
However article is clearly written by someone who has been psychologically harmed and sees the world through that lens.
I did not get the sense that this person was pretending to have worked at Apple
Edit: This post seems plausible once you start hearing multiple accounts.
- “You are a skinny kid with no experience. Nobody cares about what you do. Just put your head down, shut your mouth or get yourself fired”.
- “You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental problems. ”
- “Just leave Apple before they kick you out. This is exactly what happened to the previous guy we fired.”
- “My husband worked for FBI and I can get you deported on a cargo boat if I want.”
- “How much do you drink? Do you do drugs?”
I'm not sure though, creating a post like that is the best thing. I don't know what exists in the US, but in France, you can sue your employer for free (You don't even need a lawyer), and if you are able to show a few emails showing abuse, there is like almost 100% chance the company will loose
EDIT: To the people who downvote me, seriously why ?
A company ought to be defined by the worst conditions it allows to persist, otherwise they have less incentive to clean up their organization.
I would like to believe sunlight is a disinfectant, but I have yet to see that in the corporate world.
I think the only real ‘disinfectant’ would be the CEO realizing that it’s worth making things better for its own sake, and not just because of bad press.
At the less secretive companies I've worked at, where there are many-to-many dependencies and interactions, you'd never be able to get away with something like that because people will freely talk/collaborate/associate with people without going through management. Or people would just look at your source code and see that it's all smoke and mirrors.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Miserable-and-depressed-at-Ap... https://www.teamblind.com/post/I-am-full-of-Hate-vOCmEpjn
Many bad posts about IS&T as well. I swear I've seen at least two very similar posts to the OP about Apple (maybe even written by the same person) although I'm having trouble finding it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25606200
If the company can be the biggest and most profitable, and build the best products, it sure as hell can figure out how it expects people to be treated, since there is already such a culture of controlling what information is leaked to the public.
Edit: I hold Apple to a special standard because it creates some of the best products that I pay a premium for. I expect the people and culture to be no less and unimaginable best of breed like the M1 chip and the A14 chip.
You might also imagine that inside a company made of money, there's no need for anyone to be a jerk.
Yes
> folks like their products
Yes
> maintain some level of underdog cachet
???????
> ???????
They were clear underdogs in the 90s, and it's maybe only in the last decade or so that they've been in dominant mega-corp territory. I'm sure a lot of people still carry associations from that older time that haven't been completely extinguished.
Just couple of days ago there was this article on front page of HN
https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/29/iphone-workers-forced-labor/
Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
Knowing the reasons is quite important in fact. Part of the discussion and understanding, learning.
Downvoted posts are distinct markers that shape our experience. But we're warned to not discuss it; the very thing that controls how we see and what we see (or not see). Apparently that's boring.
Voting systems create echo chambers. Most people vote based on subjective agreement, not on objective quality. We need to be aware of that, and discuss it. Just my opinion, which I'm wary to post but will anyhow.
Until HN has something other than just downvoting this isn't true.
If I make a point that doesn't fit the HN groupthink, and it gets downvoted without response, I always mention it because I know people linger around the thread and I want to challenge their assumption that my point is so false as to not deserve specific counterargument.
Edit: Funny. Usually I get downvoted for being skeptical of Tesla or Bitcoin. This is a new one for me. Downvote away HN trolls!!!
Edit 2: Lol. Picked up another downvote for mentioning Tesla and Bitcoin. I'm awesome.
I can't speak for others but me personally it was because you dismissed the problem then started talking about what would happen in France.
Essentially the comment added nothing all said and done
Edit: To the downvoters of this, naw I'm kidding. Have at it.
My future downvotes shall remain my little secret :)
The UK will probably be reasonably ok on its own, I don't imagine things will suck too much for the UK after Brexit. So what would be the incentive for rejoining the EU?
Plus if the UK does decide it wants to rejoin, this time it probably will get 0 exemptions, or close to it. I think it might get some as it's a big economy and it's geostrategically important, but definitely not as many as it used to have.
Without a major external or internal shock for the UK, it probably won't rejoin the EU during our lifetimes.
> Please follow the site guidelines and don't complain about downvotes—all it does is lower the signal/noise ratio. Everyone gets downvoted. It doesn't matter.
That's mind boggling, especially since all accounts paint Steve Jobs as being an massive asshole manager, and company culture gets set by examples at the top.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/books/steve-jobs-lisa-bre...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2011/10/12/steve-j...
An example of how direct, involved management clashes with traditional corporate style came up right after Steve Jobs returned. He would walk around the offices, knock on doors and introduce himself, and ask what people were working on. Those who were fully engaged were kind of jealous that others had a chance to talk with the top manager directly in such a way. Oddly enough, most of the long term Apple corporate types reacted very badly to this. They stuttered and could not summarize what they were actually doing. In every case I was aware of these employees left the next day in absolute shock and horror, sharing with everyone just how mean Steve Jobs was. But I was there and observed some of these encounters myself and all he did was drop by, casually introduce himself, and ask about what people were working on. For some and those who stayed at that time that was actually pretty cool hierarchy flattening behavior but for corporate climbers it was an inconceivable breach of protocol.
He might have had other talents that compensated (at a corporate level) for the damage from his asshole behaviors, but it seems pretty clear that he was, in fact, an asshole. Not all those stories are from the workplace, that second link is all about how he treated his daughter.
The issue here is how does having an asshole like that at the top affect the rest of the company's culture and the behavior of the other managers?
In the U.S. there are many employment lawyers who will represent harmed employees on contingency, meaning that they will only be paid if the case results in a judgment or settlement for the employee. An individual can technically sue without a lawyer but that is usually a terrible idea.
The union least has lawyers experienced in this kind of trouble, and they are cheap/free to use for members.
This is still good advice though - unions will probably help you even as a non-member.
Ref: https://www.worker26.com/ & https://twitter.com/worker291
Disclaimer: No relation to N26 or the union in any way, just another Berliner supporting their cause
Most unions I know of operate on a country-level.
They have an advice line, but don't generally help non-members.
https://prospect.org.uk/article/getting-help/
UTAW looks like a new British union for tech workers, set up by Google and Microsoft employees.
https://utaw.tech/about
The purpose of the lawyer is so that you don't have to invest your brain in that issue. Your lawyer can deal with the intricacies of court procedures and employment law while you move on with your life.
There may also be a moral duty of injured employees to sue their employer because corporate behavior won't change if they don't. Letting the company get away with it is like letting a rapist or child molester get away with it. There will almost certainly be future victims so if someone can put a stop to it, they should.
Toxic workplaces exist, and toxic teams within divisions exist.
When I saw this stuff, I was too young and inexperienced to recognize bad behavior and recognize my own power to go fish for something else. I did not have immigration issues to think about though, which adds a whole other dimension to getting stuck in something like this.
One time I saw this guy in the company softball league charge the pitcher over whether a pitch was a strike or a ball. It was absolutely not okay and the senior manager in the division said the guy was a "teddy bear" and "had kids" and that I needed to drop it.
I learned later that he was a major producer in sales engineering for the company's leading product.
Sometimes you get unlucky and are placed in a group like this. Powerful engineers probably have more control during the interview stage, and some companies can be good at getting rid of bad behavior. However results and loyalty can outweigh bad behavior.
Something that people should think about is their ability to manage emotional barriers. This isn't something I was taught growing up, but I hope young people are more familiar about asserting these today.
If people take advantage of you in your personal life, and you have the bad luck of being placed into a workplace with predatory personalities, they will take advantage of you there. Since that is your livelihood, it can be scary.
I'd advise people who experience toxic workplaces or think that they are in them to consider whether they themselves are lacking in the ability to assert their own boundaries and act on those assertions when they are broken repeatedly.
If you are not able to do this, use your health insurance to seek professional help because you'll need this ability in professional and personal environments for the rest of your life. Better to learn about yourself now than later.
If you don't have health insurance, there are communities on reddit and elsewhere that support people dealing with emotional abuse. Which is basically what this stuff is. You can learn a lot by reading and anonymously participating in these communities.
If at all possible get professional help even if it means cash out of pocket, because your mental health is among the most valuable investments you can make.
On the other hand, it sounds believable that these things happen in a big Corp like Apple.
Not trying to be conspiratorial, just to keep in mind - what you see on HN should be taken with a clear headed mind that some of this public information isn’t verified by a reputable newspaper with any anon source.
That's it, blame the victim.
People should not be emotionally abusive. But they are. They attain positions of power.
Through reflection you may come to realize they are among people you consider friends or family.
You can’t “fix” them, but you can learn how to handle or avoid them.
Sometimes, if a person looks inward and into their past they will find a pattern of people who have taken advantage of them.
If that’s the case there may be work to do, like:
- confront these past abuses
- recognize those that are ongoing and how to navigate them
- build and practice skills in recognizing and dealing with new toxic people going forward
Life is hard and we get taught things unevenly.
It is not a wrong to be ignorant of an important life skill.
And even when you have read all of the evidence and logic needed to recognize and change your circumstances, some wait far too long, or never do.
I do not blame folks in these positions, my heart goes out to them. Because I have been there.
edit:
I did not expect this chain to get the attention it did. And I had to look up victim blaming, because it sounds awful and I needed to understand if I got this wrong. I make mistakes.
Here's the wikipedia article on Victim Blaming for those who want to learn more about what this phrase means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
I'm not going to try and further explain myself. If folks do not like this feedback, they may leave it. I will accept that some of my advice may be problematic. I'm not a therapist and I crafted these posts in the same speed and style I comment on technology platforms.
This is honestly not a subject I want to go into greater detail about today. I hope the empathy behind my words shows through and wish anyone in any toxic situation at home or work the best.
That's victim blaming to the extent there is nothing someone can do to assert themselves other than basically leaving.
Plus some people are frankly bullies and if stand up to them you see their true colors, as cowards.
In this scenario, I suggest the advice would be to:
1) Get Out.
2) 'Bend like a reed in Wind' and avoid avoid avoid. Do your job as well as you can, document, be careful with HR but do document that.
Confrontation in this scenario probably just leads to more antagonizing.
No - his advice of 'applying assertion' is definitely wrong in this context, where the advice should be 1) leave or 2) bend like a reed in the wind and avoid avoid avoid. Reacting to antagonizing - even if the victim knew how to do it, would likely yield more blowback - and more likely, the victim would have no idea how to assert themselves.
The situation is not like 'physical assault' where you have nothing to lose from fighting back.
Inability to pushback is not a function of decision or character, it's a function of the crazy power dynamic.
If the victim had US citizenship, it would have been much easier to hold ground, for example.
If someone has moved one far enough from the original trauma in order to work towards self-development, that's good advice to them. But in this case, they are still dealing with the fallout. Your advice is extolling them to work on themselves rather than trying to bring the perpetrators to justice and seek restitution from those who did them wrong. In other words, you're placing burden on the wronged rather than focusing on those who wronged them. That's victim blaming.
This is terrible advice.
It's not a matter of 'character' that people cannot act, it's a matter of power.
The entire situation is due to a messed up power dynamic.
If the staffer was not deathly afraid they may have been able to do all sorts of things otherwise not possible.
If this was a post thrashing Google, it would already have over 300 upvotes, and "necessary" comments how there are already people who are "de-Googling" their life...
I mean there are already skeptic comments regarding the author's intentions and experience?
The fact is that out of all FAA(M)NG companies, work experience in Apple is by far the least known online, some might even say it has tendencies with a cult...
Apple is a big target with a decades of history in online advocacy debates. It’s not hard to criticize Apple on HN, every Apple thread has significant critiques. There are often defenders too, however, which is also fine.
Just remember that HN is all about tribalism. The show is more important than the substance. You’ll need to fall in love with performance art if you want your points to be known. And language, for that matter.
I don’t think that’s a bad thing, personally. People are allowed to hate google but not apple, and vice versa.
But! You’re also dead wrong. The story is substantive enough that we’re both reading it. Most of the top comments are echoing the story. And we’re all having a nice round of “managers suck.”
Apple's cult following is treated as a religion by its fans. I see this with religions or cults that attack others who criticize them with similar tactics: denial, obfuscation, manipulation, deflection, shaming, name-calling, threats, etc.
Aside from technical criticisms - which the tech community in HN values and encourages, a different and recent example is that of long time labor abuses. The initial articles have not gathered enough attention, but once they did, you start to notice some user burying and flagging. They have just recently resurfaced due to more evidence being discovered.
Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570247
Tesla: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25360432
Sometimes you have to punch your way into brainwashed people's minds to make them see the truth (ex: overwhelm them with evidence).
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...
Apple bashing is objectively a sport here.
Maybe partly this might even be because Apple's focus is selling actual products you can hold and keep in your home (and not become monetized by) as opposed to being an abstract software program or service. It's easier to be surprised and delighted by real products.
For those who find themselves in one, the biggest stress comes from the fact it’s hard to leave. The abusers know this, of course, and they know that the more abuse they pile on, the harder it gets to leave.
There is no easy answer, but I’ve seen it done to many people and those who’ve come out of it okay are those who just left. They had to get another job, yes, but in many cases the company where the abuse occurred is no longer having fun when the victim leaves, so they’ll just respond to a reference request with ‘yes they worked here from X to Y with this title’ and you’ll never have to deal with them again.
The 'colleagues' in this story sound like they got themselves into a cushy position where they could coast off of the hard work and hopefulness of a new hire, drain them to the point of complete burnout, and then either fire them or let constructive dismissal take its course while they wait for fresh meat.
The things a group of nasty individuals can do when put together is truly saddening, and I hope the author of this post finds a better job where they are treated as a human being.
The RDF is strong with you.
No longer true. Devices repairing cost are going up, with way less free repair as good gesture than they are used to. Retail stuff are pushed for selling AppleCare+ and new devices when a repair could have been done.
None of these to me is customer centric. They are profit centric.
Each time I'm downvoted.
The Apple Shiny Aluminum Corporate Distortion Field.
It's called plausible deniability. They're not stupid.
Why would we ever trust the messaging of a company that:
1. Has removed the headphone jack claiming there wasn't enough room inside the phone for it.
2. While "accidentally" deciding to sell a $150 pair of wireless earbuds just as they removed the previous accessory.
3. Now has removed the charger, claiming that they want to reduce pollution.
4. While almost all their equipment is not reparable (which is much, much worse for the environment!).
5. And also "accidentally" introducing a $40 wireless charger just as they removed the old charger from the box.
Repeat ad nauseam.
Which one is more likely?
1. They had an internal meeting where they had to choose between
A) shut up and have people replace their phones, so more $$$
B) say something, deal with angry customers, best case scenario make $0, worst case scenario have to spend some $$$
and they chose A), cause, you know, corporation + $$$.
2. They couldn't figure out how to communicate the issue and its trade-offs correctly? The company that invests probably billions in carefully designed marketing?
Oh, and assuming you're right.
Why are they losing the lawsuit? Why do they have to pay tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars? Why are they being sued in Europe, too?
It's the third time I'm having the same discussion here :-)
Apple Shiny Aluminum Distortion Field, I'm telling ya!
Deliberately. The technical reasons are irrelevant. If Apple had slowed down the phones and shown a notification that said "Phone running in reduced mode. Replace your battery to restore full performance." they would be acting ethically. Hiding it was unethical and they deserved their fine and more.
On MacBooks, if _one_ of the USB-C ports break, all ports are disabled.
On the Intel MacBook, the fan is not attached to the heat sink, making it literally useless and cause the CPUs to fry out in a few years of turbo use.
WSJ did so much diligence with the Theranos story. Years. They’ve also released a book explaining what went into their analysis and how they approached taking down a big dog like Theranos. Not saying Apple is same as Theronas, mind you; the point is that newspapers such as WSJ do thorough investigations compared to some random anon account on Medium.
I’ve just become increasingly aware of misinformation after this the US elections drama. I take everything with a grain of salt.
"Trust but verify" --Ronald Reagan
There used to be a saying, "Don't believe everything you read on the internet." Somehow it's been forgotten.
Not saying the article is false or contrived. I'm saying we just don't know since it's anonymous, and therefore I take it with a grain of salt.
Sounds alarmist but I feel like the west in next decade is going to have to deal with a lot of “Distrust and ask for verification”.
If I’m reading the origin of that phrase correctly, it’s actually Russian (not Western) and Reagan borrowed it.
These people and these companies and jobs aren’t worth all this. Stand up for yourself and look out for yourself because nobody else is going to.
It's unfortunate that workplace abuse is so easy to do and hard to fix. She called their bluff when they told her they could easily replace her, after she spoke up about the treatment. They were shocked that she would actually leave. I was so proud of her.
Either way the manager is insane in this story so I’m not sure what their motivation is.
> There was no code repository for our project and the page that was listed as the project page only had script names in it but no code was linked. For example, you could see name of the scripts such as garbage.py but there was no code! ...
and honestly think about the type of person that would write like that
I’ve personally landed crap managers at 2 of the FANGs, both the worst managers I’ve had in my career by a long shot. I’ve also seen fantastic managers at one, and uh, mediocre at best but well intentioned at the other.