Live data from Hacker News

Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

medium.com

101–110 of 692 posts

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that the witch trials, which were effectively a small genocide against women, are a particularly effective metaphor for refuting manifestations of sexism.

I suppose that would be true if you think arguments are soldiers in favor of women or against them. You think I believe I raised a +1 for men, while you think I raised a +1 for women by mentioning a time they were victims. In fact, I believe arguments are attempts to converge to truth. The fact that women were victims in 1631 has no bearing on this discussion. RoderickDay made an argument that happened to be flawed (…

"This man did a sexist thing to curry favor with a woman. This other man did a sexist thing against her. Clearly, the woman must have been lying in one of the two scenarios."

You're an idiot dude. Linking to a wikipedia fallacy page lmao you're like a caricature.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#103
post #71

> I was getting preferential treatment because of my “cuteness factor” > Indian women being subservient I agree that these comments don't belong in the workplace. I have seen similar ones lead to people fired on the day and escorted to the door. Thankfully it's relatively rare but some places do take it very seriously. Apple was wrong. In Australia the law is clear and they've breached it. Take them to court and get…

> that was acquired by a competitor who wanted to drive in the boot heel

Why on earth would any company want to do that? Not doubting your story, looking for legitimate answers.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#104
post #11

Calling Apple one of the best engineering teams is little much, don't you think?

> Calling Apple one of the best engineering teams is little much, don't you think?

In a word, no.

Yes they are a huge company and make a lot of boneheaded technical decisions, not all of which can be blamed on management/marketing (their web services are behind the curve, as is a lot of user-facing software).

But at the same time a lot of their hardware work is amazing: their chip work, general hardware robustness, the fact that they are one of the largest phone mfrs with a unusually low hardware defect rate, and who has pulled some amazing rabbits out of hats (when the iPad was released its retail price was lower than the BOM of most alternatives). Their privacy engineering (secure enclave that protects your fingerprint data, determination to keep certain data in the terminal rather than the cloud) shows dedication and hard engineering. Though a lot of their apps are shambolic (iTunes, photos, etc) their drivers are typically quite solid and standards compliant (cough ignoring wifi, ahem), and Frankly they're willing to knife the baby (Windows suffers a lot due to their longstanding commitment to backwards compatibility).

Yes, you can legitimately complain that the OSX scheduler still sucks, network stack is slow, or you can roll your eyes that their marketing pronouncements are ludicrous and their vocal fans somewhat creepy. But yes, they have one of the best engineering teams.

Don't get hung up on they hype either way. It's like talking about Musk: fundamentally he's a complete bullshitter, but he did found a company that makes rockets fly into space. Apple are bullshitters, no question about it. But they also deliver.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#105

Its not a bad idea, but it flirts with unionization which is actively banned in many US states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

Unionization is not banned in any state. Your link does not agree with your dishonest comment. Right to work laws simply prohibit collusion between unions and employers to prevent non-union workers from working. They are no different than other worker protection laws, e.g. the laws prohibiting Apple and Microsoft from forming an anti-poaching agreement.

Unions aren't much use in right to work states since the employer can simply fire all Union workers and hire non-union.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#106
post #98

How is women dealing with harassment different than men dealing with other men who are just assholes? I've been in a number of companies where I've had to call out the behavior of a colleague with a manager because the alternative would have been knocking the guys teeth out. Nothing changes, except maybe a "talking to" by a manager or HR, and said asshole just presses against a different boundary. I have also found t…

> How is women dealing with harassment different than men dealing with other men who are just assholes?

In general, white men get their work attacked, women/minorities get their identity attacked, that's the difference.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#107

> I can't help but notice the contradiction. A man jumped to her defense, which was sexism, and then her co-workers got resentful, which she wanted to be defended from but wasn't, and that was sexism too. Somehow, we all need to display more empathy for her situation. There's no contradiction. Sexism can express itself both in putting women down and in putting women in a pedestal. The rest of your comment is trash.

>There's no contradiction. Sexism can express itself both in putting women down and in putting women in a pedestal.

Since she didn't include a direct quote, or more detail, it's really difficult to say much about the supervisor jumping to her defense. It's clear that, in hindsight, she viewed it as sexist. However, a little more detail on what was said, or the nature of the situation would be helpful to understand it better.

It's not unusual at all, to me, for a supervisor to defend members of their team...and not automatically sexist, or even undesirable.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#108
post #98

How is women dealing with harassment different than men dealing with other men who are just assholes? I've been in a number of companies where I've had to call out the behavior of a colleague with a manager because the alternative would have been knocking the guys teeth out. Nothing changes, except maybe a "talking to" by a manager or HR, and said asshole just presses against a different boundary. I have also found t…

Because of the power differential? In the same way that it's different for a short man dealing with harassment from a tall man, or an average man dealing with harassment from a gymbro.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#109
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unionization is not banned in any state. Your link does not agree with your dishonest comment. Right to work laws simply prohibit collusion between unions and employers to prevent non-union workers from working. They are no different than other worker protection laws, e.g. the laws prohibiting Apple and Microsoft from forming an anti-poaching agreement.

Unions aren't much use in right to work states since the employer can simply fire all Union workers and hire non-union.

Please read the wikipedia article before spreading further misinformation. In fact, "right to work laws" simply allow non-union members to negotiate their own employment agreement with a company.

Your comment is like saying Comcast isn't much use in municipalities where Google Fiber (or other competition) is legal. If that's true, it's merely illustrating that the monopoly provider is creating no value for customers.

Re: Harassment at Apple: A personal perspective

#110
I am sorry to hear that the author went through this. Though I really like Apple and have friends both male and female who've worked there for many years, I also have heard it is a harder place towards women even than a place like Google. And some of its structural elements make that harder to fix (if there even is an effort to fix it, which I have no idea about either way).

It's also quite hard to be public about this (I know someone who recently left Apple for similar reasons but won't discuss it publicly).

Post reply on HN