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My Experience at Apple
131–140 of 840 posts
Re: My Experience at Apple
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 treat…
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.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#133It’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.
Is that really the thing you took from this? The person is reporting a pretty serious harassment issue and your input is "mmm, make it more peppy"
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..
Re: My Experience at Apple
#134Honestly, 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.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Welcome to Bad Legal Advice News.
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Re: My Experience at Apple
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you expecting them to name real names and give specific enough details where they're then identifiable?
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.
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:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804607
Re: My Experience at Apple
#137If a company's value starts with a "B" (or... ugh... a "T"), they won't care about you. You should not give them anything of your life, because it's worth next to nothing to them. Mega-corps are life sucking leeches on employees, customers, and society as a whole. Everyone. How many horror stories is it going to take? Don't get duped by the glamour. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber, none of them are going to be good for you. In the worst case, they're going to make you hurt other people.
It's an especially horrible idea if you're in a vulnerable position like being here on a visa. Many vulnerable people, including some of my close friends, are being taken advantage of by megacorps, and have very few options. Stay away! It is not your dream job.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 got a similar line from a certain european video-game company.
I interviewed for Blizzard many years ago. One of the first questions they asked is how many all-nighters I had done. Yeah, that was the end for me.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#139Honestly 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 f…
I downvoted you because you are complaining about downvoting.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#140From the outside, Apple's company culture looks horrendous (insane focus on lock-in, sickening anti-competitive behavior and so on). But when such kind of review comes from the inside, it just confirms their infamy.