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My Experience at Apple

ex-apple-engineer.medium.com

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Re: My Experience at Apple

#171

Post by brokencode »

A company should, by policy, allow struggling employees the chance to try a different team and manager. Otherwise you never know if the employee is causing the problem or if the team is.

In this situation, maybe the managers were extremely harsh on the OP, or maybe the OP was misleading in their story to sound like a victim. It’s hard to say without knowing how they’d do on another team.

To force somebody out like this without taking every reasonable opportunity to help them improve, especially for a rich company like Apple who can afford to try, is deeply disgusting and is a failure of their HR policies.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#172

Post by andrewmcwatters »

zcw100 wrote: post #161
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #80

For anyone experiencing workplace harassment, this article is a great example of what not to do. Instead, document everything happening to you with evidence, speak with HR about incidents as they arise, and if they don't take action, seek legal counsel. Doing anything else will paint you in a bad light.

You've clearly never had this happen to you. Go ahead, document everything, it's not going to matter. That's not how this works. If you do that they'll either say, "Ok, I see what you've got there. But that's not what we're here to discuss. We're here to discuss your negative attitude" or they can look at your documentation and say, "So what were you charging the time you were doing all this documentation to?", or, "…

I have. I don't know why you presume to know my work history. The fact that I can provide succinct actionable advise on the matter should be evidence in itself. You don't need to tell people you're documenting events. Do I need to spell that out for you?

Where I live, employment is "at-will," so it would be good to establish acting in good faith first--taking an issue to HR--before taking legal action.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#173

Post by meekrohprocess »

zcw100 wrote: post #161
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #80

For anyone experiencing workplace harassment, this article is a great example of what not to do. Instead, document everything happening to you with evidence, speak with HR about incidents as they arise, and if they don't take action, seek legal counsel. Doing anything else will paint you in a bad light.

You've clearly never had this happen to you. Go ahead, document everything, it's not going to matter. That's not how this works. If you do that they'll either say, "Ok, I see what you've got there. But that's not what we're here to discuss. We're here to discuss your negative attitude" or they can look at your documentation and say, "So what were you charging the time you were doing all this documentation to?", or, "…

I think they mean that you should document everything, then express your concerns to HR in a non-confrontational way, then quietly bring your documentation to a lawyer if nothing changes.

The documentation is your "plan B" which HR doesn't need to know about.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#174

Post by vp8989 »

lordnacho wrote: post #149
exApple-anon wrote: post #9

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. 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 e…

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…

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.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#175

Post by andrewmcwatters »

meekrohprocess wrote: post #173
zcw100 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've clearly never had this happen to you. Go ahead, document everything, it's not going to matter. That's not how this works. If you do that they'll either say, "Ok, I see what you've got there. But that's not what we're here to discuss. We're here to discuss your negative attitude" or they can look at your documentation and say, "So what were you charging the time you were doing all this documentation to?", or, "…

I think they mean that you should document everything, then express your concerns to HR in a non-confrontational way, then quietly bring your documentation to a lawyer if nothing changes. The documentation is your "plan B" which HR doesn't need to know about.

Yes.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#176

Post by the_local_host »

jfb wrote: post #106
opportune wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It's not always the case that abusive behaviour under one VP... is extrapolate-able to other organizations

A company ought to be defined by the worst conditions it allows to persist, otherwise they have less incentive to clean up their organization.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#177

Post by arcatech »

lordnacho wrote: post #149
exApple-anon wrote: post #9

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. 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 e…

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…

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.

That's Apple.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#178

Post by PragmaticPulp »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #80

For anyone experiencing workplace harassment, this article is a great example of what not to do. Instead, document everything happening to you with evidence, speak with HR about incidents as they arise, and if they don't take action, seek legal counsel. Doing anything else will paint you in a bad light.

In Part 3 the author explains attempts to schedule a meeting with HR:

> I was worried and I scheduled a meeting with HR and described what had happened.

It's easy to armchair quarterback these accounts from the internet, but let's not pretend it's as simple as walking over to HR and then calling up a lawyer who will take your case for free. These cases are much harder to win than the internet would suggest, especially when much of the claimed harassment (threatening to punch the author, joking about deportation threats) occurred verbally.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#179

Post by alpb »

I am reading through this and I bet my 200$ that this person’s manager/team was primarily white and therefore this person has faced severe racism and bullying as a result of their race:

> I had joined Apple on a student OPT visa

> I was constantly being excluded from work meetings and events. There were meetings that I would be the only one who was not invited

> my manager [...] started laughing and making fun of my last name

> My manager was giving indirect negative feedback through the iBuddy rather than speaking with me

> I would enter the meetings and they would stop talking and make really strange gestures. I was ignored, ridiculed and attacked in the team meetings

> “You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental problems.”

> “My husband worked for FBI and I can get you deported on a cargo boat if I want.”

Sounds like a bunch of bully high schoolers that never mentally graduated from high school.

I also would like to point out that this post is ranked way lower than it deserves on HN homepage, despite having higher points and shorter time than many of the posts above it. That’s quite unfair. It dropped from #1 to #7 within an hour.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#180

Post by jariel »

What's shocking is the level of effort the manager put in to being an asshole.

That is some serious psychological issue right there.

The victim also seems to be in a very bad emotional state wherein they may interpret things poorly as well, I wonder what the other side of the story was? There's enough there that I don't doubt bad behaviour, but there's also some odd points in there - if they asked her to 'resign' then that's actually a polite way of being fired. Why didn't they just fire her? Seems odd.

That would make a fun case to look into.

Finally: why do Senior Directors and VPs accept this? What kind of VP wants this kind of garbage going on under them? Why not dump the manager? Odd.

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