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My Experience at Apple

ex-apple-engineer.medium.com

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Re: My Experience at Apple

#401

Post by pavel_lishin »

throwaway29303 wrote: post #193

This is awful. I'm sorry that happened to you. However, If Apple refuse to take actions, I will interview with major media outlets describing the experience in more details and I will release a list of all individuals involved from senior management to the HR director and all the evidence as public record. You're wasting your time if you think they're going to do anything with this kind of approach. Get a lawyer firs…

OP is seemingly banking on being better at marketing than Apple is. I don't think it's a smart bet.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#403

Post by tolbish »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #364
qppo wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked on a product where it ever made sense to be "on call." I'm an engineer, not a doctor.

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?

Re: My Experience at Apple

#405

Post by jldugger »

griffoa wrote: post #318

I dont quite remember the meeting room names in Mathilda 3 over at the Apple on Mathilda Ave, but if the MA03 (in the screenshot) refers to "Mathilda 3", then this story is totally believable. I worked at Apple and it was absolutely horrible. I remember sitting on the train and actually thinking about killing myself. Reasons were many, but mostly I just didn't fit in there, I think. I felt like people there were also…

Apple's old HQ is on a street called Mariani, and both have a building named Three, viewable on Google maps.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#406

Post by saagarjha »

Apocryphon wrote: post #290
m0llusk wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 App…

Perhaps it's a case of cargo culting. His confrontational, often personally insulting behaviors were retained, but not his ability to bring people together.

It’s certainly much easier to be scathing than pairing it with the ability to actually benefit a team.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#407

Post by imaginenore »

mark_mart wrote: post #250
throwaway29303 wrote: post #193

This is awful. I'm sorry that happened to you. However, If Apple refuse to take actions, I will interview with major media outlets describing the experience in more details and I will release a list of all individuals involved from senior management to the HR director and all the evidence as public record. You're wasting your time if you think they're going to do anything with this kind of approach. Get a lawyer firs…

That's a very petty approach. Apple (or any company) could easily sue this guy for that threat.

Sue for a threat to expose? On what grounds?

Re: My Experience at Apple

#408

Post by mooreds »

andreilys wrote: post #361
meekrohprocess wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, su…

Facebook had an engineer commit suicide and the company tried to cover it up. Going as far as firing an engineer that spoke up about it - https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgn9q/do-not-discuss-the-in... So yes, this does happen. Typically to visa workers who are easily exploitable due to their precarious status in the country.

> 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).

Re: My Experience at Apple

#409

Post by saagarjha »

worker767424 wrote: post #335
someonehere wrote: post #232

I worked for Apple retail in San Francisco. Being an early retail employee in the Bay Area, we had very close ties to Cupertino. I worked when Steve was still alive. * Retail management in my store ruled by fear. I heard from other stores across the US this was the same as well. * Promotions were handed out to those who kissed ass the hardest. Even if they were unqualified or cheated on promotion exams, if they brown…

> Being an early retail employee in the Bay Area, we had very close ties to Cupertino. I worked when Steve was still alive. Steve Jobs actually interacted with retail underlings?!

Can we please not call people who work in retail “underlings”?

Re: My Experience at Apple

#410

Post by qppo »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #364
qppo wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked on a product where it ever made sense to be "on call." I'm an engineer, not a doctor.

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.

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.

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