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My Experience at Apple

ex-apple-engineer.medium.com

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Re: My Experience at Apple

#551
post #53
post #27

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.

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.

> customer friendly.

The RDF is strong with you.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#552
Using an alias account obviously.

I started working for Apple a few years ago as a software engineer, after leaving a job that I liked, thinking that working for the biggest tech corporation to ever exist would be the next logical step. I don't work in California, and instead work for a satellite office in the northeast US.

People in California appear to lack the ability to understand that the northeast is three hours ahead of them. As a result, it's not uncommon for me to have meetings that go on until 9:30pm, multiple times per week. I have brought this up to my manager (and his manager (and his manager)) multiple times, asking if they can schedule meetings a bit earlier, and they say they'll "look into it". Apparently they've been "looking into it" for two years now.

Apple ostensibly supports "personal development", which would be great in theory, but anything involving this involves manager approval. While they're usually ok with you going to conferences, I tried getting approval for tuition reimbursement (which is advertised on the people/hrweb site). My direct manager said "ok", but his manager said that he's afraid that me going back to school and completing my degree would be "too big of a distraction from work", and will not be approving my request.

My job is ostensibly "individual contributor", but most of what I do is read emails, and copy and paste Java from one file to another. When I told my manager's manager that I didn't find the work enjoyable, and that I would like to be given another project, his response was that I simply "don't understand how cool the project is".

My situation is substanially less horrible than the OP's post, I don't have any visa issues or anything and I can fairly easily quit, and I probably will quit fairly soon. Still, that's a difficult thing to do, my stock packages are still vesting. Oh well.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... especially when Apple is your legal opponent. If the facts are on the employee's side, then many lawyers would take such a case on contingency because Apple (or any large, successful company) has very deep pockets to pay a judgment or settlement. Conversely, finding a lawyer to sue a small employer on contingency would be more difficult because the small employer could declare bankruptcy, making collecting a ju…

Do you actually have significant case filing you can point to about this? Genuinely asking, because it's always spoken to me that workplace abuse is extremely hard to sue over because you'll be outgunned (financially), lawyers will never work contingency because the money payout isn't worth the effort, and the employee in trying to legally defend themselves have now permanently ruined their career prospects.

> ...lawyers will never work contingency because the money payout isn't worth the effort...

This is probably true in a lot of cases. So, whether or not suing is worth it will depend on the specific facts of a case.

> ...the employee in trying to legally defend themselves have now permanently ruined their career prospects.

I agree this is a significant issue.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#554

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…

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 servi…

> 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.

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.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#556
Empathetic with the OP here. And an investigation should be undertaken. However it would be naive to expect this does not happen at Apple. It has thousands of employees. Many of them forgotten. They will try to self preserve. I don't see it as a black and white case.

Do not expect rosy experience at any company ever.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#557
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-1…

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…

> 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?

Re: My Experience at Apple

#558

I read the story. Damn this team sucks. If I were the author, I would start interviewing with other companies after the first week.

I think part of the issue is immigration/visa problems. If you're a US citizen/permanent-resident, there's sort of a "ceiling" to how much abuse you will get from your employer, since at the end of the day you can say "fuck this, I'm working somewhere else"...however, if you're on some kind of visa, these things get a lot more difficult, since the company doesn't just control your livelihood, they actually control you being allowed in the country at all.

While of course you can still apply to other places, and maybe you'll get lucky to find another company who wil sponsor your visa, it's a substantially more-uphill battle.

(disclaimer, not an immigrant, this is just based on what immigrant friends have told me and from what I've read).

Re: My Experience at Apple

#559
I read this whole, long article, and I don't understand how you're freaking out at every. single. step. although you do say the visa thing is the root stress.

But you seem to be freaking out even at not getting on-boarded immediately or that you don't have detailed explanation of what you will be working on the first day, or that you're not immediately invited to all the meetings. I work at Autodesk. This is completely normal, it takes a couple of weeks to start on a team and not everything is clear, especially if a key person just left. This isn't a job at Burger King where everything is clear. Also, nobody is going to structure their vacations around you. Some head count is getting allocated, and then filled, often with huge delays, and that person arrives at a certain date, and while people know it's coming, it's not necessarily a good time for anyone, it is forced on us. It's troublesome to onboard the intern or new employee and it gets past around like a hot potatoes sometimes. And no, often there isn't any documentation. I've onboarded probably over 50 people over 20 years.

It sounds like you arrived after the project was just sent in a tailspin and people are having meetings just to figure out WTF is the state is the state of project, and you shouldn't have expected to be invited to all those meetings, as you have nothing to contribute as junior and the people probably weren't sure of anything. It's normal. Also, that iBuddy yapping about the previous guy getting fired? We can't know the context, have you thought that person was hugely stressed about it too and sharing that earnestly? I mean, they're on the sinking project as well? And at least she's talking to you and putting you in the context of the team. Insensitive, perhaps, but again the world isn't going to rearrange around you.

At one point in the story, you're clearly falling into a depression, and seeing everything dark. A manager repeatedly cancelling and re-scheduling a meeting isn't a plot to harass you: it happens a lot to busy people, we don't know what kind of crisis he's dealing with. During this whole thing, you just assume that everyone is just taking off, missing work, and focused on you. These people might actually be going through crisis on their own and having to put out fires left-and-right.

This last bit, where you get a meeting in a locked abandoned building you think nobody should have access to, and you ask the senior director to leave because he wasn't invited: You realize that's paranoid thinking and crazy behavior, right? When you need to have a HR-type meeting with an employee, you have it in a private place -- for the employee's benefit! It's for you that it's in a private place, away from other people's prying eyes. Then, of course, the whole point of the meeting is to have the senior director talk to you, that's what the meeting is, he didn't show up unplanned. He's not on the invite so that you're not too stressed on the way. The idea that they're keeping it secret and deleting the meeting from the calendar to hide it is just paranoid delusions perhaps caused by depression. It's the way it's done. These meetings are happening because you're in deep shit, it's very rare. The director is offering you to leave on our own so that you can leave with your head up and on your own terms, and not have the record of having been fired. It's a kind of curtesy. This might sound horrible -- but firing someone is a last resort.

Now, don't get me wrong. I've hired people from india, china, singapore, and other places. I have no doubt that you have suffered inappropriate comments and racist behavior. But we don't know the full story! I've had to fire people as well, who seem to do a lot of work, but a lot of useless work that needed to be redone, or get stuck into rat holes for week without asking questions. These people all thought they were doing as best, and got multiple warnings and "PIPs" (Performance Improvement Projects, as you know) as they could and no doubt had a lot of fingers to point after they were let go. It's always other people's fault.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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