I hope she spills all the beans publicly. Put out every picture, file document, recording, and email that she can. With accusations like this, the company and the perpetrators need to be exposed to the public, nailed to the wall.
My Experience at Apple
561–570 of 840 posts
Re: My Experience at Apple
#562Posting 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…
"we were competing with another internal team to beat them to the punch"
This is what Microsoft did, and later admitted it was bad for the products and users and teams.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#563Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can only answer with LOL to such offers Yes I've worked for a startup. Yes I did long hours. Yes I learned that's not sustainable and not a good way to make things work. So, no, I won't do it again.
I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!". That appears to mean that you will work in a small team, putting in unsustainable hours, but not receive the financial reward that a successful startup could provide. I've worked in several startups, and occasional death marches are unavoidable. They don't work month in and month out. But enduring that kind of life for just sa…
> I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!"
Imho it's frequently used to falsely motivate junior/inexperienced into working crazy hours that they might get some financial or other rewards like a startup.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't believe any of the FAANG companies have unions, not even in Europe. This is still good advice though - unions will probably help you even as a non-member.
In many European countries the presence of unions isn't optional, it's compulsory above a company size threshold for example. It doesn't mean employees have to be part of it, but it has to be present.
^ +1
to support this, just a couple of months back there was a huge mess with N26 (the neo-bank) trying to prevent its employees from unionizing and how they actually did it.
Ref: https://www.worker26.com/ & https://twitter.com/worker291
Disclaimer: No relation to N26 or the union in any way, just another Berliner supporting their cause
Re: My Experience at Apple
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI, it goes both ways. An exempt employee chooses their own hours. If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.
> If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt. This is false. First, the relevant rule that is kind of like that is the “salary basis” rule, which doesn't apply to all exempt employees; for instance, it does not apply to “Computer professionals who are paid on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 per hour.” Second, even for exempt employees subject to the salary b…
Are you sure?
This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise
https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/2006...
Re: My Experience at Apple
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
My frank response would be something along the lines of "I'm going to ask you a question, and how you respond will likely determine if I work here, 'Are you self selecting for incompetents or doormats?'" Their response to this question would probably tell you most of what you want to know about working at that company.
Yeah, you can do this when you have several equally good offers in your pocket. Meaning you're good enough to be picky. What would be your response if you don't feel you're better than all others who applied for this position?
Re: My Experience at Apple
#567I feel extremely uncharitable but I don't see any other comments raising this - this reads like a lot like the writings of people who believe they're being 'gangstalked'. Meetings being added/removed to calendars to mess with you, an 'implied' threat being left in the notes section of a hidden slide in a presentation, meeting notes being manipulated to make them look bad, this sort of thing. Maybe I'm just extremely…
Exactly my thoughts. I'm surprised that the majority of commenters here are taking this at face value. Especially, as you mentioned, the "implied hidden suicide/murder threat". If it was as the author described, 99% of people at any company on Earth would be absolutely shocked and appalled by something like that. Unless Apple is some truly some kind of other-worldly hellhole, they would not have gotten the reaction that they did.
I'm obviously not qualified to diagnose anyone, especially from reading a single blog post. But have any of the other commenters stopped and considered whether it rings true that her coworker shouted "Die!" at her on her way to the bathroom? Or does that sound more like something that someone with, say, paranoid schizophrenia would say?
Re: My Experience at Apple
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gosh - I hope that isn’t a prerequisite to greatness? How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’ Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?
I suspect that abusive behavior is an optimal strategy if you're working for abusive people. Organizations tend to be set up such that people like the people in power succeed. Jobs was a notorious jerk [1] [2] [3], so it's not surprising that similar behavior is what gets promoted. [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar... [2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-1... […
Steve Jobs died from being a jerk, to himself, because he refused to take his doctor's advice about his diet and pancreatic cancer. A reality distortion field only works so long.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#569Posting 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 also worked for Apple and I had a very similar experience. Management was brutal and abusive from my immediate manager to all the way up to and including the VP level. For example even though vacation hours were accrued I never got to use them unless I wanted to endure the verbal backlash of abandoning the team and my responsibilities. When the holidays came around the director would email everyone reminding us the…
Wow reading all these stories about Apple really is eye-opening, as I've only usually heard these types of things about Amazon before.
I say that because I work for Amazon, and my work environment is pretty bad by my standards (my team cuts a lot of corners, we are given unrealistic deadlines by upper management, our on-call is paged at least 10 times a week, we have a huge backlog of tickets and bugs that we can never prioritize, and it is overall a very stressful environment.) I guess it can always be worse...
Re: My Experience at Apple
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gosh - I hope that isn’t a prerequisite to greatness? How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’ Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?
I think this is due to the exponential payoff in a success scenario. Especially in high tech where certain initiatives can have a “winner take all” effect. I find it completely unsurprising that internally the tech giants function like a cluster of startups competing against each other. Capitalism is based on the idea of transplanting the survival of the fittest paradigm into the economy and that’s exactly how I’d ex…
Internal competition on the same project shows a lack of confidence from management... it literally shows they don't know what to do, and are just throwing spaghetti at the wall, or aren't confident in their skills to get something deployed with what they choose. It's not solid leadership, it's dissonant.
It also sets people against each other, creates better-than-you mental heirarchies between equal workers where non are necessary, and is essentially friendly fire in the workplace. I've never seen this end well.
Capitalism isn't just economic natural selection either, it favors those with capital, and especially the most of it, and is easily exploitable by them to tip the playing field in their favor against their competition and those below them. Your analogy is bad in both cases; natural selection means one side dies, which is not what's being described here, and is not good for one side anyway, and capitalism is not as good as cooperation anyway. The latter is far more efficient.