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 li…
I disagree, such an approach completely desensitizes the human aspect of work and treats the people working as commodities that are expendable. Engineering is hard, teams might need to go through multiple iterations/generations to get the desired results. A better investment would be to develop the right engineering culture rather than Team A vs Team B duking it out.
you are out of touch with reality. people are expendable, not pleasant but true - get a grip :) Also, try describing the "right engineering culture"
> 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.
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?
Because often time to market is more important that R&D costs or tech debt for the success of a company. If you win the market, the profits will compensate for the additional R&D costs, and you can release increments to address the tech debt. Customers actually appreciate this, as they are constantly looking for better, newer versions of the product.
I have read things like this from time to time here about bad experiences: > I had no interaction with my manager and she was refusing to have regular 1:1 meetings with me and was not responding to my emails. Seriously, this is the most common red flag in these stories. Not having regular 1:1 meetings (when that's supposed to be a thing) and slow/no communication is an _immediate_ GTFO, do not look back, it is not go…
Wow ... now that I think back - this statement and its converse have been consistently true for me as well over many jobs. Not that frequent 1:1 is a silver bullet... but not having it at all never helps!
My brief advice to anyone writing such a post: start with the most serious accusation you have, and avoid the temptation to add ancillary grievances, however justified, until you have the reader fully engaged and outraged. The way this post structured now, beginning with fairly unspecific complaints about the hiring process, who invited whom to lunch, etc. makes the author come across as a young high-drama individual…
I stopped reading when it became obvious that this was some coddled kid’s first exposure to real life. When I see words like “psychological safety”, that sounds straight out of the playbook with the Brown University “safe spaces” crap. Maybe they were saving their real bombs for the end. I’ll never know, but they are probably going to have a very difficult time adjusting to any job.
> 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.
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?
If money isn't part of the equation, this may actually be the best approach.
During the 2007 financial crisis I worked at a bank that had to develop risk software really fast to comply with regulations and prevent disaster. They had two teams work on the same project and once a winning team emerged, they killed of the other. But the result was used for only a year or two, and replaced by a long term solution which was developed by yet another team in parallel.
As the saying goes, in software development, we can control speed, cost and quality, but only two at the same time.
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 complete…
I created an account just to say what a horrible human being you are. You assumed alot of things none of which are even remotely close to reality. Be empathetic, not everything has to happen to you for you to believe it.
ex-Apple employee so using an obvious throwaway.
One of the things to understand about Apple is they take disclosure and security very seriously, to an anal degree. After initial on-boarding an employee goes through the disclosure process where she has to submit requests for every project she will work on. Those things are very fine-grained, you rarely get full project disclosure, and have to ask for specific relevant parts, such as architecture, plans, or something else.
This process takes a lot of time. Up to weeks. During that time, you CANNOT be exposed to any material related to the project. If someone exposes you to it, they will be disciplined and may be fired. This is why employees might not get invited to meetings once they land in the organization, they are not yet disclosed.
Besides that, Apple is a very high stress environment and there's no lack of scare-stories of employees who violated some guidelines or protocols (especially relating to leaking sensitive information, even by accident) who got axed. Apple will ruthlessly protect its secrets and its corporate image. It is not pleasant at the ground level, but that's how it is. Moreover, stress tends to propagate down the organizational pyramid. A C level breathing down the necks of the managers under him will translate to 100s of engineers feeling the heat.
My time at Apple wasn't pleasant at start but that was solved easily by some communication. Later when projects started getting stressful I experienced some of that stress and some of the blame culture. People will come down hard on you, and it will come back to bite you in the ass in your yearly review if some manager feels you messed something up, even if your own manager told you just a few months back you're doing well.
To summarize my time there, I liked the team and the group, not the organization. The author might want to seek therapy to better handle what she went through. I don't think half of it was as malicious as she thinks, but it would help both with overcoming the trauma and putting things in perspective.
Accenture used to be Arthur Anderson but changed the name as a result of the Enron scandal.
Accenture spun off of HP. Don't know what happened to AA.
You're thinking of Agilent. Also Accenture didn't change their name due to Enron. It happened before the scandal (so quite lucky for them!) Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting were involved in a legal tussle which required them to change their name...
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/business/worldbusiness/IH...
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 li…
Suffering is the commodity engineers are providing.