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My Experience at Apple

ex-apple-engineer.medium.com

731–740 of 840 posts

Re: My Experience at Apple

#731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't get what's the problem here. I manage a team and one time I booked a vacation and then we hired a guy. He quit (he was the only person to ever quit that was working under me, company is treating employees good) and said in the review that this was horrible from my side. Am I not suppose to take a vacation ever?

You can take vacations whenever you want, but you can't hire new staff and just let them twist in the wind concurrently with you taking time off. Holidays are planned ahead. Don't hire at the same time. Easy.

> Holidays are planned ahead. Don't hire at the same time. Easy.

This is not realistic and quite frankly bad suggestion.

"Yeah, we would hire you next week, but since manager is on vacation we can hire you only in three weeks." Said no-one ever.

And what's the problem in taking those first two weeks to just slowly get to know the code and get to know your workmates? If I had a situation like that I would be thankful that I don't get shoved into work immediately and can take my time.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#732
post #510

The title could easily be My experience at a software firm. No large organization are without more than a few assholes

^ this. It’s par for the course who anyone in tech at a large corporation who’s not naive or looking at life thru rose colored lenses. You are a cog in their machine, an employee number that either is a cost or profit center. Nothing more

Re: My Experience at Apple

#733
post #691
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Funny how people keep flagging these comments for speaking the truth about working in big tech. People seem to want to have their cake and eat it too. The rosy dreams will never mesh with reality

Re: My Experience at Apple

#734
post #45

My wife -- not a current or ex-Apple employee -- had a very similar experience as this, at a different company and in a different geographical location than Apple. It's unfortunate that workplace abuse is so easy to do and hard to fix. She called their bluff when they told her they could easily replace her, after she spoke up about the treatment. They were shocked that she would actually leave. I was so proud of her.

I have to say -- I'm rather amazed to see folks downvoting this comment. Make of that what you will but I think that speaks for itself.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#735

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.

You stopped reading and formed an incredibly offensive and demeaning opinion of them, validated by something that doesn't exist?

Re: My Experience at Apple

#736

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember my SO working for a German bank. It was exactly as you describe. She was in a back-office job. She always said she was an overpaid perl script 95% of the time and interesting work for the rest. Exploitation is common in many companies. For me this stems from information asymmetry. Employer knows the job market, knows the salary spread, knows all internal salaries. As an employee you do not have these insig…

> Not sure what a potential solution would look like. Make all salaries public by law - you could even anonymize people, although there would be lots of issues with that caveat. I'm not saying this is a good solution (most people don't want to talk about their salaries), but it would solve the problem. It's already the case for government employees.

I am working as a works council member. I have access to anonymized salary information.

Problem is - I can easily deanonymize at least 15 - 25% of all people working at our company. It isn't easy. Also in Germany we have a law in place that allows to query your employer for average salary data in some specific cases (there have to be at least 6 comparable coworkers of the other gender).

Bu I agree - I would love for a more transparent approach. Even if this can come with it's own problems.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#737
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you refer to the US immigration policy, this is how it works essentially everywhere. In the UK, for example, you get around 60 days to find a new job or you have to leave the country. https://iasservices.org.uk/tier-2-visa-termination-employmen... I am not saying that the immigration policy is not broken or broken, I am simply stating the fact that other countries literally do the same.

If you're on a H1 (or some of its cousins here) and you lose your job, you have no option to even try to find another. Your legal status in the US is coupled to that job, not just any job.

Are you sure that is correct? According to results from googling you get 60 days to find a new job if you got laid off from H1B job. https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/05/steps-after-an-h1b-layoff.... Ps: to someone who downvoted, what don't you agree with?

Re: My Experience at Apple

#738

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t sound like she was being taken advantage of, they obviously wanted her to leave. She was staying (and killing herself) out of fear deportation which sucks. My question is if California is at-will employment why didn’t they fire her when things weren’t working out? Is it because she went to HR?

Perps want to continue the abuse. It gives them happiness.

So you think everyone invoked at Apple was conspiring to keep her there to pleasure themselves? Does that really sound likely?

Re: My Experience at Apple

#739
post #260

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…

Sounds like Disney.

Do you mean park side or Corp side? Because I’ve heard bad stories about the park side of things

Re: My Experience at Apple

#740

"If you are an Apple employee, please send this story to your upper management particularly Tim Cook." What exactly should we say? "Hey Tim, this unnamed ex-employee, working on an unnamed and extremely vaguely characterized project in an unnamed organization, is accusing unnamed co-workers, managers, and HR-representatives of perpetrating truly appalling abuses on her. You should look into this at once!" ? It's a di…

I have seen people on Twitter get angry over less information. What’s wrong with escalating this internally? We can both agree that there should be a real investigation right?
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