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My Experience at Apple

ex-apple-engineer.medium.com

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Re: My Experience at Apple

#741

Post by josto »

xvector wrote: post #661
josto wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talk to a workers compensation attorney. If this job was less than five years ago, don’t delay. It cost nothing! The attorney gets 15% when they settle the case.

Doesn’t this only work if (s)he recorded the overtime? Otherwise the company would just say there’s no evidence.

No evidence needed. Let the lawyer deal with that stuff. In California, the evidence is what a QME says it is. A medical report is the evidence. The QME will look at all medical records and make a determination.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#742

Post by KiwiJohnno »

spookster wrote: post #704
dlgeek wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accenture used to be Arthur Anderson but changed the name as a result of the Enron scandal.

That’s just not true. Arthur Andersen originally spun off its consulting arm into “Andersen Consulting” under a global holding company. AA did accounting, AC consulting. AC paid AA 15% of its profits every year. But AC was growing far faster than AA, so AA started growing another consulting arm, which was against the contract. AC partners claimed contractual breach, and as part of the separation settlement had to cha…

Here is another AC story for you: I worked at a bank in the late 90s, on a crunch y2k project that was instigated because AC knowingly installed a non-y2k compliant set of core systems in about 1997, and didn't pass on the vendor's warnings about y2k to the bank management.

The AC project (which ran about 93-97) went kinda rogue, the bank management lost control of the situation. The AC project managers kept bringing in more AC consultants and told the bank management not to worry, everything was good. They were heavily customizing a non-y2k version of the vendor's software, and the vendor warned project management that they were customizing this in ways that would prevent future support and patches, but AC project management covered this up.

Eventually the vendor contacted the bank CEO directly and said "what are you going to do about the y2k issue, we are concerned". CEO: "What y2k issue?"

The bank had to go live with what they had, fire and blacklist AC and burn tens of millions of $$ to re-start the project to deliver exactly the same thing, but using a y2k-compliant version as a starting point, and removing as much customization as possible so they could take future vendor patches.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#743

Post by j1elo »

acntr_employee wrote: post #710
j1elo wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I even had to look for what it means to "be exempt". > Exempt employees stand in contrast to non-exempt employees, which are paid minimum wage and overtime above the standard 40-hour workweek. Wow if I had heard this in a random bar discussion I would called it complete and utter bullshit. The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can hap…

From my contract, there is no overtime pay. Overtime has to be given as free time within a specific amount of time after the overtime occurred. But for any rolling period of x timeunits (don't want to be too specific obviously) I have a specific amount of hours of overtime that the company doesn't need to compensate in free time. In my case this is ~20% of my regular time in ever rolling period. But up to a maximum a…

No overtime payment specified in mine, either. The usual thing is to "fall back" to what the law says, and that's what I've seen mostly everywhere. Maybe in other sectors this is negotiated differently, though; apart from the grounds laid by law, a set of sector-specific collective agreements might have been set up in the past for different sectors, further improving or detailing their particular work conditions.

Overall, workers are given a lot more protection than what I feel there is in the US, and that percolates into the common culture and the expectations. Then we get surprised when seeing what happens in other places :-) (both ways)

Re: My Experience at Apple

#744

Post by engineersays »

exApple-anon wrote: post #9

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…

About 10 years ago I was interviewing at Apple (Cupertino office) for a software architect level position for iTunes. So I'm sitting alone in cold conference room, waiting for the last interview with hiring manager. Finally middle-aged lady comes in with very serious impression on her face and first thing she says is: "So, tell me why are you dreaming about working at Apple?". That moment I realized it's not going to be good cultural fit :) When I rejected the offer their recruiter was very insistent on getting the answer whether it was the money or not. They never ever contacted me again.

Another funny thing I remember from that experience is that they gave new hires t-shirt which says "Journey is the reward". So it's not "Money is the reward" but some mythical "journey". Apple is so full of shit.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#745

Post by ianbutler »

dvtrn wrote: post #419
ianbutler wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) how I can assess if the team is bleeding talent Nothing wrong with asking the average tenure of people on the team imo, that is something you can frame in a way less likely to make them lie.

I'll be honest, my default perspective is to expect filibustering and non-answers from all but the actualized and self-aware teams, who if reading this thread and many, many others like it, and lived experience are anything reliable: are less common than their frustrating counterparts.

You can use that to make your decision then. Both filibustering or a non answer in this case are as good as a negative answer for what you want to figure out with it.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#748

Post by shishy »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #618
idlewords wrote: post #469

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’re completely wrong, i’d encourage you to read this

Re: My Experience at Apple

#749

Post by kamaal »

microtherion wrote: post #449
boxmonster wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it totally believable that a Muslim would get harrassed given the current toxic political climate.

It's hard to know what's going on in every corner of a company as large as Apple, but open harassment certainly would not fly in our particular organization. Our team alone has engineers belonging to 4 different religions I know of (and obviously quite a few not identifying with any particular religion), and I've seen at least Christians, Hindus, and Muslims promoted to management.

>>but open harassment certainly would not fly in our particular organization.

Can't comment much on Apple. But as a Muslim I've seen this in quite a few places. Both in India and the US.

It's not even that much a company thing as much as it is a personal thing. Some people are just bigoted and don't like you. In fact the very sight of your existence disturbs them very deeply. And yeah, if you are better than them, it just makes the problem more worse. It's like they have to now deal with the realization deep down that they inferior to the person they hate.

Mostly Muslims just move on, because we have bills to pay, and families to support. Over long periods of time, it's not really possible to fight these political battles every time you have bigots around you.

I've also known cases when things are proven beyond doubt and the HR is likely to take action on the bigot, they start citing excuses like 'mental health' and 'personal preferences'.

You can't win this, there are going to be these kind of people anywhere you go. You just leave them to their state, and move on.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#750

Post by kamyarg »

nurspouse wrote: post #627
kamyarg wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "pipeline" is also easy in the US. Come here for a MS degree, and get hired. For many other countries, it's not that easy. Some allow you to immigrate due to your advanced degree, but with no guarantee of work, so you need to have plenty of money saved while you look for work - something many cannot afford. I have to disagree with this as an Iranian working in Germany who moved with an offer on a Blue Card. Aft…

> I have to disagree with this as an Iranian working in Germany who moved with an offer on a Blue Card. Reading up on it, I assume you got this offer while not in the EU? That is impressive. Over here (and often in Canada as well), few companies will give you an offer without you doing an on site interview - unless you are clearly exceptional. So it becomes a Catch-22. (Of course, things likely changed in the age of…

> Reading up on it, I assume you got this offer while not in the EU? That is impressive.

Yes, I got the offer while in Turkey and they did a virtual onsite. But I have multiple friends that got offer without an actual onsite(Including pre-covid). So can not say it is an exception.

I think in EU the minority are loud as you mentioned but I think got loader after 2016. Especially here in Germany AfD has been more vocal and had some textbook level racist scandals. But in general as I said, I and people around me did not have plain racist experiences, maybe subtle ones we have not noticed.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-afd-apologizes-after-outcry-ov...

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