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Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

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Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#351
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

class traitor I talk about class issues and economic justice a lot, but nobody owes prior allegiance to a particular class in a way that you can call them a traitor, unless it's some extreme example like a union official being willingly corrupted by a corporate fat cat - in which case a person is reneging on a promise they made, not some unilateral obligation. You might not like or disapprove of someone's work/life c…

They're framing their position as wanting to "help their colleagues" and not be a "mercenary", while in actually they're harming those colleagues for the sake of their "big promotion"; they're not just embracing a different value system but performing allegiance to communal values while actually undermining them. I'd have a certain respect for someone who openly acknowledged that they were trying to win a race to the…

That kind of reasoning is a great way to impress other Marxist-Leninists (of which I am not one) and alienate everyone else. I seriously doubt this person has ever professed or aimed to perform 'allegiance to communal values'; You're excoriating them for going back on a promise they never made, which is a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. Whether that's what you intended or a reflex you've developed, it has no basis in reality.

As I said, I don't think much of this person's choices or attitudes, but you can't betray that which you never signed up for to begin with.

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#352
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s difficult about it? Personally, I like knowing that my personal GitHub credentials stay only on my personal devices and my work credentials stay only on my work devices. I never have to worry about the two mixing and any problems that might arise.

Presuming you also contribute to FOSS projects, and that you additionally use the FOSS you work on personally at work , there will come a point at which a bug you find at work will require you to fix the upstream FOSS project on your work laptop. At that point, getting the git-commit attribution correct gets annoying.

Well, if I work on it at work for work then the attribution should be under my work email. Otherwise, it should be under my personal email.

So far, the only problem I've ever had with separate accounts (including contributing to FOSS) is one time (once!) somebody selected the wrong email alias to review a CL. That took all of (literally) 10 seconds to fix.

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#353
post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is stupid. Reformat your personal device every week as a habitual practice. Keep multiple personal devices. Use voice when possible so that wiretap laws protect you. Company should have no right to your family communications. I never use text.

I don’t know why you keep saying it is the company that is trying to access your communications. It isn’t. It is the courts ordering you to hand over your communication. If you delete something that the court has ordered you to turn over, they can and will charge you with contempt. Again, this isn’t your employer doing this. Your employer would love if you didn’t turn over anything, but they are legally required to c…

Well no, just reformat your device regularly and habitually just out of your own practice. Don't use text. Use voice calls. Maintain inbox zero on your personal e-mail.

That way if ordered by the legal system you'll only actually have at most 1 week of personal data and none of it will be text.

You won't be deleting anything after their request, you will just hand over what you have, which is incidentally not much.

Wiretapping laws prevent courts from getting your voice records, at least in CA.

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is simply false. Apple doesn’t expect you to use a personal iCloud account, and is very clear about warning you about sharing /storing personal data on work systems. I have very little sympathy for someone that used a personal account containing nudes on a work device. That was a work-inappropriate choice with entirely predictable results.

In this day and age, having nudes in any device connected to the cloud is irresponsible.

Unless you are fine with your nudes

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#355
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're framing their position as wanting to "help their colleagues" and not be a "mercenary", while in actually they're harming those colleagues for the sake of their "big promotion"; they're not just embracing a different value system but performing allegiance to communal values while actually undermining them. I'd have a certain respect for someone who openly acknowledged that they were trying to win a race to the…

That kind of reasoning is a great way to impress other Marxist-Leninists (of which I am not one) and alienate everyone else. I seriously doubt this person has ever professed or aimed to perform 'allegiance to communal values'; You're excoriating them for going back on a promise they never made, which is a kind of rhetorical sleight of hand. Whether that's what you intended or a reflex you've developed, it has no basi…

I'm by no means a Marxist-Leninist; I meant communal in the normal everyday sense of "belonging to this community". Again, they talk about wanting to help their colleagues and not wanting to be too mercenary - values most of us will sympathise with - but their actions are actually opposed to those values.

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#356
post #345
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're trying to get promoted by doing unpaid overtime and/or unpaid oncall shifts, you're a class traitor screwing over your colleagues. Help them by setting healthy boundaries even if you don't actually need them yourself.

You might want to check that anger a bit. As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance. I also have responsibilities to my family and to my colleagues, and balancing those is difficult. Especially during a pandemic with no child care - I'm full time working and full time parenting. Can you empathize with that?

> As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance.

If you're working overtime and on-call outside of work hours then no, you don't. That's not healthy and there's no way to make it healthy. You talk about "owning" responsibility for fixing this thing if it breaks, but real ownership is two-sided - do you have a meaningful equity stake (token stock options don't count) in whatever that system does so that you're getting the upside as well as the downside?

If you're choosing to spend your life and health on something you actually own, fair enough, it's your funeral. But if you're a worker then it's not your job to deal with that. I can understand that as a parent you're vulnerable, you don't want to lose your job, and when the bosses say the business wouldn't be viable if they had to pay for a proper night shift (or whatever rate it would take for them to get enough coverage from you and your colleagues voluntarily taking those shifts - funny how the biggest fans of "free markets" don't seem to like being on the receiving end) then it's hard to stand up to that. But doing free favours for the bosses is like paying Danegeld - once you start it will only get worse.

You keep talking about responsibility to your colleagues, but what you're doing hurts them a lot. That's where my anger comes from.

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#357
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have found few things as freeing as removing slack from my phone, especially at the playground - i enjoy the time i spend with my kids more.

To me, being at the playground is not a prime example of spending time with my kids. I'm fine with replying to some work related messages while basically watching my kids play. Playing soccer together, reading to them, playing a board game, doing a joint Lego construction project, learning them to skate, etc. That's spending time together. It doesn't mix well with work.

> To me, being at the playground is not a prime example of spending time with my kids.

It is if you actually play with them while there.

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#358
post #356
post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to check that anger a bit. As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance. I also have responsibilities to my family and to my colleagues, and balancing those is difficult. Especially during a pandemic with no child care - I'm full time working and full time parenting. Can you empathize with that?

> As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance. If you're working overtime and on-call outside of work hours then no, you don't. That's not healthy and there's no way to make it healthy. You talk about "owning" responsibility for fixing this thing if it breaks, but real ownership is two-sided - do you have a meaningful equity stake (token stock options don't count) in whatever that system does so that you're gett…

I'm not actually working meaningful overtime.

I am working a more flexible schedule where I handle some details from my phone AFK and work dedicated hours at times that fit better with family obligations.

I actually believe setting that expectation helps my colleagues.

And again, I work at small companies by choice. If we fail a product, the company may fail, then we are all out of a job.

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what kind of workplace did you work in? Here in Germany I think gathering many of these facts would simply be illegal.

A bank in Europe, it was EU wide laws that resulted in all mobile phones being brought into the surveilence net. It has been common in banks to use recorded lines for decades, but the regulatons effectively mandated monitoring of every communication internally and externally post the libor scandal. That said, when I have worked outside the region or in less regulated positions - the intrusion into particularly email…

Financial companies are surely different from eg Apple though. As far as I’m aware, there are no laws forcing Apple to log as much of their internal communications as a typical financial company would have to.

Re: Apple explicitly asks employees to merge their personal and work accounts

#360
post #358
post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As I said, I do have a healthy work life balance. If you're working overtime and on-call outside of work hours then no, you don't. That's not healthy and there's no way to make it healthy. You talk about "owning" responsibility for fixing this thing if it breaks, but real ownership is two-sided - do you have a meaningful equity stake (token stock options don't count) in whatever that system does so that you're gett…

I'm not actually working meaningful overtime. I am working a more flexible schedule where I handle some details from my phone AFK and work dedicated hours at times that fit better with family obligations. I actually believe setting that expectation helps my colleagues. And again, I work at small companies by choice. If we fail a product, the company may fail, then we are all out of a job.

> If we fail a product, the company may fail, then we are all out of a job.

My view remains that if you're going above and beyond then that shouldn't be just to avoid the downside - you should also be getting a proportionate piece of the upside. For a small software company skilled workers are often bringing most of the value to the table, so you should have a corresponding ownership stake (I don't mean that purely rhetorically - from a friend who works at a consultancy that's structured as a cooperative it sounds like it's very much a "normal job" in practice).

Of course in a more capital-intensive business, or if you're blitzscaling, then maybe the owners are bringing something else to the table that you couldn't replicate with just a gang of programmers. But in that case capital is almost always a part of what they're bringing, and that means the company should be in a position to be paying what things cost.

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