I Quit: What really goes on at Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#41

Post by phkahler » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #14

One of my friends used to work at Apple. After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners. Meanwhile, all of his friends worked for Google, we got gourmet food every meal of the week as a standard perk, and we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight. It's sorta like "Your 'thank you' is really more like a giant '…

Crunch time is fine when its uncommon and unforseen. Otherwise it is a manag3ment failure. Perhaps its deliberate failure to respect peoples personal life, but that's still a failure. I've worked plenty of places where crunch time is uncommon or nonexistent. It doesn't have to be that way.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#42

Post by colechristensen » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:54 PM UTC

Apple has, what, a hundred thousand employees?

If you expect none of them to be intolerable nuts, you have a problem with scale.

The thing is, if you're unsatisfied with your job, equating your personal experience with the entire company as a whole, and going on a long name-calling rant shows you as rather unprofessional yourself.

I don't doubt that some Apple managers are jerks.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#43

Post by yulaow » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:55 PM UTC

joezydeco wrote: post #38

yulaow wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that, if I remember correctly for what I read in the book about the biography of Steve Jobs, in the very old apple of Jobs and the Lisa, the team leaded by Jobs was working 120 hours/week and even making t-shirt to brag about it.

It was 90 hours. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=90_Hours_A_Week_A...

Thanks, I really have to re-read that book one of these days.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#44

Post by enraged_camel » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:55 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #14

One of my friends used to work at Apple. After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners. Meanwhile, all of his friends worked for Google, we got gourmet food every meal of the week as a standard perk, and we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight. It's sorta like "Your 'thank you' is really more like a giant '…

>>After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners.

Eh, it could be worse.

At a previous company I worked for, one of the executives passed away. There was a funeral on a Friday, followed by reception. Guess what the lunch was on Monday at the office? The leftovers from the reception.

A similar thing happened where the CEO had a party at his house for the engineering department. No one else was invited. The following day, company lunch was leftovers from that party.

Looking back, I wish they had simply given us frozen dinner vouchers rather than shitty food.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#45

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

The culture of silence between Apple and the public extends to more than just upcoming products. Has anyone noticed that there aren't as many Apple employees participating in tech conferences, hackathons, public presentations? Even for subjects unrelated to their work? Definitely fewer than Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft employees.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#46

Post by vdnkh » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #35

vdnkh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Usually home by 8 or 9pm I assume they got into work at 8 or 9am? That's terrible. I'm really glad that I work a standard 8 hour day at my small no-name company.

More like 10 or 11. Most of my friends are late-risers (perhaps because I'm a late-riser), and Google doesn't have set hours. People have been known to roll into work around 2:30 PM as long as they get their work done.

That's pretty cool. I hope to work there some day. My hours now are flexible; I come in and leave an hour early to avoid traffic.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#47

Post by Chinjut » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:56 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #36

mhurron wrote: post #2

That's a lot of words to say Apple is a corporation and acts like many others. I guess the author expected it to be like an iPod commercial when he started.

Agreed. Sounds like it acts like many (not all!) others. I've worked at a lot of places. I've been told that open-heart surgery would be counted as a vacation day. I've been in 3-hour meetings where a dozen executives bickered the whole time over how one toggle should be labeled. I've been where fully half the employees had been fired and continued working on the sheer grace/need of the owner. I've been given hard de…

You seem to be implicitly conflating two different senses of the word "right". I don't think it was in any doubt that this kind of behavior can be to Apple's profit(+). What's in doubt is whether it is behavior which the rest of us should put up with; market dominance is not the end-all, be-all arbiter of desirable behavior, at least not to me.

(+: Some people will try to get rid of this kind of behavior purely by arguing that it in fact harms an employer's productivity (via burning out their employees). This may be tactically effective, but I think it frames the debate on the wrong terms, conceding too much of the argument at the start; it allows for just as much abuse as maximizes productivity. The reason to get rid of this kind of behavior is not fundamentally because of its impact on the employer's bottom-line, but because the people affected by it are human beings who deserve empathy and dignity regardless)

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#48

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #36

mhurron wrote: post #2

That's a lot of words to say Apple is a corporation and acts like many others. I guess the author expected it to be like an iPod commercial when he started.

Agreed. Sounds like it acts like many (not all!) others. I've worked at a lot of places. I've been told that open-heart surgery would be counted as a vacation day. I've been in 3-hour meetings where a dozen executives bickered the whole time over how one toggle should be labeled. I've been where fully half the employees had been fired and continued working on the sheer grace/need of the owner. I've been given hard de…

For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#49

Post by serve_yay » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:57 PM UTC

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #40

Words like ‘pressure’ kept getting thrown at me in the context of I can’t handle the pressure and “you were told at the interview it’s high pressure”. Oh lord. As though any of them have any clue about real "high pressure" work environments. Being an asshole unnecessarily isn't a high pressure environment.

Quite so, but nonetheless Apple very much strikes me as a high-pressure workplace. There's a reason why they ship what they ship when they ship it.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#50

Post by DaFranker » Wed, Apr 08, 2015, 7:58 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #24

But... the author worked in customer support, managing agents. Customer support in any company is like this: it's full of bobblehead managers who make work to justify their own jobs. It's a cost center, and cost centers are where you put executives who are capable, but not exceptional. This is why OP has stories about how firing people was considered heroic -- when you work in a cost center, the only thing the busine…

An adept representation of a limited sample of the issues surrounding customer support and similar departments.

The problem is that it doesn't have to be like this. There are exceptional cases where customer support is not like this. Many of them have gained considerable benefit from investing in their customer support. One source of difficulty is that evaluation of those benefits requires very complicated (for an average middle manager) mathematics and causal modeling. There's no simple metric that measures the real benefits of good customer support, even tangentially.