81–90 of 566 posts
Most of these former employees feel legally threatened by their former employers, and that's what prevents them from sharing more.
I wish there was a way.
Another perfect data point to add to Michael O`Church`s excellent series on the politics and psychology of the modern corporation. For you starry eyed youngsters, just remember that this is Apple, the world`s most profitable company. It only gets worse as you go down the list. Work for yourself. Consulting, the trades and any type of work you can do independently is far superior to dealing with wannabe Machiavellians…
Whoa whoa. Consulting isn't the answer. There are plenty of opportunities in both private and public sector on awesome teams with amazing management.
You get a lot more freedom and typically a higher pay, but sometimes management uses consultants to be the fall guys or hires consultants to confirm their existing decisions. It takes a lot of business savvy (read: empathy) to understand why you're really being hired as a consultant.
I don't think OP here would be happy consulting. (Just my 2 cents.)
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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 av…
Do you, by chance, have a list of those exceptional cases? I'd love to learn more! edit: thanks everyone for these replies they're great, keep them coming!
This is why Tim Cook is CEO: he was the architect of their supply chain strategy which basically ensured nobody could build a phone at the same level as Apple. But he took what was once a pure cost center for Apple and turned it into the engine of their dominance.
I can't say I've seen the same for customer support though. It's just not a strategic advantage in most industries because only a small percentage of your customers ever call in to support in the first place.
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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.
If staff are consistently having to work overtime to hit targets then there's either: - A problem with the staff - there's either not enough of them or they haven't the skills to do what is required or - A problem with the management. I've never worked in a role where incompetent people were hired and couldn't get what needed to be done done, but I've worked under plenty of incompetent management.
Is this for real? Can anyone else corroborate this?
Certainly you hear a fair bit about Apple as a high-pressure work environment. Long hours, lots of paranoia -- though by "paranoia" I'm specifically thinking of developers, and not revealing anything Apple might be working on that isn't publicly known yet. Well, and related things like tracking what buildings you enter by your badge, access to specific labs, etc. Stuff to make sure people don't know more than they sh…
I've found it is easy to poach talent from Apple, Google, and other large ventures. It's not the money. It's the vision and the way they treat talent. They don't pay much deference to the consummate creators, the lifeblood of innovation. Long hours, synchronous work schedules with asynchronous dependencies, long commutes, and not an equal pay to warrant education level and mental capacity required for task at hand. I…
I definitely think the "startup life" culture is something a lot of people will eventually consider a downside. I recently interviewed at a place with an open floor plan, and I found that a big turn off to the position. While free lunch and dinner are nice perks, sure, they also suggest you're still at work for lunch and dinner. I want a job, not an overly-attached workplace.
I've worked at net-new startups, very large companies, and companies like I've described above. I miss the comraderie of a team under a dozen people making good progress and with everyone able to make good impact without being a superstar.
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…
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>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.
In "Becoming Steve Jobs", Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple's collusion scandal: "I know where Steve's head was. He wasn't doing anything to hold down salaries; it never came up. He had a simple objective: if we were working together on something, like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said, 'let's convert the Mac to the Intel processor', well, when we did that, we did…
But then, I've seen that attitude in startups. The passion for the company as a whole trumps everything so the people are easily disposable to them. Which, as in so many other areas of life, is completely backwards from what they perceive as logical.