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I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

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Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#91

Post by endtime »

vdnkh wrote: post #32
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 '…

>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.

I normally work 1:00 to 9:00, at Google NYC.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#92

Post by nostrademons »

beamatronic wrote: post #55
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 '…

>> a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners. That sounds very odd. Was this Omaha Steaks by chance? Perhaps it was meant well.

I don't know; he referred to it as "frozen dinners" and was pretty mad about it. He's the sort of person that would appreciate Omaha Steaks, so I don't think that's it.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#93

Post by johnward »

borgia wrote: post #76
MrNobody wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding Apple effectively owns your entire output when you're employed full-time (at least as an engineer). At a recent interview I mentioned I like tinkering with code on the side and was told I'd have to give that up and stop contributing to open source. I imagine that extends to participation in the "outside world" at least to some extent. The fact that Apple developers I've spoken to spend their per…

>At a recent interview I mentioned I like tinkering with code on the side and was told I'd have to give that up and stop contributing to open source. I faced similar in my last company (not with Apple). Now find it very difficult to get working on a side project or similar at home after having not done anything in that regard in a few years. Ideas I once had to develop are long gone. Bleh.

IBM had us sign something that said we couldn't work on outside projects without permission. It seems like it's not that difficult to get permission. Most people just ignore it.

When we got notice of the acquisition a group of devs had a lawyer come in and from what I hear the lawyer basically said "don't sign this if you want to do anything outside of work ever".

I just thought this was common for these megacorps. Is that not the case? I also wonder if they can actually enforce something like that in California.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#94

Post by brianpgordon »

Apocryphon wrote: post #45

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.

I've heard that Apple is notorious for discouraging employees from having tech-oriented blogs.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#95

Post by javert »

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 '…

Sounds just like grad school, except at least he's getting paid.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#96

Post by cmrdporcupine »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #4
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.

Not true. Not all corporations are evil dystopian cults playing mind games and wasting everyone's time. It takes tremendous cash to fuel that kind of dysfunction. Most corporations cant afford to go off the rails to that degree.

From being close to someone who worked there for many years, from the iPod-is-just-new til a few years ago, I'd say actually this culture at Apple is a product of the return-of-Steve-we're-barely-surviving Apple-austerity mode. I don't know how engineers do there, but the marketing people I knew from there worked like dogs but when the money started to rain from the iPod/iPhone/iPad sky, I didn't get the impression that they really benefited from that.

I work at Google now, there is plenty of money coming into this company and hard workers (and not-hard workers) are getting a large share of that. And while it isn't a complete paradise, the company seems grateful to its workers. I can't say I got that impression from anybody I know who worked at Apple or was close to people who did.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#97

Post by cookiecaper »

archagon wrote: post #69

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…

You have to see both sides here. Employees are too quick to see this as being robbed of the opportunity to be the subject of a bidding war. Companies try not to start or escalate poaching wars because it's massively disruptive to everyone's projects. It takes a long time to replace someone and a long time to onboard someone. While it may be economically feasible to poach an employee, it's almost definitely detrimental to the entire industry's profitability to create a recruitment culture based on poaching. Since there's a strong tit-for-tat instinct when company B takes a high-value employee from company A, the companies just agree to avoid these tensions altogether. That's the big picture version that Catmull, Jobs, et al, are seeing. They're honestly not trying to keep your salary depressed this way, but they're an easy target for Justice Department lawyers that're trying to earn some street cred and "trade outlets" that are trying to earn lots of pageviews from artificially outraged workers.

People believe they've been deprived of money and attention by default, so they'll eat up anything that appears superficially credible and gives them occasion to lay blame for that deprivation.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#98

Post by amreact »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #53
detaro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> just remember that this is Apple, the world`s most profitable company. It only gets worse as you go down the list. I'm not convinced high profitability leads to better working conditions...

I think that was his point.

> It only gets worse as you go down the list.

"It only gets worse as you go down the list" means "workplace quality decreases as profitability decreases."

This implies that "workplace quality increases as profitability increases."

"workplace quality increases as profitability increases" is a different way of saying "high profitability leads to better working conditions."

I think detaro understood FD3SA correctly.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#99

Post by Retric »

serve_yay wrote: post #49
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.

An air traffic controller messes up and they risk hundreds of lives and 100's of millions of dollars in property. That's a high high-pressure workplace, Tech is just a combination of greed and poor managment.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#100

Post by lewisl9029 »

archagon wrote: post #69

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…

"He was just very protective of his employees."

The word "protective" doesn't seem apt here, as that would imply he had his employees' best interests at heart, when clearly he only had the company's best interests in mind (which is fair, given that's the job of the CEO).

Try "possessive".

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