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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

#141

Post by jarsin »

kumarski wrote: post #63

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…

Ya I currently work 4 days a week. Because of this one simple thing about my current job it's very hard to consider leaving.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#143

Post by protomyth »

beamatronic wrote: post #58
kelukelugames wrote: post #15

I was interested in working at Apple so I messaged a few of my alum friends. All of them said they worked around 60 hours a week. Nope, can't pay me enough to work 60 hours a week.

You can pay me to work 60 hours a work, but so far no employers choose to.

Consulting companies / Body Shops often do.

I did get paid for those types of weeks a long while back (billed hourly - 50-80 hour weeks - nice rate). It does get painful after a year or two, and the winter in the northland is a bit harsh since you aren't seeing much sun.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#144

Post by wnevets »

codezero wrote: post #57
DaFranker wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

amazon

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#145

Post by throwaway6497 »

eastbayjake wrote: post #129
throwaway6497 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this negative image among developers in the Valley, how is Apple able to attract top quality engineers? They probably are not. Anecdotally, I still haven't met one single engineer who would love to work for Apple though they love using Apple products. Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quor…

Acqui-hires, amigo... swallow a company, fire the bottom 10%, give the rest offers, see who sticks around after 1-2 years. They're gobbling up companies so fast that they're running out of office space to house them all.

Acqui-hiring cannot be a long term strategy to nurture and build a strong internal talent pool. Google simply has done an outstanding job at this. Most start-up founders/employees share YC startups' cultural ethos, and will get stifled under Apple. Many of them will get demotivated, lose steam and leave as soon as their golden handcuffs expire.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#146

Post by vacri »

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…

I've worked in several cost centres, and the idea that they want to fire jobs and are full of stupid managers is simply not true. Mostly, the ones I worked in were scrambling for hires. In the big open-plan customer support job for a telco I worked, it took a month to train up staff, and retention was the biggest issue.

When I worked in a neuro lab, us techs were the primary profit centre, while the neurologists themselves didn't pull in enough money to support their own wages. Yet we were constantly told that we were the ones losing money and had to rally round the flag in various ways - we were also paid 2/3rds market rate (young and dumb).

This idea that cost centres are treated poorly and profit centres are rewarded seems more idealistic than realistic, in my experience. It also seems to me that you're handwaving away the author's issues - everything he said is a problem, regardless of the kind of department he was in.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#148

Post by exelius »

bbcbasic wrote: post #119
kyllo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that this mentality is a byproduct of the concept of a "cost center" which is itself an arbitrary and toxic concept.

Definitely, as if good customer support won't help future sales and increase customer retention. Without support and training software is kind of worthless.

Yeah, but the return on investment in marketing is likely much, much higher. Or, better yet, invest in making your product better so customers don't need to call support in the first place.

Customer churn is also very, very hard to quantify, and your customers will leave you for a variety of reasons, many of which would not be impacted by better support (i.e. they move, go out of business, get purchased, etc.)

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#149

Post by thirdtruck »

bbcbasic wrote: post #126
throwaway6497 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With this negative image among developers in the Valley, how is Apple able to attract top quality engineers? They probably are not. Anecdotally, I still haven't met one single engineer who would love to work for Apple though they love using Apple products. Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quor…

Yes the silver fox is IT's best kept secret.

What's a "Silver Fox" in this context?

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#150

Post by lkiernan »

enraged_camel wrote: post #44
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 h…

I'm outraged that they didn't throw this food away or at least charge you for the leftovers.
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