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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

#161

Post by Apocryphon »

johnward wrote: post #93
borgia wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I…

It's incredibly ironic that Apple was founded with the intention of being the anti-IBM.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#162

Post by th0br0 »

I once attended a hackathon in Switzerland where Apple sponsored some prizes. They had a bunch of relatively young (read mostly junior level) developers there and one 'glorious leader' management-level kind of guy. I shall never forget seeing two of the young developers following their glorious leader with ipads in their hands wherever he went.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#163

Post by soperj »

exelius wrote: post #135
nostrademons wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Samsung the main supplier for many of the parts used in the iPhone? And that's the reason why a.) they're in the phone business and b.) they can dominate the Android market? They took the other side of those transactions so they could learn exactly what it took to build a mobile phone, and then once they had phone-building expertise, they just need to ramp up their own production and divert some to internal use…

Yeah, but the interesting part is that for a while, Samsung was the only manufacturer capable of producing LCD screens that met Apple's specs. Apple outbid Samsung's mobile division on those parts, so that resulted in a situation where the iPhone had better screens than the Galaxy, even though the iPhone's screen was manufactured by Samsung. AFAIK Samsung still manufactures Apple's mobile CPUs (likely under heavy NDA…

And yet they had to go back to Samsung for screens because no one else could really provide the quality & quantity that Samsung could.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#164

Post by dragonwriter »

astrodust wrote: post #127
serve_yay wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That quote is so nuts! He didn't think for a minute he was doing anything wrong. That's supposed to make me feel better ? I agree with you, the way these rich people look at employees as chess pieces rather than humans is awful. If you're so afraid of someone quitting, then address that by making it worth their while not to quit! Not with collusion for god's sake. The fact that they call someone getting a better job…

The optimal arrangement for both companies is no poaching. As soon as someone pulls the trigger and starts poaching it gets exponentially more expensive for these companies to operate. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.

But if a company wants to restrict "poaching" of its employees unilaterally, it can just offer them defined-term personal services contracts with suitable compensation.

If your employees are under pure default at-will employment, its not poaching to seek to hire them out from under you, because you haven't purchased a property interest in their continuing to remain your employees. And, if you have purchased such an interest, then you suddenly don't need a no-poaching agreement to prevent them from being poached.

A multiparty no poaching agreement with the other main employers in the industry -- particularly a secret one -- is essentially trying to impose the restriction of having an extended contract with your employees without paying them for accepting that restriction.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#165

Post by jklontz »

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!

GitHub: I've emailed their support desk a half dozen times over the years, and each time received a response from an engineer within minutes containing an accurate and precise answer to my question.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#166

Post by datasink »

nostrademons wrote: post #92
beamatronic wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

That's bizarre. The standard "Thank You" at Apple is a $500 gift card which can be be used at a number of websites, including Amazon.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#167

Post by DINKDINK »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #123
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my understanding, it's effectively impossible for Apple employees to have any apps listed in the App Store through personal accounts. Which, no doubt, accounts for a lot of the reason why the Xcode -> iTunes Connect -> App Store experience is so miserable.

That's the rule.

It could be a business hedge against an anti-trust lawsuit.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#168

Post by vacri »

raspasov wrote: post #30

I wonder how many people the author has really interacted with? Even if it was 100 individuals (which is probably unlikely) that's still 5000 employees?) of the total organization. Basically a rounding error. It's very hard to make conclusions for the whole company from such a small sample. That borders discrimination/racism thinking. Not in any way trying to say that he had a pleasant experience or that his manageme…

It's very hard to make conclusions for the whole company from such a small sample.

Statistically speaking, an n of 100 is a reasonably decent sample of 5000 data points. It seems to me that you're looking for excuses, as if this concept of 'dry-run' meetings only happens to be within the author's "hundred-person bubble".

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#169

Post by zyxley »

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.

Heck, all you need for proof of that working is to scroll up and look at the people giving Zappos free advertisement on HN.
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