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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

#191

Post by aetherson »

angelbob wrote: post #62
francoisdevlin wrote: post #8

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 known some very happy Apple employees. My sense is that the company contains great variation across its breadth, due to the extreme security among teams. When you can't even go into the next division's work-space, it's hard for a single culture to permeate across the company.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#192

Post by kelukelugames »

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…

I read Isaacson's biography.

Steve Jobs is convinced he never did anything bad in his entire life. Except for denying paternity, but that still took a few decades.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#193

Post by scosman »

johnward wrote: post #115
sdab wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I worked there, it was 12pm-8pm. My friends who work there now do the same. We just get to make our own hours and being in my twenties, I like sleeping in.

I find this interesting. How do people collaborate? Did most of your team work the same hours? Do you just schedule meetings from noon-4? I would personally hate that schedule as someone with a family.

I like 11-4 as core hours. Not to early for the folks who like to sleep in, not to late for people who want to get home to their family, and there is still 5 hours of overlap for meeting.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#194

Post by erikb »

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…

I disagree. If your manager plays mind games instead of working it is not just his fault, but the fault of his manager for hiring him, for not seeing that unproductiveness, for not educating his staff. And that is a recursive assessment. So if you see that in your department and maybe another department there's quite a good chance it drags on through large parts of the whole company.

The only thing I don't know is if you can guess from this experience that the whole industry is like that.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#195

Post by underbluewaters »

archagon wrote: post #117
cookiecaper wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 detriment…

Putting aside for the moment the illegality of collusion, I appreciate your take, and I think it's important to always try to see things from the other side, even if it stands against everything you believe in. With that said, isn't the obvious solution to just raise everyone's salaries? Also, the explanation only reinforces the idea that these executives view their employees as chips to be bartered, not free agents.

How does raising salaries change the situation? All the other party has to do is raise the offer another 10k. There are enormous costs associated with loosing a valued employee, but naturally very little cost for the employee to move.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#196

Post by jessriedel »

kyllo wrote: post #88
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'd argue that this mentality is a byproduct of the concept of a "cost center" which is itself an arbitrary and toxic concept.

The concept isn't normative and it definitely is meaningful. Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure. People know that in the limit of non-existence, the company can't survive without it, so customer support has to exist. But as long as money is used to support them with no easily measurable benefit, it will always experience strong downward pressure on operating expenses.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#197

Post by Crito »

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 is pretty easy to determine things (with a high degree of confidence) about a large group of people having only encountered a small group of people.

Of course how you sample is vital. With random sampling, it is pretty straightforward Stats 101 stuff. This wasn't random sampling which throws a wrench in it, but neither are these individual people actually independent. They were all selected by the organization they belong to.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#198

Post by soperj »

ptx wrote: post #132
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…

Samsung made phones long before the iPhone existed.

Downvoted for being right. Gotta love a zealot.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#199

Post by ZenoArrow »

api wrote: post #120

Apple has built one of the most successful businesses in the world on mostly one thing: design. (And user experience, which is design more broadly applied.) Undortunately, it seems to me that good design requires totalitarianism. Apple's products are comparatively coherent, clean, unified, and aesthetically pleasing. This is achieved via a culture of totalitarianism that extends all the way down to the device. OSX ha…

Did you read the article?

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#200

Post by dragonwriter »

storgendibal wrote: post #184
beamatronic wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Heh, 60 hours is a low intensity week in management consulting and especially investment banking. Once upon a time, a banker 2-3 years out of an MBA (say 28-30) would make $300-500K cash. The hourly rate is lower than minimum wage though (these guys used to put in 100+ hours). They did it in the hopes of landing a private equity gig that would pay them $1M+ for a 50-70 hour work week. That's a deal I would take in a…

> Once upon a time, a banker 2-3 years out of an MBA (say 28-30) would make $300-500K cash. The hourly rate is lower than minimum wage though (these guys used to put in 100+ hours).

No, its not lower than minimum wage, even at the low end of that range, and even if they worked all 168 hours of every week.

$300K / 8,760 hours a year (assuming a non-leap-year, and 24/7 schedule) = $34.24/hour

Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr; even with the +50% premium for overtime after the first 40 hours in a week, that's only $10.88/hr for the overtime hours. So its literally impossible to clear $300K a year and be making less than minimum wage, without some kind of weird time warping ability that lets you work 3+ years of 24/7 work in one calendar year.

EDIT: To respond to the edit of the parent post...

> My minimum wage comment was more about making a point.

What point is made by this drastically false claim?

> Banker types like to say they make lots of money but make less per-hour than a McDonald's employee.

If that's true (along with the compensation numbers you present), that tells us that one of the following is true:

1. Bankers are innumerate,

2. Bankers are ignorant of their own compensation,

3. Bankers are ignorant of the compensation of low-wage workers, or

4. Bankers are being dishonest, perhaps in an effort to deflect criticism of their compensation compared to other workers.

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