221–230 of 566 posts
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And how rich are those employees, because of their stock vesting, compared to current ones, getting paid mere salary? ;)
They were getting paid around $20K a year (ref folklore.org) at a time when that wasn't exactly munificent. I'm not even sure they had stock grants either, just promises of greatness from Steve. Idiots.
I had organised a day off recently where all my family were visiting me from interstate. Despite this I had agreed to dial in to one conference call as the audience attending was ‘important’. Well it seems Important but disrespectful, as the audience never even turned up, yet I was still made to ‘dry-run’ the whole meeting from start to finish for an hour and a half as if there was full attendance and interest in wha…
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 '…
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…
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>>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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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.
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 think this is directly related to the language used within most companies -- at least all those I've worked at -- to describe their employees: human resources. I think this is because people too easily conflate human resources with natural resources, which are consumed by some manufacturing process.
Once upon a time, I worked at a company whose internal management guidelines stressed loading new hires with as much work as they could bear to determine their breaking points. Work load was then scaled back to some sustainable-ish percentage of that maximum, and the employees were worked until burnout. The expectation was they would then leave the company. Obviously they had an absolutely absurd amount of turnover. Upper management saw nothing wrong with utilizing their resources in this manner. This experience obviously colors my view of things.
In my opinion, the phrase human resource is simply dehumanizing. But, I also think it might be a necessary psychological barrier that is required by massive companies. If the upper management actually conceive of their organization as made up of employees, not human resources, they may act or react more slowly, become less risk averse, etc. That is bad for business! Likewise, I think there's a similar statement to be made about citizens vs. consumers when speaking about another type of large organization: governments.
Language and the words we choose matter. They shape our thoughts, and define what is possible. We ought to choose better words.
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…
You are painting with an overly broad brush. Where I work, our Support Heroes (yes, we call them Heroes because the lengths they go to for our customers are heroic) are one of the main reasons so many of our customers love us and stick with us so long. You've probably heard that it can cost ~5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. An exceptional Customer Support team is your front line in fight…
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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.
If a company sold a widget that routinely generated $500k in profit per year each and leased it for $125k/year, would it make business sense to keep it at that price? Hell no! Charge as much as the market will bear. That's just supply and demand.
[1] http://nypost.com/2014/02/28/apple-has-biggest-slice-of-prof...
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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!
Apple is actually probably the best example of a company taking a cost center (in this case, manufacturing and logistics) and turning it into a strategic advantage. Apple wields its supply chain like a weapon. It's very difficult to compete with Apple because the world has a limited supply of high-quality parts (flash memory, LCD screens, etc.), and Apple can just outbid everyone else for the entire market supply for…
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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…