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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

#241

Post by skj »

bbcbasic wrote: post #125
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 '…

And really Google's thank you is a fuck you. Try working in Europe or Australia: none of that 9pm nonsense. That is when I go to sleep after spending time with my family. Edit: OK I see from other comments that those Googlers are doing 12pm to 9pm and it is flexible so doesn't sound so bad.

Engineers at Google don't have mandated hours. Be available for important meetings, and be somewhat consistent with when you're around.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#242

Post by nashashmi »

Great read! But come on, customer support is not the main body of the company, just one of the limbs. And those limbs suffer if they do not strive to be themselves and instead seek to be someone else.

One phrase that I tell myself often kept coming to mind: the freedoms you don't take, someone else will, and the freedoms you don't fight for, someone else will take. This applies between government-citizen, corporation-employee, manager-managee, and head-subordinate.

And do you know what happens when one hot shot takes hold of the company/department/group? Everybody seeks to emulate him and judge themselves and others in comparison to him. What happens then is like what happens to metal dust scattered on paper with a magnet in the middle. The hot shot is no longer a leader with a team, but instead a one-man army with slaves extending his rule.

And some leaders will never manage creative people because they can never step out of the way.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#243

Post by nathanvanfleet »

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…

I'm sorry that's just frankly not possible. Even with your lowest value of 300k a year and you're hours value of 100 hours a week you're looking at ~60$/hour assuming they have no vacation or time off. Now look at the minimum wage and realize it's still many times that. I have a lawyer friend who says the same thing as you, and I seriously doubt it's so over the long run.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#244

Post by shostack »

smenko wrote: post #227
shostack wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is this supposed to be ironic?? Given, you know, the original poster's grievances.... Support Heroes?.. No?

Not at all ironic. OP was posting about how customer support is a cost center, amongst other claims. He stated that it is like this in any company. I completely disagree and have experienced the proof of that first hand.

I'm a little unclear from how you worded things--was the question around the notion of firing people as heroic juxtaposed against what we call our support team (ie. Heroes)?

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#245

Post by Apocryphon »

kziojzwsndppqgg wrote: post #189
francoisdevlin wrote: post #8

Is this for real? Can anyone else corroborate this?

FWIW, as an Apple employee I have no idea what the hell he's talking about. I've worked here 4 years and I absolutely love. my. job. I take days off to work from home whenever I feel like it. We drink at the office on occasion. I'm never harassed for not being constantly online. I don't have endless meetings. I'm constantly praised for the work I do, I get great reviews, with large bonuses. My impression from reading…

It's a big company, and there will certainly be diversity in experiences. But he's not the first person to talk about such situations: http://oleb.net/blog/2014/09/work-habits-at-apple/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8389238)

It does happen.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#246

Post by skj »

Hobotron1 wrote: post #111
gtremper wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I'm all for not wasting food, but that's really tacky.

What's tacky about offering free food that no one is obligated to eat? GP might have written one of the most entitled things I've seen!

If part of your compensation comes in the form of food, then it isn't free.

Of course, if it's part of your compensation, it should probably be taxed as such... maybe I should keep my mouth shut.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#247

Post by curiously »

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…

software engineers are also a cost centers.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#248

Post by cookiecaper »

archagon wrote: post #234
underbluewaters wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

dragonwriter above offers a more informed solution: "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."

Employees don't want that. The terms of the current relationship are centered around the employee's desire for continuity and stability.

Most employees do not want to be tied down to the company in a binding fixed-term commitment; how much worse would things be if people weren't free to pursue other employment whenever they wanted? How much more abuse would employees suffer if they didn't have the option of walking out and finding comparable employment at any time?

Most employees want benefits and perks that would be very difficult to provide in the context of independent agency, like medical insurance. In professional circumstances that are based on procuring such agents, there's usually a union, co-op, axis, or league that furnishes the benefits the worker desires. Read this page [1] about the stability NBA players lacked prior to unionization.

The grass is always greener. Perhaps an employee's raw salary would be higher if a free agency model was used, though I personally doubt it would be, but most of the terms of this game are defined by the employee, not the employer.

A world where every employee is an independent agent with his/her own contract is a much, much different world than we have now and would take a long time to analyze with any depth or completion. It's not that there aren't ways to make it work, but the standard employment relationship exists because it's the employment arrangement most conducive to the type of lifestyle the average person wants to have.

[1] http://nbpa.com/about-nbpa/

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#249

Post by yuhong »

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 really wish they could actually admit wrongdoing in the lawsuits, I suggest with an apology letter.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#250

Post by nostrademons »

soperj wrote: post #198
ptx wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung made phones long before the iPhone existed.

Downvoted for being right. Gotta love a zealot.

I didn't downvote either of you, but I didn't respond to either of your comments because they miss the point of mine. Yes, Samsung's been making phones forever. They have not been making smartphones forever. The iPhone was a fundamentally different product category from what phone manufacturers were doing before, requiring that competitors scrap a lot of what they were doing before [1]. And Samsung had a big leg-up in entering that product category by virtue of making many of the screens and chips used in the iPhone.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/06/building-android-a-40...

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