I Quit: What really goes on at Apple • Hacker News Board

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#381

Post by ecdavis » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:16 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #363

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…

Remember in this case we have two companies which decided to work together on a project and established no-poaching agreement. If you ask your friend to go out with you on a trip along with your girlfriend, would it be ok if your friend builds relationship with her during the trip and she breaks up with you? You can argue that may be your girlfriend found a better fit and you should be ok with that. OR you can argue…

Oh please, your analogy doesn't fit at all. Apple and Intel aren't friends, they're competitors in the labour market, both hoping to attract the top talent. If they had legitimate concerns about their employees leaving then they should've focused on convincing their employees to stay by increasing their compensation and improving their work environment.

Perhaps "corporations are people, my friend" but they're not buddies out on a camping trip with a girl. There's no Corporation-A-broke-their-word-to-Corporation-B - there's business and competition is a huge part of that.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#382

Post by yannk » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:17 AM UTC

mtarnovan wrote: post #337

"I used to be a police officer. I’ve held a gun aimed at a dangerous offenders head and had to choose whether or not to pull the trigger." Wait, what?

This line should have been the tl;dr

It obliterated the little anecdotical nuggets remotely interesting in the writing.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#383

Post by dietrichepp » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:20 AM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #352

dietrichepp wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers I'm interested in hearing how this is proven. I've seen incentivized sales reps close deals that damaged the company, just like I've seen "successful" marketing campaigns that eventually killed their products. If you use bookings as your metric for bonuses and then turn around and use bookings to m…

I completely agree there are negative externalities to focusing purely on next-quarter's bookings. But specifically around attracting and retaining salespeople who deliver bookings, if you pay basically nothing before they hit quota, and then piles of hard cash as they rack up the numbers, you tend to starve out the under-performers. It's not 'proof' by any stretch, but I was recalling this article while typing the o…

I feel like sales commission plans can take a surprising amount of time to really damage a company. Yes, you want to weed out the weak performers. But in SaaS, it's too easy to reward sales when they're actually disrupting product strategies and making everyone else's work harder.

I don't entirely recommend this book, because I feel that its arguments are not as well supported as they should be, but it is at least an interesting scan: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/541132.Punished_by_Reward...

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#384

Post by mikeash » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:24 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #363

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…

Remember in this case we have two companies which decided to work together on a project and established no-poaching agreement. If you ask your friend to go out with you on a trip along with your girlfriend, would it be ok if your friend builds relationship with her during the trip and she breaks up with you? You can argue that may be your girlfriend found a better fit and you should be ok with that. OR you can argue…

I don't think that analogy works. The boyfriend/girlfriend relationship is completely different from the employer/employee relationship, and the whole point of this controversy is that companies aren't supposed to be friends.

Here's what I think would be a better analogy: let's say you run a restaurant in a small town. The restaurant business is booming, and you and your competitors are all expanding, to the point where it's getting hard to find qualified cooks and servers.

The cooks and servers start working to get a piece of the pie. They move between restaurants as higher pay is offered. You desperately need more staff and since you can't find new people, you resort to soliciting the staff at competing restaurants and offering them more money. They do the same to your employees. Average pay rises.

You and the other owners don't like this at all. Cooking and serving was a minimum-wage job not too long ago! This steadily increasing pay is eating into your profits. So you all get together and agree to put a stop to it: you won't try to hire away their staff, and they won't try to hire away yours. Pay stagnates, and you and the other owners get to keep more of your profits.

This is what happened with Apple and these other companies over time, only with computer people instead of cooks and servers. Is it immoral for businesses to collude to artificially hold down wages? I think most people would say yes. Probably more importantly, it's illegal.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#385

Post by zik » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:25 AM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #245

kziojzwsndppqgg wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow. That sounds like an incredibly toxic workplace environment.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#386

Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:26 AM UTC

charlieok wrote: post #329

smikhanov wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be true. And also, while internet is full of stories of "what it's like to work at Google/Facebook/etc", you will have hard time finding a similar one about Apple. My explanation for that is that the "tiny innovative core" is way too overworked to write about themselves and everyone else is just irrelevant.

I'm sure apple's "tiny innovative core" is very good at what they do, and works very hard, but I suspect the reason you don't hear as much about the work environment there is that they are subject to much stricter policies concerning what they write about their employer than are employees at many other places including google and facebook. Add to that a culture that values protecting secrets versus some notion of 'op…

This. Someone close to me worked there for 7 years. The level of secrecy is crazy. Like, dysfunctional-hard-to-do-your-work and stay-up-all-night-working-before-a-launch-because-you-are-only-finding-out-about-it-then crazy. Talking in public about your job would not end well.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#387

Post by jenius » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:27 AM UTC

shostack wrote: post #336

balls187 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where I work, our Support Heroes Smugmug? Smugmug's support staff is great. There is a huge difference when dealing with regular customer support, and customer support that goes above and beyond to provide exceptional service. Smugmug Crutchfield Dreamhost Nordstrom All provide great, consistent support.

Yep, SmugMug :) Thanks for the kind words! I'm not a Support Hero, but have to say that everyone who works here from the top down has nothing but utter respect for our amazing Heroes. It is an exceptionally challenging job and thus warrants exceptionally talented individuals--I sure as heck know that I couldn't do what they do. I wish all companies had our level of customer support, but I know that isn't realistic. F…

Woah, really impressive that he was able to guess the company. That seems super crazy to me. I guess I'd better check out SmugMug if it's that above and beyond!

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#388

Post by greenyoda » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:29 AM UTC

LordKano wrote: post #205

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…

Several years ago, I was contacting by a recruiting firm about a job opening. I was interested, I fit the description of the person for whom they were looking and I wanted to proceed. The recruiter was going off an old copy of my resume that they found online and was unaware that I had a different employer. When I disclosed this, they immediately refused to go any further in the process because they were worried that…

I agree that this sucks, but you need to keep in mind that the recruiter works for his corporate clients, not for you. If helping you would cause him to lose his contract with his biggest customer, he'll make the obvious choice.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#389

Post by mikeash » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:31 AM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #97

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…

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…

When you say "detrimental to the entire industry's profitability," I see "wages would rise to match the value contributed by employees, which would reduce the surplus that businesses can extract."

If you don't want your prized employee leaving, there's a really easy solution: pay him enough to stay. If he's that valuable, then it's worth paying.

Since the solution is so easy, but Jobs et al didn't want to apply that solution, I can only conclude that suppressing salaries was precisely the idea. If it wasn't about suppressing salaries then they could have just increased the salaries for these key employees such that leaving for another job was no longer an attractive prospect.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#390

Post by cmrdporcupine » Thu, Apr 09, 2015, 2:34 AM UTC

throwaway6497 wrote: post #107

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 '…

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…

I think as an engineer the type of things one might get to work on at Apple could be more interesting than the type of things one would get to work on at a bunch of the companies you just listed. At Apple there's everything from OS to compiler to drivers to UI to hardware, etc.

I don't want to work there, as I know people who have and it sucked, but, I can see the appeal for some. Also one person I know who did a stint there got some rather obscenely large amounts of cash.