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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

#411

Post by tjradcliffe »

_ak wrote: post #182
phkahler wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crunch time is fine when its uncommon and unforseen. Otherwise it is a manag3ment failure. Perhaps its deliberate failure to respect peoples personal life, but that's still a failure. I've worked plenty of places where crunch time is uncommon or nonexistent. It doesn't have to be that way.

Long crunch times are either a symptom of longterm planning failures (not hired enough people), or it's a deliberate and premeditated attempt to abuse people for cheap labour (why have 10 people do the work when 6 overworked people can do the same job?).

They can't. As the comment before yours pointed out: after about three weeks, those six overworked people are so inefficient that they are getting less done than six people would working regular hours.

Long crunch times (more than two or three weeks) are strong evidence of deliberately abusive management, who are willing to lower productivity below what it would be with a 40-hour work week for the sake of their egos.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#412

Post by cgio »

abc_lisper wrote: post #275
_cudgel wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets? 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 res…

While I don't agree with many of the comments here, I agree with yours specifically. I really hate the phrase human resource, like it is something that is ready for exploitation. One of the many reasons I never worked for big consulting companies is that, they look at things as problems vs resources. If the problems cannot be solved by X resources, try X+1. There they are called resources, not even human resources.

In consulting, your only resources are human.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#413

Post by jqm »

andybak wrote: post #357
Periodic wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer at Google a key difference from some other companies is how few meetings I have. I have less then 10 hours of meetings per week, and they are all scheduled between 11am and 4pm. There's also plenty of less-formal meetings when I strike up a conversation with my coworkers, usually closer to 6:00 as we start to focus less and wonder more.

10 hours... A week? Is that considered good? I run a small company and - also as a developer - I'd really like to get meetings down to 3 or 4 hours a week.

Agreed. 10 hours a week of meetings seems nuts.

I've been trying to get my boss to reduce the 2-3 hours a week of meetings I have to attend.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#414

Post by roflchoppa »

duderific wrote: post #360
Periodic wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made the mistake of moving 18 miles (San Jose) from where I work (Mountain View). Two years ago traffic wasn't bad but I swear it's getting worse. If I leave the house at 9:00 it takes 45-60 minutes to get to work. If there's a major accident or problem it can take up to 90 (happened once). Now I just don't leave the house before 10:00. My commute is less than 30 minutes and I regain 30-60 minutes every day. I feel…

I agree it's getting worse over the last year or so. My commute is about 8 miles, from Seaport to 92 on 101, and I never get much above 10 mph. Bumper to bumper the whole way. It didn't used to be like that.

yeah, ive been doing 880 from hayward into Cupertino for 5 years now, and its been getting worse, which i guess is a good thing because people have jobs? or bad because there are too many people here.....

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#415

Post by roflchoppa »

MrNobody wrote: post #60
Apocryphon wrote: post #45

The culture of silence between Apple and the public extends to more than just upcoming products. Has anyone noticed that there aren't as many Apple employees participating in tech conferences, hackathons, public presentations? Even for subjects unrelated to their work? Definitely fewer than Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft employees.

From my understanding Apple effectively owns your entire output when you're employed full-time (at least as an engineer). 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 imagine that extends to participation in the "outside world" at least to some extent. The fact that Apple developers I've spoken to spend their per…

its not only for engineers.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#416

Post by tim333 »

blabla_blublu wrote: post #339

Former engineer @ Apple - some insight from my side. There is no one culture that pervades through the entire organization. Some software teams are chill, some are not, hardware side of things can be long hours for people. Can't really speak for customer care/marketing/retail/design. 1. I think most of us here understand that a single bad experience cannot reflect the culture in the company. Previously I was in a few…

>There is no one culture

It seems he worked at the Sydney office. There's a comment on his story as news.com.au

"Apple HQ in Australia was no different - a big frat-house where the "in" crowd got ahead and anyone else who challenged a process was seen as a difficult employee and managed out of the business."

Must be kind of hard to deal with that at a distance - It's not like Tim Cook would know who's who and doing the bad stuff. Maybe some sort of feedback tech would help.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#417

Post by kyllo »

jessriedel wrote: post #196
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.

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 pr…

Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure

By that metric, marketing and advertising must be cost centers! But they somehow always manage to take credit for revenue.

Honestly I think that "cost centers" are a combination of politics and managerial laziness. If you only place value on the "easily measurable" benefits, then the beneficial but more difficult-to-measure functions will be devalued and cut back.

And maybe a department only gets labeled a "cost center" in the first place if the manager running it is not influential or politically savvy enough to take credit for a piece of the revenue.

If you can form a reasonable argument that your work either earns or saves your company more money than they're paying you, you are not a cost center, and you would be foolish to accept that label.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#418

Post by ch4ck »

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…

LCD? Samsung used OLED for its top Galaxy devices since the day one. That was and is the main differentiator.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#419

Post by tjarratt »

SCdF wrote: post #323

So what I find so interesting about this is that I've never heard the counter-argument. No one is rushing to defend Apple, or say "Yeah I work at Apple on X and I really love it". In fact, the more I think about it, I don't know of any prolific bloggers, or open source contributors, or HN commentators, or really anyone, who currently works for Apple. I know Bret Victor (worrydream) used to work there, but left IIRC b…

I worked at Apple on OS X server in various capacities for a few years, and really loved the experience. As an open-source user and advocate, I was really sad there because they have a very hostile and defensive position about open source (which is a very reasonable stance, in my perspective).

The fact that there aren't any prolific bloggers, open source contributors or HN commentators is an artifact that the company does not encourage anyone to do that -- in fact, they actively discourage anyone that isn't involved in open source work on Webkit or Obj-C or Swift from talking about their work. For better or worse, they still have a culture of secrecy around their products.

For what it's worth, I really enjoyed my time there and wouldn't trade it for anything else; I worked with a lot of fabulous teams, learned a lot, and got to build some really amazing stuff.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#420

Post by jsudhams »

Not sure why person would not have called ethics line or even complain local govt HR authorities(if any). The allegations seems to be definitely a harassment if the person was not paid for work to be done outside working hours(not very clear if the person was paid for midnight calls). Not sure now but when I worked in Microsoft as customer support. They really really took care of the employees, it was a cost centre and there were call centre metrics in place but employees were treated really well. Leaves given as needed, paid for extra work and an excellent customer centric but a humble culture inside the org. The dev teams appreciated inputs from support and vice versa.
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