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.
I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
421–430 of 566 posts
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
There were so many smartphones before the iPhone, the main thing that Apple added was touch, which allowed them to have full screens. Not like it wasn't going that way anyway, LG prototyped a phone like that a year before the iphone came out.
LG didn't just prototype a phone. They released the LG Prada.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not really sure that article even paints Apple in a bad light. Yeah, it talks about how much you work hard, but even just listen to them: > I mean, it’s not that it’s not fun, it’s not that it’s not fulfilling, it’s not that you don’t get to work around all these brilliant people. The bad side effect is they’re all, like, workaholic, psychotic brilliant people. For me, one of the best things in life is the opport…
"To me, burn out is a result of feeling like you're not getting anywhere, and that just plain isn't the case at a company where we consistently ship things with huge scopes, on time and to resounding success."
Just because a company is getting somewhere, doesn't mean you or your team or even your org is. You mustn't overgeneralize your own positive experiences at the company to reflect that of a majority of people working there. (Of course, for people with the opposite experience, overgeneralization should be avoided as well.)
It's a big company. Experiences will vary.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"nobody could build a phone at the same level as Apple." People have to put their iphones in bulky cases because the screens break so easily. I have dropped my Samsung Note4 so many times, and it is fine (also, the charge lasts three days. Did I mention it is really fast too?).
My S4 fell less than 20 cm on the wooden floor and the screen cracked. I saw many Samsung made in Vietnam devices with horrible quality.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my understanding, it's effectively impossible for Apple employees to have any apps listed in the App Store through personal accounts. Which, no doubt, accounts for a lot of the reason why the Xcode -> iTunes Connect -> App Store experience is so miserable.
This is certainly not true. One of the guys in charge of Apple store approval had a number of apps on the app store. http://www.imore.com/director-app-store-apple-fart-wiz-apps
I have specific knowledge of several instances where this is, indeed, true.
Your article:
Is five years old, and never claims about that the person mentioned in article was still developing apps after being hired by Apple. In fact:
The picture displayed is from a now-defunct Seattle-centric business social networking website, and Phillip is mentioned as being part of the "Seattle Community," but a resident of "San Jose California."
It seems totally sensible that Apple would want to hire someone with experience building iOS apps, and would then make them give all of those up as soon as they're hired. Which would be identical to the experience that the people I know have had.
I did some more digging, and:
“Apple employees are generally prohibited
[from publishing apps in the App Store],”
[Evan] Doll told Wired.com. “You have to
get a special exception from a VP.
Otherwise, big no-no. If he was doing it
pre-Apple then he’d have an easier time
getting an exception,” he added.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a "Silver Fox" in this context?
I assume that refers to this bit: Based on this, I have to conclude that most good engineers@Apple are candidates who have a tenure of more than 15 years and are aging. With "silver" meaning grey hair and "fox" meaning clever.
Ah. That makes sense.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#427Earlier 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.
It depends on your role, PMs and managers would obviously have a lot more. I'm just a lowly engineer and looking at my calendar this week, I've have 2.5 hours of regular meetings, 3 hours of interviews (though that's an outlier, I normally do 1 interview a week, which is 1 hour long), and 2 hours of "tech talks" (which is not really a meeting, it's basically people from other teams talking about what they've been working on).
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It was not a big company. I was working for a small-ish family owned business.
They had, maybe 20-30 employees.
This was the end of the final email exchange between myself and this recruiting company.
Clearly, the bottom line is that clients pay XXXXXX and talent does not. It belittles us both to pretend that it's really about ethics or loyalty.
I don't maintain business relationships in which my interests come last and I don't do business with the dishonest.
Again, please, lose my number.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
From the outside, it definitely looks like the closer it gets to hardware, the better engineers at Apple get. Metal is awesome, Metal shading language and recent clang progress not bad too, Swift a little bit wonky but interesting — but the quality of their customer-facing software, especially ui stuff (not design, but I engineering) is getting worse and worse. It just doesn't "just work" anymore.
One commenter - I believe it was here on HN - said something I thought was very insightful. They said it's difficult to see software when you're looking at your computer edge-on - and that's apparently the only way Apple ever looks at their products anymore.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#430One 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 '…
> we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight... Wow, Is it normal? Sounds ridiculous to me, having a family at home, I can't imagine coming home at 9 PM, having a late dinner and going straight to bed to wake up the next day, not seeing my son or wife the whole day, is it like this in every big company?
It's normal when you're not expected to be in the office until 11am or noon.