I was interested in working at Apple so I messaged a few of my alum friends. All of them said they worked around 60 hours a week. Nope, can't pay me enough to work 60 hours a week.
Without knowing what you'd be working on? Seems shortsighted.
I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
441–450 of 566 posts
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#442"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?
What troubles you about that statement?
It may well have been a situation where the person was presenting a threat to others and he had to decide how to how much threat was being presented and how to prevent that.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#443One 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 '…
I have friends who work closely with B/C level execs. It is a clusterfuck of dysfunction at those levels.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#444But... 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…
I think people need to remember that Apple is a tiny, tiny innovative core surrounded by a huge bog-standard "big-corp" full of the same chimps from the Career Builder commercials that all big-corps have. If you're not part of that tiny core, you just work at Office Space.
Nope.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#445>I spent two years in the Apple camp managing customer service improvement for their technical support contact centres
Yeah, not exactly the kind of Apple insider we'd imagined when we read the first few paragraphs...
>Sixteen hour days are filled with meetings after meetings followed by more meetings. Whilst this is somewhat standard in most organisations, meetings at Apple wreaked of toxic agendas designed to deliberately trip people up, make fools of the less respected and call people out. Team spirit is non existent as ‘internal customers’ attack individuals and push agendas that satisfy their morning egos. Hours upon hours were wasted in meetings to prepare for meetings in preparation for other meetings to the point where little work actually got done.
And yet, they manage to be on the top at least financiancly, if not anything else, and put out tons of good products.
So either this is not the whole story, or it's mostly about the customer service department, and not the hardware and software units...
>Sickness, family emergencies, and even weddings are given no respect at Apple. When I started my role I missed one business trip as my wife was pregnant, fell down the stairs and had to be hospitalised – this was listed as a ‘performance issue’ on my record and brought up during a one on one with management as a major ‘miss’ on my behalf.
This kind of thing on the other hand is important whoever it's happening to. Maybe Cook instead of pretending to care for more glamorous media causes (like Indiana) and start treating his own employees (which include plenty of gays of course) better?
It's quite hypocritical to be a supporter for gay marriage, and then piss on the marriages and personal life of your employees in general.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#446Sounds awful !!
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP said: >"customer support in any company is like this." My post was specifically in response to that, because it was an inaccurate statement. I'm really sorry to hear you've had such poor experiences in support. That sucks, and I realize how hard/impossible that can be to turn around from a business and culture standpoint. Sounds like you have found a path that works better for you, so congrats!
When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way. My experience is that (1) most companies do a lot of things wrong (2) the respect which support receives varies from company to company as well as industry to industry, with business support taken more seriously t…
>When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way.
Well, it's not logical at all in the common sense of the word logical. It's like you're talking to a compiler...
In casual conversation everybody understands that it doesn't mean "absolutely every company".
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For the first time in the last ten years, I have downgraded my OS to 10.9 after having a disastrous experience with 10.10. I don't plan on upgrading back, at least not on this computer.
It's when your Linux distro on a 5 year old HP laptop seems more polished than your 27" iMac from 2 years ago that you begin to wonder what has gone wrong at Apple.
Two days ago I said aloud to a screen ", OS X is turning into Windows".
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#449Earlier 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.
If staff are consistently having to work overtime to hit targets then there's either: - A problem with the staff - there's either not enough of them or they haven't the skills to do what is required or - A problem with the management. I've never worked in a role where incompetent people were hired and couldn't get what needed to be done done, but I've worked under plenty of incompetent management.
Alternative 3: a problem with the law. I know 'Murica loves it's free market, dog eat dog, each man for himself ideal. But to us Europeans it looks like many US companies are no better than slave drivers. No regulation, no life for employees. On the other hand, US corps can compete with the Chinese and Koreans, there are no tech giants in well regulated European countries (are there?) because after 3 or 4 in the afternoon we all go home to our children.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#450Wow! This reminds me of my career at PwC. I was a strategic consultant to the Financial Sector there.
People were measured more on how long they stayed back in office rather than how much work got done. On multiple occasions, I was contacted by the Associate Director for some 'urgent' work while I was on leave. As you can imagine, none of the work was actually that urgent. The worst was the politics to take credit for other people's work.