Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
491–500 of 566 posts
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#492Words like ‘pressure’ kept getting thrown at me in the context of I can’t handle the pressure and “you were told at the interview it’s high pressure”. Oh lord. As though any of them have any clue about real "high pressure" work environments. Being an asshole unnecessarily isn't a high pressure environment.
Quite so, but nonetheless Apple very much strikes me as a high-pressure workplace. There's a reason why they ship what they ship when they ship it.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#493Earlier 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…
>>You've probably heard that it can cost ~5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. Not only that, but support tickets are also an excellent opportunity to turn unhappy customers into evangelists.
These days when I phone or email a company and get someone capable who can actually help me I go around the next few weeks recommending the company to everyone who will listen.
In some ways could a few small glitches and fast useful responses could actually be better than it just works?
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#494But... 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.
As for my own experience, I moved from a comfortable telecommute job with an amazing team, naively expecting that Apple would be a huge leap in my career experience.
Instead I found a huge factory sized cube farm (office space!) and a beleaguered internal dev team, whose job was to maintain a giant mountain of bockety legacy ball of tcsh/php/mysql. Project management and infrastructure were pretty much nil. Training and documentation didn't exist, it was sink or swim.
There was a bit of a siege mentality in the team because a lot of what they maintained was critical to a lot of people onsite, and these people frequently beat a path to your desk to berate you because 'the site was down'. Which site? There were countless report sites and webpages scattered around the place. There wasn't much time to go back and fix old code because the work pipeline was always gushing forth new work.
One feature of the job was endless, pointless meetings - these happened a lot, and it gave an glimpse into how some management types played the ladder-climbing game. I definitely came across some predatory/aggressive types. This seemed to be a good strategy because it equalled "visibility", which was often lauded as a career-making goal to aim for in the team and the company. A lot of things seemed to be done with the hope that it would "create visibility".
To be fair, I gather that things in that team are a bit better now - there were some bright, really hard guys there, working against ridiculous odds. But I cannot say I found the experience enriching - I found that I was using less of my skill-set, I hated the cube-farm corporate environment, so I took another opportunity as soon as it came along.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#495But... 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…
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, they have values alright. They may not be what you think they should be, or what I think they should be, but.
No, they don't. People personify corporations and talk about them being evil. But they are not evil. Nor are they good. They are amoral. They lack any moral code either way. They exists purely to maximise the profit of their shareholders. That is all. No more. No less. People have morals. But corporations are not people. No matter what the courts have ruled.
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#497Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know what else is a cost center? Engineering. It's perceived as a massive step up from Call Center or Customer Support or QA but it's just marginally closer to revenue generation than the sales reps and can suffer many the same issues. At a previous company I managed to end up doing my software development work under a Sales title, so I could get the quota and commissions that would come with it. All of a sudden…
> 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…
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#498But... 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…
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…
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#499Earlier 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.
> (Mac OSX UI) doesn't "just work" anymore Please, if someone can sell a Linux with the same polish as Mac OSX, and as low-administration time, I would agree to pay about $200 per year for it. I've switched away from Ubuntu after being unable to resolve a problem after upgrade two years ago (which cost me 4 days). I spend 2x more on computers for Macbooks, not because of the hardware but because of Mac OSX. I don't k…
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/dell-updates-linux-po...
Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
#500But... 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…
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…
I think this can even be rephrased to "your engineering-team is doing something wrong".
Where I work we had a product which represented without any doubt the majority of our customer-service's tickets. Almost all of the tickets were related to deployment-issues.
This got communicated back to engineering. We fixed deployment, and now it's hardly in the support-stats any more.
If the organization just ignores feedback like this, customer support being costly should come as no surprise.