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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

#511

Post by cmrdporcupine »

TheAnimus wrote: post #505
hondo77 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it must have sucked or else people would have bought it in iPhone-like numbers. Apple changed the category by figuring it out.

I appreciate it's not a good way to start a conversation, but do you mind my asking how old you are? When the iPhone launched, people like me [0] couldn't really understand it. I was a top five percentile earner in the UK, but still new to that bracket having only recently left uni. I was used to mobile phones being expensive at £400 commitment, £1800 (Uk price with minimum O2 exclusive contract) was unbelievable to…

I had a Palm Treo many moons before I got a smartphone. It was a good phone, and the 'apps' such as they were on it were "good enough." I never really got the fuss about the iPhone. And I kind of still don't, even though right now that's what I'm doing for work (writing an Objective-C iPhone App)

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#512

Post by shanusmagnus »

TFA, and these comments, have made me curious -- what is the best way to get a breakdown of how much people like working for a company? I know there are job sites like Glassdoor, etc, but in those reviews everything is scrambled together. And as the comments here suggest, there could be a huge difference between what it's like to work in software development (say, doing stuff for OS X) vs. customer service kinds of things. Are there any resources that could help you get a 'fingerprint' of the work-experience at a certain company, across its various aspects?

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#513

Post by mcherm »

dragonwriter wrote: post #164
astrodust wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The optimal arrangement for both companies is no poaching. As soon as someone pulls the trigger and starts poaching it gets exponentially more expensive for these companies to operate. This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.

But if a company wants to restrict "poaching" of its employees unilaterally, it can just offer them defined-term personal services contracts with suitable compensation. If your employees are under pure default at-will employment, its not poaching to seek to hire them out from under you, because you haven't purchased a property interest in their continuing to remain your employees . And, if you have purchased such an…

> it can just offer them defined-term personal services contracts with suitable compensation.

The ability to do that is HIGHLY restricted by labor laws. I'm not saying you couldn't get around it with very careful contracting... but I wouldn't want to count on it.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#514

Post by shanusmagnus »

CocaKoala wrote: post #179
johnward wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this interesting. How do people collaborate? Did most of your team work the same hours? Do you just schedule meetings from noon-4? I would personally hate that schedule as someone with a family.

You can get the same no-rush-hour benefit by going the opposite direction; I show up to the office at 7am, and I'm out the door by 330 at the latest. There's somebody else in my office that I've only ever overlapped with for a couple hours at a time because he basically never shows up before noon. He used to give me a hard time about how early I left every day until I explained that I was showing up to the office an…

At my office they seem to be biased against this -- whatever time you get in, if you disappear before 5 there's a sense that you're shirking. And this despite what is, overall, a super healthy culture. There's no stigma at all about showing up at 830 and leaving at 1700, but showing up at 700 doesn't seem to allow you to leave earlier without incurring raised eyebrows. I wonder if this is unusual, since I've not experienced it before.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#515

Post by fab13n »

kbart wrote: post #483
kumarski wrote: post #63

I've found it is easy to poach talent from Apple, Google, and other large ventures. It's not the money. It's the vision and the way they treat talent. They don't pay much deference to the consummate creators, the lifeblood of innovation. Long hours, synchronous work schedules with asynchronous dependencies, long commutes, and not an equal pay to warrant education level and mental capacity required for task at hand. I…

"I think the future may consist of Life-Work balance where one's life outside of work, is greater than their work." Why future? A lot of people do that just now.

More and more people do that, but they don't get mindshare, mediatic exposure. The most common images conjured when one talks job are:

* unskilled people piling on minimum-wage jobs to avoid bankrupcy;

* start-uppers who clock insane hours, in the hope of becoming filthy rich through Google ads revenue on their new "AirBnB for pets" or whatever;

* IBMers (do they still exist as we picture them BTW?);

* jobs of limited interest and impact, done half-arsed if not worse, as seen in tv shows like _The Office_.

The skilled guy who goes part-time because he makes enough working 3 days a week to enjoy the 4 remaining ones exists, but he's not thought about. When his female counterpart is considered, she's typically seen as sacrificing her career for her kids, rather than buying herself time by not working more than whatever she needs to earn.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#516

Post by digital-rubber »

"I spent two years in the Apple camp managing customer service improvement for their technical support contact centres and out of the fifteen plus years working in this industry I’ve never witnessed so many bizarre and unprofessional things, only some of which I have time to touch on here."

In the next 15 years (probably sooner) you'll learn that the world is the same _everywhere_ and quiting your job at apple won't make a silly difference.

I've had a ton of jobs, ALL MY BOSSES STOLE from the company. And i don't expect my current bosses to be any different. no i will not resort to such, but i stopped caring. And if i was you, i'd probably not quite my job, and simply not care about the fopping idiotic things and people i'd see around me.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#517

Post by swayvil »

shostack wrote: post #210
exelius wrote: post #24

But... 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…

In the place I worked we had this old ho who could take 3 in the ass, 3 in the vag and 2 in the mouth. Simultaneously. We called her a hero.

That stupid stretched-out bitch made us a pile of money. Of course we never called her a "stupid bitch" to her face, that would be tactless. We called her a "hero".

I think she died of kidney failure or something.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#518

Post by exelius »

shostack wrote: post #210
exelius wrote: post #24

But... 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…

Customer support absolutely is a cost center. The approach you're speaking of doesn't scale, which is why Apple went a different route.

Apple's approach to "customer experience" is many-fold: I would argue that the first line of customer support for Apple is actually the Apple Store. Here, they spend money to make it a good experience because it's a revenue driver. They can provide personalized assistance, but the techs can also build a relationship they can use to sell more stuff. Apple also spends a lot of time making their products intuitive (or at least "fail safe") so many customers don't need support in the first place.

Phone support? Not so much. It's 100% a cost center because they would prefer their customers use other methods of support that involve them walking into a store and getting the full Apple experience.

Your comments are probably true for a small or medium sized company, but not for a global behemoth like Apple. Everything is so siloed (out of necessity due to the size) that any customer feedback likely wouldn't make it up the 15 layers of middle management back to the product teams anyway. You can't have 10,000 support agents feeding things back to a team of 100-200 product developers; there's just too much noise. The product teams make enough revenue anyway that they can afford in-depth market research on a scale that small companies can only dream of.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#519

Post by seunosewa »

mikeash wrote: post #384
sytelus wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

Employers would say such an agreement is not immoral, because it benefits them, but employees would say it is immoral, because it harms them. However, most people are employees, so yeah.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#520

Post by nathan_long »

swayvil wrote: post #517
shostack wrote: post #210

Earlier 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…

In the place I worked we had this old ho who could take 3 in the ass, 3 in the vag and 2 in the mouth. Simultaneously. We called her a hero. That stupid stretched-out bitch made us a pile of money. Of course we never called her a "stupid bitch" to her face, that would be tactless. We called her a "hero". I think she died of kidney failure or something.

Oh my gosh. I don't know if this was supposed to be a joke, but it is not funny at all.
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