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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

#541

Post by deegles »

astrodust wrote: post #528
deegles wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be expensive! Tech companies are getting a fantastic deal on their employees right now. Apple made $460k in profit per employee in 2013[1]. This to me is a failure on our (software developers) part in capturing the value we're delivering. If a company sold a widget that routinely generated $500k in profit per year each and leased it for $125k/year, would it make business sense to keep it at that price? Hell…

There's two sides here. The company making profit enables it to take more risks, try new things. The employee making a higher salary has other benefits, some of which might benefit the company, but the company itself will have to be more careful when hiring and take fewer chances both on people, products and strategy. Imagine if Apple had to pay $300K per employee what kind of a landscape that would be. Nobody but Ap…

> "the company itself will have to be more careful when hiring and take fewer chances both on people, products and strategy"

If employees getting a lower salary enables a company to take risks, doesn't that mean the employees are shouldering the risk?

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#542

Post by ptx »

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 think one of the things that made it different, and successful, was that it aimed for a compromise between a smartphone and a regular phone. (Although obviously not in terms of price!)

Compared to a regular non-smart phone it had enormous amounts of RAM and a hugely more powerful CPU, which enabled it to run a real web browser (as opposed to Opera Mini). It also allowed fancier apps in general, once they allowed them at all, but I think the browser was pretty much the killer app.

Compared to smartphones it got rid of the stylus. This made it less capable but a lot more convenient. Having to fiddle with the stylus every time you pull the phone out of your pocket was probably, I believe, one of the things that made most people reluctant to switch to smartphones.

Also, as far as I can tell, most phones in the US were pure garbage compared to what we had elsewhere, before the iPhone upset the control of the carriers and encouraged people to pay more. If the US market had looked more like Europe, perhaps the iPhone wouldn't have been seen as such a revolution.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#543

Post by johnward »

nostrademons wrote: post #397
mark-r wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out California code 2870 which basically says anything you work on at home, on your own time, using your own equipment, and not related to your employers line of business, is yours. The company can still fire you for your side business though.

The "not related to your employer's line of business" is the tricky clause. With a large diversified tech conglomerate like IBM, Apple, or Google, they could conceivably argue that anything tech-related was in their line of business. They may not win, but you don't really want to fight one of their legal teams in court, and so it had a chilling effect regardless.

Exactly. There is literally no market I could enter that IBM doesn't have some presence in.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#544

Post by johnward »

r00fus wrote: post #301
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.

From working with clients in different timezones (and in a previous life running global projects) this is par for the course. The fact that you only get 4 hours joint meeting time is just as good as if you were collaborating on east vs. west coast.

I'm EST. When I work with CA companies I tend to end up just taking meetings at 8-9pm. When working with people halfway across the world there have been a few midnight and 1am calls.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#545

Post by johnward »

mark-r wrote: post #295
johnward wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM had us sign something that said we couldn't work on outside projects without permission. It seems like it's not that difficult to get permission. Most people just ignore it. When we got notice of the acquisition a group of devs had a lawyer come in and from what I hear the lawyer basically said "don't sign this if you want to do anything outside of work ever". I just thought this was common for these megacorps. I…

Check out California code 2870 which basically says anything you work on at home, on your own time, using your own equipment, and not related to your employers line of business, is yours. The company can still fire you for your side business though.

I'm not actually in CA I was just curious about CA laws because they seem to lean the most on the side of the employees compared to other states.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#546

Post by th0br0 »

mwfunk wrote: post #431
th0br0 wrote: post #162

I once attended a hackathon in Switzerland where Apple sponsored some prizes. They had a bunch of relatively young (read mostly junior level) developers there and one 'glorious leader' management-level kind of guy. I shall never forget seeing two of the young developers following their glorious leader with ipads in their hands wherever he went.

I don't get it. Why is that an unforgettable image for you?

OTOH, why do you perceive this as something not to be forgotten?

For me, this simply shows a specific kind of dependency and hierarchy that I don't want to identify with. In my opinion, IT (especially) is a topic where knowledge (how to do X) matters less and less, because said knowledge is accessible for free anyway. All that matters is how quickly and well you can execute and whom you know. (Not that I really like the last part, but I guess that that's human)

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#547

Post by mikeash »

cookiecaper wrote: post #538
mikeash wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say "detrimental to the entire industry's profitability," I see "wages would rise to match the value contributed by employees, which would reduce the surplus that businesses can extract." If you don't want your prized employee leaving, there's a really easy solution: pay him enough to stay . If he's that valuable, then it's worth paying. Since the solution is so easy, but Jobs et al didn't want to apply that…

>I see "wages would rise to match the value contributed by employees, which would reduce the surplus that businesses can extract." I understand that theoretically the wage would be negotiated to the point where it was no longer attractive to poach or be poached and everyone's life would continue along swimmingly. The problem is that I don't believe this would happen in the Real World. There is just too much emotion i…

If you're a CEO of a large company worried about the impact that poaching will have on your company and on the industry as a whole, you don't have to sit around and wait for the churn to eventually stop when the market price stabilized. You can go out and make it happen by paying your people better.

We agree that there is some salary level where that constant churn of poaching doesn't happen, right? As you said, people generally like to stay where they are. That means that poaching will only work if you can offer something substantially better. When employees are paid well enough that it's not worth paying them substantially better just to convince them to leave their current job, the poaching churn will stop.

If Jobs wanted to stop the poaching churn without being evil and without breaking the law, it would have been easy: go out and figure out what that salary level is, and start paying it. Or heck, he wouldn't even have to go that far. If we assume that the "no poaching" level is vastly higher than current salaries, all he'd have to do is pay, say, 50% higher than the other companies around, then keep an eye on things and continue bumping up compensation if and when other companies started to follow along.

I don't see how that scenario has any negative outcomes for anyone besides shareholders and executives who counted on being able to pay $1 to an employee in return for $10 of value forever. There would be no feelings of resentment and betrayal, no combative emotional stances, because none of the churn you describe would happen.

Faced with poaching, Jobs had three alternatives. He could ignore it, he could collude with other companies to stop it, or he could pay his people well enough to make the problem go away. The only reason to choose collusion over better pay is to save money by giving less of it to your workers.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#548

Post by superuser2 »

tajen wrote: post #473
golergka wrote: post #223

Earlier 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…

>I would agree to pay about $200

You would, everyone else would download the CentOS equivalent, and as consumers we don't need the assurances of first-party enterprise support.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#549

Post by jsprogrammer »

debacle wrote: post #534
rikkus wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it reasonable for them to have a hostile and defensive position in relation to open source when so much of their software is either built upon or enabled by open source?

A thing can be unethical and still be reasonable.

You can twist the definitions of words to anything you want.

Re: I Quit: What really goes on at Apple

#550

Post by bbcbasic »

exelius wrote: post #148
bbcbasic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely, as if good customer support won't help future sales and increase customer retention. Without support and training software is kind of worthless.

Yeah, but the return on investment in marketing is likely much, much higher. Or, better yet, invest in making your product better so customers don't need to call support in the first place. Customer churn is also very, very hard to quantify, and your customers will leave you for a variety of reasons, many of which would not be impacted by better support (i.e. they move, go out of business, get purchased, etc.)

Yes certainly, it is an illusion that marketing, customer support, product development and sales are all discrete things without any overlap.
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