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Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

nytimes.com

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Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#131

Post by stumpedonalog »

majormajor wrote: post #16
imgabe wrote: post #8

> Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he had struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years because his manager refused to provide a sign-language interpreter for him to communicate with customers, which federal law requires under some circumstances. This just doesn't seem like a reasonable accommodation for a retail job. Your whole job is to communicate with the customers. If you need to hire a…

I bought an iPhone from an Apple Store employee who couldn't speak but used a phone to communicate with me by typing out their messages. It was perfectly fine. I'm a bit surprised speech to text these days wouldn't basically take you as far as you need to go for a deaf employee. That said, if you take away jobs with a large communication component from the deaf, that rules out A LOT. I think reasonable accommodations…

I’ve worked with developers that I’ve never spoken to once.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#132

Post by everdrive »

Spooky23 wrote: post #77
wolverine876 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies. This is a common talking point to marginalize political activity in any situation: 'It's just a tiny minority agitating', etc. In every situation, a tiny minority appeals to the majority and sometimes it convinces them. (If a majority of Americans ever protested something, that would be over 160 milli…

A business isn’t a social club. More often than not, agitators have an agenda to agitate no matter what, or to provide air cover for other issues. When I’ve run into this sort of thing, telltale signs of bullshit activism emerges from sales and marketing people not hitting the metrics, people at risk of being pushed out for performance issues, or people getting passed over.

> A business isn’t a social club.

A lot of them are more social than anything else. Likeability supplants pure efficiency, and people hire friends, or people they want to spend time with.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#133

Post by mikelevins »

Bud wrote: post #70
jimsimmons wrote: post #24

As time goes on, Apple, the de-facto emperor of tech, will lose more of its clothes. They haven't had anything new in 10 years and each year their keynotes get more typical and lacklustre. Yet, Cook is up there using all sorts of superlatives, doing cargo cult innovation.

I guess you missed Apple Watch (which basically invented its category and leads it by a wide margin), and AirPods (also leads its category by a wide margin), and the M1 (instantly made a joke out of Intel) and most of the history of the iPhone. Kinda makes one wonder what else you've missed. Such as, basically everything. "De facto" is not hyphenated, btw, nor did you use it correctly.

While we're picking nits, whether a pair of words used as a single lexeme should be hyphenated depends on context and style standards. For example, Apple's style standards for technical publications in the 1980s and 1990s dictated that two words treated together as a modifier (an adjective or adverb) of some other lexeme should be hyphenated. That's how "de facto" is used in the OP's text.

"De facto" is Latin for "in fact", or "as a matter of fact", and it retains that meaning as an English phrase. That works perfectly well modifying "emperor of tech". Of course you might not agree that Apple is the de-facto (or "de facto") emperor of tech, but that's a separate question from whether the usage is allowable.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#134

Post by Wowfunhappy »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #121
ekianjo wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Providing an iPad to type messages on is a reasonable accommodation Doesn't that make communication slower? When I want to buy something, I certainly don't want to start chatting on a tablet to get my point across. It seems like a poor choice of position for that employee.

It can be difficult to communicate this way but I think there is a social benefit to making the extra effort for people with disabilities. Often you don’t choose to be disabled. What if you were unlucky to be disabled? Would you like your opportunities to be thoroughly reduced in life? I try to make an effort because I could have been in that employee’s shoes. I am lucky… this is the least I can do.

When I go to a store, I'm not doing it out of charity for the employees. I'm doing it because I want to buy something, in the most efficient and/or pleasant way possible.

I'd much rather fund social programs which just outright support people with disabilities (and I'd like such programs to be more robust and empathetic than they are today). Frankly, if you're not going to be able to do your job well in the first place, this works out better for everyone.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#136

Post by thebraxton »

luffapi wrote: post #125
imgabe wrote: post #8

> Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he had struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years because his manager refused to provide a sign-language interpreter for him to communicate with customers, which federal law requires under some circumstances. This just doesn't seem like a reasonable accommodation for a retail job. Your whole job is to communicate with the customers. If you need to hire a…

Only on HackerNews does someone read this story and decide the handicapped retail worker is the bad guy.

Saying that the accommodation is unreasonable doesn't mean he is a bad person. Apple has one view and he has another, one can be wrong without being bad

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#137

Post by geofft »

Bud wrote: post #62
015a wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally, nothing is unreasonable for Apple. They're among the richest companies on the planet. I'm over Corporate Equity and treating them the same as the mom & pop grocery store down the street. Yeah, it'd be unreasonable for small businesses. Its not unreasonable for Apple. Tim Cook could personally , out of his own salary, pay the salaries of every Apple employee in New York. He could give them all a 200% raise,…

You don't actually know Tim Cook's salary, do you? Please stop pretending that you do. Hint: the vast majority of his compensation is, and has always been, via stock grants.

Does the argument meaningfully change if you replace the word "salary" with "compensation"? If not, please stop pretending that you made an interesting point.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#138

Post by fortran77 »

From the Article, there's this:

> In May, hundreds of employees signed a letter urging Apple to publicly support Palestinians during a recent conflict with Israel. And a corporate Slack channel that was set up to organize efforts to push Apple to be more flexible about remote-work arrangements once the pandemic ended now has about 7,500 employees on it.

and there's this:

> On Friday, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, answered questions from workers in an all-staff meeting for the first time since the public surfacing of employee concerns over topics ranging from pay equity to whether the company should assert itself more on political matters like Texas’ restrictive abortion law.

I wonder how many names are involved in both actions. Because:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/12/04/palestines-abortion-pro...

(Hint: I had someone inside check. And there are many names in common. That means none of this is sincere. I don't know what drives it.)

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#139

Post by AbrahamParangi »

luffapi wrote: post #125
imgabe wrote: post #8

> Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he had struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years because his manager refused to provide a sign-language interpreter for him to communicate with customers, which federal law requires under some circumstances. This just doesn't seem like a reasonable accommodation for a retail job. Your whole job is to communicate with the customers. If you need to hire a…

Only on HackerNews does someone read this story and decide the handicapped retail worker is the bad guy.

This is an interesting comment because it reveals a philosophical disagreement: is good/bad mostly about moral character or mostly about power?

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#140

Post by S_A_P »

imgabe wrote: post #8

> Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he had struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years because his manager refused to provide a sign-language interpreter for him to communicate with customers, which federal law requires under some circumstances. This just doesn't seem like a reasonable accommodation for a retail job. Your whole job is to communicate with the customers. If you need to hire a…

Is this is someone who is either looking for an angle to litigate with a rich company or has completely unrealistic expectations or both? I feel like if you had a real conversation with this person and got to the root of how they feel they would know their ask is unreasonable. I’m sure they may also feel like they have been dealt a bad hand and want to find a way to be compensated. While this route may make a few lawyers happy I really doubt that winning a lawsuit against Apple for not hiring a sign language interpreter will bring them any peace. What I have been noticing and I could be completely wrong and or biased here is that we have a large population of folks in the US that are struggling with mental health issues and that manifests in a lot of odd ways. This seems to be one of them.
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