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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

#271

Post by clavicat »

ModernMech wrote: post #198
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…

> Why not just hire the interpreter? The interpreter has a job already - it’s to interpret. If they wanted to be an Apple specialist I think they would have applied for that job. Interpreting and doing the job of an Apple specialist are not the same thing. It’s possible the interpreter would be a terrible Apple specialist. Why not just hire an interpreter? It’s a win-win-win: a deaf person had a job, an interpreter h…

> Why not just hire an interpreter?

The message it sends is “you’re so incapable that we need to hire another person just to make up for your deficiencies”. And if it becomes a norm across the corporate world, companies will become even more reluctant to hire deaf people if they know that they are getting one employee for the price of two.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#272

Post by Socketier »

opo wrote: post #259
Socketier wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it's similar to the media frenzy around the woman who got seriously burned by Mcdonalds coffee and sued them. The reaction was mostly incredulity and mocking her, but the reality was that the coffee was exceptionally hot for decontamination convenience (a corporate money saving measure) and the cup was insulated such that the average person wouldn't ever expect it to be so dangerous. Best to withold judgment…

>... the reality was that the coffee was exceptionally hot for decontamination convenience It sounds like that might not be accurate: >...In 1994, a spokesman for the National Coffee Association said that the temperature of McDonald's coffee conformed to industry standards.[2] An "admittedly unscientific" survey by the Los Angeles Times that year found that coffee was served between 157 and 182 °F (69 and 83 °C), and…

Thanks, I'll have a read!

I'd like to note though that what ever the case, a beverage that she was expected to put to her lips managed to give her horrific burns. And there was, if I recall correctly, quite a few of the same case accident reports at Mcdonalds on record. She was the only one who ended up in high profile litigation though. I suppose my point is that she wasn't silly or unreasonable as the slow drip feed of facts led many people to conclude as they heard it.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#273

Post by kf6nux »

fortran77 wrote: post #251
kf6nux wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who don't remember, this fired leader wrote "Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self- regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box…

The fact is, that was a minor point in a well-received, critically-reviewd book he wrote a number of years before he was offered the job at Apple, and Apple hired him knowing about the book. And now you, who never read the book but copy-pasta a few quoted sentences, want to destroy this man. To go back after the fact and fire someone because of this was wrong. (That's why Apple settled for a lot of money, and Mr. Gar…

I don't want to destroy him. That was a weird thing for you to say.

I didn't hear about Apple settling for a lot of money. How much was it?

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#274

Post by samhwr »

Tommah wrote: post #249
samhwr wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their tenants were largely about taking care of each other. For what it’s worth, you almost certainly mean ‘tenets’. I don’t know why, but this malapropism has become increasingly common. Tenants are people who rent a property.

> I don’t know why Both words come from the Latin tenere, to hold. A tenant is someone who holds a lease. A tenet is a belief that is held.

Yeah, after wasting eight years of my life doing Latin at school I understand the basic etymology, but I’m confused because the English meanings aren’t very close. Your careful phrasing manages to get the word ‘hold’ into both of them, but ‘someone who holds a lease’ isn’t a very natural-sounding definition of ‘tenant’, and the notion that most people who make this mistake are familiar with the paradigm of teneo feels rather tenuous (plus ‘tenant’ noticeably isn’t a Latin ending, it’s apparently Old French, though transitively descended from teneo). You don’t think it’s more likely, if anything, to be that they just sound similar?

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#275

Post by sangnoir »

dogman144 wrote: post #57
fragmede wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An unofficial, definitely don't tell management slack would have 1000s of users before the email prohibiting it managed to finish sending to all employees. Draconian policies seem viable and like they'd work, but they require a certain amount of compliance to be effective.

These shadow IT attempts surface all the time through a vaguely competent SecOps’ team daily work, especially insider threat. Gets bragged about or picked up via MDM or DNS queries. So ya in this case the rule comes with easy enforcement.

Notwithstanding the write-itself scandal of a "privacy-champion spying on employees and cracking down on their communications" angle, you won't be able to enforce anything on personal devices congregating on off-company platforms and being spread by word of mouth (or company email, if they are feeling saucy)

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#276

Post by wheelinsupial »

dogman144 wrote: post #117
gkop wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment raised some questions for me: * Just curious, how do you enforce against, for example, a Facebook group? Would you have to totally block Facebook? * With word of mouth an activist Slack workspace can take off on personal devices over cellular data, if the conditions are right. Is the idea of internal enforcement just to make it less convenient to participate? * Why don’t activists use Blind to organize?…

To preface, “insider threat” is a bit of a harsh way to name the program this behavior falls under- it also covers “good” employees behaving in non-malicious but mistaken ways that will harm a company. Also, all work-related actions taking place off work devices gets covered under an AUP. So heading into this, Apple has both the program and policy to enforce a few different legal/HR actions against employees who’d go…

Do these device management tools extend to personal cell phones that have corporate software installed on them? For example, using a token that’s generated on the phone to log in to the corporate VPN while working remotely from home, would this give a company the same device management access?

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#277

Post by h4waii »

iso1210 wrote: post #157
kyleee wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you ditch Apple if you had a customer service experience with a deaf person and it took 3-5 minutes longer than it would have with a hearing person?

I'm not sure why I would need to talk to a customer service person in real life at apple. If I did (and I don't think I ever had) need to communicate my preference would be via email, or perhaps real time text chat. There's no reason someone who's deaf couldn't be on the end of those. I did however cancel a £1000 order with currys because they didn't provide anyone to talk to - by phone, email or even text chat (whic…

So this is kind of a 'dark pattern' as it makes orders harder to cancel. I think it can be intentional sometimes.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#278

Post by tomjen3 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #260
tomjen3 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is an unfair comparison. A delightful improvement does not mean that Apple needs to create a new product category - which I don't think they have ever done actually. They didn't invent a smart phone, they didn't invent the tablet or the watch+. They took what was already on the market and improved it to the clear delight of their customers.

They defined those categories, revolutionized them. When was the last product release as revolutionary as the iPhone or iPad?

AirTag

And iPad wasn't revolutionary, it was merely nice.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#279

Post by tinus_hn »

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…

You could have one Apple store in an area that always has a deaf person/sign language interpreter at hand and market it to people who want or need that!

Apple does pretty well in the accessibility department, they could use someone demonstrating it.

Re: Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

#280

Post by t-3 »

nicolas_t wrote: post #192
technothrasher wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, I'm exactly the opposite. While I do donate money to social programs, any time I have the opportunity to help others I'd much rather it be with my time and efforts than with simply handing over cash for somebody else to deal with people who need assistance. It is much more fulfilling for me to be able to interact with people I'm helping, and who may help me some day. If this is as simple as taking a few more min…

Agreed, donating money to social programs is helpful but isn't it much better to allow people to have a richer social life and to feel respected? It's not much more work to write on an ipad when asking a deaf employee and it allows him to have a much more fulfilling life.

Why is employment equal to fulfillment? This feels like a backwards approach to making a better society. We should be trying to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, so that people can interact with others on their own terms, rather than expecting workplaces to provide for a person's emotional, social, as well as economic needs.
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