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My Experience at Apple

ex-apple-engineer.medium.com

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Re: My Experience at Apple

#351

Post by worker767424 »

alpb wrote: post #179

I am reading through this and I bet my 200$ that this person’s manager/team was primarily white and therefore this person has faced severe racism and bullying as a result of their race: > I had joined Apple on a student OPT visa > I was constantly being excluded from work meetings and events. There were meetings that I would be the only one who was not invited > my manager [...] started laughing and making fun of my…

But also

> the HR lady looked at the evidence of all the listed issues and concluded that the iBuddy just does not know how to speak English

I also suspected it's a clique of a single race, but I went through all the normal ones (white, Mandarin Chinese, Indian), and nothing fit.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#352

Post by bdowling »

xvector wrote: post #123
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attorneys will happily take your money and fight for you. Use what options you have.

This is easy to say but very difficult to actually do. Immigrants are typically more desperate and companies take advantage of that.

> Immigrants are typically more desperate and companies take advantage of that.

An immigrant non-citizen employee who is harmed by an employer has just as much of a right to sue the employer as a citizen employee.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#353

Post by dreamcompiler »

reaperducer wrote: post #329
penguin_booze wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HR doesn't work for you That's what I've learned too. HR is an extension of the legal department. To be fair, their true job is to treat humans as resources. These days, they're sometimes rebranded as the "People Team"!

These days, they're sometimes rebranded as the "People Team"! Sounds like it might be a minor improvement, but I'm not hopeful. I detest the phrase "human resources." I am not a resource. I am not a box of pencils, a copy machine, or a long ton of bituminous coal to be consumed by the company. I am a human being. "Personnel" wasn't so bad. I'm OK with that because I am a person. But that was before Human Resources de…

> I am not a resource. I am not a box of pencils, a copy machine, or a long ton of bituminous coal to be consumed by the company.

In the Harvard MBA school of management which dominates American business and which Wall Street incentivizes, that is precisely what you are: You are a fungible cog in a large machine.

This is certainly not the only viable business management philosophy, but it's the most common one in America. Regardless of what cute name the HR department calls itself, the MBA model should be assumed as the fundamental philosophy of the company until the company's actions (not their words) prove otherwise.

Costco is an example of a successful American company that does not seem to use this model. There are many others, but you have to search carefully to find them.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#354

Post by Apocryphon »

outside1234 wrote: post #342

I didn't work at Apple, but at Nest Labs, which was essentially an Apple startup, and this resonates very heavily with me from the abuse I received directly from Tony Fadell for a full year -- mostly essentially around protecting my team from systematic overwork. I have had almost a half decade to put it behind me and have perspective on it, and it made a better manager. But the other lesson from this is also that if…

I don't want to engage in amateur sociology, but I have to wonder that if this is common behavior across ex-Apple orgs (I do recall reading about how the Nest acquisition has been bumpy, as the former company had a very un-"Googley" culture), how much of this is a legacy of the very big impression Steve Jobs made upon the company, and thus on the people who worked under him.

I think exposure to abuse normalizes some of the behaviors of abuse. So those who were used to that environment might act the same without a second thought. You see this even with behaviors that might be relatively harmless like being exceptionally cynical or critical.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#355

Post by hindsightbias »

newbie578 wrote: post #22

I have to ask, why is it so hard to criticize or show Apple in a negative light on HN? If this was a post thrashing Google, it would already have over 300 upvotes, and "necessary" comments how there are already people who are "de-Googling" their life... I mean there are already skeptic comments regarding the author's intentions and experience? The fact is that out of all FAA(M)NG companies, work experience in Apple i…

People keep claiming this without citations, here’s one:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal...

Apple bashing is objectively a sport here.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#356

Post by worker767424 »

oblio wrote: post #233
tdhz77 wrote: post #27

I must try and understand my bias towards certain tech companies. When somebody says something bad about Facebook I instantly believe, but for some reason I had to really dig into this Apple engineer and it took me longer to believe them. Truth is harder to discern than I had thought.

I've been bashing Apple about BatteryGate a few times. You know, where they hid information from their customers in a way that benefitted their sales. They were sued and they settled. Which is basically admitting guilt, as these lawsuits are never lost by corporations (they either drag them out forever or if there too afraid of what losing implies, they settle). Each time I'm downvoted. The Apple Shiny Aluminum Corpo…

Batterygate looks bad, but the technical reason of the battery not being able to supply enough current for the CPU to run at full speed without crashing makes sense, so I think it's mostly a case of communicating the change poorly.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#358

Post by oblio »

corobo wrote: post #249
oblio wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone from "land of the brave and the land of the free" or whatever the US anthem says, you're awfully defeatist :-)

Well I'm from the UK so I'm a little delicate on the EU right now. Just want her back.

This will be a year-long, if not decade-long process.

The UK will probably be reasonably ok on its own, I don't imagine things will suck too much for the UK after Brexit. So what would be the incentive for rejoining the EU?

Plus if the UK does decide it wants to rejoin, this time it probably will get 0 exemptions, or close to it. I think it might get some as it's a big economy and it's geostrategically important, but definitely not as many as it used to have.

Without a major external or internal shock for the UK, it probably won't rejoin the EU during our lifetimes.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#359

Post by worker767424 »

justpoolitics wrote: post #238

I feel sorry for anyone who has not had many years of corporate experience who enters a situation like this. Toxic survival politics at a big tech company are a triple black diamond ski slope and if you are just learning to ski, you will get murdered by making a single mistake. Knowing what I know now, human beings can behave in shockingly awful ways and politics can become extremely distorted in these environments.…

> who has not had many years of corporate experience

Once you have some experience, it's really nice to know you can get another job, what a good job looks like, have a green card, and have enough money saved up to be able to get out of a bad situation.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#360

Post by Apocryphon »

hindsightbias wrote: post #355
newbie578 wrote: post #22

I have to ask, why is it so hard to criticize or show Apple in a negative light on HN? If this was a post thrashing Google, it would already have over 300 upvotes, and "necessary" comments how there are already people who are "de-Googling" their life... I mean there are already skeptic comments regarding the author's intentions and experience? The fact is that out of all FAA(M)NG companies, work experience in Apple i…

People keep claiming this without citations, here’s one: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=fal... Apple bashing is objectively a sport here.

There's no shortage in anti-Apple articles, because they're an industry leader and a beloved brand, and media loves controversy. However it also seems like for whatever reason, discussions on those stories seem to attract as many knee-jerk Apple defenders as Apple critics, while stories bashing Amazon or Facebook or Google tend to involve everyone agreeing more or less that they're bad or at least not as good as they used to be.

Maybe partly this might even be because Apple's focus is selling actual products you can hold and keep in your home (and not become monetized by) as opposed to being an abstract software program or service. It's easier to be surprised and delighted by real products.

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