361–370 of 566 posts
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Fine. Writing air traffic control systems is tech, and is pressure. The difference is artificial pressure driven by concerns like "I will look bad to my boss" or "or EPS might dip a fraction of a present", as opposed to "people will die".
I know that it's hard to feel the difference between condescension and having a point, so I want to let you know you're doing the first thing here.
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An adept representation of a limited sample of the issues surrounding customer support and similar departments. The problem is that it doesn't have to be like this. There are exceptional cases where customer support is not like this. Many of them have gained considerable benefit from investing in their customer support. One source of difficulty is that evaluation of those benefits requires very complicated (for an av…
Do you, by chance, have a list of those exceptional cases? I'd love to learn more! edit: thanks everyone for these replies they're great, keep them coming!
At one point, they decided to just give he customer whatever they wanted, except in cases of fraud or abuse, and they are fantastic now.
In "Becoming Steve Jobs", Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple's collusion scandal: "I know where Steve's head was. He wasn't doing anything to hold down salaries; it never came up. He had a simple objective: if we were working together on something, like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said, 'let's convert the Mac to the Intel processor', well, when we did that, we did…
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 that you and your girlfriend were doing just fine but your friend violated your trust and lured her away destroying your precious relationship. I bet you can find people arguing both cases as "obviously" right outcome.
PS: I'm not arguing any of the sides but I'm intrigued by this morality problem.
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As an engineer at Google a key difference from some other companies is how few meetings I have. I have less then 10 hours of meetings per week, and they are all scheduled between 11am and 4pm. There's also plenty of less-formal meetings when I strike up a conversation with my coworkers, usually closer to 6:00 as we start to focus less and wonder more.
10 hours... A week? Is that considered good? I run a small company and - also as a developer - I'd really like to get meetings down to 3 or 4 hours a week.
So what I find so interesting about this is that I've never heard the counter-argument. No one is rushing to defend Apple, or say "Yeah I work at Apple on X and I really love it". In fact, the more I think about it, I don't know of any prolific bloggers, or open source contributors, or HN commentators, or really anyone, who currently works for Apple. I know Bret Victor (worrydream) used to work there, but left IIRC b…
The culture is strongly one of not talking about working at Apple while employed so not many people will discuss it online, especially if they like their jobs. The culture of secrecy is one of those things that I never was bothered by, since it's just the norm.
Some orgs. are much better to work for than others, with around ten thousand employees in hundreds of teams, there's not many ways to reasonably generalize about what it's like to work there - different jobs can result in incredibly different experiences. The guy in the article was an AppleCare program manager dealing with OSV support centers, a job I'd never sign up for ever, since it's a corporate grind that's inherently tied to interdepartmental politics and squabbling with OSVs.
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Even with your edit, you still don't get it. McDonald's employee's don't make > $50 an hour. No one can make $300k+ working at mcdonalds, even if they work 24/7. Even if you worked LITERALLY every single hour of the year (8760) minimum wage would get you to ~63.5k. That's a far cry from 300-500k Any banker type that says something like that is an asshole or is really bad at math. Assuming he's a competent banker he's…
No, you don't get it. The point is that is working insane hours worth the hourly wage you get in finance.
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Those type of jobs do exist. People working insane hours for about 5 years then cashing out. A lot of people say they would do it, but I wonder how many would survive that type of grind.
I've heard similar stories from people who work on oil platforms. Forgot the exact numbers, but it's something like six months you live there and work most of your waking hours, then six months vacation, and the pay is stupid high (and living on the platform while you work there means you have almost no personal expenses during that time).
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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…
One of my friends used to work at Apple. After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners. Meanwhile, all of his friends worked for Google, we got gourmet food every meal of the week as a standard perk, and we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight. It's sorta like "Your 'thank you' is really more like a giant '…
>>After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners. Eh, it could be worse. At a previous company I worked for, one of the executives passed away. There was a funeral on a Friday, followed by reception. Guess what the lunch was on Monday at the office? The leftovers from the reception. A similar thing happened where the CEO h…