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My Experience at Apple

ex-apple-engineer.medium.com

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Re: My Experience at Apple

#421

Post by heimatau »

saagarjha wrote: post #416
heimatau wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's their social? would be a good follow-up too. I'm not sure you understand that Apple could bury this person's career and numerous companies only need one phone call to let this person go. Please understand that you're creating an attack vector that is too great for this person to reveal.

The picture the author included has enough information for an outsider to piece together their organization. The fact that it includes a meeting time and room would be enough for Apple to figure out who it was, just by looking at who booked it. Unfortunately, they probably are already in a position where Apple knows exactly who they are, and perhaps their colleagues do too.

> The picture the author included has enough information...

I'll refrain from the sarcasm. Although...it's very appealing.

Is exApple-anon (OG comment that I responded to protect the obvious attack vector) the same as limono (HN submission)?

Do you have evidence of this? I hope you certainly don't believe that they are the same person in a 100,000 person organization. This would be terribly assumptive.

I don't believe limono's questions were malicious but I wanted to make it clear why the questions were inappropriate.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#422

Post by Judgmentality »

sdoering wrote: post #251
dreamcompiler wrote: post #212

Things new engineers don't know, but should: 1. HR doesn't work for you; they work to minimize liability for the company. If HR thinks the best way to accomplish that is to destroy your life, that's exactly what they will do. 2. Many SV companies, as well as groups within large, respected SV companies, only survive through exploitation. They exploit their customers, their workforce, or both. Exploitation means obtain…

I remember my SO working for a German bank. It was exactly as you describe. She was in a back-office job. She always said she was an overpaid perl script 95% of the time and interesting work for the rest. Exploitation is common in many companies. For me this stems from information asymmetry. Employer knows the job market, knows the salary spread, knows all internal salaries. As an employee you do not have these insig…

> Not sure what a potential solution would look like.

Make all salaries public by law - you could even anonymize people, although there would be lots of issues with that caveat. I'm not saying this is a good solution (most people don't want to talk about their salaries), but it would solve the problem.

It's already the case for government employees.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#423

Post by realityking »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #364
qppo wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never worked on a product where it ever made sense to be "on call." I'm an engineer, not a doctor.

If something goes catastrophically wrong at 1am, caused by some unforeseen bug in the code, who fixes it? Who diagnoses that an issue flooding the logs is not an issue with your software but something else down the line? I think it makes sense to have an on-call rota. Some people do it for a week or so. Cycle it through the team. There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues.

Agreed but it should be paid.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#424

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #111

I find these "bad situation" postmortems to be unreadable most of the time. I do believe that these companies are full of assholes, but there are so many red flags with these one-sided testimonies. I can't tell how much is being conveniently left out to fit a narrative.

I’m not going to point to any age “generation” or make big broad generalizations, but from my time at Amazon I saw people who disagree I would have fired in a hot second, and who also from their point of view may have written the exact same thing as the article.

I have no real judgment on this guy. But I’ve seen plenty of people straight up not prepared for the real world get hit hard and it’s never ever their fault.

I find the lack of admitting any fault anywhere to be suspicious, esp when we know there are always two sides.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#425

Post by p_l »

mcny wrote: post #415
koonsolo wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is expected that we do at least 15 - 25% overtime without compensation Is this still a thing as a developer in the western world? If any of my managers proposed this, I would laugh, then say "ah wait, you're serious?", and then laugh some more.

What are you supposed to do if your employment contract says you’re exempt (meaning no overtime pay)?

I think this is a case of culture clash between USA, where "overtime exempt" is a thing, and most of Europe, where it is required to be paid (of course, there are cases where people end up being pressured... or like me, forgot to log the overtime hours despite secretary going around with the sheet).

Of course that only applies to people working on employment contracts, not those who got seduced by "B2B" :|

Re: My Experience at Apple

#426

Post by saagarjha »

jldugger wrote: post #405
griffoa wrote: post #318

I dont quite remember the meeting room names in Mathilda 3 over at the Apple on Mathilda Ave, but if the MA03 (in the screenshot) refers to "Mathilda 3", then this story is totally believable. I worked at Apple and it was absolutely horrible. I remember sitting on the train and actually thinking about killing myself. Reasons were many, but mostly I just didn't fit in there, I think. I felt like people there were also…

Apple's old HQ is on a street called Mariani, and both have a building named Three, viewable on Google maps.

MA03 is indeed Mariani 3.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#427

Post by p_l »

mgkimsal wrote: post #317
Tommah wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!" I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke."

> I think the advantage is supposed to be that you won't come in one day and hear your boss say "Guess what? We're broke." Sure... but you may still come in and find "this project has been nixed". Upside is that you may still have a 'job' in the bigger company, but everything you worked on may be thrown away, you may lose whatever political power your project had, etc. Certainly there's an 'immediate safety net' issu…

A project at big financial company...

At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts.

Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#428

Post by eivarv »

praptak wrote: post #237
Symbiote wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in Europe etc, join a/the union. The union least has lawyers experienced in this kind of trouble, and they are cheap/free to use for members.

I don't believe any of the FAANG companies have unions, not even in Europe. This is still good advice though - unions will probably help you even as a non-member.

At least where I live (Norway) your employer doesn't have a say in whether you're organized or not, and wouldn't necessarily know if you are – but you'd typically have an elected representative in companies of a certain size or with a certain number of employees.

Most unions I know of operate on a country-level.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#429

Post by diebeforei485 »

I am not too surprised by this.

The secrecy and compartmentalization at Apple enables this sort of stuff to happen more often. This wouldn't happen as much at a place like Google with a perf review system calibrated across the company where the manager has little control.

There was a well-known incident at Apple where there was an entirely team that quit, except for a handful of folks who were dependent on the company for their visas and would have had to sell everything and leave the country if they also quit at that time.

Re: My Experience at Apple

#430

Post by geomark »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #212

Things new engineers don't know, but should: 1. HR doesn't work for you; they work to minimize liability for the company. If HR thinks the best way to accomplish that is to destroy your life, that's exactly what they will do. 2. Many SV companies, as well as groups within large, respected SV companies, only survive through exploitation. They exploit their customers, their workforce, or both. Exploitation means obtain…

Point number 1 is very important to never forget. No matter what level you are at, HR's job is to protect the levels above you, not help you. If you are an engineer that means an opaque shield of HR policies to protect the company and all people in your management chain. Middle manager? HR will shield the directors and VPs above you, concentrating particularly on keeping the VPs safe no matter what they do.
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