Apple like other big companies is a big corporation. What was the author expecting working here?
My Experience at Apple
631–640 of 840 posts
Re: My Experience at Apple
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
We fix it when we see it's broken, which isn't going to happen at 1am local time. If we have a distributed team the odds are better it gets fixed sooner. The world keeps spinning and there's always another bug to fix, it's not worth losing literal sleep over. > There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues "Thank you for calling. Our normal business hours are ..." works for the rest of the busines…
That doesn't work if gmail goes down. Or netflix. Or an ISP. Or any product that is primarily used by people outside business hours, e.g. xbox live. "Sorry several million people couldn't play games this weekend, the outage was outside normal business hours." Lots of products need uptime guarantees.
Sure.
But I bet the people working on those don’t say their employer unexpectedly “roped me into a production support on-call”.
If a role isn’t advertised as having responsibility outside regular office hours, bait and switching people into regularly working outside 9-5 type hours should not be allowed. And “not allowed” with serious enough financial teeth that companies right up to FAANG size would care, or at least that employees leaving/fired from bait and switching employment hours would end up feeling satisfied with their payouts.
If you need uptime guarantees, hire people letting them know up front so they can choose to accept or reject that work. You don’t (or at least shouldn’t) get to drop that responsibility on people who never signed up for it in the first place.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#633Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got a similar line from a certain european video-game company.
I interviewed for Blizzard many years ago. One of the first questions they asked is how many all-nighters I had done. Yeah, that was the end for me.
“More than I ever intend to do in my entire career. I’ll just see myself out, sorry you wasted my time here.”
Re: My Experience at Apple
#634Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was his diet?
The exact diet doesn't matter, what mattered is that he believed changing his diet would cure his cancer. In the end of course it didn't.
The exact diet matters a metric shitton, because Jobs' hubris cost him his life, if instead he had realized he did not, in fact, know everything, he might still be alive.
Pancreatic cancer eats sugar for-fucking-breakfast. [1] He was eating nothing but fruit, and even though fructose release is regulated in its binding with fiber, its still sugar.
If Jobs had eaten nothing but bacon, steak, and eggs, we might still have him around. I forgot what folder my bookmarks are in, but there's scant - but compelling - evidence to support that a sugarless diet high in protein and fat quite literally starves pancreatic cancer.
[1] https://jeccr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13046-019-....
Re: My Experience at Apple
#635Re: My Experience at Apple
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
My frank response would be something along the lines of "I'm going to ask you a question, and how you respond will likely determine if I work here, 'Are you self selecting for incompetents or doormats?'" Their response to this question would probably tell you most of what you want to know about working at that company.
Yeah, you can do this when you have several equally good offers in your pocket. Meaning you're good enough to be picky. What would be your response if you don't feel you're better than all others who applied for this position?
There’s nothing wrong with choosing a job that you know are going to expect all-nighters, probably un compensated all-nighters - but make sure you choose it knowingly instead of pretending it’s an office hours job. It’d be a rare job in video game production that didn’t involve crunch time, and if you want to work in those roles you can, so long as you accept/embrace that. If you’re the sort of person for whom 2-3 months a year of crunch time is going to destroy your relationships/family/mental health, you should probably choose a different industry. There are lots of 9-5 ish coding jobs that involve zero or minimal outside-office-hours work. Don’t fool yourself I to pretending your “dream job” is one of those if there are obvious (or even subtle) red flags that it’s not.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
The personal/political aspect aside, I can think of multiple projects that could have benefited from an approach like this. I'm often astonished by the inefficiency of project delivery, particularly in large companies. Teams spending months building sub-systems from scratch, where there is an off the shelf(sometimes open source) tool that will do the same job and better. Man years of work going into chasing trends li…
Interesting theory. If you pay 2 teams A and B to work on the same project, and B finishes in half the time it would have taken A, you really didn't spend anything extra did you?
... until you find they finished first by cutting corners and delivering something that is only capable of passing the scant unit tests.
Then the "zero knowledge" psychopathic management style doesn't seem so smart.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#638"Unfortunately, Apple became the place that I lost feeling of physical and psychological safety and the terror that it inflicted on me has impacted me on such a core level that the painful memories and flashbacks have replaced my dreams and they will hunt me until I am alive." I really don't understand this. I'm not saying this from a perspective that they are wrong, but that I honestly don't get it, please help me u…
Re: My Experience at Apple
#639So the company is as abusive to people on the outside as it is on the inside? I guess that shouldn't be surprising.
Re: My Experience at Apple
#640This is awful. I'm sorry that happened to you. However, If Apple refuse to take actions, I will interview with major media outlets describing the experience in more details and I will release a list of all individuals involved from senior management to the HR director and all the evidence as public record. You're wasting your time if you think they're going to do anything with this kind of approach. Get a lawyer firs…
In NY (and, I think, California), that's illegal. I found this out, because at the company at which I worked, managers kept making verbal commitments, then gaslighting me about them. I could never get them to commit in writing, and my own "reflection" emails (the standard advice about this) were worthless. I considered walking around with a little digital recorder in my pocket. But many states have explicit laws agai…
Regardless of legality if you get found out you'll probably get walked out of the building by security (even if you're just using it as eg a substitute for taking notes among people with mutual trust.) I've heard stories about people who tried this and it's unlikely to end well.