He works for Google now.
My cousin also works for Apple, and after complaining about crunch time and how he had to check the bug queue when I was visiting him on a Saturday, I asked him "So, how long has crunch time lasted?" He replied, "Oh, about 18 months. Makes it really hard to date when I don't get any weekends." (He's in his 40s now, still no girlfriend.)
Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quora, other promising startups). Any software engineer who is in the valley for a while (and heard the inside horror stories of working for Apple) wouldn't want to work there. There is no way in hell, senior engineers from the new age tech companies (listed above) will go to Apple. Apple will have a hard-time poaching them. Based on this, I have to conclude that most good engineers@Apple are candidates who have a tenure of more than 15 years and are aging. All, relatively new Apple employees are either left-overs in the talent-pool who couldn't make the cut to the above top firms/startups or really B-grade senior engineers. What is Apple's strategy of thriving in a knowledge economy, when the only asset you need are "great people" to succeed in the long term. They probably have great hardware engineers. It is a travesty that though they are the richest company in the world, they still couldn't build a compelling cloud services suite which is better and cheaper than what Dropbox, Google, Box, Microsoft can provide. This comment, will probably ruffle a few feathers. [updated for typos/grammar]
I don't want to work there, as I know people who have and it sucked, but, I can see the appeal for some. Also one person I know who did a stint there got some rather obscenely large amounts of cash.
I met several current and former Apple employees. Many of them are extremely talented.
Based on my anecdotal experience, that doesn't show Apple has any problem attracting top quality engineers.
I know Apple recently poached a bunch of people from one of the above-named companies.
From the rumours I've heard, they pay marginally higher salaries.
I assume they got into work at 8 or 9am? That's terrible. I'm really glad that I work a standard 8 hour day at my small no-name company.
We just get to make our own hours and being in my twenties, I like sleeping in.
- A problem with the staff - there's either not enough of them or they haven't the skills to do what is required
or
- A problem with the management.
I've never worked in a role where incompetent people were hired and couldn't get what needed to be done done, but I've worked under plenty of incompetent management.
Basically, if you believe that hitting a deadline is worth having overall less productivity for, you can reasonably crunch for 2 weeks, and have the third week as an acknowledged low productivity week, and it might be worth it. Anything much beyond that is counter-productive on pretty much all axes and a strong sign that management is incompetent.
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 had a party at his house for the engineering department. No one else was invited. The following day, company lunch was leftovers from that party.
Looking back, I wish they had simply given us frozen dinner vouchers rather than shitty food.
>> Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife. -- Obligatory Four Yorkshiremen[1] Python reference
Not to poke fun at folks suffering, we've all been there and it's not healthy.
The question is, what system could we put in place that would reward a positive work culture and penalize *hattery? I know Glassdoor tries, but is there a way to measure this that won't be gamed out of shape?
1. http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-four-yorkshi...
Wow, Is it normal? Sounds ridiculous to me, having a family at home, I can't imagine coming home at 9 PM, having a late dinner and going straight to bed to wake up the next day, not seeing my son or wife the whole day, is it like this in every big company?
pot calling kettle black much? Getting home at 8 or 9 sounds pretty awful to me. I get that midnight is worse, but I don't think I want to work at either place. They both sound terrible.
That sounds very odd. Was this Omaha Steaks by chance? Perhaps it was meant well.
Edit: OK I see from other comments that those Googlers are doing 12pm to 9pm and it is flexible so doesn't sound so bad.
Cost centers also tend to have very toxic work environments as a result: people are constantly reminded that the business can and will go on without them. Hence the epidemic of throwing people under the bus, trying to "catch" coworkers in a screw-up, etc. You don't have to be the fastest zebra, just faster than the slowest one.
Where I work, our Support Heroes (yes, we call them Heroes because the lengths they go to for our customers are heroic) are one of the main reasons so many of our customers love us and stick with us so long.
You've probably heard that it can cost ~5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. An exceptional Customer Support team is your front line in fighting churn, and are an invaluable asset, not a liability. They can also be critical to making sure your product and engineering teams are up-to-date on everything they need to grow a successful product that your customers want to pay for.
Unfortunately, many companies simply don't realize this or don't care because they have a captive market (for now). I would encourage you to research more about how customer support can be done "right" vs. "wrong." If customer support is a "cost center" for you, you're doing it wrong.
I have worked at a dozen or so support jobs, and no matter how much the customers stayed because of the support team or how much we drove the value our clients got out of the product, we always were a cost center and treated as such.
That always meant they we got the second best of everything, were always last on the list for raises, promotions, new hardware, proper chairs, whatever. We were left out of planning, and whenever another department decided at the last minute it wasnt their job now became ours to complete forever.
The second I switched over to being a consultant and making money for people instead of helping to avoid lost revenue, their attitude changed towards me and became much more positive and friendly instead of unreasonable and demanding (both on management and customer side).
I dont even know if this is a conscious or unconscious decision, but support/helpdesk job position is reviled for a reason, and the reason is that it is an unforgiving job with little acknowledgement, pay, or chance for promotion.
It gets even worse if you are doing stuff like Apple support (I trained iphone/ipod then ios/cpu at a vendor site) and almost everything he said rang true about them specifically (and the call center management world in general.)
Apple's training team was pretty cool and one of the few saving graces, I am glad I got to hang with them in Austin, they definitely were trying to build a robust system to train people with reproducible results. It was the best training I had gotten from any corporation before or since, it was what got me into training in the first place.
Smugmug?
Smugmug's support staff is great. There is a huge difference when dealing with regular customer support, and customer support that goes above and beyond to provide exceptional service.
Smugmug Crutchfield Dreamhost Nordstrom All provide great, consistent support.
Not only that, but support tickets are also an excellent opportunity to turn unhappy customers into evangelists.
I think this can even be rephrased to "your engineering-team is doing something wrong".
Where I work we had a product which represented without any doubt the majority of our customer-service's tickets. Almost all of the tickets were related to deployment-issues.
This got communicated back to engineering. We fixed deployment, and now it's hardly in the support-stats any more.
If the organization just ignores feedback like this, customer support being costly should come as no surprise.
But Google showed us that you can build a billion-dollar multinational with abysmal customer support.
Valve Software performs similarly well, and is renowned for having awful customer support.
Apple's approach to "customer experience" is many-fold: I would argue that the first line of customer support for Apple is actually the Apple Store. Here, they spend money to make it a good experience because it's a revenue driver. They can provide personalized assistance, but the techs can also build a relationship they can use to sell more stuff. Apple also spends a lot of time making their products intuitive (or at least "fail safe") so many customers don't need support in the first place.
Phone support? Not so much. It's 100% a cost center because they would prefer their customers use other methods of support that involve them walking into a store and getting the full Apple experience.
Your comments are probably true for a small or medium sized company, but not for a global behemoth like Apple. Everything is so siloed (out of necessity due to the size) that any customer feedback likely wouldn't make it up the 15 layers of middle management back to the product teams anyway. You can't have 10,000 support agents feeding things back to a team of 100-200 product developers; there's just too much noise. The product teams make enough revenue anyway that they can afford in-depth market research on a scale that small companies can only dream of.
That stupid stretched-out bitch made us a pile of money. Of course we never called her a "stupid bitch" to her face, that would be tactless. We called her a "hero".
I think she died of kidney failure or something.
As for my own experience, I moved from a comfortable telecommute job with an amazing team, naively expecting that Apple would be a huge leap in my career experience.
Instead I found a huge factory sized cube farm (office space!) and a beleaguered internal dev team, whose job was to maintain a giant mountain of bockety legacy ball of tcsh/php/mysql. Project management and infrastructure were pretty much nil. Training and documentation didn't exist, it was sink or swim.
There was a bit of a siege mentality in the team because a lot of what they maintained was critical to a lot of people onsite, and these people frequently beat a path to your desk to berate you because 'the site was down'. Which site? There were countless report sites and webpages scattered around the place. There wasn't much time to go back and fix old code because the work pipeline was always gushing forth new work.
One feature of the job was endless, pointless meetings - these happened a lot, and it gave an glimpse into how some management types played the ladder-climbing game. I definitely came across some predatory/aggressive types. This seemed to be a good strategy because it equalled "visibility", which was often lauded as a career-making goal to aim for in the team and the company. A lot of things seemed to be done with the hope that it would "create visibility".
To be fair, I gather that things in that team are a bit better now - there were some bright, really hard guys there, working against ridiculous odds. But I cannot say I found the experience enriching - I found that I was using less of my skill-set, I hated the cube-farm corporate environment, so I took another opportunity as soon as it came along.
My explanation for that is that the "tiny innovative core" is way too overworked to write about themselves and everyone else is just irrelevant.
At a previous company I managed to end up doing my software development work under a Sales title, so I could get the quota and commissions that would come with it. All of a sudden I was earning a percentage of revenue every time a customer bought the software I wrote, winning recognition from the CEO, going to Presidents Club, etc. and total comp basically doubled. Doing exactly the same job under Engineering in previous years won me maybe a few thousand dollar bonus, or one year a gift card for dinner.
Somehow companies don't realize that you need everyone working as team to hit that revenue number at the end of the year, and every member of that team is doing essential work. You can have Customer Support rockstars, just like you can have Engineering and Sales rockstars. It's just that the Sales rockstars are trivially easy to measure (bookings) and so much easier to reward. I have yet to read about a compelling solution to this, because a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers, and there just isn't an equivalent process you can apply in the cost centers.
Not every employee wants or needs to be on variable comp, but the way we manage and reward employees is often very much dependent on how closely they are to driving revenue. I would be interested in case studies on companies that have managed to Think Differently on this, and I don't just mean a "profit sharing" plan.
Treating business units that book revenue as "profit centres" only makes sense if the revenue they book is entirely due to goods and services supplied by magic elves. Otherwise, <em>the work done to enable that revenue to be booked is part of the profit-generating business</em>. Letting internal cost accounting say otherwise is a recipe for bad business.
So the first part of the solution is to drop the cost/profit dichotomy, and actually have CEOs focus on understanding their business. This is an unrealistic suggestion, I know, but I can dream.
I'm interested in hearing how this is proven. I've seen incentivized sales reps close deals that damaged the company, just like I've seen "successful" marketing campaigns that eventually killed their products.
If you use bookings as your metric for bonuses and then turn around and use bookings to measure whether the incentives are working on a per-worker basis, you'll miss a lot of negative effects. If sales starts overpromising the product, sabotaging each others' deals, or even chasing after bigger but short-term customers, you could see the metrics improve as the company falls apart. And then there's the fact that, even within a department, you'll hopefully have a group of people with diverse motivations.
That's why I'm curious about how this model has been "proven".
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 average middle manager) mathematics and causal modeling. There's no simple metric that measures the real benefits of good customer support, even tangentially.
edit: thanks everyone for these replies they're great, keep them coming!
Without support and training software is kind of worthless.
I have worked in a call centre. It was an odd job, for a government department, ended up creating a sort of call logging and ticketing system for them - still used today (11 years later - but that's more an artefact of sunkworks dev in a government department than a testament to my coding skillz ;)
Anyway, my point is, those employees were told, and felt, that their service mattered, that the higherups listened to feedback etc. Excellent place to work and a very good atmosphere.
When I worked in a neuro lab, us techs were the primary profit centre, while the neurologists themselves didn't pull in enough money to support their own wages. Yet we were constantly told that we were the ones losing money and had to rally round the flag in various ways - we were also paid 2/3rds market rate (young and dumb).
This idea that cost centres are treated poorly and profit centres are rewarded seems more idealistic than realistic, in my experience. It also seems to me that you're handwaving away the author's issues - everything he said is a problem, regardless of the kind of department he was in.
"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 didn't want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn't want us poaching theirs. Doesn't it make sense that you wouldn't, that it's an OK thing? I don't think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad. And I don't think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees."
Ed Catmull of Pixar, a seemingly gentle person, is similarly unapologetic about the issue. Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets?
(I don't mean this as an anti-Apple comment. In fact, I want to give Jobs, Cook, and Catmull the benefit of the doubt, in the sense that they probably did approach the issue from the perspective of doing what's best for their companies, not as a quick way to save some paltry money. But that's kind of the underlying problem, isn't it? Once you've internalized the idea that your employees are company assets — that they aren't hard workers who make the company tick, but that they literally are the company — it's easy to slide down the slippery slope towards incredibly unethical and shady dealings like collusion. I wonder how this can be avoided.)
The word "protective" doesn't seem apt here, as that would imply he had his employees' best interests at heart, when clearly he only had the company's best interests in mind (which is fair, given that's the job of the CEO).
Try "possessive".
I've read that book (audio) - that was one of the more cringeworthy passages of the book. What I gathered was that Tim probably felt like "hey I wouldn't do this, but it's Steve and he's my boss so I have to put a marginal defense out there".
I agree with you, the way these rich people look at employees as chess pieces rather than humans is awful. If you're so afraid of someone quitting, then address that by making it worth their while not to quit! Not with collusion for god's sake.
The fact that they call someone getting a better job "being poached" just says it all really. (If you use this phrase, take a moment to really think about what you are saying.)
As soon as someone pulls the trigger and starts poaching it gets exponentially more expensive for these companies to operate.
This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.
I think this is directly related to the language used within most companies -- at least all those I've worked at -- to describe their employees: human resources. I think this is because people too easily conflate human resources with natural resources, which are consumed by some manufacturing process.
Once upon a time, I worked at a company whose internal management guidelines stressed loading new hires with as much work as they could bear to determine their breaking points. Work load was then scaled back to some sustainable-ish percentage of that maximum, and the employees were worked until burnout. The expectation was they would then leave the company. Obviously they had an absolutely absurd amount of turnover. Upper management saw nothing wrong with utilizing their resources in this manner. This experience obviously colors my view of things.
In my opinion, the phrase human resource is simply dehumanizing. But, I also think it might be a necessary psychological barrier that is required by massive companies. If the upper management actually conceive of their organization as made up of employees, not human resources, they may act or react more slowly, become less risk averse, etc. That is bad for business! Likewise, I think there's a similar statement to be made about citizens vs. consumers when speaking about another type of large organization: governments.
Language and the words we choose matter. They shape our thoughts, and define what is possible. We ought to choose better words.
Wow. That's... ballsy.
Sure, holding down salaries might not have been the primary motivation.
Doesn't change the fact that collusive no-hire agreements hold down salaries, and Cook and Jobs are smart enough to know this.
People believe they've been deprived of money and attention by default, so they'll eat up anything that appears superficially credible and gives them occasion to lay blame for that deprivation.
If you don't want your prized employee leaving, there's a really easy solution: pay him enough to stay. If he's that valuable, then it's worth paying.
Since the solution is so easy, but Jobs et al didn't want to apply that solution, I can only conclude that suppressing salaries was precisely the idea. If it wasn't about suppressing salaries then they could have just increased the salaries for these key employees such that leaving for another job was no longer an attractive prospect.
With that said, isn't the obvious solution to just raise everyone's salaries?
Also, the explanation only reinforces the idea that these executives view their employees as chips to be bartered, not free agents.
Why? To understand the motivations of Jobs, Cook, Catmull, etc.? The motivations are clear. Collusion is still illegal, and "seeing both sides" is an attempt at justification.
Steve Jobs is convinced he never did anything bad in his entire life. Except for denying paternity, but that still took a few decades.
It is possible he was very good at deluding himself.
Perhaps that self-delusion is contagious.
If one wants to believe something strongly enough, then maybe one can believe it.
If people want to believe that the only way to produce great form factor and ease of use in a computer is to be Jobs-like and conduct "business" like Apple, then they might believe that, even if there is a good chance or evidence this behaviour is not necessary.
It seems people have a difficult time separating the Apple products from the organization that sells them.
One may be worthy of adoration, the other may not.
But then, I've seen that attitude in startups. The passion for the company as a whole trumps everything so the people are easily disposable to them. Which, as in so many other areas of life, is completely backwards from what they perceive as logical.
The recruiter was going off an old copy of my resume that they found online and was unaware that I had a different employer. When I disclosed this, they immediately refused to go any further in the process because they were worried that if they helped me to leave then my employer wouldn't use them to fill future openings.
I told them to lose my number. Since that time, when one of my friends is looking for work in tech, I steer them away from this particular recruiting firm (I have no desire to blast them here) because of my experience with them.
This happened in the Pittsburgh area, I can only imagine what it was like out there on the left coast.
Employees do not belong to their employers, I don't know why this is such a difficult concept for some people to grasp.
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.
Here's what I think would be a better analogy: let's say you run a restaurant in a small town. The restaurant business is booming, and you and your competitors are all expanding, to the point where it's getting hard to find qualified cooks and servers.
The cooks and servers start working to get a piece of the pie. They move between restaurants as higher pay is offered. You desperately need more staff and since you can't find new people, you resort to soliciting the staff at competing restaurants and offering them more money. They do the same to your employees. Average pay rises.
You and the other owners don't like this at all. Cooking and serving was a minimum-wage job not too long ago! This steadily increasing pay is eating into your profits. So you all get together and agree to put a stop to it: you won't try to hire away their staff, and they won't try to hire away yours. Pay stagnates, and you and the other owners get to keep more of your profits.
This is what happened with Apple and these other companies over time, only with computer people instead of cooks and servers. Is it immoral for businesses to collude to artificially hold down wages? I think most people would say yes. Probably more importantly, it's illegal.
Perhaps "corporations are people, my friend" but they're not buddies out on a camping trip with a girl. There's no Corporation-A-broke-their-word-to-Corporation-B - there's business and competition is a huge part of that.
The fact that Apple developers I've spoken to spend their personal coding time (on the rare occasion it exists) on work projects only reinforces all of this.
(All that said, my sample size is seven people, so I could be quite wrong in the end.)
I faced similar in my last company (not with Apple). Now find it very difficult to get working on a side project or similar at home after having not done anything in that regard in a few years.
Ideas I once had to develop are long gone. Bleh.
I certainly have. I was going to bring it up if no one else did.
There was an interesting article in Fortune a while ago. The tldr was that you shouldn't get mad that Wall Street pays too much, but that the rest of corporate America pays too little. When companies are building war chests in the tens of hundreds of billions, and also feel the need to collude to prevent "poaching", you have to wonder.
The sad part is that people in technology sometimes love the work so much, that they are willing to put in more than they should on pure economic terms. The finance and consulting types are more ruthless about their own worth.
EDIT: My minimum wage comment was more about making a point. Banker types like to say they make lots of money but make less per-hour than a McDonald's employee.
I did get paid for those types of weeks a long while back (billed hourly - 50-80 hour weeks - nice rate). It does get painful after a year or two, and the winter in the northland is a bit harsh since you aren't seeing much sun.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=90_Hours_A_Week_A...
I guess the author expected it to be like an iPod commercial when he started.
I've worked at a lot of places. I've been told that open-heart surgery would be counted as a vacation day. I've been in 3-hour meetings where a dozen executives bickered the whole time over how one toggle should be labeled. I've been where fully half the employees had been fired and continued working on the sheer grace/need of the owner. I've been given hard deadlines to complete hundreds of pages of documentation nobody would ever read. Etc...and plenty of people on HN have their own equivalent stories. Apple is a big company, and can't keep everything pristine and orderly, and still has to meet massive big-budget deadlines by every means necessary.
The kicker: Apple gets results. One way or another, that system works; one company does not have one product take over fully half of an entire major electronics market unless they're doing something right.
What you are actually saying is "shut up and take it." Not the best comment in response to someone voicing their concerns regarding workplace conditions.
It is, however, the standard response by those who want to silence dissent.
It's very hard to make conclusions for the whole company from such a small sample. That borders discrimination/racism thinking. Not in any way trying to say that he had a pleasant experience or that his management was solid. Probably wasn't. Just hard to make conclusions for a big group from such a small sample.
The only thing I don't know is if you can guess from this experience that the whole industry is like that.
Of course how you sample is vital. With random sampling, it is pretty straightforward Stats 101 stuff. This wasn't random sampling which throws a wrench in it, but neither are these individual people actually independent. They were all selected by the organization they belong to.
Statistically speaking, an n of 100 is a reasonably decent sample of 5000 data points. It seems to me that you're looking for excuses, as if this concept of 'dry-run' meetings only happens to be within the author's "hundred-person bubble".
For you starry eyed youngsters, just remember that this is Apple, the world`s most profitable company. It only gets worse as you go down the list.
Work for yourself. Consulting, the trades and any type of work you can do independently is far superior to dealing with wannabe Machiavellians on whose benevolence your paycheck depends.
Get out of the corporate world, and do anything else. The sky is the limit.
I'm not convinced high profitability leads to better working conditions...
I wouldn't go that far. I mean, quite a large number of organizations are dysfunctional, but the mean-spiritedness and overt psychopathy described by the OP is fairly rare, even in Corporate America.
From his description I'd guess that Apple is worse than 95% of places where people work, between the 16-hour days and the bizarre status games.
Oh god. I would have hung up. The concept of a "dry run" for a meeting is insanely offensive and counterproductive. If a meeting needs to be scripted and rehearsed, it does not need to happen.
It's not something you do with everyone there or with a meeting that just works off an agenda.
It's not a on/off thing - it's a continuum from fact-based decision making to perception-based decision making. The difference is how good are the managers at seeing what's really going on and how much they care about it.
What's sad is when a meeting is actually just an elaborate ruse of a presentation.
Undortunately, it seems to me that good design requires totalitarianism. Apple's products are comparatively coherent, clean, unified, and aesthetically pleasing. This is achieved via a culture of totalitarianism that extends all the way down to the device. OSX has some openness grandfathered in, but iOS shows you where Apple wants to go.
... and customers largely approve. Having used both iOS and the more open Android, I can say that while Android is more capable iOS is more of a pleasure to use. There you have it.
It's something I have seen broadly in the world, and I actually find it rather disturbing. Bazaars can be creative and can offer a rich array of options and a lot of value, but only a cathedral can deliver aesthetics and usability.
It is hardly curing cancer.
Oh lord. As though any of them have any clue about real "high pressure" work environments. Being an asshole unnecessarily isn't a high pressure environment.
Miller's wartime exploits were to give him a greater sense of perspective when he returned to the sports field. When asked many years later by Michael Parkinson, about pressure in cricket, Miller responded with the famous quote: "pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse, playing cricket is not".
It's not the money. It's the vision and the way they treat talent. They don't pay much deference to the consummate creators, the lifeblood of innovation.
Long hours, synchronous work schedules with asynchronous dependencies, long commutes, and not an equal pay to warrant education level and mental capacity required for task at hand.
I think the future may consist of Life-Work balance where one's life outside of work, is greater than their work.
Why future? A lot of people do that just now.
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 because they weren't letting him do things he creatively wanted to do.
Where are the Apple advocates?
The fact that there aren't any prolific bloggers, open source contributors or HN commentators is an artifact that the company does not encourage anyone to do that -- in fact, they actively discourage anyone that isn't involved in open source work on Webkit or Obj-C or Swift from talking about their work. For better or worse, they still have a culture of secrecy around their products.
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed my time there and wouldn't trade it for anything else; I worked with a lot of fabulous teams, learned a lot, and got to build some really amazing stuff.
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.
Trust me, complaints about this come up a lot inside Apple. I'd love to go to conferences and talk about the tech we're working on. (Even if just to get more hires!) I'd love to blog about it. I'd love to contribute to open source projects. But it's just not what we do here, in general. (Hell, I had to make a throwaway just to post this on HN.) It's definitely my biggest complaint about my job, and it's definitely kept us from being able to hire good talent.
I personally liken companies to a large conglomeration of small organizations - your management chain really matters. Which is why when a respected manager leaves, sometimes his/her team leaves with them (HR flight risk).
I know someone who worked (works?) at Apple - she moved from a difficult arguably acidic environment to one where she feels valued and rewarded.
I can relate similar stories from other companies all over the world.
Managing Quality Customer Experience Programs for AppleCare's technical support contact centres across APAC; including vendor and internal teams in Australia, New Zealand, thePhilippines and the USA. Vendor management and quality initiative planning and execution to ensure Apples technical support contact centres maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction & consistently deliver an exceptional standard of customer experience by measuring & analysing performance in-line with regional and global standards of excellence and technical aptitude.
He was there for 19 months.
I've worked here 4 years and I absolutely love. my. job. I take days off to work from home whenever I feel like it. We drink at the office on occasion. I'm never harassed for not being constantly online. I don't have endless meetings. I'm constantly praised for the work I do, I get great reviews, with large bonuses.
My impression from reading this article is that he either had a shitty manager (it can happen, Apple's a huge company) or his department wasn't very well-run. (It is customer service, that's never known for being a great environment almost anywhere you work.)
I feel bad for the guy, in a situation he described I would've left too. Fortunately I'm not in that situation, and neither is anyone else I know here. People have their issues with small things but at the end of the day I think everyone I work with loves what they do.
The one that sticks in my mind is being sent to China for a short two week production run, and getting to return 7 months later. Her managers kindly offered to let her fly back and forth to the US over the weekend to get a change of clothes after month 3.
Well, and related things like tracking what buildings you enter by your badge, access to specific labs, etc. Stuff to make sure people don't know more than they should.
I've worked with a lot of ex-Apple folks, and know some current Apple folks socially.
Wait, what?
It may well have been a situation where the person was presenting a threat to others and he had to decide how to how much threat was being presented and how to prevent that.
It obliterated the little anecdotical nuggets remotely interesting in the writing.
1. I think most of us here understand that a single bad experience cannot reflect the culture in the company. Previously I was in a few other tech companies, where my experience was quite similar in nature. Some teams have inherently crappy people, leading to crappy culture. Ultimately it boils down to the manager and the members of the team when it comes to the question of fostering a culture.
2. The culture in my team(software) was mostly relaxed. Most of my colleagues did a 8-9 hour days on average. Of course, there were days(very rare) it became a 10-12 hour shift.
3. I am a firm believer in the fact that the employee needs to set the expectations straight, right off the bat. If you run the wheel like a hamster on steroids in the first few months, sucking up, staying late and trying to be the all conquering hero - the expectations are going to be centered around that.
4. I am an average Joe, who preferred to get in by 9.30 and get off by 6.00ish - I didn't sync my emails, didn't give a hoot unless it was absolutely crucial and someone called/texted me about the issue and it needed urgent attention. I am not a doctor saving people, just an engineer fixing bugs.
5. Of course my compensation/bonuses didn't go up like my friends who did the long hours, but I am absolutely cool about that. They deserved it.
It seems he worked at the Sydney office. There's a comment on his story as news.com.au
"Apple HQ in Australia was no different - a big frat-house where the "in" crowd got ahead and anyone else who challenged a process was seen as a difficult employee and managed out of the business."
Must be kind of hard to deal with that at a distance - It's not like Tim Cook would know who's who and doing the bad stuff. Maybe some sort of feedback tech would help.
The positive is just having Apple on your resume you will make landing a job anywhere easier. So the torture is more then worth it.
In contrast Google is more bottoms up / crowdsourced or "Darwinian" as Elon Musk would say. Meetings are more cross functional, shorter, and to the point this way.
What the fuck?! How the heck can this happen between two human beings who happen to work for the same company? I'd rather plant potatoes for a living or even go to war than having to deal with people who have no soul inside of them. Empty shells.
Most of these former employees feel legally threatened by their former employers, and that's what prevents them from sharing more.
I wish there was a way.
If you expect none of them to be intolerable nuts, you have a problem with scale.
The thing is, if you're unsatisfied with your job, equating your personal experience with the entire company as a whole, and going on a long name-calling rant shows you as rather unprofessional yourself.
I don't doubt that some Apple managers are jerks.
EDIT: No really, IT SOUNDS JUST LIKE SAMSUNG.
It happens pretty much in all big corporations in S Korea and also Japan.
"Do you like working here?"
"Yeah. I guess it's okay."
Versus
"What's the worst thing about working here?"
"They stick used hypodermic needles in your urethra once a week."
Other orgs. in the company are generally a lot nicer to work in, though it varies where you wind up.
"Road Less Travelled is authored by Ben Farrell, (online alias ‘nomadic_rambler’) – Freelance Writer & Photographer – That’s me!"
When I read that I thought to myself, this guy has so much passion and enthusiasm for understanding the world, it is a shame he took a job at a company that is as intensely focused as Apple is.
This is the money quote for me, "Finally now, for the first time in two years, I feel light, creative and inspired. I am again an individual with my own creative ideas, perceptions, values and beliefs. It may take me a while, but from what I believe – I’m now able to express such beliefs again." I really admire Ben for sticking it out for two years. The key here is that Ben was always the individual with ideas, perceptions, values and beliefs, and it sounds like that was not what Apple was looking for in this position. I've seen it time and again where someone races home after work to play in their garage band or rebuild an engine or practice some other art. And if there peers at work are staying late to work on something they believe in at the office, well that is a recipe for a problem.
I also think that if you find yourself in the situation of finally unwinding what turned out to be a painful choice in your life, its probably not the best thing to blog about it on the same day you take action on your future :-)
That bit about missing time to take care of his pregnant wife is pretty horrible.
Yeah, not exactly the kind of Apple insider we'd imagined when we read the first few paragraphs...
>Sixteen hour days are filled with meetings after meetings followed by more meetings. Whilst this is somewhat standard in most organisations, meetings at Apple wreaked of toxic agendas designed to deliberately trip people up, make fools of the less respected and call people out. Team spirit is non existent as ‘internal customers’ attack individuals and push agendas that satisfy their morning egos. Hours upon hours were wasted in meetings to prepare for meetings in preparation for other meetings to the point where little work actually got done.
And yet, they manage to be on the top at least financiancly, if not anything else, and put out tons of good products.
So either this is not the whole story, or it's mostly about the customer service department, and not the hardware and software units...
>Sickness, family emergencies, and even weddings are given no respect at Apple. When I started my role I missed one business trip as my wife was pregnant, fell down the stairs and had to be hospitalised – this was listed as a ‘performance issue’ on my record and brought up during a one on one with management as a major ‘miss’ on my behalf.
This kind of thing on the other hand is important whoever it's happening to. Maybe Cook instead of pretending to care for more glamorous media causes (like Indiana) and start treating his own employees (which include plenty of gays of course) better?
It's quite hypocritical to be a supporter for gay marriage, and then piss on the marriages and personal life of your employees in general.
One phrase that I tell myself often kept coming to mind: the freedoms you don't take, someone else will, and the freedoms you don't fight for, someone else will take. This applies between government-citizen, corporation-employee, manager-managee, and head-subordinate.
And do you know what happens when one hot shot takes hold of the company/department/group? Everybody seeks to emulate him and judge themselves and others in comparison to him. What happens then is like what happens to metal dust scattered on paper with a magnet in the middle. The hot shot is no longer a leader with a team, but instead a one-man army with slaves extending his rule.
And some leaders will never manage creative people because they can never step out of the way.
Their hardware, sold as rock-solid, is partly flawed. My (and thousands of other users ) Macbook graphic card broke after 12 month. The OS and their software has become bloated inconsistent and buggy. Their customer service is so bad, it even beats some of the worst telecom companies in my country. Their sales people are good looking but technically incompetent. Some of Apples technologies (Applescript, Objective-C) are just awful.
I think Apple products and services are only usable, if you have a lot of money to throw around and if you don't really rely on them, but look at them as toys to play around.
Using Ubuntu and Android now, I can admit that the UI is not nearly as sexy. But stuff works or can be fixed in reasonable time.
<rant>
People were measured more on how long they stayed back in office rather than how much work got done. On multiple occasions, I was contacted by the Associate Director for some 'urgent' work while I was on leave. As you can imagine, none of the work was actually that urgent. The worst was the politics to take credit for other people's work.
</rant>
As they saying goes, shit runs downhill. I guarantee you these guys are behaving this way because someone above them is giving them the same amount of shit.
Sounds like all experiences I've had with the private sector although I have had better experiences with teams and general behaviour of team mates. I think founders of companies expect everyone to have the same belief in their business as they do but with less money out of it and no real influence over the company...that and not everyone thinks the same.
It's not always easy to walk away from a significant sum of money, even when you sense it's doing real damage.
In a similar situation I didn't walk away and it took years to recover. Probably would do it again, having a family might be the deciding factor.
As with any "break up" this phase of WOOHOO+rage will crest, then the community dynamic ( refactored/lost ) will echo as loudly in the mind if not louder than the perceived freedom gained... to go work with other people, but still always people.
Draconian tendencies aside, no one will ultimately satisfy as a peer or network. So, OP, enjoy the rush. High-profile exits from large names is thrilling, but then you're without a scapegoat, if there is one at all. Tomorrow will be a reality check unless self critique is harsher than pointing fingers.
The whole "tell the entire world how much X company sucks" trend is pretty much played out, even/especially if the company left does suck. It's a form of therapy to do it, probably, but a lot of it feels like marketing for the next leg of a career regardless.
Even for me as an owner, this has deteriorated my life. I run an international shipping company. And every shipment is time-definite, not because they are, because customers make it so.
Such kind of job, is not for everyone, therefore we make it loud and clear, we have a lot of fun too, to compensate for it and I make it clear to my guys.
Anyhow, we do not have a culture of 'disrespect' but in a fast-paced environment, moods swings are pretty common.
Again it's not for everyone. Ask me frankly, 911 or Police are less stressful than we are. as you laid out., as If police job is more stressful.
It's sad that in order to 'make it' we can expect to receive such insensitivity at work, I certainly wouldn't stand for it, but it's frustrating that this is ultimately a first-world problem; millions of people deal with this kinda shit day in day out at shitty fast food jobs, and they get neither respect nor compensation for their efforts.
xD My sides!
