[HN Gopher] My Experience at Apple
___________________________________________________________________
My Experience at Apple
Author : limono
Score : 774 points
Date : 2021-01-01 18:10 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ex-apple-engineer.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ex-apple-engineer.medium.com)
| worker767424 wrote:
| The author avoided this, but I wonder if the clique was all the
| same ethnicity. I've definitely seen teams in tech companies that
| are Chinese teams or Indian teams. Also some white teams, but not
| as many.
| [deleted]
| scotth wrote:
| I have belonged to teams with abusive elements, and it certainly
| felt similar to what the author describes (while not nearly to
| the same degree, and for that I feel for them).
|
| Approaching HR or higher ups at the company doesn't feel like an
| approach that is likely to bear fruit. It sucks, because it
| should, but reality is that you're likely to be labelled a
| problem -- especially if it's your word against a team that is as
| closely knit as this one is described.
|
| I have to wonder whether gritting your teeth and trying to get
| through it is a better approach (that is, if you want to stay).
| There is something about being friendly, eager, unemotional, and
| unopinionated that tends to placate the jerks.
|
| You only have to do this as long as it takes to escape to a more
| emotionally supportive situation. A couple good review cycles,
| and you can wave goodbye.
|
| I realize that this may not be possible depending on your
| situation. Just an anecdote.
|
| In any case, I hope the author lands on their feet. Don't let it
| get you down.
| makach wrote:
| Just wow... I work within IT, and this post totally changed my
| point of view on Apple - from being optimistically positive to
| chaotic neutral. I will still consume much of their hw/sw - but I
| will not have desire to work for them - or think highly about
| them - until the stories that comes out of Apple change.
| adultSwim wrote:
| This is one of the many reasons we need a UNION
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Apple is a big company with a great reputation, but there are bad
| apples in every bunch.
|
| My biggest takeaway from this article is that the author should
| take this advice: Before you accept a position, find out what
| project you will be working on, and get to know the people who
| you will be working with. If you are being hired to replace
| someone who left, try to find out why they left (or were fired).
|
| I have not done much moving around in my (long) career, but I
| have many friends who have. There are plenty of jobs out there,
| but many of them are tainted by toxic people or cultures. During
| your interview process, find out what you can. If you come away
| with any concerns, trust your feelings. If uncertain, raise your
| concerns and seek more information before you accept an offer.
| You will either come away with more concerns, or you will find
| out that your concerns were unfounded.
|
| Any big company hiring a new PhD grad should do their best to
| make the new employee feel welcome as part of the team. It seems
| that there were plenty of warning signs in this case, but as this
| was the author's first work experience, she either missed them or
| did not recognize their significance.
|
| It's a shame that the visa process and ITAR rules compounded the
| problems described.
|
| I'm a bit confused about the end of this article where she
| writes; "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."
|
| She no longer works for Apple, and probably doesn't want to ever
| work there again, so why the threat, and why the ultimatum? Why
| not just go public with all of the names and documentation? They
| already did their best to damage her reputation and career. Why
| should she hold back?
| [deleted]
| someonehere wrote:
| I worked for Apple retail in San Francisco. Being an early retail
| employee in the Bay Area, we had very close ties to Cupertino. I
| worked when Steve was still alive.
|
| * Retail management in my store ruled by fear. I heard from other
| stores across the US this was the same as well. * Promotions were
| handed out to those who kissed ass the hardest. Even if they were
| unqualified or cheated on promotion exams, if they brown nosed
| enough they got promoted. * The goal for every retail employee
| was to eventually make it to Cupertino and work for the corporate
| side of things. Either Genius support or logistics in Elk Grove.
| * Those who I knew who made it to Cupertino shared similar
| experience to the author's post.
|
| Apple comes off as a happy family friendly company, when in
| reality behind the scenes it's a rule by fear culture.
| abdabab wrote:
| You can sense it when you walk into an Apple store. I met a few
| unnecessarily rude salesperson and wondered how or why they
| were still there.
| romanovcode wrote:
| > Apple comes off as a happy family friendly company, when in
| reality behind the scenes it's a rule by fear culture.
|
| Just like any other company.
| xenihn wrote:
| Sounds like Disney.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Explains why Pixar was such a good fit with Disney.
| worker767424 wrote:
| > Being an early retail employee in the Bay Area, we had very
| close ties to Cupertino. I worked when Steve was still alive.
|
| Steve Jobs actually interacted with retail underlings?!
| [deleted]
| __m wrote:
| Sounds like Steve Jobs is still in charge. I like Apple but I
| would never work for them
| coldtea wrote:
| Now, imagine the same behavior from bosses, but also being paid
| way less, working to the bone, and wearing diapers because
| bathroom breaks are frowned upon.
|
| Welcome to Amazon warehouse work...
| albertopv wrote:
| If it was me, I wouldn't have lasted so long. No way. I worked
| for mid size companies, and I found envs quite toxic, but this is
| a whole new level for me. I'm glad I decided a long time ago my
| life worths more than working at any $faang.
| sokoloff wrote:
| It's a long, rambling post with some fairly vague and difficult
| to falsify accusations. I have no connections to Apple (other
| than as a consumer), but I could not wade through the article
| enough to determine if I thought there was an actual smoking gun.
|
| I suspect the story would be much more powerful if it were 1/5 as
| long and stuck to the material facts.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Here's the thing you need to know about experienced abusers
| (note: often narcissists): They know how to "play the game",
| and what to do.
|
| They know that when it comes to the illegal stuff - you do it
| off-the-record. Then it just become "he said, she said", which
| is very difficult to prove.
|
| They are experts at gaslighting, which ties in with the point
| above. Not only can the invalidate your claims about (difficult
| to prove) verbal abuse, but they can actually turn it against
| you, by claiming that you're obviously mentally unstable /
| hearing things due to workload / not fit for the job / etc.
|
| Especially for narcissists, they tend to be very good at
| forming networks and friendships which benefit them - and in
| turn can produce cliques like this.
|
| They know what buttons to push in the organization, to cover
| their own ass, and make the other party look incompetent. This
| includes creating extensive paper trails, frequent meetings to
| establish some opinion on a person, and what not.
|
| Prolific abusers are hard to catch because they are very good
| at it, and because they create (or join) environments which are
| chaotic, and tie in multiple people on the abuse (whether want
| it or not - pretty much in the same way that bullies in school
| rarely do the bullying themselves, but form groups to do it).
|
| In this case, it's even worse - because there's such an extreme
| imbalance of power. On one side you have a fresh hire, without
| any permanent VISA, completely dependent on the job. On the
| other side, you have established bullies in clique, with
| decades of employment in the company.
|
| And not only that - it all happened within a company that
| enforces a strict culture of non-disclosure. It's hard to go
| public with information which may include explicitly
| confidential work/data.
| corobo wrote:
| Is that really the thing you took from this? The person is
| reporting a pretty serious harassment issue and your input is
| "mmm, make it more peppy"
|
| Worse, at the time of writing this is the second highest
| response!
|
| e: at least the comment got reshuffled while I wrote that,
| seriously though..
| jariel wrote:
| This is a very poor characterization.
|
| It's not the job of junior engineers from foreign countries to
| write perfect Medium posts.
|
| Also the article was chock full of facts, there were facts in
| every sentence.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Yeah, I wanted to read it more carefully but it seemed to be a
| long litany of real or perceived psychological abuse. Maybe I
| too missed a smoking gun.
|
| What I read described an Apple that is completely alien to me.
| I have never seen or even heard of anything even remotely like
| this team or the behavior described.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Well, that's the basis of their article. They're trying to
| tell you an "inside story", that's the hook of the whole
| thing.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > long litany of real or perceived psychological abuse. Maybe
| I too missed a smoking gun.
|
| Its staring you in the face. How can anyone be allowed to
| pull off half of that shit? I mean if you are _knowingly_
| causing someone to take beta blockers, you've got to have a
| long hard look at yourself.
|
| I have made mistakes, fortunately early in my career. I made
| a colleague cry, I thought it was a "bit of fun" but I was
| being a horrid shit. I don't shout at work anymore. Its a
| sign that I've lost the argument, failed to see reason, or
| more often just plain wrong.
|
| To allow others to cause people to cry or shout is frankly
| unforgivable. Especially if they are senior and its aimed at
| a young'un. Yes, they might be annoying, or a dipshit. but
| its up to you to guide them or move them on. Not play with
| like a cat with a half dead bird.
|
| in short: enigneers don't let other people be abusive dicks.
| paganel wrote:
| > perceived psychological abuse
|
| Do you call this:
|
| > "You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental
| problems."
|
| "perceived psychological abuse"?!? What the heck, the
| sociopathic person who said that stupid ass thing should have
| been fired on the spot, apparently he/she still is a manager
| at Apple.
| busterarm wrote:
| I have a friend who recently left Microsoft after a decade
| and a half. He'd completely drunk the Kool Aid but ended his
| experience at the company facing more than a year of abuse
| from a new manager and senior engineer. Very similar to this
| long post about Apple, unfortunately. He and a couple of
| other people on his team tried to move to different teams,
| but despite a long history of excellent work, everyone was
| treated by the rest of the company like they were toxic
| waste.
|
| Nobody thinks that their company is like this until they're
| on the other side of it. In my friend's case, it was only in
| retrospect that he saw patterns of toxic behavior from
| management.
| VRay wrote:
| I haven't seen this sort of outright abuse, but I've
| definitely experienced firsthand at multiple companies a
| situation where a newcomer needs a ton of tribal knowledge
| in order to do their job, but the newcomer's team members
| get miffed every time they're asked a question. So then the
| newcomer ends up having to do way too much work on his/her
| own the hard way, it makes everything way harder and less
| effective, and before too long they're branded a "low
| performer" and it all goes downhill from there.
|
| It happened to me at Microsoft, and later it ALMOST
| happened to me at Apple. Fortunately, at Apple I knew what
| was going on that time and I just badgered my irate
| teammate and bullied him into giving me all the info I
| needed. (Or went around him when I could, since I was lucky
| that the rest of the team was a lot easier to work with in
| that respect) He was a nice guy, but he'd get visibly
| annoyed every time I asked him a question. Either the
| answer was patently obvious, or the question was
| unanswerably difficult.. Later on, that teammate left and a
| new one came onboard with a ludicrous number of really dumb
| questions, but I just swallowed my bad attitude and did my
| best to patiently and nicely answer them.. and sure enough,
| after a couple of months he was fully up to speed.
|
| Also, even more fortunately, when things were going badly
| at Microsoft I had a decent savings account built up and a
| lot of self confidence/stubbornness, enough to say from a
| place of complete conviction "I'M not the problem; this
| whole org is a steaming pile of shit!" no matter who told
| me otherwise. I feel really bad for the author of TFA,
| because I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to
| have the type of screwed-up, mercenary attitude it would
| take to get through his experiences unscathed.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| I totally agree. I'm working on a system now that is the
| most complex I've ever worked on - managed K8s,
| OperStack, bare metal - all the provisioning, build and
| test infrastructure (dealing with nested virtualization,
| DinD, integrating build tools into tools that do things
| as low level as PXE boot servers). There's a huge amount
| of tribal knowledge required and I struggled with this.
|
| Thankfully my manager was open to questions, and patient,
| it was me "not wanting to be a bother". But I had a
| meeting with my manager's manager and he talked about how
| stupid he felt, and understanding that no-one would feel
| like I was an "anchor" asking the "silly" questions of
| "Why do we / don't we ..." and persisting through that
| because everyone had been there.
| gcheong wrote:
| What kind of smoking gun are you looking for? Given that Steve
| Jobs was partly famous for his capriciousness in how he treated
| people I imagine his example set a baseline of acceptable toxic
| behavior in the company so it's not unreasonable for me to
| imagine that a team like this could emerge given the apparent
| lack of oversight by HR and upper management and all the
| secrecy and isolation between teams that Apple is famous for.
| throwaway8193 wrote:
| I think this has a lot to do with it. I worked at Apple for
| four years, and the most successful (promoted) managers all
| tried to emulate the managerial attributes _they believed_
| Steve embodied: Hard nosed, demanding, callous, ridiculing
| failure, and they all thought they had his product sense too.
| They attempted to be Steve-clones all the way up the chain to
| Craig (who was actually a really decent guy, and didn 't, at
| least to me, act like a Steve-clone himself). They were
| consistently rewarded for this behavior, so that kind of
| behavior became known as the way to go places at Apple. I
| remember having [careful] conversations with my manager where
| I essentially asked, "Do I have to be a raging asshole to get
| rewarded here? Because that's all I see--raging assholes get
| the promotions and equity refreshes."
|
| There were other managers who were not toxic, and knew how to
| develop a team and reward/motivate them, but most of them
| stagnated and never went anywhere promotion-wise.
|
| I also found the place very clique-y. There was definitely a
| small in-group, with the rest in the out-group, and it seemed
| to have nothing to do with tenure, seniority, or level. They
| would have their own private off-sites to do who knows what.
| I think they called it Top-100 or something while I was
| there. Everything was siloed and secret so you could never be
| sure.
|
| EDIT: Reading the article, I see the cliques were
| specifically mentioned. I have no doubt the author is for
| real.
| loceng wrote:
| Are you expecting them to name real names and give specific
| enough details where they're then identifiable?
| randallsquared wrote:
| Even if the rest was vague enough (and it only would be if
| this was a very common set of experiences), there was a
| screenshot of a 1-on-1 meeting _time and room_ , so the
| anonymity ship has sailed.
| generalpf wrote:
| The meeting was deleted afterwards. It's mentioned right
| there in the post.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Logs
| Someone wrote:
| If this story realistically describes what happened, I would
| expect Apple HR can identify who wrote it (Muslim with a
| student OPT visa, specific request to do no previous work
| experience, reported issues with the export license, and a
| case like this)
|
| If there were tens of similar cases, we would have heard of
| more.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Apple's culture of silence works well enough that employees
| are self-censoring. You do hear a few stories now and then,
| but often constrained to IS&T or from non-engineering orgs:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804607
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12502336
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994
| dtech wrote:
| Someone has to speak out first and it has to get a ball
| rolling. Stuff like this can be hidden for decades before
| coming to light, if ever, see e.g. #metoo with prominent
| examples like Epstein and Spacey.
| gorbachev wrote:
| Amazing that someone who has English as a second language
| wouldn't write a perfectly legible blog post about a traumatic
| experience.
| grumple wrote:
| The author is trying to maintain some anonymity. That would not
| be possible with specific details.
| jb1991 wrote:
| My wife -- not a current or ex-Apple employee -- had a very
| similar experience as this, at a different company and in a
| different geographical location than Apple.
|
| It's unfortunate that workplace abuse is so easy to do and hard
| to fix. She called their bluff when they told her they could
| easily replace her, after she spoke up about the treatment. They
| were shocked that she would actually leave. I was so proud of
| her.
| valuearb wrote:
| Why didn't the manager just fire this person, they could have at
| any time?
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Surely at a certain point when their team isn't performing and
| they keep firing employees eventually the common denominator
| becomes the manager, no?
| nakovet wrote:
| Some people enjoy causing mental distress in others, from the
| report they were not busy with work, so they wanted some other
| games to keep them busy. Similarly people enjoy hurting others
| and pain, e.g. sadomasochism
| ineedasername wrote:
| They'd already fired the previous person and an intern. At some
| point it stops looking like the worker's fault and starts being
| very clear the problem is the manager. In fact sometimes the
| way toxic managers like this are removed is when a decent
| manager notices that sort of trend.
| almost_usual wrote:
| You can't fire an employee at any time in California without
| good reason. You need to build a case against the employee,
| that's why they were put on a PIP.
|
| Either way the manager is insane in this story so I'm not sure
| what their motivation is.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Not sure why you think this. You can fire anyone whenever you
| want for any or no reason in the state of California. The
| only exceptions are when you have a written or implied
| contract that makes you not "at-will". The best way to be an
| exception to "at-will" in California is to be paid in
| advance.
| almost_usual wrote:
| If you're fired without good reason or paper trail and live
| in California take your employer to court. They still need
| good cause for termination.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Welcome to Bad Legal Advice News.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| It's not that bad, to go to court would require a lawyer
| who would tell them if there's any chance of success or
| not.
| almost_usual wrote:
| If you think letting employers bend you over without good
| reason is the way to live your life then go for it.
| valuearb wrote:
| If you think giving out clearly incorrect legal advice
| that ignores the rules of at-will employment isn't going
| to cost anyone who follows it dearly, go for it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ddevault wrote:
| If a company's value starts with a "B" (or... ugh... a "T"), they
| won't care about you. You should not give them anything of your
| life, because it's worth next to nothing to them. Mega-corps are
| life sucking leeches on employees, customers, and society as a
| whole. Everyone. How many horror stories is it going to take?
| Don't get duped by the glamour. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google,
| Facebook, Uber, none of them are going to be good for you. In the
| worst case, they're going to make you hurt other people.
|
| It's an especially horrible idea if you're in a vulnerable
| position like being here on a visa. Many vulnerable people,
| including some of my close friends, are being taken advantage of
| by megacorps, and have very few options. Stay away! It is _not_
| your dream job.
| jaChEWAg wrote:
| This!!!! It's easy to get the wrong idea about these companies
| and that it must be a dream to be working there but stories
| like these prove exactly the opposite and realistic view.
| carvantes wrote:
| I don't understand the allure of FAANG for residents besides
| the money. The thing is, for us H1B workers, we have very
| limited options. And these big companies have the best track
| record in processing GC for us. Unless these regulations got
| changed, and give smaller companies more chances. Given how
| powerful big companies are, I probably wouldn't be surprised if
| they also lobbied regulations against small companies hiring
| immigrants.
| ddevault wrote:
| I'm not an immigrant, so I don't have your perspective. But I
| wonder the same about H1B's: I don't understand the allure of
| the United States (besides the money?). Our industry is
| horrible to its H1B's, H1B exploitation is rampant and
| disgusting. FAANG hires them so that they can exploit them as
| cheap labor that can't risk leaving.
|
| Why not move somewhere else if you want to work abroad? I can
| think of so many better options.
| carvantes wrote:
| Thats the thing, most of us immigrant does not come from
| well-off countries. We couldn't just book a ticket and get
| visa to work in , say Canada or Japan. Our passport power
| is shit. All things considered US is still the most
| welcoming for most of us who want to improve our life.
| Where I come from, I can got thrown into jail if they found
| my religious non-affiliation, combined with my racial
| identity. Not sure for other immigrants, but for me,
| companies literally have execution power over my trajectory
| of my life.
| ddevault wrote:
| I see. That's a really messed up power dynamic. I'm
| really ashamed of the US immigration policy, and of the
| exploitation of H1B's by US companies, especially in the
| tech sector. I'm sorry you have to endure that.
| [deleted]
| throwaway29303 wrote:
| This 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 first before
| thinking on doing any of that, though.
|
| And let this be a reminder to everyone else that HR isn't there
| to help you - it's there to help the company.
|
| In this kind of environment it almost feels like one needs to
| record _everything_ that 's happening in order to defend
| themselves. Cops use cameras, maybe it's time for employees to
| start wearing them too. Maybe.
| mark_mart wrote:
| That's a very petty approach. Apple (or any company) could
| easily sue this guy for that threat.
| x0x0 wrote:
| The author is... well, I don't think interviews are going to go
| the way he or she thinks.
|
| To wit, reading part 1, the first paragraph boils down to "my
| manager was on vacation for my start date. I was provided with
| an onboarding buddy, who warned me that Apple is trigger happy
| firing folks." Para 2: manager made a likely inappropriate joke
| about last name. para 3: not really relevant? para 4: project
| was raw. para 5: onboarding buddy was not super helpful with
| onboarding. It may well have been the case that onboarding
| buddy was not an expert on the project, or that OP was hired
| because of his or her specific expertise on this project. etc.
|
| For better or worse, I don't think going public with this story
| is going to be viewed as anything but a he said / she said
| mess. None of which means I think Apple treated him or her
| well, or that the team wasn't a mess, or anything else.
|
| It may well, however, come up when googling the author's name
| for quite a long time. That's an additional factor to think
| through. It may be the best outcome for the author is to leave
| this behind, seek some therapy to help move on, and get a job
| at a company that doesn't treat him or her like this.
| romanovcode wrote:
| I actually don't get what's the problem here. I manage a team
| and one time I booked a vacation and then we hired a guy.
|
| He quit (he was the only person to ever quit that was working
| under me, company is treating employees good) and said in the
| review that this was horrible from my side. Am I not suppose
| to take a vacation ever?
| worker767424 wrote:
| Agreed. This is really only interesting to journalists if
| they're building a story like the NYT/Amazon one a few years
| back.
|
| > googling the author's name for quite a long time
|
| Yup. Especially for someone with one year of experience and
| needing a visa, this isn't a good look.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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 against surreptitious
| _audio_ recording. I suspect that comes from politicians being
| caught with wires (yeah, I 'm a cynic).
|
| That's why, if you get a surveillance camera that also records
| audio, they will usually have a card in there that tells you to
| post notices if you switch on the audio recorder.
| mpalmer wrote:
| It is not illegal in New York to record a conversation if the
| person recording is part of the conversation (one-party
| consent).
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Huh. I did not know that. Thanks!
| justpoolitics wrote:
| 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.
|
| The only way to survive a situation like this is to not react
| emotionally and to take an extremely neutral and objective
| approach. Do not become a threat or a problem, keep your opinions
| to yourself, carefully observe the Personalities and structure
| and understand who they are and why they are acting this way.
|
| Do not engage in gossip or any negativity. Do not complain or
| criticize or raise questions.
|
| You do not know the pressures, history or forces causing the
| behavior of your management and if you become the problem you are
| cooked.
|
| I experienced a toxic situation myself recently, it caused me to
| do a lot of reading and research.
|
| My peers who remained positive and optimistic and polite and non
| threatening or competitive survived the environment fine. They
| made a mental decision to be positive.
|
| If you find yourself in this persons situation you had better
| keep your mouth shut until you can find a new place to go or you
| will get killed off by your peers and your management.
| throwaway44295 wrote:
| Exactly this, this should become common knowledge, especially
| among the people who actually care to create something great.
| Work is work and private life is private life.
|
| I've also worked in very toxic environments but nowadays I'm
| not surprised by anything anymore. People ask for
| uncomfortable/impossible accomplishments? Just explain in a
| very objective way what needs to be done, where the projects is
| at and how much effort it is normally. Also I highly encourage
| people to study the Jira boards (or whatever tool you use),
| chances are it's full of non-sense but also might consider hard
| facts how long tasks really take by other more established team
| members. This will make you confident on what the real metrics
| are and see what is a nonsense request and what not.
|
| When people say slightly insulting things it's also best to not
| be emotional, say nothing or if you feel creative to respond
| with a respectful but tough response. In any case, it's normal
| to switch every 2 years and in larger shops there are enough
| unexpected but safe opportunities to tell about this nonsense.
| (E.g. when quitting)
|
| Also I strongly agree with not speak to HR/managers, it usually
| just gets worse (=stressful) the more you do it.
| worker767424 wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway_1237 wrote:
| This rings so true! I interviewed for a few different teams at
| Apple and got an offer from one (they make you choose a team
| before you get an offer). There were echos of nepotism,
| scapegoating, and toxic treatment even during the interview
| process. Based on the answers I got during the "ask us some
| questions" portion at the end of each interview, it seemed like a
| very political and tense environment for a few of the
| interviewers. Thank you for sharing, this validated that I made
| the right choice. I'm sorry you had to go through this.
| nojvek wrote:
| What surprises me is how abusive Amazon and Apple can get to
| their employees while ship fantastic products to their customers.
|
| May be the whole you need great talent and treat them well isn't
| true. You just need to treat them well enough so they don't leave
| and pressure them enough so they don't crumble.
|
| At the end of the day, management is about getting the most out
| of your employees and that's what they are doing right?
| trap_chateau wrote:
| This take seems a bit short sighted IMO. How do you know that
| if the work culture was better, the product wouldn't be any
| different?
|
| It does seem unnecessary to strive for a perfect work-life
| balance for these giant companies to ship good enough products
| and make boatloads, though.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| My heart goes out to any immigrant forced to stay in a abusive
| environment like this just to not get kicked out of the country.
| adultSwim wrote:
| I've seen that firsthand. Employers really have them over a
| barrel. Even more with extremely low paid outsourced workers.
| worker767424 wrote:
| Ironically, if you're here illegally working in fields, it's
| probably easier to find an employer who treats you better.
| faangAnon wrote:
| I had similar bad manager experience at $FAANG. Managers have so
| much control over information, narratives, and access to decision
| makers they control perception so most organizations are useless
| at properly evaluating their work.
|
| I've seen managers ride out perpetually failing projects that
| haven't made meaningful progress in years, team 'decisions' that
| are reliably and demonstrably bad, services that cost a fortune
| to run and have a slew of problems and unhappy customers, and
| rock-bottom scores in anonymous surveys. None of this matters.
| Essentially your job as a manager is to take credit, dodge
| accountability, and expand your empire(headcount) as to maneuver
| yourself towards the better high-visibility projects. Just like
| politicians, unless they're overtly bad(and even then) it's
| difficult to separate them from the sprawling cybernetic organism
| so you just kind of shrug. Maybe a team's success is because of
| the manager, maybe it is in spite of them or vice versa - no way
| to know.
| adultSwim wrote:
| Union, now!
| vincentmarle wrote:
| This post reminds me of the first episode of the HBO show
| "Industry", where (spoiler alert) the workaholic guy dies of
| having a panic attack after discovering a typo.
| artursapek wrote:
| Sounds like the spaceship building could also use some suicide
| nets.
| saos wrote:
| Happens in every business. Apple is no different
| shmerl wrote:
| From the outside, Apple's company culture looks horrendous
| (insane focus on lock-in, sickening anti-competitive behavior and
| so on). But when such kind of review comes from the inside, it
| just confirms their infamy.
| griffoa wrote:
| 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 a bunch of whiny little
| bitches to be honest. Always having some problem with a hand or a
| back or some family problem or whatever which demanded that they
| take days off. There were a few people whom I felt were probably
| talking some shit behind my back, but I couldn't really believe
| it until I read this story. It was just a horrible horrible place
| and I can also recognize that thing about having a predecessor,
| who was apparently a "bad person" and thus had to be terminated.
|
| Every other day I would have people telling me how great a place
| it was and how lucky we were to be working in a place so big
| while still having that startup feeling. I have worked at
| startups and I always just imagined to myself that 40 year old
| "dude" who refuses to grow up. That is Apple..
|
| Never again.
|
| I got dragged through the whole white boarding experience also
| for the first time and it was fun enough, but in hindsight, they
| should just have asked me if I would suck Steve Jobs dick, if he
| came in that door. The answer to that question alone would have
| provided them with enough information about whether I would have
| been a good hire or not.
|
| I am 45 and have never every experienced a work place like that.
| Always had positive feedback and never had any problems with
| colleagues.
| IThinkImOKAY wrote:
| This post was vote manipulated.
| 23B1 wrote:
| In my experience hiring engineers, people who are raised or cut
| their teeth at Apple... bring the traits outlined in this article
| with them when they leave.
| neurobashing wrote:
| I have read things like this from time to time here about bad
| experiences:
|
| > I had no interaction with my manager and she was refusing to
| have regular 1:1 meetings with me and was not responding to my
| emails.
|
| Seriously, this is the most common red flag in these stories. Not
| having regular 1:1 meetings (when that's supposed to be a thing)
| and slow/no communication is an _immediate_ GTFO, do not look
| back, it is not going to get better.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| 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.
| exApple-anon wrote:
| Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
|
| Unlike others, I actually find this story fairly believable.
|
| When I first joined Apple, straight out of college - a good
| program, top three in the country - I was abused similarly. I
| joined a team that was on a project behind schedule.
|
| Our manager was a brusque, no-nonsense sort of dude. But he
| clearly had anger problems. On the team were 2 senior engineers,
| me, and a junior engineer that had just completed his internship
| and was on a work Visa.
|
| As the project got closer to the deadline, and the scope
| increased, the manager got agitated. In our team meetings, he
| would start yelling at us. People down the hallways would stare
| at us with those "looks." In our 1:1s he told us we might not
| have a job if our product doesn't ship on time (we were competing
| with another internal team to beat them to the punch.)
|
| The two senior engineers decided they'd had enough and quit the
| team. The manager told us to work overtime (no overtime pay, but
| we had to for fear of our job). He promised us that if we did it
| that we would get a month of vacation on him, and that he could
| secure it for us.
|
| The product released. After countless nights of overtime we did
| it. Our manager left, our guarantee of a month of vacation
| evaporated, and for the next three months, us two junior
| engineers were left on 24/7 primary/secondary on-call for a
| critical service. It was a nightmare. Calls at 3 AM, 6 AM, on
| weekends.
|
| Our manager got a promotion and is fairly high up at Apple now.
|
| Horrible experience. I left for a new company that pays me nearly
| double.
| valuearb wrote:
| Your story sounds believable (and sadly common). The posted
| story sounds incredible, ie it strains credibility.
| GloriousKoji wrote:
| I also worked for Apple and I had a very similar experience.
| Management was brutal and abusive from my immediate manager to
| all the way up to and including the VP level. For example even
| though vacation hours were accrued I never got to use them
| unless I wanted to endure the verbal backlash of abandoning the
| team and my responsibilities. When the holidays came around the
| director would email everyone reminding us there's a stipend
| for working through the holidays but in reality it pays less
| than our normal salary and was a means to justify not taking
| time off. A variant of Stockholm syndrome made me appreciate
| the clever design of having a convenient cash out vacation days
| button.
|
| In the end the team was meet with a hostile takeover; everyone
| was merged into another team working on something similar with
| new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss. A good
| number of people ended up leaving the company shortly after
| that.
|
| One more thing, you can also include me as another data point
| for getting pay doubled after leaving Apple.
| limono wrote:
| What org was that in? IS&T? I am thinking that this story by OP
| was in IS&T because that is known to be the worst org in Apple
| [deleted]
| caycep wrote:
| especially bc she/he mentions SREs...
| heimatau wrote:
| 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.
| snickmy wrote:
| what does IS&T stands for?
| karlding wrote:
| Information Systems & Technology. They're mostly
| contractors that are hired to build and work on Apple's
| internal tools and infrastructure.
|
| Buzzfeed News has an excerpt [0] from Alex Kantrowitz's
| book Always Day One [1], which contains interviews with
| former employees that describes the dynamic.
|
| [0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkantrowitz/alw
| ays-d...
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52027218-always-
| day-one
| [deleted]
| z3t4 wrote:
| Ianal. I think Apple broke a bunch of laws in your case you
| should be compensated for your overtime or at least the
| promised vacation, plus legal cost and a compensation for the
| abuse.
| mgh2 wrote:
| "If you are an Apple employee, please send this story to your
| upper management particularly Tim Cook."
|
| I doubt he will care, reflected at how he manages PR when
| accused of international labor abuses.
| boxmonster wrote:
| I find it totally believable that a Muslim would get harrassed
| given the current toxic political climate.
| [deleted]
| gabereiser wrote:
| Sadly, you can fill in the blank with any FAANG company with
| this story. I've heard it a thousand times. Toxic management.
| Sorry you went through that, sorry that was your first taste of
| engineering out of college. Glad you stuck with it.
|
| It's a tough spot to be. Do you roll over and do the job your
| being yelled at to do even though you know any concessions are
| BS? Or like the senior folks, do you walk? It's a really hard
| choice.
|
| Does Apple not have manager feedback mechanisms?
| outside1234 wrote:
| Honestly, at Microsoft, I've never seen a situation like
| this, and I have worked in something like 15 roles now.
|
| That might also be, for better and worse, why Microsoft folks
| have such long tenure at the company. Its honestly a great
| place to work compared to these shit shows.
| exApple-anon wrote:
| > Does Apple not have manager feedback mechanisms?
|
| My manager left me out of the first review cycle, but at the
| end of the second review cycle I did leave a review of the
| manager. By this time he had left our team though. I don't
| think it did anything as he continued to rise through the
| ranks.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Would it not be appropriate to contact said managers (new)
| manager directly in this case?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Not to speak for the OP, but cross-team HR situations at
| Apple don't exactly play well. I don't think jumping the
| chain of command so to speak to contact a manager's
| manager ever actually works.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| I don't think so. I've worked at other FAANG companies which
| had these sorts of posts written about them, and I've
| witnessed plenty of situations that I would call "abusive".
|
| But what I read in this article was beyond the pale. I never
| felt like anybody adjacent to any of my roles might have
| cause to fear for their physical safety. Reviews were used as
| political tools and occasional sources of psychological
| abuse, sure, but people still got marched out quickly if they
| stopped acting like empathetic human beings towards their
| peers.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _But what I read in this article was beyond the pale._
|
| Yes, but while I believe it happened just like that, it's
| too beyond the pale to be representative of Apple at large.
|
| Looks like a particularly, close knit toxic team +
| gaslighting above levels about the new recruit.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It's hard to say, because Apple is a huge corporation. It
| would be wrong for the takeaway to be "all of Apple is
| like this." But it should call into question "how much of
| Apple is like this?" and "how many more stories are there
| like this?" because I guarantee you that this author is
| not the only one who has experienced this at Apple, and
| there may be elements of its secrecy-obsessed, top-down
| culture that are common factors which contribute to it.
| Daho0n wrote:
| >it's too beyond the pale to be representative of Apple
| at large.
|
| Why?
| kmonsen wrote:
| This is fairly obviously true, FAANG's are large companies
| so lots of strange things happen even if they on average
| are great. I worked at Google for 10 years, and had 10
| great years there with very little negative to say. That
| was true for almost anyone I knew. But there was a mailing
| list "yes at Google" for these kind of stories so other can
| see that it does happen even if most of us thought it was
| great. Most of the targets in the unfortunate stories were
| woman or minorities.
| andreilys wrote:
| Facebook had an engineer commit suicide and the company
| tried to cover it up. Going as far as firing an engineer
| that spoke up about it -
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgn9q/do-not-discuss-the-
| in...
|
| So yes, this does happen. Typically to visa workers who are
| easily exploitable due to their precarious status in the
| country.
| greesil wrote:
| Some companies have a more open and transparent review
| process. I'm not sure if it would help with a clique, but at
| least people have to put information in writing which when
| push comes to shove can be verified. And, reports can review
| their managers. If your management chain doesn't care then
| yes, senior people walk.
| ineedasername wrote:
| You can put just about any company in the "Apple" role here.
| A bad manager anywhere can cause a workgroup to turn toxic.
| I've seen it happen literally everywhere I've ever worked,
| though luckily only 1st hand at one location. (Actually there
| was one exception: working at a Barnes & Noble during
| college. I'd heard horror stories about other locations while
| I was there, but the store I worked at was run by an
| extremely good manager who cared for her employees and
| fostered that attitude in her assistant managers as well. It
| was also the most profitable store in the region, probably
| not a coincidence)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Any large corporation that gets remotely near the headcount
| as Apple will have enough variance across team cultures
| that there will inevitably be cesspools of toxicity, true.
| But there's still the question if certain orgs foster a
| higher or lower standard across the org, and what factors
| contribute to it.
| simonh wrote:
| That's true, I've seen toxic situations happening in
| other teams like those described here at several
| employers that were otherwise good places to work.
|
| Sometimes it's down to a particular manager, but
| sometimes it can just be the consequences of a bad
| decision taken further up the food chain. This can leave
| a team in a no-win situation where even a good team lead
| can end up in a mess with no good options. I was at one
| employer where this happened and the team lead in
| question fell on his sword and quit rather than beat his
| team to death. I ended up taking on some of his
| responsibilities and team members and got some additional
| resources to deal with the re-org, so it worked out well
| for the team members and the company. It also gave me my
| first taste of management. It cost the guy his job
| though, which was grossly unfair. Not many mangers would
| have the guts and integrity to do something like that,
| and even if they did there's no guarantee it would
| actually benefit the team. They could just be replaced by
| a tyrant.
|
| The only answer is to be open and honest about what you
| think and principled in your own actions. Call out bad
| behaviour where you see it and say when you see mistakes
| being made. If you aren't prepared to do so, why should
| anyone else? Too many people silently tie the line and
| keep quiet and then wonder why these things spiral out of
| control and end in disaster. It's because nobody said
| anything or did anything about it. We have to be prepared
| to take responsibility for calling out what's happening
| around us and what we do about it as employees. It's not
| somebody else's problem, it's our problem. Don't be
| afraid of losing your job, it may well happen but jobs
| come and go. Having principles carries a cost, but one I
| think is worth paying.
| hertzrat wrote:
| Does anybody really want to be "the person who criticizes his
| or her managers," in an official on-the-books capacity, in a
| context where your job is already being threatened?
| nelson_muntz69 wrote:
| Welcome to wage slavery, friend. You can't even criticize!
|
| Hah-ha!
| djcapelis wrote:
| It's not a hard decision. You unquestionably walk away from a
| situation like this. If your interactions with the team are
| going this poorly, walk immediately. There's nothing to be
| gained from trying to hang on in a situation like this. This
| person should have walked much earlier.
|
| It's agonizing how much broken US immigration policy plays a
| large role in forcing talented people who have decided to
| join our country to feel like this isn't an option for them.
| We owe them much better.
| uzakov wrote:
| Not sure why you refer to the US immigration policy, this
| is how it works essentially everywhere. In the UK, for
| example, you get around 60 days to find a new job or you
| have to leave the country.
| https://iasservices.org.uk/tier-2-visa-termination-
| employmen... I am not saying that the immigration policy is
| not broken or broken, I am simply stating the fact that
| other countries literally do the same.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I think for most people the question is whether there are
| reasons to think Apple's internal environment fosters this kind
| of behaviour.
|
| You can imagine a company of that size has a huge number of
| teams, some where everything is just dandy, some with terrible
| issues like yours and the author's.
|
| But is there something corporate-wide about Apple that makes
| you think what you went through was common, or the opposite (ie
| that you were unlucky)?
|
| You can ask the same about all the large techs.
| vp8989 wrote:
| The secretive nature of their product development and the
| supposed "allure" of being an employee there seem like they
| would combine to enable particularly douchey forms of
| management.
| arcatech wrote:
| The internal culture was influenced by Steve Jobs. He was
| widely known for being an asshole who also happened to be an
| excellent salesman with a really good design sense.
|
| That's Apple.
| m0llusk wrote:
| That isn't really true. Steve Jobs was no nonsense, but was
| most often merely direct rather than rude.
|
| One thing which Steve Jobs did do was go to great length to
| assemble highly qualified teams for missions that were
| clearly stated and understood and which all involved agreed
| were worthwhile even if there might be quibbles over
| details. The Apple that rescued itself from near death with
| colorful and fun designs and then released a BSD derived OS
| was very different from the modern Apple where contributors
| joust for top status without much if any existential
| threat.
| dingaling wrote:
| Direct is basically a euphemism for rude, in that it
| indicates lack of empathy. It might not intentionally be
| so, but usually shows that the speaker puts other
| priorities ahead of the emotional state of the recipient.
| coldtea wrote:
| Sure, but I've never read an as-toxic Jobs story /
| exchange, as the things in this story...
| throwaway8193 wrote:
| Exactly--Jobs was a raging asshole, and that became what
| the managers looked up to as the example of what brings
| success. During my time there, the assholes were the ones
| rewarded and promoted, and thus became the promoters, and
| the people with a shred of decency and empathy who just
| wanted to be good and do good work were marginalized and
| not rewarded. It's up and down the chain from VP level down
| to the first level managers.
| dwardu wrote:
| If this is true, it's really sad, I've read the whole thing. I
| had an experience, not as bad as yours but I know the feeling.
|
| I really hope you will go public about this experience and
| share it, Apple aren't the "virtuous" company as they pretend
| to be.
| [deleted]
| exApple-anon wrote:
| Some extra tidbits that didn't make it in because the edit
| timer ran out:
|
| - Despite the big release and herculean efforts, both of us
| were paid a fraction of our target bonus. This was the day I
| decided to move jobs.
|
| - I eventually grew some balls and told Apple to (a) pay me
| 2.5x during overtime (b) hire SREs for this critical service,
| or (c) go fuck themselves. They chose (c), which worked alright
| because our service was pretty stable.
|
| - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you
| work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will likely
| not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't kill
| yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
|
| - Only my first manager at Apple was an asshole. My last
| manager was a kind and genial person.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I can empathize with your story. I once landed what I thought
| would be my dream job at my dream company. I quickly
| discovered that the position was open because all of the
| previous team had quit due to the extreme toxicity.
|
| > The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if
| you work hard
|
| Be careful about getting jaded and cynical. This is far from
| a universal truth in the tech industry. I've hired a few ex-
| FAANG who had burned out and become cynical on work
| altogether. We had to let them go because their negativity
| was dragging everyone down.
|
| A similar thing can happen to people who go through difficult
| divorces. If they let themselves become cynical, they start
| believing that marriage is a doomed institution and that all
| members of their ex-spouse's gender are equally terrible
| people and such. It can become very counterproductive to
| moving on.
| dvtrn wrote:
| The last few jobs I've had were glowing from the interviews
| and believe me I asked some very tough questions I hoped
| would be revealing enough without torpedoing my candidacy.
|
| Every one of them: as soon as I started, the foundational
| person of the team quit, you know the guy or gal who burned
| themselves out building the process. Fixing all the cruft
| and actually trying to unfuck everything but leaving scant
| documentation because the mountain of technical debt
| rivaled the heights of K2?
|
| As a result I had to "drink from the water hose"
| constantly. And this is something I am absolutely sick of
| doing, and no team should tolerate it.
|
| It's happened so often I'm beginning to wonder a) how I can
| assess if the team is bleeding talent (I've had companies
| straight up lie about things like attrition and retention)
| or b) if I just have some kind of gravitational pull for
| companies that are running people out the door.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| > I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard. Nobody
| notices
|
| What I learned people that spend all their time working don't
| have time for the social engineering needed to get ahead.
| Also a lot of people that focus heavily on social engineering
| make bank on passing dirt on their coworkers to upper
| management.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you're the type of person that can only "work hard" due to
| being driven by needing the project to be completed and as
| best as it could possibly be, then maybe working for MegaCorp
| is not the best idea. Seems to be you'd be much better suited
| for a start-up (hopefully with prospects of major funding).
|
| If you're the type that doesn't want to work very hard and
| just there for a paycheck, then you are probably more suited
| for working at MegaCorp.
|
| Getting these out of wack makes for unhappy working
| conditions.
| spottybanana wrote:
| > - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if
| you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will
| likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't
| kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
|
| This depends a lot on the situation/company. It is definitely
| true that in many cases it doesn't make sense to work hard.
| However there are situations where hard work is rewarded.
| Those are just probably quite rare situations after all.
| oconnor663 wrote:
| > The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if
| you work hard.
|
| As with most things in life, there are places where it
| matters and places where it doesn't matter. If someone's a
| junior employee working in a big company, it's likely that
| they don't have the necessary experience to figure out
| whether hard work matters in their position. That's an
| important risk to be aware of. But the opposite advice,
| avoiding hard work, is also risky. (And not a good habit to
| cultivate in the long term of course.) If you're not sure
| which position you're in, and you don't trust your more
| experienced coworkers to tell you honestly without punishing
| you for asking, then putting in some amount of hard work with
| the goal of finding out is a pretty good start.
| temac wrote:
| I don't know. Work fairly, certainly. Work _hard_... what
| 's the point?
|
| So in some cases you want to fast track your advancement in
| a direction that you like and this possible through this
| method, and you actually _can_ work hard, so in this case
| take the chance if you want to. But that kind of situation
| is quite rare, I think.
|
| Also certainly do not _appear_ to be working too lightly.
| But also do not appear to be working extremely hard if it
| is not the case.
|
| And remember, the (perceived) results are more important
| than actually working hard. It can be very unfair
| sometimes, because e.g. if you have to maintain and add
| features in a legacy codebase, (poor, but that's common)
| higher-ups may be uninterested with your difficulties
| caused by the spaghettis of your predecessors, but well
| life is just unfair I guess :P
| ma2rten wrote:
| I got an offer from Apple. The hiring manager told me "You
| worked at a startup before, you'll have no problem working
| overtime". I didn't end up taking the offer.
| shoulderfake wrote:
| You should have just said no sir I wont have any problem
| working overtime and my rate is 2.5x for overtime hrs, you
| wont have a problem paying for that you're a rich company.
| Raed667 wrote:
| I got a similar line from a certain european video-game
| company.
| nvarsj wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I work at a startup right now and can count the number of
| times I've had to work overtime with a null-pointer - 0.
|
| Well run startups can still compete by making smart,
| focused decisions.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I completely agree, sure if you're into a feature and on
| a roll in a startup keep going but if you've reached a
| good point to stop no need to cause yourself stress!
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| There are definitely days I work late, but that's almost
| always by choice. When I do work late, it means shorter
| days for me later in the week.
| derivagral wrote:
| I've never had a startup that hasn't roped me into a
| production support on-call for a month or more in
| addition to regular duties. Under 10 engineers, 50
| engineers, 500+ engineers: they've all done this.
| qppo wrote:
| I've never worked on a product where it ever made sense
| to be "on call." I'm an engineer, not a doctor.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's probably obvious, but I'd suggest never working on a
| product doctors use.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| 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.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I can only answer with LOL to such offers
|
| Yes I've worked for a startup. Yes I did long hours. Yes I
| learned that's not sustainable and not a good way to make
| things work.
|
| So, no, I won't do it again.
| geophile wrote:
| I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like
| a startup, but in a big company!". That appears to mean
| that you will work in a small team, putting in
| unsustainable hours, but not receive the financial reward
| that a successful startup could provide.
|
| I've worked in several startups, and occasional death
| marches are unavoidable. They don't work month in and
| month out. But enduring that kind of life for just salary
| is nuts.
| Tommah wrote:
| > 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."
| mgkimsal wrote:
| > 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' issue of "you may have a paycheck next week",
| but doesn't address any of the emotional stuff that goes
| along with "we'll have a scrappy startup mentality!"
|
| I had been in something similar - not quite a 'startup in
| a large company' situation, but similar. And... we hit a
| "hey, this project is being shut down, and there's no
| other budget in the company for this team". So.. the
| company itself was still going OK - everyone else kept
| rolling along - but a handful of us were effectively cut
| adrift for a bit. Some were able to be assigned to other
| internal teams, some weren't.
| andrewem wrote:
| The other notable thing about "just like a startup but in
| a big company" (often for startups which have been
| acquired) is the frequent claim that the startup will be
| left alone by the rest of the company. Every single
| process and incentive is against that remaining true.
|
| Maybe in some cases you can hope for the acquired startup
| to be the pet project of the acquirer's founder/CEO?
| libria wrote:
| > - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if
| you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will
| likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't
| kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
|
| I think this close, but a little off. Work hard only on what
| matters. Join the high visibility projects and work hard on
| the important parts. "Nobody notices" -> that's up to you.
| Document and demo your achievements every few weeks.
|
| Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams ASAP.
| Never, ever wait for "things to improve". So many times after
| I switched jobs, I said to myself "Man, why didn't I leave
| sooner?"
| xvector wrote:
| > Work only the good jobs. If it's not good, switch teams
| ASAP.
|
| I agree with this but you have to understand that it's very
| difficult and frightening for an inexperienced new grad or
| someone on a green card to do. These groups are also
| unfortunately the most exploited.
| rmk wrote:
| I do not understand why someone w/ a green card needs to
| be afraid of being fired. Isn't the whole point of it to
| firm up your status as someone who is allowed to stay on
| indefinitely with very few conditions, one of them being
| % of year spent in the US, plus not committing certain
| serious offences (felonies?)
| vp8989 wrote:
| That is true. The parent probably meant to say Visa not
| Green Card. I can definitely relate to the feeling of
| being "stuck" in a bad situation while on a Visa and/or
| while waiting for a green card to be processed. It's such
| a __huge __relief when you finally get that freedom to
| move around in the job market.
| rhizome wrote:
| People with green cards don't need to be afraid of being
| fired: they're permanent residents. The people who have
| to worry are those on work visas.
| mgh2 wrote:
| I am sure he meant people on a work visa, whom the
| employer had applied for and are waiting to get a green
| card. The process can take from 2 to 10 years, so you are
| at the mercy of the employer during that time- where
| abuse often worsens because of the power leverage.
| libria wrote:
| Thanks for the correction. I did write this thinking
| narrowly as a privileged resident and I remember now not
| everyone has that freedom unfortunately.
| rmk wrote:
| - The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if
| you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will
| likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't
| kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
|
| This has been my experience as well. Nowadays I work hard
| only while most of the following are true: - I'm making top
| dollar (good salary + equity value is high) - Work is
| interesting (something new to learn, or challenging, or both)
| - My home life is not going great (there are ups and downs,
| and working hard during the downs is a pretty decent way of
| coping)
|
| I absolutely _do not_ work hard if any one of the following
| is true: - Project Manager is applying pressure. - People who
| do not deliver value have been promoted over me. - Manager
| /Technical leadership has repeatedly ignored my advice and
| leanded the team in hot water (cutting corners to make
| arbitrary timelines, only to incur high support costs or
| maintenance costs later) - Performance Management is not
| occurring at the company (underperformers are not thrown out,
| or, worse, promoted). - Company is not doing well (equity
| value is down). - Salary has not kept pace with market (i.e.,
| nothing more than 3-4% raises per year). - There is an over-
| reliance on junior people and they start calling the shots,
| thereby making my hard-won experience useless to the team.
| acntr_employee wrote:
| Throwaway for obvious reasons
|
| I work for a company belonging to Accenture.
|
| I can only agree. Shareholders get +10%. Employees get nil.
|
| It is expected that we do at least 15 - 25% overtime
| without compensation. Project manager promises everything
| the client asks for. Even if they know we cannot in any
| universe deliver this without massive overtime. At the same
| time they introduce new mandatory processes to follow
| costing additional time.
|
| Performance management is a joke. Employee development non
| existent. Promotion and raises have nothing to do with
| performance. If managing directors do not like you, you are
| out of luck as they ultimately decided on your salary,
| promotion and bonuses.
|
| I am still there because I can only switch jobs after Sept
| 2021 for private reasons.
|
| After that it is jobhunting season.
|
| If anyone is of the opinion that you do not deserve
| adequate pay, can be bullied by project managers or others
| - do yourself a favor and look for another company that
| does value you.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Wow, Great List! The last one (juniors calling the shots)
| really hit home; when I worked in <automobile industry>, I
| was ultimately standing on the shoulder of midgets.
|
| The worse part? As a CS grad, I knew how to do better, but:
| nobody with the power to change things understood how or
| why what I was suggesting was better(!).
|
| I've long thought about this afterward, and concluded it's
| that 'my world' (which includes a lot of experience, and
| facility with Math) required me to study a lot and learn a
| lot; and these 'coders' simply did not have the background
| to understand what I was trying to teach them. I would have
| had to fill in several semesters in order to get my points
| across. Yes, I left. (And yes I tried simplifying - but
| that only goes so far.)
| rmk wrote:
| It's very prevalent in this industry. Newbies cost less
| and there is usually a lot of mundane work that needs
| doing, so they comprise the majority of any average team.
| Even more so in established or mid-size companies where
| the sudden expansion or huge existing base necessitates a
| lot of grunt work. Sadly, there is also a trend of
| managers bending over backwards to please newbies
| (otherwise the hiring pipeline is thought to dry up;
| also, it's easier to hand out raises that appear larger
| if pay is lower) which exacerbates the situation.
| rasengan0 wrote:
| >- The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if
| you work hard. Nobody notices, and even if they do you will
| likely not get anything out of it. Do your job, but don't
| kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
|
| This. And the intrinsic metric does not necessarily align to
| the company's until much further down the road or sometimes
| not at all. Hard lesson for me to learn after a score at the
| same company and the health insurance stays the same
| regardless.
| OOPMan wrote:
| Stuff like this is why I refuse to work at large companies.
| Shit does happen at smaller companies, for sure, but it seems
| like larger companies are just that much more dysfunctional
| that I don't want to take the risk.
| abledon wrote:
| sleek aluminum curves hide so much sadness and abuse.
| isoskeles wrote:
| > (we were competing with another internal team to beat them to
| the punch.)
|
| What this intentional? I worked at a company that similarly had
| three projects that were "competing" with each other,
| unofficially. It was more like three different teams working on
| a spellchecker, all with different upper engineering management
| VPs or directors vying for more influence in the organization.
| Many other teams standing by were not choosing what project to
| integrate with because we didn't know which would be completed
| first (or if they made a choice, it was because VP / director
| told them they had to).
|
| In any case, it seemed silly, and worse, it revealed a lack of
| vision or leadership in upper management to just choose one of
| these projects instead of having multiple people working on the
| same thing, which would inevitably lead to two projects being
| canned and some number of engineers feeling demoralized and
| quitting.
| [deleted]
| vr46 wrote:
| This sounds like an absolutely terrible experience. I hope that a
| decent writer or journalist takes this story on board and digs a
| bit deeper. Companies' internal behaviour should absolutely be of
| public interest.
| adjkant wrote:
| This is a case where a good journalist could do wonders - to
| synthesize this beyond the extensive length and to force Apple
| to investigate and respond. IANAL but it sounds like some of
| this could get near a workplace harassment suit too and
| publicity could attract pro-bono representation, especially in
| the current anti-tech political climate. It'd also validate
| some of this, as this thread is already littered with doubters
| of the story. While I generally believe most of this, I think a
| full picture adds a lot more teeth to some of the crucial parts
| here.
|
| Any journalist reading this - please engage with this person
| and help them.
| jsteinbach wrote:
| I don't want to comment on the content, but on the form.
|
| In my opinion there are two reasons to write such an article:
|
| a) To vent b) To get a message around
|
| This article is a great and powerful vent (which also makes sense
| in the context of "healing journey"), but it does a terrible job
| at getting a message across.
|
| Bold messages lose their impact if there are more bold messages
| than normal text. Also the article is missing a clear red line -
| I felt myself skipping multiple paragraphs and not missing out on
| any content.
|
| I would be very much interested if the writer could re-write
| their vent into a powerful message.
|
| This might also be a chance (regarding the "healing journey") to
| re-work the happenings and bring the "this is what happened!!!"
| into a "THIS is what happened", in the same way an emergency-
| centre operator deals with emergency calls. Focus on the facts,
| not the feelings.
| worker767424 wrote:
| > Apple was my first job. A dream that came true after many years
| of hard work...
|
| I might be reading into this, but "dream jobs" are likely to
| disappoint. I've seen it happen a few times.
| antipaul wrote:
| Dear author,
|
| Please follow-up on your last paragraph.
|
| Sincerely,
|
| A less courageous soul
| johnghanks wrote:
| This dude claims to have a PhD but writes like a 12 year old. For
| example, just read this paragraph:
|
| > There was no code repository for our project and the page that
| was listed as the project page only had script names in it but no
| code was linked. For example, you could see name of the scripts
| such as garbage.py but there was no code! ...
|
| and honestly think about the type of person that would write like
| that
| avipars wrote:
| Reminds me of FB and Amazon
| grumple wrote:
| I have experienced abuse at the hands of supervisors (generally
| disrespectful / belittling behavior). You have to have a special
| kind of privilege to have not experienced this sort of thing. I
| haven't ever experienced such a pervasive environment of targeted
| abuse as in the OP, but it certainly sounds believable. It's the
| reason why unions came into being. We didn't go from being a
| society of slaveowners to a society of saints in the past 150
| years.
|
| I have learned hard lessons though:
|
| HR is not there to help you. I consulted HR and a senior director
| about my previous supervisor's toxic behavior; not only did they
| do nothing, but they said they had previous complaints about
| them! And of course, I knew this, because I had many friends in
| the org, and I had witnessed the disrespect this person displayed
| towards others.
|
| Collect evidence and get a lawyer if you want to stay in the org.
| This is the only way to protect yourself - it becomes very
| difficult for them to fire you in retaliation. I haven't taken
| this route, but I've seen others do it.
|
| My advice would be to make plans to leave. OP was in a tough spot
| due to citizenship. But you have to leave toxic environments. You
| will not fix them, and if you could, you'd be better off quitting
| and starting a consultancy to fix those places. Find someplace
| new and be more particular about joining them.
| hartator wrote:
| I know it's controversial but you really have to name people to
| make things move forward.
| [deleted]
| computerdork wrote:
| In a huge way, this person's post seems true - from what I've
| seen being a software engineer for twenty years, many tech
| companies (especially those in the Bay Area) are fast paced,
| demanding, and stressful, even for experienced developers. It's
| often an unforgiving environment where you either perform or are
| let go - personally have had my own equal share of victories and
| massive failures - And as for abuse, have had some true horror
| stories (a senior dev who would actively and openly attack my
| work at every chance they got during large meetings for months on
| end). But...
|
| ... At the same time, this is somewhat universal to most (not
| all) companies to some degree, _especially tech_. And the more
| important the work, the more stressful the environment often is.
|
| Could be way off on this, but just my impression is that since
| they are a newly graduated PhD working at their first job, am
| wondering if the shock of that first position (which was also at
| Apple, who is known to be very demanding), was a bit too much to
| handle - and if you also have a bad lead, you're in for real
| trouble. Apologies to this person as I wasn't there and have no
| real idea on what happened, but the workplace is a tough
| environment more often than not.
|
| Know this only an estimate, but in my humble opinion, Glassdoor
| is generally in the right ballpark when it comes to a company's
| actual culture (how it treats its people), and 4.2 for Apple is
| really good - did a contract job at Stubhub a few years back,
| which when I worked there was a 2.8 (it's now a 3.3). And yeah,
| it was really that bad. The politics and scapegoating were the
| most intense I've ever seen (got caught up on the wrong side of
| this majorly myself. Felt like I was in one of those targets at
| those Carnival games where people line up to take shots at you).
|
| Yeah, and tech is ruthless but, as another person said, typically
| in the Bay Area it usually isn't abusive about it. In the
| socially aware Bay-Area, they often won't tell you directly that
| they have an issue with you like they do on the East Coast, but
| through silence and innuendo - you'll feel it before they
| actually tell you they're not happy.
|
| And sorry to hear about this person's visa issues, the stress
| this has caused my foreign friends is immense. Hope they're okay!
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > ... At the same time, this is somewhat universal to most (not
| all) companies to some degree, especially tech. And the more
| important the work, the more stressful the environment often
| is.
|
| There is tough love, there is pressured work environment,
| however this is none of that. Even if half of this is made up
| or exaggerated, its out and out bullying.
|
| it is your responsibility as a work colleague to put a stop to
| this sort of stuff. I have been bullied and I'm never standing
| for it again. So if I see shit like this happen near me, they
| fucking know about it.
|
| The most important thing you need to remember is this: just
| because they are big company it doesn't mean they can treat you
| like shit. Work your hours, no more, no less, use their free
| perks, fucking push back when they take the piss.
| spicyramen wrote:
| Downvote me if you want, but I have had offers and accepted jobs
| at 2 companies, which first week was a joke, I left (Blue Jeans
| and Twilio). I didn't care and continue interviewing, I just
| don't take people BS and unprofessionalism, some have VISA or
| other needs that need to put up with this non-sense. Just tell
| people to go hell.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Honestly, I want to believe anything we get out of companies and
| people's experiences, but this really feels... off. Maybe it's
| the writing, but it _feels_ like an Apple hater who never worked
| at the company wrote a false expose just for the sake of it.
| mynameishere wrote:
| There is something about one person being in a beehive of
| drama, but at the same time confusing ordinary office politics
| with "nepotism" or constantly conflating Apple policies and
| national policies (the so-called "Muslim Ban" etc) or taking
| what might be honest advice "Quit before you're fired" as some
| sort of threat. In other words, when one person's short
| experience contains more complaining than I've made in my
| entire life--especially when that one person is dealing with a
| massively deep-pocketed and "woke" corporation--there's indeed
| something very off about it. This person is almost certainly
| going for the big bucks.
| xenihn wrote:
| Here's a fun bias exercise for you: read the piece replacing
| Apple with a company you hate, and see if it changes how you
| feel.
| j45 wrote:
| Maybe you can try writing something this long, in detail and
| see if it turns out the same? Assuming you don't work at Apple.
|
| Edit: This post seems plausible once you start hearing multiple
| accounts.
| PEJOE wrote:
| My friends who work at Apple have definitely complained about
| bureaucracy and a not so great working environment.
|
| However article is clearly written by someone who has been
| psychologically harmed and sees the world through that lens.
|
| I did not get the sense that this person was pretending to have
| worked at Apple
| bawana wrote:
| The ghost of Steve Jobs is everywhere there. The stories and
| myths mutate and multiply. That virus finds host in the dark
| corners of suffering that most people have and their only
| expiation is to inflict it.
| hu3 wrote:
| This sounds surreal. If that is true, this person had to deal
| with horrible things at work:
|
| - "You are a skinny kid with no experience. Nobody cares about
| what you do. Just put your head down, shut your mouth or get
| yourself fired".
|
| - "You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental
| problems. "
|
| - "Just leave Apple before they kick you out. This is exactly
| what happened to the previous guy we fired."
|
| - "My husband worked for FBI and I can get you deported on a
| cargo boat if I want."
|
| - "How much do you drink? Do you do drugs?"
| brokencode wrote:
| A company should, by policy, allow struggling employees the
| chance to try a different team and manager. Otherwise you never
| know if the employee is causing the problem or if the team is.
|
| In this situation, maybe the managers were extremely harsh on the
| OP, or maybe the OP was misleading in their story to sound like a
| victim. It's hard to say without knowing how they'd do on another
| team.
|
| To force somebody out like this without taking every reasonable
| opportunity to help them improve, especially for a rich company
| like Apple who can afford to try, is deeply disgusting and is a
| failure of their HR policies.
| cgearhart wrote:
| At my first job out of university I was hired into a company
| with a developmental program that lasted for the first 3-5
| years. New engineers would do rotations for about a year to
| find a team with a good fit-but new engineers could also be
| fired pretty trivially within the first year.
|
| During one of my rotations I worked on a project with a recent
| PhD graduate from a fairly renowned university-we'll call him
| Dave. Dave was _terrible_ at...everything, really. He could not
| seem to do _anything_ right on the project, and struggled for
| months to make any progress at all. Eventually I wound up
| taking over his part of the project, and our manager basically
| told him "you're being let go at the end of the probationary
| period unless you find another team that will take you".
|
| Dave shopped his resume around internally for the few months
| left in his probationary period and eventually transferred to a
| different group in another town a few hours away. I went to
| work full time for the team where I did my rotation, and a bit
| less than a year later my boss tells me he had gotten an
| unsolicited call from the director of the team where Dave
| transferred. Evidently, Dave was a _rockstar_ there-like a duck
| in water. The director was calling to ask where Dave was
| recruited, and if we had anyone else like him or could help
| them with their recruitment pipelines to source more candidates
| like Dave.
|
| All this to say: to this day I think there are a lot of reasons
| someone might succeed or fail in any given job. It has been my
| experience that finding the right team fit is _hugely_
| important, and often completely ignored.
| arcticbull wrote:
| The tough part about FANGs is that being so large, the quality of
| your manager is basically the sole determining factor of your
| experience there and yeah you'll see a few bad apples, no pun
| intended.
|
| I've personally landed crap managers at 2 of the FANGs, both the
| worst managers I've had in my career by a long shot. I've also
| seen fantastic managers at one, and uh, mediocre at best but well
| intentioned at the other.
| gok wrote:
| Why would you publish this without names?
| [deleted]
| polote wrote:
| Honestly why do people think that cannot happen at Apple ? That
| kind of thing can happen in any company. Apple is thousands of
| employees, it only requires a few bad people to create a
| situation like that.
|
| I'm not sure though, creating a post like that is the best thing.
| I don't know what exists in the US, but in France, you can sue
| your employer for free (You don't even need a lawyer), and if you
| are able to show a few emails showing abuse, there is like almost
| 100% chance the company will loose
|
| EDIT: To the people who downvote me, seriously why ?
| [deleted]
| opportune wrote:
| From this and a few other random posts I've seen on Blind and
| Hacker News, the closed/secretive nature of Apple seems to
| allow it to happen more frequently than at other companies.
| jfb wrote:
| Apple also varies, culturally, pretty widely between
| departments. It's not always the case that abusive behaviour
| under one VP -- or good treatment under a different one! --
| is extrapolate-able to other organizations.
| the_local_host wrote:
| > It's not always the case that abusive behaviour under one
| VP... is extrapolate-able to other organizations
|
| A company ought to be defined by the worst conditions it
| allows to persist, otherwise they have less incentive to
| clean up their organization.
| jfb wrote:
| Oh, no doubt. I just wanted to point out that someone can
| go through a whole career at Apple without encountering
| this sort of garbage.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| I have worked in several highly secretive companies,
| including this one, and this is correct. Secrecy enables
| abuse.
| zepto wrote:
| This stuff happens in companies that aren't secretive
| though. I don't see how secrecy enables this.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Sunlight is a disinfectant. With transparency, even the
| largest most aloof company has to grapple to some degree
| with poor PR and public shaming. Amazon is well-known for
| having a toxic work culture even beyond its fulfillment
| centers, thanks to Amazon employees speaking out. And
| having a high-profile voice- a Tim Bray, a Susan Fowler,
| is also invaluable. As of yet, there isn't an equivalent
| to Apple, probably because its culture is so secretive
| that people readily self-censor themselves about what
| goes on in the company.
| opportune wrote:
| I don't think it has to do purely with visibility outside
| the company. Visibility within the company is just as, if
| not more, important. A common theme I've noticed
| regarding this in stories from Apple is people covering
| up/scapegoating failing projects by lying to management,
| creating fake reports, fabricating data, etc. The con
| seems able to be kept up for a long time because there is
| only one person you need to fool or convince to not care.
|
| At the less secretive companies I've worked at, where
| there are many-to-many dependencies and interactions,
| you'd never be able to get away with something like that
| because people will freely talk/collaborate/associate
| with people without going through management. Or people
| would just look at your source code and see that it's all
| smoke and mirrors.
| zepto wrote:
| Is there a collection of stories like this about Apple
| where you have been able to see a common theme?
| opportune wrote:
| I have just seen a lot of posts about this on Blind. Try
| searching Apple + toxic.
|
| https://www.teamblind.com/post/Miserable-and-depressed-
| at-Ap... https://www.teamblind.com/post/I-am-full-of-
| Hate-vOCmEpjn
|
| Many bad posts about IS&T as well. I swear I've seen at
| least two very similar posts to the OP about Apple (maybe
| even written by the same person) although I'm having
| trouble finding it.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| There's a few here and there
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25606200
| zepto wrote:
| I think Tim Bray is going a great service, but I don't
| see any 'disinfecting' going on.
|
| I would like to believe sunlight is a disinfectant, but I
| have yet to see that in the corporate world.
|
| I think the only real 'disinfectant' would be the CEO
| realizing that it's worth making things better for its
| own sake, and not just because of bad press.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| You're not wrong; we've seen Amazon try to wriggle out of
| their bad press by simply hiring armies of posters to
| tweet and blog positive propaganda, rather than actually
| fixing issues. Sunlight isn't enough, but I still think
| at least it's one step in the right direction. Better
| that Amazon has a poor work reputation than no one know
| about its abuses.
| fluffy87 wrote:
| The fact that HR and senior management where in on it makes it
| systemic.
| j45 wrote:
| It's less about disbelief than it being unacceptable.
|
| If the company can be the biggest and most profitable, and
| build the best products, it sure as hell can figure out how it
| expects people to be treated, since there is already such a
| culture of controlling what information is leaked to the
| public.
|
| Edit: I hold Apple to a special standard because it creates
| some of the best products that I pay a premium for. I expect
| the people and culture to be no less and unimaginable best of
| breed like the M1 chip and the A14 chip.
| the-dude wrote:
| I downvoted you because you are complaining about downvoting.
| sfblah wrote:
| Meh. I upvoted him to cancel out your downvote. Who cares if
| people complain about downvotes.
| the-dude wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :
|
| _Please don 't comment about the voting on comments. It
| never does any good, and it makes boring reading._
| corobo wrote:
| > EDIT: To the people who downvote me, seriously why ?
|
| I can't speak for others but me personally it was because you
| dismissed the problem then started talking about what would
| happen in France.
|
| Essentially the comment added nothing all said and done
|
| Edit: To the downvoters of _this_ , naw I'm kidding. Have at
| it.
| oblio wrote:
| Why isn't his comment about France useful? That's how we
| improve, by seeing what others do better.
| [deleted]
| corobo wrote:
| The EU has better employee protections than the US, shocker
|
| My future downvotes shall remain my little secret :)
| oblio wrote:
| For someone from "land of the brave and the land of the
| free" or whatever the US anthem says, you're awfully
| defeatist :-)
| corobo wrote:
| Well I'm from the UK so I'm a little delicate on the EU
| right now. Just want her back.
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
| rsync wrote:
| I downvoted you because you are complaining about downvoting.
| extrememacaroni wrote:
| isn't that you basically complaining about his complaining
| about his downvoting?
| vulcan01 wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7807998
|
| > Please follow the site guidelines and don't complain
| about downvotes--all it does is lower the signal/noise
| ratio. Everyone gets downvoted. It doesn't matter.
| bdowling wrote:
| > I don't know what exists in the US, but in France, you can
| sue your employer for free (You don't even need a lawyer)...
|
| In the U.S. there are many employment lawyers who will
| represent harmed employees on contingency, meaning that they
| will only be paid if the case results in a judgment or
| settlement for the employee. An individual can technically sue
| without a lawyer but that is usually a terrible idea.
| ardy42 wrote:
| > Honestly why do people think that cannot happen at Apple ?
| That kind of thing can happen in any company. Apple is
| thousands of employees, it only requires a few bad people to
| create a situation like that.
|
| That's mind boggling, especially since all accounts paint Steve
| Jobs as being an massive asshole manager, and company culture
| gets set by examples at the top.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/books/steve-jobs-lisa-bre...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidcoursey/2011/10/12/steve-j...
| m0llusk wrote:
| That is a common but very shallow take on Steve Jobs
| management. Yes, there are instances of him being abrasive,
| but he led some very successful tech development efforts
| which involved getting people to come together around
| difficult goals. Remember that for most of his second period
| of management Apple stock went for around 12-25 a share and
| it was hard to hire good engineers because it was common
| knowledge that Apple was doomed.
|
| An example of how direct, involved management clashes with
| traditional corporate style came up right after Steve Jobs
| returned. He would walk around the offices, knock on doors
| and introduce himself, and ask what people were working on.
| Those who were fully engaged were kind of jealous that others
| had a chance to talk with the top manager directly in such a
| way. Oddly enough, most of the long term Apple corporate
| types reacted very badly to this. They stuttered and could
| not summarize what they were actually doing. In every case I
| was aware of these employees left the next day in absolute
| shock and horror, sharing with everyone just how mean Steve
| Jobs was. But I was there and observed some of these
| encounters myself and all he did was drop by, casually
| introduce himself, and ask about what people were working on.
| For some and those who stayed at that time that was actually
| pretty cool hierarchy flattening behavior but for corporate
| climbers it was an inconceivable breach of protocol.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Perhaps it's a case of cargo culting. His confrontational,
| often personally insulting behaviors were retained, but not
| his ability to bring people together.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| There is a tendency to give Apple a pass among the big
| companies. They sell actual products instead of you, the
| user('s data). Their logistical chain does not rely upon a
| system of (often fellow American) warehouse workers who are
| pushed to the breaking point. [The developing world workforce
| that actually assembles their products- that's another story,
| but bogus hoaxes like Mike Daisey's only add confusion and make
| their supply chain working conditions seem more innocuous than
| critics claim.] They don't actively contribute to the
| disruptions and dysfunctions in our society that social
| networking have brought us. Somehow just by being less
| apparently bad, people assume that means they're more
| automatically good. But that's a fallacy; the badness can exist
| elsewhere, and given a culture of secrecy and silence, can be
| readily hidden.
| baby wrote:
| I agree and disagree. I agree that bad stuff can happen
| wherever. But some companies do set incentives that lead to bad
| culture.
| bawana wrote:
| The ghost of Steve Jobs is everywhere. That virus finds host in
| the dark corners of everyone's suffering and can only be expiated
| by sacrifice of others.
| praptak wrote:
| In such situations always gather evidence and hire a lawyer. HR
| are there to protect the interest of the company, you need
| someone that _you_ employ to protect your interest.
| spottybanana wrote:
| Lawyer? Isn't the most effective thing just to quit and look
| for another job. Maybe you can milk some money out of the
| company with a lawyer, but you are going to pay mentally by
| investing your brain to that issue. It is better to focus
| elsewhere.
| Symbiote wrote:
| 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.
| praptak wrote:
| 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.
| adultSwim wrote:
| This. One worker is tiny against a company. Many together are
| strong.
| nikivi wrote:
| If this is true, I am sure it's not reflective of the entire
| company as otherwise they won't be shipping these great products.
| klipt wrote:
| For big companies like FANG culture can be very team dependent.
| There are great teams and awful teams.
| itg wrote:
| I haven't found much of a correlation between company culture
| and the quality of products they ship.
| nikivi wrote:
| So you can have the experiences as described in the article
| across all areas of the company with everyone staying in line
| and still doing their 'best work'?
| [deleted]
| EliRivers wrote:
| Seems unlikely, doesn't it? I suspect it's not true. This
| guy clearly wasn't producing his 'best work'. The rest of
| the team, from his description, doesn't seem very
| competent.
|
| Does your question presuppose that everyone is somehow
| magically doing their 'best work'? If so, do you have any
| evidence of that? Lots of companies get by with shitty
| cultures and low-productivity employees.
| Quintus_ wrote:
| I'm sorry you had to go through this. The world can be a vicious
| place
| aninteger wrote:
| This is really sad and I can't imagine going through that. I
| think we've also heard time and time again that HR is not out to
| protect you but rather the company. I understand that this is
| this person's first job but they should have understood that this
| is not normal behavior. You should always put your (mental)
| health first and seek other forms of employment, even if you are
| on a visa, if this type of abuse is occurring.
| asebold wrote:
| Girl I am so sorry. I 100% believe you. I worked at a Fortune 500
| company (you might know one of my former coworkers named "jake"),
| and experienced and saw similar abuse. I feel like this mentality
| is indicative of big organizations.
| frongpik wrote:
| That meeting in the abandoned part of the building was scheduled
| because the sr. director wanted sexual favors. The meeting was
| scheduled by her manager, but later the director shows up out of
| blue and the manager leaves and says that "it's something very
| important". Thev director is the spider here: he's a true
| sociopath, probably admiring the evil already, has plotted the
| entire thing to make sure nobody would ever believe the female
| employee, then got a manager to schedule a meeting without him
| being involved in paper and then showed up, expecting to get the
| coerced initiative from the employee. If it worked out, the
| director would later say that he's never been to that abandoned
| part of the building. The director even has a personal dog with
| criminal background that he unleashes on the prey.
|
| The best they can do in this situation is a lawsuit from multiple
| victims, former employees, backed by paper trail (emails, etc.).
|
| Edit. I'd add, that companies like Apple don't care about
| employee troubles, but they care about bad publicity. Call that
| director out, make Apple realise that he's a net negative for
| their PR, let Apple boot him out and destroy his reputation: with
| such track record and publicity, no company would want to hire
| him and deal with his reputation. Those who don't recognize the
| law, should be judged without the law.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 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
| _obtaining something of value without paying a fair price for
| it._ Exploitation is accomplished through a variety of coercive
| processes like gaslighting, manipulation, instilling fear, etc.
| Outright lying is probably the most common coercive tactic since
| it 's easy and there's usually no penalty for it.
|
| If you find yourself in an exploitive work environment, you need
| to leave as quickly as possible. _The situation is not going to
| get better._ It 's only going to get worse, and your options are
| two: Leave with your mental health and reputation intact or leave
| after they have been destroyed. There is no option 3.
| sdoering wrote:
| 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 insights and need to trust the
| employer to be fair.
|
| As we probably all know information asymmetry makes efficient
| and rational markets to break down.
|
| Not sure what a potential solution would look like.
| penguin_booze wrote:
| _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"!
| worker767424 wrote:
| > humans as resources
|
| I'm still disappointed this game never got made:
|
| https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/human-
| resourc...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _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 departments
| became warehouses for the legions of yoga moms who think
| they're being rewarded for being slightly above average, when
| the reality is it's another industrial make-work program to
| keep the drones from revolting.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > 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.
| throwaway888abc wrote:
| Words of wisdom, should be pinned up
| [deleted]
| bredren wrote:
| No way to say if this is a legit story, but I have seen this kind
| of thing at Intel, a subsidiary of comScore and a subsidiary of
| Siemens.
|
| Toxic workplaces exist, and toxic teams within divisions exist.
|
| When I saw this stuff, I was too young and inexperienced to
| recognize bad behavior and recognize my own power to go fish for
| something else. I did not have immigration issues to think about
| though, which adds a whole other dimension to getting stuck in
| something like this.
|
| One time I saw this guy in the company softball league charge the
| pitcher over whether a pitch was a strike or a ball. It was
| absolutely not okay and the senior manager in the division said
| the guy was a "teddy bear" and "had kids" and that I needed to
| drop it.
|
| I learned later that he was a major producer in sales engineering
| for the company's leading product.
|
| Sometimes you get unlucky and are placed in a group like this.
| Powerful engineers probably have more control during the
| interview stage, and some companies can be good at getting rid of
| bad behavior. However results and loyalty can outweigh bad
| behavior.
|
| Something that people should think about is their ability to
| manage emotional barriers. This isn't something I was taught
| growing up, but I hope young people are more familiar about
| asserting these today.
|
| If people take advantage of you in your personal life, and you
| have the bad luck of being placed into a workplace with predatory
| personalities, they will take advantage of you there. Since that
| is your livelihood, it can be scary.
|
| I'd advise people who experience toxic workplaces or think that
| they are in them to consider whether they themselves are lacking
| in the ability to assert their own boundaries and act on those
| assertions when they are broken repeatedly.
|
| If you are not able to do this, use your health insurance to seek
| professional help because you'll need this ability in
| professional and personal environments for the rest of your life.
| Better to learn about yourself now than later.
|
| If you don't have health insurance, there are communities on
| reddit and elsewhere that support people dealing with emotional
| abuse. Which is basically what this stuff is. You can learn a lot
| by reading and anonymously participating in these communities.
|
| If at all possible get professional help even if it means cash
| out of pocket, because your mental health is among the most
| valuable investments you can make.
| zcw100 wrote:
| "I'd advise people who experience toxic workplaces or think
| that they are in them to consider whether they themselves are
| lacking in the ability to assert their own boundaries and act
| on those assertions when they are broken repeatedly."
|
| That's it, blame the victim.
| bredren wrote:
| If that is what you took from my post, you're mistaken.
|
| People should not be emotionally abusive. But they are. They
| attain positions of power.
|
| Through reflection you may come to realize they are among
| people you consider friends or family.
|
| You can't "fix" them, but you can learn how to handle or
| avoid them.
|
| Sometimes, if a person looks inward and into their past they
| will find a pattern of people who have taken advantage of
| them.
|
| If that's the case there may be work to do, like:
|
| - confront these past abuses
|
| - recognize those that are ongoing and how to navigate them
|
| - build and practice skills in recognizing and dealing with
| new toxic people going forward
|
| Life is hard and we get taught things unevenly.
|
| It is not a wrong to be ignorant of an important life skill.
|
| And even when you have read all of the evidence and logic
| needed to recognize and change your circumstances, some wait
| far too long, or never do.
|
| I do not blame folks in these positions, my heart goes out to
| them. Because I have been there.
|
| edit:
|
| I did not expect this chain to get the attention it did. And
| I had to look up victim blaming, because it sounds awful and
| I needed to understand if I got this wrong. I make mistakes.
|
| Here's the wikipedia article on Victim Blaming for those who
| want to learn more about what this phrase means:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victim_blaming
|
| I'm not going to try and further explain myself. If folks do
| not like this feedback, they may leave it. I will accept that
| some of my advice may be problematic. I'm not a therapist and
| I crafted these posts in the same speed and style I comment
| on technology platforms.
|
| This is honestly not a subject I want to go into greater
| detail about today. I hope the empathy behind my words shows
| through and wish anyone in any toxic situation at home or
| work the best.
| jariel wrote:
| Well you did specifically say 'assert their own
| boundaries'.
|
| That's victim blaming to the extent there is nothing
| someone can do to assert themselves other than basically
| leaving.
| [deleted]
| xenihn wrote:
| The poster you're responding to is dispensing advice on
| how to handle and escape from predators. Accusing them of
| victim shaming is wrong, and you're just siding
| supporting the predators by doing so. It's good advice.
| oblio wrote:
| Sometimes a bit of pushing back helps. A lot of people's
| bite is worse than their bite.
|
| Plus some people are frankly bullies and if stand up to
| them you see their true colors, as cowards.
| zcw100 wrote:
| Sounds like the kind of person who wouldn't last long in
| jail. "Hey you really shouldn't let him steal your peach
| cobbler. You need to push back." and gets his ass shived
| nine times.
| oblio wrote:
| So Apple is like jail ? :-))
| zcw100 wrote:
| Because that's exactly what you're saying. It's abusive
| because you're not in control. When you say there is
| something the victim can do to stop the abuse you're saying
| they're in control therefore it's not abusive. It's not
| abuse if you can say, "no" and it stops.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| > Sometimes, if a person looks inward and into their past
| they will find a pattern of people who have taken advantage
| of them.
|
| If someone has moved one far enough from the original
| trauma in order to work towards self-development, that's
| good advice to them. But in this case, they are still
| dealing with the fallout. Your advice is extolling them to
| work on themselves rather than trying to bring the
| perpetrators to justice and seek restitution from those who
| did them wrong. In other words, you're placing burden on
| the wronged rather than focusing on those who wronged them.
| That's victim blaming.
| chalst wrote:
| I think bredren is oversimplifying a bit but not victim-
| blaming. Bullies choose their victims and they choose
| situations where their victims are unlikely to succeed in
| seeking justice. The article provides a clear example: if
| an junior manager wants a scapegoat to cover-up a
| failure, an immigrant on a limited visa is just perfect.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Nation states and adversaries can also fabricate these stories,
| especially since the damage to western brands is best done at
| the root - attraction of talent and sowing doubts.
|
| On the other hand, it sounds believable that these things
| happen in a big Corp like Apple.
|
| Not trying to be conspiratorial, just to keep in mind - what
| you see on HN should be taken with a clear headed mind that
| some of this public information isn't verified by a reputable
| newspaper with any anon source.
| [deleted]
| jariel wrote:
| "I'd advise people who experience toxic workplaces or think
| that they are in them to consider whether they themselves are
| lacking in the ability to assert their own boundaries and act
| on those assertions when they are broken repeatedly."
|
| This is terrible advice.
|
| It's not a matter of 'character' that people cannot act, it's a
| matter of power.
|
| The entire situation is due to a messed up power dynamic.
|
| If the staffer was not deathly afraid they may have been able
| to do all sorts of things otherwise not possible.
| newbie578 wrote:
| 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 is by far the least known online, some might even say it
| has tendencies with a cult...
| parasubvert wrote:
| I suspect if this were Google there would be similar skepticism
| about an anonymous unverified story that offers a threat at the
| end. There is too much bullshit out there on every topic, and
| it's usually much more believable if you attach your name and
| reputation to a story (which is why it's good to "believe
| women", while still verifying).
|
| Apple is a big target with a decades of history in online
| advocacy debates. It's not hard to criticize Apple on HN, every
| Apple thread has significant critiques. There are often
| defenders too, however, which is also fine.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| 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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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.
| sokoloff wrote:
| There are many articles and comments on HN critical of Apple.
| Read the vitriol over the 30% App Store cut, accusing them of
| being a minority and yet simultaneously monopoly producer of
| smartphones, the MBPro keyboard fiasco (which was absolutely
| shitty on Apple's part), the glued-in batteries, the touchbar,
| the removal of ports, soldered-in RAM, etc. I don't
| particularly think Apple gets a pass here. This article is
| garnering skeptics in part by being a James Joyce-ian barely
| coherent account of slights that read as a mix of real and
| imagined.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Apple gets its share of critics as it has since its
| inception, but it also gets its share of loyalists where the
| rest of FANG don't. One quickly notices that in discussions
| there as much of a knee-jerk impulse to defend Apple, as
| there is to bash the company. Even your comment reveals an
| abrupt dismissal of the OP's testimony, impugning the
| character of its author.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I intended primarily to impugn their ability to tell a
| coherent, readable story, which is a necessary pre-
| condition for forming a judgment about the contents.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| That's your subjective take. The author's account reads
| like one of a trauma survivor, and is complete with
| details, quotes, and bolding for emphasis. Those who
| refuse to consider alternate viewpoints will have made
| their judgements, even if they have never been on the
| inside. So be it. But it is absolutely reprehensible to
| dismiss a victim's testimony in bad faith as "barely
| coherent account of slights that read as a mix of real
| and imagined". Shame on you.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Hehe. You're not wrong.
|
| Just remember that HN is all about tribalism. The show is more
| important than the substance. You'll need to fall in love with
| performance art if you want your points to be known. And
| language, for that matter.
|
| I don't think that's a bad thing, personally. People are
| allowed to hate google but not apple, and vice versa.
|
| But! You're also dead wrong. The story is substantive enough
| that we're both reading it. Most of the top comments are
| echoing the story. And we're all having a nice round of
| "managers suck."
| rantwasp wrote:
| People are about tribalism. We're wired to work this way :(
| mgh2 wrote:
| Because when people's belief systems are threatened, they react
| as if they are being personally attacked.
|
| Apple's cult following is treated as a religion by its fans. I
| see this with religions or cults that attack others who
| criticize them with similar tactics: denial, obfuscation,
| manipulation, deflection, shaming, name-calling, threats, etc.
|
| Aside from technical criticisms - which the tech community in
| HN values and encourages, a different and recent example is
| that of long time labor abuses. The initial articles have not
| gathered enough attention, but once they did, you start to
| notice some user burying and flagging. They have just recently
| resurfaced due to more evidence being discovered.
|
| Apple: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570247
|
| Tesla: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25360432
|
| This may sound harsh, but sometimes you have to punch your way
| into brainwashed people's minds to make them see the truth.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I am sorry to hear this.
|
| I was a manager for 25 years, at a renowned corporation, that
| wasn't fun, but didn't have too much of this kind of thing.
|
| When I became a manager, my personal vow was to "be the manager I
| always wanted."
|
| Contrary to popular mythology, this was _not_ "Become a doormat."
| As anyone that worked for me can tell you, I could be quite firm.
|
| But that was the exception; not the rule.
|
| Kindness and empathy pay _huge_ dividends, as a manager --as long
| as they are "for real." In my experience, artificial empathy gets
| detected quite quickly, by the types of folks we manage (smart
| ones).
|
| But this should not be considered just an "Apple" problem. It
| happens _everywhere_ , and, unlike in the movies, where the
| villain always gets their comeuppance, the perpetrators often
| thrive, establishing ugly corporate environments.
|
| Sadly, their bosses are often quite aware of how bad they are,
| but they "get results," and results are the bottom line.
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| As a hiring manager, I would never bring on an employee to
| scapegoat them. I had the experience, once, where I felt the VP
| of Operations was waiting for me to fail instead of supporting
| my success. I chalked it up to bad leadership on her part which
| threatened my ability to achieve the goals I was tasked with.
| Guess what? No one cares. Part of the pathway to success is to
| be able to navigate around such obstacles. It took me two years
| to build up trust with her and turn it into a productive
| relationship. As a manager, I learned a lot about what _not_ to
| do by watching her, which was a pretty invaluable lesson.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| At a company that has secrecy and "jobsian" leadership at its
| core, it's not difficult to believe that this kind of stuff
| happens.
|
| The question that's more important: is it common, and is it an
| accepted tradeoff in the company culture.
|
| To those that are expressing disbelief that this happened: even
| if half of it is made up, its still unacceptable. The reason to
| not ignore this is that one day, this superteam of arsehole might
| be in your life.
| gjvc wrote:
| I hope he/she goes full-on public with this.
| uselessemployee wrote:
| I believe this particular team was a "Forgotten" team as in the
| Forgotten Employee
| (https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/), or "bullshit
| jobs team".
|
| I probably will never truly understand the sufferings and misery
| of the author. However, the author perhaps was expecting the
| environment to be challenging in a positive way, with interesting
| work and motivated colleagues. Unfortunately for the author, the
| team was complete opposite of it. Recognizing such environments
| is also a valuable office skill, because then you can decide for
| yourself if you would like to basically do nothing alongside the
| team or leave for greener pastures. Being new to the team and
| trying to make a positive change immediately will only create
| resistance from the peers and may lead to abuse described in the
| article.
|
| Paradoxically, doing nothing and being conformant with the team
| nature would have led to positive reviews and much, much less
| overall misery.
| Lammy wrote:
| I'm very sorry to read about your experience and have seen
| similar stories play out at other "top" tier companies, including
| once myself. I thought this paragraph really stood out in your
| post:
|
| "This is while the rest of the team were taking weeks and months
| to complete a task that takes an hour, were on vacation or just
| out of office or out of touch. The time they were out of office
| was more than 2 months in one year!"
|
| Sounds like you were perceived as a threat to the career
| stability of people who have been there a long time, have figured
| out how to coast, and don't want a spotlight shone on their
| general area. This is not intended to be a justification of any
| part of what you experienced, but this does sound like it wasn't
| all personal.
| timvisee wrote:
| This is horrendous.
|
| Thanks for sharing your story in such detail. I hope you'll be
| doing well.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I worked at Apple Computer long ago and overall, was abused for
| labor, including no December vacation, expected overtime, and
| getting me to design the project t-shirt and then not letting me
| have two of them for my trouble (insult). I was young and dealt
| with it. I have moved on. I am not surprised by this article.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| For anyone experiencing workplace harassment, this article is a
| great example of what not to do.
|
| Instead, document everything happening to you with evidence,
| speak with HR about incidents as they arise, and if they don't
| take action, seek legal counsel.
|
| Doing anything else will paint you in a bad light.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It seems like that's what she was doing? At the end, she
| mentions that she has documented these events, and is asking
| Apple to step forward now and take responsibility or she'll
| take it to the press.
| zcw100 wrote:
| You've clearly never had this happen to you. Go ahead, document
| everything, it's not going to matter. That's not how this
| works. If you do that they'll either say, "Ok, I see what
| you've got there. But that's not what we're here to discuss.
| We're here to discuss your negative attitude" or they can look
| at your documentation and say, "So what were you charging the
| time you were doing all this documentation to?", or, "So this
| is why you're not getting your work done. You're spending all
| this time on this paranoid documentation instead of doing your
| work".
|
| Go to HR? Are you kidding me? First, HR is not your friend.
| They're there to protect the company. Perhaps sometimes your
| interests align with the company but that's just an accident.
| Second, there is no way these people are engaging in abusive
| behavior without HR having their backs so going to HR just
| risks exposing HR to accusations of abuse so now you've got an
| even bigger target on your back.
| asveikau wrote:
| > First, HR is not your friend. They're there to protect the
| company.
|
| This is absolutely correct.
|
| However the next sentence reveals a curious mis-alignment in
| our culture at large:
|
| > Perhaps sometimes your interests align with the company but
| that's just an accident.
|
| It is _absolutely_ in the interest of the company to not
| treat people like shit, from multiple vantage points ranging
| from selfishly not wanting to be embarrassed by their own
| misconduct, to more altruistic moral obligation. If the
| company does not believe that, they are mistaken and foolish,
| prioritizing perceived short term gain over the right thing
| to do. Unfortunately, this particular brand of short-
| sightedness is the norm and our cultural expectation.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I have. I don't know why you presume to know my work history.
| The fact that I can provide succinct actionable advise on the
| matter should be evidence in itself. You don't need to tell
| people you're documenting events. Do I need to spell that out
| for you?
|
| Where I live, employment is "at-will," so it would be good to
| establish acting in good faith first--taking an issue to HR--
| before taking legal action.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| I think they mean that you should document everything, then
| express your concerns to HR in a non-confrontational way,
| then quietly bring your documentation to a lawyer if nothing
| changes.
|
| The documentation is your "plan B" which HR doesn't need to
| know about.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| Documenting everything is good advice, but it can give
| false hope to people in these situations. Hiring a lawyer
| is never as easy, cheap, or as quick as it sounds from
| internet comments.
|
| It's easy to armchair quarterback these situations and talk
| about hypothetically lawyering up, but what's the endgame?
| Suing your company won't suddenly convert a toxic job into
| a happy job, regardless of the outcome. Settlements, if
| they ever arrive, are rarely significant enough to make a
| financial difference unless someone has a truly home-run
| protected class harassment case with hard evidence (not
| just verbal conversations recited from memory).
|
| Good lawyers won't take cases that don't appear winnable
| from the start. However, there are plenty of bad lawyers
| who will happily give people false hope about their chances
| and then bill as much as they can get away with before the
| client gives up.
|
| "Plan B" should always be to find another job ASAP, if
| possible. (Not easy in the author's case).
| gamblor956 wrote:
| _Good lawyers won 't take cases that don't appear
| winnable from the start._
|
| Very false. Generally, the difference between a good
| lawyer and a bad lawyer is that the good lawyer will
| counsel the client about the chances of _not_ winning the
| case, especially after discovery has concluded, while a
| bad lawyer won 't.
|
| If the the winnability of a case was apparent at the
| start, _there wouldn 't be a case_ as the parties would
| settle before a formal lawsuit was filed. This happens
| very frequently, especially for labor cases where the
| employee has documented instances of harassment.
|
| A lot of cases that appear to be "winnable" at the
| beginning turn out not to be winnable based on evidence
| that becomes available during discovery, and a lot of
| cases that didn't appear to be winnable turn out to be
| slam dunks after discovery. Most of the landmark cases
| today were cases that didn't appear "winnable" at the
| start (see, e.g., the DuPont and Erin Brokovich cases).
|
| Moreover, for most cases of this type (and generally for
| almost all civil cases involving individual torts),
| lawyers work on a contingency basis for plaintiffs, so
| they only get paid if they win. The only lawyers that
| won't handle civil torts for individual clients on a
| contingency basis are the bad ones who don't expect to
| win, or the truly amazing ones that charge fixed or
| hourly fees because they're so good that they can resolve
| the case without doing the amount of work that would
| justify a 30% or 40% fee.
| meekrohprocess wrote:
| Yeah. It's always a bad situation, and really the best we
| can do is empathise when people have to go through it.
|
| Voting with your feet is usually the best policy, but
| people with visa issues have an especially hard time with
| that. Sadly, asking our representatives for visa reforms
| to avoid putting people in indentured positions doesn't
| seem to accomplish much.
|
| And some people will choose to demand justice even when
| it isn't the best move for their career or personal
| lives. I don't think it's right to admonish that.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Yes.
| bdowling wrote:
| > Go to HR? Are you kidding me? First, HR is not your friend.
|
| The purpose of going to HR is so that the employee's attorney
| can later show that the company (1) had actual knowledge of
| the abuse and (2) subsequently did nothing.
| [deleted]
| alpb wrote:
| You're absolutely correct but missing out on a major point. If
| you are an immigrant, especially on a soon-expiring visa,
| especially from a country with export restrictions (I'm
| guessing Iran), you are unlikely to pursue a legal battle. Most
| likely you won't even be able to attend to any court hearings
| on time.
|
| This is also why many immigrants on H1b and OPT visas at FAANGM
| companies (often their first job) bow down to abuse, get their
| work done, and do their time until they receive a Green Card so
| they can freely roam the job market.
| tooltower wrote:
| This person was not a US citizen, and needed to remain on the
| only path to a green card. Your options feel more limiting when
| that happens. They clearly didn't want to rattle the cage.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Attorneys will happily take your money and fight for you. Use
| what options you have.
| xvector wrote:
| This is easy to say but very difficult to actually do.
| Immigrants are typically more desperate and companies take
| advantage of that.
| bdowling wrote:
| > 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 non-citizen employee.
| specialist wrote:
| IDK. I've tried it every which way. None have worked out well
| for me.
|
| Me now thinks only winning move is to suck it up while finding
| a new gig. For H1B prisoners like this OP, well, it's tough to
| win a rigged game.
|
| The core problem, IMHO, is not having a baseline model for what
| good management looks like.
|
| In my 30s, I finally stumbled into a high mutual trust
| situation. It was heaven. We got so much done, had so much fun.
|
| Once you get a taste of trust, it's hard to suspend disbelief,
| kinda ruins you for future relationships.
|
| After earning my PhD in failure, I'm still no wiser, have no
| prescriptive advice.
|
| The only "skill" I got was tuning my spidey sense.
| sdoering wrote:
| I hear you. I stumbled into a situation of high mutual trust
| as well. And I saw it go down the drain over few years.
|
| One is burned after experiencing what work could be like. But
| what to do - I have so no idea.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Doesn't exactly work when HR is toothless and one is seeking
| legal action against literally the richest company in the world
| and already inundated in lawsuits. Not to mention the author
| was on a student OPT visa- how is someone being sponsored by a
| company going to risk their status by suing that company?
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The flip side is that Apple cannot afford to lose such a case
| because it would shine a very dark light on them.
|
| If you have anywhere near a solid case they will probably
| settle for a handsome amount.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Apple is constantly being sued at all times. I recall a
| manager saying that they could not delete any work emails
| because of possible subpoena orders. Most cases likely get
| lost among it all, and get no outside publicity.
| onepointsixC wrote:
| Even if she did, would she have been able to even stay while
| the lawsuit plays out over months to years? Unlikely.
| aspaceman wrote:
| There's nothing to do. Documenting wouldn't help.
|
| Criticizing them is the exact type of navel gazing commentary I
| hate about this place. You must think you're oh so intelligent.
| You read a Reddit comment that said to make sure to document
| and email everything and now you'll pompously make that comment
| under anything. You're not actually helping.
|
| "You see Oedipus, if you had only asked that man if he was
| Laius before killing them for attacking you, none of this would
| have ever happened." Tragedy is about empathy and shared
| experience, not an instructional guide for how to live life.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| In Part 3 the author explains attempts to schedule a meeting
| with HR:
|
| > I was worried and I scheduled a meeting with HR and described
| what had happened.
|
| It's easy to armchair quarterback these accounts from the
| internet, but let's not pretend it's as simple as walking over
| to HR and then calling up a lawyer who will take your case for
| free. These cases are much harder to win than the internet
| would suggest, especially when much of the claimed harassment
| (threatening to punch the author, joking about deportation
| threats) occurred verbally.
| praptak wrote:
| Seek legal advice BEFORE speaking to HR. Seriously. If you are
| at the "document everything" stage, it's not the time to speak
| to HR.
| CivBase wrote:
| According to the article, the person was documenting things.
| They even included a picture of a meeting invite. They also
| went to HR many times.
|
| Only thing they didn't do was seek legal council, but that's
| probably a hard step to take when you're on a work visa -
| especially when Apple is your legal opponent.
| bdowling wrote:
| > ... especially when Apple is your legal opponent.
|
| If the facts are on the employee's side, then many lawyers
| would take such a case on contingency because Apple (or any
| large, successful company) has very deep pockets to pay a
| judgment or settlement.
|
| Conversely, finding a lawyer to sue a small employer on
| contingency would be more difficult because the small
| employer could declare bankruptcy, making collecting a
| judgment difficult or impossible.
| alpb wrote:
| 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 last
| name
|
| > My manager was giving indirect negative feedback through the
| iBuddy rather than speaking with me
|
| > I would enter the meetings and they would stop talking and make
| really strange gestures. I was ignored, ridiculed and attacked in
| the team meetings
|
| > "You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental
| problems."
|
| > "My husband worked for FBI and I can get you deported on a
| cargo boat if I want."
|
| Sounds like a bunch of bully high schoolers that never mentally
| graduated from high school.
|
| I also would like to point out that this post is ranked way lower
| than it deserves on HN homepage, despite having higher points and
| shorter time than many of the posts above it. That's quite
| unfair. It dropped from #1 to #7 within an hour.
| jldugger wrote:
| > 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 can see why you'd think that, but don't you think it's just
| as likely that the manager was a high caste Hindu? It seems in
| poor taste to speculate.
| geodel wrote:
| > .. likely that the manager was a high caste Hindu?
|
| Good point. I'd say with critical race or caste theory in
| fashion if atrocity happened perpetrator is either white male
| in US or upper caste hindu male in India. Any other case
| would be called deflection from 'real' issues.
| worker767424 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jariel wrote:
| What's shocking is the level of effort the manager put in to
| being an asshole.
|
| That is some serious psychological issue right there.
|
| The victim also seems to be in a very bad emotional state wherein
| they may interpret things poorly as well, I wonder what the other
| side of the story was? There's enough there that I don't doubt
| bad behaviour, but there's also some odd points in there - if
| they asked her to 'resign' then that's actually a polite way of
| being fired. Why didn't they just fire her? Seems odd.
|
| That would make a fun case to look into.
|
| Finally: why do Senior Directors and VPs accept this? What kind
| of VP wants this kind of garbage going on under them? Why not
| dump the manager? Odd.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| There are areas like this in every company, from 8 person
| businesses to large corporates.
|
| For those who find themselves in one, the biggest stress comes
| from the fact it's hard to leave. The abusers know this, of
| course, and they know that the more abuse they pile on, the
| harder it gets to leave.
|
| There is no easy answer, but I've seen it done to many people and
| those who've come out of it okay are those who just left. They
| had to get another job, yes, but in many cases the company where
| the abuse occurred is no longer having fun when the victim
| leaves, so they'll just respond to a reference request with 'yes
| they worked here from X to Y with this title' and you'll never
| have to deal with them again.
| ljm wrote:
| This is a sad story not only because of just how toxic that
| team/department was, bur also because it sounds exactly like
| one where you're set up to fail the moment it's decided you're
| placed there.
|
| The 'colleagues' in this story sound like they got themselves
| into a cushy position where they could coast off of the hard
| work and hopefulness of a new hire, drain them to the point of
| complete burnout, and then either fire them or let constructive
| dismissal take its course while they wait for fresh meat.
|
| The things a group of nasty individuals can do when put
| together is truly saddening, and I hope the author of this post
| finds a better job where they are treated as a human being.
| kirstenbirgit wrote:
| I really feel bad for this person. It seems like they are used to
| another workplace culture than the secretive and strict culture
| of Apple, and they might have committed some social faux pas
| which tainted their reputation, leading to sabotage from their
| teammates. Of course that doesn't excuse their behavior.
|
| Additionally, I really hope that they now have learnt to separate
| themselves emotionally from their workplace. I know that it
| might've been a stressful (e.g. visa issues), but one should
| never let themselves get to a point where they cry about a
| workplace issue in their Christmas/NYE break. It's just a job,
| after all.
| xyst wrote:
| stuff like this needs to be taken to court - air out the laundry
| of the employer and the public will truly see the evil side of
| some of the greediest corporations.
| markvdb wrote:
| This kind of story is why your first priority when you start
| earning a salary should be to save up some f __k you money.
|
| That should be about ten times easier on a software developer
| salary than on anything else, so consider yourself lucky.
| tdhz77 wrote:
| 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.
| xenihn wrote:
| I personally believe smaller companies and huge companies will
| be more prone to this. There's less accountability and ability
| to monitor and punish abuse and toxicity towards both extremes.
| oblio wrote:
| 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 Corporate Distortion Field.
| [deleted]
| worker767424 wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| There we go again :-)
|
| It's called plausible deniability. They're not stupid.
|
| Why would we ever trust the messaging of a company that:
|
| 1. Has removed the headphone jack claiming there wasn't
| enough room inside the phone for it.
|
| 2. While "accidentally" deciding to sell a $150 pair of
| wireless earbuds just as they removed the previous
| accessory.
|
| 3. Now has removed the charger, claiming that they want to
| reduce pollution.
|
| 4. While almost all their equipment is not reparable (which
| is much, much worse for the environment!).
|
| 5. And also "accidentally" introducing a $40 wireless
| charger just as they removed the old charger from the box.
|
| Ad nauseam.
|
| Which one is more likely?
|
| 1. They had an internal meeting where they had to choose
| between
|
| A) shut up and have people replace their phones, so more
| $$$
|
| B) say something, deal with angry customers, best case
| scenario make $0, worst case scenario have to spend some
| $$$
|
| and they chose A), cause, you know, corporation + $$$.
|
| 2. They couldn't figure out how to communicate the issue
| and its trade-offs correctly? The company that invests
| probably billions in carefully designed marketing.
|
| Oh, and assuming you're right.
|
| Why are they losing the lawsuit? Why do they have to pay
| tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars? Why are they
| being sued in Europe, too?
|
| It's the third time I'm having the same discussion here :-)
|
| Apple Shiny Aluminum Distortion Field, I'm telling ya!
| valuearb wrote:
| Maybe because after every paragraph you ask yourself, why
| didn't they just fire them? They could have done it at any
| point.
| opportune wrote:
| At most big companies firing people is a lengthy process.
| Also firing someone under 12 months into their first "real"
| job after graduating looks very bad.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's hard from an HR perspective and it's something that a
| lot of managers just don't want to have to deal with. I
| remember in a former life, a number of problem people--not
| ill-intentioned but just couldn't do their jobs--who only
| got forced out as part of one or the other layoffs that
| happened over the years.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| partly its a pain in the arse to fire someone, but also its
| useful to have a scapegoat about to blame. Also if I take the
| story at face value, I think there is some level of enjoyment
| they took in tormenting the OP
| ma2rten wrote:
| In my mind the reputation of Facebook is that it's more
| employee friendly and customer hostile, but Apple is more
| employee hostile (thinking about Steve Jobs stories) and
| customer friendly.
| abhishekjha wrote:
| In what way is apple customer friendly? Definitely not in the
| fixing broken devices way. The hostility is across the board.
| geodel wrote:
| Which of your device did they break?
| totallypear wrote:
| _new throwaway_
|
| I think what this person missed was that the iBuddy was their
| real manager all along. And once it became clear that the person
| would not cooperate with the iBuddy, they became the "problem
| employee" and were railroaded out.
|
| Not justifying the abuse. They should have explained more clearly
| what was happening or transferred. It's also always more
| difficult when there are cultural and language barriers; they
| needed to take a more generous approach and explain things. And
| instead, they seem to have decided in the first couple days that
| they weren't going to give this person any slack.
|
| I was hired in similar circumstances. I replaced someone who was
| fired. I had an "informal" manager, who ghostwrote my reviews and
| did everything my real manager would. Eventually my real manager
| was fired and the iBuddy became a manager of a new politically
| favored team.
|
| It also looks like this person was hired on directly to a secret
| project. That's a really rough way to start at Apple. That may
| explain why they didn't give any slack and why they were really
| cagey with giving them access to project resources. It also
| sounds like the project was not going well, which also removes
| room for error.
|
| They must have gotten a bad first impression and that spiraled
| into a negative feedback loop, since no-one was helping this
| person into the culture or explain what they were doing wrong.
| For example, when the real manager got back from vacation, they
| probably heard bad things from the iBuddy about this person's
| first couple days. And rather than trying to course correct, the
| real manager solidified the idea that this person is dangerous to
| the project and may cause problems for them. Again, this person
| was being turned into the "troublemaker employee" unnecessarily.
|
| I can also corroborate the clique-iness. Retention is better at
| Apple than other companies (ie. people work there longer on
| average than other companies). And my experience is that combined
| with the secret projects and avoiding the bureaucracy is that you
| learn who will cooperate to get things done and who wont. And it
| is critical to your success to only work with people who
| cooperate and to avoid or even sabotage people who won't.
|
| There were some other faux-pas here and there that definitely
| didn't help things. The author seems to have reached out to
| people without consulting the iBuddy or their manager. That's a
| huge no-no and again explains why they were on the shitlist.
| Also, they refused to hand over data citing GDPR. That was
| another bad call. The author was right to bring up GDPR and
| explain that they were in violation. But they should not have
| refused to give up the data. They may be correct on the merits,
| but it's a death sentence to them personally. Once management
| decides, you shouldn't be surprised if your reviews / employement
| is impacted for resisting, even if you are morally right.
|
| So again, not excusing the abuse. What happened to the author was
| terrible and unnecessary. Some Apple specific stuff contributed
| to it: the high stakes secrecy, clique-iness, and informal power
| structures. But it sounds like this person also was not familiar
| with corporate politics and made a lot of faux-pas. With better
| management, they could have been taught how to navigate Apple's
| culture.
| zepto wrote:
| I find this entirely believable.
|
| Not because I think it's common at Apple in particular, but
| because it's common in companies of almost any size and in almost
| any industry.
|
| It _should_ be better at Apple. They do in fact lead in many
| areas of improving corporate behavior, but I have actually _never
| heard of them leading in this area_ , and everyone I know who has
| worked there makes it sound little different other than the scale
| of what you work on and the pay, from any other corporation.
|
| It's one of the reasons I have never seriously thought of working
| for Apple myself.
|
| I hope Tim Cook reads this and takes it seriously.
| Nokinside wrote:
| Treatment described is is just small step towards workspace
| equality. Apple lobbies against Uighur forced labor bill, so they
| should start treating employees in the US much worse, not better.
| draw_down wrote:
| Come on
| magicfractal wrote:
| it's very sad, this is clearly someone that has suffered a lot of
| trauma and abuse and feels completely powerless. Imo, we're
| seeing what the US immigration system does to folks, all labor
| protection laws are useless if you have one month to leave the
| country after losing your job.
|
| My heart goes to you anon! Don't think that your career is over!
| There's many other places in the world you can start afresh and
| have great quality of living and better protections such as
| Europe and Canada.
| sgustard wrote:
| I worked at Apple decades ago before Next and the return of
| Steve. It was glorious, fun, respectful, creative and bubbling
| with energy. Of course, it was nothing like the juggernaut of
| today. It was an upstart democracy, messy and sublime; now it's
| China: authoritarian and no patience for dissent.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _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._
|
| I'd say go for it.
|
| I like Apple products (most of them), but this is nuts, and those
| people must be punished, up to the level that allowed it.
|
| Unfortunately golden parachutes mean that certain levels and
| above will just get a repositioning and laught it off at worst...
| specialist wrote:
| I want someone to train an AI with organizational psychology
| metrics, to better spot dysfunction and pathology.
|
| Surely anyone looking at OP's team from afar could spot the
| dumpster fire, if only the data were available.
| parasubvert wrote:
| This would be far more valuable if it weren't anonymous and
| didn't have the threat at the end. Cheapens the message. Think of
| Susan Fowler with Uber, and why that was so effective.
| throwaway_1237 wrote:
| I won't reply using my real accounts on HN or Medium for fear
| of retaliation by Apple... I think it's still valuable and
| entirely understandable.
| xenihn wrote:
| >A few weeks after the previous incident, I was looking at work
| on Radar which my "iBuddy" had copied directly from what I had
| done, and I noticed a note under the note section of a hidden
| slide on a deck that she had uploaded and it was an indirect
| suicide/murder threat. Given the history of the team, I felt
| worried sick and stayed home that day from fear of showing up to
| work and being harmed. I alerted the senior manager who told the
| iBuddy. The "iBuddy" followed up with another email about a child
| who was murdered by her parents and was thrown into the river and
| a person who had committed suicide by hanging himself.
|
| My heart breaks for this person. They ended up on a team filled
| with people exhibiting borderline personality disorder traits,
| entrenched and protected by corporate interests. Literally my
| worst nightmare. Compound this with the other factors in this
| situation (first job, immigrant status) and it's truly horrible.
| I feel so bad for them.
| [deleted]
| txdv wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Seems like the author is going to expose more details about his
| story including names if things do not change at Apple. I just
| wonder, how will he know? He is not working at apple any more.
| rantwasp wrote:
| I don't get it. This person was abused to the moon and back and
| al they want is for Apple to "fix" it? How would that even
| work.
|
| I would say: lawyer up and make them pay through the nose. Once
| that happens 1) all the people involved in this will get canned
| / have a really bad time 2) Apple will put some kind of
| measures in place to prevent this kind of abuse.
|
| Also, hello Apple HR? Wtf are you doing? I understand you give
| 0 fcks about the employee, but your job is to protect the
| company? Spoiler Alert: by this story existing you have failed
| miserably.
| Fordec wrote:
| There are enough details here that any halfway competent person
| in HR can decode who this was with company records in about 20
| minutes.
|
| If they want this to be quiet, they are very able to reach out.
| Or not.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Just keep this in mind - Anon stories like this needs to be
| verified by a reputable journal, newspaper, etc. Medium or
| Twitter doesn't do the due diligence. Nation states can fabricate
| this easily. Not saying that is indeed the case, I'm asking
| people to stop looking at places like Substack and Medium as a
| source of truth, especially Anon posters.
|
| WSJ did so much diligence with the Theranos story. Years. They've
| also released a book explaining what went into their analysis and
| how they approached taking down a big dog like Theranos. Not
| saying Apple is same as Theronas, mind you; the point is that
| newspapers such as WSJ do thorough investigations compared to
| some random anon account on Medium.
|
| I've just become increasingly aware of misinformation after this
| the US elections drama. I take everything with a grain of salt.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > I take everything with a grain of salt.
|
| "Trust but verify" --Ronald Reagan
|
| There used to be a saying, "Don't believe everything you read
| on the internet." Somehow it's been forgotten.
|
| Not saying the article is false or contrived. I'm saying we
| just don't know since it's anonymous, and therefore I take it
| with a grain of salt.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| "Trust but verify" - That doesn't work anymore. Western
| values are being eroded. Sadly.
|
| Sounds alarmist but I feel like the west in next decade is
| going to have to deal with a lot of "Distrust and ask for
| verification".
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > That doesn't work anymore. Western values are being
| eroded.
|
| If I'm reading the origin of that phrase correctly, it's
| actually Russian (not Western) and Reagan borrowed it.
| jariel wrote:
| Apple is the #1 advertiser in the world, when are you going to
| see corporate news really take on corporations?
| outside1234 wrote:
| 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 this starts
| happening -- drop everything and find a new job -- it is not
| worth it no matter what.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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.
| draw_down wrote:
| It's very important to understand the worst that can happen in a
| situation. If they fire you, ok that will suck and be painful,
| but important to maintain perspective. They can't kill you.
|
| These people and these companies and jobs aren't worth all this.
| Stand up for yourself and look out for yourself because nobody
| else is going to.
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