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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Large consulting firms seems to operate this way, being basically a pyramid with endless layers of non-programming "Enterprise Architect Solution Expert". I've had folks tell me explicitly when joining these firms post-grad that their goal was not to code in two years.
Arthur Anderson used to be one of the Big 5 accounting firms along with Deloitte and Touche, KPMG, Price Waterhouse and Ernst&Young.
I was briefly at an Indian subsidiary of EY(those days, the Big 5 weren’t allowed to operate by themselves without partnering with a local chartered accounting firm) because only certain firms could do bank audits and I wanted the experience at one if the Big 5. KPMG was known for its entertainment industry accounts. I picked E&Y for manufacturing and I think I ended up with an international cement conglomerate account. The Big 5 clearly decided who gets what industry. They operate like a cartel. They also had consulting divisions. AA after Enron simply focused solely on consulting and IT.
They are all ‘special’ kinds of hell. Just different flavors. AA/Enron scandal was a big deal and was the only talk for days and days and days.
[..] Andersen was responsible for checking the accounting of energy company Enron. The energy company went down with great noise because of shoddy accounting. Trouble came for Andersen as they had approved this accounting. After learning the Securities and Exchange Commission had begun an investigation of Enron’s accounting, orders were given at Andersen to destroy thousands of documents and e-mail messages. These illegal acts resulted in a conviction, which made it impossible to act as a public accountant for American stock exchange funds. Andersen decided to hand in its licenses before the SEC would withdraw them.[..]
[..] On appeal for the destruction of the files, Andersen was acquitted and there was no formal objection to the continuation of the audit practice. However, almost all employees had left due to the obscure practices. The practice had changed hands and the name would always be linked to this scandal. The few employees that stayed, worked on litigation arising from past audits, as well as pension issues and few other matters. Also there still is another firm which reminds us of the existence Andersen, namely Accenture. Accenture started off as the consultancy part of Andersen, which split off just in time, before the scandal happened.[..]
That’s just not true. Arthur Andersen originally spun off its consulting arm into “Andersen Consulting” under a global holding company. AA did accounting, AC consulting.
AC paid AA 15% of its profits every year. But AC was growing far faster than AA, so AA started growing another consulting arm, which was against the contract.
AC partners claimed contractual breach, and as part of the separation settlement had to change their name and distance themselves from the brand.
This was lucky given what happened with AA’s reputation later.
Here is another AC story for you: I worked at a bank in the late 90s, on a crunch y2k project that was instigated because AC knowingly installed a non-y2k compliant set of core systems in about 1997, and didn't pass on the vendor's warnings about y2k to the bank management.
The AC project (which ran about 93-97) went kinda rogue, the bank management lost control of the situation. The AC project managers kept bringing in more AC consultants and told the bank management not to worry, everything was good. They were heavily customizing a non-y2k version of the vendor's software, and the vendor warned project management that they were customizing this in ways that would prevent future support and patches, but AC project management covered this up.
Eventually the vendor contacted the bank CEO directly and said "what are you going to do about the y2k issue, we are concerned". CEO: "What y2k issue?"
The bank had to go live with what they had, fire and blacklist AC and burn tens of millions of $$ to re-start the project to deliver exactly the same thing, but using a y2k-compliant version as a starting point, and removing as much customization as possible so they could take future vendor patches.
Wow. That's ridiculous.
Problem with non y2k version was exactly what? Just compatibility with year 2000 to be recognized as valid year? Thanks for replies all!
You're thinking of Agilent. Also Accenture didn't change their name due to Enron. It happened before the scandal (so quite lucky for them!) Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting were involved in a legal tussle which required them to change their name...
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/08/business/worldbusiness/IH...
I even had to look for what it means to "be exempt".
> Exempt employees stand in contrast to non-exempt employees, which are paid minimum wage and overtime above the standard 40-hour workweek.
Wow if I had heard this in a random bar discussion I would called it complete and utter bullshit. The more I read HN the more it feels like being a worker in the US is like riding a horse through the wild west; anything can happen.
In my country the overtime pay is mandatory by law and it is also constrained to be a minimum of 75% more than the normal wage.
Btw it is also mandatory to enjoy your (minimum of) 23 days of holidays per year; no exchanging for other perks or money, like some comment mentions above.
From my contract, there is no overtime pay. Overtime has to be given as free time within a specific amount of time after the overtime occurred.
But for any rolling period of x timeunits (don't want to be too specific obviously) I have a specific amount of hours of overtime that the company doesn't need to compensate in free time. In my case this is ~20% of my regular time in ever rolling period.
But up to a maximum amount of overtime hours per year. This max amount is short of 10% of my yearly hours.
So in the end I have to accept about 10% overtime just already compensated with my contract.
No overtime payment specified in mine, either. The usual thing is to "fall back" to what the law says, and that's what I've seen mostly everywhere. Maybe in other sectors this is negotiated differently, though; apart from the grounds laid by law, a set of sector-specific collective agreements might have been set up in the past for different sectors, further improving or detailing their particular work conditions.
Overall, workers are given a lot more protection than what I feel there is in the US, and that percolates into the common culture and the expectations. Then we get surprised when seeing what happens in other places :-) (both ways)
FYI, it goes both ways. An exempt employee chooses their own hours. If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.
> If the company tries to dock them for working less they'd immediately become non-exempt.
This is false. First, the relevant rule that is kind of like that is the “salary basis” rule, which doesn't apply to all exempt employees; for instance, it does not apply to “Computer professionals who are paid on an hourly basis at a rate not less than $27.63 per hour.”
Second, even for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, they can be subject to workplace conduct rules requiring a set schedule and be subject to disciplinary dock for failing to comply with that conduct rule. The structure of the dock needs to make sense as a disciplinary dock and not be a de facto shift to non-salary pay, but there is absolutely no rule in US federal labor law that “an exempt employee chooses their own hours”.
> This department of labor letter seems to state otherwise
That letter doesn't deal with even the question of what effects the status of exempt employees, since it deals with rules applicable to, and I quote from the letter itself, “salaried non-exempt employees.”
Even so, while it finds the specific conduct being addressed was prohibited, it articulates a rule similar to the one I discuss for exempt employees subject to the salary basis test, stating that, “an employer may take a disciplinary deduction from an employee’s salary for willful
absences or tardiness or for infractions of major work rules.”
But the employer chooses what needs to be done and the time frame for completion. You can choose whatever hours will let you complete the assigned work. Just complete it or you're fired.
I think this is a case of culture clash between USA, where "overtime exempt" is a thing, and most of Europe, where it is required to be paid (of course, there are cases where people end up being pressured... or like me, forgot to log the overtime hours despite secretary going around with the sheet).
Of course that only applies to people working on employment contracts, not those who got seduced by "B2B" :|
It’s supposed to work both ways - I work 60 hours this week with the implicit understanding that I work 20 next week. Sure, I don’t get OT pay, but I can abide by that as long as it all balances out to 2000 hours at the end of the year.
That said, the abuse of the exemption system is arguably a pandemic in the US.
The problem is that unlike with proper overtime protection, it's just an implicit understanding that is in no way guaranteed.
Overtime laws generally allow taking the hours worked back as PTO. The only thing is that usually there are limits to avoid running everyone ragged with no end.
Look for another job. Developers have enough leverage in the job market that there's no need to put up with bad working conditions unless they want to.
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.)
I'm curious, what kind of things did you learn in your cs curriculum that applies to that job, and the other coders didn't have?
I'll precise I'm not being sarcastic, genuinely curious. My math background could be better and I'm planning on improving that, but it would be for personal satisfaction as it's not hurting my work (legal tech). But maybe it is, you don't know what you don't know.
Just to add to the list. Keep a paper trail of all communications between you and your line management or any other colleague. Especially abusive communications. It will look really bad when you read these out aloud at a HR meeting for them.
Sounds like you're an algorithms guy, and the other coders didn't have the background needed for understanding their use?
I'm self taught, and for many years didn't know about algorithms, big-O notation, and similar. You can do a lot of stuff without that knowledge, but there are definitely some areas that require it.
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.
Hiring Newbies to call the shots becoming a cost saving pillar that eroded work culture at Boeing is one of those things that indirectly contributed to the recent debacle.
Is a bean counter still heading Boeing? Technology companies really need to be run by technologists first, businessmen second. It's fine to have a COO handle the nitty-gritty of running the company, but the vision and culture need to be set by a technical person and should be very technology-focused in general.
>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 dunno - I worked hard, especially early in my career and people noticing lead to four new jobs, two of which included substantial pay/benefit raises. Then again more than a bit of that hard work was on cross-organizational teams; I wasn't acting solely in my direct organizational unit.
So hard work can pay off if you are doing it somewhere it is visible by others. Getting involved in working groups outside of your company, even if you have to do it after hours, is a great way to network and help others notice your work ethic.
I see far too many people who burrow into their current organization and then just bitch about it without doing something about it. If people can't see you they won't be able to recognize your work.
This isn't directed at you but just a general observation - if you don't like your current organization, get proactive and do something about it. I have little sympathy for people who just complain without doing anything.
Agree. Not always easy to be rewarded within a company. However, others will notice you do good work (assuming you can make it visible) and they’ll be a great resource when seeking next positions.
This is a common problem. It doesn't work to do great work and expect others to notice. You've got to promote yourself and your work. Nobody is going to do it for you.
Without much experience in the industry, I would say that both perspectives are important:
The person most invested in your success is you, so leverage that and promote yourself.
But you absolutely deserve management and teammates who celebrate your accomplishments and help you get rewarded for them.
Discrimination and prejudice also affect this—it’s probably hard to advocate for yourself if your management just doesn’t believe you’re capable for some reason—but I’ve generally found solace in the synthesis of both attitudes.
Fight for yourself, but find people who fight with you. Maybe put it like this: if you yourself were a people manager, wouldn’t you want to advocate for your reports?
This is generally true, however in a toxic workplace being effective might set you as a target for doomed projects or envy - even sabotage. You may see people getting promoted by threatening to leave rather than doing good work. You can't assume good intent in every situation sadly.
When I switched to a different team a year ago, I talked with my ex-manager and asked what he considers be strengths and weaknesses. I found the answer quite funny because it was a random sample of mostly minor things. It showed my that my manager has actually no clue what I'm doing all day. He is a nice guy and wants to be a good manager but that is harder than it looks.
His biggest criticism was that 20 months earlier, I skipped him and addressed his bosses boss for some bureaucratic thing. I find that argument reasonable but it showed me that he was not aware of the full context. Either I never explained it to him or he forgot. The context is: At that time I was in a special two week task-force team where his bosses boss was officially involved as Scrum Master. As such he was officially responsible for impediments. The impediment was: We either get this bureaucracy thing out of the way today or I'm unable to participate in the task-force anymore. Given the urgency and him being our Scrum Master, I found skipping levels the right thing to do.
This why the stereotypical sociopath go-getter/politican/evil-business man claim credit for everything, all the time, and blames everyone else for any failure.
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.
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.
I'll be honest, my default perspective is to expect filibustering and non-answers from all but the actualized and self-aware teams, who if reading this thread and many, many others like it, and lived experience are anything reliable: are less common than their frustrating counterparts.
You can use that to make your decision then. Both filibustering or a non answer in this case are as good as a negative answer for what you want to figure out with it.
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.
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.
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.
The disconnect seems to be that it isn't mentioned before the offer. If the employee is expecting normal hours but finds out after the fact that the employer actually demands more on-call than was initially discussed, how could that be interpreted as anything other than a bait-and-switch?
We fix it when we see it's broken, which isn't going to happen at 1am local time. If we have a distributed team the odds are better it gets fixed sooner. The world keeps spinning and there's always another bug to fix, it's not worth losing literal sleep over.
> There needs to be someone knowledgeable to call in case of issues
"Thank you for calling. Our normal business hours are ..." works for the rest of the business world, there's no reason it can't work for you. You can always sell 24h tech support for more money, or make products that don't break in the middle of the night by not relying on systems and designs that are likely to fail spectacularly in the middle of the night.
That doesn't work if gmail goes down. Or netflix. Or an ISP. Or any product that is primarily used by people outside business hours, e.g. xbox live. "Sorry several million people couldn't play games this weekend, the outage was outside normal business hours."
But I bet the people working on those don’t say their employer unexpectedly “roped me into a production support on-call”.
If a role isn’t advertised as having responsibility outside regular office hours, bait and switching people into regularly working outside 9-5 type hours should not be allowed. And “not allowed” with serious enough financial teeth that companies right up to FAANG size would care, or at least that employees leaving/fired from bait and switching employment hours would end up feeling satisfied with their payouts.
If you need uptime guarantees, hire people letting them know up front so they can choose to accept or reject that work. You don’t (or at least shouldn’t) get to drop that responsibility on people who never signed up for it in the first place.
Other fields don’t release new version of their product every few days. Oncall for things that are always changing is very hard to be done by people who aren’t ones making those changes. You need formal release process and expecting training for each change. That’s not how 99.99% of internet businesses work.
I'll note that only the largest of those companies had this deployment style. The rest were either ~quarterly (with client pressure to slow that down) or weekly/monthly (agile-ish).
I think the only one with a formal release process was the quarterly release outfit, and even that was due to single-client risk.
This was the first thing that really shocked me at my first job (startup in SF back over a decade ago). The attitude that what we're doing really matters, and if something was found broken on the weekend we'd get a call and have to come into the office. Fucking absurd hubris all throughout SV.
Very little of what most people do "matters" from a certain point of view. But everyone has to eat and there are plenty of products that make money that might not "matter" but offer jobs. We can't all work for Tesla or SpaceX.
if the only thing that mattered is some system being down not making some suit money, and mgmt has no respect for the work, it doesn’t matter. i work to feed myself not because it matters.
Agreed: well-run startups can still compete by making smart, focused decisions.
I've worked at 3 startups (5th employee, 16th employee, 2nd employee).
The first one had 80 hour weeks and burned me out after a year. The company had enough capital to stay in business, but never went anywhere, and my shares were washed out in subsequent funding rounds.
The second had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for six years. A fair-to-middling exit to Broadcom.
The third one had 40 hour weeks and I worked there for 3 years. A great exit to Google.
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!
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
At some point around March we learnt post-factum that the project, mostly staffed by contract workers (aka "B2B"), nearly lost pretty much all of non-managerial staff, because parent company of the group (a german corp) made decision to cancel all B2B contracts.
Our project barely survived because of some fast talking, and by becoming "important enough" the fact that canceling the contracts would leave them with no "doers" on it was the main reason we didn't get "sorry, you're fired" email.
> I never understood the supposed attraction of "just like a startup, but in a big company!"
Imho it's frequently used to falsely motivate junior/inexperienced into working crazy hours that they might get some financial or other rewards like a startup.
My frank response would be something along the lines of "I'm going to ask you a question, and how you respond will likely determine if I work here, 'Are you self selecting for incompetents or doormats?'" Their response to this question would probably tell you most of what you want to know about working at that company.
To be honest, I appreciated the honesty. Lots of companies would not ask such a question because they would be afraid of scaring people off. Blizzard can afford to be very picky about their candidates, and they were surprisingly blunt about the work environment. If I was single, I probably would not have cared - Blizzard was always one of my dream companies to work at.
Yeah, you can do this when you have several equally good offers in your pocket. Meaning you're good enough to be picky. What would be your response if you don't feel you're better than all others who applied for this position?
There’s nothing wrong with choosing a job that you know are going to expect all-nighters, probably un compensated all-nighters - but make sure you choose it knowingly instead of pretending it’s an office hours job. It’d be a rare job in video game production that didn’t involve crunch time, and if you want to work in those roles you can, so long as you accept/embrace that. If you’re the sort of person for whom 2-3 months a year of crunch time is going to destroy your relationships/family/mental health, you should probably choose a different industry. There are lots of 9-5 ish coding jobs that involve zero or minimal outside-office-hours work. Don’t fool yourself I to pretending your “dream job” is one of those if there are obvious (or even subtle) red flags that it’s not.
Actually, I just realized I can't relate to this concern. I've never had a situation when someone asked me to work extra. In every job I've ever had I was expected to get things done, and no one ever cared when I do it as long as I do it by a deadline, or by a sprint review, or by a demo day, etc. More often than not it was me who were setting those deadlines for myself, just because I'm ambitious, and I like to impress others, and I like being promoted. Besides, I could never work 9-5. I usually accomplish little in terms of actual work during those hours. Occasionally I get into the zone late at night, without any distractions. That's when I feel most productive, and that's when I do most of the work. Another thing is, I either work on something I love, or I work for a very decent salary. In both cases, I feel fine working extra hours.
Working overtime at a startup here and there can have an emotional reward, as a small team works together with enthusiasm to bring something to market. Yes, this can be abused by bad management and planning, and often is, but .. it's an entirely different beast from demanding overtime out of employees at a large profitable company where poor planning and under-resourcing are not really excusable.
> The primary lesson I learnt is that it doesn't matter if you work hard.
I knew of one company, a pair programming shop doing the sort of financial software where bugs could get very expensive. To maximize quality, they had firm rules about all code requiring a pair, and that barring emergencies, everybody had to go home on time. It worked; they had very low bug rates.
They told me about a new employee they had, somebody who'd come from a company where performative overwork was valued. He'd stay until the wee hours, coding up a storm, expecting people to be impressed. In the morning, they'd thank him for his enthusiasm, revert the commit, and do the work again with proper pairing, testing, etc. I never heard what happened to the guy, but I imagine he pretty quickly unlearned his bad habits. That or he quit and went somewhere he could feed his heroism addiction.
In contrast, I remember a long-ago 6-month contract a major online auction company starting with e and ending with Bay. I was on some internal mailing list where I'd get promotion announcements. Every fucking one of them included a dramatic story about how the person had egregiously overworked themselves. The code was of course a giant fucking mess. It was simultaneously the result of tired idiots who never cleaned up and also the cause of so many bugs and schedule issues that people had to dramatically overwork themselves to hit arbitrary managerial deadlines.
> - 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?"
> 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.
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?)
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.
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.
At least in large companies it can be pretty hard to actually find the good teams among all of the noise. I've tried to keep my eyes open for them but haven't had any luck yet.
> 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.
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
I think it really depends on the person. It's a very common problem for people to procrastinate or drag their feet on the parts of their job that they don't particularly like. (Just like most students drag their feet doing homework they don't like.) But no job (or school program) is ever 100% fun stuff, and being able to delay gratification and get the unpleasant parts done is a super important life skill that not everyone has. For a lot of people, maybe most HN readers, this is basic stuff that they nailed in high school and never had a problem with after that. But I'm not sure that's the majority experience.
> 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.
Exactly this. Unless your manager has a history of giving raises and/or promotions to YOU for doing your JOB then do not assume, ever, that they will give you anything for overworking to chase a carrot on a stick.
That said if they have a history of recognizing and appreciating your work, and compensating you for extra effort, then by all means feel free to put some sweat into the work. That's a good relationship.
My rule of thumb whenever starting a new job is - Work hard for the first year, but almost never overtime. Do my job, and do it well, but don't kill myself. If manager recognizes the good work, and gives me a raise, I'll talk to them about incentive based objectives, and that I'm willing to work over time if there's a reward structure. Or, that I'm happy to continue at my 9-5 pace if that's working for them. Point is - always wait for them to make the first move. If they don't, either accept the 9-5 work for the pay, or move on to another employer that does value incentive based (bonus) salaries.
> Do your job, but don't kill yourself over it. Work-life balance is king.
This is the most important lesson I learned working at the fruit company. That and never have a long commute.
I now work at a place that's ten minutes door-to-door in the morning and fifteen in the afternoon. I took a pay cut to achieve that (I live in East Bay), but maybe the new wfh culture post-COVID will open up more possibilities.
Anyway, point being that I've decided that my job is second to my happiness.
> - 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.
> 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.
>- 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.
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.
I've been on both sides of the BigCo fence, and in my experience, the small companies I've worked at have been much more dysfunctional than the alternatives. A BigCo is usually a loose conglomerate of smaller fiefdoms; -much- the sanity level in your team depends on your immediate boss and coworkers. If you luck out and find the right bunch, you're set. A small company is usually a larger fiefdom than a BigCo team, and self-selects for certain bodily orifices, doormats and complexity junkies.
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.
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.
Wow reading all these stories about Apple really is eye-opening, as I've only usually heard these types of things about Amazon before.
I say that because I work for Amazon, and my work environment is pretty bad by my standards (my team cuts a lot of corners, we are given unrealistic deadlines by upper management, our on-call is paged at least 10 times a week, we have a huge backlog of tickets and bugs that we can never prioritize, and it is overall a very stressful environment.) I guess it can always be worse...
> everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss
I worked for Apple before Jobs died. He'd frequently have several teams working on the exact same thing, in secret, and then pick the team that met his goals the best. Sometimes the "losers" would be merged into the "winning" team, but never treated well by the winners.
I know more than one famous scientist who does this. Multiple postdocs working on the same project. Whomever gets there first gets a Cell-Science-Nature paper. The other(s) get nothing.
Probably a very common abusive management style at high levels in many industries.
The personal/political aspect aside, I can think of multiple projects that could have benefited from an approach like this.
I'm often astonished by the inefficiency of project delivery, particularly in large companies.
Teams spending months building sub-systems from scratch, where there is an off the shelf(sometimes open source) tool that will do the same job and better.
Man years of work going into chasing trends like "serverless" or "microservices" for no real reason, when a monolith running on a server, could be delivered in a fraction of the time and probably do a better job than what ended up being built.
I'm convinced that paying two teams to work on the same project would often cost less than paying for the huge teams and cost overruns I've seen.
I disagree, such an approach completely desensitizes the human aspect of work and treats the people working as commodities that are expendable.
Engineering is hard, teams might need to go through multiple iterations/generations to get the desired results. A better investment would be to develop the right engineering culture rather than Team A vs Team B duking it out.
It only is that way because we make that way. There's no law in the Universe dictating that people are spendable, it's part of a system, a myth we created and live on.
Don't get too cocky against someone that has a more humane view of what's valuable to be human. Get a grip that reality has very many shades of grey.
Interesting theory. If you pay 2 teams A and B to work on the same project, and B finishes in half the time it would have taken A, you really didn't spend anything extra did you?
It isn't a zero knowledge style. It is an experimental, or knowledge-acquiring style. To employ that approach most effectively it makes sense to have competing teams with purposefully different styles.
It's a manager who has decided understanding the nature of the work is beneath him, when he can deploy someone else's money to wind up some insects that will run around doing the work for him and watch them struggle against each other. Literally zero knowledge, before, during and after.
When whatever result appears they will not analyze the meaning of what happened beyond punishing some insects and rewarding others.
At the same time, can't this make it harder for members of the different teams to become friends with each other -- in a way, they are competitors, not coworkers. And maybe they'd be worried about getting fired if they "lost"? That could cause some of them to start looking for other jobs? Or some could feel bad, get demotivated. And other weird side effects.
What could be ways to avoid such things
How did this work out at Apple? When you were there
Gosh - I hope that isn’t a prerequisite to greatness?
How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’
Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?
I suspect that abusive behavior is an optimal strategy if you're working for abusive people. Organizations tend to be set up such that people like the people in power succeed.
Jobs was a notorious jerk [1] [2] [3], so it's not surprising that similar behavior is what gets promoted.
Steve Jobs died from being a jerk, to himself, because he refused to take his doctor's advice about his diet and pancreatic cancer. A reality distortion field only works so long.
The exact diet matters a metric shitton, because Jobs' hubris cost him his life, if instead he had realized he did not, in fact, know everything, he might still be alive.
Pancreatic cancer eats sugar for-fucking-breakfast. [1] He was eating nothing but fruit, and even though fructose release is regulated in its binding with fiber, its still sugar.
If Jobs had eaten nothing but bacon, steak, and eggs, we might still have him around. I forgot what folder my bookmarks are in, but there's scant - but compelling - evidence to support that a sugarless diet high in protein and fat quite literally starves pancreatic cancer.
For most larger companies an engineer salary, or any human labour for that matter, is very cheap. FAANG could pay 10x more if they had to, but they don't have to because no one else pays more.
If money isn't part of the equation, this may actually be the best approach.
During the 2007 financial crisis I worked at a bank that had to develop risk software really fast to comply with regulations and prevent disaster. They had two teams work on the same project and once a winning team emerged, they killed of the other. But the result was used for only a year or two, and replaced by a long term solution which was developed by yet another team in parallel.
As the saying goes, in software development, we can control speed, cost and quality, but only two at the same time.
This is not a bad solution, as long as the teams are on the same side (and know it too). I strongly believe that toxic culture is neither needed nor useful, ever.
By having leaders who want this and who know how to achieve it. It is simply a matter of principles and trust (both ways). Granted, I have only seen this in companies up to 100 employees... :shrug:
I think this is due to the exponential payoff in a success scenario. Especially in high tech where certain initiatives can have a “winner take all” effect. I find it completely unsurprising that internally the tech giants function like a cluster of startups competing against each other.
Capitalism is based on the idea of transplanting the survival of the fittest paradigm into the economy and that’s exactly how I’d expect it to look in practice. Especially as progress accelerates and massive wins become both scarcer and more impactful at the same time.
Internal competition on the same project shows a lack of confidence from management... it literally shows they don't know what to do, and are just throwing spaghetti at the wall, or aren't confident in their skills to get something deployed with what they choose. It's not solid leadership, it's dissonant.
It also sets people against each other, creates better-than-you mental heirarchies between equal workers where non are necessary, and is essentially friendly fire in the workplace. I've never seen this end well.
Capitalism isn't just economic natural selection either, it favors those with capital, and especially the most of it, and is easily exploitable by them to tip the playing field in their favor against their competition and those below them. Your analogy is bad in both cases; natural selection means one side dies, which is not what's being described here, and is not good for one side anyway, and capitalism is not as good as cooperation anyway. The latter is far more efficient.
Software projects often operate in high-uncertainty scenarios. Best approach may often only be "obvious" in hindsight. It's not irrational to do it in parallel/ in several teams - in fact, I'm surprised it's not happening more often.
I disagree that (internal) competition unequivocally leads to better-than-you mindset. If done properly, in an open and sharing mindset – one might call it scientific, with expectations and criteria defined up front and with the projects objectively compared against the criteria, then it will work. I have also this work. It takes effort to come up with criteria and metrics beforehand but that is what makes it different from throwing spaghetti at the wall .
First and foremost, a safe (team) environment. This has to be created over time and there are few shortcuts.
In addition, for each experiment you need: a defined time window, up front criteria by which to judge the results, optionally form solution ideas together, give all teams the same amount of time and opportunity, after the experiment is finished each team presents their solution in a fact based manner in perspective of the criteria. After this the teams rotate and see what they can improve on their original solution with the remarks and information from the other tracks. After this decide together or with an informed captain which solution to continue. After this there should be no hard feelings, no personal consequences. Each team should be treated equally because they all contributed to the end goal. This is what will give you a fair competition and help create team safety.
This can be done on all kind of levels, between one day for something small and two/four weeks for the bigger challenges. Making it bigger than this will incur a lot of stakes/vested interest.
>Internal competition on the same project shows a lack of confidence from management...
I'd disagree, internal competition (like it or not, and yes it doesn't sound fun and often doesn't feel great or fair) can be a very effective motivating strategy. And management is used to using this with sales teams, everyone in sales is always competing with each other. It's never fair, they'll have unequal markets, for example, but the competition is incredibly motivating. When I was in sales long ago, the drive to be the best and regarded as such was even more motivating than just getting more commissions. It's dog eat dog but for better or worse it works.
I often hear that about capitalism, but then the caricatural opposite is the survival of the unfit. It is quite visible when swathes of our economy that are not put on any kind of competitiveness (the DMV) end up dropping standards beyond bottom.
We need a balance in between, and we are living in this balance: We are not on either extreme side of this spectrum, the reality is more mild than all-or-nothing, and the non-fittest can still work for a less performing company and be happy with their life. It is just the temptation of big corporations with big incentives that makes some engineers too eager to work for a bad company.
Because often time to market is more important that R&D costs or tech debt for the success of a company. If you win the market, the profits will compensate for the additional R&D costs, and you can release increments to address the tech debt. Customers actually appreciate this, as they are constantly looking for better, newer versions of the product.
The unfortunate thing is that if not for the social/political side, this would be a good approach. I would be happy to be on one of many teams doing parallel implementations if at the end one codebase won but no people lost.
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.
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.
> Typically to visa workers who are easily exploitable due to their precarious status in the country.
This is the key point about this experience to me. The fact was that without the visa situation, the author would have had many more choices. Unfortunately, it seems like the lack of viable alternatives was taken advantage of to the hilt (and presumably the author wasn't the first or last employee so affected).
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.
I've never read anything even half as terrible as this story on Yes At Google. I'm not saying shitty things don't happen, but I'd like to believe that such shittiness would not fly at the G.
I had friends experience what I think was way worse at Google. Don't really feel comfortable sharing, but lets say it more or less always involved power games and/or sexual harassment. Worst one was probably a combination. Google was/is great, but sadly not for everyone.
I mean Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal worked at Google when they did their career ending stuff.
Rubin's career-ending stuff was being accused by a woman he had been in a relationship with and was in a custody battle with of something that could never be proven and which he strongly denied. It was career ending only due to the western culture that women are always believed, even sans evidence and when there are obvious reasons to not believe it (e.g. years having passed with the supposed victim having made no complaints, right up until there was some sort of power struggle).
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.
Because of a general understanding of how the world works, how businesses are, how western businesses are, people and so on.
Same way if a told you some politician was sexually assaulting his pages, you woulnd't assume this is representative of congressmen and pages in general...
I don't have recorded minutes of their interactions or other such hard proof.
> 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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I disagree. There are many large, profitable companies (>50k people) who don't need public or media attention to fire the whole managerial line-org once abuse is discovered and then hold several workshops for all senior employees and managers detailing out what exactly is acceptable in the workplace and what is not.
In-fact you don't get your bonus if you don't attend these workshops and score in these tests. HR regularly queries all low-level employees about their work/life balance and other other work-place issues and regularly sends feedback to senior management. Actually senior management even regularly has meetings with entry-level employees with team leads and management sent away from the room to obtain proper assessment.
But then this is a German company and not a US one. I will never work for a US MNC in my life after the bad experience I had early in my career.
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.
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.
If you're on a H1 (or some of its cousins here) and you lose your job, you have no option to even try to find another. Your legal status in the US is coupled to that job, not just any job.
Are you sure that is correct?
According to results from googling you get 60 days to find a new job if you got laid off from H1B job.
https://www.stilt.com/blog/2020/05/steps-after-an-h1b-layoff....
Ps: to someone who downvoted, what don't you agree with?
You are right that I overstated this. You do have a window to try to find a new job. However, the new employer will need to be willing to sponsor a new H1B visa, and will need to get their part done within a fairly narrow timeframe.
I agree that this is not an impossible scenario. But I also have a strong feeling that it's not a particularly likely one either.
Absolutely, my point was that this system is essentially everywhere, in one way or another, there is no need to say "US", since it's not USA specific system.
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.
I've seen it happen, multiple times, at Microsoft. Additionally know 2nd hand of dozens of other instances of abuse, career sabotage, and scorched earth management.
Have been fortunate that the instances I was involved in directly, I was prepared, had extensive documentation, and my position (and my colleagues) were more valuable than the perpetrators, so they were swiftly shown the door.
At the end of the day it's the same at every large company. HR protects the business, not the employee. They don't protect the victim, they protect the more valuable resource.
I agree, in 15 years at MSFT I've had mostly good experiences. The worst I've seen could only be described as "mildly annoying".
If any manager behaved like the article described, I don't see how the team would get anything done, plus their MSFT poll score would quickly get them into trouble.
I would suspect that finding out how many employees throughout the hierarchy have been there for a long time may be a good way to find a good company. The company I work for got acquired a couple years ago by a much older and larger company, and it usually feels like anyone you talk to has been there for 15, 20, even 30 years. I've yet to have a single issue with someone in that part of the parent organization, even though helping my group out isn't something they have been told to do.
My employer is like this - I'm the second newest person on my team and I've been here for 9 years. It's a great place to work and quite difficult to be hired here.
To quote the old Tom and Jerry cartoon, "Don't you believe it." I could tell you comparable hair-raising stories I witnessed there over a couple of decades.
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?
9 years at Google and I've never heard of anything this bad here. I'm sure there are cases, and while I've been in unpleasant teams myself with crappy arrogant team leads who got away with dubious personal behaviour because of their engineering genius, the kind of obvious outright hostility and abuse would described by people here... well, I am pretty sure it would lead to some serious sanction.
I could be wrong and just lucky tho.
FWIW my wife worked at Apple in a non-engineering role for almost a decade about ten years ago, and I can completely see how this kind of dysfunction could happen in that company. Pressure cooker environment.
Big difference is that other FAANGs have much less secretive inside culture. That of course doesn’t prevent abuse, and horrible experiences will happen everywhere. But it’s much easier to hide and develop pockets of abuse if everything you work on is top secret.
I've never been able to understand why Apple thinks they need to be so secretive. Most other companies do just fine without pretending that they're working on life-changing secrets that are worthless if they are leaked.
1. Being able to reveal something new and surprising leads to a flurry of good press. Failing that, constant rumors about what they are working on is like free advertising.
2. Keeping something a secret until it is shipping gives competitors less time to react/plan.
3. Preventing your employees from publicly discussing what they are doing may make it harder to know whom to poach, and harder for folks who want to leave to sell themselves.
4. It is useful as a cultural tool: it brings employees together in sharing a secret, creating an in-group/out-group dynamic; it gives product launches a kind of mystery, makes them something special for employees to watch together and celebrate together.
5. It helps Apple keep control of the framing of a product and the narrative around its launch.
So they're making it hard to leave, creating a distinctive in-group and air of mystery, and clamping down on information to maintain strict control of the narrative.
I can't help but notice that some of these are the same reasons why cults are often so secretive.
Sure. I think there are some pretty deep parallels.
The company had been really successful. That makes it easy to trust the leadership and believe they know best.
If you’re changing the world and doing the best work of your life, maybe that’s worth making sacrifices for (overtime or whatever).
On the bright side, I’m not sure there’s any equivalent of the malevolent, sexually abusive stuff we see in cults. Hard to complain about being a well-paid engineer with good benefits, etc.
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.
About 10 years ago I was interviewing at Apple (Cupertino office) for a software architect level position for iTunes. So I'm sitting alone in cold conference room, waiting for the last interview with hiring manager. Finally middle-aged lady comes in with very serious impression on her face and first thing she says is: "So, tell me why are you dreaming about working at Apple?". That moment I realized it's not going to be good cultural fit :) When I rejected the offer their recruiter was very insistent on getting the answer whether it was the money or not. They never ever contacted me again.
Another funny thing I remember from that experience is that they gave new hires t-shirt which says "Journey is the reward". So it's not "Money is the reward" but some mythical "journey". Apple is so full of shit.
I was thinking the exact same thing. I did all of three months in that org, attempted to switch to iCloud, got blocked, then quit and went back to my old company. Fuck that shit straight to hell.
What's their social? would be a good follow-up too.
I'm not sure you understand that Apple could bury this person's career and numerous companies only need one phone call to let this person go. Please understand that you're creating an attack vector that is too great for this person to reveal.
The picture the author included has enough information for an outsider to piece together their organization. The fact that it includes a meeting time and room would be enough for Apple to figure out who it was, just by looking at who booked it. Unfortunately, they probably are already in a position where Apple knows exactly who they are, and perhaps their colleagues do too.
> The picture the author included has enough information...
I'll refrain from the sarcasm. Although...it's very appealing.
Is exApple-anon (OG comment that I responded to protect the obvious attack vector) the same as limono (HN submission)?
Do you have evidence of this? I hope you certainly don't believe that they are the same person in a 100,000 person organization. This would be terribly assumptive.
I don't believe limono's questions were malicious but I wanted to make it clear why the questions were inappropriate.
I’m sorry, I’m not following your comment. I had interpreted the one I had originally responded to as “please don’t dox this person” to which I was responding “the pictures in the article are enough to dox the person already”. I am not quite sure how ‘limono or ‘exApple-anon come into this; FWIW I would doubt that they are or that ‘limono is even the person that wrote the article on Medium.
I know from my own personal experience that Apple doesn't care. This person could go right back to a different department and get a new contract if the opportunity exists.
Yeah, really. My last contract was with Apple Online Store which was part of IS&T. IT WAS HORRIBLE. I wasn't working at the time (because of my previous mistreatment by Apple) and my "friend" was a manager in the org and he had a contract for me. It supposedly involved development with microservices, Docker, Ansible, etc. Turns out, he was a pathological liar and that was just his pet project that went nowhere from day 1. He would go out and vape weed in the parking lot every day. I ended up working 9 months just documenting the infrastructure of the AOS on their internal wiki as an "IT consultant". The real reason the other managers said that I was hired as a consultant (not developer) was to fix their broken organization. 80% of the workforce was VISA and they acted like they feared for their lives. I was asked to gather information from managers throughout the department and they would ignore my emails and keep postponing meetings until months later. They knew my contract would just expire so they did not care. They shoved everyone into bullpen cubicles and teams were using conference rooms as offices for their entire teams. Booking a conference room for a meeting or just to make a private phone call was impossible. I had no office - I had to sit on a bench in the hallway, or sit in a woman's office who was actually in another woman's office (who was out on maternity leave). The second that office door shut, my manager and his hiring manager would mock their senior tech lead (who was just doing his job properly), and start gossiping about other mid-level managers non-stop. The level of hostility in the org was amazing.
That was almost as bad as my previous 15-year stint with Apple where I started with my dream job and ended up 15 years later in the same organization being told "You should be thinking about your career" by a new director (who was actually a professionally trained diplomat) because they were going to stop shipping the software I worked on for 15 years. They don't just do layoffs because of the liability. I watched other competent senior engineers and managers be treated the same. They removed all of my areas of responsibility and then claimed that I wasn't doing anything, but still forced everyone to show up every day (instead of working remotely, as we had been doing). For the first time, we had daily standup meetings where the manager would just call in to make sure we were present. In that case, they had told us that we were going to be "guinea pigs" for the new Apple spaceship building. Not once did anyone ask me about my opinions regarding the new work environment. They had me in a shared "office" with other perturbed individuals who only wanted to complain about the situation. I was surrounded by glass walls, put at a "desk" with a glossy monitor with windows (no blinds!) behind me so I couldn't even work once the sun started reflecting off of my monitor. One engineer (who now had to commute every day from Carmel to Cupertino) grabbed a patio table's umbrella and propped it up against the window because of the lack of curtains/blinds. I had to watch people drink beer on the patio in the bezel of my monitor because of the reflection. Directly to my left was a black globe security camera always in my peripheral vision, annoying me. I started calling sick because of this crap, and my sick days were maxed out and weren't accruing anyway, so why not. Eventually I just had to leave, like everyone else. All of this after working HARD for 15 years and even winning an Emmy award with my work. And when I came back to Apple for that contract for the online store, that was even worse and the job was all based on lies from the manager.
Let's just say that I do not display my 10-year glass trophy from Apple or the Emmy award, they mean nothing to me and are in a cabinet somewhere. I just sit and laugh at stories about engineers running into the glass walls/doors in the new building, so much so that they started putting sticky notes on the walls/doors so they wouldn't run into them. So that's what became of me being a "guinea pig" for the spaceship building. Then I switched back to PC/Windows/Linux as my primary platform, just like it had been 15 years earlier. Never again, Apple.
I suspect there is more to this individual’s story, but IS&T is truly horrible. It’s full of fiefdoms built on tier 1 consultants (H1-Bs who are treated horribly).
Apple Retail and IS&T clash horribly, projects run over by years and tens of millions of dollars. Seating is beyond inadequate. There is very little very that is redeeming about IS&T, especially when compared to the other organizations within Apple (Apps, iOS, macOS, coreOS, hell, even iCloud).
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
Jobs himself was abusive. But in his second stint at Apple, he generally worked through layers of management who bore the brunt of his abusiveness, and oddly enough, for the most part, his managers did not emulate his abusive ways. The two members of senior management that I had a chance to interact with for some time (Bertrand Serlet and Jony Ive) did not at all strike me as abusive.
One of the reasons, I suspect, is that for all his flaws, Jobs was not particularly fond of flattery and imitation, and he did not want to surround himself with mini-mes. I can think of only one member of senior management who could have been described as having somewhat Jobs-like tendencies, and even he was not that close a resemblance.
Next time you see Jony Ive, tell him that it was his fault that I had to work in a hellhole when Apple told me that our team were "guinea pigs" for the new spaceship building. That was all his work. They took my office away and replaced it with a panopticon prison-style environment where everything was glass, with no curtains for the external windows, a black globe surveillence camera right above/next to me. Every 2 minutes someone would walk by, distracting me. I couldn't see my screens because of the windows behind me with no curtains, so I was being blinded by the sun. They didn't even provide a bookshelf for my programming-related books. AND they never once asked me about my experience in that "office." I found three (sorry, but OBESE/UGLY) individuals constantly walking around and pointing at things - I followed them around and those were Ive's employees examining the horrible workplace they were creating. That was all Ive's fault. Then they forced us to be in the "office" every day instead of working remotely like I had for years. In his words, "And I know how we work and you don't!" RIGHT. Well, I left that job after 15 years while in that crap environnment. That's when I lost all respect for Jony Ive.
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.
Jobs was highly empathetic, it’s why he was able to understand the customer so well and why he was famous for saying “the customer doesn’t know what they want”.
Understanding someone’s emotional state does not mean you need to coddle them.
I have found that people who harbour opinions like these usually just aren’t very good at realising how bad they are at what they are doing in the first place. So they need the niceness to keep the false assumption that they are not that bad.
Sometimes the emotional state of the recipient is just a function of how grown up they are.
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.
> 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.)
That sounds like behavior I've seen in banks - more the "competing with other teams" than straight job threats.
It's baffling. If I'm a company, the idea of having more than one team doing the same thing in order to try to beat the other down strikes me as not just counter-productive, but expensive and evidence of a broken hierarchy and culture.
> It's baffling. If I'm a company, the idea of having more than one team doing the same thing in order to try to beat the other down strikes me as not just counter-productive, but expensive and evidence of a broken hierarchy and culture.
Depends... If you have the resources, multiple team can achieve the same result in many ways, one possibly being vastly superior than others. If you look at large companies like IBM or Oracle, this internal innovation is often stifled by "we have whale clients X Y and Z, ask them what they want and implement that".
That said though, it can lead to duplication of efforts and pretty much the same result done twice (once for the finished product, and once for the almost finished product by team B). If you're apple with billions of dollars that you don't know what to do with, this is a viable and useful strategy (also employed by Amazon AFAIK).
Maybe I’m just too jaded, but this is how I assume all big tech companies operate. The people that win get the results, even if it means being a massive piece of shit and treating your employees like garbage.
In fact, I would wager that not a single VP or higher at any major tech co isn’t a self-serving, backstabbing asshole. You simply don’t get into those types of positions on merit alone. You need to play the game.
That type of environment, where it’s almost impossible to do good work because you constantly need to be watching your own back is so unappealing to me that I can’t fathom why anyone with self worth would work at a FAANG. Perhaps it’s because they don’t know yet, but Blind exists, and it’s more horror stories than not.
Not having to deal with office politics and deranged managers is worth a hell of a pay cut imo.
The experience can vary wildly at those companies, sometimes while still holding the same role. I’ve seen people shifted from amazing transformative mentoring managers to gaslighting managers that counted lines of code as a key metric in performance reviews right before directly claiming they didn’t in team meetings.
I have a friend who went through this two times. (Second time was "shame on me").
One problem was that he worked with a lot of H1-B coworkers. So management would push, and they feared for their ability to stay in the country, and when he got there, people would just just suck it up. His first day, calls at 1am 2am 3am. He left.
So a year later they cajoled and talked him into another job. He was given assurances and when he got there, basically the same culture slapped him in the face again. sigh.
> (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.
Talk to a workers compensation attorney. If this job was less than five years ago, don’t delay. It cost nothing! The attorney gets 15% when they settle the case.
No evidence needed. Let the lawyer deal with that stuff. In California, the evidence is what a QME says it is. A medical report is the evidence. The QME will look at all medical records and make a determination.
It's hard to know what's going on in every corner of a company as large as Apple, but open harassment certainly would not fly in our particular organization. Our team alone has engineers belonging to 4 different religions I know of (and obviously quite a few not identifying with any particular religion), and I've seen at least Christians, Hindus, and Muslims promoted to management.
>>but open harassment certainly would not fly in our particular organization.
Can't comment much on Apple. But as a Muslim I've seen this in quite a few places. Both in India and the US.
It's not even that much a company thing as much as it is a personal thing. Some people are just bigoted and don't like you. In fact the very sight of your existence disturbs them very deeply. And yeah, if you are better than them, it just makes the problem more worse. It's like they have to now deal with the realization deep down that they inferior to the person they hate.
Mostly Muslims just move on, because we have bills to pay, and families to support. Over long periods of time, it's not really possible to fight these political battles every time you have bigots around you.
I've also known cases when things are proven beyond doubt and the HR is likely to take action on the bigot, they start citing excuses like 'mental health' and 'personal preferences'.
You can't win this, there are going to be these kind of people anywhere you go. You just leave them to their state, and move on.
I can't vouch for a complete absence of hidden prejudice, and I'm sure sometimes things happen that people perceive as discriminatory (e.g. on team outings, not everybody automatically remembers the vegetarians when picking restaurants, and one person's jocular lunch banter might be stepping on the trunk / kicking the cross of another person's deity of choice, etc).
There is a big difference between this and not getting promoted by a manager who just promoted an easily identifiable inferior performer belonging to their own religion/caste. Or they praising that kind of a guy in every team meeting, or sending out appreciation emails for trivial stuff. It becomes more than obvious they building a case to promote their people.
I've even gotten cold stares for using the office budgets for books, Why do people like you have to read books and get better than us?
Many times it's subtle, but some people are just living through bigotry day in and out. They just can't stand you. And it becomes visible easily.
I've read lots of workplace complaints and talked with lots of different people about their workspace experiences and this persons description rings hollow in many places. You are crazy if you think a publicly traded company the size of Apple would tolerate religious discrimination or anything like what is described in this post.
Double so for Apple who has gone woke. I'd expect a white Christian to get hazed LONG before anyone would even THINK of harassing a Muslim at Apple.
:( sorry that this happened to you! So much of a good job experience is on the project and the manager it seems. I hope to join Apple one day but youth ear stories helped me temper my resolve because I know a) don’t meet your heroes, and b) this is similar to high stress places like Amazon or Netflix that I’ve heard about. :/ But f, all of that, I’m glad you got out and are happy. I had a similar experience although at a very much just a microcosm of a place where when I left I had some legit trauma (PTSD) but I’m all good now.
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.
Shows how terrific output can be achieved with abuse and slavery of youth. You only need to look at the Pyramids of Egypt to know that it really pays off for the folks at the top. These corporate overlords really need to be brought down several pegs. Please break up Apple.
Teams competing with another team seems to hurt the whole “it just works”, no? Wouldn’t it be better if teams collaborated? Competition will do wonders for delivery of projects sure but it has all sorts of negative externalities.
I hope Tim Cook sees this and takes swift action to make things right with you, hold others accountable, and ensure processes are changed to prevent this from ever recurring.
To defend Apple’s image as a progressive, innovative, diverse, compassionate company that values its employees and is a great place to work. Even if he does not care at all about this person, he at least has huge reasons to not want articles like this circulating among major programmer forums.
With a bit of fantasy, one could infer narcissism or cocaine abuse from some parts of the story: the childish ever-moving meeting with subsequent blaming of the victim, all the while ignoring that there were other managers (i.e. non-victims) being annoyed by the same ever-moving meeting.
Is Apple known for having high salaries? I was under the impression (possibly wrongly, I've never worked for Apple) that they underpay their engineers, relying on the engineers' desire to work for them because of their brand.
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.
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.
By reflection emails you mean where you summarize what was said and try to get the other person to confirm them?
I think those only work if you disregard any statements that don't get confirmed, and/or you twist the statements into action items that you don't prioritize until they confirm them.
The way that weasels (BTW: The Way of the Weasel, by Scott Adams, is downright prophetic about this kind of stuff) deal with it, is to not respond at all. Then, when you bring it up, they say “I never agreed to/said that!” If you then share the email, they say “I never got that. I would have corrected it, if I had.”
Their manager always has their back on these exchanges.
That's why my reflection email always includes at least one question about some detail of the statement I want to confirm.
"Per our conversation of this morning when you asked me to delete all our backups, do you want me to erase the disks or should I also roll over them with the company steamroller?"
> 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).
Voices can be easily faked, that's the reason. Same will happen to video as deepfake technologies keep improving.
Regardless of legality if you get found out you'll probably get walked out of the building by security (even if you're just using it as eg a substitute for taking notes among people with mutual trust.) I've heard stories about people who tried this and it's unlikely to end well.
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.
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?
I've seen this attitude quite often in juniors: The manager is always supposed to be available. Not immediately answering your email so you need to follow up with a phone call? Thanks, you just interrupted my talk with my boss and his boss about our department budget, and your colleague next door could also have solved your urgent problem.
More often the reverse complaint is uttered, and because of the power differential I think that direction is far prevalent.
But ideally, both sides should learn to see each other as human beings with limited lifetime, limited availability and patience and a life outside of work. As a manager, this is a little easier to accomplish: just scold your subordinates for answering emails off hours and remind them to take their vacations seriously. They'll learn quickly to do the same for you. Everybody wins.
On the great hierarchy of potential conflicts that can be caused by taking your vacation on day X instead of Y, missing a new direct report's start date by a couple days is a very minor concern. Particularly at a larger company where a new hire will have to go through a bunch of onboarding busywork and has a buddy.
I can understand why this would be bad optics to someone who's insecure and junior, but it really shouldn't be a big deal.
It’s not about being insecure and junior, it’s about being a good manager and putting the right tools in place to help your employees succeed. No one — junior, senior, insecure, or secure — wants their time wasted doing nothing. It’s one thing to go on vacation, but it’s another to not put the proper support system in place for the new employee as to not keep them in the dark. That’s just one of the things that differentiate bad/average managers from the best.
Unfortunately this industry is just too polluted with managers like the one referenced in the blog post who end up contributing to bozo explosion
Reality: hiring takes an unknown amount of time. Candidates often prioritize prompt hiring, to do things like start health insurance, paychecks, etc. On growing teams with open reqs, this is equivalent to never being allowed to take a vacation.
> Holidays are planned ahead. Don't hire at the same time. Easy.
This is not realistic and quite frankly bad suggestion.
"Yeah, we would hire you next week, but since manager is on vacation we can hire you only in three weeks." Said no-one ever.
And what's the problem in taking those first two weeks to just slowly get to know the code and get to know your workmates? If I had a situation like that I would be thankful that I don't get shoved into work immediately and can take my time.
My brief advice to anyone writing such a post: start with the most serious accusation you have, and avoid the temptation to add ancillary grievances, however justified, until you have the reader fully engaged and outraged.
The way this post structured now, beginning with fairly unspecific complaints about the hiring process, who invited whom to lunch, etc. makes the author come across as a young high-drama individual even though it ramps up to more serious matters.
Remember you only have a couple of paragraphs to set the hook and get the reader on your side in a piece like this. Not even your SO or mom want to read the full wall of text about how you were mistreated, let alone internet strangers.
I agree and glad I am not the only one with this opinion.
The world is cruel. And you have people keep telling you to be positive and not be cynical when you are young. Except when you step into the society, it was a culture shock and the exact opposite happens. And Apple is possibly the worst culture shock on its kind.
That is not saying Apple isn't wrong. But cracks are starting to appear everywhere. Although it may take another 10 years before those cracks becomes large enough to be vulnerable.
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.
Their post doesn't say that, and I too read the chosen wording twice. Their employment overlapped with Steve Job's lifespan, that's it. That's important to them to say, and is completely useless to us. That's all.
My first interpretation of "underlings" tends to have it be a somewhat derogatory term towards someone who is of some sort of lower status, which I took to assume (having much experience with this happening while working corporate and on other online forums) that retail employees were somehow lesser/less worthy of being listened to since they were generally further removed from decisions that the rest of the company made (as in, multiple interactions where I would see a conversation like "When working in Apple retail…"/"Shut up, you don't know anything, you just work retail"). The commenter has clarified their position so in good faith I would be willing to believe them but hopefully that gives you a bit more insight into why the way that was phrased was evocative of this to me.
Hey, this kind of post will get you banned here because we're trying for something different than internet default. Would you mind reading https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using HN in the intended spirit?
Not really. Worked for 5 companies, 2 were ruled by fear culture (including an explicit stack ranking of employees every 2 quarters, with the bottom ones being fired), one by desperation, one by... inertia maybe. The 5th is Google. Still can't figure out what it's ruled by exactly, but absolutely no fear, yet it mostly works. That's why I'm sticking around, I guess.
I've moved teams and orgs quite a bit, so I don't think it's just me being lucky with a manager. If there is fear, it's in quite isolated pockets.
At least when I was there, google seemed like an island with melancholic, but smart and kind pandas who never had to compete for food, for the food was brought to them by a ferry, and never had to do any work, unless they had a spark of curiosity that made them explore an interesting rock or mess with sand on the beach. All pandas were consistently exceeding expectations, even if they slept on a tree most of the day.
+1, if anything, its frustratingly the opposite from my perspective (i.e. its hard to find peers who want to dig into things, the SWE is the center of the universe, personal lack of interest is enough to refuse work)
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.
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.
I feel extremely uncharitable but I don't see any other comments raising this - this reads like a lot like the writings of people who believe they're being 'gangstalked'. Meetings being added/removed to calendars to mess with you, an 'implied' threat being left in the notes section of a hidden slide in a presentation, meeting notes being manipulated to make them look bad, this sort of thing.
Maybe I'm just extremely lucky but I've never worked with anyone who would put in the effort for this sort of thing, even if they really disliked the person. And some of it just makes no sense - an implied murder/suicide threat, in the notes section in a hidden slide in a slideshow?
Also the formatting being a long screed with random bolding doesn't help, although that could well be a non-native speaker not realising how this appears to natives.
Exactly my thoughts. I'm surprised that the majority of commenters here are taking this at face value. Especially, as you mentioned, the "implied hidden suicide/murder threat". If it was as the author described, 99% of people at any company on Earth would be absolutely shocked and appalled by something like that. Unless Apple is some truly some kind of other-worldly hellhole, they would not have gotten the reaction that they did.
I'm obviously not qualified to diagnose anyone, especially from reading a single blog post. But have any of the other commenters stopped and considered whether it rings true that her coworker shouted "Die!" at her on her way to the bathroom? Or does that sound more like something that someone with, say, paranoid schizophrenia would say?
I also feel uncharitable bringing this up, but it appears nobody in the comments has yet considered that this could be GPT-3 generated text. I only noticed this as a possiblity once you pointed out the random bolding. Some of the article items that seem suspect:
- fully random bolding
- long, rambling, not entirely coherent (understandable given the subject matter, of course. however, the author also has a PHD?)
- inconsistent naming, e.g. iBuddy
- broad conclusion that doesn't fully match the content
- a nondescript screenshot which doesn't implicate anybody
- separated into 5 segments ("parts"), although the segments aren't narratively meaningful
- a huge list of accusations (of varying degrees of believably) interwoven as though they were more related textually rather than contextually
I hope it's not GPT-3, and that if this is true the victim gets their due justice, but it's worth consideration.
> Maybe I'm just extremely lucky but I've never worked with anyone who would put in the effort for this sort of thing, even if they really disliked the person.
I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of behaviour is endemic in organisations that use a stack ranking system [0], as Microsoft did in the past.
"If you are an Apple employee, please send this story to your upper management particularly Tim Cook."
What exactly should we say? "Hey Tim, this unnamed ex-employee, working on an unnamed and extremely vaguely characterized project in an unnamed organization, is accusing unnamed co-workers, managers, and HR-representatives of perpetrating truly appalling abuses on her. You should look into this at once!" ?
It's a difficult situation for the original author; I understand their desire to remain anonymous for their protection, and I understand their wish to have their allegations investigated, but I don't see a good way to reconcile these two goals, and especially not a good way to recruit allies for the second goal.
I'm an employee of Apple and am appalled at the behaviors described in this article. I'm also unsure of what I can do to help here for similar reasons. That being said, I hope this person seeks some professional help to sort themselves out after this experience.
Not to get political but this is one reason that employment and healthcare shouldn't be so inextricably linked.
I have seen people on Twitter get angry over less information. What’s wrong with escalating this internally? We can both agree that there should be a real investigation right?
I agree. But I don't think the intermediate step of Apple employees reporting this anonymized story to Tim Cook helps much.
The original author has the option of reporting this pretty directly to Tim Cook (or, presumably, a team of minions acting as his mail filter), naming names, projects, etc. He'd be well advised to take this report seriously.
Alternatively, the author also has a number of further options. They could go to the press, as mentioned in the article. They could also find themselves a lawyer. IANAL, but the allegations, if true, would seem to constitute a constructive dismissal[0], which (apart from human decency) is a reason why Apple should have every interest to investigate the allegations.
Any of these three options would seem to me to be a promising way to get this investigated.
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.
> 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.
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 contain 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 speaking to HR/managers, it usually just gets worse (=stressful) the more you do it.
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.
Unions come with consistent skills trainings, legal counsel, and representatives to intercede when management is treating employees poorly. This seems like a very helpful stable of support to be able to call on in situation like this one.
> Unions come with consistent skills trainings, legal counsel, and representatives to intercede when management is treating employees poorly
I didn't notice any of that when I was represented by SEIU. I had not seen a raise in 4 years, and representatives didn't even call me until after I was laid off. Found a more stable job paying 4x as much though as a result of the layoff.
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.
I think Apple, like several other notable tech companies, has a ton of great developers and engineers, and a lot of really bad managers (and a few good ones.) As in most tech companies, employees have no power vs. management, and HR exists to protect the company from liability. (And good luck keeping your job if you try to, say, organize a union.)
A bummer about Apple as well is that because it is such a popular company, largely due to its well-regarded and often exciting and innovative products, there are always lots of people lined up ready to take your place. As a result, they can get away with paying in prestige (rather than a fair market wage) and demanding excessive (and anti-productive) time commitments.
Perhaps it's changed recently, but the myth of dual career ladders has been a major problem at many companies; basically to increase your salary it's almost mandatory to go into management, or to leave for another company. HR and management will point to highly paid individual contributors, but it's largely a pyramid with very few people at the upper ranks, and they do their best to hide and obfuscate the pay scale.
Many tech companies also love college hires because they usually lack the ability to negotiate pay, have few outside responsibilities such as children or a spouse, and often lack a concept of work-life balance. After they quit due to burnout they are easily replaced.
I still think it's nuts that Tim Cook wants his team to have calls on Sunday nights. There's really nothing that can't wait until Monday morning - it's just a stupid bit of the culture of anti-productive overwork and demands for proof of loyalty to a company that will never repay it.
And India. My last Apple manager was always on late night meetings with India because ~80% of the Apple Online Store's work was outsourced to India. Another manager at his level had like 200-300 direct reports located in India. I actually counted the number at the time because it was so many people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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...
"Unfortunately, Apple became the place that I lost feeling of physical and psychological safety and the terror that it inflicted on me has impacted me on such a core level that the painful memories and flashbacks have replaced my dreams and they will hunt me until I am alive."
I really don't understand this. I'm not saying this from a perspective that they are wrong, but that I honestly don't get it, please help me understand it. My response is about ambition related stress.
I've had experiences in war torn countries and seen those that are drastically less fortunate than the author. For the author to say that they have terror and flashbacks that will hunt them.... is this just a perspective thing? The author mentions twice he had been in a war related country.
Is it a self imposed stress to do well that is greater than the stress that those in poverty and war stricken countries deal with? Is it all relative? I feel like there is real stress involved with ambition from reading this.
I mean this honestly, I read this post and feel this is a first world problem post. What am I missing?
The article talked about being psychologically and emotionally abused in a hostile work environment. The author talked about being insulted in a completely unprofessional way. Just because the trauma is much less than that of a war stricken country does not mean it's any less painful. Not to mention, the threat of poverty, or at least the disruption of one's life, is present in a hostile work environment, especially to someone on a work visa. What does ambition have to do with anything?
> I've had experiences in war torn countries and seen those that are drastically less fortunate than the author.
Author is literally from a war-torn country and would have had to go back if they were fired. This situation was explicitly part-and-parcel of their bullying.
For me, that explains the extreme level of stress on its own, nevermind just the normal deleterious psychological effects of workplace bullying. You don't need to invoke "ambition stress"
* from war-torn country (I'm guessing Syria, or maybe Yemen)
* worked extremely hard to get a dream job
* first job
* complete lack of support from people who are supposed to help you do your job
* bullying and scapegoating at that job,
* cannot quit or you have to go back to the war-torn country
* cannot be fired or you have to go back to the war-torn country
* not enough experience to know if this is normal or how to handle it
As an aside, a careful reading of the article indicates that OP is probably a woman
I'm having a hard time understanding the lack of understanding. Where is the difficulty, here?
That's kind of what I was getting at. We all have the same standard and can reach the same level of stress no matter where we started based on a plus or minus from where we started..... or is that false and we just think our life is hard and have no idea the magnitude of difficulty that others live in.
I don't think it takes a whole lot to end up with this sort of thing. I distinctly remember having flashbacks/panic attacks for a week or two after someone kissed me for the first time. (for those of you wanting advice for how to deal with people with less experience, take it slow and simple!)
The author was physically assaulted by their iBuddy, who was later promoted to management, among other abuses
Edit: I misread this part. I thought she had slammed the door into her face: One day I went to use the woman restroom my “iBuddy” was there. She told me “die!” and slammed the door in my face.
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.
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.
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.
No longer true. Devices repairing cost are going up, with way less free repair as good gesture than they are used to. Retail stuff are pushed for selling AppleCare+ and new devices when a repair could have been done.
None of these to me is customer centric. They are profit centric.
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.
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.
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.
Repeat 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!
> I think it's mostly a case of communicating the change poorly.
Deliberately. The technical reasons are irrelevant. If Apple had slowed down the phones and shown a notification that said "Phone running in reduced mode. Replace your battery to restore full performance." they would be acting ethically. Hiding it was unethical and they deserved their fine and more.
Great marketing isn't just about an individual product -- it's about your entire brand. It influences the way people perceive your company as a whole, how they feel about it emotionally. And Apple's marketing is second to none.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The real story here is that the author depended upon these jerks for his/her work visa, facing deportation back to (I assume) a less pleasant country. It sounds like everyone involved took advantage of that fact. Perhaps systemically.
I've faced similarly abusive workplace cliques on multiple occasions. They're very easy to bust if you're willing to put aside your personal shame. But I never had a visa hanging over my head during these confrontations.
It doesn’t sound like she was being taken advantage of, they obviously wanted her to leave. She was staying (and killing herself) out of fear deportation which sucks. My question is if California is at-will employment why didn’t they fire her when things weren’t working out? Is it because she went to HR?
HR reviews when a manager wants to fire someone, and ensures they have justifiable cause, rather than something more nefarious like racial animus that can lead to a lawsuit later. So if the employee is in certain protected classes, they need to dot their i's and cross their t's first.
While HR's main job is to advise and not order, this is one area where management tends to listen because in certain cases liability can become personal, and the cost is low.
The author also mentioned she (?) had some friends at Apple too. She didn't write "everyone".
And some of the "bad" people might just have been ordinary people who didn't dare to say no to the more real oppressors. Like, not being friends with, or helping, the kid at school who's getting bullied by the bullies
Absolutely. I had a shitty experience at Apple, manager/team lead treated me as a beginner despite me being in a senior engineer role and I was highly experienced from some other major companies. He thought time at Apple was the only metric.
He constantly questioned my code, despite it being actually much better than his, and more Apple style. Would give me no latitude to implement features independently that I could do in my sleep.
But I had “fuck you” money saved. It had been my dream to work at Apple, but after 6 months I called it quits, told that asshole where to stick his job.
ex-Apple employee so using an obvious throwaway.
One of the things to understand about Apple is they take disclosure and security very seriously, to an anal degree. After initial on-boarding an employee goes through the disclosure process where she has to submit requests for every project she will work on. Those things are very fine-grained, you rarely get full project disclosure, and have to ask for specific relevant parts, such as architecture, plans, or something else.
This process takes a lot of time. Up to weeks. During that time, you CANNOT be exposed to any material related to the project. If someone exposes you to it, they will be disciplined and may be fired. This is why employees might not get invited to meetings once they land in the organization, they are not yet disclosed.
Besides that, Apple is a very high stress environment and there's no lack of scare-stories of employees who violated some guidelines or protocols (especially relating to leaking sensitive information, even by accident) who got axed. Apple will ruthlessly protect its secrets and its corporate image. It is not pleasant at the ground level, but that's how it is. Moreover, stress tends to propagate down the organizational pyramid. A C level breathing down the necks of the managers under him will translate to 100s of engineers feeling the heat.
My time at Apple wasn't pleasant at start but that was solved easily by some communication. Later when projects started getting stressful I experienced some of that stress and some of the blame culture. People will come down hard on you, and it will come back to bite you in the ass in your yearly review if some manager feels you messed something up, even if your own manager told you just a few months back you're doing well.
To summarize my time there, I liked the team and the group, not the organization. The author might want to seek therapy to better handle what she went through. I don't think half of it was as malicious as she thinks, but it would help both with overcoming the trauma and putting things in perspective.
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?
This can be hard to do, especially at a place like Apple where you’ll often just get a basic idea of what you’ll be working on. And how are you supposed to judge your coworkers by the hour or so you spent with them in an interview?
For a PhD level position, she should have had a good idea of what she would be working on. The fact that her manager skipped her on-boarding meeting should have been a BIG red flag right at the beginning. I cannot imagine a corporate culture where that would be acceptable or even permitted.
None of that is a big deal or red flag. At a large intense company things come up, meetings get missed. New people will float around for awhile until there’s time to fit them in. It’s very much sink or swim and a test of how adaptable/self sufficient you are. People at those kinds of companies don’t have time for hand holding - it’s just how it is. If you can get hired by Apple there of plenty of less intense companies you’ll be able to work for.
Having worked for a Fortune 50 company, I can say that management at all levels considered on-boarding to be of critical importance, and would preempt other normal business. It was very important to make sure the new hire had a place to sit, a phone, and a computer as soon as they arrived. Meeting your new manager (as scheduled) is extremely important to a new hire. If the manager doesn't show, it makes a bad first impression on the new employee.
All of that being said, I will now relate that I NEVER attended the new hire orientation meeting at that company. I was on business travel and I never rescheduled it. It did not seem to matter much for me though as I stayed there for most of my career (35 years).
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.
Wow ... now that I think back - this statement and its converse have been consistently true for me as well over many jobs. Not that frequent 1:1 is a silver bullet... but not having it at all never helps!
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.
Thanks for sharing this. I imagine it had to be painful to write. Sharing such experiences help others in the same situation understand that it's not their fault: unfortunately, toxic people and toxic work environments exist.
If you are in a situation like the one described, my advice is: _just leave_. It's not worth it: it's not worth the money, it's not worth the feeling of "failure", it's not worth the fear that you won't find anything better. Just leave. If you have some friends at that job, don't worry: they'll understand.
Don't be afraid of not finding anything else: we're very lucky in this regard, software engineering jobs are relatively easy to find. And "there may be many unexpected feasts ahead of you".
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.
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.
All the fanbois criticizing the author with thinly-veiled racist/xenophobic rhetoric should be ashamed of themselves.
It is the exact same treatment the author describes in the article. Ignoring the substance of what he says and criticizing typographic or subjective stylistic mistakes. I am astonished that you can't see that.
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.
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?
You left out Disney, IBM, Microsoft... American corporates are awful to work for imho. I worked for one once, never will again, they do make great products but so many abusive middle managers.
I couldn't watch office space for years after - it was too much like real life.
I work at a company where every junior PM is has a right to put any feature he wants on any piece of screen real estate. Every idea about how to build it is good. Every implementation is good enough to launch. Every launch is successful. We do not have the concept of "no." We do not have the concept of failure.
It avoids a lot of the politics and culture issues that Apple is infamous for, but I think it's also the reason our products could never be mistaken for theirs.
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.
>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.
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!
> ... 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.
Yeah, wonder if that is the problem, it took me years to know how to stand up for myself. You have to be willing to walk away from a job at any moment, letting them know you're not happy (don't need to be a jerk about it, just show you don't need any job, no matter how good the company is). Because if you've got a manipulative lead and this person senses that you need or really want this job, this person will exploit you as far as they can.
Dude go talk to a work comp attorney. You don’t have to pay up front and this is a textbook stress claim, esp if six months employment. It’s sad nobody knows their rights. Your first clue is the fact that they were pressuring you to resign. NEVER RESIGN.
It sad he will be dealing with this stress for life but never thought that he should at least consult with an attorney??? THIS IS AMERICA. You think HR and those idiots are going to help you??
Anyone who has to deal with this crap, call an attorney!
If you read the story, you know that the person here was a young woman, probably from Afghanistan, on a temp visa in the US. There is no way she's going to hire a lawyer, she's probably already back in her home country.
I think there are several assumptions in your reaction.
- that they would have been able to find let alone retain a lawyer out of grad school
- that they knew enough about workers compensation law to event think of that option
- that they somehow understood the existence of recourses beyond HR in a highly secretive and litigious company
- that they weren't terrified that this could lead to long term stigma and stifle their career which is crucial to their ability to remain in the U.S.
I say this as a white European who was under an [OPT][1] and somehow managed to find a company willing to sponsor its renewal. Even for me the process was opaque and terrifying and I'm extremely lucky that no one tried to take advantage of the situation. Had I fallen into the kind of toxic nightmare described in the post, it would also would have felt insurmountable.
Most employers don't understand work visas and really don't care to but those who do surely understand the leverage they have. Even people on work visas often struggle to understand their rights since BY DESIGN they are dependent on employers for their ability to remain in the country. If you lose your job under most work visas, you need to find a new job immediately or pack up and go home regardless of the circumstances.
Initially, there are [safeguards][2] to prevent wage discrimination for visa workers, but eventually after receiving a work permit, before its renewal, or before an employer accepting to sponsor a green card application, the baseline level of fear you're under effectively reduces job mobility for visa workers. Not being able to "quit and just get a new job" like most U.S. residents because their current one is utterly toxic, visa workers have to interview, secure a new employer, initiate a work visa transfer, all with unpredictable delays in transfer processing from USCIS which routinely leads to companies rescinding job offers because the USCIS is too slow (we're talking months and years) to adjudicate requests.
The idea that someone under an OPT would launch a workers comp suit against Apple for emotional abuse is sadly very far-fetched to me. The OPT worker likely be quickly out of a job and their unemployment grace period (90 days for OPT, 60 days for H-1B) would quickly run out as interviewers for prospective jobs would ask "What made you want to leave Apple after such a short time?"
1. Search google there are plenty of comp attorneys out there.
2. They would easily be able to find a lawyer.
3. He literally said on his website he went to the industrial clinic at Apple! He even lost time from work! Due to his work injury!
4. It doesn’t matter who the employer is.they will comply with a subpoena.
5. He doesn’t need to know work comp law. That’s what the lawyer is for.
The bottom line is he has a work related injury. Even undocumented immigrants can get comp benefits.
The stigma and visa are the only real issues here. As to stigma and them asking why he left Apple: it was toxic. Maybe some employers won’t like that or it may cause immigration troubles but that is something an immigration lawyer can advise on. Maybe there is a disability exception, maybe not.
The fact is Apple will never change their behavior through hr. These employers only understand one thing: liability. That is how they change. If nobody files a claim nothing will change.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am an immigrant who got a GC via the H1B route, so I'll give some perspective. I work at one big company, and have heard from those at FAANG.
It depends on how you define H1B abuse. Most of the H1-B abuse I'm aware of are either from small companies, or companies like Infosys, etc where they really exploit the whole system. Most of the major companies (Microsoft, FAANG, etc) do not have systematic abuse, beyond perhaps lowering everyone's wages as a result of hiring them. At least where I worked, people with H1B's did not get paid less than those who were citizens.
Now although there's no systematic abuse, individual instances exist where managers exploit this dynamic and tend to overwork people. In the teams I saw this, it was usually the manager doing it to everyone (H1B or citizen), but they were often biased in favor of hiring H1Bs. One particular (very senior) manager was recently fired for abusive behavior, and it likely was because he became senior enough that many of the people under him were not H1Bs, and were quite vocal in not putting up with his crap. So it does exist.
As another commenter said, FAANGs and similar companies are usually very good at helping you get a green card. My company, for example, has a policy that if they hire you for a H1B, they will start your green card process as soon as they can. You just have to perform your job till you get it (1-2 years if you're not Indian or Chinese and have a MS degree). Most other companies (including established big names) do not have such a policy - a lot of them say they want to try you out for a while to see if you're good enough before putting in the financial investment to apply for your green card. With lots of companies, you often have to pay for it yourself and keep a tab on the law firm to make sure they're doing things right - not so at FAANG.
For a lot of H1Bs, they have to consider the alternatives. Quite a few come from countries with little opportunities, and much worse abuse. I can say that for my case, and it is likely true for people from India, China and Korea.
The "pipeline" is also easy in the US. Come here for a MS degree, and get hired. For many other countries, it's not that easy. Some allow you to immigrate due to your advanced degree, but with no guarantee of work, so you need to have plenty of money saved while you look for work - something many cannot afford.
For all that we hear about racism in the US, the day to day experience (outside of work) is still a lot better in the US than in many European countries. A South Asian friend of mine moved from the US to Switzerland and not long after he moved someone planted a big anti-immigrant sign right on his door. He was also made to feel unwelcome in bars. I've heard similar stories in other European countries. The experiences aren't directly comparable - some things really are worse in the US, but it's not a clear ordering where other countries are better. The only one better places I can think of is Canada (albeit with a lot lower pay), and maybe Australia. Australia was definitely considered worse than the US (from an anti-immigrant stance) in the 90's, but most people I know who've moved in the last 15 years really like it.
So as bad as you think the US is, there aren't many good alternatives if your goal is to settle down. Either you get a good environment with no path to citizenship and/or low income, or you get a poor environment (locals very unfriendly), or both.
> FAANG hires them so that they can exploit them as cheap labor that can't risk leaving.
FAANG pays H1Bs more than almost all other companies pay senior American execs. I cannot call that exploitation.
> The "pipeline" is also easy in the US. Come here for a MS degree, and get hired. For many other countries, it's not that easy. Some allow you to immigrate due to your advanced degree, but with no guarantee of work, so you need to have plenty of money saved while you look for work - something many cannot afford.
I have to disagree with this as an Iranian working in Germany who moved with an offer on a Blue Card.
After getting an offer, getting visa was 1 week, I started working immediately, have changed job with only bureaucracy being involved is a small email to the Foreigners employment Office(LABO) to confirm my new contract looks good.
I think people have an unfair view of state of immigration in EU.
Regarding your other point about racism, that experience is not representative of the whole of EU. I am biased as I live in Berlin but I think you are also biased (probably) if you live in the multi cultural centers of US(SV/LA/NYC/Seattle etc.).
I have not had any horrible racism experience neither my friends whom I discuss these things regularly. I am sure if I lived in a small town/city, I will get racism behavior regularly, independent of EU, USA, Canada etc.
To clarify: Took 1 week from Turkey where I was living then, from Iran would have been longer due to German Embassy inadequate staffing, etc.
> I have to disagree with this as an Iranian working in Germany who moved with an offer on a Blue Card.
Reading up on it, I assume you got this offer while not in the EU? That is impressive. Over here (and often in Canada as well), few companies will give you an offer without you doing an on site interview - unless you are clearly exceptional. So it becomes a Catch-22.
(Of course, things likely changed in the age of COVID).
> Regarding your other point about racism, that experience is not representative of the whole of EU. I am biased as I live in Berlin but I think you are also biased (probably) if you live in the multi cultural centers of US(SV/LA/NYC/Seattle etc.).
Well, like in the EU, it is fairly nuanced here. I've spent most of my time in the US in small towns, actually - 100K or smaller, and some time in a larger city (but not as big as Seattle, etc). I've lived in both Red and Blue states. It's extremely hard to generalize. The least diverse city I lived in was also the most welcoming (I am not white) - and in a Red state. The larger, multicultural (and liberal) city I live in only like people like ma as long as my views are in line with theirs ;-)
I may be wrong. Pre-2016, it was much easier to find very open and vocal anti-immigrant rhetoric in the EU - but perhaps it's just a very loud minority. Of course, post-2016 you see plenty of that in the US. But prior to that, people really cared mostly about illegal immigration (and amusingly, the pro-immigration folks are often only referring to illegal immigrants - they do very little for those trying to gain legal immigration).
Speaking of racism in the US, here are some comments I made a while ago with more details:
> Reading up on it, I assume you got this offer while not in the EU? That is impressive.
Yes, I got the offer while in Turkey and they did a virtual onsite. But I have multiple friends that got offer without an actual onsite(Including pre-covid). So can not say it is an exception.
I think in EU the minority are loud as you mentioned but I think got loader after 2016. Especially here in Germany AfD has been more vocal and had some textbook level racist scandals. But in general as I said, I and people around me did not have plain racist experiences, maybe subtle ones we have not noticed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> "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.
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.
The main villain - the sr. director with bad breath - predicted this and got his subordinate - a manager - schedule the meeting. Later he stopped by and replaced that manager. In other words, he can claim he has never been to that meeting.
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.
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:
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.
It's the only way to tell the story. Of course it's an uncomfortable read, how could it be different? IMHO this should be indeed picked up by a journalist though. It's not an engineer's job to write catching stories.
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.
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.
> 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.
This is the right thing to do however for many people on a visa it has significant life consequences and financial hardship with having limited time to pack up your life and leave the country you built a life in.
I’m sure if the author wasn’t dependent on having a visa they would of left much sooner than they did. Companies know they have unfair leverage on employees dependent on sponsored visas. Employees on sponsored visas have very little options and next to no rights, in this case the author felt suicide might be their only way out.
I’ve been in a situation in a job I didn’t like with a bad manager well aware if I quit I had 90 days to find a new job or leave the country. 90 days isn’t a long time to find a new job or pack/sell all your belongings and ship to a new country without a job/place to live. I had to put a plan together to save enough money to cover the significant costs of leaving, a timeline to find a job with a deadline if it doesn’t work out to pack and go. The situation was far less stressful than the authors and I was in a good position where if the worst came to the worst I could take the financial hit and be relatively ok on the other end. Non the less it was incredibly stressful and put me in bad mental health so can completely understand why for some people they believe suicide to be a valid option.
For some people leaving is not just a case of handing in their notice.
This is a good example of why the arbitrary system of nations restricting free trade by deciding who is allowed to work where is a method specifically designed to aid in this type of exploitation.
>> I’m sure if the author wasn’t dependent on having a visa they would of left much sooner than they did. Companies know they have unfair leverage on employees dependent on sponsored visas. Employees on sponsored visas have very little options and next to no rights, in this case the author felt suicide might be their only way out.
> This is a good example of why the arbitrary system of nations restricting free trade by deciding who is allowed to work where is a method specifically designed to aid in this type of exploitation.
Not really. Only nontransferable sponsored visas tied to specific employers (or ones with terms so short that they're effectively the same) have this exploitation problem. You don't have to go all open borders to fix this, you just need to give sponsored immigrants just as much job-hopping freedom as permanent residents already have.
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.
> Not sure what a potential solution would look like.
Make all salaries public by law - you could even anonymize people, although there would be lots of issues with that caveat. I'm not saying this is a good solution (most people don't want to talk about their salaries), but it would solve the problem.
I am working as a works council member. I have access to anonymized salary information.
Problem is - I can easily deanonymize at least 15 - 25% of all people working at our company. It isn't easy. Also in Germany we have a law in place that allows to query your employer for average salary data in some specific cases (there have to be at least 6 comparable coworkers of the other gender).
Bu I agree - I would love for a more transparent approach. Even if this can come with it's own problems.
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.
> 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.
You’re correct on point 1, but point 2 is overly pessimistic.
The fact that the economy grows every year is proof alone that companies on the whole are generating value and not just exploiting people. The economy is not a zero sum game.
The truth is, all companies, no matter how cool their branding is, are just a collection of mostly average people. The larger the company, the more average the workforce will be. This is a statistical fact.
Inside any large organization, most of your job (no matter how technical) will be coordinating among groups of people, not creating X deliverable by yourself.
This inevitably results in the classic drama, tension, fights, camaraderie and occasional abuse you will find when you bring any group of humans together.
The X% of abusive situations that arise when you bring human animals together does not equal proof of widespread exploitation among the worlds highest paid employees. Slavery this is not.
It just means your experience in any big company will essentially be a probability game. At FAANG, you have a 95% chance of getting reasonably wealthy within 5 years, with a X% (lower) chance of abuse/toxic overwork and X% chance of dying in a traffic accident on your morning commute. The problem is nobody wants to acknowledge the potential downsides.
If you aren’t okay with this, there is of course the startup and indie hacker route.
> The fact that the economy grows every year is proof alone that companies on the whole are generating value and not just exploiting people. The economy is not a zero sum game.
This does not make any sense. The economy in the colonial Americas grew exponentially PRECISELY due to the explotation of people.
The economy in the colonial Americas grew exponentially because thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of new people were arriving every year and creating value.
The shitty, exploitative things those humans also did back then were not responsible for the growth. Countries in the rest of the world were doing the same things back then but not growing as fast. Only 5% of the slaves taken from Africa were brought to North America.
For a further example, the US experienced its greatest upward climb during the industrial revolution, after slavery was abolished.
If exploitation was the only reason for the US’s success, then why would the US experience explosive growth after abolishing slavery?
That doesn't follow in a growing economy, even a very simple two-person one where person 1 picks bananas by hand and person 2 builds a faster banana picker every year. No exploitation there.
You don't even need trade in your model economy. Just one person prefers a higher banana income so they can do pranks with the banana peels, or whatever.
Point number 1 is very important to never forget. No matter what level you are at, HR's job is to protect the levels above you, not help you. If you are an engineer that means an opaque shield of HR policies to protect the company and all people in your management chain. Middle manager? HR will shield the directors and VPs above you, concentrating particularly on keeping the VPs safe no matter what they do.
I always figured it was more like, they protect the company aka the group. If your interests and the company's align they are in your corner; if not then you are the "other" and their enemy. The bias towards protecting the upper ranks not being their mission statement, instead the company's interests simply more often align with the VP than the NCG.
I'm staying at [large SV company] for now BECAUSE OF their reputation of hiring smart engineers, so that I will be able to hopefully get a gig at a more employee-friendly company later in life. New grads that were in my position often don't have much of a choice, and being offered the ability to pay off my student debt almost immediately at 22 seemed irresponsible to pass up. It's been 4 years and my mental health has degraded for sure (and the work I am doing is not glamorous in the slightest) but my savings are piling up and the thought that this is only temporary (and will give me a nice financial cushion) will keep me going until it's unbearable.
So when do you decide to leave? Do you have a magic dollar amount? A particular mental health symptom you're waiting to develop? I'm not sure what you're waiting for. Four years at a company is a long time; it's not like you'd be accused of nonsense like job-hopping.
3. After any major organizational change, such as a merger, any promises made by the diminished chain command are not enforceable. What you won't see is that some of those promises are encouraged by the new chain of command in order to maintain calm.
Eventually the one making the promises will either not be around or find that they don't have the resources to fulfill the promise. They may quit when they figure this out, if they haven't already been let go once they've established their status as scapegoat.
If something matters to you, make sure you get the new bosses to announce it in front of people. Be aware that you should have already thought at least briefly about the wording of your resignation letter prior to doing this.
Agreed, but I've also seen this happen with only a minor change, such as your boss leaving. When your boss gets replaced, it can be quite difficult to ensure that previous promises are kept. Not always, but often.
Definitely. Also don't stake your whole life plan on that promise being kept. Transitional promises have a habit of being walked back.
There are many workplace promises that are disappointing or an inconvenience if they don't work out, but some end up being an existential threat (eg, "Don't worry, we're keeping the Boston office.")
Accept the promise, but groom your professional network extra carefully until the dust settles.
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.
Frankly speaking, it sounds the author ended up joining a 'dud' team where the entire team is well steeped with playing politics rather than actually being productive. It happens in large companies and sometimes in small ones as well. How these unproductive teams survive is beyond me but they do.
I hope the Author realizes one thing: Never ever complain to Manager and/or HR in any company about other team member UNLESS they disclose themselves to you that they don't like that person and ask you for your negative input -- even then, keep it almost neutral / slightly negative. And if you do make the mistake of complaining, DO NOT EVER do it over email/chat/anything written -- a simple call / over-the-coffee conversation is more than enough. Based on this fact, its hard for me to fault the Senior Manager / Director / VP at Apple the Author talked about -- once this kind of thing starts, at any company it is expected outcome from Management.
From what I can deduce - the Manager and the violent co-worker were best of friends and Manager was going all out trying to protect that co-worker who was a toxic and non functioning employee. The Manager and co-worker kept on making stupid rules and confrontational policies and the Author kept on thinking she doesn't have any choice and is stuck otherwise she will get deported -- I mean, USA (or any other Country) is not a place where you would end up going in depression over for and start popping mental health pills for while contemplating suicide. I would choose my dignity and sanity even if it meant going back to Yemen or Somalia or somewhere similar. The Author could have simply started applying for jobs in lots of countries for some R&D job or post-doc position and should have left Apple.
I hope she spills all the beans publicly. Put out every picture, file document, recording, and email that she can. With accusations like this, the company and the perpetrators need to be exposed to the public, nailed to the wall.
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.
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.
I started working for Apple a few years ago as a software engineer, after leaving a job that I liked, thinking that working for the biggest tech corporation to ever exist would be the next logical step. I don't work in California, and instead work for a satellite office in the northeast US.
People in California appear to lack the ability to understand that the northeast is three hours ahead of them. As a result, it's not uncommon for me to have meetings that go on until 9:30pm, multiple times per week. I have brought this up to my manager (and his manager (and his manager)) multiple times, asking if they can schedule meetings a bit earlier, and they say they'll "look into it". Apparently they've been "looking into it" for two years now.
Apple ostensibly supports "personal development", which would be great in theory, but anything involving this involves manager approval. While they're usually ok with you going to conferences, I tried getting approval for tuition reimbursement (which is advertised on the people/hrweb site). My direct manager said "ok", but his manager said that he's afraid that me going back to school and completing my degree would be "too big of a distraction from work", and will not be approving my request.
My job is ostensibly "individual contributor", but most of what I do is read emails, and copy and paste Java from one file to another. When I told my manager's manager that I didn't find the work enjoyable, and that I would like to be given another project, his response was that I simply "don't understand how cool the project is".
My situation is substanially less horrible than the OP's post, I don't have any visa issues or anything and I can fairly easily quit, and I probably will quit fairly soon. Still, that's a difficult thing to do, my stock packages are still vesting. Oh well.
My heart breaks for this engineer. We can’t just file this under “it happens at all large companies” and call it a day. Large companies like Apple should be held to a higher standard.
With the rise of evaluating company stocks based on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) shareholders should start demanding that companies publish anonymized statistics on number of HR cases reported and how they were handled. Workplace abuse can happen everywhere but larger companies like Apple need to double-down and start showing that they are handling it.
This _might_ sound utopian. But shareholder value is about the only thing companies like Apple care about.
Apple held a modicum of respect in my book for stepping up to protect privacy. Reading a piece like this tears that away. I’m reminded that Apple is yet another gigantic tech company. The ends doesn’t justify the means. Great products doesn’t justify abuse.
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 ?
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.
They're also hip, maintain some level of underdog cachet, and folks like their products. People wish they could be that, and tend to give a pass to the things they idolize.
You might also imagine that inside a company made of money, there's no need for anyone to be a jerk.
They were clear underdogs in the 90s, and it's maybe only in the last decade or so that they've been in dominant mega-corp territory. I'm sure a lot of people still carry associations from that older time that haven't been completely extinguished.
Yes, that's what I was alluding to "the developing world workforce." For whatever reason, despite reoccurring reports about worker abuses from Foxconn/Wistron, Apple often gets a pass in the discourse- possibly because those workers are out of sight, out of mind.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Perhaps it's a case of cargo culting. His confrontational, often personally insulting behaviors were retained, but not his ability to bring people together.
> 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.
He might have had other talents that compensated (at a corporate level) for the damage from his asshole behaviors, but it seems pretty clear that he was, in fact, an asshole. Not all those stories are from the workplace, that second link is all about how he treated his daughter.
The issue here is how does having an asshole like that at the top affect the rest of the company's culture and the behavior of the other managers?
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.
> 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.
This is a cursory and opinionated, unfounded claim saying 'never' and 'boring'. Who are they to decide beforehand about something that doesn't even exist yet, based on a highly subjective matter (boring)?! Also this 'never' thing is just a joke, have they measured the goodness of comments on voting and resulted in 100% 'no good'? This kind of 'reasoning' about vote comments is pretty empty, equals to saying: 'because I say it so!' :/
Knowing the reasons is quite important in fact. Part of the discussion and understanding, learning.
I happen to think the opposite. I know it's unpopular.
Downvoted posts are distinct markers that shape our experience. But we're warned to not discuss it; the very thing that controls how we see and what we see (or not see). Apparently that's boring.
Voting systems create echo chambers. Most people vote based on subjective agreement, not on objective quality. We need to be aware of that, and discuss it. Just my opinion, which I'm wary to post but will anyhow.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading
Until HN has something other than just downvoting this isn't true.
If I make a point that doesn't fit the HN groupthink, and it gets downvoted without response, I always mention it because I know people linger around the thread and I want to challenge their assumption that my point is so false as to not deserve specific counterargument.
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.
> 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.
I find these "bad situation" postmortems to be unreadable most of the time. I do believe that these companies are full of assholes, but there are so many red flags with these one-sided testimonies. I can't tell how much is being conveniently left out to fit a narrative.
I’m not going to point to any age “generation” or make big broad generalizations, but from my time at Amazon I saw people who disagree I would have fired in a hot second, and who also from their point of view may have written the exact same thing as the article.
I have no real judgment on this guy. But I’ve seen plenty of people straight up not prepared for the real world get hit hard and it’s never ever their fault.
I find the lack of admitting any fault anywhere to be suspicious, esp when we know there are always two sides.
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.
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.
I have been harassed by some apple recruiter for a SRE type job, the recruiter has been pretty bully when I rejected them, i am glad I didn't gave up and not working for apple.
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...
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is an Apple office populated mostly by Scientology (ProData subcontractors) folks over in Malmoe in Sweden. Maybe their management methods are leaking to SV.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"to is dispensing advice on how to handle and escape from predator"
No - his advice of 'applying assertion' is definitely wrong in this context, where the advice should be 1) leave or 2) bend like a reed in the wind and avoid avoid avoid. Reacting to antagonizing - even if the victim knew how to do it, would likely yield more blowback - and more likely, the victim would have no idea how to assert themselves.
The situation is not like 'physical assault' where you have nothing to lose from fighting back.
Inability to pushback is not a function of decision or character, it's a function of the crazy power dynamic.
If the victim had US citizenship, it would have been much easier to hold ground, for example.
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.
> The new officemate had previous harassment history at Apple as well as criminal history and arrest. She took pride that she does what she wants, and nobody can do anything about it
"previous harassment history at Apple as well as criminal history and arrest" .... I am really skeptical of this. Does anyone have insider information to corroborate such a claim?
My basic assumption is that most people at the big IT corps either just want to a) make money or b) work on interesting things. I don't think the majority there enjoy torturing colleagues or subordinates (although it certainly can happen). That being said, the story to me sounds entirely or at least partially made up. In this story, everyone at Apple seems to have only the goal of psychologically abusing OP. Especially the passage "the note section of a hidden slide on a deck that she had uploaded and it was an indirect suicide/murder threat" sounds absolutely implausible, why would someone put a death threat in a slide deck which clearly documents said threat?
My serious (and absolutely not mean-spirited) advice to OP: see a psychologist and talk to him about it, especially about all the "hidden signs" you supposedly received from colleagues.
You must not be social enough to have met these people, but I can for sure think of people who I knew (but don’t currently work with) who would do these kinds of things. Maybe they didn’t start out to be mean at the start but when the author started commenting about shoddy work and how the team was manipulating data, they probably saw her as trying to ruin a good thing they had going (which would probably threaten all their prospects of career progression). From their perspective they might’ve just saw her criticisms as her maliciously trying to get ahead or as an attempt to showoff her technical superiority by pointing out their mistakes (which may put the manager always correcting typos into perspective as well).
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.
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.
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.
It's ironic that the big tech companies which are most affected by issues of racism, misogyny, safety... Are also the ones doing the most preaching about it in the media.
Just because these corporations and the media are rotten to the core, they assume that the rot is all around as well. It's not.
These big tech corporations just attract the worst people.
Most of the people I know who ended up working for big tech are the biggest psychopaths I've met.
These companies don't even select for talent anymore; they just select for psychopathy. If you're not a psychopath, you will not last in such company, no matter how good you are.
I'm surprised that they're not all strangling each other in there...
I've worked at several of the big whale tech companies in their prime (like, now) and this story shocked me to my shoes. Maybe I have been sheltered. And this may be random and pointless but I was tired enough of google selling my data that my next phone was going to be an IPhone but after reading this I ... just can't.
^ this. It’s par for the course who anyone in tech at a large corporation who’s not naive or looking at life thru rose colored lenses. You are a cog in their machine, an employee number that either is a cost or profit center. Nothing more
Empathetic with the OP here. And an investigation should be undertaken. However it would be naive to expect this does not happen at Apple. It has thousands of employees. Many of them forgotten. They will try to self preserve. I don't see it as a black and white case.
Do not expect rosy experience at any company ever.
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.
Was there a punchline at the end? It read like it was written by a preteen - bouncing around with vignettes and stream of consciousness. I couldn’t get to the end. They all sound awful to work with.
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.
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.
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.
The author made a comment about GDPR privacy violations, but those are European laws that largely don't apply to American companies, especially related to internal HR matters.
While I don't want to dismiss the complaints out-of-hand, it does seem like there's just a touch of exaggeration going on.
Perhaps it's just a matter of perspective, but many of the complaints described could be chalked down to someone inexperienced being thrown into the deep end in a large organisation. E.g.: the complaint about "not knowing what I was doing for days" is almost laughable, when in my experience new hires at large orgs aren't properly informed about what they're doing for months!
The racism and physical abuse of course is inexcusable, but unfortunately all too common...
All true, and also GDPR has nothing to do with a developer not being allowed to give data to its manager. This is all paranoid bullshit. The author must have been a real pain in the ass to work with.
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.
The secrecy and compartmentalization at Apple enables this sort of stuff to happen more often. This wouldn't happen as much at a place like Google with a perf review system calibrated across the company where the manager has little control.
There was a well-known incident at Apple where there was an entirely team that quit, except for a handful of folks who were dependent on the company for their visas and would have had to sell everything and leave the country if they also quit at that time.
i worked at a company similar to apple. we had an employee that actually was terrible and not competent in the simplest things. but from their perspective it may have seemed like what the article laid out
on the other hand, i see alot of people agreeing that apple is terrible. so in these situations it really is he-said she-said
I think part of the issue is immigration/visa problems. If you're a US citizen/permanent-resident, there's sort of a "ceiling" to how much abuse you will get from your employer, since at the end of the day you can say "fuck this, I'm working somewhere else"...however, if you're on some kind of visa, these things get a lot more difficult, since the company doesn't just control your livelihood, they actually control you being allowed in the country at all.
While of course you can still apply to other places, and maybe you'll get lucky to find another company who wil sponsor your visa, it's a substantially more-uphill battle.
(disclaimer, not an immigrant, this is just based on what immigrant friends have told me and from what I've read).
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.
you're completely wrong and the author, as paranoid as she is, is not even making these types accusations and you have no place making them. When you have an HR-type meeting with employee you're having problem with, you chose a place that is private so the employee is not embarrassed to be seen. The senior director or HR person is not on the meeting invite in order to not stress you in advance. It's standard practice for a firing/layoff or major HR problem needing dealing with. The employee then usually goes straight home. A perp walk from the main conference room to your desk would be awful.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I read this whole, long article, and I don't understand how you're freaking out at every. single. step. although you do say the visa thing is the root stress.
But you seem to be freaking out even at not getting on-boarded immediately or that you don't have detailed explanation of what you will be working on the first day, or that you're not immediately invited to all the meetings. I work at Autodesk. This is completely normal, it takes a couple of weeks to start on a team and not everything is clear, especially if a key person just left. This isn't a job at Burger King where everything is clear. Also, nobody is going to structure their vacations around you. Some head count is getting allocated, and then filled, often with huge delays, and that person arrives at a certain date, and while people know it's coming, it's not necessarily a good time for anyone, it is forced on us. It's troublesome to onboard the intern or new employee and it gets past around like a hot potatoes sometimes. And no, often there isn't any documentation. I've onboarded probably over 50 people over 20 years.
It sounds like you arrived after the project was just sent in a tailspin and people are having meetings just to figure out WTF is the state is the state of project, and you shouldn't have expected to be invited to all those meetings, as you have nothing to contribute as junior and the people probably weren't sure of anything. It's normal. Also, that iBuddy yapping about the previous guy getting fired? We can't know the context, have you thought that person was hugely stressed about it too and sharing that earnestly? I mean, they're on the sinking project as well? And at least she's talking to you and putting you in the context of the team. Insensitive, perhaps, but again the world isn't going to rearrange around you.
At one point in the story, you're clearly falling into a depression, and seeing everything dark. A manager repeatedly cancelling and re-scheduling a meeting isn't a plot to harass you: it happens a lot to busy people, we don't know what kind of crisis he's dealing with. During this whole thing, you just assume that everyone is just taking off, missing work, and focused on you. These people might actually be going through crisis on their own and having to put out fires left-and-right.
This last bit, where you get a meeting in a locked abandoned building you think nobody should have access to, and you ask the senior director to leave because he wasn't invited: You realize that's paranoid thinking and crazy behavior, right? When you need to have a HR-type meeting with an employee, you have it in a private place -- for the employee's benefit! It's for you that it's in a private place, away from other people's prying eyes. Then, of course, the whole point of the meeting is to have the senior director talk to you, that's what the meeting is, he didn't show up unplanned. He's not on the invite so that you're not too stressed on the way. The idea that they're keeping it secret and deleting the meeting from the calendar to hide it is just paranoid delusions perhaps caused by depression. It's the way it's done. These meetings are happening because you're in deep shit, it's very rare. The director is offering you to leave on our own so that you can leave with your head up and on your own terms, and not have the record of having been fired. It's a kind of curtesy. This might sound horrible -- but firing someone is a last resort.
Now, don't get me wrong. I've hired people from india, china, singapore, and other places. I have no doubt that you have suffered inappropriate comments and racist behavior. But we don't know the full story! I've had to fire people as well, who seem to do a lot of work, but a lot of useless work that needed to be redone, or get stuck into rat holes for week without asking questions. These people all thought they were doing as best, and got multiple warnings and "PIPs" (Performance Improvement Projects, as you know) as they could and no doubt had a lot of fingers to point after they were let go. It's always other people's fault.
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.
I dont quite remember the meeting room names in Mathilda 3 over at the Apple on Mathilda Ave, but if the MA03 (in the screenshot) refers to "Mathilda 3", then this story is totally believable.
I worked at Apple and it was absolutely horrible. I remember sitting on the train and actually thinking about killing myself. Reasons were many, but mostly I just didn't fit in there, I think.
I felt like people there were also 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.
That’s how people take extra vacation pretty much everywhere. It’s not being a whiny bitch it’s called not working yourself harder than necessary. Go work yourself to death somewhere else and stop shaming people for not being Apple fanboys and working extra hard for Papa Steve.
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.
In many European countries the presence of unions isn't optional, it's compulsory above a company size threshold for example. It doesn't mean employees have to be part of it, but it has to be present.
^ +1
to support this, just a couple of months back there was a huge mess with N26 (the neo-bank) trying to prevent its employees from unionizing and how they actually did it.
At least where I live (Norway) your employer doesn't have a say in whether you're organized or not, and wouldn't necessarily know if you are – but you'd typically have an elected representative in companies of a certain size or with a certain number of employees.
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.
> ... you are going to pay mentally by investing your brain to that issue.
The purpose of the lawyer is so that you don't have to invest your brain in that issue. Your lawyer can deal with the intricacies of court procedures and employment law while you move on with your life.
There may also be a moral duty of injured employees to sue their employer because corporate behavior won't change if they don't. Letting the company get away with it is like letting a rapist or child molester get away with it. There will almost certainly be future victims so if someone can put a stop to it, they should.
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.
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.
Have you paid attention to the behavior of USCIS employees over the last 4 years, notably towards people with backgrounds in predominantly Muslim countries (as the author of TFA appears to be)? It's not so much that you're wrong, more that it doesn't matter that you're right.
An employer-employee dispute will usually be litigated in either a state court or a US District Court (Article III court). USCIS, a federal Article II agency, has no influence over either court.
The influence of USCIS over the court doesn't matter much if the (ex)employee has been detained and removed by the time the court hears the case. And it's not that companies have to be particularly malicious for this to happen: if they terminate an H1* employee, they are required to notify USCIS.
And then there's the bigger picture: living in a country knowing that the only legal basis for your presence here is a visa tied to you being employed by your current employer, and now considering whether or not to launch legal action against that employer.
p.s. I'm a former H1B immigrant, Green Card holder, and now US Citizen.
How many hundreds of thousands of dollars would it take to lose against Apple?
Obviously there's a chance but this is literally like taking on Oceania from 1984 - Apple's apple-isms and the famous reality distortion field really do make the comparison slightly alarming, thinking about it.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The point was that good lawyers won't take blatantly unwinnable cases.
At some point or another, a lawyer must start putting their name on the line for the cases they take. If a client arrives without a shred of usable evidence or a blatantly unbelievable story (happens frequently) then a good lawyer is not going to throw their reputation on the line to see if it pans out.
The legal world isn't as big as you might think, and lawyers can expect to run into a lot of the same other lawyers, judges, and so on for decades of their career. Taking obviously unwinnable cases is a quick way to get yourself branded as a toxic lawyer.
This Medium article is a good example of a case that would be challenging from the start. Much of what the author claims comes from unrecorded meetings, in-person interactions, and other situations that lack any usable evidence. However, the author also goes on record admitting that they were struggling to finish their work and other such performance issues (Yes, I know it's from the company's abuse, but think in terms of evidence here). If anything, publishing this Medium article has done the author far more harm than good.
The legal world isn't as big as you might think, and lawyers can expect to run into a lot of the same other lawyers, judges, and so on for decades of their career.
You're talking to a lawyer who used to do litigation. The legal world is a lot bigger than you think it is. My friends that still do litigation have never come up against the same lawyers twice in their careers. But we practice in a big city. If you're in Hoboken or Fargo, your experiences will obviously differ.
Taking obviously unwinnable cases is a quick way to get yourself branded as a toxic lawyer.
You're assessing cases as "unwillable" before actually knowing if they are winnable. There are very few cases that are "obviously unwillable" at the onset and with extremely rare exceptions, that "obvious" part is due to procedural defects in the case, like an expiring statute of limitation that precludes a lawsuit. And in those cases, if your client wants to keep fighting after being advised that the case is procedurally unwinnable, you pursue all appropriate legal avenues still available to your client (or even ones that are now precluded but could be granted at judicial discretion), because that is precisely what lawyers are paid to do, and other lawyers understand that and do not hold that against them.
Moreover, no case is "obviously unwinnable" on the factual merits before discovery. Hell, it's even possible to take a case that is "obviously unwinnable" after discovery and still win (and indeed, I got my first trial one month after the bar exam because my boss thought the case was "unwinnable" but would be good for experience. That client is walking around free right now because I won an "unwinnable" case.)
As for "toxic reputation", your behavior in court and in dealings is what gets you branded as toxic, not the cases you take, and that is true whether or not your cases are winnable.
Depends on the case. If a case is taken on a contingency basis (personal injury, medical malpractice, and other practice areas are usually contingency), the lawyer will only take winnable cases because the client is paying a billable hour rate and if you lose you're left with nothing but expenses and an angry client.
For cases where the client is paying the billable hour rate, lawyers will take just about any case as long as it isn't totally unethical and could get you in hot water with the bar.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I haven't been in this kind of situation, but I'm curious if the HR's goal is to help the company, not individuals, how is protecting abusers and ignoring negative workplace dynamics helping the company?
In such situations:
a) HR provides the appearance of some orderly process to settle such situations
b) HR provides partial witnesses for settlement talks
c) HR produces documentation about the situation to be used to the company's advantage in later lawsuits
d) HR creates (beforehand) a net of regulations that a "troublemaker" can easily be found to have violated
e) HR shields more important employees (i.e. bosses), because they represent more value to the company
f) HR shields larger numbers of employees (i.e. the mob of abusers) against smaller numbers (i.e. the single victim), because larger numbers represent more value and higher risk of complications
Nowhere in the above list I did mention anything about workplace happiness or positive energy or anything. That is not up to HR, and if a "situation" arises it's too late anyways. Good interpersonal conditions are up to all persons and especially management. HR is just there as an executive, to sweep up the broken cutlery and make things look nice and tidy.
It isn't that an HR department doesn't want good working conditions. They are just in no position to impose them, only management is.
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.
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?
> Even if she did, would she have been able to even stay while the lawsuit plays out over months to years? Unlikely.
It is not necessary for a plaintiff to be a U.S. resident for a lawsuit to proceed in a U.S court.
I'm not an expert on immigration law, but if a foreign resident needs to appear as a witness at trial in a U.S. court, then they can usually enter on a tourist visa or some other visa.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
Do you actually have significant case filing you can point to about this? Genuinely asking, because it's always spoken to me that workplace abuse is extremely hard to sue over because you'll be outgunned (financially), lawyers will never work contingency because the money payout isn't worth the effort, and the employee in trying to legally defend themselves have now permanently ruined their career prospects.
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.
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.
> 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.
> .. 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.
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'?
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.
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.
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 exposé just for the sake of it.
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.
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.