I Quit: What Really Goes on at Apple

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Even if only half of what this guy says is true, it is still pretty damn bad. And you thought your job sucked. :eek:

Sixteen hour days are filled with meetings after meetings followed by more meetings. Whilst this is somewhat standard in most organisations, meetings at Apple wreaked of toxic agendas designed to deliberately trip people up, make fools of the less respected and call people out. Team spirit is non existent as ‘internal customers’ attack individuals and push agendas that satisfy their morning egos. Hours upon hours were wasted in meetings to prepare for meetings in preparation for other meetings to the point where little work actually got done.
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so... it really sounds like what happens in most corporate environments. None of this is new and because it happens at apple doesn't make it unique. Larger organizations have lots of office politics and people who want to show their authority or ego more than getting work done.
 
Sounds like a lot places I have worked. They made a former manager of mine not take his vacation that he paid for to be at a meeting. They new he was going to be on vacation that week and scheduled it anyway. He maid them call his wife and explain why they cancelled there trip. They reimbursed him for the trip but still. He said it was pretty sad that they wasted that money because it was really something that could have waited for a week and wasn't resolved bye the meeting.
 
Was this really meant to be a surprise to some? Because it wasn't to me. What the writer said is the way many large companies conduct themselves. Workers (to these large companies) are expendable and easily replaced. Don't get me wrong, some large companies do promote a very friendly and humane work ethic, but at the same time many don't.
 
I always take these former employee testimonials with a grain of salt ... all of the Silicon Valley companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Intel, etc) have brutal corporate cultures that will not be a good fit for everyone ... I spent 14 years at Intel before leaving and it had some of those traits as well (but I didn't consider them a bad employer) ... the Silicon Valley companies are meat grinders but they pay well and offer experience that can be leveraged in future jobs or opportunities ... if they aren't a good fit for you then you should move on (there are lots of other employers) but criticizing a company for the corporate culture that has made them successful is not going to accomplish anything
 
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I hate Apple! I love the Woz but Steve Jobs and his monster suck. I have never bought an Apple product and I never will.
 
And this is why I've chosen to make myself indispensable at a smaller company, run directly by owners who don't tolerate this sort of crap.

Not that there aren't problems there as well. But, the passive-aggressive, back-stabby inane bullshit isn't put up with. And calling it out generally makes the problem go away. Even if the problem occasionally arises from the owners.

Working at Apple would probably have me:

Narrator: said:
And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap, and then stalk from office to office with an Armalite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semi-automatic weapon, pumping round after round into colleagues and co-workers. This might be someone you've known for years. Someone very, very close to you.
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Tyler's words, coming out of my mouth.
 
jkerr2 said:
Sounds like a lot places I have worked. They made a former manager of mine not take his vacation that he paid for to be at a meeting. They new he was going to be on vacation that week and scheduled it anyway. He maid them call his wife and explain why they cancelled there trip. They reimbursed him for the trip but still. He said it was pretty sad that they wasted that money because it was really something that could have waited for a week and wasn't resolved bye the meeting.
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I don't think I've ever seen such a high misspelling rate before. Grats.
 
Welcome to every corporate office job ever. Everything I read is nothing new and pretty common among tech companies (including the one I'm typing this from.)
 
What a shocker; a company focused on money that doesn't care about ethics. I am amazed, no really.
 
This is why you should work for yourself. Not only do you get to set your own hours, but you can sexually harrass yourself all you damn well want. Take that HR!
 
Sounds a bit like sour grapes to me.

The guy quit. OK, so.

Why does he feel compelled to hate on his former employer....I guess just because it's Apple.
 
Welcome to corporate America in the 21st century.

Don't like it?

Find someplace else to work, or work for yourself.

It's not as hard to do as you might think.
 
magoo said:
Sounds a bit like sour grapes to me.

The guy quit. OK, so.

Why does he feel compelled to hate on his former employer....I guess just because it's Apple.
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Not really. I mean, he may be sour that it didn't turn out like he expected, but I'd be pissed to at what he had to deal with. I can understand his meetings to prep for meetings crap... that's a HUGE waste of time.
 
Am I the only one here that works in a decently run Fortune 500 company? I mean, there's moments of bad management, and sometimes we get saddled with some idiot VP's pet project for a few years, but those eventually get fixed and ship, or get canceled. This happens because all the money comes form publicly known and (depending on the dollar amount, constantly reviewed) contracts.

In the modern defense industry, you'd be surprised how much oversight you get, and how hard it is to just throw money into a toilet like some of these high-profile SV places. If your project is high-profile enough to have the Billion dollar word associated with it, you get Congressional hearings if you dick around too much on a program, mostly because they look for any weakness as an opportunity to move or cancel the contract. In there days of tighter budgets, they watch the big dollar programs like a hawk.

In the end of the day we have a mostly sane system. Mandatory overtime is not the norm, although it does happen. So when it happens, we don't feel like we're supporting yet-another death march without a purpose. And while vacation is not as "generous" as some other firms, if you schedule it in advance, YOU CAN ACTUALLY USE ALL OF IT without worrying about having a job when you get back. Software and hardware engineers are valued and encouraged to grow, because new features are the only way to convince the military to buy new stuff/upgrades, since all the aircraft we build (and they properly maintain) tend to last for decades.

So yeah, you can spend your life awash in the never-ending money train of Apple, getting trampled by everyone you work with just because they want a taste of ambrosia. I couldn't care less. We haven't had that level of crazy in 25 years here in defense, and I like things that way :D
 
Seems like a typical corporative environment.

/shrug
 
Don't know if that's 100% typical. The non-stop meetings, yes, but the vindictive, petty and toxic environment?

Honestly, that seems to be modeled on Jobs' personality and work method. It's the brutal all-out capitalist, chew up anything and spit it out because there is always more, more more to exploit and waste is not an issue. In this case, the resource to exploit is people.
 
TwistedAegis said:
Don't know if that's 100% typical. The non-stop meetings, yes, but the vindictive, petty and toxic environment?

Honestly, that seems to be modeled on Jobs' personality and work method. It's the brutal all-out capitalist, chew up anything and spit it out because there is always more, more more to exploit and waste is not an issue. In this case, the resource to exploit is people.
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Dude. I've seen vindictive, petty and toxic environment working fast food. It's all rather random in who you happen to come across.
 
so what's the TL:DR version of this? I read the first couple paragraphs and had no idea what that guy did at Apple other than the company he worked for wanted him to do things their way instead of his way.
 
jkerr2 said:
Sounds like a lot places I have worked. They made a former manager of mine not take his vacation that he paid for to be at a meeting. They new he was going to be on vacation that week and scheduled it anyway. He maid them call his wife and explain why they cancelled there trip. They reimbursed him for the trip but still. He said it was pretty sad that they wasted that money because it was really something that could have waited for a week and wasn't resolved bye the meeting.
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Goddamn it, I just want to beat you for your atrocious writing.
 
No wonder iProducts suck, all makes sense now. On a side note, some of the things this guy says sent my BS meter into the red, like being a cop, holding a gun on someone and deciding to drop the hammer or not. How do you go from cop to apple developer? Seems thin.
 
Having read half of Steve Jobs autobio (I had had enough) I can believe what Applie's corp tendencies might be, i.e. if they get in your way run over them.

Such cultures are set from the top down and with Jobs having been there, the corp execs that were below him were trained to follow his example. While such environments can be changed, it takes a very long time.

I've been very lucky in that over my 40+ years in industry I've had only one situation that might be considered bad and that didn't last long ---- I left. The world is full of a$$holes, take care of yourself and move on.
 
Sounds like most companies. Endless pointless meetings by out of touch management that distract from actual work getting done.
 
jkerr2 said:
Sounds like a lot places I have worked. They made a former manager of mine not take his vacation that he paid for to be at a meeting. They new he was going to be on vacation that week and scheduled it anyway. He maid them call his wife and explain why they cancelled there trip. They reimbursed him for the trip but still. He said it was pretty sad that they wasted that money because it was really something that could have waited for a week and wasn't resolved bye the meeting.
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Let me guess: you're an English professor?
You would need a Phd to fuck up your native language that completely.
 
So an greedy, self-indulgent company, that make products for narcissistic self-indulgent people, treats its US employees as badly as they treat the slave labor that builds their products in china.

Why am I not surprised?
 
nutzo said:
So an greedy, self-indulgent company, that make products for narcissistic self-indulgent people, treats its US employees as badly as they treat the slave labor that builds their products in china.

Why am I not surprised?
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I doubt that Apple is very different from most of their Silicon Valley counterparts ... Google offers all the services onsite for their employees not out of the generosity of their heart but because they don't want their employees to leave ... the infamous Google buses that the slackers in SFO were protesting offered their employees transportation and internet services so they could get more work done ... as an exempt employee at Intel I had days ranging from 9 hours to 48 hours (I did skip out for an hour on that 48 hour day to go home and shower and get a quick bite of food) ... I once did 24, 19, and 17 hour days back to back ... and during a critical project at Intel I once did a stretch of working 7 days a week for about 4 months

Silicon valley companies are brutal, as are some of the Washington cultural equivalents (Amazon, Microsoft) ... for people that can adjust to the corporate cultures they can be high paying jobs (especially with stock options) ... and most of them look good on a resume ... for people who need the kinder and softer corporate cultures they probably need to look elsewhere for employment ... this really sounds like a disgruntled employee whining because he quit before they could fire him :cool:
 
nutzo said:
So an greedy, self-indulgent company, that make products for narcissistic self-indulgent people, treats its US employees as badly as they treat the slave labor that builds their products in china.

Why am I not surprised?
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Oh, c'mon now. Don't mince words. Say what you REALLY think...
 
Hypergreatthing said:
so... it really sounds like what happens in most corporate environments. None of this is new and because it happens at apple doesn't make it unique. Larger organizations have lots of office politics and people who want to show their authority or ego more than getting work done.
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Most Corporations that function like that fold like a napkin under any real challenge. For example, US auto companies once our Trade organization bureaucrats started taking patronage jobs with Japanese companies went from the top of mount Olympus to the cesspools of Hades in about 10 years couldn't do a thing about it. The electronics field is less forgiving.
 
DocSavage said:
Dude. I've seen vindictive, petty and toxic environment working fast food. It's all rather random in who you happen to come across.
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This argument doesn't hold up.

One would expect uneducated misfits to work fast food. And the High School bullshit that comes with it.
 
His title @ Apple in Sydney, Australia: "Quality Program Manager - JAPAC"

Meetings are pretty much all he would do. I'm not sure why he would apply for and accept such a position. It sounds boring as hell to me. He just comes off as a dissatisfied whiner, knocking over pencil cups and papers as stomps out like a 4 year old child.
 
16hr days? In what universe is this legal? And we are complaining about conditions in China?!
 
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