I Quit: What Really Goes on at Apple

M'ichal said:
16hr days? In what universe is this legal? And we are complaining about conditions in China?!
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In the USA many professional positions are classified as Exempt (especially engineer and manager positions) ... exempt employees are not covered by any of the restrictions on hours or overtime (nor are they directly paid for overtime) ... 16 hour days are not usually common with any company but they happen ... my longest contiguous day was about 36 hours (came in Thursday morning, had to work through the night due to a production machine being down, then had to teach a class on Friday) ... I also had 24, 19, and 17 hour days back to back during a product launch ... those sorts of situations are not common as they tend to burn out employees, but I suspect workers at any of the Silicon Valley firms have encountered them at one time or another ;)
 
Ruoh said:
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.
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a huge corporation with hundreds or thousands of employees and someone is surprised or annoyed that his or her department has to meet before those managers go to the next meeting? cry me a river... :rolleyes:
 
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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Agree. And it's really the fault of leadership. Those in charge would rather protect their high paying jobs and pad their reputations than put their necks on the line to better their organization.
 
It is no secret that apple thinks your stupid, just look at their ads (particularly history of them leading up to the modern ad). Bright colours, pop music, all designed to distract you from their over priced garbage. It is no surprise they are toxic on the inside as well as out.

Best part is they are right, most people are stupid.
 
I used to work at Boeing and the first Dilbert cartoon I could commiserate with was regarding meetings.
 
The Apple mega-corp manifesto, lol.
Well, at least someone woke up and smelled the coffee after drinking the flavor-aid. :D
 
Navilor said:
I used to work at Boeing and the first Dilbert cartoon I could commiserate with was regarding meetings.
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Sally Forth had a cartoon years ago where she was assigned to the "meeting meeting" (the meeting to decide what meetings they needed to have) ... her secretary then chided her that maybe someday she would be assigned to the "committee committee" ... to which she replied "Dare to dream" :D ... it seemed far too appropriate for how big business works :cool:
 
kbrickley said:
Sally Forth had a cartoon years ago where she was assigned to the "meeting meeting" (the meeting to decide what meetings they needed to have) ... her secretary then chided her that maybe someday she would be assigned to the "committee committee" ... to which she replied "Dare to dream" :D ... it seemed far too appropriate for how big business works :cool:
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My favorite are multi-hour "decision" meetings where no one can summon up the courage to actually make a decision...and the only "decision" is to have multiple more meetings on each of several details brought up in this meeting.

Paralysis by analysis is real. Sometimes you have to recognize when further information has diminishing returns and just make a damn call; information will almost 100% of the time be imperfect. Even if it is perfect, we're imperfect computers.
 
This was my experience in corporate America. Add to it, promotions that are awarded multiple times, yet never actually happen.. People put into "interim" management positions that last for years, keeping people hostage to advancement without the corresponding pay or other benefits.. Layoffs where managers make the determination who stays or goes, only to have seniors several levels up (that have never even met the affected employees) make indiscriminate changes... It goes on and on in my experience.

But yeah the whole thing is more a reflection of corporate America than it is just Apple.
 
Steve said:
Even if only half of what this guy says is true, it is still pretty damn bad. And you thought your job sucked. :eek:
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This doesn't really surprise me. It's kinda what I'd expect at Apple. Most of what I've heard about Steve Jobs makes me think that the culture is an extension of him. I always heard he was a horrible boss, especially before he was canned.
 
He probably would have been treated better if he was a homosexual.
 
kbrickley said:
In the USA many professional positions are classified as Exempt (especially engineer and manager positions) ... exempt employees are not covered by any of the restrictions on hours or overtime (nor are they directly paid for overtime) ... 16 hour days are not usually common with any company but they happen ... my longest contiguous day was about 36 hours (came in Thursday morning, had to work through the night due to a production machine being down, then had to teach a class on Friday) ... I also had 24, 19, and 17 hour days back to back during a product launch ... those sorts of situations are not common as they tend to burn out employees, but I suspect workers at any of the Silicon Valley firms have encountered them at one time or another ;)
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Sometimes they'll disguise it too. One of my engineering jobs had mandatory 10 hour weekdays, and mandatory 6 hour Saturdays. That's "only" 56 hours, but they also had mandatory training classes that were "on your own time" because they were considered a benefit. You'd get off work at 5:30, have an hour to eat, and be back at 6:30 for training. That was 4 days/week for 2-3 hour time blocks and lasted pretty much all of my first year.

Not sure if it would have continued, b/cI quit after that, but had to stay that long to recoup all of my relocation expenses the company paid.
 
TwistedAegis said:
My favorite are multi-hour "decision" meetings where no one can summon up the courage to actually make a decision...and the only "decision" is to have multiple more meetings on each of several details brought up in this meeting.

Paralysis by analysis is real. Sometimes you have to recognize when further information has diminishing returns and just make a damn call; information will almost 100% of the time be imperfect. Even if it is perfect, we're imperfect computers.
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I tend to be more of a type A person so those types of meetings rarely occur when I am invited ... also, the Intel method of consensus was "Disagree and commit" ... everybody got their say but once the decision was made (and decisions WERE MADE) then everybody had to follow along with it ...

the hardest part was managing some of the PHD types who wanted solutions that would take months and years to implement rather than days or weeks (when we were lines down or close to launch dates) so I had to carefully guide them towards their managers so they could grab the development opportunity but keep the team focused on the launch or lines down situation ... herding cats sometimes :cool:

the most useful tool in any meeting is always the "Parking lot" or "Bin List" where you capture the items that are rat holing discussions ... I was in one meeting though (by phone) that was so ineffectively managed that they were finding rat holes in the rat holes :eek: ... those are always a treat :p
 
Sounds a LOT like when I worked at Microsoft. I spent more time in meetings then I did doing any work. We had a daily "scrum" meeting, then 2-3 weekly meetings to talk about the scrum's. Then we had a monthly department wide meeting that we would have a meeting to prepare for. Then we had a big meeting every 2-3 months to show progress. The problem is the progress was a dog and pony show that we would spend an entire week preparing for, and that would take place of actual work since most of what we did was throw-away work.

Too many chief's, and not enough Indian's. But they are fixing that since now most of Microsoft's employee's are now from India...
 
In my 25 year engineering career I can safely say I've seen it all. I have friends that work at Apple and in the bay area in general and it's like this at a lot of companies. It's ego, pure and simple. Someone comes in and if they don't like you, they find ways to trip you up, make you suffer, ask you to do things that are cringe-worthy. It's cliquey and lord of the flies like. I've been in design review meetings that lasted days at 12 to 15 hour stretches. Ridiculous. People sitting there jawing for almost nothing than what could have been talked about in an hour. Play the game or leave. When I was younger, this was happening to a lot of us and finally I went into my managers office cause the other guys were to scared and I told him straight up that what he was doing was bullshit. The long hours, the ridiculous understaffed deadlines, the broken promises, cancelled vacations for deadlines there were non-existent and meant nothing other than his milestones that no one else had input on. He looked me dead in the eye and said that I didn't like it I can leave. I told him I would, but not before I would jump to the VP who I knew from another company and spilled what he was doing. He dared me to do it. I did it anyway, gave my two weeks and bounced. After that three quarters of the engineering staff left cause of this guy. VP canned him and called us all back. About half came back, the other half went elsewhere.

a few months later I ran into this dude at a restaurant at a lunch I was having with some new co-workers. He thought he could saunter over and try to embarrass me in front of them about what I did at the last company. These guys knew who this clown was. Everyone is connected in the valley/bay area somehow. People know people. People know the good guys and the bad.

Companies like Apple harbor people like this because they are a huge, bureaucratic organization now akin to government. Their processes and workflows are no different now. They even have engineering organizations within the company that produce work that goes nowhere so that one team doesn't know what the other is doing to catch people from leaking secrets from one side to the other. It's insanity. Like I said, I'm 25 years into my engineering career and I'm looking to get out and do something else careerwise to leverage my knowledge into something else. I've seriously considered becoming a heavy equipment operator. The hours are early, but I don't care and I don't have to put up with shitheads. Maybe even in that industry. I don't know. Going to try it though anyway.
 
nilepez said:
This doesn't really surprise me. It's kinda what I'd expect at Apple. Most of what I've heard about Steve Jobs makes me think that the culture is an extension of him. I always heard he was a horrible boss, especially before he was canned.
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He was just a horrible human being.
 
Oh, the other shit I hate more is everyone trying to one up everyone else. Whether it's in conversation, a meeting, the work, whatever. God that gets tiring.
 
I see these posts, "it's just like every corporate environment" and can't help but laugh. I'm guessing 98% of you have never held a position of power in any company, albeit a corporate enterprise. What is described is NOT the environment created at most corporations. Finding and retaining talent is MUCH less expensive than churning it through. If you had any experience in mid to upper management you would know that. It's the same as a customer - it's many times more expensive to replace a customer than retain and grow one.

Of course you have the under-qualified, tiny swinging dick, lower management who treat the entry level employees like shit. This is because they don't know how to manage. The ultimate goal of any manager should be to grow his or her team. This gentlemen isn't writing about an entry position. He is writing about the sadistic nature of upper management in a poorly run company.

I recently worked directly under a VP who decided to attempt to have the CEO of my company let me go while I was in Mexico for my wedding. A wedding I had put my PTO request in a year in advance. He was a bully and behaved many times in a way this gentlemen describes management does at Apple. Funny thing is he is no longer with the company, I have his position, and he now works for a company 1/100th of our revenue; best part he is in a lesser position. Eventually it will catch up to people like this, unless the corporation has a culture that encourages. It sounds like Apple does.

/end rant (sorry)
 
mope54 said:
a huge corporation with hundreds or thousands of employees and someone is surprised or annoyed that his or her department has to meet before those managers go to the next meeting? cry me a river... :rolleyes:
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Yes, because said meetings are generally a useless waste of time.
 
Going to be brutally honest, this sounds like most every corp I've worked for or been involved with. I'll sum up most of them, it's like high school, but worse. This is going to sound sexist but it's just the damn truth, the more women are involved, usually the worse that high school drama bullshit is. It doesn't matter how good you are in most places, just that you are kissing the correct ass. Also if you are banging a co-worker, you are playing with fire and its only a matter of time until she cries foul and your happy ass is terminated so fast your head will spin.
 
Stories like this is why I don't work in a corporate environment. Crap like this would make me postal.
 
I watched a show on the development of the Boeing 747 a couple days ago. They had an executive on there who was asked to let go a large portion of his engineering staff because the company was having money issues at the time. He knew that really what he needed was more engineers not less and if he let them go the whole project and the company could fold. Going into the meeting he knew he could lose his job sticking up for these guys and insisting that they don't lay any of them off. He got his way and Boeing and the 747 are a great success story.

We need more people like that. Paid to have that type of responsibility and aren't browbeaten and afraid to stick up for what is the best course of action no matter what the politics of the situation are.

I've worked in IT departments where we have certain policies and "rules" set by our management. And as soon as someone in executive or officer level leadership decides that it shouldn't apply to them - management folds like a deck of cards instead of sticking up for our policies and procedures.
 
Ruoh said:
Yes, because said meetings are generally a useless waste of time.
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although companies have plenty of useless meetings, not all meetings are useless ... I have always worked for multinational companies and have often had matrix managers ... meetings are sometimes necessary to communicate upwards, downwards, and sideways ... with lots of travel restrictions this year (at my current employer), meetings are sometimes the only way to collaborate globally on big projects or issues
 
haste. said:
I recently worked directly under a VP who decided to attempt to have the CEO of my company let me go while I was in Mexico for my wedding.


Funny thing is he is no longer with the company, I have his position, and he now works for a company 1/100th of our revenue; best part he is in a lesser position.
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The best revenge is living well (and walking away with "their" stuff).

The next best is shooting/punching/cattle-prodding the smug fucker in the face at the absolute height of their smugness and continuing until they need a tracheotomy and an iron lung to breath.

Granted, #2 stops being fun around the time they arrest you. But still. There's LOTS to be said for unrestrained catharsis!
 
if you actually did that to someone you'd have a fairly soft ride through prison, too, so it wouldn't be a total loss
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Going to be brutally honest, this sounds like most every corp I've worked for or been involved with. I'll sum up most of them, it's like high school, but worse. This is going to sound sexist but it's just the damn truth, the more women are involved, usually the worse that high school drama bullshit is. It doesn't matter how good you are in most places, just that you are kissing the correct ass. Also if you are banging a co-worker, you are playing with fire and its only a matter of time until she cries foul and your happy ass is terminated so fast your head will spin.
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IME, women are way better to work for. They have far better people skills than men. I'm not saying they're all great and I've worked with plenty of guys that were good and a few that were really good managers, but overall, women seem to be better managers.
 
nilepez said:
IME, women are way better to work for. They have far better people skills than men. I'm not saying they're all great and I've worked with plenty of guys that were good and a few that were really good managers, but overall, women seem to be better managers.
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I imagine career field and region play a significant role. The last time I had to I was a business analyst for a call center. Since I moved back to field it and contact work its been fine. Though I still maintain my stance about dipping in the company pool. I've seen too many guys get ruined due to that. Sure the rate one works our, but the odds are just too high that you're gonna be looking for another job a minimum.
 
And people wonder why so many of us loathe Apple so completely and utterly...the birthplace of the RDF. The whole blasted company is one big RDF indoctrination--I'm surprised that Scientology is not the official corporate religion at Apple...although "Mickey Mouse" seems a better fit...;)
 
"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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I actually find this entertaining to read. There's something special about it.
 
Tyler-Durden said:
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.
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Have to agree. Had my turn at it in the 90s working for a major electronic company.
They talked a lot about team work and not about individuals efforts or stepping on one another.
They had the walls covered with those inane motivational posters that were popular then (and a joke now). BUT the true culture was back stabbing, nepotism, cronyism, lying, and a general "throw 'em under the bus" way of handling issues. Management NEVER admitted to mistakes.

I will never forget when I was told to order double the usual inventory of a 80MB (yeah, megabyte) hard drives because the influx of failure claims were so high. Made sense; so I did. When the inventory report came in out of balance I was thrown under the wheel. My boss (who told me to do it) and a district manager chewing my ass out because I took it upon myself to make such an order. I stood there and took it. Only saying "yes sir, right away sir". Afterwards when the district manager left I confronted my boss over the issue. He actually said he never told me to change the order.
I turned around and walked away shaking my head. But really I knew that was the end for me. I wasn't really one of the 'insiders'. I didn't go out drinking with them. I wasn't included in some meetings (even though my peers were). I didn't like their crooked, dishonest culture.
I wasn't surprised when I got hit with the next round of layoff but afterward I was glad I was free from that hell hole.
 
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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I'm not sure i agree with that. Steve Jobs was an asshole, but he was probably one of the only CEOs to earn his pay and most importantly he is dead and has been for a while. Even assuming the culture's creation is his fault, if this is the culture now, its Tim Cooks fault. Period.

I don't buy the all out capitalist line either. I've worked in government, military and major corporations and every time i've seen something like this happen (which i have seen everywhere) has been the result of a managers being made leaders and those managers not conducting the proper oversight or being properly prepared for that transition. Being a manger and a leader are two fundamentally different things.

I do think the leadership system does bear fault. The lack of an actual leader allows the people making decisions to run on a quarter to quarter bases, never thinking long term health. Eon Musk is a leader, Steve Jobs was a leader, Bill Gates was a leader. Tim Cook and Steve Balmer are managers. Just to put it in perspective of what i'm thinking along. I'd actually argue most CEOs are managers and not leaders for whatever the entity's long term detriment
 
Dr. Righteous said:
Have to agree. Had my turn at it in the 90s working for a major electronic company.
They talked a lot about team work and not about individuals efforts or stepping on one another.
They had the walls covered with those inane motivational posters that were popular then (and a joke now). BUT the true culture was back stabbing, nepotism, cronyism, lying, and a general "throw 'em under the bus" way of handling issues. Management NEVER admitted to mistakes.

I will never forget when I was told to order double the usual inventory of a 80MB (yeah, megabyte) hard drives because the influx of failure claims were so high. Made sense; so I did. When the inventory report came in out of balance I was thrown under the wheel. My boss (who told me to do it) and a district manager chewing my ass out because I took it upon myself to make such an order. I stood there and took it. Only saying "yes sir, right away sir". Afterwards when the district manager left I confronted my boss over the issue. He actually said he never told me to change the order.
I turned around and walked away shaking my head. But really I knew that was the end for me. I wasn't really one of the 'insiders'. I didn't go out drinking with them. I wasn't included in some meetings (even though my peers were). I didn't like their crooked, dishonest culture.
I wasn't surprised when I got hit with the next round of layoff but afterward I was glad I was free from that hell hole.
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I think most working stiffs that have around long enough have similar stories. Can't say I've every worked for someone that I knew was straight up lying to my face but I've certainly suspected it on a few occasions.

Fortunately this hasn't been the norm for me but it's this kind of thing that makes work very discouraging.
 
Romale23 said:
Eon Musk is a leader, Steve Jobs was a leader, Bill Gates was a leader. Tim Cook and Steve Balmer are managers. Just to put it in perspective of what i'm thinking along. I'd actually argue most CEOs are managers and not leaders for whatever the entity's long term detriment
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I see what you're saying. But particularly in the case of Jobs and Gates, you're talking about transformative figures in the IT world. Virtually no one coming after them was going to have the same kind of stature. I think that Ballmer was actually not a bad CEO. He made his mistakes but had he been anywhere else besides Microsoft at the time he was a produced the overall results there that he did at Microsoft, he would have been heralded as a great CEO/leader.
 
evilsofa said:
What if I told you that "This is going to sound sexist but" is always followed by something sexist?
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Depends on what follows, sometimes the truth hurts. Reality is in many (not all) work environments many women haven't moved beyond the pretty, judgemental drama of high school. Sometimes someone has to call a spade a spade instead of just pretending it isn't. I've worked many corporate environments over the years. It's the same shit over and over and it's sad.
 
Methadras said:
In my 25 year engineering career I can safely say I've seen it all. I have friends that work at Apple and in the bay area in general and it's like this at a lot of companies. It's ego, pure and simple. Someone comes in and if they don't like you, they find ways to trip you up, make you suffer, ask you to do things that are cringe-worthy. It's cliquey and lord of the flies like. I've been in design review meetings that lasted days at 12 to 15 hour stretches. Ridiculous. People sitting there jawing for almost nothing than what could have been talked about in an hour. Play the game or leave. When I was younger, this was happening to a lot of us and finally I went into my managers office cause the other guys were to scared and I told him straight up that what he was doing was bullshit. The long hours, the ridiculous understaffed deadlines, the broken promises, cancelled vacations for deadlines there were non-existent and meant nothing other than his milestones that no one else had input on. He looked me dead in the eye and said that I didn't like it I can leave. I told him I would, but not before I would jump to the VP who I knew from another company and spilled what he was doing. He dared me to do it. I did it anyway, gave my two weeks and bounced. After that three quarters of the engineering staff left cause of this guy. VP canned him and called us all back. About half came back, the other half went elsewhere.

a few months later I ran into this dude at a restaurant at a lunch I was having with some new co-workers. He thought he could saunter over and try to embarrass me in front of them about what I did at the last company. These guys knew who this clown was. Everyone is connected in the valley/bay area somehow. People know people. People know the good guys and the bad.

Companies like Apple harbor people like this because they are a huge, bureaucratic organization now akin to government. Their processes and workflows are no different now. They even have engineering organizations within the company that produce work that goes nowhere so that one team doesn't know what the other is doing to catch people from leaking secrets from one side to the other. It's insanity. Like I said, I'm 25 years into my engineering career and I'm looking to get out and do something else careerwise to leverage my knowledge into something else. I've seriously considered becoming a heavy equipment operator. The hours are early, but I don't care and I don't have to put up with shitheads. Maybe even in that industry. I don't know. Going to try it though anyway.
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Thanks for the post man. I'm pretty early on the engineer career path, but this isn't where I want to be headed. Already looking for another career path without politics and idiocy. You'd think at least scientists and engineers could get shit done without bickering like schoolgirls.
 
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