I Quit: What Really Goes on at Apple

[heatlesssun]

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.

A little thing called human nature.

 

[Zion Halcyon]

Nope, I work for Boeing. The place is pretty well oiled. Just have to get used to the culture.

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)

You nailed it.

I've worked for 2 corporations and 2 educational institutions in my career, and guess which one had the worse politics, backstabbing, and nonsensical bullshit?

The Educational institutions both times (a university and a school district). I got stories that rival the apple guys.

Is there always some office politics wherever you go? Of course. Nature of any job.

But what I've found at my corporate stops is that where I have worked is 90% or more performance-based. Do your job, and you got nothing to worry about. Hell, the last corporate job I held I got a couple of $2500 bonuses for going above and beyond in a given quarter, and I wasn't even at their corporate headquarters in CA - I worked out of the Midwest in a satellite office.

Don't buy the "all corporations are evil!" bullshit. There are some bad ones, but plenty of good out there too. Most of the bad ironically seem to be in the Silicon Valley area. Maybe its just proof Californians need to get out more? Corporate Culture isn't all or even mostly like Silicon Valley - that place just seems to be a cesspool where asshole management congregates.

 

[Dawill]

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.

I wouldn't take too much stock in any one opinion. Some companies are more political than others. I've worked a few very high profile tech companies myself. I'll leave out the details, but most of the politics are localized to individual managers. Most companies try to make things work fairly well in general and have sensible policies. However it's very important for individual managers, be they high level or entry level managers, to enforce them. So you could just as easily have a bad experience at a very good company just solely based on your manager. It sucks because starting out it's harder to identify such things and you might get stuck in a bad situation, but it's easy to bail if you don't have kids or a mortgage.

As somebody else stated this is human nature. The corporate system, and life in general is competitive. Some people have to use politics to get ahead. However I would say engineering is much more based on technical performance than bullshit like other sales/marketing/customer service/etc. So I wouldn't jump ship. I still think it's the best career field to be in personally. I don't have 25years experience, but I'm in double digits. In the end you leave managers, not companies.

 

[nilepez]

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.

I'm talking about Software groups. I have no comment on Call Centers, because I've never worked in one. The people I know who've worked in them said they were universally shitty places to work.

 

[nilepez]

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

While I don't disagree that Cook has to take some of the blame, the bottom line is the environment is one that started with Jobs. It sounds very similar to the stories of his style when the Mac was first developed. So we can blame Cook for not ending it, but anyway you look at it, what the guy describes is Apple to the core.

As for Balmer, I think he's getting the shaft. The guy took MS to record profits during his tenure. They had a lot of failures with new products, but that's nothing new for MS (Bob any one?). It seems like Nadella is changing things, but to me the changes we see now are probably the first ones that he really changed. MS is the a giant ship and it takes time to change things. Of course the other issue is likely that Gates didn't like giving up control and the fact that he appears more involved now indicates that there may have been some high level politics undermining Balmer.

Note that I'm not upset at the change, but I think he's getting the shaft not unlike Fiorina at HP (whose successor was hailed for changes immediately after he took over...which clearly had to be in place before he took over).

 

[evilsofa]

Already looking for another career path without politics and idiocy.

There are none.

 

[zer0nix]

of the four types of employees, the most deleterious and destructive are the stupid but industrious. -i'll leave it to y'all to decide which positions can be so described.


>One would expect uneducated misfits to work fast food. And the High School bullshit that comes with it.

sociopathy and idiocy have nothing to do with education.

you can't fix stupid and you can't fix evil. what you can do is root it out and make an attempt to eliminate it.