The Verge editor secretly joins Apple, doesn't inform the Verge
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
- You wouldn't risk your new position by not quitting your old one.
- Apple would not want you to keep your old job since they want your focus on your new position.
- Getting double salaries is not worth the paperwork headache of tricking the system.
The only reason I can think of is, he would get some sort of extra pay from his old job if he would fulfil a time written on his old contract.
(conspiracy intensifies)
I don't believe this of course, but hey, tinfoil.
Anyway, this theory is getting too convoluted, hence almost certainly false :)
It turned out playing out much like what Patel describes with Ziegler. Manager at old job became suspicious when he became largely unresponsive and figured out what was going on, then fired him. I think he thought he could do both at once better than he was able to.
Was he trying to time slice multiple processes like an OS?
I knew someone who jumped from TiVo to Google and part of the contention in the timing of the switch for him was options vesting.
So Google (well his hiring mgr/HR) told him to keep working at TiVo and get his bonus from them and they'd have something lined up for him to jump immediately afterwards. They couldn't let him work on Google proprietary stuff, though.
Given his experience in both tech media and automotive media, perhaps he was hired at Apple as part of the team whose responsibility it will be to construct the messaging and narrative around the unveiling of Apple's car program. As part of the secrecy around the project, he might well have been hired by one of Apple's automotive shell companies [1], thus his name not appearing in the Apple intranet.
As for his employment overlap, that sounds more like a mishandled quiet departure than anything else – Apple HR would certainly have instructed him to keep his transition low-profile, and maybe he simply screwed it up.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/alleged-apple-front-company-a...
But I've never heard of this kind of double-dipping. Other than the brief extra paycheck, this is all massive downside, particularly in media becomes the grist for another news cycle. The fact that he's also just gone silent on Twitter makes me think there is some other problem here.
That's probably not super crazy for a reasonably senior writer working on "longish" form stuff. While a month is probably a long time, I wouldn't be surprised if a week or two usually passed without touching base. It might take a couple of those "week or two" cycles to notice someone hasn't checked in.
The article also says it wasn't unnoticed, and that they tried to reach him several times in that period.
In this case, it turned out to be something else, but that's why I wouldn't have rushed to fire if I were in HR at the Verge.
However, it looks like nobody was able to reach him, which might mean he had an accident.
Regardless, keeping coworkers in the dark is bad form, even if Apple was pressuring him to do so (which might not have been the case at all).
but it doesn't really fill in all the gaps. Like where he is now, if he still works there, etc.
I imagine a pretty good engineer could maybe work two full time jobs pretty easily remotely working 4-5 hours per day on each gig.
3hours each and you could be totally productive (and not burnout)
if you're running two well-paying full employments with all benefits, you have a sweet gig going.
only possible in the US due to the setup of healthcare and overall taxes, etc.
And are paid more to compensate for it. Whereas if you're working for two employers you're "paying" for two sets of healthcare etc., which seems wasteful.
Double-dipping on insurance policies messes with their actuarial table calculations.