Apple fires engineer after his daughter’s iPhone X video goes viral
bizjournals.com
bizjournals.com
Welp, if you weren't getting fired for showing off the iPhone X before it ships without permission you should be fired for being at Apple for four years and not realizing this might be a problem.
I can't even take this as genuine. I seriously wonder if they were already half out the door for other reasons.
I don’t think it’s particularly genuine either, but it’s not a quote from the employee.
He must have known he'd be fired. No one of his seniority is that naive. And no way they shot all this footage in the Cafè and had this much face-to-face interaction with workers there without someone reminding them about "No Photography." No reasonable response he could've given except that they had permission.
Edit: Come think of it, forget about the iPhone X, this is probably one of the very few (only?) videos ever of Cafe Macs.
The engineer did violate his NDA, but he was trying to help out his daughter. Should your job really come before family especially since he didn't reveal anything truly secret.
I'm always nervous when I see phrasing like this because it all depends on what you mean by "come before". For example, I would love to spend 40+ more hours per week with my family, but I don't. That doesn't mean I put work before my family, it means I love my family enough to provide for them.
Conversely, if I had a job that required 40 hours per week (objectives and culture wise) and I worked 80 hours for the fun of it, then this would be a clear case of putting work before my family. In that case, no, I shouldn't be doing it.
The question here is which category (if either) does this fall into? It seems as though the issue here is the employee had a non-disclosure condition of employment, which he violated. The "help" he provided his daughter may have helped her financially, though I suspect ego was the primary driver for both the employee and the daughter. As unpopular as it may be to side with the big-bad-company, I think Apple acted appropriately here.
Somehow hard to believe.
The article mentions that the phone had been announced and the press already had access to it. A teenager is unlikely to think much about the ship date and unlikely to think about the press having restricted access at all.
The ball really falls into the father's court. Not only is he the one covered by the NDA, he also has more life experience and more experience with Apple to realize that he should not have shown his daughter the phone (nevermind let her film it).
Father told/showed daughter prototype phone in breach of an NDA that I know he signed if he had access to that hardware. Daughter felt really proud of superstar daddy and took to the internet to show off.
Apple has three recourses,
1) Sue the employee to the fullest extent covered under the NDA. My employer can hold me personally liable for any loss of revenue and it wouldn't be hard to claim damage on this.
2) Ignore the incident, set a precedent that leaks are ok. Or internally lambast the employee which is akin to bullying in some eyes.
3) Terminate the employee, allow a clean break and for the employee to persue other jobs with newly accrued information (IE; that when your NDA says "NOBODY (inc. Family) are to be told [...] that it generally means it.
This is a non-story. Yes, it's sad. But it's wholly self-inflicted and I think Apple took the least destructive path on this.
I hate that HN lets you downvote without an explanation.
edit: And now I'm being down voted for asking a question!? Wtf is going on.. I'm trying to get information here..
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
I do find it very strange that we're not supposed to foster discussion, but rather quietly accept silencing of dissenting views. Seems very against the meaningful discussions that I come up HN for. Strange for me.
Thank you, despite it breaking the rules I guess. I'm let down by HN this day. :/
Second rule of HN: you get the idea....
Eg, if someone writes a long well thought out post, full of information, and is down voted heavily - should we not question it? It seems the HN mantra is "well the masses have spoken, best not to question them".
I don't give a damn about someones magic internet points, but what I'm being told is I cannot try and prompt actual discussion? I just have to remain dumb about something I'm missing, because that's what a HNer is supposed to do?
This seems so wrong :/
Honestly, this seems like an above (not by you exactly) of the root idea. By all means, don't talk about down votes, but I wasn't - I was talking about the content, that others apparently did not find worthy. Why was it not worthy?
Why is it a good rule to not understand why things aren't worthy? Again, I'm not talking about magic internet numbers, I'm talking about content - yet we're not allowed to do that either. Wtf?
I can only assume everyone else is perfectly fine with it - except yours is not the first post I've seen like this.
This is the nature of a lot of journalism these days, with many outlets either (a) reiterating what's in a press release or (b) reporting what has already been reported elsewhere. This happens with plenty of stories, even without an agenda.
If that is true, then it would seem pretty arbitrary to fire the employee, especially since the articles makes it seem like his daughter took the video down immediately on request.
Regardless, there is no shortage of demand for RF engineers. An engineer with 17 years of experience, getting fired over something uniquely a concern for Apple, that he was not even primarily responsible for, and getting featured on TechCrunch... This could be one of the best things to ever happen to his career.
Much worse violations have happened in the past at Apple, and were unintentional. Like the firmware leak that leaked everything about this year's iPhones. As far as I know, nobody was fired for that, because it was a mistake.
NDA's are very effective when you are talking about documents and adults. As soon as you're talking about devices and/or kids NDA's are ineffective because anybody that spots the device can post a picture without any recourse by the company and kids will do whatever they want to in today's connected world.
Whether it was smart or not is another matter but I feel that firing someone over something like this is way too harsh, besides all the good publicity it gave Apple. But I guess when you're a tech-fashion company it's perfectly ok to ignore the realities of producing physical goods and the fact that you're going to have to let your product out of your control at some point.
This all happened on Apple's campus, mentioned in the second paragraph. Maybe read the article before commenting?
I visited a couple of hardware manufacturers in the past (Swatch, Logitech) and have seen pre-production hardware of which only single working prototypes existed. There is no way that you'd be able to take a photograph of any of those and those are not companies that are as paranoid as Apple about this stuff.
My guess is that they are making an example out of this guy to cover up their utter failure in process that allowed this to happen in the first place.
Okay, but testing consumer products in the real world is an extremely common occurrence, and you have to walk a fine line between inadequate testing and product disclosure. Its fine to propose idealistic solutions, but without providing means of actually implementing those proposals, it doesn't help anyone. Keeping radio devices confined on premises would have severely impacted their testing.
>As soon as you're talking about devices and/or kids NDA's are ineffective because anybody that spots the device can post a picture without any recourse by the company and kids will do whatever they want to in today's connected world.
That's not the same as giving your kid an unreleased product. The adult is still responsible for _their_ actions.
(As opposed to a practical reason, like "what he did mattered.")
NDAs are serious. If I violated a NDA I would likely be taken to court as well as fired.
Unless, of course, you're in a position of power. Then you do.
That kind of cheapens the idea that we're all working to build something great. Situations like this reveal what we're really working for.
The choice was made when he signed the NDA. That's literally what signing it means.
Your options are to smile and sign, or start your own company. And the latter isn't practical for most of us.
Seems to me the overwhelming majority of people are free to make the choice to start their own company. Or, am I missing something...?
In the video, we can see an email on his phone marked "restricted" with a project code name and some other details. That could potentially be harmful. His daugher is probably not allowed to see that, let alone post it on youtube.
Not to mention, they want to tightly control the message prior to the pre-order sale... they don't want any unfinished software on the device changing people's opinion and affecting pre-orders unnecessarily.
Now he's seen it and can leak the design to the world and nobody would know. Or were there dozens of these prototypes running around the Apple campus and everyone (including contractors and guests) knows to look the other way?
Remember that one guy they fired for a bad decorated apartment? You got life a representative lifestyle- so designer cloths, designer furniture- else apple does not want to associated with you. IKEA is very very close to crossing a line there.
No. What are you talking about?
Maybe it is sarcasm, but it’s bizarre if so. (Bizarre either way, actually.)
If they cut off his hands, that would be loss of livelihood, but he will probably be able to get another job in the field.
If his reputation is so sullied that he can't get a tech job, well, then that isn't really just on Apple.
Sucks if he really liked his job, but I doubt he'll be out of work long enough to really feel it financially.