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Comment by taywrobel | Hacker News Reader

That’s a major part of why I left Apple for GitHub. Their OSS culture is horrible there.

The only OSS projects that get approved to contribute to are ones where they’ve already hired most of the people that work on it. Cassandra, Mesos, and some other infra stuff come to mine. And occasionally they just buy a whole OSS company for their own use (FoundationDB).

Submitting a patch to a small library you use? A multi-month process to be told no in the end 90% of the time or more. Have your own OSS projects? Not any more you don’t.

In my exit interview I made my reasoning clear, and pointed out that as they move more into services and away from pure hardware as revenue, it’s going to be a bigger issue. Whether they agree or will work to fix it, only time will tell.

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Genuine question, what's the value of providing feedback in an exit interview. At best you get nothing from it, and at worst you get put on some secret hiring blacklist. Either way nothing changes, you're just a datapoint in some HR piechart.

This. I presume it's hoping if enough do it, they'll be forced to change.

Genuine answer - I have a metric shit ton of Apple stock after being there for several years. I want to see the company succeed, purely for financial reasons if none other. At least until I hold the stock for a year and only pay capital gains on it.

Secret hiring blacklists don’t exist. And if they did, I wouldn’t want to work at a company that uses them anyways.

There’s a lot of confidence there for lack of hiring blacklists when Google, Apple, etc are known to have shared hiring data with each other to underpay new hires.

I've been involved with hiring in several companies accused of having "blacklists" or other shady hiring practices. The closest I have ever seen is recruiters or engineers recognizing problematic people from previous jobs and flagging that with the hiring manager. But there's no magic list they consult. Having such a thing even exist would be ripe for a heavy discrimination lawsuit if it ever saw the light of day.

Maybe I'm wrong and I'll be unemployed forever now that I had the apparent audacity to say this, but... yeah, I doubt it.

Maybe not quite what's being intended by this discussion, but definitely related to hiring blacklists in general (if for a different reason), were Google, Apple and Adobe agreeing not to hire some of each other's employees.[1]

1: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...

Many companies DO have self-hiring blacklists. Basically a checkbox that says "would rehire". I don't know if there are legal criteria necessary to check that box.

I haven't heard of them sharing the lists with other companies.

Apple and other companies have also had do-not-hire agreements with business partners (basically no-poaching) but they were sued and I believe stopped doing that.

Now unofficially, your guess is as good as mine.

Yeah, but Apple seems to hold grudges against everyone who leaves, so I’m not too worried about that.

I heard rumors of recruiting guidelines to not accept people back who left Apple to go to Netflix back when it was the new kid on the block. I also only knew 2 people who left and came back in several years there.

Given the rest of my experience there I am not chomping at the bit to return. It’s not a great place to work in server side infrastructure. At least not until some significant cultural shifts occur.

> I have a metric shit ton of Apple stock after being there for several years. At least until I hold the stock for a year and only pay capital gains on it.

Genuine question for anyone who gets RSUs at a public company like this. Why do you keep your $FANG stock when it is granted?

You've already paid income tax on the basis, which is the closing price the day you got it. The year long timer for long term capital gains tax starts the day you get it. So vesting $X of grants on your vesting day and holding is equivalent to just buying $X of stock on any old day. As a bonus, you're already heavily heavily exposed to that stock because A) they're your employer, and B) presumably unvested RSUs coming in the future.

It's not an equivalent of buying. It's an equivalent of receiving it and paying taxes on it immediately right with the stock, or with your cash if you so choose.

If your particular letter of FAANG currently outperforms the market ("S&P 500" index, etc), I see no incentive to immediately sell it and reinvest into something else. Of course you can sell and reinvest if you see an even better investment opportunity, but most of the employees don't, they are engineers, not experienced stock traders.

What's the difference that it is not equivalent to buying? Nothing is special tax-wise about those shares that they came from RSUs. If you got N shares at $X you've paid taxes on $X*N, she same if you bought those shares with cash in your bank account. If you wish to own extra stock in your employer you'd be better suited to dollar cost average and buy every paycheck.

> If [your company] currently outperforms the market

What does that mean? Outperforms over some past time period? That has no bearing on the future. If you have insider knowledge that you think your company will outperform the market in the future I agree it makes sense to keep, but see above about dollar cost averaging and also consult your lawyer about insider trading laws.

> most [don't], they are engineers, not experienced stock traders.

Exactly, and the standard advice for non-experts is to buy index funds. Not try and guess which specific companies will outperform the market.

You're invited to a meeting, asked for your input on a work related matter, you're being paid to be there, it's part of your job because you haven't left yet. On what grounds would you reasonably refuse to answer? They already know you're unhappy enough to leave, if they're going to retaliate for that they already can.

> At best you get nothing from it

At best, other people can get something from it.

Telling them about systemic issues doesn't really get you a black mark, and maybe if they hear it from enough people they might fix it. So it's altruistic.

Obviously it's not a good idea to bad mouth individual people in your exit interview. The time for that was when you still worked there and could give it as candid feedback.

Just as information, that seems to be a very US centric thing.

In Europe I have never done an exit interview, wasn't even aware that they are a thing if it wasn't for the occasional HN comments.

Naturally you might talk with someone informally, but isn't given.

I did have one, but I was working for an American company.

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