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Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

>I was an Apple employee for nearly 13 years, and I loved helping people get the most out of their Apple products. All of that ended about 6 months ago when Apple showed me its true colors. [...] I told him that yes I had in fact helped a friend with a data transfer (something Apple does for free) and that I had helped him on my own time. He told me that I had just admitted to a major conflict on interest, and that an official investigation in to my actions would now start, two days later I was suspended.

Maybe I'm missing some context but it seems like something huge has to be omitted from author's narrative.

There's just no way Apple Inc's ~137000 employees are all saying to friends & family, "nope, sorry, I can't help you with your iPhone/iPad/iMac because it's a conflict of interest and I'd get fired."

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Agreed. Nothing here adds up at all. Sounds to me like the author was let go for different reasons entirely (and this was just an easy excuse for management), or that something else is missing here.

The number of mentions about Apple providing the service "for free" makes it sound like the author perhaps actually charged their elderly friend, and honestly that would be a huge violation. I don't know exactly what the author's job was (can't find it on the site), but if their job is servicing Macs, it's very normal for their employment contract to forbid making money servicing Macs outside their job -- it's literally having your own employees compete with you.

But if the author didn't charge... then there's got to be a separate "real reason" they were fired.

> I don't know exactly what the author's job was (can't find it on the site), but if their job is servicing Macs, it's very normal for their employment contract to forbid making money servicing Macs outside their job -- it's literally having your own employees compete with you.

It still depends. Even if it's in the employment contract, the extent to which anti-moonlighting, non-compete, and other kinds of anti-competitive clauses that attempt to control the employee when they're not at work are enforceable varies drastically from case to case and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Conflicts of interest and potential IP theft can affect the decision, but even doing the exact same job just outside of your normal working hours is not necessarily grounds for a breach of contract.

In places like apple doing password resets / account unlocks to allow data transfer, even if you do that for free on the clock, is very commonly prohibited off the clock and/or for "friends".

I actually had a case recently where someone lost reset to a google account. They ended up (THANKFULLY) somehow getting a password reset through an enterprise account admin who had the pull of a huge contract to help out. But I'm sure it was cleared and on the clock for the employee side to do this because I immediately thought - awesome! and also thought - damn, whoever can do these transfers has a TON of power if they ever went rouge.

> In places like apple doing password resets / account unlocks to allow data transfer, even if you do that for free on the clock, is very commonly prohibited off the clock and/or for "friends".

Yep, that sounds like it could be more clear cut -- you're using employer resources/tools without permission.

Hell, he could have been fired for providing a competing service (even if it was for free).

That's one of the simpler theories. Mentioned to a co-worker he made some extra coin over the weekend helping a neighbor. The co-worker, for whatever reason, spilled the beans. Maybe he was on thin ice for other reasons...

Or maybe the manager had a grudge against him... happens a lot.

This is a retail outlet afterall, far away from the culture of the mothership.

But then this isn't the first time we read about an Apple Employee being majorly mistreated / Apple having a questionable work culture on Hacker News.

If I should guess such kind of article pops up around every half a year since I'm following Hacker News (I have an account since 4 years so more than that).

Some even came from people much higher up then this person seems to have been.

My guess is that they have a policy against it, but normally either don't hear about "private support" or don't care about it. But do use it to get ride of anyone who thinks differently in the sense that they don't agree with everything Apple does, like complaining to another employee that it's petty of Apple to sue some small company with a peach logo.

There are ex Apple employees here and on Reddit saying there’s no such policy, so either this manager made up a bogus excuse and risks getting fired themselves, or the author is concealing the real reason.

Surely the author must know this isn’t a policy violation though? Why not report the manager, or sue for wrongful termination? It doesn’t make any sense.

IANAL, but until someone posts the terms of employment for an Apple genius bar somewhere, everything is pure speculation.

You can be pretty much fired for any reason in any company, with or without cause. Apple probably isn't going to say anything. It could be as simple as the manager wanted to hire his best friend's son, and needed an open spot.

Well yes and no. California where I am is at will, which means the company can say hey, sorry do not need you and not give a reason. All good. However if they do give a reason then they are required to be able prove the reason is valid. Having managed a great deal of people I have been in situations where I would document any issues in detail, however at the end the company just did an “At Will” see yah termination as it is safer.

This is my understanding. IANAL or an HR person.

Pretty sure the company is on the hook for unemployment if they're fired without cause.

You're telling me Apple doesn't have a conflict of interest policy?

That sounds strange.

So the Geniuses at the Genius bar can basically openly tell people that they can go to the other shop they work at across the door and they will do the repair at half the price? And Apple will have no policy against that?

The ex Apple employees, including one posting here, say the conflict of interest policy does not prevent helping friends or family with tech problems for free.

It seems plausible this guy did so for money. Note that the post says the work was done in spare time but doesn’t say it was done for free. That would be a conflict of interest because it’s engaging in commercial activities also engaged with by Apple.

It's also possible that he took home some internal tools to use as well, which I can imagine would land him in hot water.

They don't need an excuse to fire anyone, the majority of the US is at-will employment, which means your employer can fire you without cause.

EDIT: What's with the downvotes? it's true.

It’s true, but it misses the point that they can be sued for age discrimination, violating their own governance policies, not properly training the worker, intentional infliction of abnormal stress, etc. BTW, I couldn’t downvote you if I wanted. Lots of Apple people involved in this site.

You are severely mistaken. At will doesn't mean you can fire people for any reason without liability. Wrongful termination is a thing that companies are terrified of. There are so many protected classes in CA, and firing someone in a protected class can have dire consequences. I've witnessed it first hand.

It's not a mistake, and it isn't severe. You're talking about exceptions to the law, not the law itself. The law is exercised thousands of times a day and wrongful termination lawsuits account for single-digit percentages.

As the plaintiff in such a case you need to be able to provide evidence that it's "reasonable to believe" that you were fired because of whatever protected class you fall into.

It can be difficult to do, especially if you're blindsided and escorted out of the building and cut off from any sort of evidence (tip: if you think you could be fired because of who you are, start keeping receipts before you're fired).

Previous to winning my own discrimination case, I was a juror in a case where an employer almost got away with blatantly discriminatory firing. They thought they were being sly by sacrificing another non-protected employee at the same time... but then bragged about it to an employee they didn't realize would rat them out. If it wasn't for that email there wouldn't have been enough evidence to know for sure.

That aside, if you're not a protected class (the majority of people aren't)... good luck. You can be fired without cause at any given moment.

> You're talking about exceptions to the law, not the law itself.

Yeah, exceptions are the problem, there are many.

> That aside, if you're not a protected class (the majority of people aren't)

80% of the people I work with are in a protected class.

> Previous to winning my own discrimination case

All the suits filed against my company in the last 35 years (2) were frivolous and we settled both of them. Good for you for winning a non-frivolous one, but in my experience (talking with other COO's) frivolous cases are very common.

It's fear of these frivolous cases that drive LOTS of behavior.

EDIT: there were threats of other suits (3-5). All frivolous.

I read the constant mentions of "for free" to point out that Apple was not losing any money from his helping out the neighbor. If Apple did charge for the data transfer service and he did it for free, then I could see Apple getting upset. Then again, maybe Apple offers data transfer for free as a loss leader to get the person in so they can charge them for some other service or product.

That's a bad take on the "for free" aspect. I think he pointed that out to say that his friend opted for his help rather than wait 1-2 weeks on the "free" service because it was inconvenient. I have my doubts about apple letting someone go for something that they do for free and also for doing something that basic in their own private lives. It's not impossible, just improbable

They might have been a fan of his manger's rival sports team.

Manager is a spiteful asshole and found a reason to fire them.

This also happens.

But I agree the official reason sounds like a corporate scapegoat to not get sued.

I get the same feel from something missing in the testimony, but, what would be the motive of the ex-employee to write this ?

Personally I can relate to the author because I've experienced a similar sobering up from the marketing of a different corporation that I worked for. (I dreamed of working there growing up and one day I got a chance to work for them almost by accident.)

It was exhilarating for the first 1-2 years but as I came to know how the company actually works from the inside I was more and more disappointed that their outside image couldn't be further away from the truth.

I imagine an expanded story, based purely on speculation. Old guy comes into the store and buys a new iMac. This guy recognizes him as a neighbour or friend-of-friend and comes over to say hi while another Apple sales associate is checking him out. He overhears the sales associate mention Apple's free program to transfer data. The old guy says "nah, I don't want to leave my computer here" and the friendly guy says "hey, no problem, I'll just pop by your place later and do it for you at your house". The original sales associate might have thought that was a conflict of interest so he reports it to a manager.

Now the manager is in a tough spot. This is some kind of official internal complaint and it is literally his job and his duty to investigate. He talks to the employee and the employee confirms the report. It's now out of his hands, has to go up a chain to a regional manager. It gets passed around a bit until someone unfamiliar with the employee looks at the policies and facts of the matter and they make a by-the-book call.

I can totally understand the frustration. It reminds me of some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare where justice is run through an algorithm. At some point we'd all hope a compassionate judge would look over the human's involved in the situation and apply some magnanimity.

Each person in a chain had an option to use their judgement to break the chain but nobody did. This isn't an indictment of Apple as some may want to see it. It seems more likely it is a pretty standard outcome of people following a bureaucratic process.

> Each person in a chain had an option to use their judgement to break the chain but nobody did. This isn't an indictment of Apple as some may want to see it. It seems more likely it is a pretty standard outcome of people following a bureaucratic process.

Is it not Apple's bureaucratic process? Then is not the pretty standard outcome of that process Apple's as well?

Also, who else but Apple can empower each person in the chain to actually exercise their judgment?

And this doesn't even consider bad actors trying to socially engineer the system. Must each person in the chain now make the determination that they are actually helping a customer or being fooled by an adversary?

I guess I just think it's naive to expect workers to unilaterally disobey the bureaucratic process because it is demonstrably imperfect. Just fix the broken process instead of punting liability to each individual. What ever happened to leadership?

> Then is not the pretty standard outcome of that process Apple's as well?

We can't say that based on this single incident. How often has a manager in a similar position decided to handle it themselves by having a word with the employee and not documenting it? I can't know and I don't think you know either.

> Just fix the broken process

I'm of the opinion no such fix could be perfect. It is the reason we have a common law system with precedents and judges interpreting laws with respect to them. And even then a judge may decide to throw the book at someone and an appeal can be lost.

Same thing happens in almost every single avenue of life. A cop has discretion to let you off a ticket and decides not to. A teacher refuses to accept late work. An employee stands-firm against a customer on a store policy like the wearing of a mask instead of letting it slide. Even if these things are statistically rare, it still stings if you are on the receiving side.

This sounds a lot more like a vindictive or petty boss with an axe to grind than evil corporate policy gone awry. Corporate policies are like federal laws, there are multiple mutually exclusive ways to violate them, but you only get held to account if you are subject to some attention.

Interesting thought. I wonder what the difference between a vindictive boss and a vindictive Siri would be. If corporations have all the rights of an individual with none of the responsibilities, how does that play out when Siri starts applying corporate policy on your iLife? Corporations can be criminals, but only bodies can go to jail.[1]

[1]: https://consumerist.com/2014/09/12/how-corporations-got-the-...

Corporations don’t have “all the rights of an individual.” You are making the common mistake of misunderstanding Citizens United. The majority wrote, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."

The key thing in Citizens United isn’t that “corporations are people,” but that an association of people be the same First Amendment rights as an individual person. And that makes sense: a newspaper is published by a group of people, spending money to distribute their message. A newspaper editorial is published by the paper, not by the individual. So restricting an association of people’s First Amendment rights, you would necessarily restrict the right of a newspaper to publish, unless the newspaper is completely self-funded by the writer/publisher.

So no, corporations don’t have all the rights of an individual, they can’t for example, vote in an election, join the military, hold elective office. A corporation is nothing more than a group of people sharing a common goal. A corporation is no different from a club, a union, a rock band, or an activist group. It’s just a legal structure that allows people to join together for some common purpose.

That is a magnificent explanation. Well done.

Thank you for taking the time to make your point. Assuming that Siri enjoys the same First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights as you or I, how does that play out when Siri starts applying corporate policy on your iLife?

>> but you only get held to account if you are subject to some attention.

I agree 100%.

I was sales for a long time before getting out and going the developer route.

As a sales person, you're constantly pushing the line and boundaries, but once you get one someone's radar (whatever level of management that is) then you get back on the straight and narrow pretty fast or you're on your way out.

To me, it sounds an awful lot like he got on someone's radar and instead of jumping back on the straight narrow, continued to push the line and finally got caught and they axed him.

It's so hard to fire someone from a corporate gig these days. You never have just once chance and they "investigate" and then you're let go. There are multiple warnings, write-ups, PIP's until HR has enough documentation to fire you if you continue to screw up.

Clearly, this wasn't his first run in with the Apple HR team.

> "You never have just once chance and they 'investigate' and then you're let go."

That is absolutely untrue. I know of very many such events.

In order to hold them to account, you need to be able to give up the severence allowance. They can easily tell from your credit report whether you can, and choose accordingly.

It is very easy to believe this was the first run-in. Furthermore, the HN CoC requires that you presume so.

Severance allowance? Do you have knowledge of Apple's practices around hiring and firing employees, or am I just not aware of this thing?

An employer that permits such behavior is exactly that evil.

This is the sort of thing that may not be evil by intent, just stupid - but definetly is evil by the consequences.

> I decided to help an elderly _friend_

> I had just been fired for helping _someone_

> they wouldn’t have fired me for helping a _customer_

This shifting language is suspicious to me; is this a friend or a customer you met at the Apple store and then helped off the clock? It sounds like this person was employed at an Apple retail store, and I can't imagine Apple having a policy that retail store employees are not allowed to help their grandparents set up a new Mac. There is 100% something else going on here.

WAG: this guy told a customer at the store that he could get the data transfer done faster, and was effectively running a Genius Bar out of his garage.

EDIT: I get that he's using different nouns in order to make his case in a few different ways. Ultimately, I think the writer did something shady and got fired for it.

I think "customer" in this context just means an Apple customer, which they obviously are if they have old and new Macs.

Fair. I still think this person is being very selective with the facts of the matter; despite Apple not being incredibly nice, I don't think they're unreasonable in the way he implies.

What?

He's obviously talking about the person in different contexts.

The person is a friend to them, but they are also a someone, and for Apple they are a customer.

Sure, you can read it that way. My point was that he isn't clear about the exact nature of his relationship with the person he helped, and those details are probably relevant to his termination.

Him helping that elderly person undermined Apple's highly engineered brand interaction with that customer. Apple is there to have you bring your computers in to the genius bar and interact with you to build brand loyalty and sell you more things. The customer is then supposed to go tell their friends how wonderful the Apple Store is.

Instead, an Apple employee undermined the precision-crafted brand experience with this customer. Worse yet, if he would have messed up the transfer, he'd be making Apple look really bad when the customer told their friends about how unreliable getting a new Mac going can be due to their experience.

This is possibly their narrative on this issue. Companies like Apple worry endlessly about this, which is how they have earned their reputation with customers.

I can understand a warning or write-up being an educational opportunity for the employee to understand the problem here, but clearly there was no malicious intent here, firing someone over this is really poor management unless they are a repeat offender after a warning.

This is Apple we're talking about though. One of the most strict companies out there.

Nothing compared to the likes of Raytheon or Northrop Grumman. Everyone likes to bash the big ones, but they are far from unique, they are simply well known.

From what I have heard I know FB, Google to be pretty vocal internally and with tough questions on policies, products and decisions. Amazon and Microsoft fall into the category where most employees don't bother with this behaviour. Is Apple even more restrictive than Microsoft or do employees don't even bother?

I'm not sure what you think you know about Microsoft but I think you're off base here.

I love how everyone is forgetting about the employee that got fired for showing Woz the ipad early.

https://www.cultofmac.com/39931/woz-accidentally-gets-apple-....

That's absolutely a fire-able offence.

I even like in the article how Jobs said it wasn't a big deal.

Sure, but that was Jobs’ call to make, not the employee’s.

And he did, and the employee still got fired!

No, decisions are things that occur prior to action. It was not the employee’s place to freelance their guesses about what Jobs might approve of.

Just because the employee got lucky and gambled successfully with Jobs’ reaction, doesn’t make them trustworthy in future.

I see what you did there.

Poor Woz, rofl

Rockin' dem downvotes from people who know Woz only from fictional books and movies.

Woz is a deity-like figure to my peeps (not because of Apple) and he says what he wants, when he wants to. Need something kept secret? Use the Cone Of Silence to tell it to a real businessy-marketing-greaseball. Want your cool new tech (even the OG Samsung smartphones!) to get it's name out there, be certain it truly is cool and only then, show it to Woz! https://youtu.be/AWQKNxuGqg4

Rules are rules, right?

Selective enforcement of rules is far worse than rules you just think can be broken because “hey, this would be harmless, I without any authority have decided!”

Apple already has special rules for Woz. Jobs was never fired for all the times he broke company rules.

With some exceptions where the company simply can't turn the other way, if someone high up gets fired for relatively minor rule-breaking, you can be pretty sure the board and/or senior management was looking for a reason to show that person the door anyway.

Uh...except that one time in 1985 ROFLMAO

downvoted for referencing Jon Sculley's famous demoting/firing of Steve Jobs https://youtu.be/a1Tpe-dbPQI

This is why I love this website.

> Jobs was never fired for all the times he broke company rules.

There was that one time he was fired for trying to break (or at least work around) the rules:

This is why Steve Jobs got fired from Apple — and how he came back to save the company https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-apple-fired-retur...

https://www.cultofmac.com/2613/steve-jobs-still-parking-in-h...

Yeah, I hate to reflexively take the side of a huge corporation here. I don't doubt that Apple has abusive employer relations, but it really does feel like there's something missing from this story.

It seems plausible that Apple has a policy against free-lance tech support and they over-applied the rule in this case when he was just helping out a friend - perhaps using work resources in some way (e.g. a work phone was involved).

It's certainly plausible, but it still feels like something is missing. How did the boss hear about this? "Someone told him." This all just sounds so very odd.

Even so, I can't imagine anyone actually being let go over this as described unless the company was actively searching for a reason to fire them.

To follow the thread of skepticism about the whole story: it's a bit like the customs entry form you have to fill when entering some countries. One question asks "Are you a member of a terrorist organization?". People laugh when they see this, and say "Why would any terrorist check 'yes' here?!". But the idea is, if they do catch a terrorist, if they can't satisfiably prove he's done anything wrong, they can still say "He lied while filling a customs form" and jail him.

So... maybe the company/boss has other issues with the guy, but no solid ground to fire him, until they caught him "violating" this "conflict of interest" rule.

How can you “catch a terrorist” without proving that they have done something wrong?

They lied on the form! What else do they need?

Yes, this does not make sense. But that is the reality of law enforcement, and of border patrol. It doesn't take a conviction to cancel your visa and deport you.

Other people can tip you off to their plans, and you can arrest them with a backpack full of knives. That’s pretty reasonable suspicion that they were about to commit an act of terrorism.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/27/armed-police-wes...

Right, but planning a terrorist attack isn't "they can't satisfiably prove he's done anything wrong."

In the US, mere declaration of support for a terrorist organization isn’t illegal. It is free speech after all.

Without being able to prove that you have given money, or undergone training by terrorists, or support or plan to commit a specific act then it would be otherwise difficult to remove someone from the country.

However asking on the form grants two options.... first they can simply deny entry, and second they can deport you for lying if it turns out you are the press secretary for the IRA for example.

Or they applied the policy exactly as they intended to. Some organizations simply enforce their policies without exception.

That is, however, exactly what you're doing. We can see if apple responds, but until then, I'm assuming he's telling the truth.

Emn - did this guy sign a release so that apple could release his records.

A lot of these types of complaints, they don't / won't sign a release allowing the employer to release their records.

Apple won’t “respond”...it would become actual news (instead of “Hacker News”) if they made any comment. Nope, this is going down like firing the worker for letting his little girl blog from the lunchroom with a prototype within view or the kid who blew his brains out in the conference room etc.

I have no insight into this specific situation and you may be right that something is being omitted by the author. However I don't agree with your reasoning for coming to that conclusion. Just because Apple treats one employee that way doesn't mean Apple treats all employees that way or that all Apple employees act in a way counter to how this employee acts.

He was caught being old and under the influence of Steve’s original creative spirit. Apple is run by mobsters again (not talking about Tim Apple) —only thanks to Steve coming back, they have nearly unlimited capital and capacity. The joke is on them though because Tim is a hardliner who will fry their butts when the revenues begin to falter. It’s all bad anyway tho because Apple stock tanking is enough to make the market crash of 2000 look like a cakewalk.

I'm guessing he charged the guy for his services. I don't see what the conflict would be otherwise.

Same thought I had. There must be more to it.

This is how apple operates and always has.

Agreed. I've got a rant or three about how Tim Cook's Apple has become cold and calculating, but this guy was not fired for helping his friend. There was something between him and his manager. Maybe his manager is a dick who wanted to replace him with a buddy, but if that's the case it just means there's a few dicks in Apples' 140K employees. Maybe this guy has a long list of warnings.

We won't ever know.

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