Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

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Trying to uncover some facts to help infer the article's complaint with nuance prior to knee-jerk hopping on the "big apple is bad" flavor du jour was my intent in posting the comment.

My point is not that it is less "important or impactful" but that working within a retail environment vs a corporate environment - even at Apple - is an apples / oranges comparison.

Apple has effectively the highest retail employee retention rate full in the USA (1) - they have led the charge in changing the retail paradigm for the better for 10s of thousands of employees.

My first job was retail and I would have killed to work at an Apple store.

Petty bosses wielding a 100 page HR rule-book that some back closet McKinsey intern produced to fire anybody at anytime (even in states w/good protections) is PAR for the course in retail.

Is it because corporate is evil or because managing a largely lower-education(2), transient workforce is incredibly challenging?

Is it nuanced and two sided? of course!

Did this maybe happen at an Apple Store?

It might have!

Could it have been a manager looking for an HR dept defensible excuse to get rid of a difficult employee?

Could just likely have been.

(1) https://www.hrzone.com/community/blogs/mark-mccormack/apple-...

(2) https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/industry-at-a-glan...

Can you explain how any of this is relevant to the post? Because I'm not seeing it.

I accept your challenge, here's why my comments are relevant:

- This post is front paged on HN, grabbing your attention, mine, and a demographic that skews largely to Apple's core corporate HR need and customer base.

- It is important that the HN community can rely on the comments section to gain insight or nuance that they would not otherwise have from the source material.

- The author works to harm Apple's reputation as an employer and company suggesting one stops buying their products and opt out of their ecosystem etc.

- This central argument, that Apple is an unfair and malicious employer, is in conflict with Apple's objectively industry leading employee retention numbers that I share above.

- The author never discloses that he is/was a retail employee vs. a corporate employee which I think anybody with an understanding of retail employment in general would appreciate to have as a filter to assess his pov.

- Without taking a position of this termination being right or wrong, the evidence above suggests this is an edge-case and is probably not deserving of my or my fellow HN users taking into deep consideration in our opinion of Apple.

- Instead it feels like a well timed piece of negative content that fits into a narrative that several very large and powerful corporations are working hard to try in the court of public opinion. (1)

- - -

And then back to your comment - what lesson or theme are you drawing from a single retail employees one-sided negative experience working within the Apple employee ecosystem? What am I missing? Why is this relevant?

(1) https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/17/21372480/apple-epic-threa...

very well put. my first impression was “apple is bad”. upon closer examination (reading comments, including yours) this post became much less scandalous. Nothing out of ordinary and, actually, quite reasonable.

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