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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

It’s a long, rambling post with some fairly vague and difficult to falsify accusations. I have no connections to Apple (other than as a consumer), but I could not wade through the article enough to determine if I thought there was an actual smoking gun.

I suspect the story would be much more powerful if it were 1/5 as long and stuck to the material facts.

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What kind of smoking gun are you looking for? Given that Steve Jobs was partly famous for his capriciousness in how he treated people I imagine his example set a baseline of acceptable toxic behavior in the company so it’s not unreasonable for me to imagine that a team like this could emerge given the apparent lack of oversight by HR and upper management and all the secrecy and isolation between teams that Apple is famous for.

I think this has a lot to do with it. I worked at Apple for four years, and the most successful (promoted) managers all tried to emulate the managerial attributes they believed Steve embodied: Hard nosed, demanding, callous, ridiculing failure, and they all thought they had his product sense too. They attempted to be Steve-clones all the way up the chain to Craig (who was actually a really decent guy, and didn't, at least to me, act like a Steve-clone himself). They were consistently rewarded for this behavior, so that kind of behavior became known as the way to go places at Apple. I remember having [careful] conversations with my manager where I essentially asked, "Do I have to be a raging asshole to get rewarded here? Because that's all I see--raging assholes get the promotions and equity refreshes."

There were other managers who were not toxic, and knew how to develop a team and reward/motivate them, but most of them stagnated and never went anywhere promotion-wise.

I also found the place very clique-y. There was definitely a small in-group, with the rest in the out-group, and it seemed to have nothing to do with tenure, seniority, or level. They would have their own private off-sites to do who knows what. I think they called it Top-100 or something while I was there. Everything was siloed and secret so you could never be sure.

EDIT: Reading the article, I see the cliques were specifically mentioned. I have no doubt the author is for real.

Here's the thing you need to know about experienced abusers (note: often narcissists): They know how to "play the game", and what to do.

They know that when it comes to the illegal stuff - you do it off-the-record. Then it just become "he said, she said", which is very difficult to prove.

They are experts at gaslighting, which ties in with the point above. Not only can the invalidate your claims about (difficult to prove) verbal abuse, but they can actually turn it against you, by claiming that you're obviously mentally unstable / hearing things due to workload / not fit for the job / etc.

Especially for narcissists, they tend to be very good at forming networks and friendships which benefit them - and in turn can produce cliques like this.

They know what buttons to push in the organization, to cover their own ass, and make the other party look incompetent. This includes creating extensive paper trails, frequent meetings to establish some opinion on a person, and what not.

Prolific abusers are hard to catch because they are very good at it, and because they create (or join) environments which are chaotic, and tie in multiple people on the abuse (whether want it or not - pretty much in the same way that bullies in school rarely do the bullying themselves, but form groups to do it).

In this case, it's even worse - because there's such an extreme imbalance of power. On one side you have a fresh hire, without any permanent VISA, completely dependent on the job. On the other side, you have established bullies in clique, with decades of employment in the company.

And not only that - it all happened within a company that enforces a strict culture of non-disclosure. It's hard to go public with information which may include explicitly confidential work/data.

Yeah, I wanted to read it more carefully but it seemed to be a long litany of real or perceived psychological abuse. Maybe I too missed a smoking gun.

What I read described an Apple that is completely alien to me. I have never seen or even heard of anything even remotely like this team or the behavior described.

I have a friend who recently left Microsoft after a decade and a half. He'd completely drunk the Kool Aid but ended his experience at the company facing more than a year of abuse from a new manager and senior engineer. Very similar to this long post about Apple, unfortunately. He and a couple of other people on his team tried to move to different teams, but despite a long history of excellent work, everyone was treated by the rest of the company like they were toxic waste.

Nobody thinks that their company is like this until they're on the other side of it. In my friend's case, it was only in retrospect that he saw patterns of toxic behavior from management.

I haven't seen this sort of outright abuse, but I've definitely experienced firsthand at multiple companies a situation where a newcomer needs a ton of tribal knowledge in order to do their job, but the newcomer's team members get miffed every time they're asked a question. So then the newcomer ends up having to do way too much work on his/her own the hard way, it makes everything way harder and less effective, and before too long they're branded a "low performer" and it all goes downhill from there.

It happened to me at Microsoft, and later it ALMOST happened to me at Apple. Fortunately, at Apple I knew what was going on that time and I just badgered my irate teammate and bullied him into giving me all the info I needed. (Or went around him when I could, since I was lucky that the rest of the team was a lot easier to work with in that respect) He was a nice guy, but he'd get visibly annoyed every time I asked him a question. Either the answer was patently obvious, or the question was unanswerably difficult.. Later on, that teammate left and a new one came onboard with a ludicrous number of really dumb questions, but I just swallowed my bad attitude and did my best to patiently and nicely answer them.. and sure enough, after a couple of months he was fully up to speed.

Also, even more fortunately, when things were going badly at Microsoft I had a decent savings account built up and a lot of self confidence/stubbornness, enough to say from a place of complete conviction "I'M not the problem; this whole org is a steaming pile of shit!" no matter who told me otherwise. I feel really bad for the author of TFA, because I don't think it's reasonable to expect people to have the type of screwed-up, mercenary attitude it would take to get through his experiences unscathed.

I totally agree. I'm working on a system now that is the most complex I've ever worked on - managed K8s, OperStack, bare metal - all the provisioning, build and test infrastructure (dealing with nested virtualization, DinD, integrating build tools into tools that do things as low level as PXE boot servers). There's a huge amount of tribal knowledge required and I struggled with this.

Thankfully my manager was open to questions, and patient, it was me "not wanting to be a bother". But I had a meeting with my manager's manager and he talked about how stupid he felt, and understanding that no-one would feel like I was an "anchor" asking the "silly" questions of "Why do we / don't we ..." and persisting through that because everyone had been there.

> perceived psychological abuse

Do you call this:

> "You escaped a war zone; it is obvious you have many mental problems."

"perceived psychological abuse"?!? What the heck, the sociopathic person who said that stupid ass thing should have been fired on the spot, apparently he/she still is a manager at Apple.

> long litany of real or perceived psychological abuse. Maybe I too missed a smoking gun.

Its staring you in the face. How can anyone be allowed to pull off half of that shit? I mean if you are _knowingly_ causing someone to take beta blockers, you've got to have a long hard look at yourself.

I have made mistakes, fortunately early in my career. I made a colleague cry, I thought it was a "bit of fun" but I was being a horrid shit. I don't shout at work anymore. Its a sign that I've lost the argument, failed to see reason, or more often just plain wrong.

To allow others to cause people to cry or shout is frankly unforgivable. Especially if they are senior and its aimed at a young'un. Yes, they might be annoying, or a dipshit. but its up to you to guide them or move them on. Not play with like a cat with a half dead bird.

in short: enigneers don't let other people be abusive dicks.

Is that really the thing you took from this? The person is reporting a pretty serious harassment issue and your input is "mmm, make it more peppy"

Worse, at the time of writing this is the second highest response!

e: at least the comment got reshuffled while I wrote that, seriously though..

Are you expecting them to name real names and give specific enough details where they're then identifiable?

Even if the rest was vague enough (and it only would be if this was a very common set of experiences), there was a screenshot of a 1-on-1 meeting time and room, so the anonymity ship has sailed.

The meeting was deleted afterwards. It’s mentioned right there in the post.

Logs

The main villain - the sr. director with bad breath - predicted this and got his subordinate - a manager - schedule the meeting. Later he stopped by and replaced that manager. In other words, he can claim he has never been to that meeting.

surely Apple could easily recover this information if they wanted to?

If this story realistically describes what happened, I would expect Apple HR can identify who wrote it (Muslim with a student OPT visa, specific request to do no previous work experience, reported issues with the export license, and a case like this)

If there were tens of similar cases, we would have heard of more.

Someone has to speak out first and it has to get a ball rolling. Stuff like this can be hidden for decades before coming to light, if ever, see e.g. #metoo with prominent examples like Epstein and Spacey.

Apple's culture of silence works well enough that employees are self-censoring. You do hear a few stories now and then, but often constrained to IS&T or from non-engineering orgs:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22804607

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12502336

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994

This is a very poor characterization.

It's not the job of junior engineers from foreign countries to write perfect Medium posts.

Also the article was chock full of facts, there were facts in every sentence.

It's the only way to tell the story. Of course it's an uncomfortable read, how could it be different? IMHO this should be indeed picked up by a journalist though. It's not an engineer's job to write catching stories.

You are the exact kind of person that would gladly embrace this culture. Maybe you should have finished the article, you would have seen a mirror.

Amazing that someone who has English as a second language wouldn't write a perfectly legible blog post about a traumatic experience.

The author is trying to maintain some anonymity. That would not be possible with specific details.

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