Hacker News Reader

Comment by meekrohprocess | Hacker News Reader

I don't think so. I've worked at other FAANG companies which had these sorts of posts written about them, and I've witnessed plenty of situations that I would call "abusive".

But what I read in this article was beyond the pale. I never felt like anybody adjacent to any of my roles might have cause to fear for their physical safety. Reviews were used as political tools and occasional sources of psychological abuse, sure, but people still got marched out quickly if they stopped acting like empathetic human beings towards their peers.

View on HN

Facebook had an engineer commit suicide and the company tried to cover it up. Going as far as firing an engineer that spoke up about it - https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvgn9q/do-not-discuss-the-in...

So yes, this does happen. Typically to visa workers who are easily exploitable due to their precarious status in the country.

> Typically to visa workers who are easily exploitable due to their precarious status in the country.

This is the key point about this experience to me. The fact was that without the visa situation, the author would have had many more choices. Unfortunately, it seems like the lack of viable alternatives was taken advantage of to the hilt (and presumably the author wasn't the first or last employee so affected).

Same thing at Uber

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/04/27/is-uber-...

Apple had its own tragedy, but the details are unknown.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-death-idUSKCN0XP383

This is fairly obviously true, FAANG's are large companies so lots of strange things happen even if they on average are great. I worked at Google for 10 years, and had 10 great years there with very little negative to say. That was true for almost anyone I knew. But there was a mailing list "yes at Google" for these kind of stories so other can see that it does happen even if most of us thought it was great. Most of the targets in the unfortunate stories were woman or minorities.

I've never read anything even half as terrible as this story on Yes At Google. I'm not saying shitty things don't happen, but I'd like to believe that such shittiness would not fly at the G.

I had friends experience what I think was way worse at Google. Don't really feel comfortable sharing, but lets say it more or less always involved power games and/or sexual harassment. Worst one was probably a combination. Google was/is great, but sadly not for everyone.

I mean Andy Rubin and Amit Singhal worked at Google when they did their career ending stuff.

And their careers ended (albeit with insane golden parachutes). In this story everyone gets away with it.

Rubin's career-ending stuff was being accused by a woman he had been in a relationship with and was in a custody battle with of something that could never be proven and which he strongly denied. It was career ending only due to the western culture that women are always believed, even sans evidence and when there are obvious reasons to not believe it (e.g. years having passed with the supposed victim having made no complaints, right up until there was some sort of power struggle).

>But what I read in this article was beyond the pale.

Yes, but while I believe it happened just like that, it's too beyond the pale to be representative of Apple at large.

Looks like a particularly, close knit toxic team + gaslighting above levels about the new recruit.

It's hard to say, because Apple is a huge corporation. It would be wrong for the takeaway to be "all of Apple is like this." But it should call into question "how much of Apple is like this?" and "how many more stories are there like this?" because I guarantee you that this author is not the only one who has experienced this at Apple, and there may be elements of its secrecy-obsessed, top-down culture that are common factors which contribute to it.

>it's too beyond the pale to be representative of Apple at large.

Why?

Because of a general understanding of how the world works, how businesses are, how western businesses are, people and so on.

Same way if a told you some politician was sexually assaulting his pages, you woulnd't assume this is representative of congressmen and pages in general...

I don't have recorded minutes of their interactions or other such hard proof.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com