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Comment by someonehere | Hacker News Reader

I worked for Apple retail in San Francisco. Being an early retail employee in the Bay Area, we had very close ties to Cupertino. I worked when Steve was still alive.

* Retail management in my store ruled by fear. I heard from other stores across the US this was the same as well. * Promotions were handed out to those who kissed ass the hardest. Even if they were unqualified or cheated on promotion exams, if they brown nosed enough they got promoted. * The goal for every retail employee was to eventually make it to Cupertino and work for the corporate side of things. Either Genius support or logistics in Elk Grove. * Those who I knew who made it to Cupertino shared similar experience to the author’s post.

Apple comes off as a happy family friendly company, when in reality behind the scenes it’s a rule by fear culture.

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You can sense it when you walk into an Apple store. I met a few unnecessarily rude salesperson and wondered how or why they were still there.

I've had that sort of experience at the genius bar of all places.

Sounds like Disney.

Explains why Pixar was such a good fit with Disney.

Do you mean park side or Corp side? Because I’ve heard bad stories about the park side of things

Park is fine if you're okay with following rules to a T. If you want to think for yourself, well...

> Being an early retail employee in the Bay Area, we had very close ties to Cupertino. I worked when Steve was still alive.

Steve Jobs actually interacted with retail underlings?!

Their post doesn't say that, and I too read the chosen wording twice. Their employment overlapped with Steve Job's lifespan, that's it. That's important to them to say, and is completely useless to us. That's all.

The way I interpreted is, this torture culture is not a recent development. It already existed during SJ watch.

Can we please not call people who work in retail “underlings”?

I'd call engineers underlings, too. It's more honest than "retail associate."

It seems like perfectly good English to me. Please let's not micromanage each other's language.

(I don't think the OP implied any particular interaction with Steve Jobs, but that's a separate issue.)

My first interpretation of "underlings" tends to have it be a somewhat derogatory term towards someone who is of some sort of lower status, which I took to assume (having much experience with this happening while working corporate and on other online forums) that retail employees were somehow lesser/less worthy of being listened to since they were generally further removed from decisions that the rest of the company made (as in, multiple interactions where I would see a conversation like "When working in Apple retail…"/"Shut up, you don't know anything, you just work retail"). The commenter has clarified their position so in good faith I would be willing to believe them but hopefully that gives you a bit more insight into why the way that was phrased was evocative of this to me.

> Apple comes off as a happy family friendly company, when in reality behind the scenes it’s a rule by fear culture.

Just like any other company.

Not really. Worked for 5 companies, 2 were ruled by fear culture (including an explicit stack ranking of employees every 2 quarters, with the bottom ones being fired), one by desperation, one by... inertia maybe. The 5th is Google. Still can't figure out what it's ruled by exactly, but absolutely no fear, yet it mostly works. That's why I'm sticking around, I guess. I've moved teams and orgs quite a bit, so I don't think it's just me being lucky with a manager. If there is fear, it's in quite isolated pockets.

+1, if anything, its frustratingly the opposite from my perspective (i.e. its hard to find peers who want to dig into things, the SWE is the center of the universe, personal lack of interest is enough to refuse work)

At least when I was there, google seemed like an island with melancholic, but smart and kind pandas who never had to compete for food, for the food was brought to them by a ferry, and never had to do any work, unless they had a spark of curiosity that made them explore an interesting rock or mess with sand on the beach. All pandas were consistently exceeding expectations, even if they slept on a tree most of the day.

LOL, you nailed it, thank you very much

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