U.S. labor agency investigating two complaints from Apple workers
reuters.com
reuters.com
I managed a junior, female engineer who did exactly that --her voice turned up at the end of sentences, making statements always sound like questions-- and I noticed this only happened during stressful presentations, not in regular conversation or team meetings. It destroyed any authority in her voice and made her sound rather childlike. I worked on it with her without mentioning the pitch shift itself (to not make her self-conscious and possibly worsen the problem) but instead I worked to increase her overall confidence when speaking and when running meetings. And I was so happy when I saw her run a multi-team meeting with a strong, steady voice.
I resent the notion that if I had mentioned the pitch shift, I could be labeled sexist.
I hope that the uncertainty, lack of authority, and amateurism that I ascribe to up-speaking is rightly placed. I hope that it's just a matter of cultural norms that young women are the most likely to speak this way.
But what if there's nothing intrinsically grating about up-speaking, and instead it only reminds us of young women?
I've convinced myself that it's the former, but it wouldn't blow my mind if I were wrong.
No beginner speaker is in complete conscious control over every detail. Nor are they expected to be, really.
> It is a subconscious defense mechanism.
Clearly they mean the "choice" is subconscious. Perhaps poor wording but only if you ignore the rest of the comment is it unclear what they mean.
Both of our ideas are speculative at best, and to attempt to discredit the GP's point via speculative refutes does nothing but polarize the conversation further.
I appreciate your counter anecdata, and I recognize that it offers a counter argument to my assertions.
I don't think that means we should take my post down. Do you truly believe that? Do you believe in such limiting of speech? Have I committed a thought crime by thinking that using up speak during a presentation is a defense mechanism? Is it possible I am sometimes right?
I hold that it's possible that I am sometimes wrong. Do you allow that perhaps I am sometimes right?
Do you think this post should be taken down too?
Are you able to introspect on your social groups usage of upspeak and ponder a reason as to it's origin? Perhaps it's advertising a set of values?
I don't want to dump on your idea too much. It's very possible there's a kernel of truth to it—I know I have noticed sometimes that people use higher voices (as a whole, rather than a cadence) when they don't want to offend. But I think we would all be better served if we learned to start with questions and calls for discussion, than trying to claim universal truth and quickly being refuted.
I hear a lot of bullshit from people who focus on how they sound. Can't authority be established through work history? TBH, the more polished and confident a presenter sounds, the more likely they are to be actively bullshitting, and it's really annoying to see people fall for it "because he sounded so confident."
If you are ignoring someone's point because of the sound of voice, rather than quality of content... Yikes. I guess certain silicon valley-isms (e.g. Theranos) start to make sense if people really do that in a corporate setting.
No. We're still (relatively primitive) animals: we have plenty of well-documented "vulns" and internal biases that affect our decision-making and opinion-forming abilities - and these come from both actual-instinctive habits (like how we're generally predisposed to be biased towards selecting tall people as leaders or for promotion) and learned biases from our cultural upbringing (e.g. racism in the southern US).
The vocal uptilt --at least in common native-English dialects-- turns statements into questions, and/or indicates that the speaker seeks agreement or approval from the listener. Do it here and there and it's no problem. Do it for every sentence and it's very off-putting, and distracts from the content itself.
It's not radically different advice from not saying Umm every two words, not mumbling/eating half your sentence, not talking to a room in a whisper, etc.
One of my autistic-traits is that some vocal sounds, tics, and things like that are incredibly irritating to me - it's nothing to do with any mental-associations like that, it's just something my brain/body does.
...but if I were in the same position I'd probably just grin-and-bear it: it's not something worth raising a (potential) fuss over, especially the optics of being seen as being sexist or "man-splaining" to a woman how they should speak (a huge obvious no-no right there).
Whyso? At work you're expected to function as a team, and part of being a team necessarily means needing to make personal compromises for the team's sake.
In this situation, non-native English speakers are going through the monumental effort of both learning English and having to put their skills to the test every day instead of them working and communicating in their fluent language. While people with accents such that they're harder for non-native speakers to understand are being asked to have clearer enunciation - for the sake of the team.
You're not being asked to change your accent, just to have clearer enunciation (if your org's DEI team said "accent" instead of "enunciation" then their wording is unhelpfully vague or demonstrably open to misinterpretation) - and not for the benefit of people who aren't themselves doing anything for their own situation (it's not like the non-native English speakers in your workplace are insisting everyone speak their language, after all). Everyone is making a compromise for everyone's sake. There's nothing ironic about it at all - just unfortunate messaging from the DEI people.
The irony is the reduction in diversity of speaking is requested to improve the equity and inclusivity of comprehension.
I am more inclined to charitably view it as a minor inconsiderate overstep, an internal matter not for public consumption. Perhaps if it was phrased as 'enunciation' it would not have garnered any reaction.
There is no way to do what you suggest without risking a mob.
You should risk the mob. It's not ok for a DEI team to ask people to tailor their regional accents for foreigners who don't speak english well. You can also release this anonymously (it's hard for people to deny written exchanges because the results are in many inboxes).
Also on a point of misunderstanding it's not an Americans vs. Foreigners situation.
I'm not saying to take advantage of mob justice, just shine a larger light on the facts.
> Lindsay is a critic of woke culture
Riiiight.
> Lindsay announced his intention to vote for Trump in the 2020 election, citing illiberalism on the left as the reason
I'm not interested in polemics from people who voted for Trump because they feel the opposition is "illiberal".
"Hey khazhoux, maybe you /are/ sexist for thinking that a vocal trait sometimes associated with young women is a sign of amateurism."
The tricky thing about unconscious bias is of course that it's hard to know when you're carrying it. Nonetheless, I'm fairly confident that that speaking style would be considered un-authoritative by most people, and as a manager I see my job as how to help the individual whose career could be impacted by cultural norms both fair and unfair.
I like how you describe it below, as just another nervous habit in public speaking. A very annoying one.
But I'm a woman and I'd love that kind of candid feedback from my manager. If I'm doing something that limits my career I want to know, regardless of what it is or if it's "fair".
I absolutely think we should be having discussions about how women are treated and calling out bad behavior from companies, but from a selfish, personal perspective I worry that news reports like this are going to make managers less likely to give me useful feedback.
With that disclaimer out of the way, I would have serious concerns about a male employee with 'valley girl' rising terminals in meetings. According to Wikipedia [1] while there are differences between the way men and women 'valleyspeak' it does in fact apply to both. I would address both the same way, seeking to understand - in open dialogue - whether there was a basis in (lack of) confidence and trying to find ways to support them further in their career development. Maybe suggest public speaking classes, especially if available through work.
[edit] further to [2] I found the way the feedback was communicated around the rising intonation friendly, positive and when addressed, the progress was kindly affirmed and remarked on. I saw no negativity in this. I did see someone who was indignant about receiving criticism, however, and took it to a level rarely seen in a professional setting. To call this the 'nuclear option' would be a bit of an understatement.
Reading the back and forth documented in [2] is an absolute train wreck. Once I got a few pages in, I started to empathize deeply with Apple ER. That's not an easy job some days.
One tweet the author posted said:
> "... when #Apple just tried I said 'No thx, Mr Suicide Nets.' If you're going to create a nervous breakdown you get to watch it unfold in real time & now I'm on Twitter again."
Referring to Tim Cook as 'Mr Suicide Nets' on Twitter seems like an insta-fire.
That's one spicy meatball of a tweet.
I'm not saying there aren't some legitimate potential instances of concern documented here, or at least grey areas (director inviting Ashley to drinks alone, 'looking sad' when she brought a friend and talking about his ex-wife) - but they are glossed over, and instead the focus is on sensationalizing some things I would consider trivial. The things I would consider particularly concerning are deemphasized in Ashley's narrative [2].
I suspect some of her 2015 concerns amounted to her manager and team really just not liking her very much. I suspect the behavior Ashley is pointing to wasn't sexism (from her female manager) but rather that she went over her manager's head to the director and shit-talked her. Naturally this was filed under a "Quid-pro-quo" complaint to HR.
It appears she had an open conversation with HR for almost six years complaining about many of the folks she'd ever worked with.
Then when the seed is planted everything the gossip target says it does gets put under a microscope to confirm the suspicion that they hate you or are discriminatory or are retaliating over something or other.
I don’t really know what the fix is. I think the basecamp furore recently might be the way. Just discourage this sort of clique formation around airing grievances. But then that has the effect of not giving space for valid grievances.
Some people think they are hated because they are in $OpressedGroup, when in reality they are just insufferable.
Update: from reading through some of this, as well as her "I thought I was dying" article (https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...) I honestly think she's having some kind of mental health crisis. Some of the logical leaps she makes are bizarre and she seems extremely paranoid.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/media-gets-its-facts-wrong-wor...
I don't particularly think that the original complaint has much merit, (ie, being coached is not sexist) but that said I also find this sort of attitude wholly unhealthy. Is room full of paid professionals unable to distinguish the content of someone's speech from the quality of their delivery? Particularly in a case where we're just talking about tone of voice, and not difficulty with word choice or articulation? I believe it says more about the audience if they are unable to analyze an idea on its merits rather than using body language to evaluate the value of an idea.
Also, plenty of communication works better via text. For example, a book has a very different format than a speech, precisely because of the strengths of the two formats. The same is true of something like a small talk vs. a technical document. And people, with their reliance on body language of course benefit from books and technical papers quite often.
Anyhow, this is a sore point of mine, and I seldom see much agreement on my position. So, thank you very much for your polite discourse on the topic.
It's not humanly possible to do this, which is why it's such a false narrative. No one ever really knows what the "best quality idea" is, and expecting regular people to have mystical powers isn't helpful.
If you had two employees, one man and one woman, and they both spoke like a “Valley Girl” which would you judge more harshly? I suspect the man, for fairly to conform to expected gender norms/stereotypes.
That’s exactly why it’s sexist.
Even if the person who got the feedback doesn't want to change, at least take the opportunity to educate the person that gave you the feedback, rather than reporting them.
Reporting it to HR doesn't address anything, and only sets things back.
This speaking habit is present among men too. It's also a bad speaking habit when men do it.
This is someone crying "oppression" when given simple criticism. There is oppression for sure, but it is not of people who can't take criticism.
But the phenomenon, "unnecessary querying tone", is not a dialect and it is not exclusive to female English speakers.
It is not as widespread as the habit of injecting the phrase "Oh my god" or the word "like" into sentences in English. But consider these habits. They too are something that many English-speakers do, regardless of gender or orientation or social status.
If we were to tell a speaker that injecting "Oh my god" and "like" into sentences is distracting and reduces the effectiveness of a presentation, we would be right.
Presenting is an important skill. The healthy response to constructive criticism is to reflect and improve.
I used to receive the same feedback, though I don't have what commenters or the person in the complaint describes.
My voice deviates in tone a lot, sometimes for no reason at all. The deviations sound like inflections. Additionally, I also have body language that is quite off from what people might expect. On top of that, I have a perma-scowl. I attribute it to time in the military. I've had someone in authority (two levels above me) give me this feedback fairly bluntly. I don't know if there's ever a good way to give this feedback but I would not describe that meeting as pleasant much less positive. I subsequently was not awarded a raise I was promised despite delivering on numerous advancements technologically (and monetarily), the program I was involved with was dissolved, and there was talk of reassigning me. I quit within the month and did not regret it.
A couple notes I have, some dissonance included:
- Critiquing tone and body language is straight up junk. Society has an expectation of what various things look or sound like, however, in a neuro-divergent field you should expect deviation from these things. Maybe even celebrate it.
- I did follow that directors advice. I wear thick frame glasses to cover up my scowl instead of wearing contacts. I don't cross my arms. I don't look up at the ceiling when I'm drawing on information. When I'm excited or engaged I don't let the pitch of my voice change. Does it work? Sure, but work also gets a very shallow clone of me in front of people I won't have a beer with.
Edit: if it's not clear, I'm a man.
This is all fine and good, until you have to communicate with people who are not engineers. Not being able to communicate effectively with non-tech people, whatever the reason is, is certainly going to be a career-limiting factor. You can celebrate it all you want, but you also need to acknowledge the reality of the situation.
At the same time, though, it looks like you've already experienced some consequences because of these things:
> I subsequently was not awarded a raise I was promised despite delivering on numerous advancements technologically (and monetarily), the program I was involved with was dissolved, and there was talk of reassigning me.
This is what I was talking about regarding it being a career-limiting factor, and acknowledging the situation. You can say it's bullshit all you want (and, for the record, I agree with you on that), but, in this case, you've seen first hand what can happen when you don't fit that imaginary mold. And, I would claim that, at least in this instance, it was constructively communicated to you, since you mentioned making changes and subsequently getting better results.
Whether we like it or not, people pick up on things like body language and vocal intonations. If you're lucky, not conforming to peoples' expectations there will make you seem "odd," or maybe "eccentric." If you're not, then, further down the scale of reactions you may receive could include thinking your manner of personal interaction is "weird," "unsettling," or, even "creepy." And, these are all serious problems if you ever want to hope to communicate with and be taken seriously by the majority of people.
Again, I want to reiterate that I agree with you, and this is all basically bullshit. But, like it or not, that's the game you have to play if you want to get your ideas across to people.
While the things this director rattled off were taken of note, "consequences" would've been good to stop at a conversation. They became non-constructive when they went too far, especially for something far out of my control. The biggest change I made was not interviewing at product or traditional businesses. Engineering firms tend to not have these problems. I once regarded Apple as an engineering firm, but it could be argued they've grown to such a size that they lost homogeneity that would otherwise benefit them in these scenarios.
Thanks for the thoughts regardless.
Conversely I've also been told stuff that boiled down to fitting a mold, working customer service or delivery and being told that tattoos weren't professional while consistently seeing doctors or other 'real' professionals with tattoos.
I feel like the dividing line kind of comes down to the difference between "this is how I personally interpret and feel about your actions/communication" and "this is what I suspect an imaginary other desires".
Maybe you should think about the “advice” you give and why you are so worried about getting “cancelled”.
Glad to hear it :). It's nice to know that things aren't that bad after all.
> Maybe you should think about the “advice” you give and why you are so worried about getting “cancelled”.
Fair enough. The advice given to the OP was "when closing sentences in presentations, you finish the sentence in a way that sounds like you're asking a question. Something to pay attention to going forward". [1]
The boss than later provided feedback when she improved that in her presentations by saying "you did great. I didn't hear you going up an octave at the end of your statements, came across as much more authoritative, it's super refreshing to provide feedback and then see you attempt to act upon it."
In general, I don't really see that as sexist at all. However, the person getting that advice said "This #tonepolicing is totally okay feedback to get from my #bigtech #male leaders and not #sexist".
At this point, considering that anything seems to be able to be taken as "sexist". Maybe it's better to keep your mouth shut when giving feedback to females. Again, Why risk your entire career for one person? That's my logic at least. I hope that doesn't mean I am sexist.
Here's your simple test: Do you feel the same way about working with men? If not...I think you get your answer. But you already knew that didn't you?
Not working, but giving feedback. You can work with someone without giving them feedback or trying to improve them.
However, touche.
I am not sure how that improves anything at all though. The entire point is that it seems like, in today's culture, it is better for men to not give feedback to women ala the case mentioned here (Ashley) and I've personally heard many other anecdotes as well. You can also see the case that the other person who replied to my comment talked about where a female coworker decided to file for discrimination just because the male was promoted.
I guess it is sexist (1). Although, isn't that what women want? After all, "#tonepolicing is totally okay from my #bigtech #male leaders" clearly indicates that males giving advice is not appreciated at least to one female. Mentioning their gender clearly indicates that being "men" is what is also an important factor in why the feedback was bad.
The addition of anecdotes, and the fact that anything taken even remotely badly is going to result in massive repercussions for the male who was giving advice only to benefit the female. Is providing benefit to another person really so important that one should take a risk? I am not sure.
It is sexist to give feedback, and it is sexist to not give feedback.
----
1. I guess this means I am a terrible human being, I mean I don't really consider myself as sexist or not liking/hating women. I am perfectly happy to work with women, and in general would like more women in tech since the testosterone gets way too high in rooms at times. In general, I never have thought of myself as a person who's sexist.
However, I clearly did indicate a view where based on gender, I would likely choose to make a different decision in certain situations i.e. if I was giving feedback to a female, I would likely be a lot more cautious of my words and frame things so that there was no way for it to be taken badly, or more often, likely not say it because I am socially awkward enough anyway. :P
Cause there is risk for people. There is a risk they are going to make a mistake, and/or find out that they are ignorant and that society has rapidly moved on from social mores they may be accustomed to.
Since I do consider myself her friend, I tried to take her off the ledge. You are just starting there. You do not want to brand yourself from get-go. You do not know what kind of backing the guy had. HR is not your friend.
I did not hear from her for a while so I hope she took the advice. I would not dare to offer this advice to someone I don't trust.
Encouraging a junior team member to have more self-assurance in their presentation style is one thing but routinely asking women to behave more like men is another. This same scenario could be seen either way depending on your perspective.
To address sexism in the industry we need to be able to have a reasonable conversation about these kinds of subtle and subjective differences. There are grey areas and we won't all agree but resenting the challenge to think this through is probably not a response that's going to affect change.
This is about a single-sided, openly made accusation of sexism. Not an attempt at having a "reasonable conversation".
What does the second half of your statement mean? If who assimilated, and into what? Sorry, I feel like I'm missing some context you're relying on here.
Meaning women do not know what it is they're getting into. The ones that are successful rarely if at all cite sexism until well after their career has been established.
Before you take this as me being some moron that thinks all women are stupid, they're not. I've had plenty of women managers that knew their shit and ran their part of the company really well. It's the naive women (who aren't driven by money) that tend to fall into the trap of anything remotely corrective of their action by a man is interpreted as sexism or an affront.
Not everyone in the meetings will be so understanding, either consciously or subconsciously.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal
EDIT: from the wiki article
> Because HRT has been popularized as "Valley Girl Speak", it has acquired an almost exclusively feminine gender connotation. Studies confirm that more women use HRT than men.[18] Linguist Thomas J. Linneman contends, "The more successful a man is, the less likely he is to use HRT; the more successful a woman is, the more likely she is to use uptalk".
https://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-founder-elizabeth-h...
She's got a summary of it all here: https://www.ashleygjovik.com/ashleys-apple-story.html
She also appears to have a few smoking guns, like this:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E8o4fb3VEAEDVHM?format=jpg&name=...
And we thought reality TV was bad.
According to the story, the contents of her work phone were legally required to be turned over under as part of the civil discovery process in a trial.
Apple does not require you to use company devices for personal, sensitive data, and in fact, is quite clear about the risks inherent in doing so.
Nevertheless, she chose to store nude photos on a company device, mixing her company communications with personal communications.
How are the consequences of her inappropriate use of company resources Apple's fault?
I disagree. In some cases they might be, but I know several people who dogfood on those devices without really understanding what this could entail.
If your company hands you a device, don't then aim the camera at your genitals.
If your device has Caffe Macs and Radar apps installed, don't point it at your junk.
If you used a device to go over OKR status in the morning, don't point it down your pants at night.
If your Photos app alternates between pictures of the whiteboard from your system architecture meeting, and snapshots of your tickly parts, take a moment to think if maybe there's a problem there.
I mean... should we cater so much to people that can't figure this out themselves?
However I have the same problem with the Photos app on my personal phone. Apple lacks a proper way to store the private-private stash of late-night consumption vs daytime photos. I never show photos on my iPhone to friends, I never lend it to children, despite carefully triaging photos into albums of my holidays vs memes vs photos of administrative papers vs… porn. They shouldn’t have been in the same app to start with.
In a twist of irony, if Apple employees dogfooded their porn stash a little more with their work iPhone, maybe they would have actually come up with a “Photovault” feature, which doesn’t mix the photos in the photostream, nor uploads them to the cloud, which lead the photo scanning scandal of last week.
It's not just for photographs taken south of the border, so to speak.
If you do anything on company property or time (including laptops and phones) that isn't 100% company work, it can get caught up in subpoenas, discovery and other miscellaneous legal proceedings that your employer may be a party to. This can land you in legal hot water even if these activities had nothing to do with your employer. Once the DA's got your files, they can charge you with anything you may have dug up even if it's not related to their primary inquiries. Your drug-fueled trips to burning man may not look so entertaining to the DA.
Further the California blanket IP ownership exemptions only apply to things you do on your own time and your own property. If you come up with a fun startup idea, and you write some notes down on your work laptop or text your buddy on your work phone, you should just assume it belongs to the company.
Anyways, for anyone who needs to hear it again, for the love of all that's good and holy do not take photos of your genitals with company property.
And if you work somewhere you're assigned a laptop and a phone, you can probably afford your own of each. If that's the case I highly recommend it. As an Apple employee, the corporate discounts are worth taking advantage of.
I see odd google searches in Chrome regularly when someone is screen sharing and typing a URL.
A programmer who does that is incompetent. More than using Incognito, I specifically require my employees on the first day to create several Chrome profiles, to deal with personal stuff. Not only does it avoid Facebook cookie mangling with work, it also helps avoid unrelated advertising during work, improves search relevance, autosuggest becomes actually useful… and you can use your personal profile for your house hunt and bar searches, keeping the bookmarks and all.
What company? I just want to make sure I never apply. A boss who nanomanages your Chrome profile habits sounds like a terrible supervisor.
Some people just are cunts about the freedoms they’re given, and because of employees like you, we end up with antiviruses on laptops and corporate firewalls that block Facebook.
Just because employees feel “micromanaged by a terrible supervisor” who asks to use a separate Chrome profile to not mix cookies with work.
And your response illustrates my point. You think the poor souls you manage are ungrateful "cunts" who should thank you for the "freedoms" given by their benevolent dictator.
Again, what company is this? If you're this proud of your leadership, go on record.
It's still pretty messed up that you exploded so quickly and thoroughly over a completely reasonable criticism.
Point is there should be a limit to the amount of snooping in a company is expected to do/carry out, in this case Apple the company has clearly exceeded that limit.
[0] https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...
More importantly, the DTSC representative even suggested that if there were VOCs, they most likely came from construction.
There's a lot of accusations without anything more than circumstantial evidence - but the path forward here seems clear. The first air quality assessment came back inconclusive. So do another.
> I argued back and forth with DTSC for months about next steps. At several points, she told me if I could give them proof of chemicals in my body and apartment that could cause my symptoms and be linked to the chemicals on site, then they “can continue to investigate further.”
> I kept pushing back that they were asking a normal resident to pay for and perform seemingly industrial testing. I was also very concerned that a government agency seemed to be asking for my medical records. At one point they said they were happy to talk directly with one of my doctors. WTF.
Holy moly. Do the test. If it's that important, do the test. Seek compensation after.
This seems like a new building, new construction and if there were VOCs the most likely source sounds like adhesives from the construction. It's possible Ashley is particularly sensitive to them. I've met people like that before.
Then, in another incident, attacked her with a "surprise" nerf gun ambush, recorded her screams and then turned them into a remix and shared it with everyone. Even after she told them she has PTSD from past physical violence. Were those people ever reprimanded? It seems like they haven't.
The nerf gun email exchange was a bit odd though, it read as though she is joking and playing along. If I had read just that email chain, without the rest of the context, her saying stuff like "I need to out mischief them - hide or boobytrap their toys maybe", might be interpreted as something more benign. But, it's worth acknowledging that it would be hard to go against the grain, even though saying something like "what they are doing is disruptive, ask them to stop" might have had a better effect.
The other odd thing was the "Make Ashley's Life a Living Hell" ticket screenshot. It looks incredibly bad, but then she replies on the ticket which can be perceived as playing along. I understand that victims sometimes cope that way, by pretending to go along, hoping the abuse would stop, but at the same time, it makes it harder to convince others later how bad things were.
Strangely, her timeline about Apple begins in March with an article she published about her health problems. I remember the story was #1 on Hacker News that day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26688965 She was having health problems and believed they were the result of toxic waste somewhere on the site of her apartment complex property.
I remember that the details of the story didn’t really support her claims as significantly as she suggested. I detailed my concerns in the HN thread about her other toxic waste battle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26689837 The summary is that she was living in an upper floor apartment but she assumed something in the ground was causing her medical symptoms. She found evidence that an old toxic waste container might be buried somewhere on the 100 acre property surrounding her apartments. She used some questionable measurements (heart rate change of 10bpm and spurious readings from a generic indoor VOC monitor) to try to bolster her story, but it didn’t make sense that the thousands of other people on this site weren’t experiencing severe medical issues even though her apartment wasn’t close to the supposedly toxic ground.
She is apparently also waging a significant battle against her apartment complex and the city for the issues she believes were caused by a toxic waste container that was supposedly buried somewhere near her old apartment.
I bring this up because she highlights this story as the start of her Apple timeline on her site I linked above and brings it up many times throughout her Apple writings. She seems to imply this was somehow related to her harassment claims at Apple, though I’m not sure what she’s exactly implying with that claim.
Whether it's a barrel of waste, or just chemical laden construction materials, most likely she was very much experiencing real health problems.
Her blog is kind of hard to follow, and she seems a little nutty, but if her boss indeed tried to 'hook her up' with somebody, that seems like it could be considered harassment in some form.
Yes, but she’s making huge leaps to claim that her 3rd-floor apartment is being filled with VOCs from an old toxic waste container that may or may not still be buried somewhere on the 100 acre property where her apartments were built. If VOCs were truly the cause, and we don’t know that, it would be far more likely to be coming from construction materials or the furniture in her apartment.
I’m not doubting that she’s experiencing distressing symptoms. I am very skeptical of her conclusion that it’s due to buried toxic waste somewhere nearby and her ongoing battles against the city and apartment builders.
This same person has been in the headlines for 3 different victimization stories in the past 6 months: The toxic waste story and her ensuing battle with the city, the time her work phone was subpoenaed for a legal case and lawyers wouldn’t let her selectively delete files from evidence, and now her harassment lawsuit against Apple.
The harassment claims should be investigated like any others. However, before we grab our pitchforks in the court of public opinion it’s important to know the context of her actions. When someone is becoming an extreme outlier victim in multiple situations and promoting her case vigorously on social media, skepticism is warranted.
I think part of her original argument in the case was that the cleanup was never actually performed, the city rubber-stamped the job, and that the entire site might actually be contaminated. She was getting the run around trying to investigate, everyone involved refused to look into any facet of the grounds. I don't recall if she provided any specific evidence of this causing a measurable affect in here apartment or not.
Superfund sites like this are pretty well understood and characterized at this point, which ongoing monitoring and sampling done by multiple parties. The only way to see into this, however, is to get involved in local politics or hire lawyers to do some investigation. ashley instead appears to have done a terrible job at "investigation" and then threw a bunch of unrelated "facts and opinions" together to make it sound more legitimate.
Here's an example of an actual superfund site that has had all sorts of problems that likely affected the health of people nearby: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2021/03/25/hunters-point-s...
That's a legal case where actual legal people did actual real investigation and uncovered strong evidence of corruption.
By the way the more you learn about what happened in the bay area in the 1940s-70s, the less surprised you should be by any of this, or why we exported semiconductor manufacturing.
I think if there's evidence of corruption in one, that's evidence of corruption in all. The entire area needs an independent investigation IMO. Unfortunately, California is still struggling with basic things like electricity, so that's unlikely to happen any time soon.
The investigation would have to be federal, as it's Superfund, which is federal and supercedes local law.
"The biggest obstacle for making progress at Apple is the culture of secrecy and alienation."
Also demanding that employees be allowed to spend time on a slack channel discussing pay seems unreasonable. Do it on your own time and not on company infrastructure. The term "equity" in this instance is not clearly defined, does it mean we all earn the same, or all people with same title earn the same, or maybe there's variation in productivity and that causes inequity?
Some of the best tone policing I've received has been from women.
The idea that people are getting tone policed and instead consider it being sexist is interesting to me.
I'll let you make up your own mind about the likely merits of their specific complaints.
As far as the article and it's headline, "U.S. labor agency investigating..." is clearly intended to imply that existence of such an investigation is notable, when in fact:
"The NLRB receives about 20,000 to 30,000 charges per year from employees, unions and employers covering a range of unfair labor practices described in Section 8 of the Act."
There's plenty of material written about it, such as Speech Patterns: Uptalking [1] (which has a section about its prevalence in Australia), and there's an interesting if navel-gazing BBC article [2] from 2014, The unstoppable march of the upward inflection? - note the question mark in the headline there. (The article mentions how bosses/older people tend to frown on this tic; quite a good read, IMO.)
And re the written word, I've increasingly noticed question marks in non-interrogative text (including on HN), which to me is the same thing as the uplift terminator in speech. Matt Levine [3], the Bloomberg finance writer, tends to do this a lot in his Money Stuff column/newsletter, in fact his writing is littered with this device.
I really don't understand why some people react so negatively to what I'd describe as quite a nuanced form of expression, unless it's along the lines of grammar pedants who don't appreciate that language always evolves; who imagine that the evolution ended when they learnt to speak and write.
I'd appreciate feedback on my thoughts/observations here, from other HN folk?
[1] https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-169257...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
No, they aren't, selectively; they can comprehensively ban non-work discussions of all kinds, but if they don't, since discussions are covered as employee organizing/mutual aid, they cannot selectively be banned (in the US) without violating the National Labor Relations Act and (often) state labor relations law, as well.
That's simply not what the legal precedent says. It is an "unfair labour practice" to forbid workers doing collective action like discussing pay in a venue where you let them have other kinds of general discussion.