I Quit: What really goes on at Apple
roadlesstravelled.me
roadlesstravelled.me
Cost centers also tend to have very toxic work environments as a result: people are constantly reminded that the business can and will go on without them. Hence the epidemic of throwing people under the bus, trying to "catch" coworkers in a screw-up, etc. You don't have to be the fastest zebra, just faster than the slowest one.
The problem is that it doesn't have to be like this. There are exceptional cases where customer support is not like this. Many of them have gained considerable benefit from investing in their customer support. One source of difficulty is that evaluation of those benefits requires very complicated (for an average middle manager) mathematics and causal modeling. There's no simple metric that measures the real benefits of good customer support, even tangentially.
edit: thanks everyone for these replies they're great, keep them coming!
This is why Tim Cook is CEO: he was the architect of their supply chain strategy which basically ensured nobody could build a phone at the same level as Apple. But he took what was once a pure cost center for Apple and turned it into the engine of their dominance.
I can't say I've seen the same for customer support though. It's just not a strategic advantage in most industries because only a small percentage of your customers ever call in to support in the first place.
But you're right, being such a critical component of Apple's supply chain has likely given Samsung inside knowledge of Apple's platforms. As a result, Apple has been diversifying their supply chain to avoid Samsung.
I don't know that plays into their dominance of the Android market though. Samsung was already the top consumer electronics brand in the world prior to the release of the iPhone, so it's not surprising that would carry over into mobile phones. It was certainly a factor, though probably not a large one.
Really? "From 2016, {Samsung] the company will supply 80 percent of APs used in Apple devices"
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/tech/2014/11/133_168259...
Let's call Tim Cook out for what he is. A former Dell middle manager who happened to be working the supply chain when China opened up to the world. Otherwise there must be a million supply chain geniuses out there who have also figured out how to place orders using cheap labor...
[1]: https://medium.com/@BoltVC/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-like...
They gave this concept a lot of credit for turning themselves around from being a bottom of the barrel PC vendor to becoming a retail powerhouse in the early 2000s, before they were acquired by Gateway.
This isn't what I originally read, but there's an interesting publication here on the subject: http://www.pcic.merage.uci.edu/papers/2004/eMachines.pdf
I highly recommend following http://www.asymco.com/ where Horace Deidu does lots of analysis on the industry, with focus on Apple. Heck he can fairly accurately predict future Apple sales because of the capital expenditures mentioned in the previous paragraph http://www.asymco.com/2015/02/10/how-many-ios-devices-didwil...
Generally in B2B where the accounts your call center are responsible for "keeping happy" are worth 5 or 6 figures in revenue...tends to lead to a very different environment. Of course, at that point you aren't really paying $10/hr but are hiring "support engineers" with real salaries.
The only B2C one I can think of is Zappos.
Back in the day when they were reselling AT&T DSL (which they are doing again, I hear), it was a big bonus to get AT&T DSL at the same price, but not have to deal with AT&T almost ever. Let a third party deal with that and provide better service for the same cost. Win.
Full Disclosure: I've worked at Sonic.net multiple times in the past, ranging from customer support when in college, to their operations and system administration department more recently. I have fond memories of it, and count it as one of the best places I've worked, but I'm not employed by them currently.
Customer service isn't a cost center. It's a value creator.
I have similar probably-irrationally-high opinions of In-N-Out Burger's operations.
I've had such excellent service for so many years that even when I have an objectively __terrible__ experience [0], I end up writing it completely off as a fluke, or an inexperienced or frazzled employee. I actually reflected on this the last time it happened, and even recognizing this I still think highly of their service.
They get customer service so right in so many directions that I almost feel bad exposing the rare instances that my visit hasn't been flawless.
0: Last week, in the same visit to the drive-through: "No, I didn't order those [3] shakes. I actually ordered two fries." They eventually got me the right things, and my burgers were right, but I've had that wrong too before. Almost never.
The yardstick for measuring the potency of a corporate culture is consistency over time.
Apple's still like that, its why I buy their hardware.
Another issue about customer support is that it isn't glamorous and usually not encountered by the typical customer since they usually handle issues and exceptions rather than the visible product. When someone mentions a company, pictures of their product, their service, etc come to mind before a customer service experience, unless it is a negative one. Had a good experience? It's usually an, "Oh yeah..." moment, at the back of your head. Psychologically, customers don't use these positive experiences to judge a company. If they have a negative experience, then that company is the worst in the world...
My experience with them was the best customer support experience I have ever had. They were great. They were prompt, knowledgeable, and compassionate.
A while ago, I could walk in the store and get replacement parts on the spot. They've replaced my sister's broken computer when she was out of warranty without giving her a hard time.
Most recently I had a really esoteric thing where my Apple Developer account had my mom's name on it because it was linked to the phone I got from her... I dunno, anyways, I managed to get someone who manages developer accounts on the phone, even though I don't pay for the developer account, and they updated it for me and got it sorted out, with minimal friction, and only a small amount of time on the phone.
At one point, they decided to just give he customer whatever they wanted, except in cases of fraud or abuse, and they are fantastic now.
Without support and training software is kind of worthless.
Customer churn is also very, very hard to quantify, and your customers will leave you for a variety of reasons, many of which would not be impacted by better support (i.e. they move, go out of business, get purchased, etc.)
If you look at the Lean Manufacturing folks, they have their own notions of accounting. They think the mantra of, "increase revenues, reduce costs" is stupid. For them, it's "increase value, reduce waste".
A simple example: you make hamburgers. You find a cheaper supplier of meat. It's not quite as good, but the number of complaints is manageable. In the western perspective, that's a win: revenues are stable (in the short term, anyhow) and costs are decreased. But in the Lean perspective, you've probably fucked up: value is down and you haven't reduced systemic waste.
As an example of what customer service looks like from that perspective, consider this example: http://kevinmeyer.com/blog/2008/10/jke-day-2-saishunken-cosm...
By that metric, marketing and advertising must be cost centers! But they somehow always manage to take credit for revenue.
Honestly I think that "cost centers" are a combination of politics and managerial laziness. If you only place value on the "easily measurable" benefits, then the beneficial but more difficult-to-measure functions will be devalued and cut back.
And maybe a department only gets labeled a "cost center" in the first place if the manager running it is not influential or politically savvy enough to take credit for a piece of the revenue.
If you can form a reasonable argument that your work either earns or saves your company more money than they're paying you, you are not a cost center, and you would be foolish to accept that label.
I'm puzzled by this. Compared to customer support, marketing's benefit is _very_ easy to measure. You just correlate a given marketing action or strategy (say, a particular ad) with the lead generation / customer acquisition / "new" customer base metrics over its duration + a certain margin afterwards calculated from your product's delay-to-purchase, comparing with your prior projected growth at the rate it was going before the marketing strategy.
Of course once you throw in larger entities and multiple concurrent strategies and other confounders it takes a bit more math chops to isolate specific edges, but usually it's easier for a manager to find information about measuring marketing output than for typical "cost centers". And when all else fails, that's what the "Where did you hear about us?" box on the questionnaire is there for.
> And maybe a department only gets labeled a "cost center" in the first place if the manager running it is not influential or politically savvy enough to take credit for a piece of the revenue.
But yet, that's the kind of manager who gets put there! You want your best managers in the meaningful places that your company really relies on, and the lesser ones, well, there's an open spot down in Office Health & Safety right?
So it "earns" the label of a cost center because management put its worst person in charge of it. Okay. That's still... bad overall management, not just bad political savvy on the part of one manager.
When I worked in a neuro lab, us techs were the primary profit centre, while the neurologists themselves didn't pull in enough money to support their own wages. Yet we were constantly told that we were the ones losing money and had to rally round the flag in various ways - we were also paid 2/3rds market rate (young and dumb).
This idea that cost centres are treated poorly and profit centres are rewarded seems more idealistic than realistic, in my experience. It also seems to me that you're handwaving away the author's issues - everything he said is a problem, regardless of the kind of department he was in.
Where I work, our Support Heroes (yes, we call them Heroes because the lengths they go to for our customers are heroic) are one of the main reasons so many of our customers love us and stick with us so long.
You've probably heard that it can cost ~5x more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. An exceptional Customer Support team is your front line in fighting churn, and are an invaluable asset, not a liability. They can also be critical to making sure your product and engineering teams are up-to-date on everything they need to grow a successful product that your customers want to pay for.
Unfortunately, many companies simply don't realize this or don't care because they have a captive market (for now). I would encourage you to research more about how customer support can be done "right" vs. "wrong." If customer support is a "cost center" for you, you're doing it wrong.
I'm a little unclear from how you worded things--was the question around the notion of firing people as heroic juxtaposed against what we call our support team (ie. Heroes)?
Can you provide any examples of industries where there is no opportunity to turn CS into a profit center vs. a cost center? Sure it might be very difficult to model and prove out the exact impact it has on the bottom line, but I'm not convinced there are any scenarios where pissing off your customers with a poor experience is better for business than making them feel loved and, well, supported. :)
I would argue you're seeing the same narratives play out in the ride sharing space right now. Lyft tried to compete with Uber with their friendlier drivers vs we'll get you there faster and cheaper messaging and we'll see how long that differentiation lasts since Lyft seems to be rapidly backing away from their branding and into competing on purely on price.
Markets which are natural monopolies like Comcast also don't profit from extra CS. When your choice is shitty broadband vs no broadband, there's little CS, good or bad can do to sway your decision.
Markets where the purchaser is not the end user like enterprise sales also benefits from investing more money in sales than support. Every doctor I've ever been to has bitched at length about basic usability issues with the software they're forced to deal with but they have no real power so the software stays uniformly bad.
Markets where purchases happen infrequently. I recently had to buy a spare part for my refrigerator. Amazon didn't carry it, and the sites that did seemed uniformly low rent and amateur. I ordered from 1 site that said it was in stock and chose reasonably fast shipping. After not hearing from them for 2 days, I sent an email and they got back to me saying that due to a clerical error, it was actually out of stock and wouldn't be shipping out for another 4 days. Meanwhile, the website still listed the part as in stock. They didn't care, what's the worst I could punish this retailer for? Denying them all of my future spare fridge part purchases?
Sure, there's always exceptions to be found in all of these areas but by being the exception, you relegate yourself to a niche of the market and it becomes hard to expand outside of that niche.
Admittedly the Lyft example was unknown to me--I'll have to dig in, sounds interesting.
Specifically to airlines, I'd direct you to some interesting info on Southwest[1]. While TBH the case study doesn't really prove to me the causation of success by being customer-centric, it does show that they can compete in that industry with that approach and be successful.
For the cable industry I'd argue that Sonic.net has carved our a nice business for themselves in part because of their amazing service. That doesn't really disprove your statement that it relegates a business to a niche of the market and makes it hard to expand outside the niche, but I again think back to the question of correlation vs. causation. Comcast, TWC, etc. were all well entrenched before Sonic.net even existed. So it is hard to say how much of a factor that played in their limited ability to compete vs. the fact that they focus on customer service.
Respectfully, what I still remain unconvinced of with your examples is what exactly Comcast and others like them are leaving on the table by not having awesome customer support experiences. You don't necessarily need to break the bank to have one, but you do need strong direction and culture, and that comes from the top down.
I go back to the notion of customer acquisition costing potentially 5x as much vs. retention costs (all hypothetical averages of course). If an industry has razor-thin margins and cost-focused customers, wouldn't you think it would make them a lot of money to maximize the LTV of said customers?
[1] http://digitalstrategies.tuck.dartmouth.edu/cds-uploads/case...
As you mentioned, it's always hard to separate out cause and effect but I'd argue Southwest's unique fleet and labor arrangements gave it a temporary structural advantage. Now that those advantages are disappearing, it seems to be reverting towards the mean (http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023039497045794596...).
It's hard to believe this is true. I'd gladly pay $20 extra for a trans-Atlantic seat with more legroom and my experience shows that I'm not alone--all those "improved economy" seats are usually sold out well in advance (and they cost a lot more than $20 on a 1k extra).
But often this is not the case. I find that while good CS can make customers happy in normal circumstances, CS really makes or breaks a customer relationship when something goes wrong. Good CS and you have a brand advocate. Bad CS and you may have a nemesis that will go to irrational lengths to tarnish your brand out of pure spite.
I left my old cable operator for two reasons: 1) they were unable to fix my cable internet for two weeks, 2) their customer service kept giving me the wrong information.
Of those two, the latter was by far the most important factor. The former was just the trigger that put me at the mercy of their abysmal CS processes. Before that, if you'd asked me, I'd have recommended the company, and been totally neutral about their customer service, as I'd not had to deal with them for anything of substance.
Leaving did not get me internet back faster. It did not get me better service - just different. But it gave me the satisfaction of telling them to f-off, very publicly, after I'd suffered through multiple days of regular calls to their customer service team.
The downtime made me annoyed to start with, but their CS team who could have defused the situation just with some basic courtesy - others have - massively escalated things by being unsympathetic, not passing on the right information, not calling back when there were changes to the situation, and the final straw: after I'd decided to cancel, and had waited in line 45 minutes, I was told the computer systems were down and when I asked if they could take my details and arrange it later, they said no - ok, but could they call me back? No. I was expected to call back, wait in the same queue again for who knows how long, without knowing if they'd manage to cancel for me then.
So just by attitude and a few process issues that would not have made a material difference to their cost, first they lost me as a customer, then they pushed me into publishing a scathing complaint on my blog and tweet about it. I "only" have a direct reach of a few hundred people, but apparently that worried them enough that I had a call from someone claiming to be an assistant to the CEO the following (Saturday) morning, asking how he could help.
While that calmed me somewhat, had they just had better processes in place, they'd have had several thousands pounds in additional revenue from me by now, and not wasted a dozen or so CS reps time with all the repeated calls that arose from their poor internal communications.
That's why good CS matters.
It's those cases where long term previously satisfied customers decides to blacklist you for life and starts to badmouth you to every friend, co-worker and relative just because your CS processes made them angry by unnecessarily escalating some minor problem.
[1] http://www.helpscout.net/blog/disney-customer-experience/
Not only that, but support tickets are also an excellent opportunity to turn unhappy customers into evangelists.
These days when I phone or email a company and get someone capable who can actually help me I go around the next few weeks recommending the company to everyone who will listen.
In some ways could a few small glitches and fast useful responses could actually be better than it just works?
Platform lock-in is a negative, customer-hostile approach. The positive alternate version of "lock-in" is "stickiness." Ie. the concept that your product/service/experience is so amazingly awesome that your customers have many reasons to keep coming back and using you.
Platform lock-in has always come across to me as a crutch for some flaw in a product/service/pricing model. I understand businesses need to manage risk and their investment in customer acquisition, but focusing on customer-positive ways to do so seems better aligned with all parties interests, no?
Absolutely.
At my office, it was amusing when others would adopt the latest iPhone, but the charger was different... yet again! People would scurry about looking for a compatible charger, while the few of us with android phones would look at each other and mouth the words, "micro usb". Simple.
Good products can still be good while conforming to industry-wide standards -- something I seem to find less prevalent in my years of experience working with Apple products. (Design agency)
I have worked at a dozen or so support jobs, and no matter how much the customers stayed because of the support team or how much we drove the value our clients got out of the product, we always were a cost center and treated as such.
That always meant they we got the second best of everything, were always last on the list for raises, promotions, new hardware, proper chairs, whatever. We were left out of planning, and whenever another department decided at the last minute it wasnt their job now became ours to complete forever.
The second I switched over to being a consultant and making money for people instead of helping to avoid lost revenue, their attitude changed towards me and became much more positive and friendly instead of unreasonable and demanding (both on management and customer side).
I dont even know if this is a conscious or unconscious decision, but support/helpdesk job position is reviled for a reason, and the reason is that it is an unforgiving job with little acknowledgement, pay, or chance for promotion.
It gets even worse if you are doing stuff like Apple support (I trained iphone/ipod then ios/cpu at a vendor site) and almost everything he said rang true about them specifically (and the call center management world in general.)
Apple's training team was pretty cool and one of the few saving graces, I am glad I got to hang with them in Austin, they definitely were trying to build a robust system to train people with reproducible results. It was the best training I had gotten from any corporation before or since, it was what got me into training in the first place.
>"customer support in any company is like this."
My post was specifically in response to that, because it was an inaccurate statement.
I'm really sorry to hear you've had such poor experiences in support. That sucks, and I realize how hard/impossible that can be to turn around from a business and culture standpoint.
Sounds like you have found a path that works better for you, so congrats!
My experience is that (1) most companies do a lot of things wrong (2) the respect which support receives varies from company to company as well as industry to industry, with business support taken more seriously than consumer support. I'd be curious to know what industry you happen to work in.
That said, there are many companies out there that differentiate on support, so I still feel OPs statement painted with an overly broad brush. The example I gave from where I work was simply an anecdote.
No company is perfect and there will always be conflicting priorities when resources are finite (so, always). I didn't intend to plug, but since someone else in this thread accurately guessed...I work at SmugMug. We are a SaaS business, so keeping customers happy such that they never feel a need to leave aligns our business priorities very nicely with those of our customers. However it is also very much in our company's DNA.
I'm still not convinced though that a crappy customer experience is ever better than a happy one when it comes to growing a successful business that's in it for the long haul.
I think there's confusion about good/bad customer experience and what that means. Great staff doing great interactions is important, but if you focus just on that you're missing out on two important earlier layers.
No-one really wants to talk to customer support. Ever. So trying to be good at talking to people is nice, and you better be good at it when you need to or you will lose some customers (whether that be through lack of acquisition from bad stories or people actually quitting), but it's like the third level of defense, and it is arguably less important than the first two levels.
The first level is "Make sure your stuff just works". Actively work towards eliminating defects. The best product is the one that just works. People hate on Ryanair in Europe - I think it is vastly exaggerated. They get the point that having things just work is huge. They "just work" better than any other airline. They suck completely at the third level, and are only ok at the second level, but they are good at the first level. And sometimes good at first level, and good prices, is all you need.
Second level is - if things for some reason dont work, make it easy for me to fix it myself. Again - I dont want to think about your thing, I just want it to work, but if you're making me think about it by having it break, at least make sure I can do all my thinking and solving in one go - best way to do that is to let me fix it on my own. Sky broadband does a decent job of this. Their routers come with built in self-service menus rather than random error screens. Along the lines of "Something is wrong - lets start by plugging and unplugging the wires. Here's what a micro-filter is and looks like, check if you have one of those in place. Ok, lets power-cycle the router, you do that by just unplugging this wire..." 100% better than having a generic error screen or referring to online help.
Third level is - If you failed at the first two levels, make it easy and nice to talk to you. Important, not least for PR reasons, since people who failed the first two levels and also fail on the third will be really pissed off with you, but arguably less important than the first two layers, if they are done right. The other reason it is hugely important is that your improvement points on level 1 and 2 will come from 3. If your team isnt set up to continuously feed back what they are hearing from 3 and use that to improve 1 and 2, you're not going to get better.
The fourth bonus level is "f you failed the first three, at least have a decent social media setup to manage your awfulness".
A good CS organisation recognises all three levels at least, and spends time on all of them. You continually work on moving things from the third level up to the first, or at least the second, and doing that proactive work is part of what makes a good CS team.
Well, it's not logical at all in the common sense of the word logical. It's like you're talking to a compiler...
In casual conversation everybody understands that it doesn't mean "absolutely every company".
That's not true at all! There are lots of people (myself included) who tend to interpret things very literally, and would not recognize this subtlety. So not EVERY person understands that...
... oh. Never mind.
It's not just the helldesk. Even an experienced, senior level sysadmin, if they are doing their jobs well, even if what they do is absolutely critical to the company, upper management won't even be aware of their existence.
The differentiation is so deep, even the frequency of outings and the places they take you vary. The work timing differs, shift timing differs, perks differs. After all, the people who make things are revenue generators for the co, and we were nothing but easily replaceable pieces.
Smugmug?
Smugmug's support staff is great. There is a huge difference when dealing with regular customer support, and customer support that goes above and beyond to provide exceptional service.
Smugmug Crutchfield Dreamhost Nordstrom All provide great, consistent support.
Thanks for the kind words! I'm not a Support Hero, but have to say that everyone who works here from the top down has nothing but utter respect for our amazing Heroes. It is an exceptionally challenging job and thus warrants exceptionally talented individuals--I sure as heck know that I couldn't do what they do.
I wish all companies had our level of customer support, but I know that isn't realistic. Fortunately for us, that creates a great opportunity to win customers for life.
What motivates us to excel in that area? If I had to take a stab at it, I'd say there are two main reasons...
First, we view our support and our product as two sides of the same coin. We are immensely proud of what we've accomplished at SmugMug, and it simply would not enter the thoughts of the caliber of people who work here to have an awesome product and mediocre support.
Second, and more to the point, photos and photography are intensely personal pursuits and businesses warranting equally personal service. Whether we are protecting customers' memories and art or enabling them to live the dream as a pro photographer, they need to know they can rely on us no matter what when things hit the fan (as they unfortunately do on occasion).
That trust is a non-negotiable part of our relationship with our customers, and our Heroes are amazing at earning it through every ticket they help with, large or small.
But Google showed us that you can build a billion-dollar multinational with abysmal customer support.
Valve Software performs similarly well, and is renowned for having awful customer support.
I think this can even be rephrased to "your engineering-team is doing something wrong".
Where I work we had a product which represented without any doubt the majority of our customer-service's tickets. Almost all of the tickets were related to deployment-issues.
This got communicated back to engineering. We fixed deployment, and now it's hardly in the support-stats any more.
If the organization just ignores feedback like this, customer support being costly should come as no surprise.
That stupid stretched-out bitch made us a pile of money. Of course we never called her a "stupid bitch" to her face, that would be tactless. We called her a "hero".
I think she died of kidney failure or something.
Apple's approach to "customer experience" is many-fold: I would argue that the first line of customer support for Apple is actually the Apple Store. Here, they spend money to make it a good experience because it's a revenue driver. They can provide personalized assistance, but the techs can also build a relationship they can use to sell more stuff. Apple also spends a lot of time making their products intuitive (or at least "fail safe") so many customers don't need support in the first place.
Phone support? Not so much. It's 100% a cost center because they would prefer their customers use other methods of support that involve them walking into a store and getting the full Apple experience.
Your comments are probably true for a small or medium sized company, but not for a global behemoth like Apple. Everything is so siloed (out of necessity due to the size) that any customer feedback likely wouldn't make it up the 15 layers of middle management back to the product teams anyway. You can't have 10,000 support agents feeding things back to a team of 100-200 product developers; there's just too much noise. The product teams make enough revenue anyway that they can afford in-depth market research on a scale that small companies can only dream of.
software and everyone involved in it's development are becoming commoditized via open source or money being injected by venture capital or a non-monopolized industry over time ends up on certain standards and margin falls for everyone.
At a previous company I managed to end up doing my software development work under a Sales title, so I could get the quota and commissions that would come with it. All of a sudden I was earning a percentage of revenue every time a customer bought the software I wrote, winning recognition from the CEO, going to Presidents Club, etc. and total comp basically doubled. Doing exactly the same job under Engineering in previous years won me maybe a few thousand dollar bonus, or one year a gift card for dinner.
Somehow companies don't realize that you need everyone working as team to hit that revenue number at the end of the year, and every member of that team is doing essential work. You can have Customer Support rockstars, just like you can have Engineering and Sales rockstars. It's just that the Sales rockstars are trivially easy to measure (bookings) and so much easier to reward. I have yet to read about a compelling solution to this, because a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers, and there just isn't an equivalent process you can apply in the cost centers.
Not every employee wants or needs to be on variable comp, but the way we manage and reward employees is often very much dependent on how closely they are to driving revenue. I would be interested in case studies on companies that have managed to Think Differently on this, and I don't just mean a "profit sharing" plan.
I'm interested in hearing how this is proven. I've seen incentivized sales reps close deals that damaged the company, just like I've seen "successful" marketing campaigns that eventually killed their products.
If you use bookings as your metric for bonuses and then turn around and use bookings to measure whether the incentives are working on a per-worker basis, you'll miss a lot of negative effects. If sales starts overpromising the product, sabotaging each others' deals, or even chasing after bigger but short-term customers, you could see the metrics improve as the company falls apart. And then there's the fact that, even within a department, you'll hopefully have a group of people with diverse motivations.
That's why I'm curious about how this model has been "proven".
It's not 'proof' by any stretch, but I was recalling this article while typing the original comment: http://www.saastr.com/a-framework-and-some-ideas-for-your-fi...
I don't entirely recommend this book, because I feel that its arguments are not as well supported as they should be, but it is at least an interesting scan: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/541132.Punished_by_Reward...
Just to give you an idea of why this model is attractive ... and also why there is such huge churn in Sales. If you don't succeed pretty quickly, you're going to be broke.
What makes the rockstar saleperson's commission so much happier spending compared to the rockstar engineer's salary? I think simply the ability to measure the ROI on those dollars. The day anyone figures out how to directly measure ROI of engineering dollars with the same "obviousness" as sales quotas / commissions, it would completely change how we hire and retain engineers.
Your variable comp model can't be just a straight % commission, or else your sales reps will go chase enormous contracts that may be bad for your company. If you want to target smaller deals, weight their comp more on number of deals closed. There are hundreds of metrics you can use to judge your sales staff, and getting it right is hard. Your sales strategy needs to be driven by your business strategy, which should decided upon at the highest levels of the organization.
There is an art to creating variable comp models. You need your metrics to line up with your strategy. A star will deliver the numbers no matter what they are; while a low performer won't. The model is proven, but the details are up to every company.
Treating business units that book revenue as "profit centres" only makes sense if the revenue they book is entirely due to goods and services supplied by magic elves. Otherwise, <em>the work done to enable that revenue to be booked is part of the profit-generating business</em>. Letting internal cost accounting say otherwise is a recipe for bad business.
So the first part of the solution is to drop the cost/profit dichotomy, and actually have CEOs focus on understanding their business. This is an unrealistic suggestion, I know, but I can dream.
Wow, that hits close to home. I think I'll be using that line in the future, thanks!
Companies full of ego maniacs eat themselves alive from the inside out. It takes a while for small problems to become big problems, but I think the Apple of 2025 is going to look more like today's Hp or Yahoo than the Apple of 2015.
My explanation for that is that the "tiny innovative core" is way too overworked to write about themselves and everyone else is just irrelevant.
Add to that a culture that values protecting secrets versus some notion of 'openness', and an incentive to hold onto that job if you really like it and the valuable stock options that may have come with it, and I'm not terribly surprised that you see relatively few insider stories.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-confess-all-t...
As a person with direct experience of being affected, these stories ring true to me.
Full of wannabe Mr Jobs.
As for my own experience, I moved from a comfortable telecommute job with an amazing team, naively expecting that Apple would be a huge leap in my career experience.
Instead I found a huge factory sized cube farm (office space!) and a beleaguered internal dev team, whose job was to maintain a giant mountain of bockety legacy ball of tcsh/php/mysql. Project management and infrastructure were pretty much nil. Training and documentation didn't exist, it was sink or swim.
There was a bit of a siege mentality in the team because a lot of what they maintained was critical to a lot of people onsite, and these people frequently beat a path to your desk to berate you because 'the site was down'. Which site? There were countless report sites and webpages scattered around the place. There wasn't much time to go back and fix old code because the work pipeline was always gushing forth new work.
One feature of the job was endless, pointless meetings - these happened a lot, and it gave an glimpse into how some management types played the ladder-climbing game. I definitely came across some predatory/aggressive types. This seemed to be a good strategy because it equalled "visibility", which was often lauded as a career-making goal to aim for in the team and the company. A lot of things seemed to be done with the hope that it would "create visibility".
To be fair, I gather that things in that team are a bit better now - there were some bright, really hard guys there, working against ridiculous odds. But I cannot say I found the experience enriching - I found that I was using less of my skill-set, I hated the cube-farm corporate environment, so I took another opportunity as soon as it came along.
I have worked in a call centre. It was an odd job, for a government department, ended up creating a sort of call logging and ticketing system for them - still used today (11 years later - but that's more an artefact of sunkworks dev in a government department than a testament to my coding skillz ;)
Anyway, my point is, those employees were told, and felt, that their service mattered, that the higherups listened to feedback etc. Excellent place to work and a very good atmosphere.
He works for Google now.
My cousin also works for Apple, and after complaining about crunch time and how he had to check the bug queue when I was visiting him on a Saturday, I asked him "So, how long has crunch time lasted?" He replied, "Oh, about 18 months. Makes it really hard to date when I don't get any weekends." (He's in his 40s now, still no girlfriend.)
I assume they got into work at 8 or 9am? That's terrible. I'm really glad that I work a standard 8 hour day at my small no-name company.
I work 6am to 3pm, and I still get stuck in traffic pretty regularly.
We just get to make our own hours and being in my twenties, I like sleeping in.
I'm in California and I try to get meetings scheduled for the late morning or early afternoon. 11am meetings are totally reasonable for anybody on the west coast, and it's not too hard to convince people in (for example) New York to not schedule meetings for before 10am their time. On the rare occasion that I need to make a 6am phone call with somebody who's a real go-getter on the east cast, I'll just bite the bullet and show up at 6, and then take off around 2.
On the other hand, I used to work in a bakery, so waking up at 7am is still sort of like sleeping in for me. But there's nothing like finishing your day at 330; I love it.
The fact that you only get 4 hours joint meeting time is just as good as if you were collaborating on east vs. west coast.
Is that considered good? I run a small company and - also as a developer - I'd really like to get meetings down to 3 or 4 hours a week.
I've been trying to get my boss to reduce the 2-3 hours a week of meetings I have to attend.
I feel very fortunate to work at a company and with a team that supports my preferred schedule.
- A problem with the staff - there's either not enough of them or they haven't the skills to do what is required
or
- A problem with the management.
I've never worked in a role where incompetent people were hired and couldn't get what needed to be done done, but I've worked under plenty of incompetent management.
Well, that's not entirely true. Unfortunately, in Portugal, it's more like 6PM; 7/8PM for tech jobs. And no tech giants here, also. :)
If you instead mean homegrown tech giants then you have a definite point. The only European giants I can think of are Telefonica, Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Nokia and SAP. It would be interesting to see the research on if the reason for that has much to do with the horrible work expectations in the US.
Long crunch times (more than two or three weeks) are strong evidence of deliberately abusive management, who are willing to lower productivity below what it would be with a 40-hour work week for the sake of their egos.
Basically, if you believe that hitting a deadline is worth having overall less productivity for, you can reasonably crunch for 2 weeks, and have the third week as an acknowledged low productivity week, and it might be worth it. Anything much beyond that is counter-productive on pretty much all axes and a strong sign that management is incompetent.
Eh, it could be worse.
At a previous company I worked for, one of the executives passed away. There was a funeral on a Friday, followed by reception. Guess what the lunch was on Monday at the office? The leftovers from the reception.
A similar thing happened where the CEO had a party at his house for the engineering department. No one else was invited. The following day, company lunch was leftovers from that party.
Looking back, I wish they had simply given us frozen dinner vouchers rather than shitty food.
Of course, if it's part of your compensation, it should probably be taxed as such... maybe I should keep my mouth shut.
In the funeral scenario, the problem was that the funeral was on a Friday and the food was stale and gross by the time it was served for lunch on Monday.
In the other scenario, a lot of people were offended that they were being served left-overs from a private party they weren't invited to, despite being a part of the company. The CEO not only gave preferential treatment to engineering but then went one step further and served the leftover food to the rest of the company. To me, that clearly communicates what he thinks of non-engineers.
>> Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife. -- Obligatory Four Yorkshiremen[1] Python reference
Not to poke fun at folks suffering, we've all been there and it's not healthy.
The question is, what system could we put in place that would reward a positive work culture and penalize *hattery? I know Glassdoor tries, but is there a way to measure this that won't be gamed out of shape?
1. http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/monty-python-four-yorkshi...
That sounds very odd. Was this Omaha Steaks by chance? Perhaps it was meant well.
Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quora, other promising startups). Any software engineer who is in the valley for a while (and heard the inside horror stories of working for Apple) wouldn't want to work there. There is no way in hell, senior engineers from the new age tech companies (listed above) will go to Apple. Apple will have a hard-time poaching them. Based on this, I have to conclude that most good engineers@Apple are candidates who have a tenure of more than 15 years and are aging. All, relatively new Apple employees are either left-overs in the talent-pool who couldn't make the cut to the above top firms/startups or really B-grade senior engineers. What is Apple's strategy of thriving in a knowledge economy, when the only asset you need are "great people" to succeed in the long term. They probably have great hardware engineers. It is a travesty that though they are the richest company in the world, they still couldn't build a compelling cloud services suite which is better and cheaper than what Dropbox, Google, Box, Microsoft can provide. This comment, will probably ruffle a few feathers. [updated for typos/grammar]
Based on this, I have to conclude that most good
engineers@Apple are candidates who have a tenure of
more than 15 years and are aging.
Most of the cash from overseas operations is overseas which is legal.
You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.Two days ago I said aloud to a screen ", OS X is turning into Windows".
I moved to OS X 5 years ago, and recently I realised that a lot of my assumptions about Windows are no longer true. Now, I contemplate moving back.
The problem with OSX now, as I see it, is that as Windows irons out the problems that made *nix users dislike it, OSX seems to be allowing those problems (both engineering and usability) to creep in.
Please, if someone can sell a Linux with the same polish as Mac OSX, and as low-administration time, I would agree to pay about $200 per year for it. I've switched away from Ubuntu after being unable to resolve a problem after upgrade two years ago (which cost me 4 days). I spend 2x more on computers for Macbooks, not because of the hardware but because of Mac OSX.
I don't know how large is the audience for a paid workproof Linux, but I wish someone would build it.
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/dell-updates-linux-po...
You would, everyone else would download the CentOS equivalent, and as consumers we don't need the assurances of first-party enterprise support.
I know Apple recently poached a bunch of people from one of the above-named companies.
I met several current and former Apple employees. Many of them are extremely talented.
Based on my anecdotal experience, that doesn't show Apple has any problem attracting top quality engineers.
From the rumours I've heard, they pay marginally higher salaries.
I don't want to work there, as I know people who have and it sucked, but, I can see the appeal for some. Also one person I know who did a stint there got some rather obscenely large amounts of cash.
Edit: OK I see from other comments that those Googlers are doing 12pm to 9pm and it is flexible so doesn't sound so bad.
Wow, Is it normal? Sounds ridiculous to me, having a family at home, I can't imagine coming home at 9 PM, having a late dinner and going straight to bed to wake up the next day, not seeing my son or wife the whole day, is it like this in every big company?
pot calling kettle black much? Getting home at 8 or 9 sounds pretty awful to me. I get that midnight is worse, but I don't think I want to work at either place. They both sound terrible.
"I know where Steve's head was. He wasn't doing anything to hold down salaries; it never came up. He had a simple objective: if we were working together on something, like with Intel, where we threw everything in the middle of the table and said, 'let's convert the Mac to the Intel processor', well, when we did that, we didn't want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn't want us poaching theirs. Doesn't it make sense that you wouldn't, that it's an OK thing? I don't think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad. And I don't think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees."
Ed Catmull of Pixar, a seemingly gentle person, is similarly unapologetic about the issue. Why is it that, at a certain level, intelligent company leaders seem to stop thinking of their employees as individuals and instead start thinking of them as company assets?
(I don't mean this as an anti-Apple comment. In fact, I want to give Jobs, Cook, and Catmull the benefit of the doubt, in the sense that they probably did approach the issue from the perspective of doing what's best for their companies, not as a quick way to save some paltry money. But that's kind of the underlying problem, isn't it? Once you've internalized the idea that your employees are company assets — that they aren't hard workers who make the company tick, but that they literally are the company — it's easy to slide down the slippery slope towards incredibly unethical and shady dealings like collusion. I wonder how this can be avoided.)
But then, I've seen that attitude in startups. The passion for the company as a whole trumps everything so the people are easily disposable to them. Which, as in so many other areas of life, is completely backwards from what they perceive as logical.
People believe they've been deprived of money and attention by default, so they'll eat up anything that appears superficially credible and gives them occasion to lay blame for that deprivation.
With that said, isn't the obvious solution to just raise everyone's salaries?
Also, the explanation only reinforces the idea that these executives view their employees as chips to be bartered, not free agents.
Most employees do not want to be tied down to the company in a binding fixed-term commitment; how much worse would things be if people weren't free to pursue other employment whenever they wanted? How much more abuse would employees suffer if they didn't have the option of walking out and finding comparable employment at any time?
Most employees want benefits and perks that would be very difficult to provide in the context of independent agency, like medical insurance. In professional circumstances that are based on procuring such agents, there's usually a union, co-op, axis, or league that furnishes the benefits the worker desires. Read this page [1] about the stability NBA players lacked prior to unionization.
The grass is always greener. Perhaps an employee's raw salary would be higher if a free agency model was used, though I personally doubt it would be, but most of the terms of this game are defined by the employee, not the employer.
A world where every employee is an independent agent with his/her own contract is a much, much different world than we have now and would take a long time to analyze with any depth or completion. It's not that there aren't ways to make it work, but the standard employment relationship exists because it's the employment arrangement most conducive to the type of lifestyle the average person wants to have.
It depends on the terms of the contract. If a company offered me a three-year contract for more than I thought I could earn anywhere else over the next three years (e.g., $500K per year), why shouldn't I take the opportunity?
The contract would need to spell out working conditions, of course. For $500K, I wouldn't lock myself into an obligation to work 60-hour weeks for three years straight. My health and sanity are worth more to me than that.
Some of the highest-paid workers in our society lock themselves into contracts: professional athletes, movie stars, etc. Would you want to start filming a high-budget movie if your leading actor could walk off the job at any time?
If you don't want your prized employee leaving, there's a really easy solution: pay him enough to stay. If he's that valuable, then it's worth paying.
Since the solution is so easy, but Jobs et al didn't want to apply that solution, I can only conclude that suppressing salaries was precisely the idea. If it wasn't about suppressing salaries then they could have just increased the salaries for these key employees such that leaving for another job was no longer an attractive prospect.
I understand that theoretically the wage would be negotiated to the point where it was no longer attractive to poach or be poached and everyone's life would continue along swimmingly. The problem is that I don't believe this would happen in the Real World. There is just too much emotion involved, and perception is too fickle, for this to work out well for anyone. The industry's productivity would be deeply damaged, not just from the high-level executive POV where you're comparing year-over-year profit-dollars-per-employee, but also from the tangible, objective POV, where it would take much longer to get things done.
There's a reason that anyone who gets caught up in a poaching war takes effort to avoid that situation from occurring ever again, and there's a reason that employees aren't going out and more actively inciting bidding wars no matter how fun it sounds in theory to have two or more companies tripping over themselves to outbid each other for you. Putting aside the actual economic realities that would be incurred, employees have real emotional needs that would be difficult to meet in a poaching culture. People need continuity and camaraderie. People need a sense of accomplishment and contribution. Those things are not going to occur if 25% of your workforce churns over to the competitor and back again every year, and like I said, while I understand the theory that the churn would eventually stop once a "market price" for the labor was stabilized, I don't think that's how it would play out in real life; I think the entities would commonly harbor feelings of resentment and betrayal, and I think many participants would adopt other combative emotional stances, that would deeply impede the industry's function.
I'll have to do some research and see if I can find some real-life data that may credit or discredit this theory.
We also need to acknowledge that anti-poaching agreements can be interpreted in various ways. My understanding is that most of these agreements bar active recruitment or incitement of sitting employees at members of the pact, but they do not bar hiring an employee away if he seeks you out. There may be exceptions and this may have changed depending on the interpretation of different persons in the HR dept. I definitely believe that refusing to hire employees who seek out employment externally due to your no-poach agreement is uncool.
We agree that there is some salary level where that constant churn of poaching doesn't happen, right? As you said, people generally like to stay where they are. That means that poaching will only work if you can offer something substantially better. When employees are paid well enough that it's not worth paying them substantially better just to convince them to leave their current job, the poaching churn will stop.
If Jobs wanted to stop the poaching churn without being evil and without breaking the law, it would have been easy: go out and figure out what that salary level is, and start paying it. Or heck, he wouldn't even have to go that far. If we assume that the "no poaching" level is vastly higher than current salaries, all he'd have to do is pay, say, 50% higher than the other companies around, then keep an eye on things and continue bumping up compensation if and when other companies started to follow along.
I don't see how that scenario has any negative outcomes for anyone besides shareholders and executives who counted on being able to pay $1 to an employee in return for $10 of value forever. There would be no feelings of resentment and betrayal, no combative emotional stances, because none of the churn you describe would happen.
Faced with poaching, Jobs had three alternatives. He could ignore it, he could collude with other companies to stop it, or he could pay his people well enough to make the problem go away. The only reason to choose collusion over better pay is to save money by giving less of it to your workers.
Why? To understand the motivations of Jobs, Cook, Catmull, etc.? The motivations are clear. Collusion is still illegal, and "seeing both sides" is an attempt at justification.
The word "protective" doesn't seem apt here, as that would imply he had his employees' best interests at heart, when clearly he only had the company's best interests in mind (which is fair, given that's the job of the CEO).
Try "possessive".
I've read that book (audio) - that was one of the more cringeworthy passages of the book. What I gathered was that Tim probably felt like "hey I wouldn't do this, but it's Steve and he's my boss so I have to put a marginal defense out there".
I agree with you, the way these rich people look at employees as chess pieces rather than humans is awful. If you're so afraid of someone quitting, then address that by making it worth their while not to quit! Not with collusion for god's sake.
The fact that they call someone getting a better job "being poached" just says it all really. (If you use this phrase, take a moment to really think about what you are saying.)
As soon as someone pulls the trigger and starts poaching it gets exponentially more expensive for these companies to operate.
This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.
It's kind of like a union in some regard. No wonder companies don't like it.
If your employees are under pure default at-will employment, its not poaching to seek to hire them out from under you, because you haven't purchased a property interest in their continuing to remain your employees. And, if you have purchased such an interest, then you suddenly don't need a no-poaching agreement to prevent them from being poached.
A multiparty no poaching agreement with the other main employers in the industry -- particularly a secret one -- is essentially trying to impose the restriction of having an extended contract with your employees without paying them for accepting that restriction.
The ability to do that is HIGHLY restricted by labor laws. I'm not saying you couldn't get around it with very careful contracting... but I wouldn't want to count on it.
The ability to do that under the law is demonstrated by the fact that there are whole major industries where this kind of contracting with talent is normal. (Legal limitations tend to highly restrict the ability to get a remedy beyond money damages for breaches of such agreements, to be sure, but they don't tend to prevent the agreements themselves.)
It tends to be expensive (both in terms of what you pay the talent and in terms of the overhead associated with contracting), but if the talent is really valuable enough, that's the price you pay.
If you aren't willing to pay that price, you shouldn't complain about people "poaching" what you didn't want to pay the cost to have a durable claim to in the first place.
If a company sold a widget that routinely generated $500k in profit per year each and leased it for $125k/year, would it make business sense to keep it at that price? Hell no! Charge as much as the market will bear. That's just supply and demand.
[1] http://nypost.com/2014/02/28/apple-has-biggest-slice-of-prof...
Imagine if Apple had to pay $300K per employee what kind of a landscape that would be. Nobody but Apple could afford to hire anyone.
If employees getting a lower salary enables a company to take risks, doesn't that mean the employees are shouldering the risk?
With lower salaries, the company can assume more risk, there's more room for failure. With higher salaries the employee becomes an increasing liability.
Just compare how hiring in France is, where terminating people is significantly more difficult, with an at-will environment like California.
It's not really, but that is an enlightening comparison. Using the prisoner's dilemma as an analogy for this hiring situation, the employees aren't players (prisoners, if you prefer) at all. Which is exactly the problem.
That just gives you the reason why two companies would want to collude and would have to agree to collude to get the best outcome for both companies.
I agree the more important issue is as you say; the legal and moral aspects are what they are because of the fact that employees are being treated as resources or pawns. But that means that we are happy to see a prisoners dilemma dynamic here, it means that there has to be some type of collusion to make this dynamic happen. Collusion is explicit and detectable. Much better than the various other types of exploitative dynamics that are emergent.
Okay, but the problem itself is different. In a classic prisoner's dilemma the players cannot know how the other will decide and so they act in the manner which benefits them the most. When pursuing their interests they both rat out their accomplice, with the ironic outcome that neither avoids punishment.
> But that means that we are happy to see a prisoners dilemma dynamic here, it means that there has to be some type of collusion to make this dynamic happen. Collusion is explicit and detectable.
Okay, but the collusion is why it's not a classic prisoner's dilemma, I would think.
Also, we're not that happy. The collusion means the companies can avoid punishing one another prisoner's dilemma style. Great for the companies but bad for the employees, since "punishment" in this context involves... hiring.
I can understand why large company CEOs would want to do this. I can even empathize with them and imagine myself wanting to this were I in their situation. I can also see how this affects employees, though, and why employers shouldn't be allowed to do so.
Either way, it would surprise me if people who are otherwise happy at their company would randomly switch to a partner company unless either: a) the salary offered were significantly (>30% or so) higher than at their current company for similar work in similar conditions (meaning they are undervalued or undercompensated at their current company), b) the other company looked much more promising a place to work for or offered a much better position (in terms of autonomy or career advancement). Pretty sure the solution there is just to compensate your employees fairly and make their work conditions on par with the standard for similar workers in the industry (or better, if possible).
Wow. That's... ballsy.
Sure, holding down salaries might not have been the primary motivation.
Doesn't change the fact that collusive no-hire agreements hold down salaries, and Cook and Jobs are smart enough to know this.
Steve Jobs is convinced he never did anything bad in his entire life. Except for denying paternity, but that still took a few decades.
It is possible he was very good at deluding himself.
Perhaps that self-delusion is contagious.
If one wants to believe something strongly enough, then maybe one can believe it.
If people want to believe that the only way to produce great form factor and ease of use in a computer is to be Jobs-like and conduct "business" like Apple, then they might believe that, even if there is a good chance or evidence this behaviour is not necessary.
It seems people have a difficult time separating the Apple products from the organization that sells them.
One may be worthy of adoration, the other may not.
The recruiter was going off an old copy of my resume that they found online and was unaware that I had a different employer. When I disclosed this, they immediately refused to go any further in the process because they were worried that if they helped me to leave then my employer wouldn't use them to fill future openings.
I told them to lose my number. Since that time, when one of my friends is looking for work in tech, I steer them away from this particular recruiting firm (I have no desire to blast them here) because of my experience with them.
This happened in the Pittsburgh area, I can only imagine what it was like out there on the left coast.
Employees do not belong to their employers, I don't know why this is such a difficult concept for some people to grasp.
They had, maybe 20-30 employees.
This was the end of the final email exchange between myself and this recruiting company.
Clearly, the bottom line is that clients pay XXXXXX and talent does not. It belittles us both to pretend that it's really about ethics or loyalty.
I don't maintain business relationships in which my interests come last and I don't do business with the dishonest.
Again, please, lose my number.
I think this is directly related to the language used within most companies -- at least all those I've worked at -- to describe their employees: human resources. I think this is because people too easily conflate human resources with natural resources, which are consumed by some manufacturing process.
Once upon a time, I worked at a company whose internal management guidelines stressed loading new hires with as much work as they could bear to determine their breaking points. Work load was then scaled back to some sustainable-ish percentage of that maximum, and the employees were worked until burnout. The expectation was they would then leave the company. Obviously they had an absolutely absurd amount of turnover. Upper management saw nothing wrong with utilizing their resources in this manner. This experience obviously colors my view of things.
In my opinion, the phrase human resource is simply dehumanizing. But, I also think it might be a necessary psychological barrier that is required by massive companies. If the upper management actually conceive of their organization as made up of employees, not human resources, they may act or react more slowly, become less risk averse, etc. That is bad for business! Likewise, I think there's a similar statement to be made about citizens vs. consumers when speaking about another type of large organization: governments.
Language and the words we choose matter. They shape our thoughts, and define what is possible. We ought to choose better words.
If you ask your friend to go out with you on a trip along with your girlfriend, would it be ok if your friend builds relationship with her during the trip and she breaks up with you? You can argue that may be your girlfriend found a better fit and you should be ok with that. OR you can argue that you and your girlfriend were doing just fine but your friend violated your trust and lured her away destroying your precious relationship. I bet you can find people arguing both cases as "obviously" right outcome.
PS: I'm not arguing any of the sides but I'm intrigued by this morality problem.
Perhaps "corporations are people, my friend" but they're not buddies out on a camping trip with a girl. There's no Corporation-A-broke-their-word-to-Corporation-B - there's business and competition is a huge part of that.
Here's what I think would be a better analogy: let's say you run a restaurant in a small town. The restaurant business is booming, and you and your competitors are all expanding, to the point where it's getting hard to find qualified cooks and servers.
The cooks and servers start working to get a piece of the pie. They move between restaurants as higher pay is offered. You desperately need more staff and since you can't find new people, you resort to soliciting the staff at competing restaurants and offering them more money. They do the same to your employees. Average pay rises.
You and the other owners don't like this at all. Cooking and serving was a minimum-wage job not too long ago! This steadily increasing pay is eating into your profits. So you all get together and agree to put a stop to it: you won't try to hire away their staff, and they won't try to hire away yours. Pay stagnates, and you and the other owners get to keep more of your profits.
This is what happened with Apple and these other companies over time, only with computer people instead of cooks and servers. Is it immoral for businesses to collude to artificially hold down wages? I think most people would say yes. Probably more importantly, it's illegal.
1. I think most of us here understand that a single bad experience cannot reflect the culture in the company. Previously I was in a few other tech companies, where my experience was quite similar in nature. Some teams have inherently crappy people, leading to crappy culture. Ultimately it boils down to the manager and the members of the team when it comes to the question of fostering a culture.
2. The culture in my team(software) was mostly relaxed. Most of my colleagues did a 8-9 hour days on average. Of course, there were days(very rare) it became a 10-12 hour shift.
3. I am a firm believer in the fact that the employee needs to set the expectations straight, right off the bat. If you run the wheel like a hamster on steroids in the first few months, sucking up, staying late and trying to be the all conquering hero - the expectations are going to be centered around that.
4. I am an average Joe, who preferred to get in by 9.30 and get off by 6.00ish - I didn't sync my emails, didn't give a hoot unless it was absolutely crucial and someone called/texted me about the issue and it needed urgent attention. I am not a doctor saving people, just an engineer fixing bugs.
5. Of course my compensation/bonuses didn't go up like my friends who did the long hours, but I am absolutely cool about that. They deserved it.
It seems he worked at the Sydney office. There's a comment on his story as news.com.au
"Apple HQ in Australia was no different - a big frat-house where the "in" crowd got ahead and anyone else who challenged a process was seen as a difficult employee and managed out of the business."
Must be kind of hard to deal with that at a distance - It's not like Tim Cook would know who's who and doing the bad stuff. Maybe some sort of feedback tech would help.
I certainly have. I was going to bring it up if no one else did.
The fact that Apple developers I've spoken to spend their personal coding time (on the rare occasion it exists) on work projects only reinforces all of this.
(All that said, my sample size is seven people, so I could be quite wrong in the end.)
I faced similar in my last company (not with Apple). Now find it very difficult to get working on a side project or similar at home after having not done anything in that regard in a few years.
Ideas I once had to develop are long gone. Bleh.
When we got notice of the acquisition a group of devs had a lawyer come in and from what I hear the lawyer basically said "don't sign this if you want to do anything outside of work ever".
I just thought this was common for these megacorps. Is that not the case? I also wonder if they can actually enforce something like that in California.
Your article:
Is five years old, and never claims about that the person mentioned in article was still developing apps after being hired by Apple. In fact:
The picture displayed is from a now-defunct Seattle-centric business social networking website, and Phillip is mentioned as being part of the "Seattle Community," but a resident of "San Jose California."
It seems totally sensible that Apple would want to hire someone with experience building iOS apps, and would then make them give all of those up as soon as they're hired. Which would be identical to the experience that the people I know have had.
I did some more digging, and:
“Apple employees are generally prohibited
[from publishing apps in the App Store],”
[Evan] Doll told Wired.com. “You have to
get a special exception from a VP.
Otherwise, big no-no. If he was doing it
pre-Apple then he’d have an easier time
getting an exception,” he added.
Oh god. I would have hung up. The concept of a "dry run" for a meeting is insanely offensive and counterproductive. If a meeting needs to be scripted and rehearsed, it does not need to happen.
It's not a on/off thing - it's a continuum from fact-based decision making to perception-based decision making. The difference is how good are the managers at seeing what's really going on and how much they care about it.
It's not something you do with everyone there or with a meeting that just works off an agenda.
What's sad is when a meeting is actually just an elaborate ruse of a presentation.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=90_Hours_A_Week_A...
A. Ask any of the original Mac team if they'd have skipped the opportunity.
B. Most of them have done quite well for themselves.
I wish I knew then what I know now :) I put in 100+ hours a week for a tech firm because interesting/love what I do/blah. And all I have to show for it is stock that increased a little bit.
Oh lucky guy. I've heard enough of these stories without even that. But startups are highly voluntary so I take that relatively lightly compared to corporate responsibility of Apple et al.
That idea is now a myth, only a handful of wall-streeters break the 1-2 million mark according to various industry surveys (generally you can earn a lot more if you are a principal or a portfolio manager at a successful hedge fund, but those are outliers, the truth is that the belief everyone on the buyside is living a model and bottles lifestyle (or might be able to) is a huge misconception). IMHO, the best shot at becoming rich remains entrepreneurship.
Forgot the exact numbers, but it's something like six months you live there and work most of your waking hours, then six months vacation, and the pay is stupid high (and living on the platform while you work there means you have almost no personal expenses during that time).
And, again, personal expenses go down to almost zilch while living on-base.
My mom's boyfriend is in the National Guard. Every few years, he gets activated and deployed somewhere for a year or two. Every time he comes back, he takes the money he saved by not having to pay for anything for a year and buys himself an expensive new car. Last time, he bought a Dodge Challenger SRT8.
I did get paid for those types of weeks a long while back (billed hourly - 50-80 hour weeks - nice rate). It does get painful after a year or two, and the winter in the northland is a bit harsh since you aren't seeing much sun.
There was an interesting article in Fortune a while ago. The tldr was that you shouldn't get mad that Wall Street pays too much, but that the rest of corporate America pays too little. When companies are building war chests in the tens of hundreds of billions, and also feel the need to collude to prevent "poaching", you have to wonder.
The sad part is that people in technology sometimes love the work so much, that they are willing to put in more than they should on pure economic terms. The finance and consulting types are more ruthless about their own worth.
EDIT: My minimum wage comment was more about making a point. Banker types like to say they make lots of money but make less per-hour than a McDonald's employee.
No, its not lower than minimum wage, even at the low end of that range, and even if they worked all 168 hours of every week.
$300K / 8,760 hours a year (assuming a non-leap-year, and 24/7 schedule) = $34.24/hour
Federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr; even with the +50% premium for overtime after the first 40 hours in a week, that's only $10.88/hr for the overtime hours. So its literally impossible to clear $300K a year and be making less than minimum wage, without some kind of weird time warping ability that lets you work 3+ years of 24/7 work in one calendar year.
EDIT: To respond to the edit of the parent post...
> My minimum wage comment was more about making a point.
What point is made by this drastically false claim?
> Banker types like to say they make lots of money but make less per-hour than a McDonald's employee.
If that's true (along with the compensation numbers you present), that tells us that one of the following is true:
1. Bankers are innumerate,
2. Bankers are ignorant of their own compensation,
3. Bankers are ignorant of the compensation of low-wage workers, or
4. Bankers are being dishonest, perhaps in an effort to deflect criticism of their compensation compared to other workers.
Looks like you are one order of magnitude wrong, even at just 300K a year working 100 hours a week that's over $50 an hour.
When I graduated college, base salaries in banking were about $65,000, which leads to $12.50 / hour. After their first bonus check, this doubles, of course, but that first year can feel pretty bad. Still not minimum wage, but I think the point they want to make is that, yes, we make lots of money, but is it worth it with the hours. In comparison, a $120,000 tech job at a big company (not counting equity), working 40 hours a week with 2 weeks vacation comes to about $60 / hour.
The difference is that the professional services compensation grows at a much faster rate than the tech compensation, unless you happen to pick the next Google/FB/whatever and get on-board early on.
Any banker type that says something like that is an asshole or is really bad at math. Assuming he's a competent banker he's probably not actually bad at math and is just an asshole.
Other orgs. in the company are generally a lot nicer to work in, though it varies where you wind up.
Oh lord. As though any of them have any clue about real "high pressure" work environments. Being an asshole unnecessarily isn't a high pressure environment.
The difference is artificial pressure driven by concerns like "I will look bad to my boss" or "or EPS might dip a fraction of a present", as opposed to "people will die".
Miller's wartime exploits were to give him a greater sense of perspective when he returned to the sports field. When asked many years later by Michael Parkinson, about pressure in cricket, Miller responded with the famous quote: "pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse, playing cricket is not".
It's not the money. It's the vision and the way they treat talent. They don't pay much deference to the consummate creators, the lifeblood of innovation.
Long hours, synchronous work schedules with asynchronous dependencies, long commutes, and not an equal pay to warrant education level and mental capacity required for task at hand.
I think the future may consist of Life-Work balance where one's life outside of work, is greater than their work.
I've worked at net-new startups, very large companies, and companies like I've described above. I miss the comraderie of a team under a dozen people making good progress and with everyone able to make good impact without being a superstar.
Why future? A lot of people do that just now.
* unskilled people piling on minimum-wage jobs to avoid bankrupcy;
* start-uppers who clock insane hours, in the hope of becoming filthy rich through Google ads revenue on their new "AirBnB for pets" or whatever;
* IBMers (do they still exist as we picture them BTW?);
* jobs of limited interest and impact, done half-arsed if not worse, as seen in tv shows like _The Office_.
The skilled guy who goes part-time because he makes enough working 3 days a week to enjoy the 4 remaining ones exists, but he's not thought about. When his female counterpart is considered, she's typically seen as sacrificing her career for her kids, rather than buying herself time by not working more than whatever she needs to earn.
The positive is just having Apple on your resume you will make landing a job anywhere easier. So the torture is more then worth it.
In contrast Google is more bottoms up / crowdsourced or "Darwinian" as Elon Musk would say. Meetings are more cross functional, shorter, and to the point this way.
What the fuck?! How the heck can this happen between two human beings who happen to work for the same company? I'd rather plant potatoes for a living or even go to war than having to deal with people who have no soul inside of them. Empty shells.
In fact, the more I think about it, I don't know of any prolific bloggers, or open source contributors, or HN commentators, or really anyone, who currently works for Apple. I know Bret Victor (worrydream) used to work there, but left IIRC because they weren't letting him do things he creatively wanted to do.
Where are the Apple advocates?
The culture is strongly one of not talking about working at Apple while employed so not many people will discuss it online, especially if they like their jobs. The culture of secrecy is one of those things that I never was bothered by, since it's just the norm.
Some orgs. are much better to work for than others, with around ten thousand employees in hundreds of teams, there's not many ways to reasonably generalize about what it's like to work there - different jobs can result in incredibly different experiences. The guy in the article was an AppleCare program manager dealing with OSV support centers, a job I'd never sign up for ever, since it's a corporate grind that's inherently tied to interdepartmental politics and squabbling with OSVs.
Trust me, complaints about this come up a lot inside Apple. I'd love to go to conferences and talk about the tech we're working on. (Even if just to get more hires!) I'd love to blog about it. I'd love to contribute to open source projects. But it's just not what we do here, in general. (Hell, I had to make a throwaway just to post this on HN.) It's definitely my biggest complaint about my job, and it's definitely kept us from being able to hire good talent.
The fact that there aren't any prolific bloggers, open source contributors or HN commentators is an artifact that the company does not encourage anyone to do that -- in fact, they actively discourage anyone that isn't involved in open source work on Webkit or Obj-C or Swift from talking about their work. For better or worse, they still have a culture of secrecy around their products.
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed my time there and wouldn't trade it for anything else; I worked with a lot of fabulous teams, learned a lot, and got to build some really amazing stuff.
Most of these former employees feel legally threatened by their former employers, and that's what prevents them from sharing more.
I wish there was a way.
It's very hard to make conclusions for the whole company from such a small sample. That borders discrimination/racism thinking. Not in any way trying to say that he had a pleasant experience or that his management was solid. Probably wasn't. Just hard to make conclusions for a big group from such a small sample.
Statistically speaking, an n of 100 is a reasonably decent sample of 5000 data points. It seems to me that you're looking for excuses, as if this concept of 'dry-run' meetings only happens to be within the author's "hundred-person bubble".
Also, while I have no doubt his experience sucked, he was also in customer service as opposed to being a developer/engineer. I suspect those areas differ somewhat. (Not suggesting it's ok at all, just that it may not be completely representative of the entire company)
A sample size of 100 is equally meaningless for 500 or 5 billion if the sample is skewed--which it definitely is in this case.
That said, since the people he met certainly weren't randomly selected, it'll be a heavily biased sample.
The only thing I don't know is if you can guess from this experience that the whole industry is like that.
Of course how you sample is vital. With random sampling, it is pretty straightforward Stats 101 stuff. This wasn't random sampling which throws a wrench in it, but neither are these individual people actually independent. They were all selected by the organization they belong to.
"Road Less Travelled is authored by Ben Farrell, (online alias ‘nomadic_rambler’) – Freelance Writer & Photographer – That’s me!"
When I read that I thought to myself, this guy has so much passion and enthusiasm for understanding the world, it is a shame he took a job at a company that is as intensely focused as Apple is.
This is the money quote for me, "Finally now, for the first time in two years, I feel light, creative and inspired. I am again an individual with my own creative ideas, perceptions, values and beliefs. It may take me a while, but from what I believe – I’m now able to express such beliefs again." I really admire Ben for sticking it out for two years. The key here is that Ben was always the individual with ideas, perceptions, values and beliefs, and it sounds like that was not what Apple was looking for in this position. I've seen it time and again where someone races home after work to play in their garage band or rebuild an engine or practice some other art. And if there peers at work are staying late to work on something they believe in at the office, well that is a recipe for a problem.
I also think that if you find yourself in the situation of finally unwinding what turned out to be a painful choice in your life, its probably not the best thing to blog about it on the same day you take action on your future :-)
If you expect none of them to be intolerable nuts, you have a problem with scale.
The thing is, if you're unsatisfied with your job, equating your personal experience with the entire company as a whole, and going on a long name-calling rant shows you as rather unprofessional yourself.
I don't doubt that some Apple managers are jerks.
I personally liken companies to a large conglomeration of small organizations - your management chain really matters. Which is why when a respected manager leaves, sometimes his/her team leaves with them (HR flight risk).
I know someone who worked (works?) at Apple - she moved from a difficult arguably acidic environment to one where she feels valued and rewarded.
I can relate similar stories from other companies all over the world.
Managing Quality Customer Experience Programs for AppleCare's technical support contact centres across APAC; including vendor and internal teams in Australia, New Zealand, thePhilippines and the USA. Vendor management and quality initiative planning and execution to ensure Apples technical support contact centres maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction & consistently deliver an exceptional standard of customer experience by measuring & analysing performance in-line with regional and global standards of excellence and technical aptitude.
He was there for 19 months.
Undortunately, it seems to me that good design requires totalitarianism. Apple's products are comparatively coherent, clean, unified, and aesthetically pleasing. This is achieved via a culture of totalitarianism that extends all the way down to the device. OSX has some openness grandfathered in, but iOS shows you where Apple wants to go.
... and customers largely approve. Having used both iOS and the more open Android, I can say that while Android is more capable iOS is more of a pleasure to use. There you have it.
It's something I have seen broadly in the world, and I actually find it rather disturbing. Bazaars can be creative and can offer a rich array of options and a lot of value, but only a cathedral can deliver aesthetics and usability.
It is hardly curing cancer.
They are the kings of design and UX. It disturbs me that their culture is this totalitarian and dysfunctional, but it doesn't surprise me in the least.
It's interesting that you say that because from everything I've heard talking to people I work with and in other departments who have been here a while, the opposite is true.
The conventional thought is at least over the past 2 years or so, the stress has gotten lower. Most of this is from the departure of a particular executive (no, not Steve) who was known to crack the whip really hard on people. I also hear those same people talk about how quality has suffered as a result of his departure, and they actually long for the higher-stress days when they had to work longer hours but were happier with the finished product.
A lot of job adverts have "must be self-motivated" (which I thought was a load of bollocks) but it seems self-motivation has been largely extinguished at Apple (by design or accident)
That bit about missing time to take care of his pregnant wife is pretty horrible.
Well, and related things like tracking what buildings you enter by your badge, access to specific labs, etc. Stuff to make sure people don't know more than they should.
I've worked with a lot of ex-Apple folks, and know some current Apple folks socially.
The one that sticks in my mind is being sent to China for a short two week production run, and getting to return 7 months later. Her managers kindly offered to let her fly back and forth to the US over the weekend to get a change of clothes after month 3.
I've worked here 4 years and I absolutely love. my. job. I take days off to work from home whenever I feel like it. We drink at the office on occasion. I'm never harassed for not being constantly online. I don't have endless meetings. I'm constantly praised for the work I do, I get great reviews, with large bonuses.
My impression from reading this article is that he either had a shitty manager (it can happen, Apple's a huge company) or his department wasn't very well-run. (It is customer service, that's never known for being a great environment almost anywhere you work.)
I feel bad for the guy, in a situation he described I would've left too. Fortunately I'm not in that situation, and neither is anyone else I know here. People have their issues with small things but at the end of the day I think everyone I work with loves what they do.
It does happen.
> I mean, it’s not that it’s not fun, it’s not that it’s not fulfilling, it’s not that you don’t get to work around all these brilliant people. The bad side effect is they’re all, like, workaholic, psychotic brilliant people.
For me, one of the best things in life is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing. Apple gives me that, and I feel extremely fortunate.
I've been at jobs where the stress is very low and I had time to browse the internet at all hours and didn't have much expected of me. This is 100% the opposite of that, and I'm happier now than I ever was then. It's been 4 years and I've never had anything close to burn-out, because I've never felt that the work wasn't "worth it". (To me, burn out is a result of feeling like you're not getting anywhere, and that just plain isn't the case at a company where we consistently ship things with huge scopes, on time and to resounding success.)
Yeah, there's exec demos, and yeah there's dry-run meetings for them, but you know what? The execs here are fucking smart. Every meeting I've had with execs has left me awestruck at the level with which someone can be simultaneously so big-picture oriented while still being able to sweat little details. There's a reason they got to where they are, and I really feel that at Apple it's a true meritocracy.
It sounds like it's even harder work if you're in the direct email line-of-sight of an exec (which I am not), and I feel for the authors of your linked post about how hard that must be, but to me that comes with the territory of being so close to the success or failure of a product that you are under that kind of scrutiny. What else would you expect?
Just because a company is getting somewhere, doesn't mean you or your team or even your org is. You mustn't overgeneralize your own positive experiences at the company to reflect that of a majority of people working there. (Of course, for people with the opposite experience, overgeneralization should be avoided as well.)
It's a big company. Experiences will vary.
Yeah, not exactly the kind of Apple insider we'd imagined when we read the first few paragraphs...
>Sixteen hour days are filled with meetings after meetings followed by more meetings. Whilst this is somewhat standard in most organisations, meetings at Apple wreaked of toxic agendas designed to deliberately trip people up, make fools of the less respected and call people out. Team spirit is non existent as ‘internal customers’ attack individuals and push agendas that satisfy their morning egos. Hours upon hours were wasted in meetings to prepare for meetings in preparation for other meetings to the point where little work actually got done.
And yet, they manage to be on the top at least financiancly, if not anything else, and put out tons of good products.
So either this is not the whole story, or it's mostly about the customer service department, and not the hardware and software units...
>Sickness, family emergencies, and even weddings are given no respect at Apple. When I started my role I missed one business trip as my wife was pregnant, fell down the stairs and had to be hospitalised – this was listed as a ‘performance issue’ on my record and brought up during a one on one with management as a major ‘miss’ on my behalf.
This kind of thing on the other hand is important whoever it's happening to. Maybe Cook instead of pretending to care for more glamorous media causes (like Indiana) and start treating his own employees (which include plenty of gays of course) better?
It's quite hypocritical to be a supporter for gay marriage, and then piss on the marriages and personal life of your employees in general.
One phrase that I tell myself often kept coming to mind: the freedoms you don't take, someone else will, and the freedoms you don't fight for, someone else will take. This applies between government-citizen, corporation-employee, manager-managee, and head-subordinate.
And do you know what happens when one hot shot takes hold of the company/department/group? Everybody seeks to emulate him and judge themselves and others in comparison to him. What happens then is like what happens to metal dust scattered on paper with a magnet in the middle. The hot shot is no longer a leader with a team, but instead a one-man army with slaves extending his rule.
And some leaders will never manage creative people because they can never step out of the way.
Their hardware, sold as rock-solid, is partly flawed. My (and thousands of other users ) Macbook graphic card broke after 12 month. The OS and their software has become bloated inconsistent and buggy. Their customer service is so bad, it even beats some of the worst telecom companies in my country. Their sales people are good looking but technically incompetent. Some of Apples technologies (Applescript, Objective-C) are just awful.
I think Apple products and services are only usable, if you have a lot of money to throw around and if you don't really rely on them, but look at them as toys to play around.
Using Ubuntu and Android now, I can admit that the UI is not nearly as sexy. But stuff works or can be fixed in reasonable time.
<rant>
People were measured more on how long they stayed back in office rather than how much work got done. On multiple occasions, I was contacted by the Associate Director for some 'urgent' work while I was on leave. As you can imagine, none of the work was actually that urgent. The worst was the politics to take credit for other people's work.
</rant>
As they saying goes, shit runs downhill. I guarantee you these guys are behaving this way because someone above them is giving them the same amount of shit.
EDIT: No really, IT SOUNDS JUST LIKE SAMSUNG.
It happens pretty much in all big corporations in S Korea and also Japan.
"Do you like working here?"
"Yeah. I guess it's okay."
Versus
"What's the worst thing about working here?"
"They stick used hypodermic needles in your urethra once a week."
Sounds like all experiences I've had with the private sector although I have had better experiences with teams and general behaviour of team mates. I think founders of companies expect everyone to have the same belief in their business as they do but with less money out of it and no real influence over the company...that and not everyone thinks the same.
For me, this simply shows a specific kind of dependency and hierarchy that I don't want to identify with. In my opinion, IT (especially) is a topic where knowledge (how to do X) matters less and less, because said knowledge is accessible for free anyway. All that matters is how quickly and well you can execute and whom you know. (Not that I really like the last part, but I guess that that's human)
It's not always easy to walk away from a significant sum of money, even when you sense it's doing real damage.
In a similar situation I didn't walk away and it took years to recover. Probably would do it again, having a family might be the deciding factor.
As with any "break up" this phase of WOOHOO+rage will crest, then the community dynamic ( refactored/lost ) will echo as loudly in the mind if not louder than the perceived freedom gained... to go work with other people, but still always people.
Draconian tendencies aside, no one will ultimately satisfy as a peer or network. So, OP, enjoy the rush. High-profile exits from large names is thrilling, but then you're without a scapegoat, if there is one at all. Tomorrow will be a reality check unless self critique is harsher than pointing fingers.
The whole "tell the entire world how much X company sucks" trend is pretty much played out, even/especially if the company left does suck. It's a form of therapy to do it, probably, but a lot of it feels like marketing for the next leg of a career regardless.
Even for me as an owner, this has deteriorated my life. I run an international shipping company. And every shipment is time-definite, not because they are, because customers make it so.
Such kind of job, is not for everyone, therefore we make it loud and clear, we have a lot of fun too, to compensate for it and I make it clear to my guys.
Anyhow, we do not have a culture of 'disrespect' but in a fast-paced environment, moods swings are pretty common.
Again it's not for everyone. Ask me frankly, 911 or Police are less stressful than we are. as you laid out., as If police job is more stressful.
It's sad that in order to 'make it' we can expect to receive such insensitivity at work, I certainly wouldn't stand for it, but it's frustrating that this is ultimately a first-world problem; millions of people deal with this kinda shit day in day out at shitty fast food jobs, and they get neither respect nor compensation for their efforts.
Wait, what?
It obliterated the little anecdotical nuggets remotely interesting in the writing.
It may well have been a situation where the person was presenting a threat to others and he had to decide how to how much threat was being presented and how to prevent that.
But even so, should police officers really aim for the head?
That's a good question.
For you starry eyed youngsters, just remember that this is Apple, the world`s most profitable company. It only gets worse as you go down the list.
Work for yourself. Consulting, the trades and any type of work you can do independently is far superior to dealing with wannabe Machiavellians on whose benevolence your paycheck depends.
Get out of the corporate world, and do anything else. The sky is the limit.
I wouldn't go that far. I mean, quite a large number of organizations are dysfunctional, but the mean-spiritedness and overt psychopathy described by the OP is fairly rare, even in Corporate America.
From his description I'd guess that Apple is worse than 95% of places where people work, between the 16-hour days and the bizarre status games.
You get a lot more freedom and typically a higher pay, but sometimes management uses consultants to be the fall guys or hires consultants to confirm their existing decisions. It takes a lot of business savvy (read: empathy) to understand why you're really being hired as a consultant.
I don't think OP here would be happy consulting. (Just my 2 cents.)
I'm not convinced high profitability leads to better working conditions...
"It only gets worse as you go down the list" means "workplace quality decreases as profitability decreases."
This implies that "workplace quality increases as profitability increases."
"workplace quality increases as profitability increases" is a different way of saying "high profitability leads to better working conditions."
I think detaro understood FD3SA correctly.
I guess the author expected it to be like an iPod commercial when he started.
I work at Google now, there is plenty of money coming into this company and hard workers (and not-hard workers) are getting a large share of that. And while it isn't a complete paradise, the company seems grateful to its workers. I can't say I got that impression from anybody I know who worked at Apple or was close to people who did.
What you are actually saying is "shut up and take it." Not the best comment in response to someone voicing their concerns regarding workplace conditions.
It is, however, the standard response by those who want to silence dissent.
I've worked at a lot of places. I've been told that open-heart surgery would be counted as a vacation day. I've been in 3-hour meetings where a dozen executives bickered the whole time over how one toggle should be labeled. I've been where fully half the employees had been fired and continued working on the sheer grace/need of the owner. I've been given hard deadlines to complete hundreds of pages of documentation nobody would ever read. Etc...and plenty of people on HN have their own equivalent stories. Apple is a big company, and can't keep everything pristine and orderly, and still has to meet massive big-budget deadlines by every means necessary.
The kicker: Apple gets results. One way or another, that system works; one company does not have one product take over fully half of an entire major electronics market unless they're doing something right.
(+: Some people will try to get rid of this kind of behavior purely by arguing that it in fact harms an employer's productivity (via burning out their employees). This may be tactically effective, but I think it frames the debate on the wrong terms, conceding too much of the argument at the start; it allows for just as much abuse as maximizes productivity. The reason to get rid of this kind of behavior is not fundamentally because of its impact on the employer's bottom-line, but because the people affected by it are human beings who deserve empathy and dignity regardless)
No, they don't. They have two-digit billions-with-a-b in cash reserves. They could give every human on earth a few dollars and not have to tighten their belts to compensate.
xD My sides!