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Comment by raspasov | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how many people the author has really interacted with? Even if it was 100 individuals (which is probably unlikely) that's still <2% (I think Apple has > 5000 employees?) of the total organization. Basically a rounding error.

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.

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I disagree. If your manager plays mind games instead of working it is not just his fault, but the fault of his manager for hiring him, for not seeing that unproductiveness, for not educating his staff. And that is a recursive assessment. So if you see that in your department and maybe another department there's quite a good chance it drags on through large parts of the whole company.

The only thing I don't know is if you can guess from this experience that the whole industry is like that.

I think you're off by over an order of magnitude. Apple employs over 90,000 people worldwide. In the Cupertino area there are probably 30,000-40,000 Apple employees.

Thanks for the stats correction, that makes my point even stronger.

According to http://www.apple.com/diversity/ Apple employs about 98.000 employees.

It is pretty easy to determine things (with a high degree of confidence) about a large group of people having only encountered a small group of people.

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.

It's very hard to make conclusions for the whole company 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".

My experiences at Apple are vastly different than the author's; As a developer I've never had such a low-stress position. My hours will sometimes drift over the 40-43 mark but not often.

as noted elsewhere, apple actually employs over 90,000 people. it's less significant in that scope.

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)

My point is that the parent considered a sample of 100 to be too small for a population of 5000. Statistically speaking, it's a decent sample size.

To mikeash and vacri,

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.

Actually, the size of the population as a whole is nearly irrelevant when considering the significance of a particular sample size. 100 people has just about the same significance for a population of 1000 as it does for a population of 1 billion.

That said, since the people he met certainly weren't randomly selected, it'll be a heavily biased sample.

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