I wanted to work at Apple really bad, and now not so much | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to work at Apple really bad, and now not so much

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12 pointsjpgleeson7 comments

>On boarding was super bumpy, and they had so many passwords, accounts, and logins that it took nearly a month just for me to get on the server. There were meetings all the time which were disruptive to everyone’s productivity

Got a chuckle out of this and then realized I've been working exclusively for megacorps and had nearly forgotten not every place is like this.

You merely adopted the bureaucracy....

A few thoughts.

As has been noted a number of times on Hacker News and other Internet forums, job interviews are not particularly reliable either for employers or employees. Most people can behave reasonably for the duration of a typical job interview or even an unusually long and thorough interview process.

There is probably a positive correlation between your impression of a potential new job from an interview and what actually will happen but it is far below a perfect 100 percent correlation. My educated guess is that the coefficient of correlation is something like 0.2 or twenty percent.

At least in the computer field, in my experience, there is a high infant mortality rate, with many people encountering a serious problem and indeed leaving or being fired within the first ninety days of a new job -- and even more new employees within six months. A good rule of thumb is to treat the first six months as a trial or probationary period both for the employee and the employer.

The key question with a job is "is it working for me?" It is easy to confuse a company's success and name recognition with your interests. Some companies are successful entirely or in part because they are exploiting their employees. And even if in general this is not true for your employer, your individual situation may be bad for you.

A good rule of thumb is to put up with a bad situation until you have found something else. It is almost always easier to find a new job with a job. However, there are exceptions and psychologically abusive situations can cause significant permanent harm, both psychological and physical -- think high blood pressure and other longer term physical effects of stress.

In general, it is probably unwise to post a blog article with details of why you left a job, especially negative comments on your former employer. It is likely to raise questions about you, if not a red flag, in the minds of potential future employers. What if you post a blog article about them? Having said that, there are certainly exceptions to this general rule as well.

So the author discovered Apple isn't the land of unicorn farts and then abruptly leaves in a huff? Sure, it sounds like he had a bad boss but neither he, nor by extension we, have learned anything from this experience. For example, did the boss favor employees and treat the contractors poorly? That'd be valuable insight. Is Apple bogged down in process? Have they not adopted agile development practices? That'd all be interesting to know. But we got nothing. More sadly, the author got nothing. All he knows is he had a bad boss at Apple and since he never gave anyone a chance to rectify the situation we have no idea if this is typical or atypical of Apple nor how Apple handles these situations.

It sounded like the meetings and rigid work hours were troublesome, but the main thing was the boss's constant insults. That's not professional behavior, and should absolutely have been brought to HR's attention. (It makes me thankful to always have had such good bosses.)

I agree, the author could have done many things better. There has to have been a way out which would have preserved a good professional relationship with coworkers and his recruiter. It's easy to see, though, how one might be so disheartened by the organization's (perceived) failure to recognize such toxic behavior by a manager, and so just feel like walking away was the best thing to do.

I've always chosen the "tough it out" strategy when dealing with bad management and/or toxic social environment at work, but over the long run I can't say it's done me any good. Those jobs never worked out no matter how much effort I put in, and in two cases the psychological stress was significant enough to degrade my productivity for over a year after leaving.

From what I can see, if you're a new hire stuck with a bad manager, your best bet really is to bail out as fast as you can. HR is not your friend, no matter what they tell you, and you're simply not going to win a fight with your manager unless you have connections and an in-company reputation strong enough to bring down pressure from above. Perhaps the author of this article could have chosen a just slightly more graceful way of leaving, but I just can't fault his decision to pull the ripcord as soon as he realized the plane was on its way down.

Let's see if we can answer your questions:

"He was democratic about his patronizing and rude comments"

"My coworkers that stood their ground and set boundaries seemed to end up on a shit list of sorts and were out of the inner circle of people that kissed the producer’s ass."

"I didn’t feel there was anyone to turn to. It was unclear who exactly I even worked for or who I should share my grievances with. I was contracted by one company, yet paid by another contracting company, and then I worked at Apple. To this day, I never once encountered anyone from HR while at Apple, as I wasn’t technically employed by them."

Oh wow, I would never take a pay cut to work somewhere as strenuous as Apple. I don't think I would ever work there at all, but certainly not for less money.

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