But... the author worked in customer support, managing agents. Customer support in any company is like this: it's full of bobblehead managers who make work to justify their own jobs. It's a cost center, and cost centers are where you put executives who are capable, but not exceptional. This is why OP has stories about how firing people was considered heroic -- when you work in a cost center, the only thing the business cares about is getting the same results for less money.
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.
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 disagree.
You are using your company as a counter example to all other companies, and you admit that in your last sentence. I am glad your company treats your people right, and it bodes well for your EVERYTHING.
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.
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!
When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way.
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.
>When someone says "any company", it's easy to interpret that as meaning "any company without exception". This is a very logical interpretation, but it is not necessarily reasonable to interpret it that way.
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".
> 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...
I was aware of how logically I was interpreting the statement.
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.
Here's my view, based on 10 odd years in various CS roles.
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.
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'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.
Well put, I totally agree with you. I've worked in support team at two MNCs, and now being a developer now I can guarantee that there exists an really thick border between the two sects..
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'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.
Woah, really impressive that he was able to guess the company. That seems super crazy to me. I guess I'd better check out SmugMug if it's that above and beyond!
I immediately guessed Smugmug as well. I've been a customer for ~4 years now, and the few times I've needed their help, it's been nothing short of phenomenal. Support tickets answered in minutes by people clearly knowledgeable (if not experts) on the platform. Smugmug is a wonderful service, and would be fully worth the price even without such high levels of CS, so I wonder what motivates them to excel in that area?
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.
As someone who works at Crutchfield, I really appreciate the props. Customer support during the entire shopping experience is a huge priority for everyone here. Bill Crutchfield's relentless focus on the customer experience is legendary.
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?
> If customer support is a "cost center" for you, you're doing it wrong.
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.
Another way to combat churn is platform lock-in, which I think is more Apple's strategy. Also the Genius bar, no other consumer tech company gives you in-person access to support employees.
There are many ways to combat churn. My point was that doing what is right to make the customer happy can be an awesomely powerful and more importantly POSITIVE weapon in the battle against churn.
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?
This: "Platform lock-in is a negative, customer-hostile approach."
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)
Customer support absolutely is a cost center. The approach you're speaking of doesn't scale, which is why Apple went a different route.
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.
Not at all ironic. OP was posting about how customer support is a cost center, amongst other claims. He stated that it is like this in any company. I completely disagree and have experienced the proof of that first hand.
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)?
What your example demonstrates though is how much of a difference happens when a company thinks of CS as a profit center rather than a cost center. That's great for you guys but there's lots of industries where CS genuinely is just a cost center and should rationally be treated that way, with all the attendant pathologies that go along with that.
I've heard this argument before and with all respect, I don't buy it.
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. :)
Sure. The airline industry, for example, has been notoriously unfriendly towards most attempts at differentiation based on quality. Margins are razor thin (http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/03/travel/how-airlines-make-less-...) and customers are incredibly price sensitive. While many consumer's stated preferences are for things like more legroom and less delays, their revealed preference is they'd rather save $5 on a $300 ticket and suffer the indignities.
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.
> their revealed preference is they'd rather save $5 on a $300 ticket and suffer the indignities.
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).
$20 a seat will buy you legroom on a 2-hour flight (and $30 will buy you extra legroom in the front of the plane with better recline). Extra trans-atlantic legroom costs more like $200 a seat, though.
In the Bay Area Megapath competes with Comcast by offering the same exact connection but much better service with value added options like proactive monitoring. The same physical line in the ground will get you internet access. They will almost always cost more than Comcast, but it is worth it to many people to not have to deal with automated phone systems that waste your time and ineffectual support.
Right, so what you see is in areas where people have a choice, Comcast rationally decreases prices and increases service levels. That's the entire logic behind Google Fibre. But for most of the country, there's literally no choice of broadband and there's no incentive for Comcast to improve.
I had a feeling you might cite some of these examples :)
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?
so everyone loves to talk about Southwest but I'd say the far more representative example is Virgin America. Despite being the mesia darlings and winning all sorts of awards, it's hemorrhaged money for 6 straight years before posting a meagre profit (http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/26/business/la-fi-mo-vi...).
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...).
When there are other big differentiators, and the CS issue in question is not serious, then yes, the non-CS factors are likely to dominate decisions.
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.
the original assertion that customer service is somehow a cost center is prima facie false, since there are such things as services/consulting companies, and they are some of the largest.
I think by OP he confusingly meant the person in the article, not the post at the top of the thread. Support hero's would be an ironic concept in relation to that.
Ah, that makes more sense. I admittedly read and responded to his initial comment before RTFA. I can see where that might be considered slightly ironic (while simultaneously terrifying that anyone would ever describe mass firings as "heroic").
In the place I worked we had this old ho who could take 3 in the ass, 3 in the vag and 2 in the mouth. Simultaneously. We called her a hero.
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 people need to remember that Apple is a tiny, tiny innovative core surrounded by a huge bog-standard "big-corp" full of the same chimps from the Career Builder commercials that all big-corps have. If you're not part of that tiny core, you just work at Office Space.
Exactly this. I worked in Apple's EMEIA HQ for about 11-12 months. Actually I started about a week before Steve Jobs died, and honestly, nobody on the floor seemed to care that much.
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.
This seems to be true. And also, while internet is full of stories of "what it's like to work at Google/Facebook/etc", you will have hard time finding a similar one about Apple.
My explanation for that is that the "tiny innovative core" is way too overworked to write about themselves and everyone else is just irrelevant.
I'm sure apple's "tiny innovative core" is very good at what they do, and works very hard, but I suspect the reason you don't hear as much about the work environment there is that they are subject to much stricter policies concerning what they write about their employer than are employees at many other places including google and facebook.
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.
This. Someone close to me worked there for 7 years. The level of secrecy is crazy. Like, dysfunctional-hard-to-do-your-work and stay-up-all-night-working-before-a-launch-because-you-are-only-finding-out-about-it-then crazy. Talking in public about your job would not end well.
Therefore I'm surprised about the OP. Sure they have a specific employment contract in place with a batallion of lawyers drooling on their preys, so what does the OP risk?
Business Insider did a few stories last year, and I seem to have lost a pretty long blog post by three or four former executives that illustrated the Apple life.
My understanding here is that Apple has pretty draconian policies about writing about it. A friend once told me they had to retract an offer from a candidate because the person tweeted they just got a job at Apple.
Apple has a horrible reputation as a work place that seems to span all layers. Look up online employer reviews. I have a friend who was employed there doing iphone interface design (as I understand it) and he only lasted a year. He said the place was full of insufferable egomaniacs.
You know what else is a cost center? Engineering. It's perceived as a massive step up from Call Center or Customer Support or QA but it's just marginally closer to revenue generation than the sales reps and can suffer many the same issues.
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.
The very notion of "cost centres" vs "profit centres" is incoherent. If a function is necessary for the longevity of the business, it is a profit centre. If it is not, it shouldn't be part of the business.
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.
>The very notion of "cost centres" vs "profit centres" is incoherent. If a function is necessary for the longevity of the business, it is a profit centre. If it is not, it shouldn't be part of the business.
Wow, that hits close to home. I think I'll be using that line in the future, thanks!
Most corporate accounting and MBA-think is incoherent.
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.
> a low-base / high-commission model is proven to attract and incentivize talented reps and drive out the low performers
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".
Which is why you have sales guys close the deals, and have a sales executive who is compensated based on the performance of the company to approve them and set the comp model for the sales team.
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.
I completely agree there are negative externalities to focusing purely on next-quarter's bookings. But specifically around attracting and retaining salespeople who deliver bookings, if you pay basically nothing before they hit quota, and then piles of hard cash as they rack up the numbers, you tend to starve out the under-performers.
I feel like sales commission plans can take a surprising amount of time to really damage a company. Yes, you want to weed out the weak performers. But in SaaS, it's too easy to reward sales when they're actually disrupting product strategies and making everyone else's work harder.
Here's an anecdote: at my company, sales reps start with an average base for their first year, then move to a low base (like 30-40k + commission + kickers) afterward. In an average year, our top sales folks have the highest comp of all but the very top (CxO and a couple EVPs) executives, usually in the 600-700k USD range. The Eastern US VP of Sales works out of the same office I do and has a $2m home.
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.
It does seem like a common metric for small to midsize companies, that your #1 salesperson should earn as much if not more than the CEO. It's funny because CEOs will say, without a second thought, those are the dollars they are happiest to spend.
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.
I once lost a battle over whether a particular feature would go into a piece of software because while everyone agreed it would drive sales, another group within the company would have gotten the credit for them.
An adept representation of a limited sample of the issues surrounding customer support and similar departments.
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.
Apple is actually probably the best example of a company taking a cost center (in this case, manufacturing and logistics) and turning it into a strategic advantage. Apple wields its supply chain like a weapon. It's very difficult to compete with Apple because the world has a limited supply of high-quality parts (flash memory, LCD screens, etc.), and Apple can just outbid everyone else for the entire market supply for 6 months at a time and still make a profit thanks to their fat margins and high volumes. They've done the same thing with advanced manufacturing robots, and likely again with the metallurgy and large-scale 6-axis CNC manufacturing tools. The manufacturers of these devices can only make so many of them per year, and Apple just buys all of them. By the time the market catches up, Apple has moved on to monopolizing another factor of production for some new manufacturing process.
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.
I remember reading an article about eMachines' turnaround. It said they put their customer support and product development teams together and tried to take every customer problem and turn it, wherever possible, into a product improvement to eliminate the given problem.
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.
Isn't Samsung the main supplier for many of the parts used in the iPhone? And that's the reason why a.) they're in the phone business and b.) they can dominate the Android market? They took the other side of those transactions so they could learn exactly what it took to build a mobile phone, and then once they had phone-building expertise, they just need to ramp up their own production and divert some to internal use to fuel their own smartphones.
Yeah, but the interesting part is that for a while, Samsung was the only manufacturer capable of producing LCD screens that met Apple's specs. Apple outbid Samsung's mobile division on those parts, so that resulted in a situation where the iPhone had better screens than the Galaxy, even though the iPhone's screen was manufactured by Samsung. AFAIK Samsung still manufactures Apple's mobile CPUs (likely under heavy NDA; like when accounting firms audit each other).
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.
Yeah; it's been a problem for them. Apple has been making strategic investments in these areas trying to create a healthier marketplace so they don't have to go to their biggest competitor to buy critical components. Fortunately, Samsung loves money more than it hates Apple.
I didn't downvote either of you, but I didn't respond to either of your comments because they miss the point of mine. Yes, Samsung's been making phones forever. They have not been making smartphones forever. The iPhone was a fundamentally different product category from what phone manufacturers were doing before, requiring that competitors scrap a lot of what they were doing before [1]. And Samsung had a big leg-up in entering that product category by virtue of making many of the screens and chips used in the iPhone.
I appreciate it's not a good way to start a conversation, but do you mind my asking how old you are?
When the iPhone launched, people like me [0] couldn't really understand it. I was a top five percentile earner in the UK, but still new to that bracket having only recently left uni. I was used to mobile phones being expensive at £400 commitment, £1800 (Uk price with minimum O2 exclusive contract) was unbelievable to me.
I made the mistake of looking at the original iPhone, and seeing something that was slow (no 3G), didn't have GPS (recently moved to London, I needed my GPS-maps!) and didn't support any third party applications. It was a joke. It sold buckets loads.
The problem was before that mobile apps were a limited affair. We had things like google maps on smartphones, but not much effort went in. We had a few games, but no one was really pushing serious money in that direction.
The iPhone became a fashion hit. It was the must have for the 20-something plus who could afford it, it was a status symbol because of price. Everything about it was worse than phones on the market, it took ages to make a call, writing a text took considerably longer. It simply didn't make sense as a phone.
However it became a platform. Companies from all walks of life, some who hadn't really bothered to have a website suddenly needed an 'App' for their marketing team to be happy. This created such gravity, people thought that Android would never be able to compete.
The internals of it were not really special at all, it was quite slow, the screen resolution awfully poor. It wasn't until the 4 addressed that last major concern I bought one.
That's what "changing a category" looks like. You build something that's worse on dimensions that existing customers care about, but better in areas that new, non-consumers care about. Because it's worse on all the existing metrics of performance, existing incumbents don't believe it's a threat until it's too late to compete.
The iPhone wasn't a platform until it had significant consumer adoption anyway...the App Store didn't open until nearly a year after launch. It turns out that being a hot fashion accessory and status symbol is actually more important for consumer adoption than speed of calling or texting.
I think one of the things that made it different, and successful, was that it aimed for a compromise between a smartphone and a regular phone. (Although obviously not in terms of price!)
Compared to a regular non-smart phone it had enormous amounts of RAM and a hugely more powerful CPU, which enabled it to run a real web browser (as opposed to Opera Mini). It also allowed fancier apps in general, once they allowed them at all, but I think the browser was pretty much the killer app.
Compared to smartphones it got rid of the stylus. This made it less capable but a lot more convenient. Having to fiddle with the stylus every time you pull the phone out of your pocket was probably, I believe, one of the things that made most people reluctant to switch to smartphones.
Also, as far as I can tell, most phones in the US were pure garbage compared to what we had elsewhere, before the iPhone upset the control of the carriers and encouraged people to pay more. If the US market had looked more like Europe, perhaps the iPhone wouldn't have been seen as such a revolution.
I had a Palm Treo many moons before I got a smartphone. It was a good phone, and the 'apps' such as they were on it were "good enough." I never really got the fuss about the iPhone. And I kind of still don't, even though right now that's what I'm doing for work (writing an Objective-C iPhone App)
There were so many smartphones before the iPhone, the main thing that Apple added was touch, which allowed them to have full screens. Not like it wasn't going that way anyway, LG prototyped a phone like that a year before the iphone came out.
Not even that. Sony Ericsson P800 had a touch screen, apps, multitasking (with automatic termination of background tasks, just like Android and iOS) - in 2002! This was using Symbian and their UIQ interface (now dead).
Apple did introduce capacitive touch screens though, as far as I know, getting rid of the stylus. And they had a very attractive UI at launch. But not much was really new.
There is some more subtlety to this too. Apple's products (like most tech companies) are made by contract manufacturers, primarily Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry). What Apple does different is to buy the equipment Foxconn needs to make the products. This means there is no financial risk in that equipment to Foxconn, and that Foxconn's other customers don't get to take advantage of the equipment.
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...
AND may I add that Mr Cook caught Mr Steve's attention when Mr Cook arranged a deal with Samsung to ensure steady flow of RAM. This was when RAM shortage was causing severe issues for tech companies.
"nobody could build a phone at the same level as Apple."
People have to put their iphones in bulky cases because the screens break so easily. I have dropped my Samsung Note4 so many times, and it is fine (also, the charge lasts three days. Did I mention it is really fast too?).
I think that by Apple's "level", the above comment was referring less to design elements and more to manufacturing processes that would not be feasible for a company operating at smaller scale. An article a while ago [1] had a list of examples, such as CNC milling at scale and laser drilled holes.
i haven't had a case on my iPhone in 6 years. the screens do not in fact break easily. some people are more clumsy than others. some just prefer to have a case for whatever reason. the same is true for android phones.
Sonic.net, in the ISP market. They spend quite a bit on customer support, and use it, where they can (locally, mostly) as a feature.
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.
I've never worked at Sonic, but I'll give you a hearty amen as a customer for several years. When I try to get friends to switch from Comcast, all I hear is, "But it costs more!" To which I say, "However, it actually works. And when it doesn't, you can talk to somebody smart." Not having to fuck around is worth cash money to me.
Customer service isn't a cost center. It's a value creator.
I realize it's a little bit comical to consider customer service so highly, but I have had __consistently__ excellent support from Sonic.net, and have been a very happy customer ever since literally the first day it was installed.
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.
Chick-fil-a is known for this. One of my family members called the store to let them know they left out one sandwich on their order. The store manger drove immediately to them with 2 free sandwiches and some coupons. That's just insanely good service for fast food.
I've always been super-impressed with Chick-Fil-A's service even though their food is sometimes sub-par. That's why I continue to return. I know I'm going to get a decent, if not great, meal, and the service will be fantastic.
The yardstick for measuring the potency of a corporate culture is consistency over time.
Given that THREE of the responses to this question are Zappos, I'm going to venture that it's probably incredibly rare. Especially since, in Zappos case, they are essentially selling commodity products (branded clothes that you can buy from any retailer), so their only opportunity for differentiation is price or service.
Zappos has given me one of my best customer service experiences ever. $135 sandals, pit-lab puppy chewed one of them (only a chunk, still wearable). I emailed them asking if I could buy one sandal... they actually sent me a new pair, told me to keep the old ones, and even upgraded me to their premium class where it's free one-day shipping. I never hesitate to recommend them to everyone.
Zappos Anecdote: I reported a bug with handling of email addresses with a '+' in them (ended up in a URL in the email still as a plus instead of URL encoded). I gave a technical description of the issue. I got a prompt response, a notification that it was fixed, and my account was bumped up to some sort of 'premium' status (which I can't use because I'm no longer living in the US, but that's not their fault).
GitHub: I've emailed their support desk a half dozen times over the years, and each time received a response from an engineer within minutes containing an accurate and precise answer to my question.
No kidding, I had a similar experience with them, although I only had to contact them once. It was, however, in the middle of the night because it was a school break and I was up. I was surprised to get a reply from them past midnight (and at least very late in PT).
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...
Zappos may be a candidate for that type of case; their entire value proposition is exceptional customer support. There is no other reason to buy from them -- they aren't the cheapest or the sleekest, but they have the reputation of going above and beyond for their customers. Their motto is "powered by service". This may be more of a marketing lesson than a customer service one, though.
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.
I called Apple customer support last night for the first time ever. Called to get confirmation of AppleCare support for an iPad -- I didn't buy support :(
My experience with them was the best customer support experience I have ever had. They were great. They were prompt, knowledgeable, and compassionate.
Ditto. I've had so many positive Apple experiences, even recently.
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.
311 in San Francisco. Ok it's not a company, but damn for city government 311 has impressed me every time I call. People are knowledgable, available at odd hours, and if they can't help you the follow throughs have actually come through!
Apple is an example. Not current Apple, by the late 2000's Apple that saw exceptional growth. Apple was famous for being easy to replace broken products, get refounds, getting somebody smart to sell you stuff.
I walked into my local Apple store in November with an iPhone that wouldn't wake from a screen-touch, 15 minutes later I walked out with brand new handset.
Apple's still like that, its why I buy their hardware.
The concept isn't normative and it definitely is meaningful. Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure. People know that in the limit of non-existence, the company can't survive without it, so customer support has to exist. But as long as money is used to support them with no easily measurable benefit, it will always experience strong downward pressure on operating expenses.
All of western accounting, including the cost-reduction mindset, is artificial. It just happens to be the dominant paradigm, so many people mistake it for some sort of universal truth.
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.
Another way to describe cost centers is that their benefit is very hard to measure but their cost easy to measure
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.
> By that metric, marketing and advertising must be cost centers! But they somehow always manage to take credit for revenue.
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.
Yeah, but the return on investment in marketing is likely much, much higher. Or, better yet, invest in making your product better so customers don't need to call support in the first place.
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.)
But... customer support isn't a cost center at Apple. They sell the AppleCare extended warranty, and if you don't purchase that when you buy the product, you have to pay them by the minute for customer support via telephone.
Yes you can go there and pay to get things fixed but it's not 100% of the time. I just went to apple recently to get my MBP fixed and I saw the bill but apparently was covered by a recall. So, it was free.
I think that is a failure of (all the) companies that think that way. In my opinion customer support is a crucial part of any organisation big enough to merit one. Who else talks directly to your customers on a daily basis? Do you mine the data to find out where the biggest issues are and use that to inform your feature roadmap?
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.
Ahem... not to sound sarcastic but... everything... in a company... is a cost center. A good company knows you need to spend money to make money, in fact a lot of cost is reported ad a % of sales, meaning if you grow your sales you grow your cost. I really don't understand where your views are coming from, but they seem to be very biased. And remember that executives at public companies (like Apple) sell stock, not cost, and stock goes up based on expectations, not only cutting costs, meaning you sometimes are better off spending (like in R&D or in customer service) and give the expectation of a growing and solid company than cutting down all spend and give the idea that the firm has no future because managers only look things short term.
This is the fundamental problem with companies. Far too often we relegate Customer support to this minion role when in reality, they are our eyes and ears into the customer feedback loop. We should stop putting capable people into this role and put our exceptional people. Personally, I plan to put the customer service department under my UX Director's management. If we're to be better companies, we need empathy, and I see no better manager to instill empathy than a UX Manager.
And how does this stop the company from being Apple, "innovative, changing people's lifes, etc...?" Just because it is "just" customer support it does not imply it is not Apple.
I've worked in several cost centres, and the idea that they want to fire jobs and are full of stupid managers is simply not true. Mostly, the ones I worked in were scrambling for hires. In the big open-plan customer support job for a telco I worked, it took a month to train up staff, and retention was the biggest issue.
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.
Depends on the role - for a COTS type of software, they are certainly not - they are revenue generating. Consultancy? Same thing. Now for internal tool development or support, sure, but how many businesses can operate without one? How many can 10 years from now? 20?
well considering we still live in the industrial age system of factory owners and factory workers (concept of managers and even lean startup has roots in car factories), I would find it very rare that a non monopoly software business would view their engineering team as profit generators.
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.
One of my friends used to work at Apple. After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners. Meanwhile, all of his friends worked for Google, we got gourmet food every meal of the week as a standard perk, and we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight. It's sorta like "Your 'thank you' is really more like a giant 'fuck you'".
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.)
With this negative image among developers in the Valley, how is Apple able to attract top quality engineers? They probably are not. Anecdotally, I still haven't met one single engineer who would love to work for Apple though they love using Apple products.
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]
From the outside, it definitely looks like the closer it gets to hardware, the better engineers at Apple get. Metal is awesome, Metal shading language and recent clang progress not bad too, Swift a little bit wonky but interesting — but the quality of their customer-facing software, especially ui stuff (not design, but I engineering) is getting worse and worse. It just doesn't "just work" anymore.
One commenter - I believe it was here on HN - said something I thought was very insightful. They said it's difficult to see software when you're looking at your computer edge-on - and that's apparently the only way Apple ever looks at their products anymore.
For the first time in the last ten years, I have downgraded my OS to 10.9 after having a disastrous experience with 10.10. I don't plan on upgrading back, at least not on this computer.
It's when your Linux distro on a 5 year old HP laptop seems more polished than your 27" iMac from 2 years ago that you begin to wonder what has gone wrong at Apple.
Two days ago I said aloud to a screen ", OS X is turning into Windows".
Well I use Windows daily as a dev at a MS Partnered company but you are still correct in that when I said OSX is turning into Win I was thinking of the XP/Vista era. I am not a huge fan of either 7 or 8 tbh, but that is acknowledged as a personal preference in much the same way as I sold a practical commuter car to buy something "i like driving more".
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.
Yes, that would be very cool. And I say that as a happy OS X user. Competition in that space would be good for the customers. Unfortunately all the workstation companies went down the drain. SGI, Sun, etc. But who knows what the future holds in store?
This. Most devs I know have Macs for precisely this reason -- software, not hardware. If anything, many would prefer the hardware (diversity) offered elsewhere.
Acqui-hires, amigo... swallow a company, fire the bottom 10%, give the rest offers, see who sticks around after 1-2 years. They're gobbling up companies so fast that they're running out of office space to house them all.
Acqui-hiring cannot be a long term strategy to nurture and build a strong internal talent pool. Google simply has done an outstanding job at this. Most start-up founders/employees share YC startups' cultural ethos, and will get stifled under Apple. Many of them will get demotivated, lose steam and leave as soon as their golden handcuffs expire.
I mean that to continue their strategy they will need to onshore the money, at which point it will be taxed, at which point it looks far less viable in the long term.
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.
There's a difference: Apple is a public company (without an insider-friendly voting structure like Google's), and shareholder activism is a powerful force these days. (I am not an expert.) If the current approach stops delivering big profits I think the management will be hard put to resist the pressure to smash up the piñata and hand the cash to the shareholders. (That pressure already exists: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-to-shareholders-vote-against-... ) So I think the thing protecting the status quo at Apple these days is really the flow, rather than the stock, of profits. And indeed there doesn't seem to be any sign that the apparent decline in the quality of OS X is actually hurting profits or sales yet: http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/07/29/apples-focus-on-va... .
It's not that secret though. Sure, you only read first-hand accounts by people who have left, but it's not like Apple employees are out with their friends over beers refusing to talk about how many hours they work. Everyone in the valley probably knows someone who knows someone who works there. At some point, the constant background level of "yeah, it kind of sucks" is pretty convincing.
I think as an engineer the type of things one might get to work on at Apple could be more interesting than the type of things one would get to work on at a bunch of the companies you just listed. At Apple there's everything from OS to compiler to drivers to UI to hardware, etc.
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.
Not a developer but I would definitely do a 2+ year stint at Apple to get the name on my resume and find out what it's like to work at one of the largest and most profitable tech companies ever. I'm sure there's an incredible amount to learn and the pay is nice as well.
I have the same schedule now. It's much better since you avoid the crazy traffic of the typical 9-to-5'ers and getting to sleep in is the best thing ever.
I made the mistake of moving 18 miles (San Jose) from where I work (Mountain View). Two years ago traffic wasn't bad but I swear it's getting worse. If I leave the house at 9:00 it takes 45-60 minutes to get to work. If there's a major accident or problem it can take up to 90 (happened once). Now I just don't leave the house before 10:00. My commute is less than 30 minutes and I regain 30-60 minutes every day.
I feel very fortunate to work at a company and with a team that supports my preferred schedule.
I agree it's getting worse over the last year or so. My commute is about 8 miles, from Seaport to 92 on 101, and I never get much above 10 mph. Bumper to bumper the whole way. It didn't used to be like that.
yeah, ive been doing 880 from hayward into Cupertino for 5 years now, and its been getting worse, which i guess is a good thing because people have jobs? or bad because there are too many people here.....
I find this interesting. How do people collaborate? Did most of your team work the same hours? Do you just schedule meetings from noon-4? I would personally hate that schedule as someone with a family.
You can get the same no-rush-hour benefit by going the opposite direction; I show up to the office at 7am, and I'm out the door by 330 at the latest. There's somebody else in my office that I've only ever overlapped with for a couple hours at a time because he basically never shows up before noon. He used to give me a hard time about how early I left every day until I explained that I was showing up to the office an hour or two after he went to sleep each night.
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.
At my office they seem to be biased against this -- whatever time you get in, if you disappear before 5 there's a sense that you're shirking. And this despite what is, overall, a super healthy culture. There's no stigma at all about showing up at 830 and leaving at 1700, but showing up at 700 doesn't seem to allow you to leave earlier without incurring raised eyebrows. I wonder if this is unusual, since I've not experienced it before.
My team mostly works similar hours to me (1-9, as I said elsewhere) but my previous team was more nine-to-fivey. We just had meetings after lunch, it wasn't a big deal. A couple folks on the team had kids and left every day at 5:00, and I did their code reviews in the evenings (so they were ready waiting when they came in the next day), and they did mine in the mornings, and it worked fine.
I like 11-4 as core hours. Not to early for the folks who like to sleep in, not to late for people who want to get home to their family, and there is still 5 hours of overlap for meeting.
As an engineer at Google a key difference from some other companies is how few meetings I have. I have less then 10 hours of meetings per week, and they are all scheduled between 11am and 4pm. There's also plenty of less-formal meetings when I strike up a conversation with my coworkers, usually closer to 6:00 as we start to focus less and wonder more.
It depends on your role, PMs and managers would obviously have a lot more. I'm just a lowly engineer and looking at my calendar this week, I've have 2.5 hours of regular meetings, 3 hours of interviews (though that's an outlier, I normally do 1 interview a week, which is 1 hour long), and 2 hours of "tech talks" (which is not really a meeting, it's basically people from other teams talking about what they've been working on).
Including weekly one hour of tech talk I have 2-3 hours of meeting every week and I love it that way. 10 hours a week would be terrible. (Not a Googler btw).
I'm EST. When I work with CA companies I tend to end up just taking meetings at 8-9pm. When working with people halfway across the world there have been a few midnight and 1am calls.
Every brilliant Googler not collaborating with other brilliant Googlers is also not collaborating with other brilliant talents at Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, etc...
More like 10 or 11. Most of my friends are late-risers (perhaps because I'm a late-riser), and Google doesn't have set hours. People have been known to roll into work around 2:30 PM as long as they get their work done.
Crunch time is fine when its uncommon and unforseen. Otherwise it is a manag3ment failure. Perhaps its deliberate failure to respect peoples personal life, but that's still a failure. I've worked plenty of places where crunch time is uncommon or nonexistent. It doesn't have to be that way.
If staff are consistently having to work overtime to hit targets then there's either:
- 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.
Alternative 3: a problem with the law. I know 'Murica loves it's free market, dog eat dog, each man for himself ideal. But to us Europeans it looks like many US companies are no better than slave drivers. No regulation, no life for employees. On the other hand, US corps can compete with the Chinese and Koreans, there are no tech giants in well regulated European countries (are there?) because after 3 or 4 in the afternoon we all go home to our children.
Not really true, Ireland has a large concentration of 'tech giants'. They may be setting up because of tax regulations but they pretty much all have sizeable engineering workforces in Ireland. Google Ireland for example employs more than 2,500 people.
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.
There are quite a lot of studies that examine the difference between 'crunch mode' and 40hr type weeks. I've read that crunch beyond about 3 weeks results in less work being done per week than a 40hr week, and two months of crunch mode results in being behind where two months of 5day/40hr weeks would have got you. It also increases the risk of product failure.
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.
Long crunch times are either a symptom of longterm planning failures (not hired enough people), or it's a deliberate and premeditated attempt to abuse people for cheap labour (why have 10 people do the work when 6 overworked people can do the same job?).
They can't. As the comment before yours pointed out: after about three weeks, those six overworked people are so inefficient that they are getting less done than six people would working regular hours.
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.
>>After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you. In the form of vouchers. For frozen dinners.
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.
They've never served lunch here. Maybe we should have more funerals...
>> 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?
I said this in another response too, but normally we got lunch catered and it was part of the compensation. In the two scenarios I mentioned though, we got served leftovers just so the company could save a few hundred bucks.
I didn't say they should have thrown it away. There are many organizations that accept food donations from private events as long as it is still fresh and in good condition.
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.
I should have provided context. We normally got lunch catered, but on those particular days though they served leftovers just to save a few hundred bucks.
Depends on your start time. 10-11 AM is reasonable in Silicon Valley (rush hour on the highways lasts until about 10:30), 8 PM is 10 hour days, midnight is 14. Figure that 8 PM includes both lunch and dinner at Google and it's like 8.5 hours of actually working, which is a lot, but I don't think it's unreasonable.
> we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight...
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?
>we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight
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 don't know; he referred to it as "frozen dinners" and was pretty mad about it. He's the sort of person that would appreciate Omaha Steaks, so I don't think that's it.
I know some people who do that by choice, but no one in my branch of software engineering is forced to do it for months or years at a time. I'm senior, work 9 to 5 with limited exceptions, and extremely well-regarded (and well-compensated).
And really Google's thank you is a fuck you. Try working in Europe or Australia: none of that 9pm nonsense. That is when I go to sleep after spending time with my family.
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.
In "Becoming Steve Jobs", Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple's collusion scandal:
"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.)
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).
Using HR lingo, try "s/employees/resources/". Now it parses, neh?
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".
That quote is so nuts! He didn't think for a minute he was doing anything wrong. That's supposed to make me feel better?
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.)
But if a company wants to restrict "poaching" of its employees unilaterally, it can just offer them defined-term personal services contracts with suitable compensation.
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.
> it can just offer them defined-term personal services contracts with suitable compensation.
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 is HIGHLY restricted by labor laws.
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.
It should be expensive! Tech companies are getting a fantastic deal on their employees right now. Apple made $460k in profit per employee in 2013[1]. This to me is a failure on our (software developers) part in capturing the value we're delivering.
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.
There's two sides here. The company making profit enables it to take more risks, try new things. The employee making a higher salary has other benefits, some of which might benefit the company, but the company itself will have to be more careful when hiring and take fewer chances both on people, products and strategy.
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.
It depends on how you define risk, or what angle you're looking at it from.
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.
To even use the phrase "poaching" is to give too much to the devil. It implies that a person "belongs" at a certain organization, as opposed to being a self-interested economic actor, and that there is something incorrect or dirty or unethical or wrong about leaving where they work to work somewhere else.
Sadly true. But what's worse is, look at who I'm replying to - not a group of CEOs or other billionaires, I reckon. Even the people who get screwed by this kind of shit agree with the reasoning behind it, for some reason.
Sure, it is the optimal arrangement for both companies. It's also illegal because it is patently unfair to the majority of the people involved.
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).
> This is the Prisoner's Dilemma, plain and simple.
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.
If you are looking at the players as the companies deciding to poach/not-poach then the payoffs look just like the prisoners dilemma.
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.
> If you are looking at the players as the companies deciding to poach/not-poach then the payoffs look just like the prisoners dilemma.
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 think the Tragedy of the Commons is a more apt analogy. There's a finite resource (employees) which optimally benefits each company if they were non-competitive. As soon as they start shortening the supply of that resource (in this case, making it more and more costly to obtain the resource), then it becomes a race to the bottom.
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 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.
While I don't agree with many of the comments here, I agree with yours specifically. I really hate the phrase human resource, like it is something that is ready for exploitation.
One of the many reasons I never worked for big consulting companies is that, they look at things as problems vs resources. If the problems cannot be solved by X resources, try X+1. There they are called resources, not even human resources.
You have to see both sides here. Employees are too quick to see this as being robbed of the opportunity to be the subject of a bidding war. Companies try not to start or escalate poaching wars because it's massively disruptive to everyone's projects. It takes a long time to replace someone and a long time to onboard someone. While it may be economically feasible to poach an employee, it's almost definitely detrimental to the entire industry's profitability to create a recruitment culture based on poaching. Since there's a strong tit-for-tat instinct when company B takes a high-value employee from company A, the companies just agree to avoid these tensions altogether. That's the big picture version that Catmull, Jobs, et al, are seeing. They're honestly not trying to keep your salary depressed this way, but they're an easy target for Justice Department lawyers that're trying to earn some street cred and "trade outlets" that are trying to earn lots of pageviews from artificially outraged workers.
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.
When you say "detrimental to the entire industry's profitability," I see "wages would rise to match the value contributed by employees, which would reduce the surplus that businesses can extract."
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 see "wages would rise to match the value contributed by employees, which would reduce the surplus that businesses can extract."
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.
If you're a CEO of a large company worried about the impact that poaching will have on your company and on the industry as a whole, you don't have to sit around and wait for the churn to eventually stop when the market price stabilized. You can go out and make it happen by paying your people better.
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.
Putting aside for the moment the illegality of collusion, I appreciate your take, and I think it's important to always try to see things from the other side, even if it stands against everything you believe in.
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.
How does raising salaries change the situation? All the other party has to do is raise the offer another 10k. There are enormous costs associated with loosing a valued employee, but naturally very little cost for the employee to move.
dragonwriter above offers a more informed solution: "But if a company wants to restrict 'poaching' of its employees unilaterally, it can just offer them defined-term personal services contracts with suitable compensation."
Employees don't want that. The terms of the current relationship are centered around the employee's desire for continuity and stability.
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.
I was under personal service contracts for 16 years. They were incredibly helpful for making long term personal decisions, such as buying a house. Who knows when you'll get laid off as an at-will employee, for reasons having nothing to do with personal performance?
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?
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.
Perhaps the reason Jobs has been convincing to so many followers is because of the power of his own self-delusion.
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.
Maybe its Dunbar's number. These executives know and interact with so many people that perhaps its quite difficult for their minds to see their employees as people.
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.
Several years ago, I was contacting by a recruiting firm about a job opening. I was interested, I fit the description of the person for whom they were looking and I wanted to proceed.
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.
I agree that this sucks, but you need to keep in mind that the recruiter works for his corporate clients, not for you. If helping you would cause him to lose his contract with his biggest customer, he'll make the obvious choice.
But even the Tim Cook statement is the exact same tone as Ed Catmull. At first "protect his employees" sounds like it's as if he's protecting chess pieces from being killed in battle. But really what it boils down to is him protecting his employees from becoming employees at another company, from getting opportunities outside of Apple. Which is essentially him keeping assets to himself.
If you are partnering with a company, you typically can break the partnership by poaching employees. I think the biggest problem is this anti-bidding strategy extended to companys that weren't partners.
Steve Jobs had a simple agenda: do what was good for Apple and Steve Jobs. Everything else was collateral damage if it didn't fit in with that goal (mistreated kids, wives, employees, ...).
Remember in this case we have two companies which decided to work together on a project and established no-poaching agreement.
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.
I don't think that analogy works. The boyfriend/girlfriend relationship is completely different from the employer/employee relationship, and the whole point of this controversy is that companies aren't supposed to be friends.
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.
Employers would say such an agreement is not immoral, because it benefits them, but employees would say it is immoral, because it harms them. However, most people are employees, so yeah.
Law aside, it is unpractical. All companies are starved for cooks, and by collaborating to keep salaries low, they are preventing the job market from expanding.
Oh please, your analogy doesn't fit at all. Apple and Intel aren't friends, they're competitors in the labour market, both hoping to attract the top talent. If they had legitimate concerns about their employees leaving then they should've focused on convincing their employees to stay by increasing their compensation and improving their work environment.
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.
If you sign an agreement with your friend behind your girlfriend's back you're looking out for your own interests. You're in effect controlling or limiting her choice without her knowledge.
Former engineer @ Apple - some insight from my side. There is no one culture that pervades through the entire organization. Some software teams are chill, some are not, hardware side of things can be long hours for people. Can't really speak for customer care/marketing/retail/design.
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.
The culture of silence between Apple and the public extends to more than just upcoming products. Has anyone noticed that there aren't as many Apple employees participating in tech conferences, hackathons, public presentations? Even for subjects unrelated to their work? Definitely fewer than Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft employees.
From my understanding Apple effectively owns your entire output when you're employed full-time (at least as an engineer). At a recent interview I mentioned I like tinkering with code on the side and was told I'd have to give that up and stop contributing to open source. I imagine that extends to participation in the "outside world" at least to some extent.
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.)
From my understanding, it's effectively impossible for Apple employees to have any apps listed in the App Store through personal accounts. Which, no doubt, accounts for a lot of the reason why the Xcode -> iTunes Connect -> App Store experience is so miserable.
I have specific knowledge of several instances where this is, indeed, true.
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.
But both of these things also apply to Google employees without special permission to 'moonlight.' And yes, it's possible to get it, and people do, but it's going to be scrutinized.
>At a recent interview I mentioned I like tinkering with code on the side and was told I'd have to give that up and stop contributing to open source.
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.
IBM had us sign something that said we couldn't work on outside projects without permission. It seems like it's not that difficult to get permission. Most people just ignore it.
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.
Check out California code 2870 which basically says anything you work on at home, on your own time, using your own equipment, and not related to your employers line of business, is yours. The company can still fire you for your side business though.
When checking out California Labor Code section 2870, also remember to check out California Labor Code section 2871, which expressly states that the restriction in 2870 does not limit the employer's right to require the employee to provide confidential disclosure of inventions during the employee's term of employment, and also to require a review process by the employer to "determine such issues as may arise" related to the disclosed inventions.
The "not related to your employer's line of business" is the tricky clause. With a large diversified tech conglomerate like IBM, Apple, or Google, they could conceivably argue that anything tech-related was in their line of business. They may not win, but you don't really want to fight one of their legal teams in court, and so it had a chilling effect regardless.
As far as web tech, I don't recall seeing any Safari web evangelists at any conf I've ever been to. Wasn't there a post a month ago about trying to track one down? Someone said one did exist, and that they were only ever seen at WWDC.
It also seems unlikely that anybody would have the energy after 14+ hours days without weekends. 5 days a week with just 6 hours of meeting and such a level of intrigue would exhaust me to zombie level.
I had organised a day off recently where all my family were visiting me from interstate. Despite this I had agreed to dial in to one conference call as the audience attending was ‘important’. Well it seems Important but disrespectful, as the audience never even turned up, yet I was still made to ‘dry-run’ the whole meeting from start to finish for an hour and a half as if there was full attendance and interest in what I was saying. So, as the food I had prepared for my family went cold, there I was stuck on the phone role-playing a fake menial meeting to satisfy managements ego.
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.
I read it with a few grains of salt. I've had dry runs for meetings where I was presenting. It's pretty useful to walk through your presentation with your boss when your 3-4 level higher boss is there. I've also requested subordinates dry run when they have poor communication skills and need coaching to perform up to standard.
It's not something you do with everyone there or with a meeting that just works off an agenda.
The scripting and rehearsing seems to happen when employees pick up on the signals, from the decisions that management makes around them, that appearance and self-marketing influence promotions more than performance.
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.
I was interested in working at Apple so I messaged a few of my alum friends. All of them said they worked around 60 hours a week. Nope, can't pay me enough to work 60 hours a week.
Those type of jobs do exist. People working insane hours for about 5 years then cashing out. A lot of people say they would do it, but I wonder how many would survive that type of grind.
Actually, it gets better. That's the dirty little secret that I never knew about. Investment banking used to have insane hours (100+ basically on call all the time). The idea was that after 4-5 years you leave for a buy-side gig (hedge funds, private equity) that pay you the same or more ($1-5M in your early to mid-30s) but with more reasonable hours. This is why the smartest CS/Math/EE/Physics grads from MIT etc went to Wall Street in the 2000s.
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.
> The idea was that after 4-5 years you leave for a buy-side gig (hedge funds, private equity) that pay you the same or more ($1-5M in your early to mid-30s) but with more reasonable hours.
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.
> 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.
Lol! I was in a large tech company, so the stock was as good as cash. Since I could not get finance-level pay, I figured out how to draw lines around my work so I at least had a pretty good life outside of work. It took me a couple of years to figure that out though.
I've heard similar stories from people who work on oil platforms.
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).
that's not all that different from the deal folks get from the U.S. military; agree to work 12-on/12-off at someone else's will, for some reasonable number of months at a time ('reasonable' is determined by people who have done the same gig, once upon a time, and climbed the organisational hierarchy); in return get decent pay and extremely decent post-tenure benefits.
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.
Heh, 60 hours is a low intensity week in management consulting and especially investment banking. Once upon a time, a banker 2-3 years out of an MBA (say 28-30) would make $300-500K cash. The hourly rate is lower than minimum wage though (these guys used to put in 100+ hours). They did it in the hopes of landing a private equity gig that would pay them $1M+ for a 50-70 hour work week. That's a deal I would take in a heart beat, if I found the work interesting.
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.
> Once upon a time, a banker 2-3 years out of an MBA (say 28-30) would make $300-500K cash. The hourly rate is lower than minimum wage though (these guys used to put in 100+ hours).
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.
Even with your edit, you still don't get it. McDonald's employee's don't make > $50 an hour. No one can make $300k+ working at mcdonalds, even if they work 24/7. Even if you worked LITERALLY every single hour of the year (8760) minimum wage would get you to ~63.5k. That's a far cry from 300-500k
Any banker type that says something like that is an asshole or is really bad at math. Assuming he's a competent banker he's probably not actually bad at math and is just an asshole.
I'm sorry that's just frankly not possible. Even with your lowest value of 300k a year and you're hours value of 100 hours a week you're looking at ~60$/hour assuming they have no vacation or time off. Now look at the minimum wage and realize it's still many times that. I have a lawyer friend who says the same thing as you, and I seriously doubt it's so over the long run.
I think the saying comes from junior bankers and lawyers, before their first bonus check, although even then, the math does not work out to minimum wage.
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.
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.
The irony is that, if I remember correctly for what I read in the book about the biography of Steve Jobs, in the very old apple of Jobs and the Lisa, the team leaded by Jobs was working 120 hours/week and even making t-shirt to brag about it.
They were getting paid around $20K a year (ref folklore.org) at a time when that wasn't exactly munificent. I'm not even sure they had stock grants either, just promises of greatness from Steve. Idiots.
There are two orgs in Apple that are soul-crushing - AppleCare and IS&T. AppleCare is a depressing meat grinder of dealing with unhappy customers with broken things. IS&T uses parasitic funding (other orgs. are "customers"), and is internally broken into competing fiefdoms and systems that are a horror to interact with. Kind of sounds like this guy was in IS&T working with AppleCare. I was in IS&T for a year, and was happy it was only a year.
Other orgs. in the company are generally a lot nicer to work in, though it varies where you wind up.
Words like ‘pressure’ kept getting thrown at me in the context of I can’t handle the pressure and “you were told at the interview it’s high pressure”.
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.
I am reminded about a quote from an Australian cricketer, Keith Miller:
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".
An air traffic controller messes up and they risk hundreds of lives and 100's of millions of dollars in property. That's a high high-pressure workplace, Tech is just a combination of greed and poor managment.
High pressure describes an environment that can exist anywhere, independent of the decisions to make it that way. I like to listen to a famous controller at JFK. I detect no pressure in his voice. Every line of work has a share of high pressure environments. There are likely many people who could say "You want high pressure, try teaching pre-school!"
You're mistaking what it should (or rather shouldn't) be with what it actually is. It shouldn't be high pressure because the stakes aren't that high, but it is. The poor management is the causal reason.
Ehhh. Zooming out this far just makes the phrase meaningless in the context of tech, which seems counterproductive since as you may have noticed we tend to discuss tech around here.
Fine. Writing air traffic control systems is tech, and is pressure.
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".
I've found it is easy to poach talent from Apple, Google, and other large ventures.
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 definitely think the "startup life" culture is something a lot of people will eventually consider a downside. I recently interviewed at a place with an open floor plan, and I found that a big turn off to the position. While free lunch and dinner are nice perks, sure, they also suggest you're still at work for lunch and dinner. I want a job, not an overly-attached workplace.
The best jobs I've found are at smallish companies with reasonable chance of growing revenues that are just past the startup phase, and over the initial politics that comes from growing. They have enough job security to make it comfortable but still have the opportunity for a person to make significant impact, and usually a mixture of legacy and new project code base. Some technical debt to fix from the startup-sprint phase.
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.
More and more people do that, but they don't get mindshare, mediatic exposure. The most common images conjured when one talks job are:
* 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.
Toxic management in Silicon valley seems to be becoming a force to be reckoned with. Time and time again I hear horror stories like this and from first hand experience I can confirm all this mind playing is in fact happening by certain managers. I've worked with managers that worked at top tech companies in the Valley and their resume lists one company after another, it goes to show how easy it is for them to jump ship if things are going sour without anyone at the new company really noticing that in the interview process. There seems to be a strongly connected network of toxic managers swarming the valley more and more. It's not just Apple.
From reading about Apple I have the feeling innovation comes from the top (or from small special teams) and the rest of the organization is about pulling that innovation together. Which would make endless meetings make sense because instead of innovation you just need organization to push the innovation made by a tiny fraction of the company forward.
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.
> 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.
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.
So what I find so interesting about this is that I've never heard the counter-argument. No one is rushing to defend Apple, or say "Yeah I work at Apple on X and I really love it".
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.
I worked at Apple on OS X server in various capacities for a few years, and really loved the experience. As an open-source user and advocate, I was really sad there because they have a very hostile and defensive position about open source (which is a very reasonable stance, in my perspective).
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.
How is it reasonable for them to have a hostile and defensive position in relation to open source when so much of their software is either built upon or enabled by open source?
It's reasonable within their own worldview, which is secretive and closed. I will gladly admit, that was one of the largest driving factors for me leaving the company.
I worked at Apple for more than 10 years in various roles (have the Glass apple). Some of them were a grind, some were awesome, overall it was great and I'd do many the jobs again. A ton of the people I worked with were sharp, interesting, and entertaining. The corporate culture is generally fun, the pay could be better, but the stock options and stock purchase plan made up for it, the benefits are excellent, the food is awesome, and the campuses are generally pretty nice (some are great, some are merely good).
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.
I've responded elsewhere in the comments about my positive experiences (just ⌘+F) but I think the main reason people aren't typically in "public" about their role at Apple is because Apple has a secretive culture. You're just expected to not talk Apple's business, including what you work on, to anyone outside of Apple (or even people inside Apple if they're not disclosed on your project.)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
May I suggest that when you leave a place, and it was not a positive experience, you look back on that experience, try to learn from what you experienced and generally deal with the emotional trauma of trying to fit in, in a place where you do not fit. Ben Farrell writes in his blog ...
"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.
The problem isn't when it's "some ... managers". It's when you can't go to anyone for help with those managers. Sounds like it the problem went up at least another level. That's a problem and nothing anyone should be defending.
Would like to know which division the departing employee worked in, and how long he stuck it out.
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.
According to his LinkedIn profile[1], he was responsible for:
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.
Apple has built one of the most successful businesses in the world on mostly one thing: design. (And user experience, which is design more broadly applied.)
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.
Apple happens to have good design and happens to be totalitarian, but I don't think the one comes from the other. Apple used to be a lot less awful in this respect, but their design and usability was still great (arguably better than today).
> Apple used to be a lot less awful in this respect, but their design and usability was still great (arguably better than today).
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.
That's an unfortunate side effect if the culture they developed, whereby quality correlates with the amount of whipcracking.
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)
I don't want to refute your argument point for point, but just reading the first sentence... It sounds like you're using "design" in the same way one might use "aesthetic". User Experience is just as much about engineering as it is aesthetic. It's a disservice to the craft of software engineering to meet design requirements as well as the engineering process of architecting a user interface to debase it as you do.
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.
His post explains it. To have good design/UX (in his opinion), you need to exercise a lot of control over your product- totalitarian control, even. Apple is great at design- therefore, the company culture to maintain that control is also totalitarian.
Lots of money means lots of asshatery. When the cycle comes around again and Apple finds themselves scrambling, this will all go away, because such people are useless.
I work for a small company while my wife works for a large corporation. She makes more than I do, but I work less hours and don't have to deal with the politics.
FWIW, as an Apple employee I have no idea what the hell he's talking about.
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.
I'm not really sure that article even paints Apple in a bad light. Yeah, it talks about how much you work hard, but even just listen to them:
> 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?
"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."
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.)
Specifically, I can't. However, I have several ex-Apple friends who have told me stories of a nightmarish work environment.
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.
Certainly you hear a fair bit about Apple as a high-pressure work environment. Long hours, lots of paranoia -- though by "paranoia" I'm specifically thinking of developers, and not revealing anything Apple might be working on that isn't publicly known yet.
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.
I've known some very happy Apple employees. My sense is that the company contains great variation across its breadth, due to the extreme security among teams. When you can't even go into the next division's work-space, it's hard for a single culture to permeate across the company.
>I spent two years in the Apple camp managing customer service improvement for their technical support contact centres
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.
I believe that everything that was written in this article is true and it's really depressing to see a work culture like this. How they can retain and attract talent with this kind of culture?!
I don't like to talk about it, but some tech giants are going the same path as investment banks. I left my quant job to get freedom in the Valley, but it turned out to not be so different.
I think that it should be pointed out that Apple doesn't have "values". The idea that apple has "values" that it "preaches" is just wrong. That is called marketing. It's funny that people are shocked by this. This is what businesses do and it makes the weird partisanship that forms around them seem mad.
No, they don't. People personify corporations and talk about them being evil. But they are not evil. Nor are they good. They are amoral. They lack any moral code either way. They exists purely to maximise the profit of their shareholders. That is all. No more. No less. People have morals. But corporations are not people. No matter what the courts have ruled.
Exactly. I think its weird that people think of marketing messaging as like a person communicating with them...Like somehow Apple is a quirky guy that loves music and simple Swedish furniture and just happens to be the most valuable enterprise on the planet.
Great read! But come on, customer support is not the main body of the company, just one of the limbs. And those limbs suffer if they do not strive to be themselves and instead seek to be someone else.
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.
I don't want to offend anyone, but really Apple has become a lousy company. The single only thing that still flawlessly works is indeed the "glossy surface" (article).
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.
Wow! This reminds me of my career at PwC. I was a strategic consultant to the Financial Sector there.
<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.
> Management were inconsistent, moody and erratic. I’d often receive aggressive chats at all hours, and harassing texts every fifteen minutes asking “are you online? Your status shows you as away – are you there?”.
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.
Why 900 upvotes? This reads like a vengeful laundry list of excuses for essentially being fired, written by a low-performing, poor-culture-fit middle manager from an exceptionally dysfunctional team at what otherwise might be a great company. I've never worked there so can't say.
Not sure why person would not have called ethics line or even complain local govt HR authorities(if any). The allegations seems to be definitely a harassment if the person was not paid for work to be done outside working hours(not very clear if the person was paid for midnight calls). Not sure now but when I worked in Microsoft as customer support. They really really took care of the employees, it was a cost centre and there were call centre metrics in place but employees were treated really well. Leaves given as needed, paid for extra work and an excellent customer centric but a humble culture inside the org. The dev teams appreciated inputs from support and vice versa.
Not to attack or defend apple or the author but he just seems like a free spirit, and from personal experience in customer support myself (also quit twice) this is just not the job for a person who travels the world that much...
TFA, and these comments, have made me curious -- what is the best way to get a breakdown of how much people like working for a company? I know there are job sites like Glassdoor, etc, but in those reviews everything is scrambled together. And as the comments here suggest, there could be a huge difference between what it's like to work in software development (say, doing stuff for OS X) vs. customer service kinds of things. Are there any resources that could help you get a 'fingerprint' of the work-experience at a certain company, across its various aspects?
"The common language spoken being passive aggression, sarcasm and Kool-Aid fuelled stories of ‘success’ designed to manipulate and intimidate naive workers who have never experienced corporate life outside the Apple walls"
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.
It is a shame that you finally reach a key point in your career only to find that they are not as great as they are made out to be. But it is refreshing to see that they were able to realize where they were and that it was not for them. I would think that if we ever make it to the point where people won't make these obscene sacrifices to work for (insert random SV co. name here) it might be a better place...but lets face that will never happen.
I once attended a hackathon in Switzerland where Apple sponsored some prizes. They had a bunch of relatively young (read mostly junior level) developers there and one 'glorious leader' management-level kind of guy.
I shall never forget seeing two of the young developers following their glorious leader with ipads in their hands wherever he went.
OTOH, why do you perceive this as something not to be forgotten?
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)
As others have pointed out, life in a cost center is very tough. People turn to infighting because it's hard to use revenue as an arbiter. Apple doesn't venerate customer support. Apple celebrates the designers and engineers. It would be more interesting if this article came from there.
I've been seeing a lot of edits to the article. It seems that for now, one global network of feedback and peer review ( Apple ) is being exchanged for another ( HN ). Not good or bad, just "is" --
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.
It seems that maybe they were manufacturing mind games just to edge him out, for various reasons. But if Apple is so good at making bold moves and quick decisions, it's weird that his superiors would act so childishly toward him.
Well that's pretty much the case with everyone who quits a big company and goes on "his own path" adventure. It's not something specific to Apple, but I guess putting it "I quit Apple" makes you cool?
Ever heard of 'fast-paced' work environment. Sadly I run a tiny small company, where we make it loud and clear. That it's fast-paced work environment, full of stress, haste and everything in between.
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.
sounds like apple definitely takes advantage of its prestige. if OP made >= 6 figures, this treatment seems kinda par for the course in this industry.
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.
I was under the impression that this is an accepted thing for both Apple and Microsoft, while Google is the "we know what's good and you products deal with it" company.
Thank you to every poster who stayed in the world of facts, honesty, and objectivity in a thread about a potentially madly divisive topic. Medals for Bravery all around.
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.
"Drinks with colleagues revolved around the same stories told again and again " hm, anything to do with their address of "1 infinite loop"? Funny, usually infinite loops are a sign somebody fucked up.
This doesn't aound any different from any other company on the planet if you look at it from this angle. The author seems overly entitled and disgruntled. Any job is what you make of it.
Another perfect data point to add to Michael O`Church`s excellent series on the politics and psychology of the modern corporation.
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.
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.)
you're painting with very broad strokes. I didn't like consulting as much for a few reasons. Never being treated like a true employee, having to account for my time in 15 min intervals, thin profit margins while working for intermediate company meant small to no bonuses, no benefits or perks, harder to get promoted or switch teams. Working full time (for big corps) has been great in past decade and I'm at a place where there is no micro management (from above or myself) and a carefully chosen lean team that gets things done. No complaints here!
please excuse me for pointing out that you sound like you've drunk the consulting kool-aid yourself. in my experience it's not in any imaginable way worse down the list no matter where you look.
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.
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.
It's a huge corporation with a huge amount of variance. But it seems that Apple, at its worst, is worse than other firms at their worst. And that's something related to the corporate culture.
What a heartbreaking story. I'm glad that the author quit, and I'm yet again reminded how fortunate I am to have a boss who comes relatively close to understanding me and has my back.
Not true. Not all corporations are evil dystopian cults playing mind games and wasting everyone's time. It takes tremendous cash to fuel that kind of dysfunction. Most corporations cant afford to go off the rails to that degree.
From being close to someone who worked there for many years, from the iPod-is-just-new til a few years ago, I'd say actually this culture at Apple is a product of the return-of-Steve-we're-barely-surviving Apple-austerity mode. I don't know how engineers do there, but the marketing people I knew from there worked like dogs but when the money started to rain from the iPod/iPhone/iPad sky, I didn't get the impression that they really benefited from that.
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.
I should add that from what I have heard the culture there is autocratic, and micromanaging at the top. The person I know who worked there was way down the chain working on remote and obscure stuff but had their work go across Steve's desk and be yay'd and nay'd.
Agreed. Sounds like it acts like many (not all!) others.
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.
You seem to be implicitly conflating two different senses of the word "right". I don't think it was in any doubt that this kind of behavior can be to Apple's profit(+). What's in doubt is whether it is behavior which the rest of us should put up with; market dominance is not the end-all, be-all arbiter of desirable behavior, at least not to me.
(+: 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)
and still has to meet massive big-budget deadlines by every means necessary.
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.
I've worked at a few corporations and most of them are not they way he described Apple. I've never worked at Apple so what he said is hearsay for me and thus to be taken with some amount of skepticism. But the story as he shared is not at all normal or average in my admittedly biased experience.
This is not typical behavior for a corporation. I work for one, and believe me, nobody would be calling me during my wedding or giving me work to do in the hospital. If this is true, then Apple has an exceptionally poor work culture.
> That's a lot of words to say Apple is a corporation and acts like many others.
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.
False. I've worked (briefly) in two large corporations, neither of which demonstrated this behavior. And, having talked to friends who work in larger companies...this is nowhere are common as you make it out to be.
even if half of what's in that post is true, it's unbelievably bad. i don't know where you were working, please share so the rest of us can avoid those work camps.
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.