<story><title>My Experience at Apple</title><url>https://ex-apple-engineer.medium.com/my-experience-apple-5d8b6205cb56</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anonymouse008</author><text>Gosh - I hope that isn’t a prerequisite to greatness?&lt;p&gt;How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?</text></item><item><author>fortran77</author><text>&amp;gt; everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss&lt;p&gt;I worked for Apple before Jobs died. He&amp;#x27;d frequently have several teams working on the exact same thing, in secret, and then pick the team that met his goals the best. Sometimes the &amp;quot;losers&amp;quot; would be merged into the &amp;quot;winning&amp;quot; team, but never treated well by the winners.</text></item><item><author>GloriousKoji</author><text>I also worked for Apple and I had a very similar experience. Management was brutal and abusive from my immediate manager to all the way up to and including the VP level. For example even though vacation hours were accrued I never got to use them unless I wanted to endure the verbal backlash of abandoning the team and my responsibilities. When the holidays came around the director would email everyone reminding us there&amp;#x27;s a stipend for working through the holidays but in reality it pays less than our normal salary and was a means to justify not taking time off. A variant of Stockholm syndrome made me appreciate the clever design of having a convenient cash out vacation days button.&lt;p&gt;In the end the team was meet with a hostile takeover; everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss. A good number of people ended up leaving the company shortly after that.&lt;p&gt;One more thing, you can also include me as another data point for getting pay doubled after leaving Apple.</text></item><item><author>exApple-anon</author><text>Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.&lt;p&gt;Unlike others, I actually find this story fairly believable.&lt;p&gt;When I first joined Apple, straight out of college - a good program, top three in the country - I was abused similarly. I joined a team that was on a project behind schedule.&lt;p&gt;Our manager was a brusque, no-nonsense sort of dude. But he clearly had anger problems. On the team were 2 senior engineers, me, and a junior engineer that had just completed his internship and was on a work Visa.&lt;p&gt;As the project got closer to the deadline, and the scope increased, the manager got agitated. In our team meetings, he would start yelling at us. People down the hallways would stare at us with those &amp;quot;looks.&amp;quot; In our 1:1s he told us we might not have a job if our product doesn&amp;#x27;t ship on time (we were competing with another internal team to beat them to the punch.)&lt;p&gt;The two senior engineers decided they&amp;#x27;d had enough and quit the team. The manager told us to work overtime (no overtime pay, but we had to for fear of our job). He promised us that if we did it that we would get a month of vacation on him, and that he could secure it for us.&lt;p&gt;The product released. After countless nights of overtime we did it. Our manager left, our guarantee of a month of vacation evaporated, and for the next three months, us two junior engineers were left on 24&amp;#x2F;7 primary&amp;#x2F;secondary on-call for a critical service. It was a nightmare. Calls at 3 AM, 6 AM, on weekends.&lt;p&gt;Our manager got a promotion and is fairly high up at Apple now.&lt;p&gt;Horrible experience. I left for a new company that pays me nearly double.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wpietri</author><text>I suspect that abusive behavior is an optimal strategy if you&amp;#x27;re working for abusive people. Organizations tend to be set up such that people like the people in power succeed.&lt;p&gt;Jobs was a notorious jerk [1] [2] [3], so it&amp;#x27;s not surprising that similar behavior is what gets promoted.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ibtimes.co.uk&amp;#x2F;steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-bonus-267711&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ibtimes.co.uk&amp;#x2F;steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.yahoo.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-133000491.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.yahoo.com&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-1...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&amp;#x2F;steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&amp;#x2F;steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>My Experience at Apple</title><url>https://ex-apple-engineer.medium.com/my-experience-apple-5d8b6205cb56</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>anonymouse008</author><text>Gosh - I hope that isn’t a prerequisite to greatness?&lt;p&gt;How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’&lt;p&gt;Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?</text></item><item><author>fortran77</author><text>&amp;gt; everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss&lt;p&gt;I worked for Apple before Jobs died. He&amp;#x27;d frequently have several teams working on the exact same thing, in secret, and then pick the team that met his goals the best. Sometimes the &amp;quot;losers&amp;quot; would be merged into the &amp;quot;winning&amp;quot; team, but never treated well by the winners.</text></item><item><author>GloriousKoji</author><text>I also worked for Apple and I had a very similar experience. Management was brutal and abusive from my immediate manager to all the way up to and including the VP level. For example even though vacation hours were accrued I never got to use them unless I wanted to endure the verbal backlash of abandoning the team and my responsibilities. When the holidays came around the director would email everyone reminding us there&amp;#x27;s a stipend for working through the holidays but in reality it pays less than our normal salary and was a means to justify not taking time off. A variant of Stockholm syndrome made me appreciate the clever design of having a convenient cash out vacation days button.&lt;p&gt;In the end the team was meet with a hostile takeover; everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss. A good number of people ended up leaving the company shortly after that.&lt;p&gt;One more thing, you can also include me as another data point for getting pay doubled after leaving Apple.</text></item><item><author>exApple-anon</author><text>Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.&lt;p&gt;Unlike others, I actually find this story fairly believable.&lt;p&gt;When I first joined Apple, straight out of college - a good program, top three in the country - I was abused similarly. I joined a team that was on a project behind schedule.&lt;p&gt;Our manager was a brusque, no-nonsense sort of dude. But he clearly had anger problems. On the team were 2 senior engineers, me, and a junior engineer that had just completed his internship and was on a work Visa.&lt;p&gt;As the project got closer to the deadline, and the scope increased, the manager got agitated. In our team meetings, he would start yelling at us. People down the hallways would stare at us with those &amp;quot;looks.&amp;quot; In our 1:1s he told us we might not have a job if our product doesn&amp;#x27;t ship on time (we were competing with another internal team to beat them to the punch.)&lt;p&gt;The two senior engineers decided they&amp;#x27;d had enough and quit the team. The manager told us to work overtime (no overtime pay, but we had to for fear of our job). He promised us that if we did it that we would get a month of vacation on him, and that he could secure it for us.&lt;p&gt;The product released. After countless nights of overtime we did it. Our manager left, our guarantee of a month of vacation evaporated, and for the next three months, us two junior engineers were left on 24&amp;#x2F;7 primary&amp;#x2F;secondary on-call for a critical service. It was a nightmare. Calls at 3 AM, 6 AM, on weekends.&lt;p&gt;Our manager got a promotion and is fairly high up at Apple now.&lt;p&gt;Horrible experience. I left for a new company that pays me nearly double.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>z3t4</author><text>For most larger companies an engineer salary, or any human labour for that matter, is very cheap. FAANG could pay 10x more if they had to, but they don&amp;#x27;t have to because no one else pays more.</text></comment>