<story><title>I Quit: What really goes on at Apple</title><url>http://roadlesstravelled.me/2015/04/06/why-steve-jobs-motivated-me-to-quit-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>archagon</author><text>In &amp;quot;Becoming Steve Jobs&amp;quot;, Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple&amp;#x27;s collusion scandal:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I know where Steve&amp;#x27;s head was. He wasn&amp;#x27;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, &amp;#x27;let&amp;#x27;s convert the Mac to the Intel processor&amp;#x27;, well, when we did that, we didn&amp;#x27;t want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn&amp;#x27;t want us poaching theirs. Doesn&amp;#x27;t it make sense that you wouldn&amp;#x27;t, that it&amp;#x27;s an OK thing? I don&amp;#x27;t think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad. And I don&amp;#x27;t think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;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?&lt;p&gt;(I don&amp;#x27;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 &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; approach the issue from the perspective of doing what&amp;#x27;s best for their companies, not as a quick way to save some paltry money. But that&amp;#x27;s kind of the underlying problem, isn&amp;#x27;t it? Once you&amp;#x27;ve internalized the idea that your employees are company assets — that they aren&amp;#x27;t hard workers who make the company tick, but that they literally &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; the company — it&amp;#x27;s easy to slide down the slippery slope towards incredibly unethical and shady dealings like collusion. I wonder how this can be avoided.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lewisl9029</author><text>&amp;quot;He was just very protective of his employees.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The word &amp;quot;protective&amp;quot; doesn&amp;#x27;t seem apt here, as that would imply he had his employees&amp;#x27; best interests at heart, when clearly he only had the company&amp;#x27;s best interests in mind (which is fair, given that&amp;#x27;s the job of the CEO).&lt;p&gt;Try &amp;quot;possessive&amp;quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Quit: What really goes on at Apple</title><url>http://roadlesstravelled.me/2015/04/06/why-steve-jobs-motivated-me-to-quit-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>archagon</author><text>In &amp;quot;Becoming Steve Jobs&amp;quot;, Tim Cook says the following in regards to Apple&amp;#x27;s collusion scandal:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;I know where Steve&amp;#x27;s head was. He wasn&amp;#x27;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, &amp;#x27;let&amp;#x27;s convert the Mac to the Intel processor&amp;#x27;, well, when we did that, we didn&amp;#x27;t want them poaching our employees that they were meeting, and they didn&amp;#x27;t want us poaching theirs. Doesn&amp;#x27;t it make sense that you wouldn&amp;#x27;t, that it&amp;#x27;s an OK thing? I don&amp;#x27;t think for a minute he thought he was doing anything bad. And I don&amp;#x27;t think he was thinking about saving any money. He was just very protective of his employees.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;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?&lt;p&gt;(I don&amp;#x27;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 &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; approach the issue from the perspective of doing what&amp;#x27;s best for their companies, not as a quick way to save some paltry money. But that&amp;#x27;s kind of the underlying problem, isn&amp;#x27;t it? Once you&amp;#x27;ve internalized the idea that your employees are company assets — that they aren&amp;#x27;t hard workers who make the company tick, but that they literally &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; the company — it&amp;#x27;s easy to slide down the slippery slope towards incredibly unethical and shady dealings like collusion. I wonder how this can be avoided.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>serve_yay</author><text>That quote is so nuts! He didn&amp;#x27;t think for a minute he was doing anything wrong. That&amp;#x27;s supposed to make me feel &lt;i&gt;better&lt;/i&gt;?&lt;p&gt;I agree with you, the way these rich people look at employees as chess pieces rather than humans is awful. If you&amp;#x27;re so afraid of someone quitting, then address that by making it worth their while not to quit! Not with collusion for god&amp;#x27;s sake.&lt;p&gt;The fact that they call someone getting a better job &amp;quot;being poached&amp;quot; just says it all really. (If you use this phrase, take a moment to really think about what you are saying.)</text></comment>