It's high time this has happened. Certain large tech companies with abusive cultures have been open secrets for years (Ballmer-era stack ranked Microsoft, PIP culture at Amazon). But Apple's secretive, authoritarian nature has kept it under wraps for decades.
Apple is a huge corporation and there is a large degree of variation within it. But when things are toxic there, they can get very toxic. Middle managers can have a lot of leeway there, and HR is about as powerless as you can imagine. There is not much room for dissent against decisions there, forget "think different". The product schedule is all-important and can also be very stressful to work under. It's a situation that Apple employees can only sympathize with one another, but not much else.
> On Monday, company employees launched a Twitter account called Apple Workers to gather stories from colleagues about workplace issues such as "persistent patterns of racism, sexism, inequity, discrimination, intimidation, suppression, coercion, abuse, unfair punishment, and unchecked privilege."
It would not surprise me if this kind of behavior was happening at apple given what we've heard about some other large tech companies recently but when you use terms like "inequity" and "unchecked privilege" it taints the argument, imo.
> We've exhausted all internal avenues. We've talked with our leadership. We've gone to the People team. We've escalated through Business Conduct. Nothing has changed," the announcement read. "It's time to Think Different."
Discrimination, intimidation, suppression, coercion, abuse, unfair punishment. All of that is actionable in the US under current labor laws. Why instead of going to regulators are they releasing press statements?
I work for a FAANG company. In my experience the only corporate culture that stays from team to team is the one that’s specifically established by executives. I’ve switched teams and it’s like working at a whole new company in some aspects, but it’s like I didn’t even change teams in others.
[Opinions my own] I've worked at two FAANGs, but never switched teams within them so take this with a grain of salt in terms of breadth of experience:
While specific official and unofficial business practices vary per org or even per team, I feel that overall company culture is actually very strong. At FB, I found that there was a universal culture of (ruthlessly) optimizing for "impact." Obviously what impact was varied with your job and your role but I felt like a key unspoken job responsibility was to help come to a shared understanding of what impact was for your role. Another notable cultural trait was a strong preference for empirical data and a commitment to actually rationalizing conclusions drawn on it. Overall, the culture is what I'd call extremely pragmatic.
Google is very different. It's a much more academic-feeling atmosphere. Everyone understands that the company pays us to do a specific job, but there's a very strong tendency to do "Cool Stuff™" and figure out what the business value is later. Consequently you get a focus on very high quality technical excellent, meticulous and high quality docs and internal systems that are very powerful but perhaps a touch more complex than they need to be ;).
I will say that perhaps some of this is exists only in my head as a result of connecting data points that are actually unrelated. But hey - that's pretty much what culture is anyway so I feel okay sharing my take.
Stack ranking will rapidly turn an entire massive corporation into a cesspool of Machiavelli wannabes.
Consider the dead lake effect, the good people will eventually be subjected to sociopaths and will leave, while the sociopaths will stay to fight among themselves.
If you don't know what it is, it is the management theory that you should be actively trying to fire/get leave/layoff your lower performing 10-20% and hiring to replace them.
The false god of this failed religion is that you can measure people's contributions despite cronyism and petty motivations, when the reality is that cronyism and petty motivations dominate.
Has it really come to a point where people complain about “unchecked privilege” in the workplace? Sexism, racism, etc are of course all real issues in the workplace, but can anyone really take themselves seriously complaining about “unchecked privilege”? Do they want cishet white males to self flagellate every day? When did these things go from tumblr level insanity to real life?
Somewhat ironic that the article lumps together the grievances of an employee fired for COMPLAINING about sexism and those of an employee fired for BOASTING of sexism.
As large a company as Apple is, it would be difficult to accommodate both of them (Not that I'm implying that by upsetting both sides, Apple must be steering a prudent moderate course — on the contrary, I'm pretty sure both of them were treated badly by Apple).
Apple is a huge corporation and there is a large degree of variation within it. But when things are toxic there, they can get very toxic. Middle managers can have a lot of leeway there, and HR is about as powerless as you can imagine. There is not much room for dissent against decisions there, forget "think different". The product schedule is all-important and can also be very stressful to work under. It's a situation that Apple employees can only sympathize with one another, but not much else.