Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This just doesn't seem like a reasonable accommodation for a retail job. Your whole job is to communicate with the customers. If you need to hire another person to do the communicating, what are you doing there? Why not just hire the interpreter?
This is like if you're in a wheelchair and you get a job to hang drywall. They pay you, but then have to hire another person to actually hang the drywall while you...point out where to put it?
EDIT>> For those missing my point. If Chris Voss suddenly needed a sign language interpreter, he'd still be incredibly valuable for his ability to negotiate. A person's skills in communication aren't solely tied to their ability to speak.
People feel more comfortable in groups and more pressured one on one. The interpreter is seen as neutral but an upstanding person. Grouping the three presents a natural barrier which gives the customer space. If the interpreter can fullfill the wingman role by neutrally suggesting to go forward with a purchase to someone on the fence you have a real business.
It's a completely different thing to expect a company to hire 2 people (with 2 full time salary and benefits) when 1 will do. Especially for a low skill job that has no real shortage of potential workers.
For one of the most profitable companies in the world, this doesn't seem outrageous (1 extra employee per store, maybe full time, likely not) especially given the fact that Apple doesn't support right-to-repair they will naturally have more foot traffic than most similar businesses.
Examples: People at road construction sites holding "Stop" signs, packagers in supermarkets, money collectors in toll booths (even before electronic devices, just using a machine was easily and cheaply possible and frequently and successfully used elsewhere), and a few other jobs that appeared to be unnecessary and purely intended to keep some people busy.
Things like that, and how the defense budget is actually used as a jobs program in large parts, were quite eye opening for me. I came from former East Germany and we always thought US as the most capitalist of all places, but when I first visited for a few months of travel not long after reunification I was very surprised to find some things that we in East Germany even used in jokes comparing East and West, and now I found out that e.g. "employee of the month" (with a special parking lot no less), that we thought was a typical socialism thing, and we even had a joke about that which implied and presumed that something like that could never exist in a country such as the US, was something they actually had. Also, the reverence to uniforms (military and police especially) was very East German.
I think the US is confused about how capitalist they really are. Under the hood they try to solve the same problems as everybody else and come up with very similar solutions, only that they need be be branded differently because you can't do any "socialism" openly.
I think the ultimate truth is that we humans are all just super fucking tribal. For all our chest thumping and moralistic justifying about how our philosophy and way of life are better than everyone else, it really all comes down to "I want my tribe to be the most powerful" and we'll sacrifice any and all of our ideals to make that happen. Or maybe more accurately, those tribes that actually hold strong to their ideals don't have what it takes to become the most powerful.
How that game between tribes plays out is a never ending cat and mouse game of shifting narrative, demographics, environmental conditions, technology, and tribal affiliations.
"Capitalism is better than socialism/communism" was only ever a narrative to justify why we in the west were top dogs getting fat and happy while those in the east were struggling to survive. The truth of why that happened is a lot more complicated.
The law is not going to work if it says “the most profitable companies need to pay for 2 people when 1 will do”. And then how does it work if profits fluctuate?
It is simply much easier for the government to pay to accomplish whatever goal it wants, and at the same time does not obfuscate the price of achieving that goal. If the government wants to help deaf people be employed, then the government should pay an interpreter to help the deaf person be employed.
Is that not much simpler than arbitrarily requiring various other entities to comply with nebulous requirements and then spend resources policing them?
Of course, it is cheaper for the government to do the latter, and then spend more money policing them since in the former situation, it is easy to project how much the government will need to spend, and in the latter, the government can use some bullshit assumptions to make up whatever budget they want.
I'm a bit surprised speech to text these days wouldn't basically take you as far as you need to go for a deaf employee.
That said, if you take away jobs with a large communication component from the deaf, that rules out A LOT. I think reasonable accommodations should be provided, versus saying "most jobs are unreasonable for you to have."
Since I saw no defense of the interpreter, are you agreeing hiring an interpreter is not a reasonable accommodation?
I don't have an NYT subscription to see if there's more detail in there, but I don't necessarily take every complaint at face value. It wouldn't surprise me - since this person was there for 6 years - if other accommodations were provided that many people would consider "reasonable" and a sign-language interpreter wasn't actually necessary to perform the job, but there's just long-lingering bitterness over not getting precisely the accommodation that was desired.
Providing an iPad to type messages on is a reasonable accommodation. Customers who don’t like it can work with another employee or go elsewhere.
But hiring a second entire employee who basically shadows you and does your job for you seems like a bit much.
Doesn't that make communication slower? When I want to buy something, I certainly don't want to start chatting on a tablet to get my point across. It seems like a poor choice of position for that employee.
Sometimes I want to zip in and out of the grocery store but there’s an old lady in front of me who wants to argue about an expired coupon and it takes longer than I’d like. Such is life.
A reminder to me that if I lost my eyesight, hearing, or mobility, I won't be left behind.
Fixed it, and maybe. A decline in customer experience provides incentive for Apple to optimize the slower customer service folks out of the picture.
Yes, there are human beings on the other side of our daily transactions that should always be treated with respect. However, these are transactions, not social calls.
I live 10 minutes away from an Ace hardware, 20 minutes away from Home Depot. I almost always go to Ace and pay a few dollars more because when I walk in the door, somebody immediately asks me if they can help me find what I'm looking for. They walk me to the isle and spend a few minutes discussing the various options. If I had to communicate awkwardly through a tablet, I'd honestly just spend a few more minutes driving and save the money.
Sales is a communication-heavy job. It's pretty common already to offer extra pay for bilingual associates. I don't see what the difference is here; nobody would hire me for a job selling in Mandarin, even though I could run Google Translate on a tablet.
I think this is the issue in a nutshell. And as a salesperson, you don't get to define the method by which customers want to interact with you.
They're the ones with the money. You're the one trying to get the money. They get to have you meet them where they prefer.
I did however cancel a £1000 order with currys because they didn't provide anyone to talk to - by phone, email or even text chat (which only worked on some browsers). The only form of communication was 'fill this form in to cancel your order'.
I'd much rather fund social programs which just outright support people with disabilities (and I'd like such programs to be more robust and empathetic than they are today). Frankly, if you're not going to be able to do your job well in the first place, this works out better for everyone.
Consider the other perspective here: I'd posit that all else being equal, most people would rather not have to go to work every day, particularly if "work" is a crappy retail job. We force most people to work because their jobs benefit the rest of society, but if someone can't work in a way that helps others, why force them to do it? Because it's not fair to everyone else?
Because hard work is good for the soul? Screw that! Go read books, raise your children, live your life as best you can, and let the rest of us take care of you. If the situation were reversed, I'd expect you to do the same for us.
Couple of times I have been served by a deaf employee in my local Apple store, we typed sentences on the iPad. It was slower a bit but otherwise perfectly fine.
If this person wanted just money from social programs they would do that. But you could tell it was important for them to work, to communicate with other people, and have a sense of purpose. And it was my pleasure and privilege to participate in this, for these brief several minutes.
It might not have been the fastest way but it was definitely pleasant (2nd part of your criteria), for both of us.
Interacting with people with disabilities gives us an opportunity to think about how we can make society a little better not just for them, but for ourselves in the case that we become sick, or injured, or just live to be elderly enough that parts of our bodies have fulfilled their expected useful life and stop working.
I have near perfect vision/hearing/speech and no motor difficulties, but there are several accessibility features that I enable on my Mac and iPhone because they make it easier for me to do certain things.
Even outside the software realm, examples like adding ramps to entrances instantly makes life a little bit easier for people pushing carts/strollers, which at various times is a pretty huge part of the population.
Any of us could be disabled or our person may be a target for discrimination or worse.
Could be me.
And I make sure while it is not me I can increase the net happiness in the world.
Calm down. Breathe. You're buying something at a store, not performing surgery.
Five minutes of your time is not necessarily more important than depriving someone of their livelihood. If you were that important, you'd be driving an ambulance.
I'm stealing that line... thanks for the chuckle and snort on a Saturday morning.
But isn't this exactly the customer behavior Richard Dahan was complaining about?
You have agency here; you could choose to shop somewhere else, where they would prioritize your retail experience by not hiring the disabled. By the way this would also make you a giant knob :)
The fact is, many jobs are out of reach for most people. Standard disability is only one of many aspects of a person that makes them unsuitable for a particular job. Personality, intelligence, type and level of education, or physical strength/capability are another.
Using an iPad/iPhone seems to be the standard Apple policy, but this employee objected.
Does it say anything about if his manager had penalized him for some customers not working with him? If management requires him to post the same numbers despite knowing that, I think that's a big problem. Otherwise, I'm not necessarily sold by his story here.
(I'm curious is customers still refused with an interpreter, too. That's also going to slow things down.)
Interpretation varies, but hiring another employee to translate for an employee seems to be beyond that standard to me.
The problem is costs. I wonder what people would say if you required mom and pop stores to have sign language interpreters? It would drive many out of business.
Now look at spiraling Medicare costs. We have similar expectations for the elderly and it is increasingly untenable.
We need a lot more automation to maintain or increase this level of social support services.
Another issue is what we classify as a disability. As another commentator mentioned, what about lack of strength, intelligence, etc? There is a vein of American culture that is trending that way. It basically spreads the costs to other parts of society, directly and indirectly. Tricky since most people are actually disabled temporarily or permanently in one way or another. Color blindness, myopia, bad hearing, on crutches from tearing an Achilles, etc...
The way you seem to be looking at it - yes, I mostly agree that the company should not outright be expected to essentially hire another fully time employee to work as the deaf employees interpreter. But in the 21st century, in the developed country that is the United States, I very much feel as if there should be some way to quickly and reasonably pair this employee with a student(s) of a local sign language or whatever school/program in which they come and go assisting in translation services for part of school credit/curriculum/outreach. Anybody learning a language will tell you there's nothing better than real world experience.
This gives the disabled (in the form of being deaf) person a meaningful occupation/independence, and students an assured way to get important experience. However, since the US is a highly capitalistic machine, we seem to not have reasonable things such as this set up on any meaningful scale.
Lots of downvoting. Do HN users have beef with disability accomodations or something?
If one must keep that in mind, may one ask what definition of "welfare state" has applied to the USA since its founding?
Go read about the history of Mormons and Utah. The reason the surrounding borders are so weird is because the U.S. gov essentially tried to thwart a larger land grab by the LDS
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Deseret
Their tenants were largely about taking care of each other.
So, in short - there were a lot of welfare states, mostly segregated by religion. As time went on, they mostly morphed into an encompassing welfare state.
Do you disagree? HN is definitely a tough crowd when it comes to ideas of helping the less fortunate it seems. Hopefully your future physical therapists won't charge too much when your ruined backs and wrists are hurting, despite the fact capitalism says "why shouldn't they reap your pains for all they're worth"
Certain groups choosing to take care of their members is not a welfare state so I'm not too sure what you're getting at there.
For what it’s worth, you almost certainly mean ‘tenets’. I don’t know why, but this malapropism has become increasingly common. Tenants are people who rent a property.
Both words come from the Latin tenere, to hold. A tenant is someone who holds a lease. A tenet is a belief that is held.
I’m going to assume that this is a serious question and try to quickly answer it in good faith.
A quick search finds these figures [0] from the Congressional Research Service.
“CRS identified 83 overlapping federal welfare programs that together represented the single largest budget item in 2011—more than the nation spends on Social Security, Medicare, or national defense. The total amount spent on these 80-plus federal welfare programs amounts to roughly $1.03 trillion. Importantly, these figures solely refer to means-tested welfare benefits. They exclude entitlement programs to which people contribute (e.g., Social Security and Medicare).”
Social Security and Medicare are massive entitlements beyond welfare spending that are all but sacrosanct in US politics, and that’s just federal spending.
Looking at total social spending as a share of GDP [1], the US is in line with Australia and Canada at 2016 numbers. The difference between the US at 19% and the Netherlands or Japan at 22.5% or Germany at 25% is one of degree, not of kind. This is especially true when you consider that in absolute terms the difference is even smaller since the US has considerably higher GDP/capita than those countries.
[0] https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/CRS%20Report%20-...
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
It is a serious question and I was hoping for something closer to the late 1700s vintage. I'm well aware there is a vast welfare system in place today.
I was caught in a weak moment I guess.
“Since it’s founding the US has never been a welfare state in any sense. Change my mind!”
> If one must keep that in mind, may one ask what definition of "welfare state" has applied to the USA since its founding?
The contention was definitely whether it has been a welfare state ever since its founding. No judgement though - the English language is terribly poorly designed, so I can totally understand how you read it that way.
I'm sure there's plenty. From the Federalist years (George Washington onward) to modern times, the federal government assumed both the responsibility and the management of the US resources as the political winds found necessary. To what degree, has only grown over time in spurts and fits.
How is it limited?
Why must it become inaccessible to people with bad eye sight? My feelings aren't that fragile
Its not unreasonable for Apple. Tim Cook could personally, out of his own salary, pay the salaries of every Apple employee in New York. He could give them all a 200% raise, and he'd still make twenty times more than ICU nurses who work 20 hour shifts to save his life if he ever needs it.
As an employee, it would help me feel pride to contribute toward a company that is willing to not just meet the law, but go beyond it and provide valuable and gainful employment for people like Richard. As a customer, it would make me proud to walk into an Apple Store and work with someone like Richard, to see that Apple were willing to pay an entire second salary simply to be accommodating. Comparatively, the salaries of an entire Apple retail stores' worth of employees is exactly the same as you accidentally dropping your change at a register, a penny rolls under the checkout lane, and you say "nah its not worth it".
Now, the reality of the situation is that, Apple Corporate would probably be fine with this, but the real problem is with this Middle Manager. To be clear, it reflects poorly on Corporate, and its their responsibility to set terms and culture to ensure Bad Store Managers don't pop up. But, they will. What matters is Apple's response, not necessarily the history of what happened (though, six years is a very long time).
Please stop pretending that you do.
Hint: the vast majority of his compensation is, and has always been, via stock grants.
Apple has 4,291 employees in the entire state of New York [1]
That's $61,500 per person.
The average salary for an "Apple Genius" (one of the people who work at apple stores?) in New York City is $53,230
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28573768
[1] https://www.apple.com/job-creation/
[2] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Apple_Genius/Salary...
And that's without taking his performance into account, which is, of course, obviously the best performance by any CEO in the world.
So I'm pedantic and an asshole? Fuck that. Two can play at that game: you're a lazy jerk who paints sloppily with a broad brush.
Given that equating "salary" and "total compensation" is a reasonable interpretation, and by the context the talk was about front line apple store workers rather than high level developers, the figures add up (and then some)
I'm making no judgement on Cook's compensation or value, just confirming the numbers, but you seem to take that as a personal attack.
As for you pretending to be shocked that I considered your comments a personal attack, um, er, uh, you called me a "pedantic asshole". I think that qualifies.
You do understand that, because Apple is a public company, all of this information is literally public knowledge, right?
If you'd like to argue that stock grants are not part of a person's salary, that is a reasonable interpretation of the definition of "salary", but hardly relevant to the broader point, which is clearly not to assert that Timmy should open up his checkbook, but rather to illustrate how incredibly inane it is to suggest that a few hundred bucks a week for an hourly interpreter means anything at the scale Apple operates at.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/
It also changes the argument meaningfully in a second way: liquidity. Tim Cook can't just go sell all that stock right now, since that would cause a rather big panic and also rob him of a lot of its value. Which means he could not actually pay all those folks' salaries.
Whether my point is "interesting" is up to you. Whether it's factual isn't. It's factual.
How familiar are you with the deaf? If this was a lifelong affliction they (likely) won't verbally communicate and even if they do it's not something that can be parsed clearly enough for retail.
Best to withold judgments until get more of the facts are revealed.
However, it came to light that their internal research found most people drink the coffee while driving. The primary reason has been speculated but of course never officially acknowledged as what you suggest.
It sounds like that might not be accurate:
>...In 1994, a spokesman for the National Coffee Association said that the temperature of McDonald's coffee conformed to industry standards.[2] An "admittedly unscientific" survey by the Los Angeles Times that year found that coffee was served between 157 and 182 °F (69 and 83 °C), and that two coffee outlets tested, one Burger King and one Starbucks, served hotter coffee than McDonald's.[37]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restau...
I'd like to note though that what ever the case, a beverage that she was expected to put to her lips managed to give her horrific burns. And there was, if I recall correctly, quite a few of the same case accident reports at Mcdonalds on record. She was the only one who ended up in high profile litigation though. I suppose my point is that she wasn't silly or unreasonable as the slow drip feed of facts led many people to conclude as they heard it.
You could view it as a full employment plan.
The next logical step is to have a deaf man who only signs in Irish Sign Language. The first interpreter converts that to ASL, the second into spoken English.
By the end of the last interpreter, the guy at the Apple Store would get an order of Granny Smith apples and his vintage Mr. Coffee machine would be repaired by a passing street musician.
1. Text is a common medium for communicating with the deaf. Younger deaf people in particular will be fine with this
2. VRS is also an option, but it would be awkward in that scenario. VRS is subsidized by the government. VRS predates Facetime but both have been complimentary for deaf people
3. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to expect Apple to run their own VRS-like service optimized for deaf retail employees and situations, considering they make Facetime, and counting all the other anecdotes of interaction with deaf people here. The same should be true for any huge retail operation - Macy’s, Home Depot, Costco, etc… If you go to a hospital they already have something like this.
I also worked a few years as a "sales associate" (retail guy) at RadioShack.
I don't think these two mix well in practice. People are moody, in a rush, and don't generally have accessibility or the needs of others in mind when going to a store.
Trying to communicate when you're also trying to convince someone to give you money is paramount. Any hiccups and both sides get frustrated which just sours the whole thing.
This is more of a reflection on people than it is retail, deafness, etc. It's a terrible reality but it's reality.
It's a really, really tricky, touchy and all around uncomfortable problem to solve.
Maybe it would be harder with a deaf person vs. blind. Maybe I’m just an outlier here. Dunno.
The interpreter has a job already - it’s to interpret. If they wanted to be an Apple specialist I think they would have applied for that job. Interpreting and doing the job of an Apple specialist are not the same thing. It’s possible the interpreter would be a terrible Apple specialist.
Why not just hire an interpreter? It’s a win-win-win: a deaf person had a job, an interpreter has a job, deaf customers are better served, hearing customers are better served.
And to top it all off Apple still makes a ton of money! What does an interpreter really in the grand scheme of things when you’re a trillion dollar company like Apple? What’s the cost of an interpreter really to them? I get this idea that corporations are profit maximizing entities, but we’ve really taken it a bit far when we can’t pay a little extra for common decency even when record profits are coming in. Like, maybe if times were tough we’d have a different conversation, but Apple isn’t exactly hurting for cash here. We’re not even asking for decency, just to follow the law. They’ll bend over backwards to help out a thug like Putin when his lawyers send a takedown demand, but to do a solid for their deaf customers and employees… well they can’t be bothered.
The message it sends is “you’re so incapable that we need to hire another person just to make up for your deficiencies”. And if it becomes a norm across the corporate world, companies will become even more reluctant to hire deaf people if they know that they are getting one employee for the price of two.
It's my understanding the interpreter was requested. I don't think that's the message being sent here. The message would be more like "we comply with this reasonable and lawful request because it makes you, our valued employee of 6 years, even better at their job".
And you're not getting one employee for the price of two, you're getting one employee and a one assistant. Executives get assistants all the time and no one blinks an eye. What, are they so incapable of scheduling their days themselves?
Apple does pretty well in the accessibility department, they could use someone demonstrating it.
A good question to ask Apple. Why are they hiring such people and then ignoring their workplace demands that would allow them to do thier job satisfactorily? Is there some federal program that allows them to claim some tax benefit by hiring the disabled? Is that why Apple doesn't care about them or their job performance?
How does the incidental learning work with the iPad? Are they experiencing equal employment opportunities as others? How can they contribute during the meetings without an interpreter? Should our expectations of them be lower because they are disabled?
Is constant complaining over lunch really less effective than constant complaining in DMs? Or, if it's large channels with lots of participants - what stopped those channels from happening before? Is the idea that people who would've whined over lunch to a small group are now recruiting many others to channels?
Now teams are less siloed.
This is startling to me. I haven't had a job without Slack or an essentially-equivalent predecessor (Hipchat) in over eight years.
Perhaps someone can confirm but can a sufficiently privileged user (not a Slack employee) read contents of private channels? DMs?
People should assume communication on company services are all logged.
And then, as I should have foreseen, they demanded all communications within the company relating to their lawsuit. I’m not a lawyer, but, for whatever reason, our lawyers considered it to be within their rights; I’m sure it wouldn’t have applied to privileged legal discussions, but we were just code monkeys so I suppose our chat logs were fair game. I’m never doing that again. I don’t think their lawsuit went anywhere, but it was mortifying all the same, especially considering our brand was quite a friendly and liberal one.
Kinda reminiscent of what social media did to mainstream media --- everyone realised they were being fed a narrative and regimes changed throughout the world in an anti-establishment wave
In the US, at least, this doesn't seem to be the case. Mainstream media news - Fox, MSNBC, CNN, in order of popularity; ESPN, etc, for more niche news and events - still exists in the same form it did 20 years ago. Today's hot-button issues are what they were 20 years ago (abortion! guns! sexuality! activist judges! immigration! race!) with some new Covid-ones that are largely remixes of previously-simmering ones too like vaccines.
Some Fox viewers also have shifted more to further-right internet content, and some MSNBC/CNN viewers to further-left stuff... but neither of those changes are "rejecting a narrative," more "going where they can get even more of the one they like." I haven't seen a lot of talk of social media shifting Fox viewers to left-wingers, or the reverse!
It's easy to live in a sort of vacuum if your small team is not witness to discrimination/harassment. In a large enough org it is entirely likely that there is an asshole somewhere that you have never encountered, never worked with that is making someone's life miserable.
I am glad these things are being exposed but saddened that it could be happening in the larger company I work at.
The amount of oxygen these two took up on Slack was incredible. There would be threads hundreds of messages long arguing about politics, and every all hands had some sour, insulting question.
Both were eventually let go. But Slack really scales up rabble rousing, for good and ill.
1. Cultural 'meme' & trend that has dramatically spread throughout mostly american, urban, educated, elite/elite-adjacent spaces over the last 7-9 years that lionizes and rewards those who can claim they are a 'victim'. This meme favors certain immutable characteristics as inherently providing victimhood status. If you were born with an immutable characteristic that's held in favor by the meme, you have many advantages available to you. Nobody is supposed to acknowledge those benefits according to this meme. So you can both be objectively very privileged and also considered a mostly helpless victim of an oppressor class.
2. Internet has allowed anyone to be heard, no matter the level in the hierarchy of a company. And if you know how to use the right words according to this victimhood meme (regardless of objective victim status), you have a good chance of being rewarded both socially and professionally. This is a pathway that some take if they don't believe they'll be able to succeed by other means.
3. Increasing trend toward 'safetyism', where the concept of harm is becoming looser and more abstract. You don't need to even be objectively or provably harmed anymore to claim you were harmed and thus victimized.
Given all of the above, it's not surprising that big tech companies who operate in these elite spaces will experience 'unrest' amongst their employees. Cultural winds have created pathways for people to both legitimately and illegitimately air grievances to attempt to be rewarded socially/professionally.
(And lest anyone interpret the above as suggesting nobody is ever objectively or truly victimized, I am most definitely not saying that.)
Here's is one of many of his videos on YouTube dealing exactly with this topic: https://youtu.be/jQcDw1r1lGw
I was in Apple R&D for four years (during that period after Jobs left and before he returned). No one was hungry, few people I met were ambitious. I left mainly because they decided to treat software testers as second class citizens, and had no interest in supporting my attempts to innovate in the testing realm. I went to Borland, where morale was high and everyone wanted to beat Microsoft (until they gave up and basically bought our team).
The weird thing is that Apple worked really hard training its managers about the law and about good management practices in those days. I suspect they still do. I suspect that it has simply been overwhelmed by youngsters who expect mommy and daddy to fix everything up for their maximum comfort.
I'm impressed that Apple let her spend "several years" fighting a reassignment. I'm also not very sympathetic to this person though. I've quit a job because I got reorg'd into more work for less pay. It sucks, but I don't think it means my employer is problematic or bad or whatever. The role I had was no longer needed and I didn't like the new position I landed in, so I left. That sounds similar to what happened to this person.
Is this attitude possibly because these companies hire based on the entire emotion that you’re special and elite and we’re all going to link arms and save the planet?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27242405
Maybe even longer, given the semi-Messianic hippie-adjacent attitudes surrounding the birth of modern PCs in Silicon Valley. Some of which was cultivated by Steve Jobs himself. Apple sowed their own seeds.
This is called retaliation, and is illegal. It’s not happenstance that she got re-orged after complaining about underlying issues.
If someone is fired after complaining about sexual harassment in the workplace, that's retaliation because you have a legal right to a workplace free of such harassment.
If someone is reassigned after complaining about their employer's ESG policies, you're going to have to explain to me what the nature of the legal protection is in that case for me to see that as retaliation.
Believing your job should be something different from what your employer has hired you to do doesn't put you in a legally protected position; nor does believing that the extent to which your employer pursues a particular objective is insufficient.
Complaining that your boss doesn't let you do something based on your own interpretation of your job description isn't a "discussion of working conditions" in the NLRA sense - that's absurdly over expansive.
Her job was to improve the rare mineral supply chain. Her complaint was that it wasn’t doing that. Seems like a super valid criticism, and what employees should be doing.
The idea that you can demand to stay in your position and continue to pursue your own agenda is so odd. If you want that kind of freedom, you're not going to find it in corporate life.
A reasonable person would consider reassignment due to complaining about the ineffectivity of their role and green washing by their employer (often covered by whistle-blowing protections), as retaliation.
Please don't try to muddy the waters here by attempting to rely on the common language meaning of the word when you set up the discussion to be about the employment law meaning.
Not sure how the law varies state to state.
What other geopolitical problems does this person think Apple should be tackling other than resolving tribal conflicts in war torn central Africa? The Taliban? Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women? Haiti’s poverty?
Ridiculous.
This is often the case with corporate green-washing.
Regardless, you are free to assume PR posturing as an uninvolved commenter on HN - meanwhile, we’re discussing an actual person’s job and complaints therewith.
To me it seems odd to stay at the company for several years after that. Something makes me think she's really just looking for more pay, because if she really cared about issues with rare mineral mining in conflict zones, she'd work for a non-profit that deals with that.
>she'd work for a non-profit that deals with that.
She would have made a far bigger impact if she was working in Apple.
My guess is that she is like many of us who realise the PR and marketing message Apple has been sending is completely different to the work she is doing. Had Apple not been painting themselves so righteous they would not have this problem today. Steve Jobs think of environmental friendly product as tick boxes, nice to have but not something to market the hell out of it.
So when people then realise, especially in the age of doing the "right" thing. Apple is not what they think it is.
I think Apple sort of realise this, and they have since toned it down in this years Keynote. For anyone interested you should go and check Apple's keynote in the past 4 years and see the drastic difference.
If I had to sum it up, Tim Cook changed the PR and marketing direction in 2014. ( Also the year Katie Cotton stepped down ) And seriously he is not very good at it.
You quoted this, but seem to have ignored it. This was not a role that got deprecated, rather she complained that her/Apple’s work in that role was ineffective.
This is a very valid complaint, and the sign of a valuable employee. However, most corporations respond by covering up ineffectivity, which is why it turned out badly for her.
Dealing with highly paid, and highly desirable employees that can get a job at the drop of a hat, and which have ample savings to let them glide in any case, means that they have a lot of leverage. You need them just as much as they need you.
This is why political policy has been to keep away from full employment, and keep a continuous percentage of people unemployed at all times: power over labor. Without labor, capital and land are useless.
https://www.engadget.com/apple-faces-us-labor-board-investig...
Honestly, that realization is part of why I started commenting on message boards rather than lurking. The vast majority of people read but don't even bother to up/down vote. You have a lot of outsized influence if you choose to comment, even if it doesn't seem like your comments get much attention.
* Just curious, how do you enforce against, for example, a Facebook group? Would you have to totally block Facebook?
* With word of mouth an activist Slack workspace can take off on personal devices over cellular data, if the conditions are right. Is the idea of internal enforcement just to make it less convenient to participate?
* Why don’t activists use Blind to organize? Is Blind hostile to activists? How active is Blind at moderating content on behalf of companies (eg. taking down or burying activist content)?
With insider threat, the idea isn’t to force the behavior into concealed channels, but instead into “cleartext” channels where the data exfil, or I guess in this case subversive employee behavior, can be watched/snapshotted. Once that’s done, it goes over to HR/legal. So it’s not so much make it inconvenient to participate, but to make it easy to catch that participation is occurring, with some safeguards around what that participation is - chatter is ok, but have safeguard for Apple intellectual property landing in that activist slack.
So with FB and Blind, a company has two ways to ID that’s occurring, take evidence,nand then over to HR /Legal it goes.
If it occurs on work computers, one is device management tools like Forcepoint that allow an insider threat team to see your real time action. They see the employee going to this Slack/Blind, insider threat team starts taking artifacts, and that’s evidence. Other device mgmt tools aren’t as invasive, but achieve similar ends. All in all, regardless of the forum, the behavior can get caught, and it’s shipped to HR.
If all of the activism occurs off work computers, I’d bet the behavior gets caught by two ways. One, 3rd party vendors who scan social media/GitHub for company branding existing outside of company channels (so on FB “Apple Activist Group” would fire). Two, and more likely, is the activists suck at OPSEC because Bob or Susan from marketing who join the group but computers are Google-machines to them talk about it on work devices or the water cooler/Slack.
Gotta remember a place like Apple has insider threat programs dealing with industrial/corporate espionage. A bunch of pissed off activist employees trying to sneak around aren’t the same challenge. If Apple did have an employee activist group with ironclad OPSEC, Apple prob has big problems and those employees need to balance how important the cause is and why can’t they just talk about it to mgmt vs how that would look from the outside to a company/law enforcement.
I definitely assume work provided devices are logged and I've been told work provided cell phones are logged, but I don't know if that extends to personal devices. Of course best case would be to try and find out if there is a way to use an external token generator to keep work off a personal device.
This part is interesting, future feature, wonder how they detect that on a personal device: “ Jailbreak detection If a user installs SecureAuth Authenticate on a jailbroken or rooted phone, SecureAuth will detect the occurrence and will not allow the user to set up a SecureAuth account. (Coming Soon)”
Ultimately, read your AUP and BYOD policy and see what you did/did not sign away wrt monitoring on personal devices. Quite likely you can raise an HR stink if this app had more than just basic telemetry and they mandate it to be on a personal device.
This is a common talking point to marginalize political activity in any situation: 'It's just a tiny minority agitating', etc. In every situation, a tiny minority appeals to the majority and sometimes it convinces them. (If a majority of Americans ever protested something, that would be over 160 million people in the streets. Just think of the logistics of food, water, and waste ... cellular data bandwidth ... Twitter, Facebook and Instagram load ...)
That's how change happens; we try to persuade each other. People who are more involved, motivated, skilled, available, etc. do more of the work. If there was an environmental problem in SF Bay, the people who have the knowledge and expertise about the issue, and the communication skills, would inform and try to persuade everyone else. I'm not going to investigate it myself.
When I’ve run into this sort of thing, telltale signs of bullshit activism emerges from sales and marketing people not hitting the metrics, people at risk of being pushed out for performance issues, or people getting passed over.
As to whether or not their grievances are warranted, try asking any of your colleagues who used to work at Apple, and decide for yourself.
A lot of them are more social than anything else. Likeability supplants pure efficiency, and people hire friends, or people they want to spend time with.
He made the wrong, worst people at the company feel "empowered" and now there's no stopping them.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/12/22432909/apple-petition-h...
The reality is some people are rightly fired, others wrongly. In this case, that person was rightly fired. Writing such inflammatory bollocks would have got you fired 10 or 20 years ago too. They burned bridges with most of the people they would be expected to work with, so it’s absurd to demand that they be protected from the consequences of their actions. This goes well beyond being fired for claiming that, say, racism against white people is possible.
And now you, who never read the book but copy-pasta a few quoted sentences, want to destroy this man.
To go back after the fact and fire someone because of this was wrong. (That's why Apple settled for a lot of money, and Mr. Garcia can no longer talk about it.)
I didn't hear about Apple settling for a lot of money. How much was it?
> Anyway: Chaos Monkeys contains scenes from Antonio’s private relationships. Characteristically, they’re painted as comedies, where his personal life is depicted as an unpredictable third party over which he has little control — only occasionally, it seems, does it even listen to his suggestions. He meets a woman via Match.com whom he calls British Trader, “an imposing, broad-shouldered presence, six feet tall in bare feet, and towering over me in heels.”
He’s enthralled, but everything about her is a surprise that keeps him off balance, from the fact that her “strapping and strutting” South African ex-boyfriend docks a boat next to his not long after their first date, or that she sleeps on “a cheap foam mattress about the width of an extra-jumbo-sized menstrual pad” above a floor covered from detritus from a recent renovation. She did such work herself because, Antonio explains, “she made Bob Vila of This Old House look like a fucking pussy.” Even this side of her life has him tiptoeing. “Postcoitally it was all I could do to balance myself on the edge of the pad and off the drywall dust,” he noted.
At one point, as a means of comparing the broad-shouldered British DIY expert favorably to other women he’d known, he wrote this:
Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.
Out of context, you could, I guess, read this as bloviating from a would-be macho man beating his chest about how modern “entitlement feminism” would be unmasked as a fraud in a Mad Max scenario. In context, he’s obviously not much of a shotgun-wielder himself and is actually explaining why he fell for a strong woman, as the next passage reveals:
British Trader, on the other hand, was the sort of woman who would end up a useful ally in that postapocalypse, doing whatever work—be it carpentry, animal husbandry, or a shotgun blast to someone’s back—required doing.
Again, this is not a passage about women working in tech. It’s a throwaway line in a comedic recount of a romance that juxtaposes the woman he loves with the inadequate set of all others, a literary convention as old as writing itself. The only way to turn this into a commentary on the ability of women to work in Silicon Valley is if you do what Twitter naturally does and did, i.e. isolate the quote and surround it with mounds of James Damore references. More on this in a moment.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-the-hypocrites-at-apple-who... ----------
The NY Times mentioned this episode in this article, which is why I mentioned my belief that it's what started these internal troubles for Tim Cook and Apple.
> The complaints seem to be making an impact. When Apple this year hired Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook manager, more than 2,000 employees signed a protest letter to management because of what they called “overtly racist and sexist remarks” in a book he had written, based in part on his time at Facebook. Within days, Apple fired him. Mr. García Martínez declined to comment on the specifics of his case.
Color me unimpressed. She starts agitating after a few months of working entirely from home at a highly-paid gig? Did she even have time to get a clue about whether Apple's doing bad things or not? Or does she just kinda flit around from gig to gig looking for ways to cause trouble? I'm guessing less of the former, and more of the latter.
Because someone has had jobs at 8 tech companies that makes them a bad employee? The only way I have ever gotten a meaningful raise is by changing companies; it feels like the norm to be at a company for a lot less now-a-days.
Personally, I was loyal to a company for 10 years and as soon as I left and my experience vanished off their record, I was approached for the price my new company was giving me. Screw that noise.
Nice guess, but what's the problem with rabble-rousing? People fight actual violent battles with their employers, perhaps not so much in this country anymore. But that doesn't mean all the work to improve labor is finished. Apple and Google were fined for fixing wages only seven years ago (perhaps an eon in SV time, I wouldn't know). I'm sure I could walk into any multinational corporation and find a distasteful practice worth fixing, to pretend otherwise is the height of naivety.
Nothing. Taking a job with the intent to rouse rabbles, on the other hand, is dishonest.
Today, during the yearly Tim Cook's hands, wfh chat was talking smack about Apple even though they've officially gotten a response from corporate. It even spilled over to #talk-apple chat. Though, I gotta agree with some criticism. Apple has shot itself in the foot when it publicly takes political sides, and keeps a low radar on certain issues when employees expect Apple to take a stance. Overall, yes, Slack has changed a lot about Apple's culture.
This is at least the 2nd time on HN that a report has suggested Ashley Gjovik was complaining about "toxic chemicals at work". The previous article referred to something published at "The Verge" - "her office is in an Apple building located on a superfund site" <https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22666049/apple-fires-senio...>
Other published articles (and I believe is likely the truth) indicate that the toxic chemical issues were related to her personal living space <https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...>
The nytimes ought to be very embarrassed about this stupid error.
I note that the personal toxic superfund site issues were previously discussed on HN.
I am also somewhat confused about the persona of "Cher Scarlett". I do not think it is a real identity. I also have some serious doubts if they, or their alter ego, is actually employed at Apple. Reputable journalists could actually verify this with employment and tax records -- journalists would actually have to do the necessary due diligence.
Twitter suggests that "Cher Scarlett" is located in Seattle. (This would make them a remote worker for Apple). Also seemingly making quite a lot of tweets. When does this person do any work for Apple? Is this person the reason why Apple isn't responding to Security reports and the bug bounty program?
After reading many tweets I am failing to detect any comprehension of, or demonstration of, a computer security "mindset" -- something that, in my experience, does tend to manifest itself in the personality of security folks over extended periods of time.
I am unable to determine what sort of security role this person has.
I am not suggesting any malice or ill will towards "Cher Scarlett". I am trying to present this as a technical analysis.
In summary, I really question if "Cher Scarlett" is actually a real person in they way they are presenting themselves to be.
Also I don't know whether she's remote or onsite, but there are multiple orgs with offices in Seattle - one of my friends just got hired as an engineering manager onsite for Apple in Seattle.
Some of these comments could use some fact checking of their own :) .
Apple has a large in-person engineering office in Seattle, which is easy to determine from a Google search for 'apple seattle engineering':
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?location=seattle-SEA (scroll down past the retail jobs)
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/signs-point-apple-making-seatt...
https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-announces-new-office-s...
https://goo.gl/maps/qhjMUiC9M3HMGMQs7
I'm not sure I understand the rest of your argument. You think this person a) doesn't exist b) doesn't work for Apple c) does exist and works for Apple remotely, because there is no Seattle office d) works for Apple in the critical path for security reports and bug bounties, and is therefore why Apple is (allegedly) not responding to them because she's spending all her day tweeting e) works for Apple in an unknown capacity, which you cannot figure out f) tweets too much g) doesn't tweet enough about a specific security "mindset," which all people in a security role have?
This "technical analysis" doesn't seem to hold up, and I don't see any particular reason to suspect this person doesn't exist. I suspect the journalist's due diligence was more sound.
The complaint itself is definitely about the office. https://twitter.com/ashleygjovik/status/1438897383912394758?...
I'm willing to believe that you meant well with your comment, but I think you need to realize that even when you attempt to be objective bias creeps up readily. It starts with which stories you even decide to call out. You might feel that this person is fake or lacks the position that she says she has, but fact checking this inherently involves a selection process. Remember when Hacker News decided to "check" whether Katie Bouman had "actually worked on the black hole image"? This is where problems arise, because it's obvious this doesn't happen for everyone–just people that are thought to be "fakes", which is something that is selected by decidedly subjective criteria.
The second problem is that as you go through your analysis you bake in assumptions–in this case many that are wrong–and use it to arrive at an "objective" answer. Trying to reason from your armchair and present it under a guise of factualness is the biggest problem with any kind of "rationalist" analysis on the internet, including the kind that Hacker News is unfortunately known for. Here you literally have no idea of how Apple works internally, and at one point you openly claim that her personal Twitter doesn't demonstrate "a computer 'mindset'" (how can you possibly evaluate this objectively, even putting aside questions of why her Twitter is the right way to judge this?). Trying to submit it as "technical analysis" is just wrong, period.
It's good to be skeptical, and apply your own reasoning to things you read online. But try to be mindful of which things you're choosing to apply it to, as well as any flaws of your own you may be injecting when doing your own evaluation. Hacker News should be a place of healthy curiosity and discussion, but to do that we can't possibly accept this kind of content.
I cannot undo what I've said - it is clearly very incorrect. I would like to retract it.
Do you have any recommendations for getting better at critical thinking? How can it be practiced in a way that doesn't get you banned when making mistakes?
I really would like to avoid making these sorts of mistakes in the future.
Aside from that, I don't actually have anything concrete for you, unfortunately. What's worked for me is reflecting on my own biases and confidence in the information I am bringing to the conversation. In your case here it's clear that you started your comment with "I think this person is fake" and constructed a (tenuous) chain forwards to arrive there using assumptions rather than concrete information. We all do this to some extent, but specifically taking time to look for this kind of thing can help reduce the chances of it happening. Another skill you can learn (generally, by interacting with people you disagree with) is the ability to run your own devil's advocate on your comments. It sounds a bit strange to say it, but a lot of what I write gets much stronger pushback from myself before I even send it than it does once it's out for others to respond to.
As for practice, you can do this anytime you interact with anyone. As long as you are interacting in good faith, an open mind, and with genuine curiosity, people are unlikely to ban you. What you might want to keep in mind, however, is the context surrounding the conversation: getting something wrong about Java is regrettable, sure, but ultimately not a big deal. But outright calling someone a fraud is a pretty serious accusation, especially considering that certain groups of people are often more affected by this problem. When talking about real-life people, you should be very careful about the conclusions you draw and what their consequences may be.
I started skeptical, but by the end tended to believe Ashley Gjovik. So I don't know about Cher, and maybe Ashley kind-of got radicalized by her experience, but she does have a lot of evidence about the apartment issue.
Really worth reading. Lots of research. Data. Environmental impact reports. Kickbacks from developers to the city (<https://blogs.mercurynews.com/internal-affairs/2014/05/19/sa...>). All kinds of stuff. It's like The Wire.
It makes me look at urban redevelopment differently.
Also makes me think differently about "community investment" and such. How much of this is just bribes and protection money?
Given Benioff’s public persona I’m betting on the latter.
The one thing Slack has always sucked at is moderation tools.
Low hanging items: throttle message rates, limit number of people in a chat room, bans, shadow bans, topics, delayed message posting pending moderation
I'm embedded in the Apple universe, but I hate the company and what it has done to Silicon Valley.
Kinda makes one wonder what else you've missed. Such as, basically everything. "De facto" is not hyphenated, btw, nor did you use it correctly.
* Android Wear OS: Released June 2014
* Pebble Time (color): February 24, 2015
* Apple Watch 1: April 24, 2015
I wouldn't say they "invented" the category.
Also, AirPods leadership isn't nearly as strong as you imply and is trending downwards [1].
> AirPods market share fell from 41% to 29% in the course of nine months, according to the latest Counterpoint data, but Apple remains well ahead of its nearest competitor, and most other big names remain in the 2-5% range.
M1 is cool, I'll admit, but it is something that has more to do with Apple's scale. Google is coming out with Tensor cores, they've had TPUs for several years now and Samsung has had custom silicon for years as well. Large companies can afford to go into chip development and they do when they get a chance. M1 at the moment is not a standout feature. Sure, it can destroy Intel CPUs in the near future and I am looking forward to it. But I see it more of as an inevitability than Apple doing something "revolutionary" as the cool kids used to say a while back. If you are a 2 trillion company, it makes sense to move chip development in house rather than paying lofty premiums to a much smaller company. Vertical integration 101. This is what Google did with TPUs because they didn't want to pay Nvidia a lot of money.
Also, why is my de facto usage incorrect (hyphenation aside)?
"De facto" is Latin for "in fact", or "as a matter of fact", and it retains that meaning as an English phrase. That works perfectly well modifying "emperor of tech". Of course you might not agree that Apple is the de-facto (or "de facto") emperor of tech, but that's a separate question from whether the usage is allowable.
As for whether de facto specifically is hyphenated, go look it up yourself. Latin phrases are not hyphenated; that's generally agreed. This is because they are easily seen to hang together as a single unit without the added help of a hyphen, so the hyphen is redundant in this case. But yes, I am aware that most pairs of words used as a modifier, as in this case, would be hyphenated. I own about eight style guides, so I wasn't just going off randomly about that.
"In some scholarly articles, you’ll find hyphenated Latin expressions (such as ex-post-facto research design or status-quo bias). Does that mean those journals’ editors or proofreaders did slapdash work? No. It’s not incorrect to hyphenate Latin phrases, but it’s unnecessary. However, some style guides may recommend hyphenating all Latin phrases used as adjectives (I’m yet to find a major one that does, though)."
You've made it clear what the standard is when you're the editor, which is fine with me.
> keynotes get more typical and lacklustre
Surely huge irony is not lost here
I dunno, their new M1 silicon is pretty dope. Airpod Pros are the most recent thing I bought from them and they're a pleasure to use every day. They're not at the same level of innovation that they were 10 years ago, but they're also not at zero.
When was the last time you were surprised and delighted by an Apple product? I think they make the world's best, and most responsible, products, but surprised by an iPhone upgrade? When was the last time they created a new category?
Almost every current Apple product (save the HomePod) is the category defining product of it's class. The iPhone, the iPad, the M1 MacBooks, the Apple Watch, the AirPods, the Apple TV, the iMac, and the AirTags are all essentially best-in-class, and the standards-bearer for the category.
AirTags are pretty cool, but a small category.
Basically all of the AirPods that support sound cancellation. EarPods that could do a better job of cutting out outside sound than the very expensive Bose headphones I owned prior, but could fit in my jeans coin pocket.
The M1 and every Mac to have it so far.
Just because you're not surprised and delighted by Apple products does't mean others are.
And iPad wasn't revolutionary, it was merely nice.