I Died on Monday Night
cherp.medium.com
cherp.medium.com
Apple needs to change. Every FAANG/MANGA corporation needs to change. Management and shareholders will never do what is right, only what is profitable. You think customers have a chance of changing anything? Employee activism may be the best chance for meaningful change.
Customers have all the power and they are not choosing to exercise it. They are the only ones who can make those companies change. As long as they remain junkies, this continues unabated. Not holding my breath here.
35 years in tech, IT and development and I never used an Apple device. Including in two huge, international tech companies at very senior positions.
I love new technologies and have nothing againt Apple, just never needed to use them.
So much for that prison you are talking about.
What kind of 'data interchange' is common: AirDrop? I can't really think of anything that Apple does well for data sharing. It's not like the days of MS Word, and Apple didn't matter then either.
Professionally it is Android or Apple, data is exchanged through cloud or similar services.
My team in probably 90% use apple, but this does not change anything in terms of exchange which is completely independent on the device.
Did you have any problems writing your comment? HN is not apple, though. You probably also send emails or read web pages. No Apple there either.
It's very difficult to argue this point when employees are very well compensated for the perceived misery of being employed at these companies.
People leaving a FAANG isn't significantly different than people extricating themselves from a cult, and most of the same reasons people tend not to apply. If you quit a Big Tech company, you are probably leaving all of your friends behind at the same time, and you'll need to find a new gym and massage place too.
If your whole life is the company, leaving the company is very, very scary.
The tech space in general also has a lot of progressive minded folks. Mix all of this together and you will find those fighting the existing systems more and more.
For minor infractions, it's probably not worth becoming an activist. For instance, if I'm not being paid proportional to the market or my boss is creating a difficult culture, it's probably just time to pack up and leave. I might not even bother offering any real feedback on the way out.
For more major ones, an example from the article was preventing an employee from talking about wages, I'm going to continue doing exactly that AND look for my out. I'm also going to talk to my fellow employees about their legal rights and how this isn't right. Bonus, if I'm fired before I can find a job, I'm probably going to talk to a lawyer at bare minimum
Anything above that, I would argue you've drifted into becoming part of the problem. And the fact that you've "never seen this kind of thing work out positively for the person that does it" is part of that system that perpetuates the kind of toxic workplace you've seen. It sucks, but you've been called to fight against a giant and hopefully the worst that happens to you is you get fired. Best case, perhaps the rarest, you're part of the resistance that brings down something truly toxic
Because I actively look to join companies that share my values and leave when things get even slightly dicey, I've not had to go beyond minor infractions. But if I'm ever faced with something truly bad, I hope that I have the courage to stand even when others do not.
Edit: It also helps if you work for small companies and know the whole stack of management above you
For larger companies, knowing a few levels above you and whether or not they'd stand for shenanigans is useful too. Ideally your manager will be frank about the state of things and willing to fall on the sword for important issues
Finally, if you're a manager, you're an extension of the company and any toxic things they inflict on people below you in the hierarchy. "Minor infractions" should be fought, and you're complicit if anything worse happens. You should be willing to be fired rather than enforce anything unethical on your employees. Otherwise you simply shouldn't be a manager.
To be clear, I admire whistleblowers who call out true ethical breaches. I just think fighting with management on things like salary transparency which aren't urgent issues is a waste of time. If they're not paying you what you think you're worth go find a better gig.
You're probably right in that it's much harder to change a behemoth.
But we've seen recently the power of employee activism.
Google & china search, twitter during the election, climate strike, reddit for a few things didn't they hire and then fire a known abuser?, Google AI ethics saga (though maybe I shouldn't put that Im not sure that's a success lol, is that conservative lady still there?).
I'm sure there's a bunch more but that's just off the top of my head and maybe some aren't the best examples but other commenters I'm sure can chime in with better ones.
And of course it's more complicated. Can argue corporations would do some of this on their own simply for marketing reasons.
The first part is, if something is wrong at your employer, should you try to negotiate, or leave? The thing to realise is that conditions at an employer are already the result of negotiation, even if it isn't overt, and even if it happened before you joined. Leaving is an inefficient way of communicating your preferences, and many things are too minor to bother, or too minor at the margin to bother leaving, but you would be lobster-boiled if you let them slide. Also, to be brutal about it, top managers and CEOS are there because they are good at taking advantage. If they see an opportunity to take advantage of their employees, they do. So you are in a negotiation with them, like it or not.
The second part is, should you declare yourself an activist? I think this is more questionable. It is not necessary to follow the patterns of activism to push back against problematic decisions. You may well be better off making it clear that you consider a particular issue unacceptable, and making the employer aware that the consensus among employees is that it is unacceptable, while making it clear that apart from that, you are a loyal and trustworthy employee. Activism sets up a narrative in which you are their adversary.
This is the problem with drugs being illegal. There's no way to tell what is in illegally manufactured drugs.
This is why drugs should be legal for legally consenting adults. They'll be able to get pharmaceutical quality drugs with confidence about what they are.
More likely, she obtained the pills without a prescription. I won't speak to abusing it since that can be such a loaded word.
Legal items are counterfeited all the time. And lots of cannabis in California's legal cannabis market comes from illegal grows with unsupervised processes, for example.
By and large, our industry does not reflect the broader population. By and large, our industry is young, male, white, and from a relatively wealthy background. By and large, our industry is populated by people who have faced remarkably little adversity in our lives (by and large - if this doesn't describe you, I acknowledge you and exempt you). For the most part, our pathologies are considered cute and are indulged in, because they're relatively cheap - we're grown-ass men wearing hoodies, decorating our desks with action figures, and eating our meals in the company cafeteria. The support system for whatever the fuck is wrong with us is Postmates and Uber.
If, as an industry, we want to keep preaching this notion of meritocracy that we use to excuse all kinds of weird shit we do and support, we need to take a hard look at Cher's situation. Cher did her part - she put in the fucking work, learned to code, got a job, and landed at a FAANG, and she did so under harder circumstances than any of us did. The thing is, Cher's story is closer to normal than ours - there are more people in the world by a mile who's story looks like Cher's than looks like ours. If we actually want our industry to be the meritocracy that we pretend it is, we need to do a lot more to support people like Cher.
Is it? This story is about Apple, and according to its figures 47% of employees are white and about two-thirds are male. If the two-thirds male figure is consistent across ethnicities, around 30% of Apple employees are white men.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/21/apple-shares-2020-data-divers...
If you filter that by tech workers, only 44% are white, about 74% of whom are men, which gives a slightly higher percentage of white men, but still about in line with the general population.
1) The numbers in "R&D" are substantially worse - 30% URM, 23% female. I'd suspect if you scoped "R&D" down to just software, the numbers would get even worse.
2) I'd expect Apple's numbers here to be broadly higher than the industry at large - larger companies can afford DEI departments and put in more effort to improving their hiring practices.
3) The numbers for leadership are even worse, and that's echoed broadly across the industry - it's not hard to find a black engineer, but it's damn hard to find a black director; it's not hard to find a female engineer, but it's damn hard to find a female principle engineer.
Also helpful: a culture where it’s okay to tell your boss about the mental health issues you’re having and what kind of support you need.
It's a completely different world with the latter. You cannot ever meaningfully assume anything they say is true. It's a constant rephrasing of reality and editing of events, misplacing blame, and perpetual attention-seeking, pity, and bad-decision making.
And that last part is the key.
Robert Greene had a great insight: When someone is perpetually unlucky in life, it's very rare that they're just purely unlucky. Instead, it's more likely they're not great at making decisions. Instead of having any shred of self-preservation, they consistently self-destruct.
Is required for airline pilots, DOD, police and similar.
Is prohibited for nearly all other employers.
I understand the distinction, but its a strawman. Society is in denial about the costs of mental health issues among its citizens.
Given the growth & pervasiveness of mental illness the past couple of years, perhaps it's time we made research & treatment a priority? Cher should have resources available to deal with her challenges, and Apple shouldn't have to be a proxy for those services (or the object of the fallout from her issues).
Employers "managing risk" sounds like allowing them to exclude people with mental illness or other disabilities. Maybe that's not what you mean, but I believe that is what employers would do.
With health insurance being tied to your employment in the US (unless you're poor or elderly), how could Apple not? The system is designed that way.
Tech company employees outside the marketing department are generally preferred to not say anything publicly at all. I've helped author a couple official engineering blog posts, but those always go through lawyers and marketing before release. Lots of companies like Google also hire very expensive consultancies to prevent unionizing as well. So she set herself up to battle a company that just needed a legal excuse to get rid of her at that point.
> At the end of my tenure, I was isolated, had my Slack messages surveilled and used against me, learned that Apple had access to my personal iMessages, and received several reports of requests to disparage me and my statements
Hopefully she learned a bit. She complained a lot about her Slack conversations being surveilled, but you should always assume your employer is screen capturing your computer, recording your microphone, keeping your web cam on without your knowledge, and possibly sending your emails and other communications to your manager for reference or even approval before passing them on to the intended recipients. I've seen all these things and been asked to help set some of them up. You've usually given up any right to them not happening on a work computer at some point during new employee onboarding if not sooner.
Perhaps for anything that happens on the computer itself, but I'd be surprised if this covered using the camera to record the surroundings.
Edit:
> Apple had access to my personal iMessages
It is unclear whether this was personal iMessages on a work device, or on a personal device. The latter would be a problem, of course.
If the company issues you a phone, the same thing applies. Have your own phone for non-work use.
I wanted to highlight this specific statement. If this is true, it has major implications in a variety of arenas, notwithstanding the language in Apple's Privacy Policy which explicitly states that Apple cannot read personal messages [1].
[1] End-to-End Encryption on https://www.apple.com/privacy/features/
Another creepy thing is the new "feature" in iOS where it recognizes text in your photos...ummmm no thanks
I think all major platforms do this by now. Certainly for files in cloud storage, perhaps even the search indexers on your local storage too.
"For Messages in iCloud, if you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your messages. This ensures you can recover your messages if you lose access to your Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple."
The key to iMessage backup is stored in iCloud for convenience for the end-user. The password has to be stored somewhere. Other e2e messengers usually don't have message backup or have only manual message backup where you are responsible for not loosing the key.
Apple is not able to access iMessage if you don't enable iCloud backup for iMessage.
1. the "loophole" is a trade-off between usability and security. Making icloud backups end-to-end-encrypted (ie. you manage the keys) would be more secure, but would a usability nighmare. People are terrible at storing/remembering keys. It's very probable that by the time someone needs a backup, they would have forgotten/lost it, making their backups useless
2. is it really an issue that apple "allows" the loophole? Ultimately you need to trust your conversation partner. Even if icloud backups wasn't a thing, there's a dozen other ways your conversation can be compromised by your partner eg. them taking a screenshot, them leaving their phones unlocked, them snitching on you.
If you disable "Messages in iCloud" but enable "iCloud Backup", then messages will be included directly in the backup, no separate key needed.
If both are enabled, then messages are in a different cloud "bucket" than the backup but now will be readable with a key stored in the backup.
So it's "iCloud Backup" specifically that needs to be disabled; simply disabling the Messages switch under iCloud doesn't affect this case.
Another possibility is through the course of employment, the employee installs the internal dev version of an app and had to explicitly grant trust to it. [2] So even if the backup option is not used, the internal version of a messaging app could drop a second copy of messages to a database for audit purposes if needed later. It can be easy to forget that the messaging app you are using isn't the public version.
In short, this really shouldn't be surprising when working in a corporate environment that may have the privilege and/or obligation to monitor employee communications. The key takeaway is never use a business device for personal communications. If you granted your employer privileges to your device through a method like one of the ones above, consider that device compromised unless you factory reset it. If you are in a situation where the employer is requiring MDM and/or trust, then they should be buying you a separate phone for business purposes.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/intro-to-apple-pl...
Yeah, it's lying in all but name if you ask me.
Whatsapp is also pretty bad, but iMessage is some next level BS.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/what...
https://propertyofthepeople.org/document-detail/?doc-id=2111...
A) That Apple is breaking their own end-to-end encryption and potentially conjuring up a PR huge shit storm and legal problems by spying on a low level engineer?
B) Or that the other side of her iMessages simply snitched on her to middle management?
C) Or that she is needlessly paranoid?
> All of this culminated with my life ending clinically for 8 minutes on Monday night, when I took what looked like a Percocet to take the edge off. It wasn’t Percocet at all, it was Fentanyl, and it sent me almost immediately into cardiac arrest. I’m alive after two doses of Narcan, 8 minutes of CPR, and a defibrillator jolt to my chest.
Unfortunately this is a very common way of cutting pills with stronger drugs and stretching products for drug dealers.
Xanex and Percs are often crushed up, then cut with Fentanyl and vitamins to be re-pressed into the original pill form to be sold on the street as a prescription drug.
Yes people with high tolerance can handle fentanyl. People press fentanyl into perks because percocet is “safer” and more familiar.
We wouldnt have these problems if there was a safe and legal route to get drugs. People in withdrawal don’t care about the laws. Pressed fentanyl and fentanyl is everywhere.
Edit: This exists because people like to get high and also because people are already addicted. Chinese supply of fentanyl has dwarfed the supply of heroin as it is way cheaper and easier to produce and import. So if you are puking and dopesick as hell you need this to literally function normally. The supply of heroin has gone way down. People don’t care if it is dangerous when they are in withdrawal, or basically just generally. Also, “everyone” other than the user ODs is the mentality. Either it won’t happen to me or I am so depressed/fucked I don’t care if I die.
Thats the main attitude in my experience.
With opiods people build up a tolerance and then progress to stronger stuff. They end up regularly taking dosages that can potentially kill them, even not as a mistake. It's a very dangerous thing to do and hard to imagine being legalized to the extend addicts would want.
However the amount of fentanyl that makes up an appropriate dose is very much smaller than other opiates. Other opiates in their pure form are more human scale amounts instead of “milligrams is a fatal dose”.
Why fentanyl is dangerous is because drug dealers are poorly preparing counterfeit drugs as a result of its high potency. Poorly mixed with fillers, one pill does nothing, the next one kills you.
Users really should crush all the pills and mix the powder thoroughly so one unit of powder always contains the same amount of active compound.
It is not in theory a bad idea but in practice perhaps not the most reasonable advice.
Short answer: Fentanyl is easier to smuggle because more doses can be packed into a smaller space. The black market has no regulations.
Long answer: Because recreational opiates are illegal and unregulated. This creates a market incentive for people willing to take the legal risk to cater to the market that wants recreational opiates. Fentanyl is essentially a cost-cutting and risk management technique within the supply chain, because more doses can be smuggled in the same shipment.
I suspect that, before the pills were pressed, the fentanyl just wasn't mixed in well enough. These kinds of mistakes are very rare in a legal and regulated market.
Want to fix the problem? Support drug reform.
It was a poor attempt at grabbing the sympathy of anyone reading. I'll say if you fell for it, it's not because you have empathy and we don't, it's because you're being emotionally manipulated and we can see through the ramblings of a strung out person.
If there's one thing I've learned in life it's that your best bet is to keep your head down, do good work, and don't get in the way of others who are trying to do the same thing.
Hate that sentiment all you want, but even you probably benefit wildly from all the people surrounding you who are dealing with difficult shit but don't put it on you, or let it affect the workplace. It's standard etiquette and we're all better for it.
The difficult truth is that the situation will be two sided. Someone’s behavior and actions will go beyond what is reasonable (or legally defensible) and the reaction will likewise go beyond what is reasonable (or legally defensible). It is a complicated grey area where nobody looks good and people take sides according to their biases rooting for one side to “win” instead of being motivated to fix problems.