Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple

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&gt; Richard Dahan, who is deaf, said he had struggled at his former job at an Apple Store in Maryland for six years because his manager refused to provide a sign-language interpreter for him to communicate with customers, which federal law requires under some circumstances.<p>This just doesn&#x27;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?<p>This is like if you&#x27;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?

I don&#x27;t believe Apple or secrecy is the story here. I think the real story is how the pandemic + slack has changed corporate politics. It used to be that most corporate concerns were raised through HR or the management chain, and power ultimately rested with the executive. Now, Slack means it&#x27;s much easier to put anyone on blast, and it&#x27;s much harder to control the narrative. Combined with the pandemic, where all socialization happens through these tools, and old corporate cultures are disappearing. Apple is probably one of those that relied on in-person culture more than most. However, I think what&#x27;s happening here is happening everywhere that has company-wide chat.

There are a few bigger stories at play here (amongst many) that I see this article as an instance of:<p>1. Cultural &#x27;meme&#x27; &amp; trend that has dramatically spread throughout mostly american, urban, educated, elite&#x2F;elite-adjacent spaces over the last 7-9 years that lionizes and rewards those who can claim they are a &#x27;victim&#x27;. This meme favors certain immutable characteristics as inherently providing victimhood status. If you were born with an immutable characteristic that&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t believe they&#x27;ll be able to succeed by other means.<p>3. Increasing trend toward &#x27;safetyism&#x27;, where the concept of harm is becoming looser and more abstract. You don&#x27;t need to even be objectively or provably harmed anymore to claim you were harmed and thus victimized.<p>Given all of the above, it&#x27;s not surprising that big tech companies who operate in these elite spaces will experience &#x27;unrest&#x27; amongst their employees. Cultural winds have created pathways for people to both legitimately and illegitimately air grievances to attempt to be rewarded socially&#x2F;professionally.<p>(And lest anyone interpret the above as suggesting nobody is ever objectively or truly victimized, I am most definitely not saying that.)

People who work at very rich companies get very, very spoiled.<p>I was in Apple R&amp;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).<p>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.

&quot;she had left Apple after spending several years fighting a decision to reassign her to a role that she said had involved more work for less pay. She said Apple had begun trying to reassign her after she complained that the company’s work on the minerals was not, in some cases, leading to meaningful change in some war-torn countries&quot;<p>I&#x27;m impressed that Apple let her spend &quot;several years&quot; fighting a reassignment. I&#x27;m also not very sympathetic to this person though. I&#x27;ve quit a job because I got reorg&#x27;d into more work for less pay. It sucks, but I don&#x27;t think it means my employer is problematic or bad or whatever. The role I had was no longer needed and I didn&#x27;t like the new position I landed in, so I left. That sounds similar to what happened to this person.

I expected this to be about CSAM when I opened the link, but I guess it&#x27;s stuff that has been brewing even longer than that.<p>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.<p>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.

If I was Tim Cook I would immediately shutdown slack and mandate everyone go back to using email. It’s always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies.

The leader of this small group of &quot;unrest&quot; folks, Cher Scarlett, apparently got hired in April and has worked for 8 other tech companies, according to this story.<p>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&#x27;s doing bad things or not? Or does she just kinda flit around from gig to gig looking for ways to cause trouble? I&#x27;m guessing less of the former, and more of the latter.

We have couple of groups at Apple, that are very unhappy with the company due to WFH policy. #remote-work-advocacy channel has gone through some phases, but right now they are at the grief cycle. It&#x27;s mostly wfh memes and repetitive confirmation-bias articles. Come January, we will get to acceptance phase, and those who wanted to jump ship, will jump ship.<p>Today, during the yearly Tim Cook&#x27;s hands, wfh chat was talking smack about Apple even though they&#x27;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&#x27;s culture.

I think this is a poorly sourced and not a reliably fact checked article.<p>This is at least the 2nd time on HN that a report has suggested Ashley Gjovik was complaining about &quot;toxic chemicals at work&quot;. The previous article referred to something published at &quot;The Verge&quot; - &quot;her office is in an Apple building located on a superfund site&quot; &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;9&#x2F;9&#x2F;22666049&#x2F;apple-fires-senior-engineering-program-manager-ashley-gjovik-for-allegedly-leaking-information" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theverge.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;9&#x2F;9&#x2F;22666049&#x2F;apple-fires-senio...</a>&gt;<p>Other published articles (and I believe is likely the truth) indicate that the toxic chemical issues were related to her personal living space &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfbayview.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apartment-was-built-on-toxic-waste&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfbayview.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;03&#x2F;i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...</a>&gt;<p>The nytimes ought to be very embarrassed about this stupid error.<p>I note that the personal toxic superfund site issues were previously discussed on HN.<p>I am also somewhat confused about the persona of &quot;Cher Scarlett&quot;. 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.<p>Twitter suggests that &quot;Cher Scarlett&quot; 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&#x27;t responding to Security reports and the bug bounty program?<p>After reading many tweets I am failing to detect any comprehension of, or demonstration of, a computer security &quot;mindset&quot; -- something that, in my experience, does tend to manifest itself in the personality of security folks over extended periods of time.<p>I am unable to determine what sort of security role this person has.<p>I am not suggesting any malice or ill will towards &quot;Cher Scarlett&quot;. I am trying to present this as a technical analysis.<p>In summary, I really question if &quot;Cher Scarlett&quot; is actually a real person in they way they are presenting themselves to be.

Either slack will implement anti-activism features or a competitor will.<p>Given Benioff’s public persona I’m betting on the latter.<p>The one thing Slack has always sucked at is moderation tools.

Many of us are curious to see how the pandemic and its aftermath will affect corporate politics and policies, not just at Apple but in other workplaces as well. It&#x27;s tempting to draw general conclusions based on anecdotal, one-sided accounts of injustice and retribution. Perhaps there is also a bit of schadenfreude at work here.

NYT on a big tech company, in 2021, is not a trustworthy source. Deserves healthy skepticism and extra scrutiny.

I really don&#x27;t have time to read the whole article. One of my closest friends worked right down the hall from Jobs and knew him on a first name basis. He said, and I quote, &quot;he fucked up the raising of my kids with his reality distortion field. If I saw him coming down the hall I&#x27;d turn around and go the other way thinking &quot;I don&#x27;t want to talk to that mother fucker today, he&#x27;s just going to mess up my life&quot;. Another one of my good friends, a Stanford Masters ME, has a daughter that briefly worked for Apple (Stanford grad as well). She left when she got shit for going home for dinner when she had the flu.<p>I&#x27;m embedded in the Apple universe, but I hate the company and what it has done to Silicon Valley.

It’s not the same, but majes me remember a question: im really ugly and with an ugly body by magazine standards. If i want to model, but they dont hire me because im not tall enough or good looking, is it discrimination?

This is simply redirected wage pressure.

As time goes on, Apple, the de-facto emperor of tech, will lose more of its clothes. They haven&#x27;t had anything new in 10 years and each year their keynotes get more typical and lacklustre. Yet, Cook is up there using all sorts of superlatives, doing cargo cult innovation.

&gt; I understand the secrecy piece is important for product security, to surprise and delight customers<p>When was the last time you were surprised and delighted by an Apple product? I think they make the world&#x27;s best, and most responsible, products, but surprised by an iPhone upgrade? When was the last time they created a new category?