>I was an Apple employee for nearly 13 years, and I loved helping people get the most out of their Apple products. All of that ended about 6 months ago when Apple showed me its true colors. [...] I told him that yes I had in fact helped a friend with a data transfer (something Apple does for free) and that I had helped him on my own time. He told me that I had just admitted to a major conflict on interest, and that an official investigation in to my actions would now start, two days later I was suspended.
Maybe I'm missing some context but it seems like something huge has to be omitted from author's narrative.
There's just no way Apple Inc's ~137000 employees are all saying to friends & family, "nope, sorry, I can't help you with your iPhone/iPad/iMac because it's a conflict of interest and I'd get fired."
Agreed. Nothing here adds up at all. Sounds to me like the author was let go for different reasons entirely (and this was just an easy excuse for management), or that something else is missing here.
The number of mentions about Apple providing the service "for free" makes it sound like the author perhaps actually charged their elderly friend, and honestly that would be a huge violation. I don't know exactly what the author's job was (can't find it on the site), but if their job is servicing Macs, it's very normal for their employment contract to forbid making money servicing Macs outside their job -- it's literally having your own employees compete with you.
But if the author didn't charge... then there's got to be a separate "real reason" they were fired.
But then this isn't the first time we read about an Apple Employee being majorly mistreated / Apple having a questionable work culture on Hacker News.
If I should guess such kind of article pops up around every half a year since I'm following Hacker News (I have an account since 4 years so more than that).
Some even came from people much higher up then this person seems to have been.
My guess is that they have a policy against it, but normally either don't hear about "private support" or don't care about it. But do use it to get ride of anyone who thinks differently in the sense that they don't agree with everything Apple does, like complaining to another employee that it's petty of Apple to sue some small company with a peach logo.
There are ex Apple employees here and on Reddit saying there’s no such policy, so either this manager made up a bogus excuse and risks getting fired themselves, or the author is concealing the real reason.
Surely the author must know this isn’t a policy violation though? Why not report the manager, or sue for wrongful termination? It doesn’t make any sense.
IANAL, but until someone posts the terms of employment for an Apple genius bar somewhere, everything is pure speculation.
You can be pretty much fired for any reason in any company, with or without cause. Apple probably isn't going to say anything. It could be as simple as the manager wanted to hire his best friend's son, and needed an open spot.
Well yes and no. California where I am is at will, which means the company can say hey, sorry do not need you and not give a reason. All good. However if they do give a reason then they are required to be able prove the reason is valid. Having managed a great deal of people I have been in situations where I would document any issues in detail, however at the end the company just did an “At Will” see yah termination as it is safer.
You're telling me Apple doesn't have a conflict of interest policy?
That sounds strange.
So the Geniuses at the Genius bar can basically openly tell people that they can go to the other shop they work at across the door and they will do the repair at half the price? And Apple will have no policy against that?
The ex Apple employees, including one posting here, say the conflict of interest policy does not prevent helping friends or family with tech problems for free.
It seems plausible this guy did so for money. Note that the post says the work was done in spare time but doesn’t say it was done for free. That would be a conflict of interest because it’s engaging in commercial activities also engaged with by Apple.
You are severely mistaken. At will doesn't mean you can fire people for any reason without liability. Wrongful termination is a thing that companies are terrified of. There are so many protected classes in CA, and firing someone in a protected class can have dire consequences. I've witnessed it first hand.
It's not a mistake, and it isn't severe. You're talking about exceptions to the law, not the law itself. The law is exercised thousands of times a day and wrongful termination lawsuits account for single-digit percentages.
As the plaintiff in such a case you need to be able to provide evidence that it's "reasonable to believe" that you were fired because of whatever protected class you fall into.
It can be difficult to do, especially if you're blindsided and escorted out of the building and cut off from any sort of evidence (tip: if you think you could be fired because of who you are, start keeping receipts before you're fired).
Previous to winning my own discrimination case, I was a juror in a case where an employer almost got away with blatantly discriminatory firing. They thought they were being sly by sacrificing another non-protected employee at the same time... but then bragged about it to an employee they didn't realize would rat them out. If it wasn't for that email there wouldn't have been enough evidence to know for sure.
That aside, if you're not a protected class (the majority of people aren't)... good luck. You can be fired without cause at any given moment.
> You're talking about exceptions to the law, not the law itself.
Yeah, exceptions are the problem, there are many.
> That aside, if you're not a protected class (the majority of people aren't)
80% of the people I work with are in a protected class.
> Previous to winning my own discrimination case
All the suits filed against my company in the last 35 years (2) were frivolous and we settled both of them. Good for you for winning a non-frivolous one, but in my experience (talking with other COO's) frivolous cases are very common.
It's fear of these frivolous cases that drive LOTS of behavior.
EDIT: there were threats of other suits (3-5). All frivolous.
It’s true, but it misses the point that they can be sued for age discrimination, violating their own governance policies, not properly training the worker, intentional infliction of abnormal stress, etc. BTW, I couldn’t downvote you if I wanted. Lots of Apple people involved in this site.
> I don't know exactly what the author's job was (can't find it on the site), but if their job is servicing Macs, it's very normal for their employment contract to forbid making money servicing Macs outside their job -- it's literally having your own employees compete with you.
It still depends. Even if it's in the employment contract, the extent to which anti-moonlighting, non-compete, and other kinds of anti-competitive clauses that attempt to control the employee when they're not at work are enforceable varies drastically from case to case and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Conflicts of interest and potential IP theft can affect the decision, but even doing the exact same job just outside of your normal working hours is not necessarily grounds for a breach of contract.
In places like apple doing password resets / account unlocks to allow data transfer, even if you do that for free on the clock, is very commonly prohibited off the clock and/or for "friends".
I actually had a case recently where someone lost reset to a google account. They ended up (THANKFULLY) somehow getting a password reset through an enterprise account admin who had the pull of a huge contract to help out. But I'm sure it was cleared and on the clock for the employee side to do this because I immediately thought - awesome! and also thought - damn, whoever can do these transfers has a TON of power if they ever went rouge.
> In places like apple doing password resets / account unlocks to allow data transfer, even if you do that for free on the clock, is very commonly prohibited off the clock and/or for "friends".
Yep, that sounds like it could be more clear cut -- you're using employer resources/tools without permission.
I read the constant mentions of "for free" to point out that Apple was not losing any money from his helping out the neighbor. If Apple did charge for the data transfer service and he did it for free, then I could see Apple getting upset. Then again, maybe Apple offers data transfer for free as a loss leader to get the person in so they can charge them for some other service or product.
I get the same feel from something missing in the testimony, but, what would be the motive of the ex-employee to write this ?
Personally I can relate to the author because I've experienced a similar sobering up from the marketing of a different corporation that I worked for. (I dreamed of working there growing up and one day I got a chance to work for them almost by accident.)
It was exhilarating for the first 1-2 years but as I came to know how the company actually works from the inside I was more and more disappointed that their outside image couldn't be further away from the truth.
That's a bad take on the "for free" aspect. I think he pointed that out to say that his friend opted for his help rather than wait 1-2 weeks on the "free" service because it was inconvenient. I have my doubts about apple letting someone go for something that they do for free and also for doing something that basic in their own private lives. It's not impossible, just improbable
That's one of the simpler theories. Mentioned to a co-worker he made some extra coin over the weekend helping a neighbor. The co-worker, for whatever reason, spilled the beans. Maybe he was on thin ice for other reasons...
I imagine an expanded story, based purely on speculation. Old guy comes into the store and buys a new iMac. This guy recognizes him as a neighbour or friend-of-friend and comes over to say hi while another Apple sales associate is checking him out. He overhears the sales associate mention Apple's free program to transfer data. The old guy says "nah, I don't want to leave my computer here" and the friendly guy says "hey, no problem, I'll just pop by your place later and do it for you at your house". The original sales associate might have thought that was a conflict of interest so he reports it to a manager.
Now the manager is in a tough spot. This is some kind of official internal complaint and it is literally his job and his duty to investigate. He talks to the employee and the employee confirms the report. It's now out of his hands, has to go up a chain to a regional manager. It gets passed around a bit until someone unfamiliar with the employee looks at the policies and facts of the matter and they make a by-the-book call.
I can totally understand the frustration. It reminds me of some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare where justice is run through an algorithm. At some point we'd all hope a compassionate judge would look over the human's involved in the situation and apply some magnanimity.
Each person in a chain had an option to use their judgement to break the chain but nobody did. This isn't an indictment of Apple as some may want to see it. It seems more likely it is a pretty standard outcome of people following a bureaucratic process.
> Each person in a chain had an option to use their judgement to break the chain but nobody did. This isn't an indictment of Apple as some may want to see it. It seems more likely it is a pretty standard outcome of people following a bureaucratic process.
Is it not Apple's bureaucratic process? Then is not the pretty standard outcome of that process Apple's as well?
Also, who else but Apple can empower each person in the chain to actually exercise their judgment?
And this doesn't even consider bad actors trying to socially engineer the system. Must each person in the chain now make the determination that they are actually helping a customer or being fooled by an adversary?
I guess I just think it's naive to expect workers to unilaterally disobey the bureaucratic process because it is demonstrably imperfect. Just fix the broken process instead of punting liability to each individual. What ever happened to leadership?
> Then is not the pretty standard outcome of that process Apple's as well?
We can't say that based on this single incident. How often has a manager in a similar position decided to handle it themselves by having a word with the employee and not documenting it? I can't know and I don't think you know either.
> Just fix the broken process
I'm of the opinion no such fix could be perfect. It is the reason we have a common law system with precedents and judges interpreting laws with respect to them. And even then a judge may decide to throw the book at someone and an appeal can be lost.
Same thing happens in almost every single avenue of life. A cop has discretion to let you off a ticket and decides not to. A teacher refuses to accept late work. An employee stands-firm against a customer on a store policy like the wearing of a mask instead of letting it slide. Even if these things are statistically rare, it still stings if you are on the receiving side.
This sounds a lot more like a vindictive or petty boss with an axe to grind than evil corporate policy gone awry. Corporate policies are like federal laws, there are multiple mutually exclusive ways to violate them, but you only get held to account if you are subject to some attention.
>> but you only get held to account if you are subject to some attention.
I agree 100%.
I was sales for a long time before getting out and going the developer route.
As a sales person, you're constantly pushing the line and boundaries, but once you get one someone's radar (whatever level of management that is) then you get back on the straight and narrow pretty fast or you're on your way out.
To me, it sounds an awful lot like he got on someone's radar and instead of jumping back on the straight narrow, continued to push the line and finally got caught and they axed him.
It's so hard to fire someone from a corporate gig these days. You never have just once chance and they "investigate" and then you're let go. There are multiple warnings, write-ups, PIP's until HR has enough documentation to fire you if you continue to screw up.
Clearly, this wasn't his first run in with the Apple HR team.
> "You never have just once chance and they 'investigate' and then you're let go."
That is absolutely untrue. I know of very many such events.
In order to hold them to account, you need to be able to give up the severence allowance. They can easily tell from your credit report whether you can, and choose accordingly.
It is very easy to believe this was the first run-in. Furthermore, the HN CoC requires that you presume so.
Interesting thought. I wonder what the difference between a vindictive boss and a vindictive Siri would be. If corporations have all the rights of an individual with none of the responsibilities, how does that play out when Siri starts applying corporate policy on your iLife? Corporations can be criminals, but only bodies can go to jail.[1]
Corporations don’t have “all the rights of an individual.” You are making the common mistake of misunderstanding Citizens United. The majority wrote, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."
The key thing in Citizens United isn’t that “corporations are people,” but that an association of people be the same First Amendment rights as an individual person. And that makes sense: a newspaper is published by a group of people, spending money to distribute their message. A newspaper editorial is published by the paper, not by the individual. So restricting an association of people’s First Amendment rights, you would necessarily restrict the right of a newspaper to publish, unless the newspaper is completely self-funded by the writer/publisher.
So no, corporations don’t have all the rights of an individual, they can’t for example, vote in an election, join the military, hold elective office. A corporation is nothing more than a group of people sharing a common goal. A corporation is no different from a club, a union, a rock band, or an activist group. It’s just a legal structure that allows people to join together for some common purpose.
Thank you for taking the time to make your point. Assuming that Siri enjoys the same First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights as you or I, how does that play out when Siri starts applying corporate policy on your iLife?
> they wouldn’t have fired me for helping a _customer_
This shifting language is suspicious to me; is this a friend or a customer you met at the Apple store and then helped off the clock? It sounds like this person was employed at an Apple retail store, and I can't imagine Apple having a policy that retail store employees are not allowed to help their grandparents set up a new Mac. There is 100% something else going on here.
WAG: this guy told a customer at the store that he could get the data transfer done faster, and was effectively running a Genius Bar out of his garage.
EDIT: I get that he's using different nouns in order to make his case in a few different ways. Ultimately, I think the writer did something shady and got fired for it.
Sure, you can read it that way. My point was that he isn't clear about the exact nature of his relationship with the person he helped, and those details are probably relevant to his termination.
Fair. I still think this person is being very selective with the facts of the matter; despite Apple not being incredibly nice, I don't think they're unreasonable in the way he implies.
Him helping that elderly person undermined Apple's highly engineered brand interaction with that customer. Apple is there to have you bring your computers in to the genius bar and interact with you to build brand loyalty and sell you more things. The customer is then supposed to go tell their friends how wonderful the Apple Store is.
Instead, an Apple employee undermined the precision-crafted brand experience with this customer. Worse yet, if he would have messed up the transfer, he'd be making Apple look really bad when the customer told their friends about how unreliable getting a new Mac going can be due to their experience.
This is possibly their narrative on this issue. Companies like Apple worry endlessly about this, which is how they have earned their reputation with customers.
I can understand a warning or write-up being an educational opportunity for the employee to understand the problem here, but clearly there was no malicious intent here, firing someone over this is really poor management unless they are a repeat offender after a warning.
Rockin' dem downvotes from people who know Woz only from fictional books and movies.
Woz is a deity-like figure to my peeps (not because of Apple) and he says what he wants, when he wants to. Need something kept secret? Use the Cone Of Silence to tell it to a real businessy-marketing-greaseball. Want your cool new tech (even the OG Samsung smartphones!) to get it's name out there, be certain it truly is cool and only then, show it to Woz! https://youtu.be/AWQKNxuGqg4
Selective enforcement of rules is far worse than rules you just think can be broken because “hey, this would be harmless, I without any authority have decided!”
With some exceptions where the company simply can't turn the other way, if someone high up gets fired for relatively minor rule-breaking, you can be pretty sure the board and/or senior management was looking for a reason to show that person the door anyway.
Nothing compared to the likes of Raytheon or Northrop Grumman. Everyone likes to bash the big ones, but they are far from unique, they are simply well known.
From what I have heard I know FB, Google to be pretty vocal internally and with tough questions on policies, products and decisions. Amazon and Microsoft fall into the category where most employees don't bother with this behaviour. Is Apple even more restrictive than Microsoft or do employees don't even bother?
Yeah, I hate to reflexively take the side of a huge corporation here. I don't doubt that Apple has abusive employer relations, but it really does feel like there's something missing from this story.
It seems plausible that Apple has a policy against free-lance tech support and they over-applied the rule in this case when he was just helping out a friend - perhaps using work resources in some way (e.g. a work phone was involved).
It's certainly plausible, but it still feels like something is missing. How did the boss hear about this? "Someone told him." This all just sounds so very odd.
To follow the thread of skepticism about the whole story: it's a bit like the customs entry form you have to fill when entering some countries. One question asks "Are you a member of a terrorist organization?". People laugh when they see this, and say "Why would any terrorist check 'yes' here?!". But the idea is, if they do catch a terrorist, if they can't satisfiably prove he's done anything wrong, they can still say "He lied while filling a customs form" and jail him.
So... maybe the company/boss has other issues with the guy, but no solid ground to fire him, until they caught him "violating" this "conflict of interest" rule.
Other people can tip you off to their plans, and you can arrest them with a backpack full of knives. That’s pretty reasonable suspicion that they were about to commit an act of terrorism.
In the US, mere declaration of support for a terrorist organization isn’t illegal. It is free speech after all.
Without being able to prove that you have given money, or undergone training by terrorists, or support or plan to commit a specific act then it would be otherwise difficult to remove someone from the country.
However asking on the form grants two options.... first they can simply deny entry, and second they can deport you for lying if it turns out you are the press secretary for the IRA for example.
Yes, this does not make sense. But that is the reality of law enforcement, and of border patrol. It doesn't take a conviction to cancel your visa and deport you.
Apple won’t “respond”...it would become actual news (instead of “Hacker News”) if they made any comment. Nope, this is going down like firing the worker for letting his little girl blog from the lunchroom with a prototype within view or the kid who blew his brains out in the conference room etc.
I have no insight into this specific situation and you may be right that something is being omitted by the author. However I don't agree with your reasoning for coming to that conclusion. Just because Apple treats one employee that way doesn't mean Apple treats all employees that way or that all Apple employees act in a way counter to how this employee acts.
He was caught being old and under the influence of Steve’s original creative spirit. Apple is run by mobsters again (not talking about Tim Apple) —only thanks to Steve coming back, they have nearly unlimited capital and capacity. The joke is on them though because Tim is a hardliner who will fry their butts when the revenues begin to falter. It’s all bad anyway tho because Apple stock tanking is enough to make the market crash of 2000 look like a cakewalk.
Agreed. I've got a rant or three about how Tim Cook's Apple has become cold and calculating, but this guy was not fired for helping his friend. There was something between him and his manager. Maybe his manager is a dick who wanted to replace him with a buddy, but if that's the case it just means there's a few dicks in Apples' 140K employees. Maybe this guy has a long list of warnings.
The "boss" he mentions was probably an Apple Store Manager or Assistant Manager.
I understand the frustration from Ted but this feels a lot more like a conflict between a mid-level retail manager wielding Apple's general HR guidelines to terminate a retail employee vs. a broader story about Apple hammer smashing a little guy.
Trying to uncover some facts to help infer the article's complaint with nuance prior to knee-jerk hopping on the "big apple is bad" flavor du jour was my intent in posting the comment.
My point is not that it is less "important or impactful" but that working within a retail environment vs a corporate environment - even at Apple - is an apples / oranges comparison.
Apple has effectively the highest retail employee retention rate full in the USA (1) - they have led the charge in changing the retail paradigm for the better for 10s of thousands of employees.
My first job was retail and I would have killed to work at an Apple store.
Petty bosses wielding a 100 page HR rule-book that some back closet McKinsey intern produced to fire anybody at anytime (even in states w/good protections) is PAR for the course in retail.
Is it because corporate is evil or because managing a largely lower-education(2), transient workforce is incredibly challenging?
Is it nuanced and two sided? of course!
Did this maybe happen at an Apple Store?
It might have!
Could it have been a manager looking for an HR dept defensible excuse to get rid of a difficult employee?
I accept your challenge, here's why my comments are relevant:
- This post is front paged on HN, grabbing your attention, mine, and a demographic that skews largely to Apple's core corporate HR need and customer base.
- It is important that the HN community can rely on the comments section to gain insight or nuance that they would not otherwise have from the source material.
- The author works to harm Apple's reputation as an employer and company suggesting one stops buying their products and opt out of their ecosystem etc.
- This central argument, that Apple is an unfair and malicious employer, is in conflict with Apple's objectively industry leading employee retention numbers that I share above.
- The author never discloses that he is/was a retail employee vs. a corporate employee which I think anybody with an understanding of retail employment in general would appreciate to have as a filter to assess his pov.
- Without taking a position of this termination being right or wrong, the evidence above suggests this is an edge-case and is probably not deserving of my or my fellow HN users taking into deep consideration in our opinion of Apple.
- Instead it feels like a well timed piece of negative content that fits into a narrative that several very large and powerful corporations are working hard to try in the court of public opinion. (1)
- - -
And then back to your comment - what lesson or theme are you drawing from a single retail employees one-sided negative experience working within the Apple employee ecosystem? What am I missing? Why is this relevant?
very well put. my first impression was “apple is bad”.
upon closer examination (reading comments, including yours) this post became much less scandalous. Nothing out of ordinary and, actually, quite reasonable.
In low paid retail land, what is corp policy and not just petty personal BS that has nothing to do with the company in particular is probably just petty BS.
No not really. I didn't notice any real 'cultural' difference when I worked from franchise to franchise in retail and restaurants. What mattered was the group of people there and the manager for the most part, and even then, culture was more an industry thing than anything about the brand of the shop you worked at.
Apple is fully responsible for the behavior of their managers acting in accordance with company policy. What is a company if not the sum of its people?
That's great in theory, but the personification of a company and the many layers in a large enterprise make it unrealistic to assume everyone is the same, does the same thing, or knows about each other. Doesn't mean bad things aren't bad or good things aren't good, but besides that the marketing and PR departments put out there are more differences than similarities between the people, teams of people and groups of teams in any company.
If your company is structured such that there's no recourse in the event of squabble between a manager and his reports, then your company is bad. If indeed this was just a personal issue with the manager: that's not exactly a ringing endorsement of apple either.
You can way lower the likelihood of unwanted things happening through policies and proper enforcement, but never 100% stop it as people are still free enough to mess things up, so I wouldn't rush to immediately blame top management for a slip-up happening. If it happens often the story is completely different, of course.
Of course slip-ups happen, but then it should have involved more people, and should not have left this impression on the ex-employee, but rather the impression that HR didn't have his back (but at least were there as a second pair of eyes in the process). This sounds more like no oversight at all. Sure, we could be missing something.
They could stop blocking unionization, then these issues would never happen because there would be appeals processes that don't feel like a waste of time as well as a 3rd party that would have the majority of the blame.
Apple is 100% responsible for unresolved improper firings that become PR storms, they have a tool they could deploy to solve it, but they don't out of fear of profits.
It doesn't need to be a ringing endorsement, and it doesn't sound like some special Apple-case either.
Most companies (especially post-capitalistic American ones) are structured to provide maximum money for the company and/or the shareholders on either the short term or the long term. That's a monster we all created and fed for decades. That means that HR is your friend until they want to get rid of you. And the rules are made in line with that: plenty of options for 'legally' getting rid of people.
While I personally think that's just bad for humans, I don't think anyone should still be surprised that that is how it was designed to work.
Apple Stores are explicitly designed not to focus on maximizing profits. One of the former managers over all Apple Stores were fired because he didn’t get that. Apple Stores have to be fun to balance making money and serve as a marketing channel for Apple.
For instance, Apple doesn’t care if customers “showroom” and buy the product somewhere else. Apple makes money either way.
It's not about the retail part and specifically the stores, but the company as a whole. It is designed to balance investments and customer satisfaction to sell products. That means it's fine to lose money in one place (or not maximise revenue and profit) because you make up for it in other parts of the company. Bottom line still needs to be cash coming in. It's a different business model than say a candy supplier that just needs to move quantity one way or the other. It's a longer term system where the instant sales aren't the main driver.
That’s true. But irrelevant. In what way does an Apple employee helping a friend move data when Apple does it for free hinder Apple from making money? Does the guys story even pass the sniff test a little?
This is not true. Managers are considered to be agents of a corporation and are held to different standards than other employees. (This is also true for SWEs, where SWE manager is fundamentally different from IC.)
As someone who has previously (recently) worked for Apple as a software engineer, I have a feeling there's something more to this story that we don't know about. There's nothing that would indicate to me any sort of conflict of interest in what this person did, and the most I can construe things is that _maybe_ they were a Genius Bar employee, and _maybe_ this would count as a conflict of interest _if_ their manager was really looking for a reason to fire them, but I have a hard time imagining that anyone would go out of their way to investigate this otherwise.
Working there, there have been plenty of no-no's that we had to be careful about, and periodic training about conflicts of interest and similar, but helping out family, friends, and acquaintances was certainly not it.
Sure an excuse, but probably for an equally petty thing.
Like speaking with another employee that it's kinda petty from apple to sue a small company with a peach logo which
doesn't even compete with Apple.
Or agreeing that the Ab store sometimes acts abusive (not because of the 30% cut but because of everything else).
Or honestly speaking about a customer about all kinds of repair related thinks (like telling them that data recovery is sometimes possible after water damage but apple just doesn't provide such service, similar with any proper efficient repair, apple only replaces components, which there aren't that many as everything is soldered on the main board).
Or...
What I want to say is currently there are a lot of things an Apple employee might not like about Apple and I wouldn't be surprised if a petty boss will try to fire you if you speak about them with other employees during your brake.
"I have a feeling there's something more to this story that we don't know about."
The part that didn't make sense to me is how a manager even knew to ask the guy if he had helped someone. My guess -- and this is only speculation -- is that the "friend" came into the store to buy the new machine and/or have the data transferred, objected to having to leave his old and new machines there for a couple/few days, and the tech offered to just take care of it for him at home, off the clock, since the tech knew the customer. Again, that hypothesis could have nothing to do with the actual facts but it would explain how the manager would even know there was a potential customer service event that never happened... not to mention the liability to the Apple Store if an unofficial agreement to work on the friend's computer happened in the Apple store: what if the tech had accidentally bricked the computer?
If the employee offered to service the computer while the customer was in the Apple Store, the customer could have misunderstood the offer or assumed it was sanctioned by Apple. I'm not sure the customer would win the case but Apple has deep pockets and a good lawyer will extract a sizable sum just to make the case go away.
Liability? What liability? It was the person acting separate from Apple. Minimizing liability is not some blanked argument you can throw out there in an attempt to justify whatever nonsensical actions you happen to see before you.
Seems to me like an employee helping a customer out, on their own free-time, fostering goodwill and a good customer experience in the overall ecosystem...
No, they wouldn't want to encourage that at all. Employees doing work off the clock and unpaid, especially for the betterment of the company as a whole, is exactly the sort of thing an employer want to steer very far away from.
There could be a liability issue here. The customer knew the employee worked at an Apple Store. If the employee offered services to the customer while they were in the store, and something goes wrong, a good lawyer could make a case that Apple was responsible. We do not know where or how the offer of services was made.
You're on the verge of an epiphany about how full-time SWEs are treated versus retail employees, but it'll require grappling with the fact its unlikely he made up 100% of the story
>About 2 weeks later I was approached by my boss. Someone told him that I had helped a friend with his computer. I told him that yes I had in fact helped a friend with a data transfer (something Apple does for free) and that I had helped him on my own time. He told me that I had just admitted to a major conflict on interest, and that an official investigation in to my actions would now start, two days later I was suspended.
It's a very weird story. What normal co-worker runs tattling to their boss that so-and-so had the nerve to help an elderly neighbor that weekend? And major conflict of interest? Was borrowed equipment perhaps involved or...? Yes, I'm sure even Apple retail is sucky but something that he may genuinely
think is unimportant seems to be missing from this story.
Some supervisors are threatened by someone's expertise, look for a reason to fire them, find one, get the support of management and take it to an HR hearing. This is one reason why a good HR department is required, and the lack of them can be a problem for the unwary (or opportunity for the psychotic) at a smaller outfit. They will / should defend the company against a news story of employee bullying.
The article mentions many years of tenure. Maybe he was a manager and one of his subordinate got him fired to take his position. That's one way to go up the hierarchy.
I mean, I was trained alongside retail employees and went through the same NDA processes and secrecy training. I doubt he made up the story — I fully believe he was fired for this reason, but it seems a lot more likely to me that someone was looking for an excuse to do the firing and this was it, rather than actively hunting down and terminating employees helping the elderly in their spare time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Did you receive the Genius Bar contract and training regarding moonlighting. I doubt it.
> actively hunting down
I realize the article was hugged to death, but once it comes back online you should reread the story, where this is explained as mandatory reporting not active hunting.
> Did you receive the Genius Bar contract and training regarding moonlighting.
I did not, but if you did, I'd love to know more about what it says that I'm not aware of. If this was explicitly listed in your employment contract but not mine, that's a valuable piece of information to know for interpreting the context here.
> explained as mandatory reporting not active hunting
I did not get the sense that this was mandatory reporting, only that his manager had heard about it (potentially off-the-cuff or through unrelated channels), but will gladly re-read the article again when it comes back up.
> About 2 weeks later I was approached by my boss. Someone told him that I had helped a friend with his computer. I told him that yes I had in fact helped a friend with a data transfer (something Apple does for free) and that I had helped him on my own time. He told me that I had just admitted to a major conflict on interest, and that an official investigation in to my actions would now start, two days later I was suspended.
This did not sound to me like mandatory reporting.
This is what irks me about the “well they agreed to Apple’s TOS so they knew the risks” argument we’ve been seeing regarding their legal dispute with Epic.
TOS are written in a way to give their authors the maximum amount of power and leverage over the person or entity they’re working with, regardless of whether or not the terms exceed the spirit of general defensive legal strategy.
This guy lost a job because helped someone with some basic computer work, something many of us do with our relatives because they see us as “magicians” or whatever and we enjoy tinkering.
It’s hard to imagine what additional context needs to be present in order for Apple to be justified in doing this.
Just curious: does Apple maintain the right to disable my account if I talk bad about them online? It wouldn’t surprise me, but I guess I should read the TOS.
South Park, as often, was on point of that with HumancentiPad episode. It's funny, how 9 years later the problems are not only still there, but at much bigger scale.
obviously TOS written by companies wielding monopoly power are bullshit. We've just defined monopoly too narrowly in the law. Is it possible for me to obtain an equivalent product from a competing company? If the answer is no, then you are a monopoly. If your product is not interoperable with other products that you are claiming equivalence with, then your claims at equivalence are invalid.
I believe monopoly laws should apply to any companies having a "few million" customers and it not being trivial for customers to switch or there not being much choice to switch to.
In case of Apple it's neither trivial to switch (you can't move bought apps over) nor is there much choice (in practice it's basically Apple or Google).
I have thought pretty hard about the need to include a fuzzy word like equivalence in my definition of monopoly, what would it take for me to persuade you to adopt my definition?
The firing for for simply helping a friend seems shocking.
I did, however, once know a fellow that did tech support for an ISP, that used his work calls to source his freelance onsite tech support business. Once the main company found out they let him go.
Omitted from the article is whether the OP charged for his time. But I can't help but think that either Apple is ridiculous, or we're not hearing the whole story.
Just one idea on what might have happened. If you look at it from the manager's point of view, it is probably something like:
Employee told a potential customer that he will make a home-visit, for free. There is no way that the Apple Store would support making promises like that. But if he made that promise while he was at work, it could be construed that he wasn't doing a personal favor, but acting on behalf of his job.
So if anything went wrong (say, he fried the computer) then Apple could potentially have some liability.
Insurance is very concerned about claims resulting from off the clock / third party work related to day time work. So if you are a doctor working in a practice group, and then do freelance work, that is going to absolutely freak an insurance carrier out.
Security - people don't realize that a lot of stuff on-premise / on-network is tracked and logged. So if you "help" someone out off-site / off work people get nervous. T-mobile employee doing a sim swap with customer in store on video - sure. T-mobile employee logging in off hours to do a sim swap - maybe sketchier even if they are "helping a friend".
> In late January I decided to help an elderly friend with a data migration at home. He had just bought a new iMac and needed to transfer the data from his old one to his new one. Apple offers free data transfers, but my friend didn’t want to leave both of his machines with Apple for 3 to 5 days in order for them to do it. About 2 weeks later I was approached by my boss. Someone told him that I had helped a friend with his computer. I told him that yes I had in fact helped a friend with a data transfer (something Apple does for free) and that I had helped him on my own time.
The following is a fiction that is also the same story as above:
In late January an elderly gentleman, whom I'd helped many times during my long tenure at the Apple Store, came in to buy a new iMac. As I was ringing up his purchase, he inquired about how to migrate his data. I informed him that Apple would be happy to do it for free but it would take 3 to 5 business days, I then offered to come by his house and perform the migration for a modest fee. A few weeks later the elderly gentleman came into the Apple Store asking for me because he was having issues locating some of his files, he spoke with my manager and explained the situation. Later my manager approached me about the issue, I confirmed that I had been moonlighting and had solicited my services while on the clock at the Apple Store.
We gotta remain skeptical of all the tech monopolies that are currently in power. As a tech community, I feel we have a responsibility to push for open source and free software (and ideally, hardware as well).
The author conviently and entirely skips over which steps he took to 'help his friend'.
Apple employees are allowed to help friends, obviously. What you are not allowed to do, is to use Apple's special software tools that is intented only for helping customers during work time. These are sensible rules that protect the privacy or Apple users. I suspect the author had stepped out of line, and neglected those rules.
So I'm guessing he was like a Genius bar worker or something? I suppose I could see that can be an issue for Apple. If something went wrong and say he deleted all of this persons stuff, and they call Apple and complain about their employee working on his computer, even on his off time, it could be a problem. Seems pretty harsh though.
> Apple was in my DNA. I believed in Apple’s products, Apple’s services, and Apple’s mission
I honestly can't understand such devotion to a corporate entity. I have a preference for Thinkpads, but I don't worship at the alter of Lenovo. Give me a Mac, Chromebook, Dell, Raspberry Pi... whatever, I'll happily use it.
(alert: has spoilers) It was sad to see that he supported and evangelized Apple for 24 years (FTA) and yet they dumped him with nary a thought for helping an elderly neighbor with a data transfer.
Except that some of the big companies like e.g. Apple do all kinds of thinks to try to make Apple not just your job but part of your live.
Furthermore I have meet with people not employed by Apple which where big Apple fanatics, Apple for them was part of their identity to a non negligible degree.
So yes this is totally possible in my experience.
Sure a founder is probably even more invested, but then the level of (emotional) investment he show is totally realistic.
That was my first thought. I remember working at Grumman when they had a layoff, and a guy with F-14 Vanity license plates and an F-14 tattoo was laid off. He looked devastated! It's very important not to link your identity to your job (or your computer or your operating system).
As silly as that firing is, I wonder if Apple has really changed that much in those 13 years. I like that they are trying to produce hardware as sustainable as possible, but if they were really interested in going green, then they probably shouldn’t be trying to sell you a new iPhone every year. I mention this, because it’s another example of how silly they kind of are when you look at it.
I think you have to go waaaay back to the garage days to find an Apple that wasn’t the Coca Cola of computers/phones/tablets/iPods.
Not sure where you’re going to find a major company that isn’t kind of rotten. Most of them just have worse PR.
It's not just that they wouldn't try to sell you a new device every year but they also would either provide or allow sustainable repairs.
Apple mainly replaces whole components, like the whole motherboard. But many of the damages which causes a motherboard repair with Apple can be fixed by "just" replacing some broken capacitors or some simple chip (simple as in not the GPU/CPU/RAM). Which might sound hard but is very doable/learnable e.g. look at some of Louis Rossmanns videos.
There are also frequently problems with Macs one the line of "if this fails this other thinks will fail too and you have to buy a new laptop instead of just living without xxx".
I think all their efforts about sustainable production are PR and trying to avoid/preclude regulations.
Apple at least has a good track record of making newer iOS wirk on hold devices... I think they go back ~5 years? Same cannot be said for most Android devices.
iOS 12.x has continued to get security releases, as recently as 12.4.8 a month ago (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_12#Updates). If you bought a 2014 iPhone 6 in 2018 it's still being maintained today in 2020.
Not everything, look at other laptops and desktop computers.
You have Android and iOS that stick because of this 2 players not competing(they are happy with current market share and Google and Apple are pushing now on other fronts).
With desktop computers we can still replace parts without having to ask approval from someone, we can still install whatever we want and this is because there are more then 2 laptop or desktop suppliers. Also it is not about form factor, yes it is easy to replace parts on a desktop PC but for Apple phones they refuse to give you screens or batteries and they bully people that refurbish parts from broken devices and try to hide repair documentation and software(this is opposite of green)
I don't think Jobs was so much opposed to geeks tinkering with their toys, rather he wanted a computer perceived as a solution providing tool for everyone, not as a problem in itself usable only by engineers.
Apple tried to own the software distribution channel back in the 70's (like they do with the app store). I didn't work out, but I don't think they were ever terribly happy with needing to produce general-purpose computers.
Is there more information about Steve Jobs actively being replaceable parts for business reasons? My impression is that it's one of the first things to compromise on for cleanliness, but there is not directly a design culture against it. The Powermac G4 seems like it was easy to service.
Of course it's very easy to imagine that bad serviceability is encouraged by some managers.
It goes way back. He didn't want an App store. They had to prove publishers would pay an unconscionable 30% before he allowed it.
He didn't want anybody to be able to open a Mac and add memory, or a network card, or anything. Macs had Torx screws, back when nobody had Torx screwdrivers, and they needed have an unusually long shaft, or extension.
It's not that he necessarily hides something intentionally. There are reasons why a company might want to separate from an employee. HR has to make sure that this employee doesn't sue then the company, so they're fishing for enforceable reasons. It might be bullshit, but if it's legally sound, they'll use it. I think it's a fair bet, that this employee didn't have the best standing with his superior and he might not even have been aware of it.
"Anyone who knows me knows that I was among the biggest Apple Evangelists to ever live."
Think about this for a second. Is it possible that the 'cult', that by your own words are 'evangelizing', is ever going to turn against you when you make a mistake or do something that they don't agree with?
"I believed ... Apple’s mission (or at least what they said their mission was)" - these seems to be the words of someone finally waking up from a trance.
I feel the same: the bad behavior from Apple somehow wasn't an issue for him while he was being the biggest fanboy and an employee. When he gets fired the bad behavior of Apple suddenly becomes important to him.
I had to re-read the article, but you're right: he didn't explicitly say that he transferred data for free (although he mentions Apple does it for free, twice).
If anything I respect Apple more now. There's a lot missing from the story that I suspect the author deliberately omitted in order. Specifically what sort of backup it was, whether he used software from work, and how much of an observer he was into the data backup process. DATA being the keyword.
I respect that Apple treats customer's data with the utmost care, and that includes minimizing techs running around offering their gray-market professional services.
Disclosure: I have NOTHING to do with Apple other than owning an iPhone; I do hate when people are flippant about data sensitivity.
30 years ago I had an Apple (one-button) mouse switch go bad. I was good at electronics and could easily fix in 5 minutes if I could get a switch. (Lived in the boonies.)
So I called Apple (this is before 'genius' (hilarious) bars).
Me: I want to fix my mouse. Sell me a switch.
Apple: We don't sell switches.
Me: Why not?
Apple: (After pause) It's only an $80 mouse. Not worth it.
"Only." That's $135 in today's money. (A better mouse now sells for $7.) I should let Apple charge me $135 to replace a microswitch?
You could just watch it going south. It all started when the Mac came out. (The slim II manual had peeks and pokes in it. They actually supported hobbyists and learners.) The Mac dox (think it was 3 huge volumes) had huge lists of names of calls you could make. Just names. Soon the rainbow apple turned to a chrome apple.
My next 'Mac' came from Power Computing. Yeah, Apple slipped up and put a gate in the walled garden for a couple years. It worked great for 7 years. At 160MHz.
Software got SO much better. So, yeah, I slipped up and got an iMac -- cost me twice what a similar PC would. (But all my music software was for PPC and hardware used serial ports.) That iMac burned me in multiple ways.
I thought all that was horrible. Those times were gentle compared to today. RUN AWAY
iTed Hodges, sorry that happened. But you seem to be a little passive aggressive. That is only one symptom of a notorious psychological disorder, so it is a shot in the dark here: were there any other social conflicts at work previously? Another symptom is an inability or unwillingness to recognize a problem. Consider a psych eval, it may lead to changing your life for the better.
I do not know for certain, but most companies have some sort of review process where you can mount a defense of some kind. Forgive me for this opinion, but it seems like there must have been something else going on, and this did not occur in a vacuum out of the blue.
Don't burn your bridges, man. References are important. But it sounds like a sh*t job. You can do better. Keep cool. You will get far more sympathy saying nothing rather than going to war. Who wants someone like that working for them.
Sounds to me he violated the rules by offering free services to the guy WHILE he was in the Apple Store. Otherwise how would anyone else know about it and report it to his boss?
Sounds to me like this guy's job is to do repairs. He may even have access to tools/hardware as an Apple Employee that he doesn't have externally.
If he used corporate hardware to do the data transfer, then it doesn't matter if he didn't charge the friend. It would still have been a policy violation.
Quite a public relations campaign against Apple these days for doing no more than what every other business is doing. Don't sell to Apple customers if you don't want to pay Apple for their services.
Memory modules soldered to the motherboard - this is now common in most laptops, it's almost harder to find one without this then it is with this.
Limiting speed based on battery life - most laptops do this?
Opposing 3rd party repair shops - most large companies want you to send it back to them or take it to their repair company. Many large companies even have a "Samsung certified repair person" you need to call.
Apple is a large company and is not doing mysterious nefarious acts. They do what most other companies do.
My house, my car (not a Tesla), and my fridge are all amenable to 3rd-party repairs. As is my phone. The fact that "most big companies" want to a monopoly doesn't make it acceptable.
False equivalence; your house, car, and fridge are not subject to the same pressures to be increasingly smaller. Modern consumer tech is expected to get smaller with each generation.
Erm, you keep having a panel in the back through which the battery can be easily replaced; users buys a battery - you provided the full specs for to the market to avoid obsolescence, right - and replaces it when you warn "battery should be replaced; do you want to downgrade performance to extend battery life".
Apple are served by keeping a closed ecosystem, making repairs only possible by licensed people, not enabling device longevity but instead fetishising updated hardware.
Society should be punishing this sort of behaviour as it stands firmly against sustainable use of resources.
That excuse by apple (it was so old!) is nonsense; Li-ion batteries should not degrade nearly as quickly as they did during the whole apple-battery saga (less than a year to less than half capacity sometimes!) Clearly apple had a design defect (whether in its use of the battery or in the battery itself), and equally clearly apple didn't admit it until the public uproar was significant. The timeline of the whole thing involved a whole series of phones only a little more than a year old, and by that point there had already been a bunch of grumbling online.
Anecdotally, the situation has improved in those I know, but the batteries still degrade more quickly than those in similarly-priced android phones or windows laptops. But perhaps that's just sampling bias.
In any case - the issue is not huge now, but it was a real issue a few years back, and apple tried to cover it up, which pisses me off to this day. Yay for screwing over your customers, and not offering refunds or repairs under reasonable terms until the public outcry is huge: i.e. they certainly will screw you over to cover their collective ass if they can get away with it.
If anything, being constantly connected is a risk factor for batteries, not a boon. If your laptop is constantly connected (mine usually aren't anyhow!), your battery will likely degrade faster due to the interacting effects of higher heat (because laptops run in higher performance modes usually when connected to the grid) and high voltage across the cells (because laptops usually charge to close to 100% when connected).
But nowadays we have tons of Li-ion devices; compare to pretty much any. Battery robot mowers, cars, hedge trimmers, roombas, dust devils, home automation stuff, bikes, and of course competing phones. I've never owned even a single device that degraded as quickly as iPhones a few years ago; not one; not even close. And you don't need to take my word for it; Apple eventually admitted the faults, right?
Which is something you should've communicated to the user. How many people needlessly bought a new device because they didn't realize why their phone was slow?
The throttling was only activated after the battery failed to supply enough power and the phone shut off unintentionally; an event that only occurred after years of use.
You're looking at those memories wearing rose-tinted glasses. The amount of battery degradation was not clear (to this day AFAIK apple has not admitted by how much it typically decayed), but it was enough to be noticeable quickly - in some cases reports of less than half capacity in less than a year.
In any case; ref https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate - the problem had been swirling online for some time before apple finally responded in December 2016, talking about battery defects in models manufactured in September and October 2015 - i.e. the problem had been bad enough on a large scale to become noticeable for long enough for apple to respond within a little more than a year. Maybe some devices were usable for a full year, but this certainly didn't take years of usage as you suggest.
This is not normal, reasonably-designed Li-ion degradation. Likely apple's battery usage patterns were at fault, because heavy load (or charge) under high temperatures causes very quick degradation, and likely the batteries had issues too. Apple's batteries still seem to degrade more quickly than those of other Li-ion devices, so I suspect they're still overusing the battery in circumstances they shouldn't, but it's nothing near as bad as it used to be. Or maybe apple is charging them to a too-high voltage. Who knows? In any case: these issues are not equally strong in any old Li-ion system; design choices matter, and apple's were not only terrible, they also mislead their customers about the issue initially.
Thanks for being a voice of reason around here, the Apple fanboysm around here is sickening, always trying to justify and rationalize every single bad thing Apple does.
The bugs on Windows get fixed, the bugs on MacOS do not, and its the most ridiculous kind of bugs, like mouse freezing when an external turned off monitor is connected.
Mouse doesn't freeze here. Bugs on Windows exist that were in Windows 2000 and still are in Windows 10.
Just because your personal situation has issues doesn't mean the product has therefore be bad in everyone else's situation as well.
At the same time: if you don't like the product, then why buy it? Just get something you like instead of complaining on how it's not to your liking. General problems should be repaired, but personal tastes are unlikely to get pushed out to everyone else just because you feel it must be a 'bug'.
That's just a generic rant with maybe 2 or 3 actual problems. Overheating and previous generation bad keyboards are obviously not what is supposed to be what you get with the product (the hardware), but things like personal preferences on where buttons are located or a certain redundant field not being in a certain list and then ending it with a 'this must be poor engineering' note is just useless to make a general judgement about.
"After all this time, I cannot wait to see the back of Apple. I ditched iOS a few years back and it was the best decision I ever made, now leaving Apple is going to be the second best decision. I no longer want anything to do with them.
My Mac is up for sale and I will be closing my Apple ID.
After hundreds of articles and over 10 years of writing for LowEndMac, this is my final article. This is me signing off."
Maybe I'm missing some context but it seems like something huge has to be omitted from author's narrative.
There's just no way Apple Inc's ~137000 employees are all saying to friends & family, "nope, sorry, I can't help you with your iPhone/iPad/iMac because it's a conflict of interest and I'd get fired."