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I also worked for Apple and I had a very similar experience. Management was brutal and abusive from my immediate manager to all the way up to and including the

I also worked for Apple and I had a very similar experience. Management was brutal and abusive from my immediate manager to all the way up to and including the VP level. For example even though vacation hours were accrued I never got to use them unless I wanted to endure the verbal backlash of abandoning the team and my responsibilities. When the holidays came around the director would email everyone reminding us there's a stipend for working through the holidays but in reality it pays less than our normal salary and was a means to justify not taking time off. A variant of Stockholm syndrome made me appreciate the clever design of having a convenient cash out vacation days button. In the end the team was meet with a hostile takeover; everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss. A good number of people ended up leaving the company shortly after that. One more thing, you can also include me as another data point for getting pay doubled after leaving Apple.

fortran77 6y ago
> everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss I worked for Apple before Jobs died. He'd frequently have several teams working on the exact same thing, in secret, and then pick the team that met his goals the best. Sometimes the "losers" would be merged into the "winning" team, but never treated well by the winners.
- anonymouse008 6y ago
  Gosh - I hope that isn’t a prerequisite to greatness? How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’ Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?
  - wpietri 6y ago
    I suspect that abusive behavior is an optimal strategy if you're working for abusive people. Organizations tend to be set up such that people like the people in power succeed. Jobs was a notorious jerk [1] [2] [3], so it's not surprising that similar behavior is what gets promoted. [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-bonus-267711 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar... [2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-133000491.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-1... [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
    - neycoda 6y ago
      Steve Jobs died from being a jerk, to himself, because he refused to take his doctor's advice about his diet and pancreatic cancer. A reality distortion field only works so long.
      - CyberRabbi 6y ago
        What was his diet?
        mark-r 6y ago
        The exact diet doesn't matter, what mattered is that he believed changing his diet would cure his cancer. In the end of course it didn't.
        cbozeman 6y ago
        The exact diet matters a metric shitton, because Jobs' hubris cost him his life, if instead he had realized he did not, in fact, know everything, he might still be alive. Pancreatic cancer eats sugar for-fucking-breakfast. [1] He was eating nothing but fruit, and even though fructose release is regulated in its binding with fiber, its still sugar. If Jobs had eaten nothing but bacon, steak, and eggs, we might still have him around. I forgot what folder my bookmarks are in, but there's scant - but compelling - evidence to support that a sugarless diet high in protein and fat quite literally starves pancreatic cancer. [1] https://jeccr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13046-019-1209-9#:~:text=Excessive%20glucose%20may%20help%20cancer,pancreatic%20cancer%20cells%20%5B26%5D https://jeccr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13046-019-....
        sebmellen 6y ago
        In fact, ketogenic diets have been shown to slow tumor growth in a number of cancers. See https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/the-keto-diet-and-cancer--what-patients-should-know.h00-159223356.html https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/the-keto-diet-and-canc....
  - z3t4 6y ago
    For most larger companies an engineer salary, or any human labour for that matter, is very cheap. FAANG could pay 10x more if they had to, but they don't have to because no one else pays more.
    - dcist 6y ago
      I'm not so sure. If engineer's were cheap, you wouldn't have Steve Jobs colluding with other companies to suppress salaries: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jobs-settlement-20150903-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
      - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
        That he'd prefer to pay less doesn't mean he couldn't afford to pay more.
  - abraxas 6y ago
    I think this is due to the exponential payoff in a success scenario. Especially in high tech where certain initiatives can have a “winner take all” effect. I find it completely unsurprising that internally the tech giants function like a cluster of startups competing against each other. Capitalism is based on the idea of transplanting the survival of the fittest paradigm into the economy and that’s exactly how I’d expect it to look in practice. Especially as progress accelerates and massive wins become both scarcer and more impactful at the same time.
    - neycoda 6y ago
      Internal competition on the same project shows a lack of confidence from management... it literally shows they don't know what to do, and are just throwing spaghetti at the wall, or aren't confident in their skills to get something deployed with what they choose. It's not solid leadership, it's dissonant. It also sets people against each other, creates better-than-you mental heirarchies between equal workers where non are necessary, and is essentially friendly fire in the workplace. I've never seen this end well. Capitalism isn't just economic natural selection either, it favors those with capital, and especially the most of it, and is easily exploitable by them to tip the playing field in their favor against their competition and those below them. Your analogy is bad in both cases; natural selection means one side dies, which is not what's being described here, and is not good for one side anyway, and capitalism is not as good as cooperation anyway. The latter is far more efficient.
      - spockz 6y ago
        I disagree that (internal) competition unequivocally leads to better-than-you mindset. If done properly, in an open and sharing mindset – one might call it scientific, with expectations and criteria defined up front and with the projects objectively compared against the criteria, then it will work. I have also this work. It takes effort to come up with criteria and metrics beforehand but that is what makes it different from throwing spaghetti at the wall .
        cutemonster 6y ago
  - ako 6y ago
    Because often time to market is more important that R&D costs or tech debt for the success of a company. If you win the market, the profits will compensate for the additional R&D costs, and you can release increments to address the tech debt. Customers actually appreciate this, as they are constantly looking for better, newer versions of the product. Time to market trumps everything.
  - lodovic 6y ago
    If money isn't part of the equation, this may actually be the best approach. During the 2007 financial crisis I worked at a bank that had to develop risk software really fast to comply with regulations and prevent disaster. They had two teams work on the same project and once a winning team emerged, they killed of the other. But the result was used for only a year or two, and replaced by a long term solution which was developed by yet another team in parallel. As the saying goes, in software development, we can control speed, cost and quality, but only two at the same time.
    - Drdrdrq 6y ago
      This is not a bad solution, as long as the teams are on the same side (and know it too). I strongly believe that toxic culture is neither needed nor useful, ever.
      - cutemonster 6y ago
        How can one create a climate where they're on the same side? And no one is afraid of "losing" and worried about problems that might cause? (Eg getting fired, even if managers say won't happen)
        Drdrdrq 6y ago
        By having leaders who want this and who know how to achieve it. It is simply a matter of principles and trust (both ways). Granted, I have only seen this in companies up to 100 employees... :shrug:
- chromatin 6y ago
  I know more than one famous scientist who does this. Multiple postdocs working on the same project. Whomever gets there first gets a Cell-Science-Nature paper. The other(s) get nothing. Probably a very common abusive management style at high levels in many industries.
  - WatchDog 6y ago
    The personal/political aspect aside, I can think of multiple projects that could have benefited from an approach like this. I'm often astonished by the inefficiency of project delivery, particularly in large companies. Teams spending months building sub-systems from scratch, where there is an off the shelf(sometimes open source) tool that will do the same job and better. Man years of work going into chasing trends like "serverless" or "microservices" for no real reason, when a monolith running on a server, could be delivered in a fraction of the time and probably do a better job than what ended up being built. I'm convinced that paying two teams to work on the same project would often cost less than paying for the huge teams and cost overruns I've seen.
    - mark-r 6y ago
      Interesting theory. If you pay 2 teams A and B to work on the same project, and B finishes in half the time it would have taken A, you really didn't spend anything extra did you?
      - outsomnia 6y ago
        ... until you find they finished first by cutting corners and delivering something that is only capable of passing the scant unit tests. Then the "zero knowledge" psychopathic management style doesn't seem so smart.
        roenxi 6y ago
        It isn't a zero knowledge style. It is an experimental, or knowledge-acquiring style. To employ that approach most effectively it makes sense to have competing teams with purposefully different styles.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  The unfortunate thing is that if not for the social/political side, this would be a good approach. I would be happy to be on one of many teams doing parallel implementations if at the end one codebase won but no people lost.
kablow 6y ago
Wow reading all these stories about Apple really is eye-opening, as I've only usually heard these types of things about Amazon before. I say that because I work for Amazon, and my work environment is pretty bad by my standards (my team cuts a lot of corners, we are given unrealistic deadlines by upper management, our on-call is paged at least 10 times a week, we have a huge backlog of tickets and bugs that we can never prioritize, and it is overall a very stressful environment.) I guess it can always be worse...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

fortran77 6y ago

> everyone was merged into another team working on something similar with new management. Meet the new boss same as the old boss I worked for Apple before Jobs died. He'd frequently have several teams working on the exact same thing, in secret, and then pick the team that met his goals the best. Sometimes the "losers" would be merged into the "winning" team, but never treated well by the winners.

anonymouse008 6y ago
Gosh - I hope that isn’t a prerequisite to greatness? How does someone even get the human and financial capital to run projects like this? I guess your first attempt with the first founding team has to ‘hit.’ Otherwise, how can you afford to triple headcount, management, etc?
- wpietri 6y ago
  I suspect that abusive behavior is an optimal strategy if you're working for abusive people. Organizations tend to be set up such that people like the people in power succeed. Jobs was a notorious jerk [1] [2] [3], so it's not surprising that similar behavior is what gets promoted. [1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atari-bonus-267711 https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/steve-wozniak-cried-jobs-kept-atar... [2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-133000491.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/memoir-steve-jobs-apos-daughter-1... [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-jerk-2011-10
  - neycoda 6y ago
    Steve Jobs died from being a jerk, to himself, because he refused to take his doctor's advice about his diet and pancreatic cancer. A reality distortion field only works so long.
    - CyberRabbi 6y ago
      What was his diet?
      - mark-r 6y ago
        The exact diet doesn't matter, what mattered is that he believed changing his diet would cure his cancer. In the end of course it didn't.
        cbozeman 6y ago
        The exact diet matters a metric shitton, because Jobs' hubris cost him his life, if instead he had realized he did not, in fact, know everything, he might still be alive. Pancreatic cancer eats sugar for-fucking-breakfast. [1] He was eating nothing but fruit, and even though fructose release is regulated in its binding with fiber, its still sugar. If Jobs had eaten nothing but bacon, steak, and eggs, we might still have him around. I forgot what folder my bookmarks are in, but there's scant - but compelling - evidence to support that a sugarless diet high in protein and fat quite literally starves pancreatic cancer. [1] https://jeccr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13046-019-1209-9#:~:text=Excessive%20glucose%20may%20help%20cancer,pancreatic%20cancer%20cells%20%5B26%5D https://jeccr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13046-019-....
        sebmellen 6y ago
        In fact, ketogenic diets have been shown to slow tumor growth in a number of cancers. See https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/the-keto-diet-and-cancer--what-patients-should-know.h00-159223356.html https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/the-keto-diet-and-canc....
- z3t4 6y ago
  For most larger companies an engineer salary, or any human labour for that matter, is very cheap. FAANG could pay 10x more if they had to, but they don't have to because no one else pays more.
  - dcist 6y ago
    I'm not so sure. If engineer's were cheap, you wouldn't have Steve Jobs colluding with other companies to suppress salaries: https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jobs-settlement-20150903-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
    - mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
      That he'd prefer to pay less doesn't mean he couldn't afford to pay more.
- abraxas 6y ago
  I think this is due to the exponential payoff in a success scenario. Especially in high tech where certain initiatives can have a “winner take all” effect. I find it completely unsurprising that internally the tech giants function like a cluster of startups competing against each other. Capitalism is based on the idea of transplanting the survival of the fittest paradigm into the economy and that’s exactly how I’d expect it to look in practice. Especially as progress accelerates and massive wins become both scarcer and more impactful at the same time.
  - neycoda 6y ago
    Internal competition on the same project shows a lack of confidence from management... it literally shows they don't know what to do, and are just throwing spaghetti at the wall, or aren't confident in their skills to get something deployed with what they choose. It's not solid leadership, it's dissonant. It also sets people against each other, creates better-than-you mental heirarchies between equal workers where non are necessary, and is essentially friendly fire in the workplace. I've never seen this end well. Capitalism isn't just economic natural selection either, it favors those with capital, and especially the most of it, and is easily exploitable by them to tip the playing field in their favor against their competition and those below them. Your analogy is bad in both cases; natural selection means one side dies, which is not what's being described here, and is not good for one side anyway, and capitalism is not as good as cooperation anyway. The latter is far more efficient.
    - spockz 6y ago
      I disagree that (internal) competition unequivocally leads to better-than-you mindset. If done properly, in an open and sharing mindset – one might call it scientific, with expectations and criteria defined up front and with the projects objectively compared against the criteria, then it will work. I have also this work. It takes effort to come up with criteria and metrics beforehand but that is what makes it different from throwing spaghetti at the wall .
      - cutemonster 6y ago
- ako 6y ago
  Because often time to market is more important that R&D costs or tech debt for the success of a company. If you win the market, the profits will compensate for the additional R&D costs, and you can release increments to address the tech debt. Customers actually appreciate this, as they are constantly looking for better, newer versions of the product. Time to market trumps everything.
- lodovic 6y ago
  If money isn't part of the equation, this may actually be the best approach. During the 2007 financial crisis I worked at a bank that had to develop risk software really fast to comply with regulations and prevent disaster. They had two teams work on the same project and once a winning team emerged, they killed of the other. But the result was used for only a year or two, and replaced by a long term solution which was developed by yet another team in parallel. As the saying goes, in software development, we can control speed, cost and quality, but only two at the same time.
  - Drdrdrq 6y ago
    This is not a bad solution, as long as the teams are on the same side (and know it too). I strongly believe that toxic culture is neither needed nor useful, ever.
    - cutemonster 6y ago
      How can one create a climate where they're on the same side? And no one is afraid of "losing" and worried about problems that might cause? (Eg getting fired, even if managers say won't happen)
      - Drdrdrq 6y ago
        By having leaders who want this and who know how to achieve it. It is simply a matter of principles and trust (both ways). Granted, I have only seen this in companies up to 100 employees... :shrug:
chromatin 6y ago
I know more than one famous scientist who does this. Multiple postdocs working on the same project. Whomever gets there first gets a Cell-Science-Nature paper. The other(s) get nothing. Probably a very common abusive management style at high levels in many industries.
- WatchDog 6y ago
  The personal/political aspect aside, I can think of multiple projects that could have benefited from an approach like this. I'm often astonished by the inefficiency of project delivery, particularly in large companies. Teams spending months building sub-systems from scratch, where there is an off the shelf(sometimes open source) tool that will do the same job and better. Man years of work going into chasing trends like "serverless" or "microservices" for no real reason, when a monolith running on a server, could be delivered in a fraction of the time and probably do a better job than what ended up being built. I'm convinced that paying two teams to work on the same project would often cost less than paying for the huge teams and cost overruns I've seen.
  - mark-r 6y ago
    Interesting theory. If you pay 2 teams A and B to work on the same project, and B finishes in half the time it would have taken A, you really didn't spend anything extra did you?
    - outsomnia 6y ago
      ... until you find they finished first by cutting corners and delivering something that is only capable of passing the scant unit tests. Then the "zero knowledge" psychopathic management style doesn't seem so smart.
      - roenxi 6y ago
        It isn't a zero knowledge style. It is an experimental, or knowledge-acquiring style. To employ that approach most effectively it makes sense to have competing teams with purposefully different styles.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
The unfortunate thing is that if not for the social/political side, this would be a good approach. I would be happy to be on one of many teams doing parallel implementations if at the end one codebase won but no people lost.

kablow 6y ago

Wow reading all these stories about Apple really is eye-opening, as I've only usually heard these types of things about Amazon before. I say that because I work for Amazon, and my work environment is pretty bad by my standards (my team cuts a lot of corners, we are given unrealistic deadlines by upper management, our on-call is paged at least 10 times a week, we have a huge backlog of tickets and bugs that we can never prioritize, and it is overall a very stressful environment.) I guess it can always be worse...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]