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A company should, by policy, allow struggling employees the chance to try a different team and manager. Otherwise you never know if the employee is causing the

A company should, by policy, allow struggling employees the chance to try a different team and manager. Otherwise you never know if the employee is causing the problem or if the team is. In this situation, maybe the managers were extremely harsh on the OP, or maybe the OP was misleading in their story to sound like a victim. It’s hard to say without knowing how they’d do on another team. To force somebody out like this without taking every reasonable opportunity to help them improve, especially for a rich company like Apple who can afford to try, is deeply disgusting and is a failure of their HR policies.

cgearhart 6y ago
At my first job out of university I was hired into a company with a developmental program that lasted for the first 3-5 years. New engineers would do rotations for about a year to find a team with a good fit–but new engineers could also be fired pretty trivially within the first year. During one of my rotations I worked on a project with a recent PhD graduate from a fairly renowned university–we'll call him Dave. Dave was terrible at...everything, really. He could not seem to do _anything_ right on the project, and struggled for months to make any progress at all. Eventually I wound up taking over his part of the project, and our manager basically told him "you're being let go at the end of the probationary period unless you find another team that will take you". Dave shopped his resume around internally for the few months left in his probationary period and eventually transferred to a different group in another town a few hours away. I went to work full time for the team where I did my rotation, and a bit less than a year later my boss tells me he had gotten an unsolicited call from the director of the team where Dave transferred. Evidently, Dave was a rockstar there–like a duck in water. The director was calling to ask where Dave was recruited, and if we had anyone else like him or could help them with their recruitment pipelines to source more candidates like Dave. All this to say: to this day I think there are a lot of reasons someone might succeed or fail in any given job. It has been my experience that finding the right team fit is hugely important, and often completely ignored.

cgearhart 6y ago

At my first job out of university I was hired into a company with a developmental program that lasted for the first 3-5 years. New engineers would do rotations for about a year to find a team with a good fit–but new engineers could also be fired pretty trivially within the first year. During one of my rotations I worked on a project with a recent PhD graduate from a fairly renowned university–we'll call him Dave. Dave was terrible at...everything, really. He could not seem to do _anything_ right on the project, and struggled for months to make any progress at all. Eventually I wound up taking over his part of the project, and our manager basically told him "you're being let go at the end of the probationary period unless you find another team that will take you". Dave shopped his resume around internally for the few months left in his probationary period and eventually transferred to a different group in another town a few hours away. I went to work full time for the team where I did my rotation, and a bit less than a year later my boss tells me he had gotten an unsolicited call from the director of the team where Dave transferred. Evidently, Dave was a rockstar there–like a duck in water. The director was calling to ask where Dave was recruited, and if we had anyone else like him or could help them with their recruitment pipelines to source more candidates like Dave. All this to say: to this day I think there are a lot of reasons someone might succeed or fail in any given job. It has been my experience that finding the right team fit is hugely important, and often completely ignored.