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That bit about the firing of the designer who used the river metaphor in that email is such a good lesson for anyone: Never ever ever ever announce moves like

• capableweb 4y ago
  > That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive. You mean you lost respect for Alan Dye? Seems to have been the one who fired Imran Chaudhri. > Shortly after the email, Dye fired Chaudhri.
  • jasonlotito 4y ago
    No, they mean Ive. > The email alarmed Ive and Dye. They feared that the message Chaudhri sent could be interpreted to mean that Apple’s best days had passed. It’s clear from the article that both Ive and Dye were directly involved in the firing.
    • kumarmanket 4y ago
    • smugma 4y ago
      It’s hearsay, as even the article says it was Dye who did the firing. I’ve read many articles/interviews where Jony talks about being “hurt” by something. As in, he puts everything he has into these creations and certain things he takes very personally, as if someone is trying to stomp on a rose in his garden. Chaudhri is known to have a big personality himself and went to start a company that has hired a lot from Apple (not exclusively but sometimes browsing LinkedIn it looks that way). So he sends an email while resting and vesting (and also planning his next big thing), and they decide to cut ties, as he’s now seen as a potential liability. It doesn’t need to be petty or vindictive, but a decision based on bad vibes they got. Chaudhri could have given his notice two months in advance and cruised and sent the email on his last day, but he didn’t.
    • capableweb 4y ago
      > It’s clear from the article that both Ive and Dye were directly involved in the firing. It's really not. The part you quoted doesn't say that Ive was "directly involved" in the firing, it says he felt something about the message Chaudhri sent. The article states Dye was directly involved in the firing, and mentions nothing about if Ive was involved or not, so we should presume he wasn't. Otherwise the article would say so.
• ballenf 4y ago
  I just don't buy that the river metaphor wasn't about Apple. It just doesn't make sense unless he was retiring or leaving design entirely. Otherwise the lack of water is clearly related to Apple. If it really was solely about himself it's a really poor metaphor. So the river is moving to a new mountain? And the river's lack of water has nothing to do with the current one? Or, the mountain (Apple) has plenty of water but somehow this river (employee) can't receive any of it? The non-critical-of-Apple reading is convoluted and tortured, imo.
  • zarzavat 4y ago
    “ When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy. Sadly rivers run dry..” It seems obvious that he is talking about his personal joy running out. Because that’s what he said.
    • ballenf 4y ago
      I see that take on it. Maybe the lesson is that for employees who happen to believe that Apple's river had run dry, the message would be hard to interpret as personal to the author. Or that the river running dry personally is potentially contagious.
      • scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
        That’s the other lesson - don’t use poetry or metaphors to express your self because they will inevitably be twisted to suit the corporate interests and not yours.
        • whywhywhywhy 4y ago
          Don’t really see how it could have been interpreted any other way.
        • kzrdude 4y ago
          It's not so far from that to, "don't show your human side to the soulless corporation." And why even work for them, then?
• arrrg 4y ago
  I also don’t quite get it. Firing that designer would not increase my trust in the design leadership. It would seem thin skinned, skittish, cruel, deeply immoral and evil, leading me to lose a lot of trust, feeling as though creating a culture of fear is the goal. That behavior seems completely incomprehensible to me, especially since you need to have an extremely tortured reading of that e-mail to read it as an attack on Apple. It’s simply so extremely weird and wrong to do that. It also seems completely ineffective. What’s the intended effect here? I’m not sure what the general vibe here’s on that, but it seems abhorrent to treat people that way.
  • lupire 4y ago
    Artists are a petty and vindictive culture, since value is subjective and there's no profit for being pretty good but not the annointed winner.
    • dbspin 4y ago
      Genuine question, do you know any artists? This isn't the case generally; certainly amongst ordinary working visual artists - who are demonstrably open minded, centred, and interpersonally engaged. I can't speak to Damien Hirst level centimillionaires, who represent an invisibly small fraction of working artists.
      • chongli 4y ago
        Apologies for nitpicking but the prefix you're looking for is hecto-. The prefix centi- means 1/100 [1], implying that Damien Hirst has only $10,000 to his name, starving artist level wealth! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefixes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix#List_of_SI_prefi...
        • kerlgos 4y ago
          https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire
• protastus 4y ago
  Anyone in a leadership position has a responsibility to measure their words carefully, especially in a farewell email. "Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one." broadcasts extreme negativity to the people who remain. It almost reads like a cautionary warning followed by advice. One can write a heartfelt goodbye without ambiguity. Assuming the ambiguity was unintentional, the author was careless and paid the price. He could've gotten away with it in other places (large companies are generally too bureaucratic to fire someone who's already leaving) but obviously not in this case.
  • KptMarchewa 4y ago
    >broadcasts extreme negativity to the people who remain ...which was immediately proven right by execs who fired him.
    • laserlight 4y ago
      Firing is almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It signaled that misinterpretation is the right interpretation.
  • peterkelly 4y ago
    I think honesty is a better approach. A team or an organisation that cannot look at itself critically and recognise its problems is unable to remedy them. When people are afraid to speak about problems, those problems are more likely to remain. That's not a healthy culture.
    • bruce511 4y ago
      Your point is valid, but in my experience it can be hard to get concensus on what the problems are, much less what the solutions are. And I work in a tiny company - I can't imagine what it's like for Apple. Part of the problem is that everyone sees everything from their point of view, and not always from a holistic point of view. Someone working on homepod sees the potential there and gets frustrated that its not equivalent to an iPhone or ipad. Someone else, in the siri division has his own list of priorities and demands (perhaps from the iPhone team). Management isn't trying to fix every problem, or make everyone happy, they're trying to triage as best they can. In my personal context we get all kinds of feedback from employees, but ultimately we have more ideas, and suggestions, than money. For some problems everyone has a proposed solution, half of which conflict with the other half. Sometimes suggestions fix some of a problem, but are short term, we may be holding out for a long term approach. I guarantee that wherever you work you won't be happy with all decisions and directions - and I'm sure that includes people making those decisions and directions. I've had people leave. Some on good terms, some on bad. Some are positive on the way out, but we stomp on negative. There's a place for negative feedback, and that's up the pipeline (where we always take it seriously) but whining to co-workers who have no authority to effect change, especially after resigning, is not a good look, and is not constructive.
• doctor_eval 4y ago
  I read the book, and it says a few things that contradict other stories I’ve read about Apple, by people who were there. After a while I started taking things with a grain of salt. Considering how awful the story is, I think it’s likely that there was more to the guy who got fired than the book let on. They were worried about an exodus so they treated a guy like shit? And why did he announce his departure before his benefits were locked in? The whole story is sus.
  • Aeolun 4y ago
    > And why did he announce his departure before his benefits were locked in? This happens when people trust their team and managers. Which is why I consider it the worst sort of betrayal to fire people over it.
• jonas21 4y ago
  > That made me lose a whole lot of respect for Ive. I dunno... It sounds like they let him rest and vest for a few months as a courtesy even though he was already checked out. And then, during that time, he sent an email to the entire team that implied (either intentionally or through carelessness) that Apple's river of ideas had run dry. It seems pretty reasonable to ask him to leave immediately after doing that.
  • gonehome 4y ago
    Yeah - that was my read. They were helping him out and he wrote a stupid email, so they said fuck this you’re fired. Maybe part misunderstanding, but it was a dumb thing for him to do. That’s also taking this article at face value - I’d guess there’s probably more to it as there usually is.
• mathattack 4y ago
  Wait until the check clears if that much is at stake, especially if you don’t plan on showing up for work the last bit.
• ascar 4y ago
  Can someone explain to me how you can fire someone that already declared to leave and do financial damage to the employee with that? I guess it's some clause of a vesting schedule that gets triggered when being fired and he already declared his resignation before his shares were vested, but they would've been after his last day? I find it so weird that he already quit the job but the company could actually save money by firing him. Shouldn't something except fear of a bad reputation prevent this kind of move to do actual damage?
  • trafnar 4y ago
    Something like: When he quit, he chose a last day that was after his shares vest, which his managers agreed to. When they fired him, it was immediate, before the shares vest.
  • aenis 4y ago
    I dont think the management cared about the money the company saved; top level management rarely preoccupies itself with such pedestrian matters. It was about sending a message and reasserting authority. Management 101 in large, deep pocketed orgs. Btw, disciplinary firing of employees on leave is of course pretty rare but happens - also in those countries that make it difficult to fire salaried staff. People do stupid things, like steal, download thousands of documents, or write stupid emails.
• socialdemocrat 4y ago
  This and what Elon Musk did keep getting me struck by how little protection workers in the US have. Fired on a whim. But so do remember when working at American companies all the horror stories we heard about how our colleagues working in America got treated. It became these “did you hear the latest crazy thing they did in the US office?” I am not saying this to dump on America but hopefully to get people to demand better. If this is how people want their work life that is fine, but I hope people realize it doesn’t have to be like this. What is actually pretty bad corporate culture has been normalized IMHO.
  • refurb 4y ago
    If you publicly trash your company (externally or just broadly internally) in other countries you’re saying you won’t be fired? Or face some discipline? That hasn’t been my experience at all.
    • makeitdouble 4y ago
      There's a lot of nuance as usual. Firing you over provably true statements or things you said strictly as a private individual can have harsher consequences for the company (you can be let go but they'd need to pay a pretty heavy severance) I am not a lawyer, but I'd expect you'd need to be revealing company secrets, or have a public speaking position in the first place (e.g. you work for PR) and your declarations make you unfit for the job, or leave proofs that your goal was to damage the company, to be in a position as weak as in the US. imagine otherwise how tough it would be to do political or ideological activism on your private time.
      • refurb 4y ago
        Use the example in the article. You basically write a letter to your fellow employees saying (I’ll paraphrase) “im outta here because the talents and ideas that made this place successful are gone”. Can you do that in Europe and face no consequences?
        • 4y ago
• antipaul 4y ago
  We really have no idea why they decided to fire him. From the story, it looks like a benign email with an apropos quote. But while that could’ve indeed been the email, maybe he was also going around saying Apple is done, come join me in my new gig, Ive is dumb, etc. And team members then complained it hurt their morale. So Dye and Ive put their door down. I’m not saying this is what happened. But do we really know the full story?