Apple Went Rotten After Steve Jobs' Death, Former Engineer Claims (siliconvalley.com) 182
An anonymous reader quotes the Bay Area Newsgroup:
Apple turned against customers and its own employees after the death of co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs, a fired Apple engineer claims in a lawsuit. "No corporate responsibility exists at Apple since Mr. Jobs' death," Darren Eastman alleged in a lawsuit over his termination and patents related to his work at the Cupertino tech giant... Eastman, who is representing himself in court, started working as an engineer for Apple in 2006, largely because Jobs was interested in his idea for a low-cost Mac for education, and wanted him hired straight out of graduate school, Eastman said in the filing. Eastman claims to have invented the "Find my iPhone" function. When Jobs headed Apple, he told Eastman to notify him of any unresolved problems with the company's products, and employees in general were expected to raise such concerns, Eastman said in a lawsuit filed Thursday in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
That changed after Jobs died in 2011, he claimed. "Many talented employees who've given part of their life for Apple were now regularly being disciplined and terminated for reporting issues they were expected to (report) during Mr. Jobs tenure," Eastman alleged in the filing. "Cronyism and a dedicated effort to ignore quality issues in current and future products became the most important projects to perpetuate the goal of ignoring the law and minimizing tax. Complying with the law and paying what's honestly required is taboo at Apple, with judicial orders and paying tax (of any kind) representing the principal frustration of Apple's executives... Notifying Mr. Cook about issues (previously welcomed by Mr. Jobs) produces either no response, or, a threatening one later by your direct manager," Eastman claimed.... "There's no accountability, with attempts at doing the right thing met with swift retaliation."
Eastman even claims one Apple employee was fired for reporting toxic mold in the building, and alleges that employees were intentionally fired just before their stock options were vesting. In fact, his entire lawsuit is over just $165,000 worth of Apple common stock, plus $326,400 in damages, $32,640 in interest -- and resolution of an alleged patent-ownership issue.
Apple "declined to comment on the claims made in the lawsuit."
That changed after Jobs died in 2011, he claimed. "Many talented employees who've given part of their life for Apple were now regularly being disciplined and terminated for reporting issues they were expected to (report) during Mr. Jobs tenure," Eastman alleged in the filing. "Cronyism and a dedicated effort to ignore quality issues in current and future products became the most important projects to perpetuate the goal of ignoring the law and minimizing tax. Complying with the law and paying what's honestly required is taboo at Apple, with judicial orders and paying tax (of any kind) representing the principal frustration of Apple's executives... Notifying Mr. Cook about issues (previously welcomed by Mr. Jobs) produces either no response, or, a threatening one later by your direct manager," Eastman claimed.... "There's no accountability, with attempts at doing the right thing met with swift retaliation."
Eastman even claims one Apple employee was fired for reporting toxic mold in the building, and alleges that employees were intentionally fired just before their stock options were vesting. In fact, his entire lawsuit is over just $165,000 worth of Apple common stock, plus $326,400 in damages, $32,640 in interest -- and resolution of an alleged patent-ownership issue.
Apple "declined to comment on the claims made in the lawsuit."
Which one? Complaining about everything (Score:2, Insightful)
I notice the complaintant is talking about a bunch of different unrelated things. It's clear to me that he's mad, and he's mad at Apple, but he seems pretty unclear about what he is mad about.
In my experience, a pissed-off person who is whining about this and that and "they did this to me" and "they're assholes" and "they won't let me keep complaining about the products all the time" and on and on shouldn't be taken too seriously until they calm down and you figure out what exactly they are actually mad abo
Re: queue (Score:1)
You lot are disgusting. Land of the free indeed.
Get use to it (Score:5, Insightful)
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Jobs had a reputation as a rather maniacal boss. I have a lot of experience working in companies that get bought out, leadership changes. When this happens there always seems to be a bunch of people who get hurt, because the once comfy position where they are respected becomes a low man on the pole, where other employees seem to be getting the preferential treatment.
It seems like this engineer probably jived well with Job's vision, and he was on the receiving end on the cronyism that was in the culture.
Bought out companies are different (Score:2, Interesting)
When one company is bought out the changes often are more jarring -- especially when one company buying out another company has a different culture. You are merging two companies -- and potentially changing leadership at the same time (leadership that does not know everyone). Leadership transitions from owner/creator to the next generation (of a mat
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The new products are less better than they did in the past.
No new disruptive inventions. Competitors taking over in domains where Apple used to dominate.
It's not enough to do a bit better than you did last year. You must do better than the competition.
Objectively, Amiga 600 was better than Amiga 500, and Amiga 1200 was better than the two. Look where it got them.
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Don't forget that it is very hard to come up with new disruptive technologies regularly. The iPhone and iPad were more or less logical enhancements of the iPod at the time they were released. What scares me more is that Apple discontinues all the fine equipment and technologies that made their Macs and iDevices work so well: the Aiports, Time Machine, Mac Mini, AirTunes... That compared with their stubborn refusal to let their users determine where they keep their data will backfire one day. After all, Goog
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Never claimed it was easy... but they somehow managed to deliver. That set them apart, and made the price tag attached worth it for a lot of people.
Nowadays they are losing the race - and still attaching the same price tags as if they were still in the lead. This will come back with vengeance to them soon.
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When I bought them they cost the same as your Asus. But while the Asus lasts about three years the Airports are still going strong at the ripe old age of 8 years. They are truly indestructible. So in this case Apple is not more expensive but better.
Airplay is around but you need to buy an expensive new amplifier to use it, instead of a wifi access point that you can connect to your existing amplifier from the early 1990s that is still working fine. Please prove me wrong on this one.
I doubt that the Mac Mini
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Re: Hypocrite p51d007 here to whine about Apple. (Score:2)
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To be fair Steve was a lot of the product overall, he built and then re-saved the company at least twice. Nobody said people good at some things can't also be assholes, or misguided in other ways. He was that exactly.
A flawed human asshole with some good ideas. Still, for a Hiter worshipping whiner like p51d to jump on this story like it's just "time for apple bashing again" just seems patently obvious, again. Apple is seen as "leftist" by idiots.
They're the biggest company in this country, which runs
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Agreed. Steve's obsessions ran counter to pure profit. He was more about doing something different to get that profit, not avoiding things to do so. The company culture seems to have shifted the way Walmart's reputed did after Sam died. A lot of Costco folks are figuring the same will happen when Jim dies.
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Although his strategy kept Apple popular and famous. It maintained a long-term profit by ways of reputation of perfect, innovative products and being a leader. Now Apple may be bringing more cash in quarter-to-quarter, but it is falling behind. The newest iPhone is objectively worse than Samsung's flagship, and more expensive. It's been years since they last released any truly innovative class of devices - iPod, iPad, iPhone were all something completely new, disruptive. Now Apple just releases upgrades - a
That isn't suprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That isn't suprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Really though, is it worse now than under Steve "holding it wrong" Jobs, who was well known for treating engineers badly and being an all around ass?
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Re:That isn't suprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Jobs was a famous asshole, but it sure seemed like he actually cared about having a good product. Sure, his "good" was about fashion, but that's what worked for Apple (there's a reason 2 of the 10 richest CEOs are fashion moguls). And while Apple phones seem to be in a downward spiral, quality-wise, they're still way better than Samsung on that front.
Personally, I prefer a phone with a high-quality headphone jack, no "notch", and no exploding battery, but then I'm a nerd with no fashion sense at all.
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I wonder if Jobs would have accepted the notch.
I get the impression (as random guy in the street) that Jobs was a designer, in the sense of trying to make something awesome and gasp-worthy. And I was taught that design is a discipline, whether that's making clothes or bridges. But that dedication to a product is what, from the stories, made him succeed and fail so spectacularly, be it the Mac cube or the iPhone.
But I also suspect that the world is now too complicated for even a Jobs to handle, relying on th
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Sure, his "good" was about fashion
I think that's a mischaracterisation. Steve Jobs cared a lot about usability, but only for his specific use cases. Under Jobs, doing anything that he did on an Apple product was always efficient and streamlined. Doing things that he never did varied from 'works well' to 'isn't possible at all', often falling in the 'kind of works but is really buggy' part of the spectrum.
Since his death, the best-case usability of Apple products has definitely dropped, though I'm not sure where the average has ended
Re:That isn't suprising (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't recall which book it was (I think "Becoming Steve Jobs"), but I found it interesting that while everyone essentially agreed he was tough to work for he also had a lot of compassion to go with the assholery. One striking passage said everyone involved in the Macintosh development looked back at it as some of the best years of their lives despite how grueling it was. I think personally why people tend to admire him despite his negative traits was the overwhelming fact that he cared and didn't stand for mediocrity.
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One striking passage said everyone involved in the Macintosh development looked back at it as some of the best years of their lives despite how grueling it was.
Veterans of traumatizing foreign wars often feel that way too, so I wouldn't read too much into it....
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Re:That isn't suprising (Score:4, Insightful)
As a life long Apple user and someone who once thought MS was evil, I am actually going to defend MS a bit here. Microsoft has changed for the better under Nadella and done things I never thought I would see MS do. They have embraced open source in a real way, they have moved away from trying to lock everything to Windows to a platform agnostic strategy. Having Balmer leave (he was a founder) was the best thing that ever happened to MS.
Re: That isn't suprising (Score:1)
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That was the time when the market was still unexplored and very far away from the saturation we have now. There's no comparison with today's market.
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Nadella is an odd mix, between the "bend over and take it" approach to pushing Win10 upgrades and associated spyware and the embrace of open source and cross-platform products. Way the heck better than Balmer though (he may be a founder, but he was a sales guy through-and-through).
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Microsoft has changed for the better under Nadella and done things I never thought I would see MS do.
You were wrong. MS would have done them under anyone when they lost their stranglehold.
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The point is, people like you are even having to admit that Microsoft has changed for the better. Yes, they 'had to.'
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The point is, people like you are even having to admit that Microsoft has changed for the better. Yes, they 'had to.'
Windows didn't used to be malware, just incompetently designed and produced. Now it is the most insidious piece of spyware on the planet. This to you is an improvement?
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And it's still incompetently designed and produced.
Nice to have confirmation... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Can anyone here imagine Steve Jobs wiggling a mouse and proclaiming that the pointer getting bigger was an Innovation only Apple could bring you?
I remember those Apple Events I saw where Jobs presented simple and intuitive functionality that might have been considered trivial by any other company. I was impressed how Jobs was able to enhance the significance of these features by only using the power of presentation. True, Jobs wouldn't have shown a simple embiggened mouse cursor as an unique idea, but the culture of presentation enhanced seemingly simple features may linger around Apple still.
Come on (Score:3)
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ADB evaporating overnight. Welcome to dongles that don't really work for your ADB peripherals.
SCSI
Re: Come on (Score:2)
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I've always wondered whether Steve Jobs loved Tim Cook's dongles.
Some mod with a filthy mind.
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'Pro' products have become a synonym for Expensive,
I'm typing this on a late 2013 15" Retina MacBook Pro. I just looked up the order and it cost £2,540.21 for a quad-core 2.6GHz Haswell i7, 16GB of RAM, the GeForce 750M with 2GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, plus an external DVD drive and a few dongles. This was basically the top of the range for a MBP at the time (November 2013). It's lasted well and it's only the most recent generation that looks as if it's actually faster by a useful amount.
The new generation is, as you say, really expensive.
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I'm not the biggest Apple fan. I need more control than that, but it's clear that Jobs was a serious quality control guy. And not just from the POV of the product being good, but that customers would love the product. And he could see things in the totality - functionality, aesthetics, support, usability. He would ditch functionality (like CD drives) that
What a delusional retard (Score:4, Insightful)
Of the two Steves that founded the company, Steve Jobs was the one who lacked ethics. This idiot idolized the wrong Steve. You would think, since he claims to be an engineer, that he would choose to idolize a fellow engineer and not an amoral salesman.
Re:What a delusional retard (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with SJ's ethics. SJ's personality kept a lot of people with personalities like his in line. Now, it's a lot of cutthroat people stabbing each other in the backs to get ahead. Tim just isn't enough of an a**hole to stomp that behavior into the ground, and until someone does, Apple will continue to have serious problems.
Re:What a delusional retard (Score:5, Interesting)
And just to be clear, I'm not saying all of Apple's teams are that way. I know plenty of Apple managers (at least I assume they're still Apple managers) who are great people. Unfortunately, it only takes a few bad apples to spoil the barrel, and as soon as you let enough of those sorts of people bubble up in the ranks, things start to turn sour. That's why I also know multiple Apple managers who have left Apple post-Steve, in large part because of the toxic corporate culture that has taken over.
The real problem, to be honest, is that any suitably large company will eventually become a toxic work environment unless employees from the bottom all the way up to the top actively work to keep that from happening. Apple's problem, in particular, is that it tends to promote for the wrong reasons — not because people are good leaders, but because people took credit for "hits" (whether earned or not). That sort of meritocracy doesn't really work for choosing managers. The best managers are not the people who created the tools that became the most popular, but rather those who know how to lead—how to get the best work from the people under them. That's almost completely unrelated to the outcome of projects that those people are working on, which is mostly dependent on whether the idea itself was good, how it was marketed, and other factors entirely outside the control of those managers.
Second, Apple doesn't take into account personality at all, which means cutthroat people who claim credit for things their subordinates did are more likely to get promoted higher in the ranks, and people who pass on the bulk of the credit to those subordinates get left behind. As the expression goes, "Only cream and bastards rise."
Third, Apple's corporate culture also doesn't put a high enough price on learning from mistakes. When things go wrong, they tend to look for someone to blame, for a safe place to point their fingers, rather than looking at it as an opportunity to improve their processes to prevent such failures from happening in the future. This results in, among other things, a lot of good people getting terminated or asked to resign for no good reason, a lot of institutional memory being lost, and a near complete lack of follow-through in preventing the next poor slob who holds that job from running into the same problems. And that right there is, IMO, the main reason that Apple's quality seems to be actively slipping, rather than getting better.
Fourth, Apple's corporate culture makes internal mobility hard. You basically interview for a new team in the same way that an external candidate would. This can lead to people getting stuck in a rut because changing jobs seems so daunting. And if an employee gets blamed for things going wrong, internal mobility becomes even harder, because each employee's annual review is prepared by his or her immediate manager, whose word is rarely challenged, even if unfair.
These are all problems that Tim Cook needs to solve sooner rather than later. If left to fester, they will only get worse.
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Where there is money there will always be crime - fact. These big businesses are tremendously wealthy but that's always going to attract the worst the world has to offer for that very same reason. Expect to find narcissistic meatbags with no sense of ethics and the only thing that's illegal is murder. Everything else is "fair game". By all means go and work there if you'd like to see the contrast between likable humans and completely inhuman degenerate scum.
And please wipe your feet on the way out.
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I don't believe you need to be an asshole to be a leader. Assholes tend to treat everyone like dirt, not just the people who deserve it.
Keeping people in line takes talent, not teeth. I've read a lot of books about startup tech companies, and it's remarkable how varied personalities can be among people who really get stuff done.
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Just to be clear, neither do I. But it's one sure way to keep other a**holes in line.
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I concur... it really happened with the death of preferences. How they gave up to Windows/Linux for the power users who do graphics for a living. How their utter focus to create a top mobie OS led to the abandonment of desktop upgrades and updates --both MENINGFUL, EXPANDABLE hardware, not this crappy torus-tower and meaningful feature upgrades and security updates that spanned back to hardware that's already deemed Obsolete --not by me! How you can't take their hardware without ruining it, like glued key
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Of the two Steves that founded the company, Steve Jobs was the one who lacked ethics. This idiot idolized the wrong Steve.
Jobs did have a hardon for snuffing out quality problems. Say what you want about him but his OCD about getting things just right sometimes penetrated corporate bureaucracy. And infuriated plenty of people.
This guy knows what he's talking about, but that doesn't mean you have to like Jobs more than Woz.
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Say what you want about him but his OCD about getting things just right sometimes penetrated corporate bureaucracy.
Jobs had a disturbing lack of vision. He killed the Newton. If not for that, Android might have been an also-ran, instead of the dominant force in the mobile market.
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If not for that, Android might have been an also-ran
Yes. If not for that we might not have a world where a dominant mobile device runs on the linux kernel and apps for it are developed with a SDK that anybody can download and run on almost any common desktop hardware.
Yeah. It's really a shame he killed the Newton.
And yes, Android is a blight on corporate dominance. It could never fork into something more free. Xcode is so much more of an open source pursuit.
Are you nuts?
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Are you nuts?
It was bad for Apple, not for us. Jobs didn't give one shit about the future of computing. I didn't say I was unhappy about how things turned out, but you assumed that I was on no basis whatsoever. I am not responsible for your unfounded assumptions.
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Steve looked at a problem with failed GPU mounts and ate the cost of extending everyone's warranty to cover them. When the same problem resurfaced after his death, Genius Bar employees were fired for admitting it was an issue, laptop owners were told to spend $600 on replacement mobos with the same exact flaw and it took 3 years and a class action lawsuit for Tim's Apple to admit it was a flaw, extend the warranty AND refund everyone who was hoodwinked into paying for a replacement.
In the past five years th
I wouldn't say rotten (Score:3)
Going from a monomaniacal, obsessive, detail crazed, micro managing leader to a bunch of financially obsessive, stockholder pleasing managers will always be a painful transition.
If you look at corporate culture at Apple, it probably was best in the Apple II days. Macs seemed to introduce a different mindset and approach to the way they did business.
The first time Jobs left (was forced out) Apple, things went south pretty quickly.
Now Apple seems to be milking the dead cow, with no real innovation, just small improvemets on products that seem to be aging poorly.
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Apple engineers, in a fit of desperation, will dig up his glass coffin and attempt to harness what remains of his reality distortion field. It won't work.
They'd have better luck hooking up his spinning in the grave corpse as a power source.
You can see it in their product lines (Score:4, Interesting)
You can see that happening again now that Jobs is gone. Each product has more and more variations with stupid model numbers.
Enjoy the gravy train while it lasts. I'm writing this on the last MacBook I will ever own (mid 2014 pro) and still have an iPhone 6s I will use until it dies. After that, I'm moving away from Apple products.
Re:You're saying PowerPC was a fucking disaster? G (Score:5, Insightful)
Right now, they are reversing that trend. There are increasing numbers of variants for their phones and tablets, and I doubt Jobs would be happy with it.
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The problem was Sculley greenlighting completely nonsensical platforms like that television/computer abortion which didn't even attempt to leverage a bridge between them. Sculley's idea of progress was some nebulous information finding assistant that looked and acted like a Microsoft project doomed to be forgotten after one launch. John wasn't a bad guy but in the long run Steve made a mistake taking him into Apple.
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Steve Jobs was good at running a start up with niche expensive products. Apple is beyond that now.
Before I bought the apple watch i gave up trying to figure out which Garmin Fenix to buy or which Google Gear was a decent buy out of like 50 watches. Apple watch is simple, 3 basic models and they come in two sizes and option of cellular or no cellular.
Same with every other product. 3 or so basic models and the difference is something simple like storage size
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You're right that it's chaotic dealing with open hardware in a competitive market. It's so much easier to just nestle into a tightly closed product line.
Why are you here on Slashdot, again?
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This.
I went to Apple when the first Intel devices came out, because I thought "if that OS X everyone tells me good things about doesn't work for me, I'll just install Linux".
I never did. And I never looked back. And one of the reasons is that I saved countless hours of research and brainfucking. How much time I spent before figuring out just which notebook to buy, or just which components to upgrade in my PC? I've looked at the Android market now and then, just as I looked at the pre-smartphone smartphone m
Can't fix (Score:5, Funny)
Apple is broken and can't be fixed, the problem is soldered in its core and 3rd party repairs won't work.
Re:Can't fix (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, it is also true. Look at their high end line of "pro" products, both laptops and desktops. Everything is soldered, bolted, then welded to the motherboard. There is absolutely no way for anyone to do an upgrade. Buy a machine with 8 GB of RAM? Too bad. That's all you'll ever get unless you buy a new machine with more RAM.
The sad thing is Apple could make mincemeat of Microsoft if they had better, configurable hardware. Slightly lower prices wouldn't hurt either.
Instead, as this engineer relates, Apple is now all about making money rather than providing a good product.
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You'll find that "being fun at parties" isn't that big of a priority for people here on Slashdot.
This might not be your kind of 'blog.'
This is just a garbage case (Score:1)
It is at-will employment in California. The guy was fired for going over his manager's head. It is not discrimination. There is no case, evidently demonstrated by no blood-sucking lawyers is willing to take up his case.
And since when an employee can have a legitimate claim on patents they worked on for the employer.
Sounds like a delusional and entitled brat.
representing himself in court (Score:5, Insightful)
Dumb. Lawyers exists because they are the "engineers" of the law, and know how it works (inside and out). It is ridiculous to try to do a job where you have zero experience.
- As for Apple, it never surprised me their corporate culture would return to the Apple of Pre-Steve Jobs (pre-1997). The old Apple Board drove themselves to the same bankruptcy that killed Commodore and Atari in 1994/96 respectively, and now that board is back in power.
Re:representing himself in court (Score:5, Interesting)
Dumb. Lawyers exists because they are the "engineers" of the law, and know how it works (inside and out). It is ridiculous to try to do a job where you have zero experience.
You know what's really weird? The guy's reasons for representing himself:
1) He has no money because he hasn't worked since 2014, and
2) His attorney had a stroke, and he can't afford another one
Okay, yeah, maybe finding new work might be a little difficult if you were just fired from Apple after working there for 8 years for unprofessional conduct, but..... four years of unemployment? Come on. If you're an engineer who's good at what they do, and you live in Northern California as he does, surely you should be able to get a new job.
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> finding new work might be a little difficult
If he wasn't already black-balled, he would be the moment he filed suit against his previous employer. He's pissed off some higher-ups at Apple, who famously illegally collaborate with the other local tech companies to keep employees in line. Nobody who might ever want to work in the valley will hire him, or even want him on their team, for fear that he will sink their chances in the future.
The dude wants what he was promised; Apple are morally bankrupt and w
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> Lawyers would only take the winning side.
No. Lawyers have a professional obligation to represent their client, even if they know the client is guilty. (Besides most lawyers make you pay the fees, even if the case is lost.)
I hope his goal wasn't to win (Score:5, Insightful)
Welp, regardless of whether or not the case has merit, he's screwed on many levels:
1) "Eastman, who is representing himself in court"
2) Apple has more lawyers on staff than many companies have it total employees.
3) Even if he somehow had a strong enough argument to compensate, they'll win just by drawing the case out indefinitely so that he can't afford to keep pursuing it.
Re:I hope his goal wasn't to win (Score:5, Insightful)
He knows he cant afford lawyers as good as Apple and hence cant win in court. He aims to embarress Apple into settling and for that a story about the little guy representing himself works much better.
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Nope. Well, maybe if you have to hire a lawyer, but Apple has gobs of lawyers *in house* (see e.g. https://www.businessinsider.co... [businessinsider.com]) - they are already paid for.
For Apple, the monetary cost of filing an endless stream of motions to delay for one cause or another is minuscule.
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The same Steve Jobs who fired people on sight? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like when he didn't like you in the elevator? The same one who demeaned and cursed people? The same one who had his little circle of trust and once Cook broke it the iphone and every other product at apple improved within a year, sales went back up and the stock shot up?
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He got old and like a lot of older people, he mellowed out, it's a shame people didn't get to know old steve jobs better before he died.
It's a shame he didn't seek typical treatment for his cancer, we might have had time.
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Methinks he doth complain too much (Score:4, Insightful)
Seen this any number of times during my own tenure there. This guy was fired. He didn't leave voluntarily. Nevertheless it's clear he cares very deeply about the fate of the company he no longer works for, and is no longer welcome at. He wants the company to continue pushing towards the vision he had when he was hired there: Things "just work", surprising new must-have combinations of technology appearing every couple of years, and a clearly obsessive perfectionism behind every product design, and release, and support life cycle.
He believes he still fights for those values, and therefore the company higher-ups are corrupt idiots for firing him, and now since he knows he will never be coming back he is instead embarking on a personal crusade to draw attention to the corruption - the departure from the vision - he perceives at every level.
The company is crawling with people like him. Obsessively perfectionist live-to-work people who believe in the flattest, most democratic corporate structure possible, because that's the best way to gather and act on feedback. And they're not wrong. But they're also not perfect _people_. And chances are this guy was fired for something much more prosaic than a grand conspiracy of shareholders. He was probably fired for being an insufferable dick and annoying too many people for too long.
Take your massive paychecks and your massive stock holdings and go sit on the beach for a while doing nothing, and cool off, man, then go snag a job at almost literally any other tech company on Earth since you have Apple on your resume now. And quit your bitchin'.
honestly, it's really simple (Score:4, Funny)
Apple's success came from emulating the visionary design choices Jobs made.
They are currently building all their products in emulation of his last visionary design choice: "Get thinner and thinner until you can't do your job anymore."
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Steve Jobs challenged the Pepsi Co guy to come work for Apple by saying 'Do you want to sell sugar water to kids for the rest of your life.'
Shortly after Jobs returned to Apple, a big part of the bizness turned into selling 'tunes' to people. I remember the irony when they started putting 'get a free iTune' bottlecaps on pop bottles.
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If that's rotten, count me in. (Score:2)
What kind of rotten does he mean? The kind that happens to the tune of a bazillion dollars in market value? Or the kind where you can bloat your current lineup of signature key products (iPhone) beyond recognition and still be growing faster than competition because even your shoddy 5 years of product lifespan still is the best in the market? Or does he mean being as rotten as a premium fashion brand with an uptick of 200+$ per product sold just for the kicks of it? Or with being so aloof with fashion bran
A whole lot of nothing... (Score:3)
I once worked as a low-level engineer at a company with what I believed to be a similarly "rotten culture". You have three options: (1) find a job at a better company, (2) start your own company, or (3) change careers / retire. There is no justice in this world and as a low level engineer, you are not in a position to change corporate culture. My advice is to smile, be a model employee and very quietly work behind the scenes on your exit strategy. When you leave, take the minimum notice, be professional and don't burn any bridges. Forgo any snarky comments, shake your bosses hand and thank him or her for the opportunity to work there. Leave with your respect and reputation intact. The bottom line is that nobody has to work at Apple or at any other company. You are the master of your own fate. Just remember that when your company starts treating you like you have to work there and decides to see how much they can screw you over.
Bring back Jobs (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure they have a 'We are the greatest' bravado on campus that never dies down. There's enough richness to spread around to dampen any dissonance. For now.