It's a 'Cold War Every Day' Inside Apple's IS&T Group (buzzfeednews.com) 45
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via BuzzFeed News: A group inside Apple called Information Systems & Technology, or IS&T, builds much of the company's internal technology tools -- from servers and data infrastructure to retail and corporate sales software -- and operates in a state of tumult. IS&T is made up largely of contractors hired by rival consulting companies, and its dysfunction has led to a rolling state of war. "It's a huge contractor org that handles a crazy amount of infrastructure for the company," one ex-employee who worked closely with IS&T told me. "That whole organization is a Game of Thrones nightmare." Interviews with multiple former IS&T employees and its internal clients paint a picture of a division in turmoil, where infighting regularly prevents the creation of useful software, and whose contract workers are treated as disposable parts.
"There's a Cold War going on every single day," Archana Sabapathy, a former IS&T contractor who did two stints in the division, told me. Sabapathy's first stint at IS&T lasted more than three years, the second only a day. Inside the division, she said, contracting companies such as Wipro, Infosys, and Accenture are constantly fighting to fill roles and win projects, which are handed out largely on the basis of how cheaply they can staff up to Apple's needs. "They're just fighting for the roles," Sabapathy told me. "That's all they care about, not the work, not the deliverables, the effort they put in, or even talent. They're not looking for any of those aspects." IS&T is thus filled with vendor tribalism, where loyalty to one's contracting company trumps all. "Making a friendship is -- like you wouldn't even think about that," Sabapathy told me, speaking of cross-vendor relationships. "It's not the traditional American way of working anymore. You build relationships when you come to work because you spend most of your time here -- that's not there." "Sabapathy told [BuzzFeed's Alex Kantrowitz] Apple employees' expectations for their IS&T contractors were unrealistic given that they saw the sum total they were paying the consulting companies ($150 to $120 an hour, she said) but the contractors themselves were making much less ($40 to $55 an hour) after the companies took their cut," writes Kantrowitz. "The approach leaves Apple with lesser contractors but the same high demands, a recipe for disappointment."
In closing, Kantrowitz suggests if Apple wants to become inventive again, "it will need to give its employees more time to develop new ideas." He adds: "IS&T could therefore become a division of strength at Apple one day, building tools that minimize work that supports existing products while making room for those ideas. But until Apple gives the division a hard look, its employees will be stuck spending their time reworking broken internal software, and wishing they were inventing instead."
"There's a Cold War going on every single day," Archana Sabapathy, a former IS&T contractor who did two stints in the division, told me. Sabapathy's first stint at IS&T lasted more than three years, the second only a day. Inside the division, she said, contracting companies such as Wipro, Infosys, and Accenture are constantly fighting to fill roles and win projects, which are handed out largely on the basis of how cheaply they can staff up to Apple's needs. "They're just fighting for the roles," Sabapathy told me. "That's all they care about, not the work, not the deliverables, the effort they put in, or even talent. They're not looking for any of those aspects." IS&T is thus filled with vendor tribalism, where loyalty to one's contracting company trumps all. "Making a friendship is -- like you wouldn't even think about that," Sabapathy told me, speaking of cross-vendor relationships. "It's not the traditional American way of working anymore. You build relationships when you come to work because you spend most of your time here -- that's not there." "Sabapathy told [BuzzFeed's Alex Kantrowitz] Apple employees' expectations for their IS&T contractors were unrealistic given that they saw the sum total they were paying the consulting companies ($150 to $120 an hour, she said) but the contractors themselves were making much less ($40 to $55 an hour) after the companies took their cut," writes Kantrowitz. "The approach leaves Apple with lesser contractors but the same high demands, a recipe for disappointment."
In closing, Kantrowitz suggests if Apple wants to become inventive again, "it will need to give its employees more time to develop new ideas." He adds: "IS&T could therefore become a division of strength at Apple one day, building tools that minimize work that supports existing products while making room for those ideas. But until Apple gives the division a hard look, its employees will be stuck spending their time reworking broken internal software, and wishing they were inventing instead."
So, basically... (Score:4, Insightful)
... just like every other company I've dealt with for the last 25 years, the rats and the internal rat fights and the cheapskate delusional management.... slowly destroying the worker's souls -- for a fee, of course.
Re:So, basically... (Score:4, Informative)
I've been in places like that, it often happens when someone gets a high up management position and they bring in their own "friends". It's like watching an invasion, at first they promise nothing will change then bit by bit everything changes until you and/or your team are just frozen out of every project they've built around you. Once they and their friends establish your position is no longer needed, the invasion complete and time to remove the final remnants of the previous teams, "Here's some money, now please leave.".
At the end of the day... (Score:1)
Root cause: greed (Score:3)
Apple has more cash on hand which is more than the GDP of more than half the countries that are members of the U.N. And that's not even counting any non-liquid assets.
And yet they use contracting firms instead of hiring expertise and workers. They can afford to pay salaries and benefits. They have the HR and accounting infrastructure to support it. They refuse. They do this instead.
Why? To "save money." Also to reserve the privilege of being able to dismiss people at will rather than do layoffs.
Greed.
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Unintended consequences... and somewhat greed. A few counties/states now have requirements to inform local government of layoffs and other large scale employment changes before they happen. If you only hire people on continuing 6 months contracts, all you have to do is not extend the contract, and they are gone as opposed to having to deal with the aforementioned prerequisites. Some would call this a loophole, others would call it good business. Unstable employment is a huge crisis in my opinion. Mostly
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Re: Root cause: greed (Score:1)
Wipro, Infosys, and Tata also won't hire you unless you were born into the "appropriate" Hindu caste for the job.
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It's probably mostly because their products cannot be used to create an enterprise network. They've discontinued all of their server products. All they have is endpoints.
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It's probably mostly because their products cannot be used to create an enterprise network. They've discontinued all of their server products. All they have is endpoints.
That has nothing to do with their Datacenters and other IT infrastructure. Apple has basically never used much, if any, Apple equipment in their Datacenters and internal databases and other business/engineering software/hardware needs.
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They've discontinued all of their server products.
Thank the gods. The last time that I dealt with Apple servers the customer (an elite private middle school) had us pull them out after two weeks since the kids had already hacked them and put Napster, Dameware, Limewire and gods only know what else on them. We replaced them with MS and Active Directory, I think the servers ended up in the teachers lounge for folks to use on their breaks.
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I suspect teachers with brain-dead passwords. My co-worker who set them up said that to set permissions on shares the teachers had to be admins on the entire box, he said that the security model resembled Win95 So that would be a combination of stupid decisions made writing OSX and stupid/lazy administrators. I'm sure it's better now, but for 2006(ish) it was abysmal.
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Did you ever wonder why a company would pay almost 3x the money just so they can let someone go at will? Paying $155/hr for a guy who makes $55/hr is not about trying not to provide benefits - it doesn't cost $200K per year on top of $110K salary to provide benefits. If you are right and this is purely about being able to let people go at will, then it must be extremely expensive to get rid of employees no longer required or simply not producing enough benefit to the company to offset their pay. The termina
Re: Root cause: greed (Score:2)
Maybe our rules and regulations, and/or litigation risks, make it too expensive to part ways with employees the business no longer needs or wants.
... and yet somehow thousands of cash-strapped companies were able to lay off millions of workers over the last couple of weeks. Apparently they were able to afford the âoeexpenseâ of doing that.
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Maybe they are afraid of their own size.
The more they bring in house the greater danger of unionisation and some of the big contractors to start lobbying for anti-trust measures.
I work in consulting... (Score:4, Informative)
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I worked for Accenture's parent company (Arthur Anderson & Co., S.C.) before it was Accenture. AACo owned Arthur Anderson (audit) and Anderson Consulting (well... consulting).
The two halves of the company constantly fought with each other to the point that their own arrogance and comeuppance got them caught in the Enron debacle.
AA would come in and do audit. And make "business process improvement" suggestions. And hey, we have this other group (AC) that is functionally and formally independent of AA
Layers of IT (Score:3)
IS&T is responsible for the corporate network; each business unit has their own independent resources as well to maintain security and control over their information and communication. Quite dysfunctional. One group apparently even has a third level of crap beyond what the business unit controls that acts as an overlord.
Well, at least ... (Score:3)
I've worked for companies where the in-house development teams plus numerous well qualified contractors would make proposals that were technically better and cheaper than the outfit that won the bid. And it wasn't unusual for the members of the selection committee to be seen driving expensive sports cars after the contract award.
Re: Well, at least ... (Score:3, Informative)
"it wasn't unusual for the members of the selection committee to be seen driving expensive sports cars after the contract award."
I haven't personally seen it, but I've heard a lot it stories about bribery and kickbacks with the big offshore IT companies. One gets the impression it's an everyday part of their business. And perhaps the reason they keep getting contacts even tho pretty much everyone knows they do shit work.
Every Org Using "Consultants" (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I have met some excellent engineers from Wipro or TCS from time to time -- the brilliant guys who are transitioning off H1-B and into citizenship, but those guys are 1 in 10 and on their way to permanent positions at better non-contracting firms. The other 9 I couldn't see being worth > $40k / $20/hr in an actual competitive job market, despite them being positioned as counterparts to locals who earned their way in IT to 6 figures from the help desk up.
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One in ten [catb.org], you say?
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Consulting Companies SUCK in IT Departments (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had the displeasure of working as a "consultant" (aka. a highly-billed but lowly-paid [~4:1 bill/pay ratio]) worker in Fortune 100 companies in New York City in the Finance Sector (Wall Street, Mid-Town, etc.) from 1999 to 2009 and the consulting companies just suck in every way possible. I was a regular worker doing the same work as a FTE (Full Time Employee) but being paid less than 2/3rd but billed at twice or thrice the rate for "contracts" that were neverending.
This was a way that the "consulting" (IT sweat-shop) companies would sell their workers to the Finance Firms promissing the firm that they didn't heave to deal with any of the employee HR or pay headaches and that they would just pay a bit more for the labor.
Complete freaking scam! But like we know our governmental bodies are all pro corporatizm and against any type of employee rights so this remained. The leadership at the hiring companies ensured that this stayed legal and that the consulting companies could continue on.
I moved out of NYC the Silicon Alley of IT and saw similar type of parasitic relationship at the organization where I am now when it comes to consultants and consulting companies but somehow this organization is just a bit smarter since they on-board the "consultants" into proper employees as soon as possible in 1-2 months time or hire directly whenever they can.
Consultants and consulting firms should only be brought on for very limited time and very specific projects with clearly defined starts and ends and deliverables with a clear finish-line and goal to accomplish (e.g. Build Us This Thing! Now leave!)
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Consultants and consulting firms should only be brought on for very limited time and very specific projects with clearly defined starts and ends and deliverables with a clear finish-line and goal to accomplish (e.g. Build Us This Thing! Now leave!)
I can't disagree. That's my company's model, where I've been an implementation consultant on/off for ~12 years. In general, we bill for more than Accenture/Wipro/Infosys/etc, but the client has the understanding that we plan to leave within a few years once our fenced-off work is done. Working for a company whose revenue model isn't consulting also ensures I get a better cut, in general more than the average full-time employees of the clients I work for (sometimes by a decent margin).
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Forgot to mention that any company, corporation, or organization that follows the rent-your-services idealogy perpetuated by their leadership, as in rent-your-workers (Consultants), rent-your-servers (Cloud Computing), rent-your-software (SasS, Software-as-a-Service), etc. is going to suffer from the naturally occuring conflict of interest that exists between their core business, which is to keep their expenses low, and the rental company's business, which is always to keep their expenses to the company as
Well duh, they're loyal to the contracting company (Score:5, Insightful)
IS&T is thus filled with vendor tribalism, where loyalty to one's contracting company trumps all.
Well, duh! The contracting company is the one who signs their paychecks (or at the least is the one who'll arrange their next paycheck after their term with the current client ends), why wouldn't that be where the contractors' primary loyalty lies? When you hire contractors you know you're hiring mercenaries, in fact you intend to hire mercenaries. And you're just one client in a long line of past and future clients.
And be glad most IT contracting firms don't have Alois Hammer's negotiating style.
It comes down to opex vs capex and Wall Street (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked at a financial services company as a consultant for several years that had more contractors than actual employees. I finally managed to come up with a part of the equation as to WHY it's so predominant. I've obtained a BBA and am working on my MBA and from what I've seen he was correct. It comes down to CapEx (capital expenses) vs OpEx (operational expenses). Contractors are categorized as CapEx, and employees are OpEx.
So why does this matter? Simply put (and I'm oversimplifying here), CapEx is paid upfront but is expected to pay off in the future. Specifically, software dev like this is pushed into the R&D category. So when a Wall Street analyst looks at the companies balance sheet, they see that the company is investing tons of $ in R&D (even if they're not an R&D type company). When they see too much OpEx (employees wages, benefits, rent, etc.), they don't see the company as investing in their future. Thus you get a company dumping $10 million for a crappy system designed by contracting companies (and I've worked with most of the ones mentioned in the article, and yes most of them are crap) that could have been better designed by developers they would have had to pay a fraction of the cost for.
Honestly, I believe more of an emphasis should be put on employee engagement and corporate social responsibility. Don't get me wrong; profits are important as they allow the company to grow and employee folks. I just think too much emphasis on the short term (ironic since CapEx is supposed to be helpful for future earnings LMAO) profitability. Let's take a look at the long game of how companies are affecting our society as a whole and if they can provide folks with the ability to happy to come to work.
There have been tons of studies that show that happy employees are productive employees. Happy employees are generally not contractors (and we all know that contractor just means second class citizens in most companies). I worked as a W2 Contractor for several years of post-2008 recession and hated it for the most part. Most of the folks who work for consulting companies like the ones mentioned here are miserable.
Anyways that's my rant on why this is so rampant. Take it or leave it, but I hope you've found it mildly informative :)
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Bang on! Most places I've worked contractors are simply the IT equivalent of temps, irrespective of how they behave they're more or less depised for being "know it alls" or bemoaned by FTEs for being there to push the FTEs out their jobs, FTEs often think contractors are hired to make the FTEs look bad. It's utter BS! You don't spend 10 years learning home maint skills do you? When you want an extension on your house you hire a builder, plumber and electrician, they'll do exactly what you ask in the time yo
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Quite a lot of corporate nonsense can be traced to the weird metrics imposed by Wall Street. Apple used to be dinged quite harshly for the amount of cash they kept on hand, but those cash reserves kept the company afloat during some pretty dark times in the 90s. Your CapEx/OpEx comparison is very apt.
We've forgotten, or we've let the wolves on Wall Street convince us otherwise, but owning stock in a company used to be a great retirement investment because the stock paid dividends. You own a share of Unileve
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You are correct. I've been (mostly) a contract consultant for 30 years and I've lived through all of the excellent comments on this article.
For what it's worth, ($0.02 and all that), I think that companies should contract out everything that is not their core business. But that those contracts are:
1. Not necessarily to the company with the lowest bid
2. To one company only for a fixed duration
3. Held to strict SLAs with serious penalties for violations
4. Only available to companies with FTE to Sub-Contract
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It's what I refer to as the "MBA Disease", it's rampant in corporate America and spreading fast overseas. In the 1970s the university MBA programs added Business Ethics as a required course and started teaching that a manager's one and only duty was to shareholders. In the Reagan Badministration tax rules were changed and corporate executives began to be paid mostly in stock options. By the '90s stocks had changed from a long term investment that would pay for itself with dividends received to short term
The truth.... (Score:2)
Corporate America, in general, has no idea what IT does or who does the work.
They only care that their systems are up or the most recent "stupid idea" has been put through a technical pretzel and finally deployed.
That's about 55-60% of the companies out there. The rest view IT with the importance it deserves.
Guess who's growing among small to mid sized firms? The ones who haven't lost all their IP and then sued out of existence.
Perfectly Trumpian (Score:3)
This brings me back. (Score:2)