[lbo-talk] Historical moment: the first full privatization of a U.S. public school district

123hop at comcast.net 123hop at comcast.net
Mon Jun 25 13:31:55 PDT 2012


I worked at Apple from 1989 to 1998; my remarks are based on that period. Throughout, I worked on their most technical publications -- documenting the operating system , machine-level and source level debuggers, various tools, transport protocols, etc. So I was working with engineers all the time.

Basically, pros were attracted by the status and by the radical promise of early Apple -- the example of a company who made a product that everyone could use and who, through this democratization, rather than dumbing down the industry, raised the bar of what the industry should aim for. So, for the nerds, the appeal was about working for a radical and innovative company.

That being said, the management was hit and miss, and sometimes horrible. There was a lot of unnecessary burn out, a lot of brilliant people were constantly shifted about and were unable to ship a single line of code because of constant changes in direction. And constant, constant churn due to constant layoffs. I remember, toward the end of my stay there, getting a phone call from my manager in the middle of a layoff and realizing that I wasn't sure what version of the impending news would be bad. Would it be bad to be laid off? Or would it be bad to keep my job but have to do twice as much work because others had been laid off?

So, in the years I was there, people came for the opportunity to do fun, innovative work, and I would say many were very disappointed. After I left, a lot of my Apple friends remained or returned because after the dot com bubble, startups blew up and people wanted more stability.

----- Original Message ----- On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 8:38 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> They also underpay their more skilled pros: engineers and writers for example.

Then how do they attract top talent? ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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