Apple Fires Engineer After His Daughter's iPhone X Video Goes Viral (engadget.com)

"In a brutal reminder of the secrecy tech companies enforce on employees, Apple recently fired an employee after his daughter posted a video of the iPhone X," writes long-time Slashdot reader HockeyPuck. Engadget reports: His daughter took down the video as soon as Apple requested it, but the takedown came too late to prevent the clip from going viral, leading to seemingly endless reposts and commentary... [I]t's important to stress that this wasn't a garden variety iPhone X. As an employee device, it had sensitive information like codenames for unreleased products and staff-specific QR codes. Combine that with Apple's general prohibition of recording video on campus (even at relatively open spaces like Caffe Macs) and this wasn't so much about maintaining the surprise as making sure that corporate secrets didn't get out. Apple certainly didn't want to send the message that recording pre-release devices was acceptable. All the same, it's hard not to sympathize -- the [radiofrequecy] engineer had poured his heart into the iPhone X, only to be let go the week before the handset reaches customers.
In a new follow-up video, the former Apple engineer's daughter says "I had no idea this was a violation," adding that her father "takes full reponsibility for letting me film his iPhone X." Here's some more quotes from her video.

• "I made this little innocent video that was just supposed to be a fun memory of me and my family... It suddenly went viral, and I have no idea how my video got so much attention considering how many other iPhone X videos there are out there from other YouTubers..."

• "At the end of the day when you work for Apple, it doesn't matter how good of a person you are, if you break a rule, they just have no tolerance. They had to do what they had to do. I'm not mad at Apple. I'm not going to stop buying Apple products. Rules are in place for the happiness and for the safety of workers, and my dad takes absolutely full responsibility for the one rule that he broke."

• "It was an innocent thing, and to be honest I think Apple is going to do a much better job from here on out in addressing the rules and making sure that everybody is aware of the rules. And it was an innocent mistake, and he fully apologizes."

• "We're not angry. We're not bitter. My dad had a really great run at Apple, and he appreciates that company for everything they did for his career. My dad's gonna be okay... And yeah, I don't think he deserves this, but we're okay. We're good."

• [She breaks into tears when defending her father from critical commenters on YouTube.] "Apple really did like my dad. And they let him go. Because -- because he broke a rule. So my advice to people out there is to just not overlook rules when you're in the workplace or when you're in school or when you're at home."

Comments

He is lucky

[pablo_max]

He is lucks they only fired him. Apple is extremely aggressive when it comes to this type of thing. He is also lucky that he is out now. My current company, and many others would never hire someone from Apple who was there for more than 5 years and they are most like a person who was a heave coolaid drinker and thinks they are better than everyone else.
  I worked for an Apple "Partner" in the past. My God, the hoops they had us jump through were insane. We eventually told them, thanks, but no thanks.
The experience of dealing with Apple is the reason while to this day, I refuse to buy Apple branded anything. Biggest bunch of self righteous smug motherfuckers I have ever met in my professional career.

Re:He is lucky

[Junta]

I'm not the parent poster, but at a company that has dealt with Apple.

At least in a business relationship, they are quite abusive to their vendors. Of course, every company is as abusive to their vendors as they can afford to be, and Apple's position is such they can be really abusive.

Beyond that, they would also put out crazy requirements that would cause expensive work to meet, and then select a vendor that didn't meet any of those requirements because ultimately the only metric that matters is cost. This wouldn't be so bad if they did not insist up front that these things were a hard requirement and not doing them would mean disqualification. The only time my business 'won', it meant bidding under cost, foolishly thinking that would kickstart the relationship, but no. We are also in the list of companies that go for the greener pastures in the market and happily ignore apple, as there is plenty of money to be made elsewhere.

The thing is I wonder how their long term quality will be, if this is their attitude. As they ignore their requirements for cost savings, and more and more companies learn that bidding under cost isn't going to work, what happens to Apple?

Re:He is lucky

[serviscope_minor]

This is not news or surprising to anyone. His willful disregard for his employer means that he should be fired.

Meh: it's just a phone. An expensive one, sure, but still just a phone.

The government generally has a much more pragmatic attitude: they have been doing it longer and the secrets are more important (life or death in some cases). What they have found the hard way by bitter experience is if you massively crack down on rule breakers then you give people a really satrong incentive to cover up when they fuck up.

That actually tends to compound things and make bad mistakes really really bad.

Re:An unfortunate incident

[Anonymous Coward]

It was an accident.

This was no accident. She was filming the whole ordeal with a fat DSLR on the Apple Campus with her father and lots of other Apple people around. The video is also heavily edited, underlined with music and all that other typical Youtube vlogger stuff. This was not a case of "woops, two seconds of iPhone X footage slipped into a snapchat", this was a vlogger very deliberately showing of the shiny new phone and everybody being aware of her doing it. I am surprised that Apple even let her carry that DSLR around there in the first place.

Accidentally breaking an NDA can happen, but this is as far away from an accident as you can get.

Re:An unfortunate incident

[serviscope_minor]

Apple does not have any critical employees.

In fairness, no large organization can. Any institution over 70 years old has almost certainly had every "important" employee beyond a certain point die whether from accident, illness or simple old age. Likewise even important employees have other things in their life which even if not death will pull them away from the company at little notice.

This is why large organisations appear inefficient. They have to have redundancy otherwise they'd be in bad trouble. Apple has 116,000 employees (according to google who are never wrong). That means that a one in a million event per employee per day happens once every two weeks or less.

Small organisations don't have this, but they can collapse if a key person leaves. The inefficiency is hidden from view however.

Not defending apple here, just commenting on the general nature of bigger organsiations.

Re:X employee

[GrumpySteen]

Going by her YouTube videos, she's an adult with her own house, her own husband (who already graduated from college) and a Pilates studio that she's selling (or sold) because she prefers to make movies.

Her father isn't likely to be deciding anything about what phone she buys, she's probably done with education and hitting an adult (even your child) is assault, which is a punishable crime even if the victim doesn't want to cooperate in pressing charges.

Re: X employee

[Anonymous Coward]

Spanking is beating, it has all the same problems associated with it. You're training the kid to equate getting caught with being punished, not necessarily the connection between doing something wrong and being punished.

What's more, the parents that use violence as punishment are usually not terribly bright to begin with, which means there's an excellent chance that they couldn't explain why the rules were how they were.

When all is said and done, punishment is rather pointless if you're not also doing the work of making sure that the kids understand what the desired outcome is and why. In most cases, you're better off rewarding good behavior than trying to punish bad behavior.

Re:X employee

[BasilBrush]

It's more even that that. The dad appears in the video, and is at one stage demoing animated emojis to his daughters camera. He just didn't seem to be aware that this was a problem himself.