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

X employee

[turkeydance]

iPhuckedup

Re:X employee

[Ramze]

She's a kid who explained she didn't know she broke a rule, and her father takes full responsibility for not informing her so that the rule wouldn't have been broken. It was his job, his workplace, and his decision to bring his daughter to work... and didn't tell her not to film the visit, nor did he stop her at any time while chaperoning her through sensitive areas to inform her to stop filming/delete the video / not post it online for others to see. This was all on the parent, not the child. He may as well have brought a film crew into the R&D area. What moron doesn't have a "what not to do while on this trip" conversation with their child before going into a sensitive area? Who in their right mind would think a kid of this day and age wouldn't have a phone on them and wouldn't be using it for social media unless you explicitly told them to put the thing away or took it from them? How hard is it to tell your own kid NOT to take any photo or video while at daddy's super secretive workplace? Or to at least smack the device out of their hands when you see them holding it up filming?!?!?

Guy deserved to be fired and made an example of, but still sucks for everyone -- Apple loses an otherwise good employee and he loses a sweet job... and a family is impacted by it.

also, you mean *sore and *college , though butts soaring through the air and expensive photo collages are interesting images to invoke.

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

[Calydor]

Somehow I doubt that's a requirement from the company that starts their product names with a lowercase letter, then capitalizes the second.

Re:He is lucky

[bzipitidoo]

Firing is still harsh. Plus, if he was an important employee, it will be costly to replace him. It's possible he was already on the edge, one more mistake from being fired, and this was the last straw. But it doesn't sound like that at all. His daughter could be totally mistaken, her parents could have spun a big illusion to keep her from worrying, but she claims Apple liked him.

Apple could have docked him some pay. Have him not get the bonus, accept a pay cut, even demand he take an unpaid leave of absence. Summarily firing him sends all kinds of bad messages, like that they think great engineers grow on trees and everyone leaps at the opportunity to work for the great, mighty Apple, and that they don't care about morale and expect the rest their employees to drink deep of the company Koolaid that this firing was totally justified. Must be a stressful place to work, a worse sweatshop than most top tech companies, many of which have a bad reputation that way.

There's also a small risk this could backfire on Apple. Apple's fans and customers could feel bad about what happened, and punish Apple for it. Apple is acting just like you say, smug and self-righteous, and that too could become part of this issue which comes back to haunt them. I doubt this though. Their customers probably will never notice, and that's a shame.

Re:He is lucky

[jcr]

she claims Apple liked him.

Entirely possible, but showing the device to his daughter was already a firing offense. He might have skated on that if she hadn't gone on a public forum to blab about it, but once it was all over YouTube, Apple had to let him go.

-jcr

Re:He is lucky

[Freischutz]

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.

Really? In a market where there's a shortage of qualified and experienced engineers and developers your company would not hire a an engineer who worked for one of the most successful device manufacturers on the planet for years because he is a 'Cool Aid drinking' .. 'self righteous smug motherfucker' ... 'who think he's better than everybody else'? If I was hiring engineers I would not turn my nose up at a dyed in the wool Android developer if he was qualified and an experienced coder even though I am no particular fan of the Android OS or Google. Same goes for Microsoft developers, I may not like Microsoft as a company but their engineers and developers are not radioactive space zombies who breathe in oxygen and exhale mustard gas. Apart from being a generalisation of ridiculous proportions, that whole post is mostly just a steaming pile of fanboy whining that make you sound like the love child of a drama queen and a snow flake, you really should get over yourself.

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?

There's a reason for those NDAs.

[jcr]

Back when I first joined the company in '02, one of my colleagues explained to me what product secrecy was worth to us in dollar terms. We had just gotten the iMac G4 on the cover of Time magazine, because it was news. It was news, because it was a secret. You can't buy the front cover of Time as an ad placement, but if you could, it would be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Apple has always gotten vast amounts of press attention, worth hundreds of millions, maybe even billions of dollars, because of the secrecy. If some guy drops the ball on maintaining that secrecy and keeps his job, then more people are going to get sloppy about it, and that pisses away a massive benefit to the shareholders.

Sucks for him that he didn't take the NDAs seriously, but Apple did the right thing in showing him the door.

-jcr

Why is his daughter still posting?

[kronix1986]

Watched the video expecting it to be a 12-year-old, but no, it's a grown woman. How on earth could she not have known that she'd get into trouble for posting this before release? Did she think she was entitled to a world exclusive hands-on preview of the device because her dad is an Apple engineer?

Simply put, it's the father's fault for letting his daughter handle an employee device. Letting family use a top-secret company prototype is reasons enough for dismissal, but the family member then posting videos to YouTube of this *unreleased* product really takes the biscuit.

Apple have done some terrible things (e.g. getting the police to raid Gizmodo after they legally acquired a pre-release iPhone) but I see no issue with this firing. The fact that the daughter posted a follow-up video really says it all. Let me guess, she wants to be a social media star?

Re:An unfortunate incident

[Cyberpunk Reality]

Not to target you personally, but "the credibility of their rules needed to be protected" is a stupid and lame reason to fire someone. In the long run, *rule* is completely irrelevant. What's important is the goal the rule is trying to achieve - not leaking any product info early.

Now, maybe pour encourager les autres firings will actually achieve that. But I doubt it. From what I read, they're firing him for making a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, even big ones. The key is to keep employees who learn from their mistakes, so that you don't end up paying the cost of a different employee maing the same mistake again. Now, maybe this was one of several incidents (and they don't need to all be leaks), but I didn't see any evidence of that.

What it really send a message about is a draconian corporate culture. It tells other employees to live in fear. And random fear at that. Robert Powell, the engineer who lost a prototype iPhone at a bar years ago, still appears to be employed there according to LinkedIn. So now it looks more like a campaign of terror than "rule enforcement".

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:lose-lose situation

[drinkypoo]

its one of those sad moments where everybody lose for no good reason.

You don't seem to understand that Apple sells hype. This engineer interfered with Apple's cloak of mystery, which is one of the biggest ways they enhance their perception of value. Without smoke and mirrors, Apple is just another manufacturer of trinkets from whom the magic escaped long, long ago. Apple literally does not give one tenth of one shit whether they have the best RF engineer. Remember "holding it wrong"? That guy is an interchangeable robot to Apple. Secrecy, on the other hand, is valuable. You can't put the smoke back into the capacitor.

The "look at me" generation

[JoeyRox]

Sorry to go all old-man-yells-at-cloud up in here but today's generation is all about looking for ways to be noticed any way they can. Her apology video demonstrates that - she's beaming with pride about how her video was trending before it was taken down. People used to only earn recognition by either achieving something through hard work. YouTube and social media has provided them shortcuts to that status.

Re:An unfortunate incident

[drinkypoo]

Not to target you personally, but "the credibility of their rules needed to be protected" is a stupid and lame reason to fire someone.

In a vacuum, that might be true. However...

In the long run, *rule* is completely irrelevant. What's important is the goal the rule is trying to achieve - not leaking any product info early.

...but he did. He totally did that thing. And even if it's not serious, it interferes with Apple's most important product — the veneer of capability and competence. When holes are punched in that, Apple suffers, because it's all they've got. They don't have technical superiority, they don't have unique features... all they have is their name, and the value of that is based on things like sphincter control.

From what I read, they're firing him for making a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes, even big ones. The key is to keep employees who learn from their mistakes, so that you don't end up paying the cost of a different employee maing the same mistake again.

Apple does not have any critical employees. Literally anyone at Apple could get hit by a bus tomorrow without impeding the operation of the company. The days when Apple depended on would-be superstars to do anything but give presentations are long over and Apple is now just banging out new iterations by formula, and there are people lined up ten deep to step into every role Apple's got, desperate for a paycheck. Keeping a prototype secret is clearly and obviously very important for Apple; Apple has a long history of taking this issue very seriously. Nobody who has trouble remembering this should need Apple to "do a much better job from here on out in addressing the rules and making sure that everybody is aware of the rules" because anyone with two brain cells to rub together ought to be fully aware of the rules by now.

Re:Responsibility Accepted

[drinkypoo]

Why should it _cost_ them money? It's free press, and creates a buzz for the product, leading to increased sales, leading to more profit.

Apple spends orders of magnitude more than this guy's [former] salary on advertising, and a big portion of that is controlling the timing of the release of information. When this one engineer allowed his daughter to take pictures of this one device, it will have resulted in actual work (which costs actual money) for other employees. It may have affected media spend, where lots of zeroes on the ends of numbers are commonplace. When the left hand and the right hand don't cooperate, it becomes difficult to pull off a magic trick, and magic is Apple's differentiating factor. At the end of the day, the competitors' devices accomplish all the same tasks, so Apple isn't competing on the basis of competence. They're competing on the basis of image, and part of that is keeping wraps on their prototypes so that they can maintain secrecy, so that they can in turn control the message.

Re:An unfortunate incident

[thegarbz]

and everybody being aware of her doing it.

Being aware and giving a shit are two different things. It's amazing to see how far you can get with quite obviously breaking rules without someone stopping to speak up to you.

It's amazing how much you get away with if you show the confidence of someone who is supposed to do what they have. I remember at once chemical plant I worked at I occasionally have to take pictures. If I'm using my phone I get stopped every 5 minutes by someone asking to see my photography permit. When I brought in my DSLR and a tripod, not a single person questioned me.

Similarly walking through one company's plant without hearing protection on, I got pulled up straight away (even though it was a quiet area). Same company different site which I wasn't familiar with I walked into the plant protected area after turning down the wrong street. I was in suit and tie, people everywhere. No one dared to question the "important looking" person.

An obvious breach of the rule often look so deliberate that they may not be breaches of the rules.