Apple Went Rotten After Steve Jobs' Death, Former Engineer Claims (siliconvalley.com)

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."

Comments

Nice to have confirmation...

[ChrisKnight]

This has been pretty obvious from the outside, but it's nice to have confirmation from the inside. Innovation at Apple is dead. 'Pro' products have become a synonym for Expensive, while lacking the features pro users came to depend on. There are a number of things Jobs would not have tolerated: 1) Dongles. He would have fired anyone who tried to replace all the ports on a pro laptop and suggested users buy dongles. 2) Grinding out new products and releases on a deadline, quality be damned. He had no problems dragging out a release date until a product was perfect. 3) Micro-iterations flogged as innovation. 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've been an Apple user since the 80's, and a 'fanboi' since the early 2000's, but I may be typing this post on the last Mac I'll ever buy if Apple doesn't get their heads out of their arses. Sadly, with the way they are raking in money hand over fist, their current approach is being vindicated by the market and the Apple we once loved is never going to re-emerge.

You can see it in their product lines

[barrywalker]

Anybody else remember Apple's product lines in the early 90s? What a fucking disaster. What did Jobs do when he came back? Slashed and simplified them. Made it easy to figure out which product you needed.

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:What a delusional retard

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:representing himself in court

[Daltorak]

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.

Bought out companies are different

[CraigCruden]

I have worked for bought out companies and companies that had leadership changes that were internal and transitional -- they are completely different cases.

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 mature company - which Apple is) from inside the company -- tends to be a slow change. This person is trying to make it look like it is Jeckyll and Hyde -- sounds to me more of a person that felt entitled just because, and is trying to take his revenge and get a little money at the same time. The only thing he will do is destroy his own reputation and marketability.

Re:That isn't suprising

[quanminoan]

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.