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

Get use to it

[p51d007]

Mr. Jobs is dead son...WE the board of directors NOW run Apple. Get use to it. Now, it is ALL about profit and stock price, NOT producing the best product available.

That isn't suprising

[110010001000]

Companies are usually started by people who actually care about the company. Once they leave they are replaced by managers and MBA and accounting types who are in it to make money for themselves. I won't pretend that company founders aren't interested in making money too, but they usually want more out of it. Just look at Apple and Microsoft: not much going on once the founders left. The companies still make mountains of money though, because that is the focus.

Re:That isn't suprising

[AmiMoJo]

Really though, is it worse now than under Steve "holding it wrong" Jobs, who was well known for treating engineers badly and being an all around ass?

Re:That isn't suprising

[lgw]

Jobs was a famous asshole, but it sure seemed like he actually cared about having a good product. Sure, his "good" was about fashion, but that's what worked for Apple (there's a reason 2 of the 10 richest CEOs are fashion moguls). And while Apple phones seem to be in a downward spiral, quality-wise, they're still way better than Samsung on that front.

Personally, I prefer a phone with a high-quality headphone jack, no "notch", and no exploding battery, but then I'm a nerd with no fashion sense at all.

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.

What a delusional retard

[macraig]

Of the two Steves that founded the company, Steve Jobs was the one who lacked ethics. This idiot idolized the wrong Steve. You would think, since he claims to be an engineer, that he would choose to idolize a fellow engineer and not an amoral salesman.

Re:What a delusional retard

[dgatwood]

It has nothing to do with SJ's ethics. SJ's personality kept a lot of people with personalities like his in line. Now, it's a lot of cutthroat people stabbing each other in the backs to get ahead. Tim just isn't enough of an a**hole to stomp that behavior into the ground, and until someone does, Apple will continue to have serious problems.

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.

Can't fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is broken and can't be fixed, the problem is soldered in its core and 3rd party repairs won't work.

Re:Can't fix

[quonset]

Sadly, it is also true. Look at their high end line of "pro" products, both laptops and desktops. Everything is soldered, bolted, then welded to the motherboard. There is absolutely no way for anyone to do an upgrade. Buy a machine with 8 GB of RAM? Too bad. That's all you'll ever get unless you buy a new machine with more RAM.

The sad thing is Apple could make mincemeat of Microsoft if they had better, configurable hardware. Slightly lower prices wouldn't hurt either.

Instead, as this engineer relates, Apple is now all about making money rather than providing a good product.

representing himself in court

[commodore64_love]

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.

- As for Apple, it never surprised me their corporate culture would return to the Apple of Pre-Steve Jobs (pre-1997). The old Apple Board drove themselves to the same bankruptcy that killed Commodore and Atari in 1994/96 respectively, and now that board is back in power.

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.

I hope his goal wasn't to win

[dbrueck]

Welp, regardless of whether or not the case has merit, he's screwed on many levels:

1) "Eastman, who is representing himself in court"
2) Apple has more lawyers on staff than many companies have it total employees.
3) Even if he somehow had a strong enough argument to compensate, they'll win just by drawing the case out indefinitely so that he can't afford to keep pursuing it.

Re:I hope his goal wasn't to win

[ghoul]

He knows he cant afford lawyers as good as Apple and hence cant win in court. He aims to embarress Apple into settling and for that a story about the little guy representing himself works much better.

The same Steve Jobs who fired people on sight?

[known_coward_69]

Like when he didn't like you in the elevator? The same one who demeaned and cursed people? The same one who had his little circle of trust and once Cook broke it the iphone and every other product at apple improved within a year, sales went back up and the stock shot up?

Re:You're saying PowerPC was a fucking disaster? G

[rl117]

The problem wasn't PowerPC hardware. The problem was that the product lines were confusing. They had dozens of models which were all too similar. It made it hard for people to decide what they wanted. Jobs cut that back. How many iMac variants were there? How many iBooks? The bare minimum to differentiate based upon requirements. It made it easy to sell to people, and easy for people to be satisfied they had made the right choice.

Right now, they are reversing that trend. There are increasing numbers of variants for their phones and tablets, and I doubt Jobs would be happy with it.