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.

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: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.

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: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.