Tim Cook Faces Surprising Employee Unrest at Apple (opens in new tab)

I bought an iPhone from an Apple Store employee who couldn't speak but used a phone to communicate with me by typing out their messages. It was perfectly fine.

I'm a bit surprised speech to text these days wouldn't basically take you as far as you need to go for a deaf employee.

That said, if you take away jobs with a large communication component from the deaf, that rules out A LOT. I think reasonable accommodations should be provided, versus saying "most jobs are unreasonable for you to have."

Is this is someone who is either looking for an angle to litigate with a rich company or has completely unrealistic expectations or both? I feel like if you had a real conversation with this person and got to the root of how they feel they would know their ask is unreasonable. I’m sure they may also feel like they have been dealt a bad hand and want to find a way to be compensated. While this route may make a few lawyers happy I really doubt that winning a lawsuit against Apple for not hiring a sign language interpreter will bring them any peace. What I have been noticing and I could be completely wrong and or biased here is that we have a large population of folks in the US that are struggling with mental health issues and that manifests in a lot of odd ways. This seems to be one of them.

+1 As a society we want to do all we can to accommodate the handicapped so they can work, and many deaf persons are extremely effective lip-readers able to handle retail customer interactions. If Richard's lip-reading isn't up to the job, a non customer facing role would be better for Richard, either that or have Richard do email and message chat customer interactions that are compatible with his deafness.

There’s a lot of weird comments in here by people who don’t know anything about deaf people.

1. Text is a common medium for communicating with the deaf. Younger deaf people in particular will be fine with this

2. VRS is also an option, but it would be awkward in that scenario. VRS is subsidized by the government. VRS predates Facetime but both have been complimentary for deaf people

3. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to expect Apple to run their own VRS-like service optimized for deaf retail employees and situations, considering they make Facetime, and counting all the other anecdotes of interaction with deaf people here. The same should be true for any huge retail operation - Macy’s, Home Depot, Costco, etc… If you go to a hospital they already have something like this.

> Why not just hire the interpreter?

The interpreter has a job already - it’s to interpret. If they wanted to be an Apple specialist I think they would have applied for that job. Interpreting and doing the job of an Apple specialist are not the same thing. It’s possible the interpreter would be a terrible Apple specialist.

Why not just hire an interpreter? It’s a win-win-win: a deaf person had a job, an interpreter has a job, deaf customers are better served, hearing customers are better served.

And to top it all off Apple still makes a ton of money! What does an interpreter really in the grand scheme of things when you’re a trillion dollar company like Apple? What’s the cost of an interpreter really to them? I get this idea that corporations are profit maximizing entities, but we’ve really taken it a bit far when we can’t pay a little extra for common decency even when record profits are coming in. Like, maybe if times were tough we’d have a different conversation, but Apple isn’t exactly hurting for cash here. We’re not even asking for decency, just to follow the law. They’ll bend over backwards to help out a thug like Putin when his lawyers send a takedown demand, but to do a solid for their deaf customers and employees… well they can’t be bothered.

Common sense feels very uncommon these days.

It's unclear from the article, but there are plenty of roles (eg. if you work at the Genius bar, etc) where it doesn't make sense to hire an interpreter.

> If you need to hire another person to do the communicating, what are you doing there? Why not just hire the interpreter?

A good question to ask Apple. Why are they hiring such people and then ignoring their workplace demands that would allow them to do thier job satisfactorily? Is there some federal program that allows them to claim some tax benefit by hiring the disabled? Is that why Apple doesn't care about them or their job performance?

What if they want to move up?

How does the incidental learning work with the iPad? Are they experiencing equal employment opportunities as others? How can they contribute during the meetings without an interpreter? Should our expectations of them be lower because they are disabled?

You could have one Apple store in an area that always has a deaf person/sign language interpreter at hand and market it to people who want or need that!

Apple does pretty well in the accessibility department, they could use someone demonstrating it.

Does the interpreter know a whole lot about computers? I wouldn't say the employee is useless here.

>This is like if you're in a wheelchair and you get a job to hang drywall.

You could view it as a full employment plan.

The next logical step is to have a deaf man who only signs in Irish Sign Language. The first interpreter converts that to ASL, the second into spoken English.

It's a form of inclusion that might not be perfectly efficient as you point out but greatly improves lives of people with disabilities.

The ADA already requires Apple Stores to provide interpretation services or other reasonable accommodations for customers, so it's not much more of an ask to provide those for employees as well.

Speaking is only a small part of communicating. A sign language interpreter is just the person's "voice" but their approach on how to treat a customer is still theirs, not their interpreters.

EDIT>> For those missing my point. If Chris Voss suddenly needed a sign language interpreter, he'd still be incredibly valuable for his ability to negotiate. A person's skills in communication aren't solely tied to their ability to speak.

It is definitely a bit of a conundrum though. One must keep in mind that the United States is and near or more always has been a welfare state. We're supposed to have governments and organizations to come up with solutions to these types of societal problems we encounter.

The way you seem to be looking at it - yes, I mostly agree that the company should not outright be expected to essentially hire another fully time employee to work as the deaf employees interpreter. But in the 21st century, in the developed country that is the United States, I very much feel as if there should be some way to quickly and reasonably pair this employee with a student(s) of a local sign language or whatever school/program in which they come and go assisting in translation services for part of school credit/curriculum/outreach. Anybody learning a language will tell you there's nothing better than real world experience.

This gives the disabled (in the form of being deaf) person a meaningful occupation/independence, and students an assured way to get important experience. However, since the US is a highly capitalistic machine, we seem to not have reasonable things such as this set up on any meaningful scale.

Lots of downvoting. Do HN users have beef with disability accomodations or something?

The employee is deaf. He needs an interpreter to understand the customer's speech. He does not need the interpreter to respond to that speech. He would be performing his job. Your drywall analogy is insulting.

Literally, nothing is unreasonable for Apple. They're among the richest companies on the planet. I'm over Corporate Equity and treating them the same as the mom & pop grocery store down the street. Yeah, it'd be unreasonable for small businesses.

Its not unreasonable for Apple. Tim Cook could personally, out of his own salary, pay the salaries of every Apple employee in New York. He could give them all a 200% raise, and he'd still make twenty times more than ICU nurses who work 20 hour shifts to save his life if he ever needs it.

As an employee, it would help me feel pride to contribute toward a company that is willing to not just meet the law, but go beyond it and provide valuable and gainful employment for people like Richard. As a customer, it would make me proud to walk into an Apple Store and work with someone like Richard, to see that Apple were willing to pay an entire second salary simply to be accommodating. Comparatively, the salaries of an entire Apple retail stores' worth of employees is exactly the same as you accidentally dropping your change at a register, a penny rolls under the checkout lane, and you say "nah its not worth it".

Now, the reality of the situation is that, Apple Corporate would probably be fine with this, but the real problem is with this Middle Manager. To be clear, it reflects poorly on Corporate, and its their responsibility to set terms and culture to ensure Bad Store Managers don't pop up. But, they will. What matters is Apple's response, not necessarily the history of what happened (though, six years is a very long time).

I don't see it. The most disgruntled people I worked with in the past kept most of their griping off of slack or IM or email because they suspected it was logged.

Is constant complaining over lunch really less effective than constant complaining in DMs? Or, if it's large channels with lots of participants - what stopped those channels from happening before? Is the idea that people who would've whined over lunch to a small group are now recruiting many others to channels?

I think you bring up a very good point. I think Slack is now becoming a company-wide water cooler where any grievance, no matter how distant from your own team, can get a spotlight on it.

It's easy to live in a sort of vacuum if your small team is not witness to discrimination/harassment. In a large enough org it is entirely likely that there is an asshole somewhere that you have never encountered, never worked with that is making someone's life miserable.

I am glad these things are being exposed but saddened that it could be happening in the larger company I work at.

At my company of thousands there used to me one right wing troll and one left wing troll. The right wing troll would piss everyone off in the #diversity channel, the left wing troll would insult the company and leadership along social justice lines.

The amount of oxygen these two took up on Slack was incredible. There would be threads hundreds of messages long arguing about politics, and every all hands had some sour, insulting question.

Both were eventually let go. But Slack really scales up rabble rousing, for good and ill.

I think the feelings have been there for a long time. What changed is that it is harder to exert corporate culture (eg. fear or information control) while out of office.

Bingo

This is why all tech companies are against WFH. They realise that their game is weak without posturing, optics, name-dropping, overt extroversion and all else they've mastered to rise up.

Kinda reminiscent of what social media did to mainstream media --- everyone realised they were being fed a narrative and regimes changed throughout the world in an anti-establishment wave

Jonathan Haidt has been talking about exactly this issue for many years now.

Here's is one of many of his videos on YouTube dealing exactly with this topic: https://youtu.be/jQcDw1r1lGw

It’s a shame Apple leadership didn’t smarten up. They could have been as successful as Borland!

>She said Apple had begun trying to reassign her after she complained that the company’s work on the minerals was not, in some cases, leading to meaningful change in some war-torn countries"

What other geopolitical problems does this person think Apple should be tackling other than resolving tribal conflicts in war torn central Africa? The Taliban? Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women? Haiti’s poverty?

Ridiculous.

A job is a job. You just quit and find another one if your employer no longer wants you or wants you to do something you don’t care for.

Is this attitude possibly because these companies hire based on the entire emotion that you’re special and elite and we’re all going to link arms and save the planet?

“She said Apple had begun trying to reassign her after she complained”

You quoted this, but seem to have ignored it. This was not a role that got deprecated, rather she complained that her/Apple’s work in that role was ineffective.

This is a very valid complaint, and the sign of a valuable employee. However, most corporations respond by covering up ineffectivity, which is why it turned out badly for her.

In UK/Canada less pay is a breach of employment contract/constructive dismissal/wrongful termination, and requires the employer to pay appropriate severance.

Not sure how the law varies state to state.

Yep. The increased leverage that low-wage employees had during the pandemic due to enhanced unemployment benefits gave them a taste of this as well. Lots of people being able to say “take this job and shove it” led to very real labor shortages in certain sectors.

> It's always a tiny minority of activists organizing on slack who are causing a lot of the unrest in tech companies.

This is a common talking point to marginalize political activity in any situation: 'It's just a tiny minority agitating', etc. In every situation, a tiny minority appeals to the majority and sometimes it convinces them. (If a majority of Americans ever protested something, that would be over 160 million people in the streets. Just think of the logistics of food, water, and waste ... cellular data bandwidth ... Twitter, Facebook and Instagram load ...)

That's how change happens; we try to persuade each other. People who are more involved, motivated, skilled, available, etc. do more of the work. If there was an environmental problem in SF Bay, the people who have the knowledge and expertise about the issue, and the communication skills, would inform and try to persuade everyone else. I'm not going to investigate it myself.

An unofficial, definitely don't tell management slack would have 1000s of users before the email prohibiting it managed to finish sending to all employees. Draconian policies seem viable and like they'd work, but they require a certain amount of compliance to be effective.

That's the right direction, but the wrong policy. Basecamp's "no talking politics on work channels" is more likely to be effective, in part because spending work hours on other things - e.g. a political non-company slack - then becomes an issue of wasting time.

Is it similar to Twitter where the <0.1% drive dialogue?

Tim Cook reaps what he sows. He started all this when he fired Antonio García Martínez in response to an employee petition. (Hint to Tim Cook: You should have fired each and every one of the employees who signed that petition.)

He made the wrong, worst people at the company feel "empowered" and now there's no stopping them.

Just a note, before Slack a lot of the company was just using iMessage - nobody wants that, 30+ people group chats with messages at all hours of the day was the worst digital communication experience I've ever seen at a company.

I think when "suppressing employee communication" is part of your playbook, it's time to consider that the unrest might be warranted.

That would push internal communications into a far more externally facing/visible forum, I would guess.

This would not help Apple’s case with the current Department of Labor probes, as well as the investigations complaints lodged with California’s Dept of Industrial Relations Labor Commissioner's Office. Organizing efforts are protected by federal law, as is discussing and sharing your compensation information with others (regarding pay equity).

https://www.engadget.com/apple-faces-us-labor-board-investig...

She got hired in April of 2020.

Because someone has had jobs at 8 tech companies that makes them a bad employee? The only way I have ever gotten a meaningful raise is by changing companies; it feels like the norm to be at a company for a lot less now-a-days.

Personally, I was loyal to a company for 10 years and as soon as I left and my experience vanished off their record, I was approached for the price my new company was giving me. Screw that noise.

Yeah, Cher is an interesting character. Feels like she found a passion in being a corporate activist and it's very interesting to see how her story will play out.

"has worked for 8 other tech companies" is normal in Silicon Valley.

Twitters algo has surfaced some of her stuff on my feed before, much of the same as seen here

> I'm guessing less of the former, and more of the latter.

Nice guess, but what's the problem with rabble-rousing? People fight actual violent battles with their employers, perhaps not so much in this country anymore. But that doesn't mean all the work to improve labor is finished. Apple and Google were fined for fixing wages only seven years ago (perhaps an eon in SV time, I wouldn't know). I'm sure I could walk into any multinational corporation and find a distasteful practice worth fixing, to pretend otherwise is the height of naivety.

As the other commenters have mentioned, your "technical analysis" is very wrong here. I don't want to rehash the details that the others have mentioned about why you're wrong, but I do want to take a moment to say that what you've posted is pretty much perfectly embodies why many people hate "the orange site". It's these kind of faux-objective breakdowns that really hurt the site as a whole.

I'm willing to believe that you meant well with your comment, but I think you need to realize that even when you attempt to be objective bias creeps up readily. It starts with which stories you even decide to call out. You might feel that this person is fake or lacks the position that she says she has, but fact checking this inherently involves a selection process. Remember when Hacker News decided to "check" whether Katie Bouman had "actually worked on the black hole image"? This is where problems arise, because it's obvious this doesn't happen for everyone–just people that are thought to be "fakes", which is something that is selected by decidedly subjective criteria.

The second problem is that as you go through your analysis you bake in assumptions–in this case many that are wrong–and use it to arrive at an "objective" answer. Trying to reason from your armchair and present it under a guise of factualness is the biggest problem with any kind of "rationalist" analysis on the internet, including the kind that Hacker News is unfortunately known for. Here you literally have no idea of how Apple works internally, and at one point you openly claim that her personal Twitter doesn't demonstrate "a computer 'mindset'" (how can you possibly evaluate this objectively, even putting aside questions of why her Twitter is the right way to judge this?). Trying to submit it as "technical analysis" is just wrong, period.

It's good to be skeptical, and apply your own reasoning to things you read online. But try to be mindful of which things you're choosing to apply it to, as well as any flaws of your own you may be injecting when doing your own evaluation. Hacker News should be a place of healthy curiosity and discussion, but to do that we can't possibly accept this kind of content.

Cher is a real employee, but anything more I'll leave unsaid out of respect for her privacy. Apple employees can easily look up other employees, and there are easy ways to tell whether someone is an Apple employee should they choose to reveal some of those things.

Also I don't know whether she's remote or onsite, but there are multiple orgs with offices in Seattle - one of my friends just got hired as an engineering manager onsite for Apple in Seattle.

Some of these comments could use some fact checking of their own :) .

> Twitter suggests that "Cher Scarlett" is located in Seattle. (This would make them a remote worker for Apple).

Apple has a large in-person engineering office in Seattle, which is easy to determine from a Google search for 'apple seattle engineering':

https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?location=seattle-SEA (scroll down past the retail jobs)

https://www.geekwire.com/2021/signs-point-apple-making-seatt...

https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-announces-new-office-s...

https://goo.gl/maps/qhjMUiC9M3HMGMQs7

I'm not sure I understand the rest of your argument. You think this person a) doesn't exist b) doesn't work for Apple c) does exist and works for Apple remotely, because there is no Seattle office d) works for Apple in the critical path for security reports and bug bounties, and is therefore why Apple is (allegedly) not responding to them because she's spending all her day tweeting e) works for Apple in an unknown capacity, which you cannot figure out f) tweets too much g) doesn't tweet enough about a specific security "mindset," which all people in a security role have?

This "technical analysis" doesn't seem to hold up, and I don't see any particular reason to suspect this person doesn't exist. I suspect the journalist's due diligence was more sound.

The article <https://sfbayview.com/2021/03/i-thought-i-was-dying-my-apart...> you posted is quite interesting, actually.

I started skeptical, but by the end tended to believe Ashley Gjovik. So I don't know about Cher, and maybe Ashley kind-of got radicalized by her experience, but she does have a lot of evidence about the apartment issue.

Really worth reading. Lots of research. Data. Environmental impact reports. Kickbacks from developers to the city (<https://blogs.mercurynews.com/internal-affairs/2014/05/19/sa...>). All kinds of stuff. It's like The Wire.

It makes me look at urban redevelopment differently.

Also makes me think differently about "community investment" and such. How much of this is just bribes and protection money?

Are you suggesting there was not a real complaint about Ashley’s office being on a superfund site, or that you don’t find the claim credible and that therefore the nyt shouldn’t have reported it?

The complaint itself is definitely about the office. https://twitter.com/ashleygjovik/status/1438897383912394758?...

What would those anti-activism features be? As far as I am aware workspace owners can see "private" messages, so slack isn't much use to organize.

Yes it is, but discrimination itself is not illegal.

I guess you missed Apple Watch (which basically invented its category and leads it by a wide margin), and AirPods (also leads its category by a wide margin), and the M1 (instantly made a joke out of Intel) and most of the history of the iPhone.

Kinda makes one wonder what else you've missed. Such as, basically everything. "De facto" is not hyphenated, btw, nor did you use it correctly.

> They haven't had anything new in 10 years

I dunno, their new M1 silicon is pretty dope. Airpod Pros are the most recent thing I bought from them and they're a pleasure to use every day. They're not at the same level of innovation that they were 10 years ago, but they're also not at zero.

> Cook is up there using all sorts of superlatives

> keynotes get more typical and lacklustre

Surely huge irony is not lost here

> When was the last time they created a new category?

Almost every current Apple product (save the HomePod) is the category defining product of it's class. The iPhone, the iPad, the M1 MacBooks, the Apple Watch, the AirPods, the Apple TV, the iMac, and the AirTags are all essentially best-in-class, and the standards-bearer for the category.

Last Tuesday - an Apple Watch is coming with a swipe-capable keyboard and edge to edge screen, but doesn't make it so the bands I own don't work any longer. I will soon have a full, cellular computer on my wrist. That is Dick Tracy future tech.

Basically all of the AirPods that support sound cancellation. EarPods that could do a better job of cutting out outside sound than the very expensive Bose headphones I owned prior, but could fit in my jeans coin pocket.

The M1 and every Mac to have it so far.

Just because you're not surprised and delighted by Apple products does't mean others are.

That is an unfair comparison. A delightful improvement does not mean that Apple needs to create a new product category - which I don't think they have ever done actually. They didn't invent a smart phone, they didn't invent the tablet or the watch+. They took what was already on the market and improved it to the clear delight of their customers.