I have been wondering if you could successfully sue Apple for defamation. To be guilty of understatement, they have pretty much screwed up your career. As you have noted, they certainly knew about the book. To me their actions are wildly unreasonable and unfair.
The reason why Shopify had to clarify "we're not a family, we're a company" is because we're finally coming OFF an era where "we're more than a company, we're a family/vision/revolution/religion" was the dominant thinking of senior management.
When it served their own ends to demand enormous productivity and tamp down in dissent from their workforce, it was fine. Ideas like "Bring your whole self to work" weren't done out of any high minded egalitarian ideal, but was convenient in that it gave moral license for "you" to spend more time at "work" without any further compensation.
But now that these workforces have taken it quite literally, so now senior management is trying to backtrack. I suspect things will eventually reach a new equilibrium where the executives succeed at rooting out woke drama, but face higher labor costs as employees adapt to the new ethos of "we're a company and your employment is just a transaction."
Conversely a natural antidote to the "cancel culture" these executives are worried about, would be stronger labor protections that didn't make it so trivial to fire someone for some perceived transgression in a Tweet five years ago. This would also surely tamp down the woke mobs but I doubt these executives will be pushing for that any time soon.
This strikes me as accurate, but what changed was the early tech companies had to fight or die. If they survived, the early employees would make enormous gains, so there was an incentive for everyone to sublimate their ego/work-life balance and work towards the goal. Once the companies achieved massive success and started growing their workforce, perhaps the founders / CEOs / HR departments didn't realize the culture and hiring had to change with it. They were hiring harvesters and pretending they were frontier explorers.
I think companies / HR depts had become adept in extracting the maximal "discretionary effort" of employees by catering to their every whim. Micro-kitchens. Laundry. On-site gyms. Anything that keeps you in the building and keeps you producing.
Is it any wonder this gets conflated in employee minds to "I am the company and the company is me".
I gravitate more to (IIRC) Jack Welch's view: "It's friday. I got paid. The company and I are even".
Apple leadership has not responded to the Palestine petition or ReturnToOffice petition. So I’m super curious to know why they acted upon the petition that was circulated about you and then took action to fire you. I know you’re bound by an NDA. Still, dying to know what went down. Top performing Apple engineers earn so much $200K+ plus $200K+ in RSUs, not to mention the perks and prestige. Sorry man.
As for your forthcoming trip overseas -- would appreciate any comment on the apartheid Israel and Gaza open-air concentration camp and similarities with horrors of the Warsaw ghetto
Well written. I'm looking forward to the next email. Though I agree with you regarding starting Slack crusades instead of working, I don't think petitioning to be allowed to work from home is comparable. I don't like the implication that employees of successful companies should just be grateful and not fight for rights or privilages. They have a share of that success and can demand whatever they deem fair, and the employer can then decide whether to give it to them.
I would say that spending valuable influence as employees to push someone out because of some harsh language they published years ago is a waste. Spending it trying to improve your working conditions though. Like avoiding a long commute, when it's been proven working remote is just as productive. To me that seems a just cause.
So very nice to have you back! I read all of your pieces out loud to my wife - your writing style and choice of words are beautifully amusing, poignant, and sharp-witted.
You are absolutely right - corporate leaders need to take a stand and draw a thick, unpassable line between business and personal...otherwise, as you stated so well, there's no going back once you've conceded to demands.
Has any of the complainers read your book? Their petition makes no sense. You insulted a lot of people including yourself but by no means it was ‘misogynistic’. What about in the passage when you said that British Trader brought most of the income and the responsibilities of your children as most women do. (quotinv from memory). One door closed but many others will open and I can't wait to follow your success.
"venture capitalists and CEOs confide that every company is now agonizing over which way to break on the issue"
One thing I don't understand in all this is the lack of courage on the part of tech CEOs when it comes to activist employees. I would so much love to get these CEOs and VCs you mention in a room and just ask them one question: "why don't you just say 'no'"? Are there legal reasons? Cultural?
I could get why the leadership of, say, a series A startup wants to tamp down potential drama as quickly as possible. But how do you get to be the CEO of Apple and feel you have to immediately cave in the face of even mild employee pressure?
"Hire mostly immigrants, who still entertain the quaint notion that getting a job means actually showing up and doing it, rather than mounting Slack crusades to fill the spiritual hole at the core of their lives."
Timnit Gebru and Anima Anandkumar are immigrants. Steve Jobs was not. I know Silicon Valley's answer to everything is "more immigrants", but that's not going to help here.
The real problem is a lack of spine when dealing with activist employees. The solution is not to get more compliant employees. It's to develop a spine. At the very least, it should be a firing offense to organize campaigns to get co-workers fired.
So much to unpack this sentence. Glorious prose. "Like frontier forts in 19th-century Afghanistan where the limits of the British Empire were defined by the range of a .303 rifle, your scope of cancellation is defined by how far your antagonists can fire their Tweeted missiles that declare you no longer worthy of human attention."
I shot Lee Enfield 303s at my British public (private) school in the late 70s as part of our required CCF military training. My school closed the armory and banned the destroyed the rifles a few years back because "the culture has changed". Even Mr. Martinez's lovely metaphor has been canceled.
And to give credit where it's due, the metaphor stems from a half-remembered passage in Meyer's 'Tournament of Shadows' where he quotes some British officer's dispatch claiming 'the British Empire here extends only so far as an Enfield rifle can lob a .303 bullet', or something along those lines.
The culture has indeed changed. Not clear if it's for the better.
The proggies are leading us to colonialism? Maybe you're right. I read that Biden was bombing Syria again, or someplace like that. It's so hard to keep track.
Well it looks like you’re back to pissing into the tent from outside. Downside: you take the team jersey off and live like Brendan Behan, maybe forever. The upside: you take the team jersey off and live like Brendan Behan, maybe forever.
About "hire mostly immigrants", I don't agree. I am an American tech engineer at a Big Tech Co. and totally agree with your points. In today's world, Steve Jobs would have been cancelled before being able to change the industry. Political correctness and wokeness is impeding innovation.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which." The closing paragraph reminded me of this.
Of course Silicon Valley has been terraformed by HR ladies to more resemble their home planet. This isn’t an accident, it’s how Sand Hill Road vultures control all you feckless nerds. Write all the memoirs you want but maybe read a wiki page about sociology some time… or Karl Marx…
I have been wondering if you could successfully sue Apple for defamation. To be guilty of understatement, they have pretty much screwed up your career. As you have noted, they certainly knew about the book. To me their actions are wildly unreasonable and unfair.
The reason why Shopify had to clarify "we're not a family, we're a company" is because we're finally coming OFF an era where "we're more than a company, we're a family/vision/revolution/religion" was the dominant thinking of senior management.
When it served their own ends to demand enormous productivity and tamp down in dissent from their workforce, it was fine. Ideas like "Bring your whole self to work" weren't done out of any high minded egalitarian ideal, but was convenient in that it gave moral license for "you" to spend more time at "work" without any further compensation.
But now that these workforces have taken it quite literally, so now senior management is trying to backtrack. I suspect things will eventually reach a new equilibrium where the executives succeed at rooting out woke drama, but face higher labor costs as employees adapt to the new ethos of "we're a company and your employment is just a transaction."
Conversely a natural antidote to the "cancel culture" these executives are worried about, would be stronger labor protections that didn't make it so trivial to fire someone for some perceived transgression in a Tweet five years ago. This would also surely tamp down the woke mobs but I doubt these executives will be pushing for that any time soon.
That's entirely possible, and I don't doubt those were the motivations for some exec teams.
What an odd, odd world we live in now.
This strikes me as accurate, but what changed was the early tech companies had to fight or die. If they survived, the early employees would make enormous gains, so there was an incentive for everyone to sublimate their ego/work-life balance and work towards the goal. Once the companies achieved massive success and started growing their workforce, perhaps the founders / CEOs / HR departments didn't realize the culture and hiring had to change with it. They were hiring harvesters and pretending they were frontier explorers.
I had exactly the same thought.
I think companies / HR depts had become adept in extracting the maximal "discretionary effort" of employees by catering to their every whim. Micro-kitchens. Laundry. On-site gyms. Anything that keeps you in the building and keeps you producing.
Is it any wonder this gets conflated in employee minds to "I am the company and the company is me".
I gravitate more to (IIRC) Jack Welch's view: "It's friday. I got paid. The company and I are even".
Apple leadership has not responded to the Palestine petition or ReturnToOffice petition. So I’m super curious to know why they acted upon the petition that was circulated about you and then took action to fire you. I know you’re bound by an NDA. Still, dying to know what went down. Top performing Apple engineers earn so much $200K+ plus $200K+ in RSUs, not to mention the perks and prestige. Sorry man.
Fantastic summation of the situation at hand.
Consider a new career as a consultant writing fuck-you non-apologies for tech companies. You'd be excellent at it.
It's everywhere. See every NYT internal scandal that's broken recently; there's always a Slack component.
Thanks and congratulations.
As for your forthcoming trip overseas -- would appreciate any comment on the apartheid Israel and Gaza open-air concentration camp and similarities with horrors of the Warsaw ghetto
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E1XaAZ9WQAA5YeR?format=jpg&name=small
Two-bit, half-witted, forked tongue comment
Well written. I'm looking forward to the next email. Though I agree with you regarding starting Slack crusades instead of working, I don't think petitioning to be allowed to work from home is comparable. I don't like the implication that employees of successful companies should just be grateful and not fight for rights or privilages. They have a share of that success and can demand whatever they deem fair, and the employer can then decide whether to give it to them.
I would say that spending valuable influence as employees to push someone out because of some harsh language they published years ago is a waste. Spending it trying to improve your working conditions though. Like avoiding a long commute, when it's been proven working remote is just as productive. To me that seems a just cause.
So very nice to have you back! I read all of your pieces out loud to my wife - your writing style and choice of words are beautifully amusing, poignant, and sharp-witted.
You are absolutely right - corporate leaders need to take a stand and draw a thick, unpassable line between business and personal...otherwise, as you stated so well, there's no going back once you've conceded to demands.
Has any of the complainers read your book? Their petition makes no sense. You insulted a lot of people including yourself but by no means it was ‘misogynistic’. What about in the passage when you said that British Trader brought most of the income and the responsibilities of your children as most women do. (quotinv from memory). One door closed but many others will open and I can't wait to follow your success.
Yes, the ironic thing is that the passage, read in its entirety....is *pro-woman*. I was in fact admiring a woman's competence and resilience.
"venture capitalists and CEOs confide that every company is now agonizing over which way to break on the issue"
One thing I don't understand in all this is the lack of courage on the part of tech CEOs when it comes to activist employees. I would so much love to get these CEOs and VCs you mention in a room and just ask them one question: "why don't you just say 'no'"? Are there legal reasons? Cultural?
I could get why the leadership of, say, a series A startup wants to tamp down potential drama as quickly as possible. But how do you get to be the CEO of Apple and feel you have to immediately cave in the face of even mild employee pressure?
"Hire mostly immigrants, who still entertain the quaint notion that getting a job means actually showing up and doing it, rather than mounting Slack crusades to fill the spiritual hole at the core of their lives."
Timnit Gebru and Anima Anandkumar are immigrants. Steve Jobs was not. I know Silicon Valley's answer to everything is "more immigrants", but that's not going to help here.
The real problem is a lack of spine when dealing with activist employees. The solution is not to get more compliant employees. It's to develop a spine. At the very least, it should be a firing offense to organize campaigns to get co-workers fired.
So much to unpack this sentence. Glorious prose. "Like frontier forts in 19th-century Afghanistan where the limits of the British Empire were defined by the range of a .303 rifle, your scope of cancellation is defined by how far your antagonists can fire their Tweeted missiles that declare you no longer worthy of human attention."
I shot Lee Enfield 303s at my British public (private) school in the late 70s as part of our required CCF military training. My school closed the armory and banned the destroyed the rifles a few years back because "the culture has changed". Even Mr. Martinez's lovely metaphor has been canceled.
That's a shame.
And to give credit where it's due, the metaphor stems from a half-remembered passage in Meyer's 'Tournament of Shadows' where he quotes some British officer's dispatch claiming 'the British Empire here extends only so far as an Enfield rifle can lob a .303 bullet', or something along those lines.
The culture has indeed changed. Not clear if it's for the better.
Well, the colonialism, the world can do without. The metaphor can live on.
Don’t hold your breath. That’s where progressive do-gooders lead us. You’ll know we are there, when it’s too late.
The proggies are leading us to colonialism? Maybe you're right. I read that Biden was bombing Syria again, or someplace like that. It's so hard to keep track.
Well it looks like you’re back to pissing into the tent from outside. Downside: you take the team jersey off and live like Brendan Behan, maybe forever. The upside: you take the team jersey off and live like Brendan Behan, maybe forever.
About "hire mostly immigrants", I don't agree. I am an American tech engineer at a Big Tech Co. and totally agree with your points. In today's world, Steve Jobs would have been cancelled before being able to change the industry. Political correctness and wokeness is impeding innovation.
China is moving forward while the US is arguing over the appropriate usage of pronouns.
The Chinese have their own problems with authority and social control. And, who knows, they may get to pronouns too.
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which." The closing paragraph reminded me of this.
Of course Silicon Valley has been terraformed by HR ladies to more resemble their home planet. This isn’t an accident, it’s how Sand Hill Road vultures control all you feckless nerds. Write all the memoirs you want but maybe read a wiki page about sociology some time… or Karl Marx…
Small mind think literally. We acquire that knowledge in personal ways. And then we read books about it. Or write.