'Game of Thrones' cold war between contractors plaguing Apple tools division
An except from a new book about major tech companies characterizes an internal Apple division as having a "Cold War" atmosphere, with infighting and contractor issues causing the section to be both a grueling place to work, and inefficient for the company itself.
Apple's Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) group handles the creation and management of internal tools Apple's employees use regularly, ranging from infrastructure to retail projects. According to an except of the book "Always Day One" by Alex Kantrowitz, the group is one that has considerable problems in how it currently operates.
The group involves a number of contracting firms including Wipro, Infosys, and Accenture that are bidding for projects from Apple, the excerpt published by BuzzFeed reads. The constant negotiations and fighting to take on projects has led to what one former employee describes as a "Game of Thrones nightmare."
The contracting firms all offer bids to work on projects, with Apple typically deciding the winning bid based on how cheap it is for Apple itself. The focus on staffing and maximizing the numbers of roles for each firm has led to a culture that former IS&T contractor Archana Sabapathy suggests is like "there's a Cold War going on every single day."
"They're just fighting for the roles," Sabapathy explained. "That's all they care about, not the work, not the deliverables, the effort the put in, or even talent. They're not looking for any of those aspects."
The constant battle has led to an uncertain and combative atmosphere, where typical workplace relationships are not possible due to the needs for contractor firm loyalty, as well as the constantly shifting contracting teams.
The bidding process also leads to lower-quality contractors than the projects typically require. Consulting companies are being paid between $120 and $150 per hour for a contractor's work, according to Sabapathy, while the contractor themselves get $40 to $55 per hour.
This results in a lower quality of work produced, Apple employees told the author, with many claiming to have needed to rewrite code for projects that ship to Apple in a broken state. "The engineering quality is extremely lackluster," one anonymous employee suggested to a Quora query, who was "shocked" to see how the projects were designed and developed.
"If you compare the code quality to that of a high schooler's or a fresh undergraduate, you seriously will not be able to distinguish between the two," the employee added.
Another employee responding in the same thread claimed "this department is worse than most IT sweatshops in India that you have heard of that are a bad place to work for engineers. From the day I joined to the day I quit from this department to another, everyday was soul sucking and made me curse my life for joining this department."
Apple is not the only company said to be abusing contractors instead of paying for full-time employees, with Kantrowitz citing Google's employee walkout and a ten-fold pay disparity between Facebook contract moderators and full-time staff as issues elsewhere in the technology world.
"For Apple, fixing its broken IS&T division would not only be the right thing to do from a moral standpoint - it would help the company's business as well," proposes Kantrowitz, with the building of tools that work and support existing products without needing refactoring able to help give its employees more time to work on new ideas.
Kantrowitz further warns "until Apple gives the division a hard look, its employees will be stuck spending their time reworking broken internal software, and wishing they were inventing instead."
Apple's Information Systems & Technology (IS&T) group handles the creation and management of internal tools Apple's employees use regularly, ranging from infrastructure to retail projects. According to an except of the book "Always Day One" by Alex Kantrowitz, the group is one that has considerable problems in how it currently operates.
The group involves a number of contracting firms including Wipro, Infosys, and Accenture that are bidding for projects from Apple, the excerpt published by BuzzFeed reads. The constant negotiations and fighting to take on projects has led to what one former employee describes as a "Game of Thrones nightmare."
The contracting firms all offer bids to work on projects, with Apple typically deciding the winning bid based on how cheap it is for Apple itself. The focus on staffing and maximizing the numbers of roles for each firm has led to a culture that former IS&T contractor Archana Sabapathy suggests is like "there's a Cold War going on every single day."
"They're just fighting for the roles," Sabapathy explained. "That's all they care about, not the work, not the deliverables, the effort the put in, or even talent. They're not looking for any of those aspects."
The constant battle has led to an uncertain and combative atmosphere, where typical workplace relationships are not possible due to the needs for contractor firm loyalty, as well as the constantly shifting contracting teams.
The bidding process also leads to lower-quality contractors than the projects typically require. Consulting companies are being paid between $120 and $150 per hour for a contractor's work, according to Sabapathy, while the contractor themselves get $40 to $55 per hour.
This results in a lower quality of work produced, Apple employees told the author, with many claiming to have needed to rewrite code for projects that ship to Apple in a broken state. "The engineering quality is extremely lackluster," one anonymous employee suggested to a Quora query, who was "shocked" to see how the projects were designed and developed.
"If you compare the code quality to that of a high schooler's or a fresh undergraduate, you seriously will not be able to distinguish between the two," the employee added.
Another employee responding in the same thread claimed "this department is worse than most IT sweatshops in India that you have heard of that are a bad place to work for engineers. From the day I joined to the day I quit from this department to another, everyday was soul sucking and made me curse my life for joining this department."
Apple is not the only company said to be abusing contractors instead of paying for full-time employees, with Kantrowitz citing Google's employee walkout and a ten-fold pay disparity between Facebook contract moderators and full-time staff as issues elsewhere in the technology world.
"For Apple, fixing its broken IS&T division would not only be the right thing to do from a moral standpoint - it would help the company's business as well," proposes Kantrowitz, with the building of tools that work and support existing products without needing refactoring able to help give its employees more time to work on new ideas.
Kantrowitz further warns "until Apple gives the division a hard look, its employees will be stuck spending their time reworking broken internal software, and wishing they were inventing instead."
Comments
That is literally how all of those companies work. Its all sales and sales engineers, internal talent is minimal to say the least, and they often outsource again ( Accenture does, for sure).
Not seeing that logic though, as if they use internal developers they will obviously need to hire more people. And I don't think people join Apple to write internal tools, although I suppose it could be used as an entry level position.
Because it’s usually about companies not wanting to spend money on full-time salaries and benefits for full-time workers to do tasks that the company views as an undesirable expense. Internal tools don’t contribute to company image and don’t make profit. Therefore, their perceived value is as this article shows: lowest bidder, low quality work.
Apple leadership *should* value those tools as necessary for running Apple, and for making the actually sellable products... but we see that Apple is run by MBA types, currently, so...
It can go too far though. It concerns me that the public service, for instance, is increasingly focussing on permanent employees that are part of a “mobile public service” which means they don’t actually know much about a particular topic, but on the upside for the “content free” there’s a better path for promotion.
So the public service has to become procurement and contract managers and rely on consultants on short term contracts to provide content knowledge and write the actual policy documents. That the consultants don’t actually don’t know anything beyond how to cut and paste tender applications and if successful, cut and paste reports, doesn’t matter to the content free in the public service. They don’t know enough to know it is just a cut and paste job.
It does seem like a bean counter kinda problem, Apple shouldn't skimp there, or on AppleCare. On another forum I post on, a general one with different threads for different topics ( not reddit but similar) there's an ongoing "worst company ever" thread and the problems are always customer care. Always, You get people saying that their broadband was fine for years but when it went wrong they couldn't fix it for weeks, that every call started from the beginning, that people hung up on them.
For some reasons companies are happy to destroy their brand, by being cheap on customer care. Not Apple, yet, of course.
We currently have a Wipro team that we're stuck with for the remainder of the project... they're so bad that we've removed all tasks from them and overloaded ourselves (one "senior dev" didn't know about the $JAVA_HOME env var! An iOS "senior dev" that put the entire code in a view controller! IT that totally misconfigures/screws up the VPN and in this WFH time we're out for a day a week while they sort out the messes they keep creating)... as far as we know they're now just updating their social media posts or gaming for the remainder of the project (and more productive for the project than when they were actually working on it). And of course no one can raise the issue because politically the execs that screwed up need to be protected.
Every few years the contracting team is killed off and proper folks hired... the exec who brought the bozos in leaves... then in a few years some execs + bean counters repeats the cycle...
I'd assume Apple has the same issues with the internal IT/dev folks having the same frustration I do (and having to covering their execs/bean counters butts)
I would hope Apple would maintain their "only A players" fanaticism... but I know for a fact from friends still inside that just ain't the case anymore
The U.S multinationals quickly cook up plans and contract the tasks out. Then they progressively push to get the same work done with less staff but often with last minute demands. Projects are tuned to months and getting extensions for staff is a lengthy, difficult process plagued by paperwork and authorisation issues by people in different countries and time zones.
There are language issues, legal issues (often what is OK in the U.S and demanded by the company for its EU staff is outright illegal here).
As project goals widen or narrow, teams change in size and it is very difficult to find the necessary project knowledge in existing staff. The staff themselves demand job security from their employers and the more talented individuals get what they want (or the contractor could lose them).
All of this is hindered by constant restructuring within these multinationals and staff disappearing without warning.
It is quite literally a nightmare and quality is the first thing to suffer.
Japanese companies however (at least in my experience) manage these problems in a far more reasonable manner. They plan ahead, set goals and look to achieve them in a reasonable manner. They are far less prone to last minute changes and staff are normally hands on for longer periods, allowing them to form good working relationships with the company handling the contracting.
Not sure if this is consolation for Apple but one particularly big U.S company that divided itself up not long ago is by far the worst in my experience.
I will add that government requirements, while absolutely necessary on many occasions, also add to the pain. File security and governance is becoming a huge problem for some contractors.
If you really cared about the truth, you’d swallow your emotional reaction to employee-employer relations and acknowledge that the real reason is usually cost (as I said, as others have said, and as most businesses that hire this way will acknowledge). Whatever your personal issues are that make you have an us-vs-them attitude toward employees is irrelevant here.
Wow, you’re so close to the problem that you can’t see it. Just like government, Apple need their own department that exists for these tasks, instead of risking dealing with the third-party contractors every time a need comes up for this. You yourself just SAID that such consultancies don’t care about the work. Apple are already being forced to fix or recreate the work of the contractors, AS SAID IN THE ARTICLE. Having a department of internal experts is better in THE LONG TERM, even if they’re not constantly working on these tasks.