can you please explain how these meetings got so out of hand? did you attend them? did you decline eventually? why, why not? how does it work? who was your actual boss? is there some kind of resource management? (ie. where your time is allocated?)
thanks in advance!
(I never worked at any FAANG thing, and I never worked for a US company, so this is extremely... interesting and strange.... because I am no stranger to long nights, had the occasional death march, some kind of startup momentum and expectations here or there, small teams and overtime, deadlines, but .. also headcount was less than 20 for us)
I'm not going to pretend that I really understand the psychology of a person that thinks that 4+ hours of meetings a day is a good idea.
It started when my team opened up Singapore office. That's fine, but they are 12 hours ahead of New York, and the genius middle managers on my team thought it was very important that we synchronize on a lot of these meetings, and the only times that kind-of-sort-of-not-really "worked" for everyone was between 7:30pm-9:30pm NYC time.
That was already bad enough, but this genius would bog the first 5-10 minutes of the meetings with small talk, giving his opinion on the latest keynote or something else. Small talk is generally fine, but not when everyone is looking to go to bed.
It got really out of hand once COVID started. Suddenly, since everyone was working from home and as such it could be assumed that they had access to their work computer, managers just decided that there's basically no time off limits for a useless meeting.
> did you attend them?
Yes, most of the time. We'd get in trouble if we just skipped them.
> did you decline eventually?
As many as I could, but if I did it too often I could reliably expect a phone call complaining about it.
> how does it work? who was your actual boss?
I don't want to give specific names. My direct manager was actually fine and generally only scheduled meetings that were reasonable. His boss was pretty stupid, and scheduled a few useless meetings a week . His boss was a complete moron and I think was completely incapable of scheduling a meeting that was actually useful. The chain goes up several more levels.
It was more or less like Office Space: if you made a mistake you'd get like six managers separately explaining your mistake to you.
> is there some kind of resource management? (ie. where your time is allocated?)
Apple has its own ticketing system called "Radar". It's kind of like Jira or something, but it's a GUI app instead of a web application. Tickets are more or less ranked in the same way they are in Jira, you just estimate the number of hours it will take.
A few points of fairness to Apple:
- I'm a very annoying and difficult person to manage, and I am extremely impatient, so maybe I overreacted to all this stuff (though I know that I was not the only person really annoyed by this stuff).
- Judging by the high turnover rate my team had, I suspect that I was on an exceptionally poorly run team. I did try transferring to another team, and actually did pretty well in the interview, but I was declined because I had received a poor performance review the year before [1]. I know other people who worked at Apple who really like it, so I think I just had some bad luck.
[1] Honestly, the bad review was kind of justified, much as I hate to admit it. I had become pretty frustrated over a lot of stuff happening in my life and it was reflected in my work output. I did get better but not before the review period was over.
It seems initial impressions in these huge corps are almost everything. If things are great people are willing to put in the hours, money is great after all, so one's trajectory quickly curves upward, promotions, yeey! But if it's bad, it's hard to go anywhere, even laterally, because of the baggage, so there's only down from there :(
thanks in advance!
(I never worked at any FAANG thing, and I never worked for a US company, so this is extremely... interesting and strange.... because I am no stranger to long nights, had the occasional death march, some kind of startup momentum and expectations here or there, small teams and overtime, deadlines, but .. also headcount was less than 20 for us)