This story is about the non-Apple employees that work at the subcontractor Apex.
To generalize, the title can be "What It’s Like to Work Inside Company X's subcontractor."
Similar stories about subcontractors with less benefits & perks were written for Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Subcontractors are always going to be "2nd class citizens" compared to real employees of the client company. The phenomenon is not specific to the tech industry. Even a workers cooperative like Mondgragon outsources work to subcontractors and those non-employees complain about not being able to participate in Mondragon's benefits.
The "subcontractors" that have the same level (or higher level) of prestige and respect as the client company would be consulting companies like McKinsey or Bain.
Well written and succinct. I especially like the nod to professional consultants.
I'm not quite sure why these stories keep coming up, given the vast amount of literature available describing why and how contracting, with it's bifurcated pay and benefits systems, can and is mutually beneficial to the organizations.
In fact the #1 thread, as of this writing, is about freelancing and has dozens of comments from freelancers.
One possible explanation for the frequency of the topic, is that it's not the structure of contracting that people are rejecting, but rather the wide disparity between the size, pay and benefits of the contractor vs the contractee. Nobody complains if Bain takes a contract with Apple, as both have good pay and benefits. Similarly nobody complains about the freelancer working for [megacorp] because the freelancer is independent and an owner. However, increase the wealth gap between the companies and now you have a story.
> To generalize, the title can be "What It’s Like to Work Inside Company X's subcontractor."
Not just as a subcontractor. I used to work for a very large company, and it was just as bad as a full-time employee (and even worse for contractors!). Both of these statements applied there:
> One described the workplace as depressing and quiet, with everyone on edge.
> “There were many people who took initiative and made things, increased the efficiency. They weren’t rewarded in any way,” he says. “There were people who had abandoned any hope. They’d come in late, leave early, and just do nothing all day. They were treated the same as everyone else.”
It was absolutely horrible, and I will never let a firm get inside my head like that again.
Does the big tech company bear no responsibility for shifting as much work as it can out to subcontractors in order to cut costs? It seems to me that they're knowingly using the subcontracting mechanism in order to get away with offering Apex's 24 hours of paid leave per year, insufficient bathrooms, and other appalling conditions without tarnishing their sterling reputation. It says right in the article that Apple reviewed the Apex site and thought it was fine.
If big tech companies want to own up to being heartless mercenary capitalists who will wring every drop of sweat out of workers and spit them out as burned-out husks with no savings at the age of 35, hey, that's the system we live in. But something seems off when they want to have their cake and eat it too– that is, they want to seem like inspiring, human-friendly forces for good, but quietly use the glow from that reputation to get away with subcontracting away a huge amount of their labor to people working in miserable conditions. There's a reason that some labels moved away from sweatshop labor: it's bad press. If Apple is going to effectively use sweatshop labor (through a contractor, whatever) they should have to eat the bad press. Don't defend it as just the contractor's fault. It's literally the exact same situation as a clothing sweatshop.
This was a weirdly meandering, clickbaity article, because the only piece of news is that they found this building and talked to a few people inside of it. What is the article advocating for? Is it for Apple to pay $100/hr for data tagging or move those jobs abroad and pay $5/hr? I'm not sure.
7 million people live in SF Bay Area, and of those only about 800,000 work in technology [1]. An article like "hey, look, someone sorta-kinda works for Apple, but doesn't make $300,000/yr" is incredibly ignorant for the reality of the majority of Bay Area residents. If you take a teacher's lifetime financial growth path, it'll look bleak, compared to a recent grad at a FAANG. However, that won't generate as many clicks.
>This was a weirdly meandering, clickbaity article, because the only piece of news is that they found this building and talked to a few people inside of it.
The article very explicitly uses terminology to imply that the report is about an intelligence community black site. The article says this explicitly:
> Workers say managers instructed them to walk several blocks away before calling for a ride home. Several people who worked here say it’s widely referred to within Apple as a “black site,” as in a covert ops facility.
It says it is widely referred to within Apple as a covert ops facility. (It doesn't say jokingly referred to that way.) In addition it uses the word back door in the second paragraph, which is really evocative. It says:
>From the outside, there appears to be a reception area, but it’s unstaffed, which makes sense given that people working in this satellite office—mostly employees of Apple contractors working on Apple Maps—use the back door.
An editor who didn't want to evoke this would change it to secondary entrance, or simply, "don't use the main entrance". They wouldn't use the term back door. Bloomberg isn't some tabloid.
For better or for worse, people are missing that the article calls this a "covert ops facility" (using those exact 3 words) similar to room "Room 641A" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Finally, the suggestion to walk several blocks before hailing a ride doesn't make sense in any normal employee context. The article is calling this an intelligence community site, says so very explicitly, and puts that term in the title.
While the conditions weren't nearly as bad as those in this article, I experienced some of this as a contractor for Walmart at their Sunnyvale office.
On Thanksgiving, they had a special lunch prepared for everyone that had to come into the office (mostly just to monitor and be ready if anything went down). There were emails and signs, everyone was excited about it. When I went down with my team, they stopped me and a couple of other contractors at the door and said we couldn't go in unless we were full-time employees. There was no mention of that anywhere. We had to go get lunch somewhere else.
A couple of times a year they would buy movie tickets for everyone at a nearby theater. At lunch, the full-time staff would leave to go watch a movie for a few hours while the contractors stayed in the office.
Both of these weren't really a big deal, but they definitely made you feel like you were a second class employee.
There are limits of what they are allowed to provide to contractors before the Department of Labor says, “I don’t care if you call them contractors, you’re treating them like employees so you need to give them all the same benefits”. Companies using contractors are doing so specifically so they don’t have to provide those benefits, so they need to be very careful not to cross that line.
Sadly, the entire point is that they are not employees, let alone second class ones. In the end, it boils down to the perennial question of how much of your work is done by employees and how much by vendors. And it always leads to awkward situations. (Quite a few of those when I was an employee at Google and something I don't see as much anymore, luckily.)
I have worked as a contractor for Apple. I have to say that my personal experiences have been generally positive. Although I am only working with them at certain periods so it's not like I'm a "full-time" contractor so I can understand the frustration of being in that kind of position.
Overall, I found them to be very accommodating and concerned with our needs. They treated us well. There has never been any expectation on my part that I would be receiving any regular employee benefits. I felt like Apple treated us better than our actual employer/sub-contractor and if there was anything good coming to us it was from Apple and not our sub contractor.
The only thing I can relate to is the toilet situation. For some reason Apple has offices that can accommodate 100s of staff with literally 3 toilet cubicles to go around. The toilet door is like a conveyor belt and I often have to go several times until I can find an empty cubicle. Whoever designed these offices severely underestimated the allocation of toilets.
I did a tour of Pixar and they said Steve Jobs wanted to have 1 bathroom in the whole building. That would force everyone to walk past each other and encourage more interaction.
Turns out this wasn't allowed by building codes, but I wouldn't be surprised if somehow this "spirit" made it's way to Apple as well.
Although I've had the same problem in every male dominated tech company office I've worked in. A few years back Amazon had to have people work from home because there weren't enough bathrooms in their office.
What are these people doing? I couldn't figure out what the contractors actual jobs are. If they're tech workers and they don't like the conditions aren't there many other good options in Silicon Valley? I know it's not easy for everyone to switch jobs and interviewing is very hard but why's it so much harder for these contractors in particular that means they're putting up with conditions that are so bad, like access to bathrooms?
> Workers say managers instructed them to walk several blocks away before calling for a ride home.
Huh? Why? Zero context and zero explanation given.
This article seems pretty sensationalist... when it's just describing the entirely normal practice of contracted employees.
I mean, seriously... complaints about lines for the men's room after lunch? Spoiler alert: (non-contract) employees of big tech companies encounter those too. All the time, from personal experience. Or that the color of one's badge is a "sad grey"? Give me a break.
Yes there are some arguably valid arguments to be made against the prevalence of contract workers in modern America... but this article ain't it.
I've worked at a number of famous tech giants and none of them have enough men's bathrooms. I'm not sure that lines for the bathrooms are the strongest point of this article.
The move towards gender-neutral bathrooms has been the most effective salve to this particular problem.
(Hiring approximately equal numbers of male and female employees would also fix it, but that's a difficult hiring and pipeline problem, and gender-neutral bathrooms are created by new signage.)
My least favorite job was at an investment bank where men outnumbered women 100:1. Urinals were always clogged with garbage, toilets were left unflushed, and sinks regularly filled up with human waste.
So their complaints are that they have to work in a bland looking office with an under stocked vending machine and there are lines for the bathroom. You are all so out of touch with regular people it’s ridiculous.
Comparing lack of access to a gym to a being in a 'black site' (location where lack of oversight of security services has been allegedly used to facilitate torturing people) is truly stupid.
I'm really curious about something. Most contractor jobs seem to be meaningfully distinct from the work that direct employees are performing, whether it's stuff like security and cafeteria, or stuff that is too specialized, like short-term needs (this is the Bain thing).
But how does it come about that companies have both direct employees and contractors carrying out identical tasks in their core business? In the valley, this question amounts to: how does it come about that companies have both direct employed and contractor devs? What is it about the developers that causes them to land on one track rather than another; what is it about the products that companies are building that causes them to decide to staff one with direct employees and another with contractors?
Does anyone have some insight into this? This is the part of the contractors in the valley story that strikes me as really weird---the market rate for a package of skills in a firm ought to be more consistent than it it seems to be given the contractor/direct thing.
This is nothing new and hardly unique to the tech industry. Back in the 90s I worked summers at a factory that made door latches for Honda, Chrysler, and Nummi. About 1/3 were "temporary employees" employees of Manpower even though some people were there for over a year. Same job lower pay and no benefits.
I worked for Ericsson for three years as a contractor (two tours), I looked at it as a leg up - but eventually you either fail out, or you build up enough confidence in yourself, that you know even if this job goes away - you'll find another, and if you don't, you don't.
This sounds like poor oversight (and policy) on the apple side however - and apple should be making sure that all employees are treated well - and contractors are employees, just indirect ones.
> The restrictions were just one of many reminders of the contractors’ inferior status, right down to the apple design on their ID badges. For direct employees, the apples were multi-colored; contractors got what one described as “sad grey.”
Really? Really? Even Bloomberg knows how much of BS this is:
> It’s common for companies to distribute different badges to contractors
The badging at Apple and what you're allowed to do on the basis of your badge color, is the second-worst that I've ever personally experienced.
The worst was when I was a government civilian, working in the Pentagon, and I had a security clearance. The badges made it very clear who had what level of security clearance, and that governed where they could go and what they could do.
But at least the US Government had a pretty good reason for the way they treated people in that way.
It's map editing. Big deal. Why is this a big secret? And why is it even in Silicon Valley? It should be someplace with a labor and housing surplus but a job shortage.
[+] [-] jasode|7 years ago|reply
To generalize, the title can be "What It’s Like to Work Inside Company X's subcontractor."
Similar stories about subcontractors with less benefits & perks were written for Microsoft, Google, Amazon. Subcontractors are always going to be "2nd class citizens" compared to real employees of the client company. The phenomenon is not specific to the tech industry. Even a workers cooperative like Mondgragon outsources work to subcontractors and those non-employees complain about not being able to participate in Mondragon's benefits.
The "subcontractors" that have the same level (or higher level) of prestige and respect as the client company would be consulting companies like McKinsey or Bain.
[+] [-] AndrewKemendo|7 years ago|reply
I'm not quite sure why these stories keep coming up, given the vast amount of literature available describing why and how contracting, with it's bifurcated pay and benefits systems, can and is mutually beneficial to the organizations.
In fact the #1 thread, as of this writing, is about freelancing and has dozens of comments from freelancers.
One possible explanation for the frequency of the topic, is that it's not the structure of contracting that people are rejecting, but rather the wide disparity between the size, pay and benefits of the contractor vs the contractee. Nobody complains if Bain takes a contract with Apple, as both have good pay and benefits. Similarly nobody complains about the freelancer working for [megacorp] because the freelancer is independent and an owner. However, increase the wealth gap between the companies and now you have a story.
[+] [-] zeveb|7 years ago|reply
Not just as a subcontractor. I used to work for a very large company, and it was just as bad as a full-time employee (and even worse for contractors!). Both of these statements applied there:
> One described the workplace as depressing and quiet, with everyone on edge.
> “There were many people who took initiative and made things, increased the efficiency. They weren’t rewarded in any way,” he says. “There were people who had abandoned any hope. They’d come in late, leave early, and just do nothing all day. They were treated the same as everyone else.”
It was absolutely horrible, and I will never let a firm get inside my head like that again.
[+] [-] brianpgordon|7 years ago|reply
If big tech companies want to own up to being heartless mercenary capitalists who will wring every drop of sweat out of workers and spit them out as burned-out husks with no savings at the age of 35, hey, that's the system we live in. But something seems off when they want to have their cake and eat it too– that is, they want to seem like inspiring, human-friendly forces for good, but quietly use the glow from that reputation to get away with subcontracting away a huge amount of their labor to people working in miserable conditions. There's a reason that some labels moved away from sweatshop labor: it's bad press. If Apple is going to effectively use sweatshop labor (through a contractor, whatever) they should have to eat the bad press. Don't defend it as just the contractor's fault. It's literally the exact same situation as a clothing sweatshop.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] andr|7 years ago|reply
7 million people live in SF Bay Area, and of those only about 800,000 work in technology [1]. An article like "hey, look, someone sorta-kinda works for Apple, but doesn't make $300,000/yr" is incredibly ignorant for the reality of the majority of Bay Area residents. If you take a teacher's lifetime financial growth path, it'll look bleak, compared to a recent grad at a FAANG. However, that won't generate as many clicks.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/02/10/tech-job-growth-slows...
[+] [-] throwwy20190213|7 years ago|reply
The article very explicitly uses terminology to imply that the report is about an intelligence community black site. The article says this explicitly:
> Workers say managers instructed them to walk several blocks away before calling for a ride home. Several people who worked here say it’s widely referred to within Apple as a “black site,” as in a covert ops facility.
It says it is widely referred to within Apple as a covert ops facility. (It doesn't say jokingly referred to that way.) In addition it uses the word back door in the second paragraph, which is really evocative. It says:
>From the outside, there appears to be a reception area, but it’s unstaffed, which makes sense given that people working in this satellite office—mostly employees of Apple contractors working on Apple Maps—use the back door.
An editor who didn't want to evoke this would change it to secondary entrance, or simply, "don't use the main entrance". They wouldn't use the term back door. Bloomberg isn't some tabloid.
For better or for worse, people are missing that the article calls this a "covert ops facility" (using those exact 3 words) similar to room "Room 641A" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Finally, the suggestion to walk several blocks before hailing a ride doesn't make sense in any normal employee context. The article is calling this an intelligence community site, says so very explicitly, and puts that term in the title.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site
--
NOTE: I got mod approval to post this response, since I am doing so from a throwaway, but not to break the site guidelines.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] neb_b|7 years ago|reply
On Thanksgiving, they had a special lunch prepared for everyone that had to come into the office (mostly just to monitor and be ready if anything went down). There were emails and signs, everyone was excited about it. When I went down with my team, they stopped me and a couple of other contractors at the door and said we couldn't go in unless we were full-time employees. There was no mention of that anywhere. We had to go get lunch somewhere else.
A couple of times a year they would buy movie tickets for everyone at a nearby theater. At lunch, the full-time staff would leave to go watch a movie for a few hours while the contractors stayed in the office.
Both of these weren't really a big deal, but they definitely made you feel like you were a second class employee.
[+] [-] orev|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puzzle|7 years ago|reply
Sadly, the entire point is that they are not employees, let alone second class ones. In the end, it boils down to the perennial question of how much of your work is done by employees and how much by vendors. And it always leads to awkward situations. (Quite a few of those when I was an employee at Google and something I don't see as much anymore, luckily.)
[+] [-] mouzogu|7 years ago|reply
Overall, I found them to be very accommodating and concerned with our needs. They treated us well. There has never been any expectation on my part that I would be receiving any regular employee benefits. I felt like Apple treated us better than our actual employer/sub-contractor and if there was anything good coming to us it was from Apple and not our sub contractor.
The only thing I can relate to is the toilet situation. For some reason Apple has offices that can accommodate 100s of staff with literally 3 toilet cubicles to go around. The toilet door is like a conveyor belt and I often have to go several times until I can find an empty cubicle. Whoever designed these offices severely underestimated the allocation of toilets.
[+] [-] RandallBrown|7 years ago|reply
Turns out this wasn't allowed by building codes, but I wouldn't be surprised if somehow this "spirit" made it's way to Apple as well.
Although I've had the same problem in every male dominated tech company office I've worked in. A few years back Amazon had to have people work from home because there weren't enough bathrooms in their office.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eatbitseveryday|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lokidokiro|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] crazygringo|7 years ago|reply
Huh? Why? Zero context and zero explanation given.
This article seems pretty sensationalist... when it's just describing the entirely normal practice of contracted employees.
I mean, seriously... complaints about lines for the men's room after lunch? Spoiler alert: (non-contract) employees of big tech companies encounter those too. All the time, from personal experience. Or that the color of one's badge is a "sad grey"? Give me a break.
Yes there are some arguably valid arguments to be made against the prevalence of contract workers in modern America... but this article ain't it.
[+] [-] woud420|7 years ago|reply
Interestingly enough, that's one of my biggest complaint working @ Bloomberg.
[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
To not appear too numerous every day at 5pm right outside the office entrance and draw suspicions as to what is in there?
[+] [-] criddell|7 years ago|reply
Well, this is from Bloomberg. It's about what I expect these days.
[+] [-] shereadsthenews|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeone3000|7 years ago|reply
(Hiring approximately equal numbers of male and female employees would also fix it, but that's a difficult hiring and pipeline problem, and gender-neutral bathrooms are created by new signage.)
[+] [-] sigfubar|7 years ago|reply
My least favorite job was at an investment bank where men outnumbered women 100:1. Urinals were always clogged with garbage, toilets were left unflushed, and sinks regularly filled up with human waste.
[+] [-] burger_moon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hybro|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oxymoran|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] chrisseaton|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paultopia|7 years ago|reply
But how does it come about that companies have both direct employees and contractors carrying out identical tasks in their core business? In the valley, this question amounts to: how does it come about that companies have both direct employed and contractor devs? What is it about the developers that causes them to land on one track rather than another; what is it about the products that companies are building that causes them to decide to staff one with direct employees and another with contractors?
Does anyone have some insight into this? This is the part of the contractors in the valley story that strikes me as really weird---the market rate for a package of skills in a firm ought to be more consistent than it it seems to be given the contractor/direct thing.
[+] [-] bradknowles|7 years ago|reply
It's not uncommon to have more work in a given area than you have employees to do that work. So, you hire contractors to fill in.
But are contractors allowed to do all the things that employees can do? If not, then you've just created a whole new series of problems for yourself.
Been there, done that. On both sides of the fence, multiple times.
[+] [-] fredsted|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jccalhoun|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|7 years ago|reply
This sounds like poor oversight (and policy) on the apple side however - and apple should be making sure that all employees are treated well - and contractors are employees, just indirect ones.
[+] [-] dmitriid|7 years ago|reply
> The restrictions were just one of many reminders of the contractors’ inferior status, right down to the apple design on their ID badges. For direct employees, the apples were multi-colored; contractors got what one described as “sad grey.”
Really? Really? Even Bloomberg knows how much of BS this is:
> It’s common for companies to distribute different badges to contractors
[+] [-] bradknowles|7 years ago|reply
The worst was when I was a government civilian, working in the Pentagon, and I had a security clearance. The badges made it very clear who had what level of security clearance, and that governed where they could go and what they could do.
But at least the US Government had a pretty good reason for the way they treated people in that way.
[+] [-] nodesocket|7 years ago|reply
Oh the horror! Somebody alert OSHA. Come on Bloomberg, I know outrage stories generate the most clicks and profit for you, but this is getting absurd.
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ausbah|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hybro|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] etblg|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisweirdok|7 years ago|reply
most employees across the country are at-will, do people not know this?
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|7 years ago|reply