April 2019 – Tech Reflect

Shareholders vs employees

2019-04-30

Many large companies with excess cash do share buybacks or offer a dividend. Both of these are intended to benefit shareholders. However, the waters are muddied in that some employees are also shareholders.

Let’s look at the numbers for Apple.

Cook said that Apple had returned $27.5 billion to shareholders last quarter
Apple […] also approved a 77 cent dividend per share.
Apple stock spikes after reporting strong guidance and earnings beat—CNBC—April 30, 2019

As of September 29, 2018 , the Company had approximately 132,000 full-time equivalent employees.
Apple Form 10K—SEC—September 29, 2018

I’ll extrapolate a little since I couldn’t find complete numbers.

$27.5 billion x 4 quarters = $110 billion in yearly share repurchase
77 cents x 4.72 billion shares x 4 quarters = $14.5 billion annual dividend
$110 billion + $14.5 billion = $124.5 billion given to shareholders yearly

Divide that by the number of employees. Check my … READ THE REST

Slow down and improve your health and job

2019-04-29

I spent a lot of my career fighting for a good work/life balance for myself and encouraging it in others. I’m not sure if it had much of an impact but it was a fight worth fighting. And there’s research to back up the fact that working too many hours is detrimental to productivity and health.

The reason we have eight-hour work days at all was because companies found that cutting employees’ hours had the reverse effect they expected: it upped their productivity.
The Compelling Case for Working a Lot Less—BBC

One meta-analysis found that long working hours increased the risk of coronary heart disease by 40% – almost as much as smoking (50%). Another found that people who worked long hours had a significantly higher risk of stroke, while people who worked more than 11 hours a day were almost 2.5 times more likely to have a major depressive

… READ THE REST

Why I left Apple

2019-04-26

I always thought it would be fun to get fired from Apple. I thought it would make a good story! Maybe I could do increasingly outrageous things and eventually get fired.

The truth is less interesting though. I’ve been on leave for awhile and Apple finally said my time was up. So, in the end, I did get terminate (aka fired). But it’s such a boring story. I always wanted to go out either on a high note or a very dramatic note, so I am disappointed.

For most of my career, Apple has been the only organization I’ve been a part of where I fit in completely. I have a team photo from Aperture on my wall and I still get emotional looking at it. There are many other teams I worked on that I feel the same way about. Everything wasn’t always roses, but much of the time … READ THE REST

How did I end up at Apple?

2019-04-17

I’ve interviewed hundreds of people while I’ve been at Apple. Unlike most new recruits, Apple was not a company I ever dreamed about working for.

I never wanted to work for a big company. Period. For me, a big company was one withmore than 200 people. I found even companies that size were riddled with bureaucracy. You’d never talk to any of the senior leaders except during a Q&A at a company-wide event. I couldn’t fathom working at a company with more than 5,000 people.

Even if Apple were small, I had given up on them back in the mid 1990s. The last straw was my nearly $7,000 purchase of a PowerBook 5300— the worst computer I’ve ever owned. I later sold it for $500 just for the display. Apple’s system software quality was also at an all time low. For six months, I tried to switch to Windows but … READ THE REST

Apple: Best and worst hardware product

2019-04-15

When I used to interview people at Apple, I sometimes liked to ask them what they thought were the best and worst Apple hardware products of all time. It was a good way to test product knowledge, the ability to be critical without getting carried away, prioritization skills, and ability to keep things in perspective.

Sometimes the interviewee turns the tables on me and asks me for my best and worst. It’s something I think about a lot because the company has gone through so many highs and lows. I think it’s important to evaluate what went well and what went wrong in the past so the same mistakes aren’t made.

The worst hardware product

I started with the worst because it’s really easy. In my mind, it’s been the worst Apple hardware ever since it came out and was never topped. This product was so bad that:

I had