'Game of Thrones' cold war between contractors plaguing Apple tools division

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An except from a new book about major tech companies characterizes an interior Apple division as having a "Cold War" atmosphere, with infighting and contractor issues creating the section to be both a grueling destination 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 which has considerable problems in how it currently operates.

The group involves several contracting companies 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 resulted in 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 really is for Apple itself. The focus on staffing and maximizing the amounts of roles for each firm has resulted in a culture that former IS&T contractor Archana Sabapathy suggests is similar to "there's a Cold War going on every single day."

"They're just fighting for the roles," Sabapathy explained. "That's all they value, not the task, not the deliverables, your time and effort the put in, as well as talent. They're not looking for just about any of those aspects."

The continuous battle has resulted in an uncertain and combative atmosphere, where typical workplace relationships aren't possible because of the needs for contractor firm loyalty, and also the constantly shifting contracting teams.

The bidding process also causes lower-quality contractors compared to the projects typically require. Consulting companies are being paid between $120 and $150 each hour for a contractor's work, according to Sabapathy, as the contractor themselves get $40 to $55 per hour.

This results in a lesser quality of work produced, Apple employees told the author, with many claiming to have had a need 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 simply "shocked" to observe how the projects were designed and developed.

"In the event that you compare the code quality compared to that of a higher schooler's or a brand new undergraduate, you seriously will never 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 you have heard of that certainly are a bad spot to work for engineers. From your day I joined to the day I quit from this department to another, everyday was soul sucking and made me curse my entire life for joining this department."

Apple is not the only company said to be abusing contractors rather than spending money on 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 proper move to make from a moral standpoint - it could help the business's business aswell," 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 focus on new ideas.

Kantrowitz further warns "until Apple provides division a difficult look, its employees will be stuck spending their time reworking broken internal software, and wishing these were inventing instead."
Source: https://appleinsider.com

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