Apple Fired Me as a Software Engineer
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to work as a contractor at Apple and get fired six months after overperforming (according to stakeholders)? I worked at Apple on the ACS (fka iCloud team) for six months before my manager showed me the door. He gave me strange vibes on day 1 when he met with me to tell me that he wanted me to do things a particular way to avoid getting fired. I’ve never had a manager pull me aside to discuss how to avoid getting fired on the first day. That behavior signaled to me that more significant issues could be at play.
I started my job sometime around Jan 10th, 2022. The stock market had yet to crash. I was extremely excited to start working at Apple and tackled the projects head first. I worked 80+ hours each week to overdeliver and secure my job. After the strange first day mentioned above, I noticed my manager moving the goalpost on me. He told me not to touch anything on the DevOps side of things and then the next day reprimanded me for not working on DevOps pipelines. At first, I chalked it up as a miscommunication, but the pattern continued. Task after task, he shuffled around requirements. He directed me to speak to the wrong people over and over. He wouldn’t respond to my messages on slack, and then, in our 1:1, he accused me of not communicating enough with him. I’ve been working as a developer for six years and never saw any…
