Earlier this week, a new account emerged from a supposed former Apple employee that revealed what it was like to work for Apple under Steve Jobs. The anonymous worker painted Jobs as a very demanding boss who worked his employees to the bone. Of course, we already knew that.
Now, however, we’re pointed to a new account from a former Apple employee who isn’t anonymous. The disgruntled former project manager suggests that not only was Jobs incredibly demanding, he was also a “giant jerk” who didn’t value his employees and who blamed others for his own mistakes.
DON’T MISS: Warning: Major iPhone Security Flaw Lets Hackers Steal All Your Passwords
Erin Caton currently works as a project management consultant, and she knows very well that she’ll never work at Apple again. Why? In an old post on Medium dug up today by Business Insider, Caton pulls back the curtain on what it was like from her perspective to work at Steve Jobs’s Apple.
It wasn’t pretty.
First and foremost, it’s important to note that Caton worked as an Engineering Project Manager on the MobileMe team. MobileMe, as you might recall, was an absolute disaster, so it stands to reason that her experiences at Apple weren’t great. But even if she is disgruntled, her accounts are hardly unique — like all wildly successful CEOs, Steve Jobs could be a jerk.
Caton says she had two experiences with Jobs while at Apple. The first was when she was waiting in line for lunch and a man cut in front of her. When she turned to a coworker to ask who the “douche” was who had just cut her in line, she was informed it was Jobs.
Her second experience was significantly worse.
The former Apple worker recalled the lead-up to Apple’s big MobileMe launch, which the entire team working on the project knew was going to be a disaster. The product simply wasn’t ready and they had pleaded with management, but Jobs demanded that it launch on time.
When MobileMe crashed hard on launch night, hundreds of MobileMe team members worked around the clock to fix the service and get it running again. Then when the deed was finally done, they were all called into a meeting with Jobs.
“We all walked over to the building like we were headed to the guillotine,” Caton wrote. “He stood in front of us and yelled at us, told us that we should be mad at each other, said we could have done a staggered launch and complained that we didn’t even try to do all the things that we (those on the ground floor of production that actually make the fucking products of the world) had been begging to do. It was the world’s best de-motivational speech.”
Her full post is linked below in our source section.
