[negativez]

I don't think one has to takes sides on the manager vs Apple conflict to ask a much more important question:

"Why is this newsworthy to The Verge and Hacker News?"

At any given moment, several thousand people around the world are likely going through identical complaints with their employers, and have been for multiple decades. What makes this more relevant than any random similar example from a boring business outside Silicon Valley, where a manager might have a similar number of employees and say a similar thing to one of them? Is there a reasonable belief that this is being encouraged by Tim Cook himself? No? Then why is it "Apple does $Thing"?

Corporate HR and the legal system will work this out and get it right for a reasonable % of cases without involving the whole world in each one.

[8f2ab37a-ed6c]

It's a story that fits the kind of narratives that The Verge (and their parent company Vox) specializes in. There's a large and influential chunk of audience out there who loves their confirmation bias reinforced with this kind of content, and The Verge's business model keeps succeeding in the process. Win-win for everybody, except those who might not agree with the story being painted.