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I'm in the middle of reading the book "Apple In China" by Patrick McGee. A few excerpts from one chapter: > The eighty-hour workweeks and increasing need to be in Asia at inconsistent times, with little warning and often for unknown durations, caused massive stress on the engineers' mental health and their marriages. They were primarily men, and some of their wives took to calling themselves "Apple widows" because their husbands were around so infrequently. So many marriages were broken up during the first year of Jobs's comeback that informal preventative measures were established to contain further damage. Engineers called it the DAP, or Divorce Avoidance Program. In the late 1990s, the acronym referred to to when an engineer couldn't come in to work that day because his marriage was on the line. > One engineer says the reason he left Apple after more than a decade is that during a routine medical appointment, his doctor noted his high blood pressure and said, "Okay, I need you to do two things for me: lose weight and quit Apple." The doctor explained that that the stress would basically kill him. > Jon Rubinstein, who worked for Steve Jobs on and off for sixteen years, called the long workweeks "shattering," and it's what led to his own departure later on. "A lot of people got sick at Apple," he once said. "The list goes on and on of people who got terminally ill or really ill... and I was worried that if I stayed, I'd end up damaging myself, and my health was, frankly, more important." |