“The Apple engineer who switched Macs to Intel processors was rejected from a job at the Genius Bar,” The Daily Mail reports. “JK Scheinberg, who was spent 21 years working for the tech giants, applied to work in an Apple Store after he retired. The 54-year-old understandably thought he would be a good fit for the position – but he was turned down.”
“It was highlighted in an article on age discrimination in The New York Times,” The Daily Mail reports. “A little restless after retiring in 2008, at 54, he figured he’d be a great fit for a position at an Apple store Genius Bar, despite being twice as old as anyone else at the group interview. Schienberg told him: ‘On the way out, all three of the interviewers singled me out and said: ‘We’ll be in touch.’ ‘I never heard back.'”
“After the piece was published, the software engineer tweeted: ‘Wonder if Apple will finally give me callback on that genius bar interview,'” The Daily Mail reports. “Scheinberg invented an Intel version of Mac OSX that ran on PCs.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Something’s obviously broken in Apple’s hiring process here. Diversity, so trumpeted by Apple CEO Tim Cook, also includes age.
SEE ALSO:
The amazing true story of Project Marklar; how Mac OS X for Intel was born – June 10, 2012
Intel-based Macs running both Mac OS X and Windows will be good for Apple – June 10, 2005
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lynn Weiler” for the heads up.]
Age may have nothing to do with this. I’ve been a software guy for 25+ years, and have worked with engineers of all stripes through the years. Most of them (myself included) I would not put in front of a customer. Would you hire Sheldon Cooper to work the Genius Bar? I think not.
Apple hired me at age 57 for a sales position. There are a number of us “seniors” working for Apple.
I had the same experience in my late 50’s. I was recruited for a new Business position at Apple retail. I had worked as a reseller and for Apple directly for a long time in business and education. I had put on several tech presentations at the Apple store for the large local tech association. I was friends with the regional recruiter (although another recruited me), the manager and asst manager and they all loved me. I got thru 3 levels of interviews. I might add that all of the managers came from women’s apparel retail stores.
The final phone interview with the regional mgr did not go well. All of her questions had to do with general retail issues, not selling to businesses and not about Macs. I don’t think she had any awareness of anything outside their doors. I answered everything well and talked about the need for Mac to infiltrate the corporate sector. I got a call back from someone telling me they were going to continue looking.
This was after I tried out in the group looking for Christmas work. They paired us and gave us a project in Pages to produce and present. Always a manager, I had to show my skater partner how to use Pages and did all the graphics, coached him on presenting and speaking. They hired him.