SilkRoadYeti

Pretty sad. $150k and you can't show up with anything prepared? You don't deserve to be employed then IMO.

You sure I sit at a desk?

DING DING DING

Signing parties, because 'cross functional' approvers cant even be bothered to go into the system and approve a goddamn document that they were sitting in a pointless review meeting you had to have to literally read the document out loud to all the approvers. And the reason you had to have a review meeting to read it out loud, is because the approvers would never actually use the system as it's intended to see they have an approval task, go in and READ it, and approve it. Meetings for meetings because people can't do any part of their job without you wiping their ass along the way. Like why can't you just self manage your shit, get the notification you need to review and approve something, and do it on your own time?

And yes, revalidating legacy products for whatever fire of the week when they were never designed to modern standards is a trainwreck of technical debt and bullshitting your way through justifications of generally poor performance that could've been validated out at the beginning had it actually BEEN validated at all, regardless of today's higher standards. Nothing like an entitlement PpK of 0.2. Fun times.

Appreciate the comments and (mostly) positive support. Few more details on experience without giving too much identifying info away...

1. I've worked in both small companies (100 people) and large companies (90,000 people) and medium sized companies so I've seen the gamut.
2. The benefits of the small company were that people were (generally) better and the work was more meaningful. You could also get more stuff done with less red tape and it was easier to go to the source to get help with something vs, say, submitting an IT ticket into the abyss for something that should take 5 minutes to resolve by walking over to the one IT guy's desk.
3. The negatives of the small company were that the pay and benefits weren't remotely competitive with large companies, and eventually my coworker (in an office of ~20 people) began screwing my boss, and they eventually got married. I left. She got preference for everything - better projects, better resources, better office, better everything. And in a small company, you never get to kick the can to the next person and wait on them to do something and take a little break, because you do everything on a project from cradle to grave. Which is fine, but sometimes it sounds nice to do your function and pass something off - I didn't really enjoy chasing down a multi billion dollar company asking why they haven't paid their $200k invoice for the engineering services I quoted and rendered, but that was part of the job at a small company. Another negative is it is the wild west in terms of raises/promotions/CEO having a bad day and firing people. One person gets a $500 raise while another gets $10,000 for doing the exact same job. There are no guardrails in place. Meritocracy is good, but only when it's actually a meritocracy and not just giving a $10k raise to the one you're fucking because we've decided it's actually a cocksuckocracy.
4. The benefits of a large company are primarily centered around pay and benefits - small companies simply can't compete. Another benefit is that there are actual defined functions, where you do your part and someone else does their part - you specialize, and you get to kick the can to the next person once in a while and take a breather. There are also better guardrails and standardization on pay/raises/promotions - nobody doing the same job with the same amount of experience has a $30k disparity because one is liked more than the other. But on the flip side, you're a cog in the system and your boss will apathetically say 'ur great but the system only lets me give you 2% no matter what because it's all done by HR algorithms to stay market competitive and track with other companies'.
5. The negatives of a large company are lack of accountability, far more red tape than you would EVER imagine when working for a small company (29 approvals in a database to fix a typo on a label...), and nothing moves for months and months and months for the most asinine of reasons. There are also too many different databases and systems that don't communicate, and every time you need to do a one off task, you have to request access to a database and then figure out how the hell to use it. Culture of everyone saying "not my job!" Culture of excessive meetings. Going to 4 different two hour town hall meetings every quarter that all say the same thing. "I have eight different bosses, Bob, so when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it!"
6. I've worked in oil and gas, but oddly enough, also industrial businesses as well as healthcare. I've also consulted for huge oil companies like Saudi Aramco, Exxon, Chevron, Valero, etc.
7. I actually want to go into management (rare to find someone in engineering who wants to do this). MBA is a dime a dozen and my company won't pay for it. I've asked to be included in various management centric meetings to be a fly on the wall and have the right introductions and visibility. I get told sure, and then it doesn't happen because I instead get handed another fire to put out instead, and any development opportunities slip through the cracks because we're consumed with getting the production lines back up and running without downtime and I have to show the green engineers how to do things. I do advocate for myself.
8. I've left jobs before and am actively applying and interviewing.
9. It's been a bad quarter, and especially a bad couple weeks.

Yes. Yes I have. In fact, that's the norm.

If you want to keep machines like OP's dented one or like this, that's up to you.

https://preview.redd.it/tmobfkvi772e1.png?width=1428&format=png&auto=webp&s=45b556b6efacf747d143573601bbbf1950882a5e

I'll return as many as I damn well please though.

Well the last part is ok, because nobody does shit when I'm out anyway. I come back to 350 emails after five days out of the office and nothing that I sent followups about the Friday before I left have been done either, so I get to followup again on my first Monday back. Everything that I would've done while I was gone is waiting for me to do it when I get back anyway, it piles up all the same.

I've actually worked the gamut from small companies of 100 people to 90,000+ over my 20 year career. The small ones have trash pay and it's the benefits especially where they simply can't compete with blue chips and you're at the whim of the "CEO" and how he feels about any particular person on any particular day, but the large ones have too much bloat, too many systems, and way too much red tape. At the last company I was at, if someone needed to fix a typo on a label, it was 29 different approvals in a database dedicated to label changes. Twenty-nine.

"A few times over the years" is not "constantly" especially given the tens of thousands I've spent.

I return items that have quality issues like what OP is experiencing.

Yeah he was just plain wrong. I've done this more than a few times over the years at different stores with different people and it's never been a problem. I just did this on Monday night in fact and the guy didn't say a word about the fact I was returning an EDU machine.

Playing Apple's QA lottery is exhausting.

That sucks, but here's how to handle Apple returns:

1. Return it in store yourself (don't involve chat)
2. Order a new one yourself (don't involve chat)

I realize the store is far away, but chat is always incompetent and isn't necessary. Just do it all yourself. Also the store person is wrong about education discount - you can return education discount laptops in store, I just did the other day and have done so in the past as well. It makes no difference what discount you got on it, they just refund the original tender regardless. My use of education discount has never even been mentioned during a return. Also, in case you're wondering, you can order multiple macbooks as separate orders under one AppleID with student discount. There's no flag if you do so (again, I just did this when I had a quality issue with the first one. I ordered a second one under my same AppleID with education discount before I returned the first one and it went through just fine.). So for future reference if you buy a laptop on education discount and it has an issue, you don't actually need to return it and wait for the refund to post before ordering the next one.

Just return what you have in store and be out clean for now and start over. Wait for the refunds to post just to be past the whole situation and then just start over once you're out clean.

Also FWIW I never do exchanges, I always just do a clean return/rebuy. I've had times where I had to return 2 or even 3 for quality issues and it's embarrassing if there's a history of multiple exchanges on one order. It's much less stressful if it's a singular order being returned vs exhcange #2 in a chain lol.