the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt five)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

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 years of Jobs’s comeback that informal preventive measures were established to contain further damage. Engineers called it the DAP, or Divorce Avoidance Program. In the late 1990s, the acronym referred to when an engineer couldn’t come in to work that day because his marriage was on the line. “It was like, ‘Where’s Glen this weekend? Why isn’t he working?’” one engineer recounts. “And a colleague would reply, ‘Oh, he’s on the DAP.’ The basic meaning was: Glen’s about ready to get a divorce if he doesn’t have a weekend with his wife. So Glen wasn’t working that weekend. That kind of stuff happened on the team all the time.”

Then the DAP evolved. The necessity of giving engineers respite to save their marriage was understood, but with Apple’s ID studio continuing to push the boundaries of what was possible, workers were under constant pressure to perform. So instead of giving time off, Apple started to give out bonuses meant to assuage spouses. One engineer with more than two decades of Apple experience recalls calling his wife from the Apple office and telling her that he had to take another trip to Asia the following week. “And she just blew up. You could hear her on my phone speaker two offices away,” he says. “The thing that made her calm down was that whenever I’d go to China on a project, if that project was completed and went to production, we got a $10,000 bonus.” Engineers had a name for these bonuses: “Dan bucks” or “Danny bucks,” in reference to Dan Riccio, the VP of Product Design. He’d played a role in negotiating for the bonuses. “We had these fake little vouchers that had Dan on them—he didn’t look happy,” an engineer says.