I'm not really sure that article even paints Apple in a bad light. Yeah, it talks about how much you work hard, but even just listen to them:
> I mean, it’s not that it’s not fun, it’s not that it’s not fulfilling, it’s not that you don’t get to work around all these brilliant people. The bad side effect is they’re all, like, workaholic, psychotic brilliant people.
For me, one of the best things in life is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing. Apple gives me that, and I feel extremely fortunate.
I've been at jobs where the stress is very low and I had time to browse the internet at all hours and didn't have much expected of me. This is 100% the opposite of that, and I'm happier now than I ever was then. It's been 4 years and I've never had anything close to burn-out, because I've never felt that the work wasn't "worth it". (To me, burn out is a result of feeling like you're not getting anywhere, and that just plain isn't the case at a company where we consistently ship things with huge scopes, on time and to resounding success.)
Yeah, there's exec demos, and yeah there's dry-run meetings for them, but you know what? The execs here are fucking smart. Every meeting I've had with execs has left me awestruck at the level with which someone can be simultaneously so big-picture oriented while still being able to sweat little details. There's a reason they got to where they are, and I really feel that at Apple it's a true meritocracy.
It sounds like it's even harder work if you're in the direct email line-of-sight of an exec (which I am not), and I feel for the authors of your linked post about how hard that must be, but to me that comes with the territory of being so close to the success or failure of a product that you are under that kind of scrutiny. What else would you expect?
Operations might be a good place for someone with certain business talents. But also, apple has lately received a lot of flack for their off-shoring and the types of workers and working conditions.
Operations might be a good place for someone with certain business talents. But also, apple has lately received a lot of flack for their off-shoring and the types of workers and working conditions.
If Apple employees were more organized they could make a lot of difference to how the company was operating but it seems that all their efforts are disorganized and disjointed. It mostly seems like their internal organization efforts are nothing more than popularity contests about all the superficial aspects of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist instead of anything substantial about their working and material conditions. They keep signing letters but not actually forming any real union that has real bargaining power.
So it makes sense that they wouldn't know they could share their compensation freely without any repercussions. They seem pretty ignorant of their own rights in general which probably means being an Apple employee is a really nice job. The employees don't actually care about ruffling any real feathers, they only want to make a show of doing so to collect approval points on social media.
Important but not sexy work often gets offloaded to onsite contractors, who also don't play career games (in FAANG, not in their actual employers). Maybe only Apple doesn't work vendors, others are pretty good with it.
I don't think that Apple ever had a vibe as being especially great for employees. Secrecy to a level that you may not know what product you're actually working on, and heavy top down management as a result.
I worked at Apple for more than 10 years in various roles (have the Glass apple). Some of them were a grind, some were awesome, overall it was great and I'd do many the jobs again. A ton of the people I worked with were sharp, interesting, and entertaining. The corporate culture is generally fun, the pay could be better, but the stock options and stock purchase plan made up for it, the benefits are excellent, the food is awesome, and the campuses are generally pretty nice (some are great, some are merely good).
The culture is strongly one of not talking about working at Apple while employed so not many people will discuss it online, especially if they like their jobs. The culture of secrecy is one of those things that I never was bothered by, since it's just the norm.
Some orgs. are much better to work for than others, with around ten thousand employees in hundreds of teams, there's not many ways to reasonably generalize about what it's like to work there - different jobs can result in incredibly different experiences. The guy in the article was an AppleCare program manager dealing with OSV support centers, a job I'd never sign up for ever, since it's a corporate grind that's inherently tied to interdepartmental politics and squabbling with OSVs.
From Wikipedia: "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence", meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they cannot work competently.
"People work at Apple to change the world. Seriously." -- or just making Steve Jobs even richer. Unless you get paid really really well, I don't see any real upside for hackers to work at Apple. You are just a cog in their machine (or cult, as fake seteve jobs said).
You can change the world, and try to get fair amount of money out of it by doing something on your own, or working in smaller companies.
It's largely a waste of time due to the extreme anti corp bias on HN, but the idea that Apple employees don't value or contribute to OS is extremely misleading.
Apple has a no-bullshit work culture (you aren't infantilized like at many other Silicon Valley companies) and the employees really do value and care about their work and its impact in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately, this doesn't extend to upper-management, which is why we see things like Apple 'forgetting' to implement cloud-wide E2EE at the behest of the FBI, or turning over iCloud servers to the Chinese government, creating a massive corporate-sponsored state-surveillance network.
The standard way to describe Apple is that there are good and bad teams. My experience there (SWE org) was 70+ hour workweeks, backstabbing, more politics than anywhere else I've ever worked by a factor of ten, useless leadership (director had no charisma or leadership skills, but seemed to have the Jobs personality...), fear of senior management (director, VPs) by managers, and every other negative anecdote about a toxic workplace you can come up with.
That being said, I have colleagues in other orgs/teams that love their job, work 30 hours a week on average, have strong managers, interesting work, and shockingly higher pay.
So, there are good teams and there are bad teams. Unfortunately, you only hear that because there are often far more bad teams than good.
I've been impressed that Apple has thus far avoided one of those "Amazon is the worst company to work for" NYT articles. The lows are so unbelievably low at Apple if you end up on a bad team.
Not because I think it’s common at Apple in particular, but because it’s common in companies of almost any size and in almost any industry.
It should be better at Apple. They do in fact lead in many areas of improving corporate behavior, but I have actually never heard of them leading in this area, and everyone I know who has worked there makes it sound little different other than the scale of what you work on and the pay, from any other corporation.
It’s one of the reasons I have never seriously thought of working for Apple myself.
I hope Tim Cook reads this and takes it seriously.
I spoke to someone who worked at Apple in the pre-iPhone era, he said similar things about what ended up being the iPhone team.
It honestly just seems like a waste of time to me. That and the fact that I never see Apple employees at conferences etc. - it makes me not want to work there.
As somebody who may apply for a job at Apple in the near future: Because working for that multi-billion dollar corporation means getting to work on possibly the best set of electronic devices on the planet. If I work for a company rather than for myself, I want my work to be contributing towards as grand a project as possible, and if that end goal is valuable enough, working insane hours to meet insane requirements sounds like a fair trade.
What good does it do anyone aside from the schmoozer and the schmoozee that some middle manager at Apple is good as schmoozing?
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