Engineer • Current Employee
Pros: - Apple brand on resume if you care about these sort of superficial things.
- Product discounts
Cons: IS&T is the worst place to work for engineers. Swamped with 3rd party contractors, mostly Indian body shops, management treats them terribly. Rude, unprofessional, and unethical work culture.
Senior leadership within IS&T are terrible, egoistic megalomaniacs with zero leadership skills. They don't know how to lead by example.
There is no place for engineers here in this group. Rampant politics and horrible work culture. Managers in this group are nothing but "project managers," who have no technical/engineering acumen and have no eye towards architecture, code, or good engineering practices. They treat engineers like second-class citizens.
These managers have no interest in the career growth and development of their employees. All they care about is themselves and their RSU refreshers, appeasing their bosses anyway possible to get there.
Most of the teams in IS&T build internal and corporate tools/applications, and they are dismal at that, from infrastructure to development processes, terrible, terrible!! You won't be working on anything world-changing.
If you think you can change groups easily, you are sadly mistaken. It is very difficult to change groups/departments within Apple. You need to let your manager know of your interest first, then go through the entire recruitment process as if you are an external candidate. If, for whatever reason, you do not end up landing that new position, you would face extreme retaliation on your current team. Your current manager would screw your career up. You would be ostracized, and he/she would make sure you have no future left in Apple.
IS&T has a bad reputation within Apple, and every other group within Apple treats IS&T folks that way. Other engineering groups are treated better. In short, Apple has this subtle class-based culture. Not everyone is treated equally and with respect.
If you are an engineer and thinking about joining Apple and IS&T, assuming you would be able to do amazing engineering work, you are sadly mistaken. IS&T is the place where engineers come to destroy their careers. My personal advice: Stay away from this group.