Pros: I've seen some bad reviews on Glassdoor about working at IS&T at Apple, and I feel compelled to share my experience there because I think it was actually pretty great. Some aspects of corporate culture that I see shared by most (if not all) areas in Apple: * A standard of excellence, which can be extremely satisfying for perfectionists. At other companies that I have worked, there tends to be a mentality that as soon as something is 'good enough,' it is pushed into QA or production. At Apple, things don't move forward until they are excellent. * Passion for work. I've never been at a large company where employees are genuinely this passionate about their work. You won't encounter any of the apathy that you often find in large corporations. * Cool problems. Numbers 1 and 2 are arguably made possible on a widespread level within the company because the problems that engineers are working to solve can be extremely interesting. Additionally, solutions almost always have a large footprint of impact due to the number of people who interact with Apple products on a day-to-day basis. You won't find yourself doing anything remedial. So now the question becomes: how are things different in IS&T from other parts of the company? The answer is that it doesn't really differ. If anything, the impact of what you are working on is larger than in some other areas because a lot of what IS&T does is the foundation that makes consumer-facing products possible to run on. There are entire companies out there that *only* make one of the products that a given team in IS&T produces, and there is a good chance that IS&T is doing a better job of it. While all the teams in IS&T are different, I think that these general principles are true for all of them.

Cons: One of the things that I found challenging was the modularity of the teams. By that, I mean that the teams in IS&T don't interact much with other teams except for when they have to for business reasons. Socially speaking, I don't see a lot of full-time employees eating lunch with people from other teams that often. Also, within my own team, I never really felt like I had a strong social connection to the people I worked with. People were often just coming in and doing their own work without really interacting that much with other people in the cubes around them. This means that in order to make work friends, you kind of have to go out of your way to initiate contact with other people, which can make the first couple of months of work a little tougher. This was my experience, and I have also heard it echoed by other people in IS&T.

Pros: No pros at all. All the glitter from outside is very misleading.

Cons: Horrible coworkers. They constantly complain about each other to management. Poor management. Management does not find time to help or look at everyone's point of view. Lots of nepotism, at least in the Apple Maps team. Old timers are really fat cats and write buggy code.

Pros: Great pay, great benefits, and you have Apple on your resume.

Cons: Reviews are accurate, all of the bad ones at least. They use a lot of offshore contractors, and a high percentage are not good. The same goes for the managers; they used to be not-so-good contractors and are managers now. It's not usually bad to use contractors due to the flexibility of scaling up and down on people. But when you have 5 employees and 15 contractors, and they just come and go, you don't really have that flexibility. It's the same 15 positions, but filled by people who are taken to extreme burnout and are writing code and creating designs worse than recent grads. Engineer quality is the worst I've ever seen in my life overall, with 18 YOE. Are there good folks there? Yes, absolutely. But when you have 5 employees and 15 contractors, and 50% suck and are offshore in India on a completely different timezone, you are in for a mess and a career hara-kiri. Unless you are making much less than the current TC offered, I would advise against it. It doesn't matter the team, trust me on that. I have experienced and interacted with several teams; it's all the same. If the TC is significantly higher, take it, and leave soon for a similar paying company. I'm looking for my way out. All the contractors are from Tata Consulting and Infosys. Those guys are suffering and being exploited. 100% of the people I've interacted with are Indians. Diversity is 0%. It's incredible; you feel like you are in India yourself. I've never seen this in my life, and I've worked in all the MAGAF.