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I've seen the culture shift over the last decade

Graphics Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Apple for 20 years
May 12, 2017
Cupertino, California
4.0
RecommendsNeutral OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

The company treats you well with benefits, on-site facilities, perks, and discounts.

A vast majority of teams are working on something new and exciting.

Tim Cook is making Apple a leading example of what a company should be to its customers (privacy), its country, and the environment (energy/climate).

Cons

If your team is working on something new and exciting, it can be a little too exciting. The pace seems to gradually increase but never level off.

The "next thing's" features are more important than the bugs-in-the-wild you desperately want to fix for customers.

Since Steve Jobs left, there doesn't seem to be someone at/near the top who has their finger on the pulse of the products. Yes, Steve was intense at times, but he really knew what a product or service was supposed to be.

It's hard to take more than 2 weeks of vacation at once without giving a lot of notice (say 4+ months). It's nearly impossible to take more than 3 weeks of earned vacation at once.

HR, in my experience, is poorly managed and has high turnover. It took 3 months to get me an offer in 2005, and HR failed to give me an exit interview despite it being standard operating procedure.

Advice to Management
  1. Work with employees that want to work remotely. By refusing to consider remote work, you'll lose employees who value a quality life, which in turn yields quality work. Apple's culture heavily benefits from these people and their core values. They're the ones that want to do "the right thing." The ones that remain are often looking for wealth, power, or simply a steady check by doing "just enough."

  2. Allow longer vacations and/or bring back sabbaticals. Burnout is a real thing, and sometimes a week or two just isn't enough.

  3. Reenable everyone to help make every product better. By making every product a black box to any team that doesn't work on it, it's demoralizing to find your beautifully crafted Radar (bug report) go into a black hole, indefinitely invisible to the author.

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