Apple

Incredible opportunity to work on the world's best products, and most of the people really care about the product. It was a lot of fun to see how the world's most admired company works behind the scenes. If you have a good manager, you can go pretty far, pretty quick.

Compensation and PTO are very fair for Silicon Valley. The culture is very design and user experience driven, which may seem obvious, but you should feel the same way before joining. Sometimes sacrifices in the technical implementation are made because it provides a better user design.

My main complaint is that it gets repetitive after a few years. Specifically, working on the OS side, you just feel like it's the same cycle-driven work year in and year out.

Work-life balance can be tough, especially leading up to major OS releases.

The hybrid schedule is nice, but the in-office days force you to commute to/from Cupertino to sit in online meetings.

I put a low score for DEI because there is not huge representation of underserved minorities in tech. That becomes apparent from day one on campus, despite what the values of the company are.

The obvious thing here is to stop making your engineers, who have successful track records, come into the office. It is a waste of time, and the old Apple "water cooler" culture is dead. Over the years, I have seen some exceptional engineers and people walk out due to this aging policy that has a tremendous influence on the industry.

There is not a lot of leadership from underrepresented (in-tech) groups, which is discouraging given the public perception of the company in its marketing.