Apple

You will work with very smart people.

Advance peek into some of the new technologies the world is raving about.

It is possible to stick to 9-5 working hours most of the time; productivity is achieved more through discipline than raw time.

Candidates beware – most Java development jobs at Apple are actually SRE jobs with 24/7 pager rotation, multiple conference calls on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and management taking it for granted that you have to promptly answer phone calls every time of day or night.

Now, production monitoring jobs obviously have their place and are necessary in every company. Generally speaking, those should be non-exempt positions that pay overtime and give time off for extra hours. At Apple, it is more like software engineers are expected to work an uncompensated second job with no recognition or benefits.

But most importantly, a company must be as honest and upfront about the nature of each job as a candidate is expected to be about their skills. Instead, both myself and candidates who were considered after me were actively misled about the need to be on-call or spend months manually installing software rather than writing code. This is really a classless act for the world's richest software company that takes pride in its image and could easily afford to hire extra people to do production support on sane terms.

I should also add that Apple has the most dysfunctional internal transfer process I have seen in my life. I don't blame you if you still want to work on iOS after reading this review, but beware that you will NOT be able to take some other position and then transfer to iOS after building up internal creds. If you work for Apple, but have skills and desire to work on actual Apple products rather than backend, you must quit Apple first.

You must sell Apple to your current and future employees the same way you sell it to your customers. Most importantly, this involves honesty, a fair work culture, and rewarding success by letting people work on more interesting projects (this is far more important than money to talented engineers).

But also look at the campus! Inside of an Apple building looks nothing like inside of an Apple store. It looks like inside of a Costco, and that's being charitable. The Googleplex looks like inside of an Apple store. Our building had a caving ceiling and broken A/C this summer – who would have thought Tim would run a literal sweatshop right here in the valley!

With the "spaceship" construction increasing the number of years away, it's time to spend around $20 million of the $100 billion Apple has in the bank on putting one really cool amenity – like an arcade or a free movie theater – into each building in the sprawling campus. This will at least give employees the sense that the company has some concern about whether they are happy while tougher cultural problems are being worked on.