Apple

Financial stability. It appears good on a resume.

• Extremely outdated tools and technology.
• Poor resource allocation.
• Extremely poor quality of internal tools.
• Constant reorganizations make it impossible to focus on a project.
• Recruiters don't care about you, they just want to fill their numbers.

I was absolutely dumbfounded at the quality of the tools I was expected to use to do my job. For example, as a site reliability engineer, I care deeply about monitoring and alerting. The tools available to me were the worst that I've ever used, be it another Fortune 500 company or small startup.

I find it absolutely insane that a company like Apple, that has all the resources in the world, doesn't enable their employees to do their best work by providing at least reasonable resources.

This category of tool is just one, but this problem extends to almost every area.

Not only were the tools I needed to do my job of poor quality, the techniques in use were outdated. More often than not, I would look into a system and find that it involves many undocumented parts, created by people no longer at the company, and not under configuration management. There was zero accountability to deliver quality work, and years if not decades of this has created a frail, mysterious and ugly infrastructure. It's difficult and unpleasant to work in.

In the slightly longer than a year timespan I spent here, I or my team was reorganized 5 times. This made it impossible to focus on medium to long term projects.

During my interview process, the recruiter and interviewees assured me the position and work matched the many qualities I asked about, and that I would be able to work/do the areas I cared about. Once I moved into the position, I found out that it was all lies. This was extremely insulting.

I consider my time here a complete waste in terms of professional growth. The only thing I gained is the name on my resume.

Every single day was pure torture.