Apple

Looks good on the resume, maybe, and get your feet in the door?

The real problem with this place is the contracting model that started a long time ago. The whole IS&T was built on top of it. A lot of the full-time employees, including many managers, are coming from that background. Technical skill-wise, they can only offer the very basic and usually have no idea or insight when it comes to design and engineering. Mentally, this brings them job insecurity and pushes them to seek managerial roles as soon as possible.

Projects in this place usually have tight timelines to meet business needs, so quality was never the main concern. In this place, you will not learn anything new, as you will be working with raw SQL and single methods with 2000+ lines of code embedded within static classes everywhere. Most, if not all, of the internal business-facing systems were developed by contractors from various vendor companies. These contractors, as Apple grew, were converted into full-time employees, and some later became managers.

Due to the large number of projects taking place in this organization and the restriction on the rate of contractor conversion, sometimes outsiders will get hired in to run projects. Don't get me wrong, you are not really making any decisions here. If you are hired as a PM, you will be dealing with politics on a day-to-day basis. If you are hired as an engineer, you will not have any impact at all because you are not allowed to code using best practices. The technologies, methodologies, and design patterns that you have learned are going to cause them fear of losing control, and that is something they really do not want to see because they have nowhere else better to go. So, they will try everything to stop and 'humiliate' you. After some time, you start to think, maybe this is not the right place, and choose to move on. If you are NOT lucky enough to see the lucky ones move on, you will again see this bad cycle happening over and over again: Contractors getting converted, buddies of some higher-up getting hired without following proper HR guidelines, and occasionally some external hires (when they had no other options).

In IS&T, you will see this quick people turnover quite often. It has the tendency of not being able to keep the good people around. The ones left there mostly share the same kind of mentality. You will be wasting time if you think you could have it changed. The culture of this organization really isn't what represents the TRUE Apple. Hard work is not recognized. Performance reviews won't make a difference if the BIG boss thinks about you differently. If you are skillful and young, join a startup. If you can get an offer from anywhere else but IS&T from Apple, by all means go for it. The culture there will be completely different. If you really want to join the company with no other options at the moment, BE READY TO SUFFER AT LEAST FOR 365 DAYS!

Hear the people out and do something about it!