Apple

Great pay for Vancouver (still low compared to the USA). People are very smart, easy to work with, and helpful. Great care for customer experience.

• No office culture. Very few social events are put on, with no budget for happy hours. There's a very small quarterly budget for team socials, and very little vibe in the office. The layout is all private cubicles (think the film Office Space; it looks a lot like this). All of this makes it difficult to network within the office, and the office is socially dead / not much fun.

• No travel is allowed or funded to visit USA / Cupertino offices, not even for induction or when you have team members / managers located there. This is pretty poor, considering travel is funded between Seattle offices and Cupertino.

• Paid time off isn't great (but slightly better than the USA): 15 days + 3 days off for Thanksgiving, which you can take at another time if preferred.

• Three days in office are required. This sucks when a lot of the people coming in are off-shoots of teams based elsewhere. So, there isn't much point coming in, as you're not actually working with / socializing with anyone in the office anyway.

• Higher-up leadership has been very negative towards hiring in Vancouver. They've said they don't see it as a core part of the team or strategy. This definitely reflects in the lack of culture / budget in the Vancouver offices, with not much effort put into building a vibrant culture here from higher-ups (although it must be noted that the local office managers are awesome and try hard with the budget they have).

• Put way more effort into people joining the teams in Vancouver when their teams are based elsewhere.
• Fund them to visit Cupertino/their core teams in California at least once when they start.