Apple

Hi,

I have 6 years of experience in the software engineering field, mostly working as a software consultant and at not well known startups. Having done MSc in the field AI, I got an offer to interview with Apple for an interesting role that seemed to have the best from 2 worlds - Software Engineering & AI/ML. To my surprise, after 6 interviews over the span of 2 months and an emotional rollercoaster, I got the job at ICT3 level and moved to another country. I thought I might be underleveled at first, but I kept thinking I actually don’t have experience in AI/ML so they’re levelling me as ICT3 must be right, I also don’t feel like a senior yet.

The situation I’m in now at work is very frustrating and disappointing to me, because of the following :

• I’m still onboarding after 9 months in, without being in a senior role. There is no serious documentation, I have to “network” in a forced manner, to find out vital information for an engineer like “do we have 2 prod environments and when do releases happen”.
• up until now I have not received any tasks or projects to sharpen my skills or keep the ones I worked hard for so far
• I had to beg for 8 months to be included in a project, the explanation was “we’re in the planning stage, we’re waiting for OKs to get started”
• I get neither serious SWE experience from this, nor ML/AI related one.
• Over the past month, after telling my manager I would apply for other jobs if this situation (not participating in anything palpable - just meetings) did not change, they finally moved me to another team that’s closest to SWE that this role can get.
• in the new team, they advertised this project that would mostly be backend work in Go. It turns out the codebase belonged to another team and the role that I’m in, does not imply bettering/maintaining their codebase or adding new features, it’s mostly data hillclimbing and adding some strings in the right places, so super humiliating after having prepared from DSA , system design & design patterns
• I don’t get to touch any AI/ML models yet or work with them, because I don’t have experience with AI/ML
• My manager is a new manager and has half the experience in the field as I do. I talked to him about my disappointment of being so undervalued and his take on this is, I first have to learn the tech stack to participate in “more advanced” projects. However my male colleagues, who joined the company a few months earlier than me, have been given more responsibility faster (participating in 2-3 projects after aprox. 6 months in)
• Time spent in the office is not productive at all, I can’t do focused work there at all. People chat and socialise all the time in the open spaced office we all work in and there are at least 60 people working there. This forces me to work overtime & during weekends, to achieve deadlines for the project and to learn the needed tech stack
• I’m starting to feel trapped in this job because it’s consuming my time, including my free time and I’m actually worried that if I continue like this without coding, participating in code reviews & other healthy SWE practices I’ll get out of hand and have a hard time getting another software engineering job or staying relevant in the industry
• Maybe what I’m experiencing in this particular branch of Apple is unusual for FANG or even other Apple jobs and would be grateful for others’ opinions on this situation.

For context, I work at Apple

I’m currently having difficulty with my manager, who’s made remarks in front of others and micro aggressions, which goes against the inclusion and diversity values of Apple. My manager has been doing this in my 1:1s as well

I’ve been considering talking to HR but I am worried of any repercussions. I know Apple hasn’t laid anyone off yet but they could and I could be the one in my team to be let go (my team’s headcount increased by one person during the pandemic for context). He’s made references to layoffs in my 1:1s

What’s the best thing to do in this situation? I’ve spoken about this with him in the past

I’m nervous about joining since my past internships were very relaxed and I didn’t actually do much coding. The probation period makes me think that it may be more “sink or swim” when I join. How can I ensure I get enough support and survive the probation period?

My future manager asked me to read “Effective Java” as preparation for starting. However, it’s really not making sense to me. I have a fear that they’ll ask me how much I understood from the book. How should I answer the question without making myself look bad?

A lot of examples of growing to Staff are more oriented around less technical fundamental/soft skills, including the examples in Taro. However, I'm unsure how to find this scope in my team, and I don't think that kind of behavior works to get to Staff at Apple overall. I spend ~90% of my time coding, and the culture is more top-down at Apple compared to a company like Meta.

Given all that, how can it be possible for me to grow to Staff? Are there paths to Staff that are heavily technical?

I'm working on a part-time master's degree in Computer Science while being employed. My goal is primarily just to learn for fun, but I'm wondering if there are any career advantages?

It seems at Apple that getting promoted past ICT4 can take ages. My manager has 3x my YOE and many reports, but we're both ICT4. There is no leveling rubric that I can find, so it's unclear to me what differentiates an ICT5 from an ICT4 here. I'm thinking it might even just be worth abandoning the promo goal for the duration I work here, then aim to be hired into a promo at the next gig in a few years.

I've had a lot of friends tell me that they didn't negotiate their offer, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to negotiate. What are the costs of trying - Is it possible to lose anything if you try to negotiate and fail?

Recently, I have found myself just working on the tasks and investigating the bugs that my manager tells me to. However, from a performance perspective this would be considered "meeting expectations" at best. How do I develop a nose for impact and introduce new, innovative ideas to my team that really improve our product or development workflow?

My manager is relatively inexperienced (<1 year as a manager, and only a few more years of overall work experience than me). While they have a lot of expertise as a developer in the domain that we work on, when coming them to my previous manager, I don’t think that they have a ton of experience in growing and promoting people, esp. in a deliberate or structured way. How do I make sure that I continue growing, and receive the right growth opportunities and constructive feedback?

I am a SWE with a few years of experience looking to get promoted to senior-level. A few months ago I switched to a team that works on an area of CS that I do not have much prior experience in, and it is becoming evident that having that domain knowledge is critical to succeeding in this new role. My development velocity has been slow (I don’t have prior experience with the programming language that the team uses either) and I’ve struggled to build trust with people on my team. How do I turn the ship around quickly and succeed in this new position?

I imagine these orgs will be safer from layoffs right? I'm interested in AI/ML fairness, but I have some reservations about pivoting there as they won't directly produce revenue for Apple.

Is it effective when doing this as a tech worker? I'm also wondering how it varies by company type.

Freedom and autonomy are often mentioned as great perks of working in tech, but I feel like there can be too much freedom, especially for earlier-in-career ICs. As someone who's relatively new to my field, I feel like having more supervision could be good. Is that true?

I'm exploring other paths in tech, including SWE. For the software engineers out there, I would love to understand why you do what you do: What's the main thing that keeps you going?

I come from a non-Computer Science background, and I'm exploring other paths in tech, one of which is software engineering.

I have a vision of a software engineer working on the same piece of logic daily: Is that what it's like and if so, can that get lonely? Or is that actually what most SWE love and find exciting?

I'm trying to learn more about the different career trajectories in tech. I come from a data science background, and I'm interested in the software engineering path. It would be nice to understand what my life would look like if I were to make the switch.