Apple Career Development Videos, Forum, and Q&A
Grow Your Tech Career at Apple
Apple Inc. is an American technology company that specializes in consumer electronics, software and online services. Apple's introduction of the iPhone in 2007 ushered in the modern smartphone era and a massive platform shift. Headquartered in Cupertino, California, Apple is the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of more than $3 trillion.
Performance Review
Evaluation
See relevant discussions involving Apple engineers on Taro.
Software engineers are evaluated on the following 3 axes:
Teamwork
This is how collaborative you have been and how able you are to improve processes and projects and meetings. Make sure that you're skilled at bringing many different voices together to get a high rating here, especially at senior levels.
Results
This is your project impact. Show your ability to improve the user experience and deliver high-quality execution on time.
Innovation
Innovation covers your ability to come up with new solutions and creatively identify opportunities within your team and organization.
At a broader level, Apple is striving to weave "Diversity And Inclusion" into each of the above 3 axes.
Example: If you're able to ensure that underrrepresented voices in tech are able to be heard in your meetings, you would get rewarded more on the "Teamwork" axis.
Feedback
Performance feedback is collected in the MyPage tool which unfortunately isn't very good with bad UI/UX and arbitrary limits.
All feedback at Apple is written in a free-form style. Writing style will vary based on manager and team.
Self Review
You are limited to just 2,500 characters for your self-review, so learn to write succinctly.
In your self-review, you cover your project impact and good engineering behaviors, all anchored to Apple's 3 performance axes. It asks you to expand on your future career development goals, but it doesn't make sense to talk about that too much as you're limited to just 2,500 characters.
Peer Feedback
Peer feedback is extremely important as your manager weighs it heavily. Strive to build good relationships both within and outside your team.
Your manager will automatically request feedback from your immediate teammates, so think about which peers you can request feedback from outside your team. There is a limit of 5 for these peer feedback requests.
Unlike the self-review, there is no limit for peer feedback length.
Visibility
All feedback is loosely anonymized when being shared with you. You can probably reverse-engineer who wrote each one from their writing style and the content they covered.
Compensation
Apple is fairly frugal compared to other FAANG companies. TC increases are generally limited to 10% each year.
Every year, your compensation is increased across the following 3 axes:
- Base salary: You get a raise.
- More RSUs: You get a refresher grant that gives you more equity.
- Bonus: You get a one-time cash payment. This is limited to 10% of your base salary.
Your performance is correlated to pay increases, but the formula is very secret at Apple.
Performance Improvement Plan
Unlike most Big Tech companies, Apple doesn't target to remove the bottom 5-15% of low performers every cycle.
As long as you're getting ME on all 3 axes, you should be safe from a PIP or performance-based firing. As a whole, Apple is more relaxed on the performance-side compared to other FAANG companies.
