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What It's Like to Work at Apple
- smiler 16y agoWould be great if he had expanded on the 'no career path' section - that will probably be something that most people want to know about - surely there must be different levels of developers to some extent? Moving from development to management? Any Apple employees on here like to comment?
- gaius 16y agoAny Apple employees on here like to comment? Probably not ;-)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- FalcorTheDog 16y agoYou'd be surprised ;-)
- nostromo 16y agoThe way he mentions that Apple HR confirms that there are 'no career paths' at Apple makes me think he's referring to a more regimented promotion system (a la GE).
- jonnathanson 16y agoThis is probably what he means. It's the case at a lot of companies, and particularly tech companies. There's probably no set rulebook along the lines of "You will spend X years in Y position in Z department, then you will be promoted to Y+1, where you will spend another X years until Y+2," etc. That kind of structured progression seems to be going away in a lot of industries, with the notable exceptions being the big client-facing industries (consulting, banking, law, and so forth).
- gamble 16y agoIf you look at company reviews on glassdoor.com, you'll notice that people either complain that their company has too many layers of management, or that there are no opportunities for advancement. I've never heard anyone claim that Apple is overly bureaucratic.
- jrockway 16y agoPeople have tried to make that claim, but Apple's Reality Distortion Field picked it up and the guilty parties were taken out back and shot. Remember that 1984 video? Yeah.
- kunjaan 16y agoCould you elaborate more on the system?
- j_baker 16y agoEither that or a Google-style flat hierarchy. There may simply not be that many manager positions to get promoted into.
- jfb 16y agoAlmost certainly he's referring to a formal career plan, of which I saw none at Apple. On the other hand, I know many engineers who have made director -- but only by switching gears to management. If you want to stay an individual contributor, you can, but "moving up" at Apple is largely confined to management. There are a handful of DESTs, but they are the exception, rather than the rule.
- jon_hendry 16y agoHow does that effect compensation? Do people plateau in compensation because of the lack of formal levels, or is compensation not tied so tightly to your title/# of reports/etc.
- jfb 16y agoI don't know; they keep that data pretty close to their chest. You wouldn't get up into the eye-watering RSU/option grant territory until you made director, but the engineers (and team leads, &c.) are well compensated. The stock going berserk has changed the equation, of course. EDIT: Oh, how about I answer the question? Compensation is highly discretionary, so it varies pretty widely. But the real cheese is in equity grants, and those are heavily weighted towards management. A common complaint is that there's no realistic path up out of being an "individual contributor".
- apike 16y agoLack of a career path is part of why I left Apple to start my own company. The hierarchy is quite flat, and the departments are quite compartmentalized. Because of this, if you want to move up, you're probably quitting and applying to a new job that also happens to be at Apple. Of course, it was a wonderful place to work in a lot of other ways.
- applerecruit 16y agoApple is trying to hire me to do server side stuff. It's a job that I'm pretty good at, but I'm not very excited about anymore. My thinking was that I could transfer into another group after a year, and it would be easier once I'm "in the system." Given your statement, is it a better idea to just wait until I'm good enough at the stuff I want to do, before applying?
- jfb 16y agoLoads of people leave and come back, too. I knew several.
- jlhamilton 16y agoI heard about a guy who did this named Steve.
- jfb 16y agoEmployee 0 (apocryphal).
- 16y ago
- yardie 16y agoReservists called up to active duty are put into a military-leave status and they remain Apple employees while Apple makes up the salary difference between their military pay and their Apple pay until they return. I wonder if other companies do this. I know by law they are required to keep those positions for active reserves but I don't think they are required to continue to pay their salary. In the past, I've worked temp positions for employees that were deployed.
- rdj 16y agoA company I worked for in Atlanta did the same thing (pay the difference). However, I suspect this is still the exception, not the rule.
- jasonjei 16y agoThat really is above and beyond. Aside from the fact that many companies will find you completely unattractive if you have Guard/Reserve on your resume, paying the difference to keep your existing salary while not even at Apple makes it very military-reserve friendly environment. But you'll probably still have to weigh the other working environment factors. (It's even hard for me to convince my investors that I'll be around in case my Guard unit is deployed.)
- count 16y agoLeave Guard/Reserve off your resume in the future, maybe? From what I understand, it's illegal to consider that during employment decisions anyways.
- retroryan 16y agoI am pretty sure Oracle does this as well.
- rdl 16y agoI actually saw some (military contractor or related manufacturing) companies which continue to pay full salary (plus the employee gets whatever active duty salary and allowances). These companies also donated stuff like satellite links to their employee's unit so they could have Internet access. I would probably do this at my company (even outside of defense), purely to be more attractive to NG/Reserves candidates -- a lot of them have great additional experience and training which is paid for by the government, and especially if they value their military career and security clearance, are unlikely to get involved in anything untoward.
- novum 16y agoSecrecy: Apple's secrecy is comparable to the U.S. government's in terms of "need to know" and compartmentalization. This. My roommate is a hardware engineer on the iPad team, and he won't even confirm that there will be another iPad. He takes extra precautions when working at home - he won't take work calls if I'm in the room, and he set up the furniture in his room in an awkward fashion solely so that his computer monitor didn't face towards the door. Several times I've brought friends or family down to Cupertino. He lets us inside to walk around the inner campus and eat at Caffe Macs, but that's truly all there is to see. Certainly we can't enter any other buildings on Infinite Loop. One thing this article doesn't mention is work-life balance. We live in SF, and my roommate has a 90-minute commute (each way) on the Apple shuttle, and he usually works 12 hours on top of that. He's out by 8am and doesn't usually return until 11pm. He tells me this is a common topic of discussion at Caffe Macs - the balance between working on groundbreaking technology and, quite simply, having zero personal time during the week (and often on the weekends). He can be called to go to China with no more than a few days' notice, and the duration of his stay there is never known ahead of time. He often estimates 7-10 days but it frequently ends up being closer to 2, even 3 weeks. Apple covers all of his expenses, of course, but he doesn't much care for Shenzhen. He really likes working at Apple, but I think he recognizes that it's not a sustainable job for him for more than 3 or 4 years.
- Keyframe 16y agoSounds like a genuine shithole/borderline slavery. Why are people putting up with this?
- novum 16y agoBecause he's designing the next iPad. Several people on his team have left Apple for very lucrative careers as designers and engineers at hardware or design firms. It's a phenomenal boost to your career.
- Keyframe 16y agoThat's a valid point though. Somehow I confused him as someone senior, since you've said "designing the next iPad" - but then you've said roommate, which does not compute. Then again, something else does not compute in this story. If I were Apple and were about talked-about level of secrecy, I sure wouldn't let people that are designing key products easily let go. On the other hand, if people that were involved in the process, but were not all that important, how lucrative would they be to the competition (since they weren't key in the process - so no lucrative know-how)? edit: I apologize for word mess - I have a headache.
- adamesque 16y agoI worked at Apple for 5 years (ending in summer '08), and one of the most amazing things about the experience was how well most people understood the core vision of the company, even in departments where you wouldn't expect that – like call center management. I've worked with other big tech companies and frequently heard people talking about doing things "more like Apple". It was funny to think that was exactly the way people inside Apple talked too. Everyone's on board.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- davidj 16y agoA friend of mine worked at Apple as a consultant for a ERP system that ran on Windows NT and I used to pick him up all the time. They would let me walk right in no problem. I remember walking across a parking lot where there was a wine bar where he liked to hang out. Of course this was in 2000 though.
- nhangen 16y agoAs a former Army Soldier, it was very cool to read the piece about the military. Props to Apple for taking a strong stand.