I've also heard complaints from Google and ex-Google people that wouldn't come up at Apple. Examples: - Launching a hard-to-understand product and providing it with scant marketing support, so it promptly goes nowhere (when Apple launches a product we are committed to making it a success). - Central hiring leads to o way of knowing what kind of project you will end up working on, and high risk that it will be infrastructure grunt work which is not respected by the culture.

Does internal secrecy suck more or less than those kinds of things? I dunno. I would not be so bold as to make a claim either way without firsthand experience of both environments.