What It's Like to Work at Apple
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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.
As for the secrecy, you're totally right. I roomed with 3 other interns during the summer and none of us would talk shop, ever. When interviewing for other companies later, nearly all my answers about what I did at Apple were "I wish I could talk to you about that, but the most I can do at this point is talk 'around' it, if you will, since that's an unreleased product." Not at all unlike government secrecy.
All that said, it really was a glorious place to work. I miss a lot about it; the seemingly infectious excitement and passion for the products was really driving. I loved being in that environment. :)
I hear this from people, but I rarely buy it. I'm not saying that you didn't want to stay later, but say Tim wanted to just work 8 to 5 each day, would everyone say, "Hey that's cool. We feel bad that you can't stay later, but it's 100% fine that you work 8 hours per day"?
It just seems like places I've been, if a handful of sufficiently respected productive members of the team stay late consistently (for whatever reason) there becomes strong social pressure that everyone stay late.
Having said that, it's no coincidence that Apple never made it even in the top 100 of US companies to work for, they really don't treat their employees very well from an objective standpoint and any former employee who's had a chance to leave and take a step back can easily see that.
The distortion field obviously applies to Apple employees as well.
My experience at Apple was that working ridiculous amounts of overtime was not at all required. Most of my coworkers didn't. On the other hand, generally you wouldn't get told NOT to work a lot if you wanted to, and that's the true weakness of the company culture. If you're a workaholic, you can definitely burn yourself out. If you're not a workaholic, you'll do just fine.
Yea, I mean Walmart scored high on that bogus list once. It's hard to imagine a worse place to work than Walmart (Offices I mean, the stores are probably as crappy as any big box retailer).
Of course, there's a prevalent opinion around here that working over 40 hours a week always decreases your productivity (and not just per hour), and the people who buy into that will likely find this definition of impossible to be silly (since as a corollary, every possible thing is achievable in 40 hour weeks).
I personally would argue that an 80 hour week isn't the same as two 40 hour weeks. It would probably be more like a 40 hour week and a 20 hour week. The end result? You get something done sooner, but you end up putting in a lot more time than you would if you just worked 40 hours a week. It's more efficient for the company because they're getting a product faster and only paying for 40 hours worth of work a week. But it's less efficient for the employee because they're putting in many more hours in total to do the same task but only getting paid as if they were working 40 hours a week.
In my experience, working long hours is only good in the short-term. Sometimes that is necessary. But it is almost never a good idea in the long-term.
I think your personal experience matches mine - I'm more productive in my initial working hours (maybe discounting the first hour of getting in to it), and are less efficient in my later hours. But my total productivity goes up as I work more, at least up to around 80 hours/week. Whether or not that's good use of my time depends on how enjoyable the work is to me and what kind of non-work I'm coming home to that day.
I may also agree with your position on long hours being a bad idea "in the long-term", but I'd quibble with it the way it's worded. Periodically working long hours can be good for long term progress, but working long hours over an extended period of time leads to burn-out.
Clearly not made by people that think this way. I doubt even higher up staff think this way. I.e. Jobs, Ive.
Why do you want to work such long days when there is so much evidence that total productive work per week doesn't increase beyond around 40 hours of work for most knowledge worker jobs, especially software development?
Do the studies correct for employee satisfaction with working more, corporate culture, employee skill, employee personal life status, or level of excitement/interest in work? Because I think all of those would be a positive factor at Apple.
At other times, of course, leaving is the only way to clear my head and find a solution. It all really depends on your working habits; mine just don't tend to be very consistent. :)
I don't think this is true, though maybe you can find a source to prove it?
What I've often heard and read is that the percentage of work falls off after a certain amount of hours per week.
or put another way, working 80 hours may not give you a doubling of productivity over 40 hours but it will increase the amount of productive output.
Not saying it's wasted time - quite the contrary - but if you want to actually work 8 hours a day, you need to spend much more than 8 hours at work.
For instance what if I work 8 hours a day usually but a couple of times a week when I am in the zone put in 12 hours? What if I make up an extra 4 hours casually on the weekends? It'd be hard to say that there is no way to include more than 40 productive hours into a week, using any scheme.
i.e. if someone was equally productive (or even 25% more productive), but still produced less than you purely because they worked the scheduled hours, than they'd be less likely to get promotions, etc. ?
Producing the 'minimal expected' amount of work for a prolonged period of time (reliability) is cause for being promoted as well, I suppose, but takes more time.
The web isn't exactly swamped with "Apple Wives" blogs, so you might consider the possibility that this grave injustice that you're so worked up about is primarily occurring in your imagination.
It takes an effort by management to prevent working hours from ballooning out when people are working on long projects. It's very obvious that Apple are not doing that.
My company expects people to leave on the dot at 5:30pm. It's great.
Hours are a flawed metric for engineering, usually, since different people get different amounts done in the same amount of hours. But surely there should be some meritocratic reason for a promotion?
And remember while you like your job now, what happens if you start to like it less (or you have a family, etc.) but you can't reduce your hours otherwise you'll get penalized for it. One day you'll wake up and realize you're working for EA.
(Ref: http://andymerrett.co.uk/2004/12/09/ea-the-human-story/)
That being said, i think there should be no exemptions for overtime pay.
Which if they do this over months the 8 hour worker should be more productive over all.
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.
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.
[1] I can't comment on the industry standard because Apple is kind of a hybrid between a software and hardware company.
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.
(It's even hard for me to convince my investors that I'll be around in case my Guard unit is deployed.)
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.
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.
Any Apple employees on here like to comment?
Probably not ;-)
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?
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).
I've never heard anyone claim that Apple is overly bureaucratic.
Remember that 1984 video? Yeah.
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".