Apple iOffer (Offer letter done the Apple way)
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I've never worked for a big corporation, but working for Apple is probably like working for any other company with that size of a workforce. Some people love their job, some people are bored and a lot of it depends on which group/department you're in. I was a little turned off by the cubicle/office farms in some of the buildings, which are probably setup like that due to security.
I saw Steve Jobs a few times at the cafeteria. But he did not yell at me. Or anyone else.
I doubt that this would be possible in today's Apple though...
If FSJ commented on this, he would probably mention dispatching Moshe in a time travel machine :-)
This is already on my bulletin board. So the next time I opt for the "easy way out", I can look at this and remind myself not to be such a wimp.
Just a few of the gems inside:
The three of us spent the next six hours editing fifty thousand lines of code...It would have taken weeks for any one of us working alone.
Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive.
"This doesn't suck" (high praise in Apple lingo).
This feedback loop created an ever-increasing spiral of productivity.
It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product.
The secret to programming is having smart friends.
I gave a twenty-minute demonstration, eliciting "oohs" and "ahhs."
programmers are the least qualified people to design software for novices.
...we were in full crunch mode, working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week...If this story were a movie, you would now see the clock hand spinning and the calendar pages blowing away in the wind.
...it was a macho computer guy thing - we had never shipped a million copies of software before
I answered to no one, and no one had to do anything I asked...We were hackers, creating something for the sheer joy of making it work.
I find the story to be just the opposite: such behaviour of The Corporation is not motivating at all, in the productive sense. It is rather motivating to do something completely different from productive coding/work.
[1] imho the whole story is BS (because he was bound to bump into someone, if not when going to the bathroom). AAPL is one of the few public companies being openly secretive, and they are known to use [military grade, an HP heritage] security: you simply cannot clown around for long unwantedly.
[2] Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
People with good intentions have been breaking into Apple's secure buildings in two different millenia now.
And they've been doing the iOffers for a long time now. I was an intern in 2006, and they looked just like that back then.
Coould you expand on this? Is it something like "they don't do H1 visas" or "there are occasional incidents of borderline racism" (I heard something to this effect in a conversation recently) or something else?
To the best of my knowledge (2006), Apple does H1 visas, but they don't sponsor green card applications. When your H1-B expires, they'll have you work elsewhere until you're eligible for an H1-B again. This is based on a small sample (rumors).
Steve Jobs is the messiah and Apple his gospel.
It must be a slow news day.
Also, it's not branded paperwork. It's well-designed paperwork. There's a difference, though I suppose if you're the sort of person who still thinks a Mac is just a "branded computer" we'll have to disagree here.
Also also, I'm going to rant a second at you, because Apple is not brand-centric. I've got a Samsung phone that uses AT&T. The word Samsung appears three times on the phone's hardware, the word AT&T twice. When I open the phone, the AT&T logo is on the front screen and the back screen, and then it remains in the top bar no matter what I do. THAT'S branding for you. It's desperate, ugly branding. Meanwhile, if I total up ALL the Apple products I have with me, and that's a power cord, a laptop, an iPod touch, and an iPod cord, the Apple logo appears a total of three times, once a product; the name Apple appears a total of three times, once a product; I see the Apple logo briefly when I start up my Macbook Pro, but not when I open my iPod touch.
Mac products are very not branded, compared to their competitors' products. The thing is, Apple's brand has a reputation, unlike Samsung/Motorola/Nokia or Dell/HP, and so when you see an Apple logo it means something. When you see a Windows logo plastered on the front of your laptop you don't call it "brand-centric" because nobody cares about the Windows brand. So when people complain about Apple's logo being ubiquitous on their product, I scoff, because the complaint's really that Apple made stuff good enough that people recognize the name Apple over their competitors.
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Branding is much more than logo and where it is placed on an object. It is an entire experience targeting the consumer, employee and stake holder. It is entirely about product recognition and generating brand equity, which in turn provides real value to the business. Apple are masters of this. These documents are sample proof of this at work. It is all part of the Brand Experience.
Apple are about as brand-centric as it gets. They are a case study on how to manage a brand properly.
Perhaps next time you should familiarize yourself with the concept of branding and all it entails before you direct an unnecessary and ill advised rant (your words) at me or anyone else. Familiarity of the individuals background and knowledge of the subject might also be a good idea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand
I wrote this on my 24" iMac by the way.
I also wonder whether Sun Danyong was treated as nicely?
* 99.9% of all applications submitted are approved without controversy.
* The App Store is still new. It's slightly more than a year old. Therefore, it's still got glitches in its processes, very obviously.
* For something so young, it's exploded in use. Two billion app downloads in just over a year? That's insane. That's so insane I doubt anybody can quite process it mentally.
* Therefore, every small error in Apple's process has been magnified to the point it looks like a gaping wound.
* Apple is certainly working on this, and putting a lot of effort into it.
* Apple won't TELL you they're working on this until they've already come up with what they believe is an iron solution, because Apple doesn't like admitting their ideas don't spring fully-grown from the head of Zeus.
* Apple's got an amazing track record, and so it's logical to think that within a year or two they will figure out how to suck a lot less. That's a reasonable amount of time to give them.
* No excuse about "I can't make a living reliably until they fix this", because anybody insane enough to try and make a living from a brand-new piece of software ought to at least know the risks they made.
As far as all of the other arguments, they are very touchy feely. "The App Store is new" but it's built on top of a store that's been around for 7 years. And that store already processes billions of transactions annually, so those numbers don't strike me as crippling.
I don't know what Apple is or isn't doing, but I do know what they've admitted to publicly, and I do know dozens of (well respected) developers who have had issues with the app store. I also know that Apple has lied about the store in the past. So, I think some criticism is deserved here.
As far as relating it to the employee paperwork, that was absurd. They've been using the same paperwork for years. It's completely unrelated.
I do know dozens of (well respected) developers who have had issues with the app store.
Dozens out of thousands of developers. 99.9% might have been a stretch, I don't know the exact numbers. 99% wouldn't have been.
So, I think some criticism is deserved here.
There's a difference between criticizing Apple and hijacking a conversation about something entirely different to rant about the App Store. There are critical essays about the latter every day or two. We can complain about Apple there.