> My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.”
I have a lot of friends and former colleagues who are at Apple and you're wrong about the 'go home to your family.' At least the friends I have (mostly nerds admittedly) are routinely in the 60-70 hours mark (have only one exception and he's worked at Apple since the 1980s). But they seem to like it.
> It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup.
This feels more like Google propaganda. My impression is that google folks seem to work a lot less (long hours its true, but less) than the Apple folks. Unlike Apple I only know nerds at google -- no marketing or business folks, so it could be different.
But of my google friends there are two groups: the übernerds who get to work on whatever they like (basically research) and they seem to have a lot of fun. A bunch of them are former colleagues from PARC and MIT, so they are doing the same kind of work we did years ago -- probably Microsoft research is the same.
The rest are doing product work of some sort of another and none of them seem particularly happy. A lot of them are on the market (I have hired a couple). It feels like Google has reached the microsoft phase: they have two real cash cows and are struggling to find more. Product managers have a lot of sway. They aren't really organized like an effective business.
Apple went through that mode and was within a few weeks of dying. Luckily they debugged themselves. My Apple friends, even those deep in the bowels of tools or drivers, amazingly are still super excited by the Apple products (I guess they would have given up by now if not).