ex-Apple employee so using an obvious throwaway. One of the things to understand about Apple is they take disclosure and security very seriously, to an anal deg

ex-Apple employee so using an obvious throwaway. One of the things to understand about Apple is they take disclosure and security very seriously, to an anal degree. After initial on-boarding an employee goes through the disclosure process where she has to submit requests for every project she will work on. Those things are very fine-grained, you rarely get full project disclosure, and have to ask for specific relevant parts, such as architecture, plans, or something else. This process takes a lot of time. Up to weeks. During that time, you CANNOT be exposed to any material related to the project. If someone exposes you to it, they will be disciplined and may be fired. This is why employees might not get invited to meetings once they land in the organization, they are not yet disclosed. Besides that, Apple is a very high stress environment and there's no lack of scare-stories of employees who violated some guidelines or protocols (especially relating to leaking sensitive information, even by accident) who got axed. Apple will ruthlessly protect its secrets and its corporate image. It is not pleasant at the ground level, but that's how it is. Moreover, stress tends to propagate down the organizational pyramid. A C level breathing down the necks of the managers under him will translate to 100s of engineers feeling the heat. My time at Apple wasn't pleasant at start but that was solved easily by some communication. Later when projects started getting stressful I experienced some of that stress and some of the blame culture. People will come down hard on you, and it will come back to bite you in the ass in your yearly review if some manager feels you messed something up, even if your own manager told you just a few months back you're doing well. To summarize my time there, I liked the team and the group, not the organization. The author might want to seek therapy to better handle what she went through. I don't think half of it was as malicious as she thinks, but it would help both with overcoming the trauma and putting things in perspective.