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I left Apple after years of lack of any flexibility on the remote work process. They wouldn't allow transferring to any alternative office for most teams. From

I left Apple after years of lack of any flexibility on the remote work process. They wouldn't allow transferring to any alternative office for most teams. From what I understood, VPs could protect a small minority of some of their employees if a senior leader made a case to them. Unfortunately, this just seemed to lead to the most politically connected folks going remote and directors friends and favorite hires getting the perk. At three trillion market cap, I guess they just realized it doesn't really matter if attrition shoots up and they'll always have enough people to fill the trenches. Lots and lots of people left around the same time. Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple. Incredibly toxic atmosphere on the inside. I work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.

sdoering 5y ago
Wow. Thanks for the insights. > work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple. I am always floored by statements like this. I work as a principal data analyst and everything above 40 hours/week is overtime. While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows. On average I do something like 41 hours a week over the last few years. Including high profile client engagement or pitch situations. I find myself having enough time to also work on my side business and do work for animal protection charities. While still being able to work in the garden and shop to relax.
- nickff 5y ago
  >"While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows." The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. There's a reason why people work at FAANG companies despite the constant complaints.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    > The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. Not really. Most divisions in SWE do stack ranking (unofficially). The top quintile (decile in some groups) gets a majority of compensation at review time. The bottom half is lucky to get a cost of living adjustment to their base pay. They likely will get no RSUs and little if any cash bonus. Despite the disparity in compensation everyone on a team is expected to put in overtime. Anyone that doesn't is guilted over not being a "team player", put on a PIP, outright threatened with firing. If you get put on a PIP there is zero guidance to get off.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Higher level engineers get paid more? And that is suprising or unfair?
      - gsinclair 5y ago
        Maybe not, but it (the post in total) a legitimate counter argument to the previous message.
      - giantrobot 5y ago
        The issue is there's not necessarily any fair measurement of "higher level engineer". With stack ranking if you've got five people on a team only one member of the team can be the top quintile getting the majority of compensation. Even if the work of everyone is roughly the same. It's asinine. There's also no clarity into how to be considered the top of the rankings. The only guidance from managers is to "innovate" and work more. It's a really demoralizing system unless you're at the top of the stack. It's further demoralizing that the managers are told in no uncertain terms to make the system as opaque as possible.
    - askonomm 5y ago
      So then that makes me wonder, why work there? For the prestige? For having a bad-ass CV entry? I've spent my 11 year career working in start-ups and companies that nobody knows about, I get paid enough to be in top 2% earners in EU, I never work more than 40h a week because that simply isn't legal for an employer to tell me to do unless it explicitly states so in my contract, and none of my contracts have so far stated that, and so I'm puzzled why such a sweat-shop deal could be appealing to people when alternatives exist with a far better work/life balance.
- analogdreams 5y ago
  when the overtime is included why not push it to the limit? i once had a contract where deployments were shit shows every other weekend. i signed up for every single one... on more than a handful of occasions i was able to bill 20 hours over overtime at 2x rate for simply being 'available' meaning my phone was on mute in a deployment support conference call. they happily paid and i happily pretended to care about their product.
- kimixa 5y ago
  My experience with apple (never worked there, but worked very closely with them for years) is there's a HUGE difference between teams. If you're in the fancy new hotness that has VP political support, great. If you're in a team with a manager who has your back and pushed back on extra work and raises and bonuses for the whole team, great. But you're one of the lucky ones.
abledon 5y ago
also, isn't their new campus built atop a toxic waste site?
- dymk 5y ago
  It's an empathy building exercise for the Foxconn employees
- 30367286 5y ago
  That term could fit most of the Santa Clara Valley if you’re operating on the definition provided by the person you heard that from. I won’t link their name here, since I do not believe it is worthwhile to give them attention.
- pertymcpert 5y ago
  You mean Sunnyvale? Lots of people live and work there already.
- astrange 5y ago
  It's built on the old HP campus, so at worst it's haunted by the souls of dead graphing calculators.
tombert 5y ago
COVID made my situation worse at Apple. I worked in a satellite office (NYC), and while in the office, most folks in California were reluctant to schedule meetings later than ~2pm california time because they didn't want to keep people in the office late. When we went fully remote, suddenly it seems like any compunctions about that vanished; I would have meetings until 9pm 3 nights a week, I guess because the managers figured that we were already home. > Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple Definitely sympathize there; we weren't even allowed to leave Github issues without Legal's approval, and when I wanted to open source something (basically an HLS server I wrote to handle my home security system), I was told that a) it was too competitive with Apple because my project had to do with video, and b) there's no such thing as "my own time" with Apple, since I was salaried and well-compensated.
- abledon 5y ago
  > b) there's no such thing as "my own time" with Apple, since I was salaried and well-compensated. Is there 1 FAANG company that is the most friendly/accomodating to someone who wants to develop their own software/indiegames on the side?
  - no_wizard 5y ago
    I don't currently work there, so take this with a grain of salt, that said, it would seem Google is a lot more relaxed about this sort of thing than any other large company I've seen. Lots of ex-Google employees end up doing all sorts of things and lots of Googlers participate in open source
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
    Not FAANG, but GitHub explicitly allows employees to work on side-projects while retaining the IP rights, and you get paid Microsoft stock.
    - voidfunc 5y ago
      Whats hilarious is that this is definitely not the case for regular MS employees
CSSer 5y ago
They seem very rooted in the past for lots of ideas, which is ironic given the image and culture they try to project. For example, I've heard at least one story of someone being asked lots of irrelevant CS questions for a front-end role when they interviewed there. He did fine, but he said he felt like the interview somehow felt fifteen years out of date, which really stuck with me.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  If the role was to do front-end development for internal tools, that might have not been all that irrelevant.
  - CSSer 5y ago
    Maybe, that's true. There were more details that led to the impression but it's been too long ago now for me to remember them all.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    This is true, Apple is so secretive they try to get people into interviews without telling them the role they're interviewing for. They're so cagey and they expect you to say "yes" because they're Apple. The guy might not even have known what role he was interviewing for! It's a great way to waste everyone's time.
- tombert 5y ago
  There were times at Apple that people were given a "no" on the interview because, despite knowing the solution to the problem, had compilation errors in there code. I thought (and still think) that was idiotic.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  What CS questions would be irrelevant for front end? I don't quite follow.
  - Qub3d 5y ago
    I imagine they're complaining about the technical interview. For the record, when I did the technical interview I didn't find it too onerous -- mostly a more advanced sort of FizzBuzz to check you could do some intermediate math and handle basic data structures and logic flow. My understanding is that at Apple this can vary quite a lot in difficulty or depth depending on what team you're looking at, and who is interviewing you.
roastytoasty 5y ago
- no_one_ever 5y ago
  lol having a HN account isn't a pre-requisite to being in tech
- eunoia 5y ago
  I don’t think you understand how deep the Apple secrecy/paranoia culture rabbit hole goes. Another example: Have you ever noticed how comparatively infrequently Apple is even mentioned in FAANG working condition threads? Source: I am a former Apple employee.
- krapp 5y ago
  Most people "in tech" don't even know Hacker News exists. It's a bubble within a bubble.
- bmarquez 5y ago
  It's likely a throwaway account and I understand the reasoning behind creating one. Apple has a very secretive, almost paranoid, workplace culture. If I were in the parent poster's shoes I'd make one too to avoid blowback.
xenadu02 5y ago
Fair warning: my experience has been very different than yours or tombert's in most respects and some things have changed over time (some OSS contributions are now much easier, a very recent change). It is also the first company I've worked for that backed up appreciation for my efforts with compensation to match, and where my management chain cared about burnout and mental health with actions rather than empty words. It is still primarily an on-site company. That might mean on-site an an office in San Diego, Austin, Philadelphia, NYC, etc. But in-office nonetheless. Every team does things differently, even down to the department or individual manager level. Compared to the other FAANGs it is far more varied in most respects. Just because someone didn't like (or loves) their role doesn't mean you will feel the same way about it. If possible I recommend talking to people who work in the department you are interested in.
- Ntrails 5y ago
  > It is still primarily an on-site company. At some point I would like people to quit vilifying a completely legitimate business setup because it doesn't fit their world view. I want to be in the office, and I prefer it when my coworkers are there too. I respect that not everyone feels the same - but I do think it is up to the employer to decide. So I will be picking companies that suit my preferences.
  - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
    But there is legitimate reason to villify. I can't speak for Apple specifically, but many companies are no longer matching the CoL increases. Housing prices are steadily increasing, and so is rent. Many have to resort to longer commutes, buying cars, and such. All of these have detrimental effects to the environment, mental health or both. Pushing people back to the office with nothing else is incredibly tonedeaf to the current state and trend of the world. This despite many of them putting up the image they care about these things.
    - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
      > I can't speak for Apple specifically, but many companies are no longer matching the CoL increases. Housing prices are steadily increasing, and so is rent. I can't help but wonder if this is the flip side to the Silicon Valley mantra of "if you want a raise, job hop," where hitting your four-year anniversary with the same company makes you an old-timer and gets people on HN asking you if you're stupid. (Hopefully more politely than that, but that's absolutely the subtext of some recent message threads I've seen.) If the expectation on the company side is that they shouldn't plan on on any engineering staff being there more than a few years, then maybe it tacitly selects for "give employees a big bonus and lots of perks and just don't worry about raises because there ain't nothin' you can do to keep 'em". And, of course, there's a chicken-or-egg aspect to that: did job-hopping become the norm because companies aren't giving them enough reason to stay, or vice-versa? When I moved out to Silicon Valley close to twenty years ago, I'd have placed the blame for that particular new normal on the companies, but after having read HN for the better part of the last decade, I'm considerably less certain of that.
AppleThrow22 5y ago
pommecore 5y ago
> Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple. Incredibly toxic atmosphere on the inside. I work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple. Maybe it was because I worked there only during the pandemic, but I never really felt the emotional impact of Apple's toxicity. I could of course tell it was there, and if I actually cared about getting promoted or getting higher pay, I might have felt more stressed. For example, after pointing out some areas where I thought a proposal could be improved, from that point on I just wasn't ever invited to any more design or strategy meetings. It's like I was just cut out from everything because I had the audacity to criticize something from some senior schmuck with tenure, and I wouldn't grovel and kiss whoever's ass I needed to in order to be "allowed" in those meetings from that point forward. In hindsight I was glad I torpedoed myself right off the bat after I joined. Not actually ever having to be around any of those people in meatspace probably helped, but it was really easy for me to sit in my office at home and plug away undisturbed on the pet projects that I felt were interesting and worthwhile. What I created actually was helpful, but it was totally designed, written, and delivered in a silo. I collected my salary and stock for a year, added Apple to my resume, and then hopped on to another company with higher comp and a much healthier culture. Now at this new place, everyone is falling all over themselves to have me in their design and strategy meetings. <shrug> Fare thee well, Apple. I hardly knew ye.
knighthack 5y ago
Would love to know how it was like working at Apple? How toxic was toxic?

sdoering 5y ago

Wow. Thanks for the insights. > work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple. I am always floored by statements like this. I work as a principal data analyst and everything above 40 hours/week is overtime. While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows. On average I do something like 41 hours a week over the last few years. Including high profile client engagement or pitch situations. I find myself having enough time to also work on my side business and do work for animal protection charities. While still being able to work in the garden and shop to relax.

nickff 5y ago
>"While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows." The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. There's a reason why people work at FAANG companies despite the constant complaints.
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. Not really. Most divisions in SWE do stack ranking (unofficially). The top quintile (decile in some groups) gets a majority of compensation at review time. The bottom half is lucky to get a cost of living adjustment to their base pay. They likely will get no RSUs and little if any cash bonus. Despite the disparity in compensation everyone on a team is expected to put in overtime. Anyone that doesn't is guilted over not being a "team player", put on a PIP, outright threatened with firing. If you get put on a PIP there is zero guidance to get off.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Higher level engineers get paid more? And that is suprising or unfair?
    - gsinclair 5y ago
      Maybe not, but it (the post in total) a legitimate counter argument to the previous message.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      The issue is there's not necessarily any fair measurement of "higher level engineer". With stack ranking if you've got five people on a team only one member of the team can be the top quintile getting the majority of compensation. Even if the work of everyone is roughly the same. It's asinine. There's also no clarity into how to be considered the top of the rankings. The only guidance from managers is to "innovate" and work more. It's a really demoralizing system unless you're at the top of the stack. It's further demoralizing that the managers are told in no uncertain terms to make the system as opaque as possible.
  - askonomm 5y ago
    So then that makes me wonder, why work there? For the prestige? For having a bad-ass CV entry? I've spent my 11 year career working in start-ups and companies that nobody knows about, I get paid enough to be in top 2% earners in EU, I never work more than 40h a week because that simply isn't legal for an employer to tell me to do unless it explicitly states so in my contract, and none of my contracts have so far stated that, and so I'm puzzled why such a sweat-shop deal could be appealing to people when alternatives exist with a far better work/life balance.
analogdreams 5y ago
when the overtime is included why not push it to the limit? i once had a contract where deployments were shit shows every other weekend. i signed up for every single one... on more than a handful of occasions i was able to bill 20 hours over overtime at 2x rate for simply being 'available' meaning my phone was on mute in a deployment support conference call. they happily paid and i happily pretended to care about their product.
kimixa 5y ago
My experience with apple (never worked there, but worked very closely with them for years) is there's a HUGE difference between teams. If you're in the fancy new hotness that has VP political support, great. If you're in a team with a manager who has your back and pushed back on extra work and raises and bonuses for the whole team, great. But you're one of the lucky ones.

abledon 5y ago

also, isn't their new campus built atop a toxic waste site?

dymk 5y ago
It's an empathy building exercise for the Foxconn employees
30367286 5y ago
That term could fit most of the Santa Clara Valley if you’re operating on the definition provided by the person you heard that from. I won’t link their name here, since I do not believe it is worthwhile to give them attention.
pertymcpert 5y ago
You mean Sunnyvale? Lots of people live and work there already.
astrange 5y ago
It's built on the old HP campus, so at worst it's haunted by the souls of dead graphing calculators.

tombert 5y ago

COVID made my situation worse at Apple. I worked in a satellite office (NYC), and while in the office, most folks in California were reluctant to schedule meetings later than ~2pm california time because they didn't want to keep people in the office late. When we went fully remote, suddenly it seems like any compunctions about that vanished; I would have meetings until 9pm 3 nights a week, I guess because the managers figured that we were already home. > Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple Definitely sympathize there; we weren't even allowed to leave Github issues without Legal's approval, and when I wanted to open source something (basically an HLS server I wrote to handle my home security system), I was told that a) it was too competitive with Apple because my project had to do with video, and b) there's no such thing as "my own time" with Apple, since I was salaried and well-compensated.

abledon 5y ago
> b) there's no such thing as "my own time" with Apple, since I was salaried and well-compensated. Is there 1 FAANG company that is the most friendly/accomodating to someone who wants to develop their own software/indiegames on the side?
- no_wizard 5y ago
  I don't currently work there, so take this with a grain of salt, that said, it would seem Google is a lot more relaxed about this sort of thing than any other large company I've seen. Lots of ex-Google employees end up doing all sorts of things and lots of Googlers participate in open source
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y ago
  Not FAANG, but GitHub explicitly allows employees to work on side-projects while retaining the IP rights, and you get paid Microsoft stock.
  - voidfunc 5y ago
    Whats hilarious is that this is definitely not the case for regular MS employees

CSSer 5y ago

They seem very rooted in the past for lots of ideas, which is ironic given the image and culture they try to project. For example, I've heard at least one story of someone being asked lots of irrelevant CS questions for a front-end role when they interviewed there. He did fine, but he said he felt like the interview somehow felt fifteen years out of date, which really stuck with me.

Apocryphon 5y ago
If the role was to do front-end development for internal tools, that might have not been all that irrelevant.
- CSSer 5y ago
  Maybe, that's true. There were more details that led to the impression but it's been too long ago now for me to remember them all.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  This is true, Apple is so secretive they try to get people into interviews without telling them the role they're interviewing for. They're so cagey and they expect you to say "yes" because they're Apple. The guy might not even have known what role he was interviewing for! It's a great way to waste everyone's time.
tombert 5y ago
There were times at Apple that people were given a "no" on the interview because, despite knowing the solution to the problem, had compilation errors in there code. I thought (and still think) that was idiotic.
LAC-Tech 5y ago
What CS questions would be irrelevant for front end? I don't quite follow.
- Qub3d 5y ago
  I imagine they're complaining about the technical interview. For the record, when I did the technical interview I didn't find it too onerous -- mostly a more advanced sort of FizzBuzz to check you could do some intermediate math and handle basic data structures and logic flow. My understanding is that at Apple this can vary quite a lot in difficulty or depth depending on what team you're looking at, and who is interviewing you.

roastytoasty 5y ago

no_one_ever 5y ago
lol having a HN account isn't a pre-requisite to being in tech
eunoia 5y ago
I don’t think you understand how deep the Apple secrecy/paranoia culture rabbit hole goes. Another example: Have you ever noticed how comparatively infrequently Apple is even mentioned in FAANG working condition threads? Source: I am a former Apple employee.
krapp 5y ago
Most people "in tech" don't even know Hacker News exists. It's a bubble within a bubble.
bmarquez 5y ago
It's likely a throwaway account and I understand the reasoning behind creating one. Apple has a very secretive, almost paranoid, workplace culture. If I were in the parent poster's shoes I'd make one too to avoid blowback.

xenadu02 5y ago

Fair warning: my experience has been very different than yours or tombert's in most respects and some things have changed over time (some OSS contributions are now much easier, a very recent change). It is also the first company I've worked for that backed up appreciation for my efforts with compensation to match, and where my management chain cared about burnout and mental health with actions rather than empty words. It is still primarily an on-site company. That might mean on-site an an office in San Diego, Austin, Philadelphia, NYC, etc. But in-office nonetheless. Every team does things differently, even down to the department or individual manager level. Compared to the other FAANGs it is far more varied in most respects. Just because someone didn't like (or loves) their role doesn't mean you will feel the same way about it. If possible I recommend talking to people who work in the department you are interested in.

Ntrails 5y ago
> It is still primarily an on-site company. At some point I would like people to quit vilifying a completely legitimate business setup because it doesn't fit their world view. I want to be in the office, and I prefer it when my coworkers are there too. I respect that not everyone feels the same - but I do think it is up to the employer to decide. So I will be picking companies that suit my preferences.
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  But there is legitimate reason to villify. I can't speak for Apple specifically, but many companies are no longer matching the CoL increases. Housing prices are steadily increasing, and so is rent. Many have to resort to longer commutes, buying cars, and such. All of these have detrimental effects to the environment, mental health or both. Pushing people back to the office with nothing else is incredibly tonedeaf to the current state and trend of the world. This despite many of them putting up the image they care about these things.
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    > I can't speak for Apple specifically, but many companies are no longer matching the CoL increases. Housing prices are steadily increasing, and so is rent. I can't help but wonder if this is the flip side to the Silicon Valley mantra of "if you want a raise, job hop," where hitting your four-year anniversary with the same company makes you an old-timer and gets people on HN asking you if you're stupid. (Hopefully more politely than that, but that's absolutely the subtext of some recent message threads I've seen.) If the expectation on the company side is that they shouldn't plan on on any engineering staff being there more than a few years, then maybe it tacitly selects for "give employees a big bonus and lots of perks and just don't worry about raises because there ain't nothin' you can do to keep 'em". And, of course, there's a chicken-or-egg aspect to that: did job-hopping become the norm because companies aren't giving them enough reason to stay, or vice-versa? When I moved out to Silicon Valley close to twenty years ago, I'd have placed the blame for that particular new normal on the companies, but after having read HN for the better part of the last decade, I'm considerably less certain of that.

AppleThrow22 5y ago

pommecore 5y ago

> Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple. Incredibly toxic atmosphere on the inside. I work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple. Maybe it was because I worked there only during the pandemic, but I never really felt the emotional impact of Apple's toxicity. I could of course tell it was there, and if I actually cared about getting promoted or getting higher pay, I might have felt more stressed. For example, after pointing out some areas where I thought a proposal could be improved, from that point on I just wasn't ever invited to any more design or strategy meetings. It's like I was just cut out from everything because I had the audacity to criticize something from some senior schmuck with tenure, and I wouldn't grovel and kiss whoever's ass I needed to in order to be "allowed" in those meetings from that point forward. In hindsight I was glad I torpedoed myself right off the bat after I joined. Not actually ever having to be around any of those people in meatspace probably helped, but it was really easy for me to sit in my office at home and plug away undisturbed on the pet projects that I felt were interesting and worthwhile. What I created actually was helpful, but it was totally designed, written, and delivered in a silo. I collected my salary and stock for a year, added Apple to my resume, and then hopped on to another company with higher comp and a much healthier culture. Now at this new place, everyone is falling all over themselves to have me in their design and strategy meetings. <shrug> Fare thee well, Apple. I hardly knew ye.

knighthack 5y ago

Would love to know how it was like working at Apple? How toxic was toxic?