One reason you don't read many ex-Apple employees talking about the process is that it's complicated, and simple soundbite answers are hard to come up with. Th

One reason you don't read many ex-Apple employees talking about the process is that it's complicated, and simple soundbite answers are hard to come up with. The culture of secrecy thing is greatly overplayed by the media precisely because of the visceral reaction that you display. In reality, if someone needs to know something, they can know it. If they need to reach out to someone with a specific skill set, the resource can be disclosed. The need-to-know policy is accepted and respected inside the organization because it works, but the key point is that it does work. The amount of cross-pollination between engineering teams is actually very high. There are certainly areas where access to specific projects is constrained, but in general the culture is very open. Sharing of code and team resources rather than duplicate development is the norm, as is tight cross-functional integration between teams. At any given time you may not know precisely what your peers are working on, but this is different from not knowing who they are, or being able to talk to them. I have a hard time seeing Apple-the-engineering-environment as either decadent or miserable. Apart from being a bit tight for office space and having rather too much carbon fibre in the parking garages, the company is incredibly focussed on doing the job and doing it well, which doesn't sound much like decadence. Likewise, it's hard to see what's miserable about working within Apple. The company is always doing something interesting, and it's very pragmatic about it. Projects don't get killed "on a whim", they get killed because they're a bad idea, or they don't work, or they get shelved for a year, or three, or more until the rest of the technology catches up. If you are obsessed with shipping "your thing" that might be depressing, but if you want to ship something good, knowing that you aren't going to be chained to a turkey for five years just because some suit would lose face otherwise can be very refreshing. As an engineer, working for Apple is actually pretty amazing. The company has very little of the management BS that is prevalent in other large tech companies. Most engineering decisions (how things should work) are made by engineers; many new features are the direct result of an engineer saying "what if we did this?", or "if we stack this and this and this together we could do that"; most of the engineering management team are ex-engineers and thus well-calibrated; the toolbox and scope for attacking problems in new ways are both enormous; "that would be hard" is not usually an excuse for not doing something; "that would be stupid" is usually an excuse for not doing something. Engineers, even new hires, have a very high level of personal autonomy and corresponding responsibility; your role is largely what you make of it. On a routine basis, the stuff you work on turns up in real products that people use and love. If you actually enjoy making things, that's all kinds of awesome. tl;dr: If you're considering working for Apple and the fear of being locked into a box is putting you off - that's not how it is.