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(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this) My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took j

(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this) 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.” 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. I could be totally wrong about this.

hoare 11y ago
both attitudes have their ups and downs i guess:)
Apocryphon 11y ago
In some ways it can be thought of, "This company is the apotheosis of tech. You can get the full experience of a startup, with the stability of a giant corporation. Why would you want to go anywhere else?"
- QuercusMax 11y ago
  Which company any are you referring to, Apple or Google? I am starting at Google[x] in two weeks for exactly that reason. I just spent the first 11 years of my career helping build a solid software organization (I was employee #14-ish, and I'm the most senior engineer whose job is primarily code-related) in Cleveland. It's now a well-oiled machine, but it's lost some of the spark and excitement of the first years I was there. I decided to go with Google[x] because I'm looking for an organization where they are all about doing exciting and innovative things, with the stability and perks of a big corporation.
bomanbot 11y ago
I guess it could very well be that the mentality of Apple and Google employees could lean somewhat into those philosophies. On the other hand, your described Apple culture sounds to me a heck of a lot more sustainable in the long run (I mean, Apple has now been around nearly 40 years now), especially since the "become a bazillionaire" part from Google really only works for founders and early employees with enough stock and only for very few selected unicorn companies.
benihana 11y ago
Interesting, I only know one person who works at Apple. She's a copywriter and she says that it's definitely a 60 hour a week job.
- rhizome 11y ago
  At least.
Aloisius 11y ago
the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup. That's funny because I've always considered Google a place where great people disappear and never come out except for a small number who start a company only to be aquihired by Google. I could be wrong about that as well.
- _delirium 11y ago
  That's sort of Google's reputation in machine learning: if you're tired of the lower salaries and grant-chasing of academia (or just don't like teaching), or have had enough of the uncertainty of a startup, Google is a comfortable place to go, with a large and stable salary, good access to data & compute time, good benefits, etc. Seems more common for people to try out academia and/or startups first and then go to Google later, rather than the other way around. I haven't done any kind of proper count or survey, though.
- rifung 11y ago
  Apparently that's not true as their average tenure is only 1.1 years, at least according to http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-google-employees-ranked-least-loyal/ http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-google-employees-ranked-...
  - minwcnt5 11y ago
    Highly misleading, for a number of potential reasons a) Google was undergoing tremendous growth at the time, so many employees had 0 or low tenure, b) they had just purchased Motorola and their 20k employees, who knows how that factored in, c) it doesn't say they exclude temporary contract workers of which Google has quite a lot, d) it's only employees they were able to survey, which is likely to have selection bias towards people switching jobs. A much better measure of employee loyalty would be attrition rate, and average tenure of people leaving (but that data would still be skewed by some of the biases I mentioned). From my observations the attrition rate at Google is extraordinarily low. Very few people I've worked with have left the company.
- bane 11y ago
jsjohnst 11y ago
I've a number of friends on various teams, from WebKit, to iOS, to datacenter folks, to various app teams, and hardware teams and not one has ever consistently worked a 40hr work week. Most are easily averaging 50-60, with spurts close to or over 100 before launches. Consistently the message I've heard is people are expected to "work till its ready", so I'm not sure where you'd have heard this about Apple.
- beambot 11y ago
  > show up, do good work... > work 50-60 hrs per week Those aren't incompatible. In fact, based on current and former Apple employees I know, you're both right. It's also worth pointing out the extreme compartmentalization at Apple. I imagine that makes it more difficult to get a handle on systems-level considerations that are so key for lean startup teams.
  - jsjohnst 11y ago
    You are definitely right, I focused more on the "go home to family" part. Many I know at Apple have had relationship issues with significant others and family due to the sometimes grueling pace and "CIA spy" level secrecy some teams are forced to have even with their spouses.
    - threeseed 11y ago
      It's more the long hours / weekend work for months on end that causes problems. The secrecy is never an issue.
      - jsjohnst 11y ago
        Never is a rather bold word choice, especially as I know of a few examples that disprove it.
      - beambot 11y ago
        I wouldn't underestimate how much secrecy plays a role psychologically. Not being able to talk to friends, family, and loved ones about what you work on can be a real drain. (Spoken from some experience; I did classified work at a DOE nuclear lab in the past.)
gumby 11y ago
> 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).
- foobarqux 11y ago
  > Product managers have a lot of sway Can you elaborate on what you mean to say here? Is it that PMs have a lot of influence compared to engineers?
  - logicallee 11y ago
    it's actually a funny statement given the definition of a product manager... it's like saying the CEO has a lot of sway over company policy. well, yeah.
arrrg 11y ago
The first one sounds like a very healthy attitude, or at least inoffensive. I’m not sure why you would think you would offend anyone with that? That said, people actually working for Apple do seem to put in a lot of (and consequently inevitably) unhealthy and unproductive hours.
santaclaus 11y ago
Maybe Microsoft or Amazon, but talking with and listening to interviews with former Apple employees, that definitely doesn't seem to be the case. Nitin Ganatra (who I think was head of iPhone apps) had some super interesting interviews on the Debug podcast about the early software development of the iPhone, and those cats were clocking eighty hour weeks and certainly believed they were going to upend the technology industry. Don Melton also had some super interesting info on life at Apple. If you have a few train rides to blow, these are some super interesting looks into the internals of Apple: http://www.imore.com/debug-47-melton-ganatra-episode-i-demoing-software-steve-jobs http://www.imore.com/debug-47-melton-ganatra-episode-i-demoi... http://www.imore.com/debug-48-melton-ganatra-episode-ii-understanding-apple http://www.imore.com/debug-48-melton-ganatra-episode-ii-unde... http://www.imore.com/60-melton-ganatra-episode-iii-shipping-software http://www.imore.com/60-melton-ganatra-episode-iii-shipping-... http://www.imore.com/debug-39-nitin-ganatra-episode-i-system-7-carbon http://www.imore.com/debug-39-nitin-ganatra-episode-i-system... http://www.imore.com/debug-40-nitin-ganatra-episode-ii-os-x-ios http://www.imore.com/debug-40-nitin-ganatra-episode-ii-os-x-... http://www.imore.com/debug-41-nitin-ganatra-episode-iii-iphone-ipad http://www.imore.com/debug-41-nitin-ganatra-episode-iii-ipho...
Sideloader 11y ago
Please...stop the madness! The trend of prefacing every criticism or, indeed, observation with an apology to the fanbois or a cheery positive "Apple is awesome, but.." statement has gone too far. It's actually quite amazing how many articles and comments follow this template. And it has to stop. The Cupertino Thought Police is not going to kick your door in and drag you to the Infinite Loop basement for a Think Different session. The Internet won't grind to a halt, you won't be named and shamed...everything will be okay! Sure some fanbois with advanced symptoms might possibly berate you publicly or even downvote your post/article and that's it. It really is okay to not love Apple. Or point out that Apple isn't perfect. It's even okay to not own any Apple products whatsoever. Full disclosure...I do own Apple products and OS X is my daily driver of choice. But I have no emotional attachment to Apple's products, I don't buy Apple products exclusively and I do not worship at the iAlter or have a man crush on Steve Jobs. The over-the-top reverence for Apple even by people who are far from being fanatical iCult members really is extraordinary. If you find some of their products useful, great, if their products aren't a good fit for you, that's great too. Apple is not the mafia (yet) and you owe the company nothing.
- kzhahou 11y ago
  Chill, dude. His preface was to not insult fellow HNers who work at Apple.
- Eric_WVGG 11y ago
  Jesus dude I just didn't want to offend anyone
BJBBB 11y ago
Interviewed Apple EE last year-> BSEE from caltech and MSEE from UCB, so educated enough, but a rather narrow range of experience for a Sr Engr position. In fact, too narrow to be of any use to our small-potato company. So perhaps their organization is big and anonymous enough to find places that are well-hidden; that is, they find a comfortable niche, then just park it for a while.

hoare 11y ago

both attitudes have their ups and downs i guess:)

Apocryphon 11y ago

In some ways it can be thought of, "This company is the apotheosis of tech. You can get the full experience of a startup, with the stability of a giant corporation. Why would you want to go anywhere else?"

QuercusMax 11y ago
Which company any are you referring to, Apple or Google? I am starting at Google[x] in two weeks for exactly that reason. I just spent the first 11 years of my career helping build a solid software organization (I was employee #14-ish, and I'm the most senior engineer whose job is primarily code-related) in Cleveland. It's now a well-oiled machine, but it's lost some of the spark and excitement of the first years I was there. I decided to go with Google[x] because I'm looking for an organization where they are all about doing exciting and innovative things, with the stability and perks of a big corporation.

bomanbot 11y ago

I guess it could very well be that the mentality of Apple and Google employees could lean somewhat into those philosophies. On the other hand, your described Apple culture sounds to me a heck of a lot more sustainable in the long run (I mean, Apple has now been around nearly 40 years now), especially since the "become a bazillionaire" part from Google really only works for founders and early employees with enough stock and only for very few selected unicorn companies.

benihana 11y ago

Interesting, I only know one person who works at Apple. She's a copywriter and she says that it's definitely a 60 hour a week job.

rhizome 11y ago
At least.

Aloisius 11y ago

the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup. That's funny because I've always considered Google a place where great people disappear and never come out except for a small number who start a company only to be aquihired by Google. I could be wrong about that as well.

_delirium 11y ago
That's sort of Google's reputation in machine learning: if you're tired of the lower salaries and grant-chasing of academia (or just don't like teaching), or have had enough of the uncertainty of a startup, Google is a comfortable place to go, with a large and stable salary, good access to data & compute time, good benefits, etc. Seems more common for people to try out academia and/or startups first and then go to Google later, rather than the other way around. I haven't done any kind of proper count or survey, though.
rifung 11y ago
Apparently that's not true as their average tenure is only 1.1 years, at least according to http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-google-employees-ranked-least-loyal/ http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-google-employees-ranked-...
- minwcnt5 11y ago
  Highly misleading, for a number of potential reasons a) Google was undergoing tremendous growth at the time, so many employees had 0 or low tenure, b) they had just purchased Motorola and their 20k employees, who knows how that factored in, c) it doesn't say they exclude temporary contract workers of which Google has quite a lot, d) it's only employees they were able to survey, which is likely to have selection bias towards people switching jobs. A much better measure of employee loyalty would be attrition rate, and average tenure of people leaving (but that data would still be skewed by some of the biases I mentioned). From my observations the attrition rate at Google is extraordinarily low. Very few people I've worked with have left the company.
bane 11y ago

jsjohnst 11y ago

I've a number of friends on various teams, from WebKit, to iOS, to datacenter folks, to various app teams, and hardware teams and not one has ever consistently worked a 40hr work week. Most are easily averaging 50-60, with spurts close to or over 100 before launches. Consistently the message I've heard is people are expected to "work till its ready", so I'm not sure where you'd have heard this about Apple.

beambot 11y ago
> show up, do good work... > work 50-60 hrs per week Those aren't incompatible. In fact, based on current and former Apple employees I know, you're both right. It's also worth pointing out the extreme compartmentalization at Apple. I imagine that makes it more difficult to get a handle on systems-level considerations that are so key for lean startup teams.
- jsjohnst 11y ago
  You are definitely right, I focused more on the "go home to family" part. Many I know at Apple have had relationship issues with significant others and family due to the sometimes grueling pace and "CIA spy" level secrecy some teams are forced to have even with their spouses.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    It's more the long hours / weekend work for months on end that causes problems. The secrecy is never an issue.
    - jsjohnst 11y ago
      Never is a rather bold word choice, especially as I know of a few examples that disprove it.
    - beambot 11y ago
      I wouldn't underestimate how much secrecy plays a role psychologically. Not being able to talk to friends, family, and loved ones about what you work on can be a real drain. (Spoken from some experience; I did classified work at a DOE nuclear lab in the past.)

gumby 11y ago

> 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).

foobarqux 11y ago
> Product managers have a lot of sway Can you elaborate on what you mean to say here? Is it that PMs have a lot of influence compared to engineers?
- logicallee 11y ago
  it's actually a funny statement given the definition of a product manager... it's like saying the CEO has a lot of sway over company policy. well, yeah.

arrrg 11y ago

The first one sounds like a very healthy attitude, or at least inoffensive. I’m not sure why you would think you would offend anyone with that? That said, people actually working for Apple do seem to put in a lot of (and consequently inevitably) unhealthy and unproductive hours.

santaclaus 11y ago

Maybe Microsoft or Amazon, but talking with and listening to interviews with former Apple employees, that definitely doesn't seem to be the case. Nitin Ganatra (who I think was head of iPhone apps) had some super interesting interviews on the Debug podcast about the early software development of the iPhone, and those cats were clocking eighty hour weeks and certainly believed they were going to upend the technology industry. Don Melton also had some super interesting info on life at Apple. If you have a few train rides to blow, these are some super interesting looks into the internals of Apple: http://www.imore.com/debug-47-melton-ganatra-episode-i-demoing-software-steve-jobs http://www.imore.com/debug-47-melton-ganatra-episode-i-demoi... http://www.imore.com/debug-48-melton-ganatra-episode-ii-understanding-apple http://www.imore.com/debug-48-melton-ganatra-episode-ii-unde... http://www.imore.com/60-melton-ganatra-episode-iii-shipping-software http://www.imore.com/60-melton-ganatra-episode-iii-shipping-... http://www.imore.com/debug-39-nitin-ganatra-episode-i-system-7-carbon http://www.imore.com/debug-39-nitin-ganatra-episode-i-system... http://www.imore.com/debug-40-nitin-ganatra-episode-ii-os-x-ios http://www.imore.com/debug-40-nitin-ganatra-episode-ii-os-x-... http://www.imore.com/debug-41-nitin-ganatra-episode-iii-iphone-ipad http://www.imore.com/debug-41-nitin-ganatra-episode-iii-ipho...

Sideloader 11y ago

Please...stop the madness! The trend of prefacing every criticism or, indeed, observation with an apology to the fanbois or a cheery positive "Apple is awesome, but.." statement has gone too far. It's actually quite amazing how many articles and comments follow this template. And it has to stop. The Cupertino Thought Police is not going to kick your door in and drag you to the Infinite Loop basement for a Think Different session. The Internet won't grind to a halt, you won't be named and shamed...everything will be okay! Sure some fanbois with advanced symptoms might possibly berate you publicly or even downvote your post/article and that's it. It really is okay to not love Apple. Or point out that Apple isn't perfect. It's even okay to not own any Apple products whatsoever. Full disclosure...I do own Apple products and OS X is my daily driver of choice. But I have no emotional attachment to Apple's products, I don't buy Apple products exclusively and I do not worship at the iAlter or have a man crush on Steve Jobs. The over-the-top reverence for Apple even by people who are far from being fanatical iCult members really is extraordinary. If you find some of their products useful, great, if their products aren't a good fit for you, that's great too. Apple is not the mafia (yet) and you owe the company nothing.

kzhahou 11y ago
Chill, dude. His preface was to not insult fellow HNers who work at Apple.
Eric_WVGG 11y ago
Jesus dude I just didn't want to offend anyone

BJBBB 11y ago

Interviewed Apple EE last year-> BSEE from caltech and MSEE from UCB, so educated enough, but a rather narrow range of experience for a Sr Engr position. In fact, too narrow to be of any use to our small-potato company. So perhaps their organization is big and anonymous enough to find places that are well-hidden; that is, they find a comfortable niche, then just park it for a while.