FWIW, as an Apple employee I have no idea what the hell he's talking about.
I've worked here 4 years and I absolutely love. my. job. I take days off to work from home whenever I feel like it. We drink at the office on occasion. I'm never harassed for not being constantly online. I don't have endless meetings. I'm constantly praised for the work I do, I get great reviews, with large bonuses.
My impression from reading this article is that he either had a shitty manager (it can happen, Apple's a huge company) or his department wasn't very well-run. (It is customer service, that's never known for being a great environment almost anywhere you work.)
I feel bad for the guy, in a situation he described I would've left too. Fortunately I'm not in that situation, and neither is anyone else I know here. People have their issues with small things but at the end of the day I think everyone I work with loves what they do.
I'm not really sure that article even paints Apple in a bad light. Yeah, it talks about how much you work hard, but even just listen to them:
> I mean, it’s not that it’s not fun, it’s not that it’s not fulfilling, it’s not that you don’t get to work around all these brilliant people. The bad side effect is they’re all, like, workaholic, psychotic brilliant people.
For me, one of the best things in life is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing. Apple gives me that, and I feel extremely fortunate.
I've been at jobs where the stress is very low and I had time to browse the internet at all hours and didn't have much expected of me. This is 100% the opposite of that, and I'm happier now than I ever was then. It's been 4 years and I've never had anything close to burn-out, because I've never felt that the work wasn't "worth it". (To me, burn out is a result of feeling like you're not getting anywhere, and that just plain isn't the case at a company where we consistently ship things with huge scopes, on time and to resounding success.)
Yeah, there's exec demos, and yeah there's dry-run meetings for them, but you know what? The execs here are fucking smart. Every meeting I've had with execs has left me awestruck at the level with which someone can be simultaneously so big-picture oriented while still being able to sweat little details. There's a reason they got to where they are, and I really feel that at Apple it's a true meritocracy.
It sounds like it's even harder work if you're in the direct email line-of-sight of an exec (which I am not), and I feel for the authors of your linked post about how hard that must be, but to me that comes with the territory of being so close to the success or failure of a product that you are under that kind of scrutiny. What else would you expect?
"To me, burn out is a result of feeling like you're not getting anywhere, and that just plain isn't the case at a company where we consistently ship things with huge scopes, on time and to resounding success."
Just because a company is getting somewhere, doesn't mean you or your team or even your org is. You mustn't overgeneralize your own positive experiences at the company to reflect that of a majority of people working there. (Of course, for people with the opposite experience, overgeneralization should be avoided as well.)
Specifically, I can't. However, I have several ex-Apple friends who have told me stories of a nightmarish work environment.
The one that sticks in my mind is being sent to China for a short two week production run, and getting to return 7 months later. Her managers kindly offered to let her fly back and forth to the US over the weekend to get a change of clothes after month 3.
Certainly you hear a fair bit about Apple as a high-pressure work environment. Long hours, lots of paranoia -- though by "paranoia" I'm specifically thinking of developers, and not revealing anything Apple might be working on that isn't publicly known yet.
Well, and related things like tracking what buildings you enter by your badge, access to specific labs, etc. Stuff to make sure people don't know more than they should.
I've worked with a lot of ex-Apple folks, and know some current Apple folks socially.
I've known some very happy Apple employees. My sense is that the company contains great variation across its breadth, due to the extreme security among teams. When you can't even go into the next division's work-space, it's hard for a single culture to permeate across the company.
