I never worked for apple, but huge companies with established, incumbent cash flows and huge moats can bear a truly, spectacularly, mind-bogglingly incredible amount of internal dysfunction while still generally going forward. This can make it really crushing to be a sensible, well-intended single person inside this beast where you have essentially no power yourself.
Yes. And part of why you're paid exorbitantly at these places is to absorb, manage, and counteract this dysfunction. This can be exhausting and lonely work.
i worked at a FAANG for six years and this matches my experience. there's a variety of responses:
- to burn out. sometimes the flameout is spectacular, other times it's a quiet, lonely exit.
- to "go with the flow." soft-quit, accept that the dysfunction is there and narrow your own expectations within it
- (rarely) to productively challenge it, and -- through picking battles and careful resource management -- push through and make something truly good for yourself or your reports.
this is situational. all three are often present in one career at different times.
Counteract might be the wrong word.. The ongoing dysfunction doesn't fall from the sky, it is largely a consequence of people prioritizing the goals they are assigned for the betterment of their group, etc.
At YT, I hated that you needed two weeks of prep for the meeting to uncover two weeks of prep for the meeting where you could get preliminary access to the data source you needed to figure out if your job description was even viable.
I get that you need internal controls or whatever, but just log my queries, and if I'm stalking an ex then fire and sue me. It's hard to optimize conversion rate for superchat or whatever if it's a 3-month process to find out if the source of data I plan to use is actually the right source of data.
Is Apple any better? My friends on the inside say it's worse, but I'm also just one guy, and their stock is going up and to the right. Make your own decisions.
Getting data, even for live systems, wasn't too hard as long as you weren't doing anything secret during a trading blackout window, which didn't seem too unreasonable to me.
I didn't work with data science though, my stuff was generally limited to database queries and log messages.
Oh my, how long you got? There were a ton of things, but I can really boil down to a few instances.
First:
The thing that really made me disenchanted with the company came down to an incident where I replied back to a previous email chain with <REDACTED> (one of the higher-ups at Apple) with a topic that wasn't directly relevant to the subject of the previous emails, and then that asshole thought it was best to complain to every single manager between me and him, which was six people.
The next day every one of those managers decided to schedule a half-hour meeting explaining to me how inappropriate it was that I emailed <REDACTED> directly, instead of going through the bureaucratic channels. It was three hours of nearly-continuous meetings, all with the same subject of how bad it was to email a higher-up without first emailing every single person in-between first.
Three. Fucking. Hours. They wasted basically half a day just to make sure that I didn't send an email to the wrong people in the wrong order. It was worse than that scene in Office Space.
Second:
There was also another incident, where my manager's manager's manager emailed me, I hadn't replied in two hours, so he called my cell phone and yelled at me for not checking my emails more frequently. I tried explaining that email was asynchronous and that if he needed my attention immediately he should message me with HipChat or call my phone, which he clearly knew how to do, only for him to tell me that I have an attitude problem.
Not as bad as having my day ruined for emailing the wrong person, but still really rubbed me the wrong way.
There were a lot more annoying things that happened, and my understanding is that a lot of it was an issue with my team; Apple has thousands of software engineers and I think some teams are better than others.
There are absolutely good teams at Apple. I left a toxic one (Photos) to follow an co-worker I liked a lot who had become a manager (and his team had an opening).
Honestly, it was a back-water project with just a handful of engineers on it. But my manager was awesome, my team was cool.
My favorite stint at Apple was when I was working on MacOS frameworks. It was chill, you got no significant bonuses to speak of, no special attention during WWDC Keynote presentation. You just did your job and the developers were grateful for the fixes and features you enabled.
I was indeed working in the Eddy Cue branch of Apple, though he wasn't the redacted person in the anecdote (someone close to him though, though I ask if you figure who it is that you do not post it here).
I tried to do a transfer to another team (the storage backend for iCloud), went pretty far, and almost got an offer to move, but I had gotten a less-than-stellar review the previous year due to my attitude problems, and they decided not to move forward with the transfer.
In fairness to them, by the time I was doing that interview, I definitely did have an attitude problem, some of it justified, a lot of it not, so I don't really hold any grudges with that particular team for not letting me transfer.
After that transfer fell through, I was pretty depressed and eventually just decided to get another job at a different company.
When I was younger, I had "attitude problems" as well. I like to think though it was because I was passionate about what we were doing at Apple — how we were being perceived by the public.
I think I eventually just stopped giving a shit and instead more or less kept my head down. And perhaps that's too bad.
I think my biggest ongoing frustration was how much time I was expected to read and reply to emails; on my first day one of the first things I was instructed to do was to use their internal email filtering system (the name of which I can't remember), because if you didn't you'd have literally thousands of emails going into your main inbox. Mostly alerts, lots of cross-team announcements that weren't relevant to me, some Radar updates on tickets that I wasn't assigned to IIRC.
Even when I got the filters more or less under control, I would still have to spend a lot of time replying to emails throughout the day, or risk getting in trouble for letting them pile up.
It was pretty depressing, and I remember the first time I pushed back I ended up kind of yelling at my boss's boss about it when I said something like "You know, during the interview you asked me a lot of really hard computer science questions, I thought that's why you hired me, but maybe we should revise the process to just be a fucking endurance test of replying to emails for two hours and see how they do." He didn't like this suggestion, for whatever reason.
So I don't completely blame them for saying I had a bad attitude, and frankly I don't think I was a good fit for the AMP team of Apple; I am far too unorganized.
I'm a so-so to possibly bad programmer, but I am very well organized, responsible (respond to everything immediately), and very good at enduring pain and BS like you describe. Lifetime of it, it's how I survive. I'd never get hired at Google due to the interview process I'm sure, but it sounds like I'd be their ideal employee. Shame that marriage made in heaven will never be consummated!
It really is amazing how uptight people are and the lengths they'll go to ensure your managers know how much you've "offended" them. I've left all non-work Slack channels as a result of such an incident. Employees will also ask you questions as if they genuinely care about you and rather than correct you or give friendly advice, will go to your manager.
I've worked at startups for most of my career so I'm used to people talking to me directly with misgivings. The passive/indirect bullshit is super frustrating.
Yeah, I think most people end up learning the hard way that there's no equivalent to "attorney client privilege" in regards to coworkers and managers.
I like all my current coworkers, I think they're nice and smart people, and I don't think they're assholes at all, but I don't really say anything to them that I wouldn't be fine with HR hearing about, even during off hours. They're not bad people, and I don't think that they'd be overly vindictive, but I've been burned enough by coworkers that I have trouble trusting them.
Personally it's pretty hard to get me to tattle on people [1], in no small part because I think that most people don't need to be reminded six times for one mistake. I also just think that unfeeling bureaucracies are capable of unspeakable evil but that's far more of a tangent that I'm not going to get to in this message.
[1] With obvious exceptions, if I were to see outright abuse or fraud or something then I'd probably tell someone.
I’m very much still an Apple fan but being on the inside and seeing how weirdly cutthroat people are (we’re not even in the same teams!!) encourages me to look elsewhere.
I have worked for a fair number of BigCos now, and they all have their own little annoyances.
As far as I can tell, pretty much all “enterprise” companies drain your life force. They’re all subtly slightly different in how they suck away your will to live, and some are worse than others, but they’re all kind of horrible in their own wonderful ways. There is almost always cutthroat shit.
I wasn’t a huge fan of working at Apple but don’t let me take it away from you if you do. If you can stomach it, stick with it, let the stock vest, and retire comfortably in your 50’s.
I don't have the skills to get hired by Apple, but I think maybe for my mental health I should just work on my side projects instead of trying to get hired by the FAANGs.
> It was three hours of nearly-continuous meetings, all with the same subject of how bad it was to email a higher-up without first emailing every single person in-between first.
There is a famous scene, in the movie Office Space (1999), where the low level coder is constantly harassed about an idiotic memo because he forgot a cover sheet on his TPS reports.. he is reminded of this 3 times and then some by other people..
It's unreal how the "modern" corporate environment, remains the same as it was in early 90s..
The best part of that movie is the office is supposed to be a bleak, soul-destroying cube farm. But watching the movie now it's like "wow they have so much space and privacy."
"They bring in a rookie, throw money at him, buy the car, the house, after a couple of years, and your kids are in private schools, you're used to the good life, they tell you the truth"
Big salaries thrown at young people are bait. They don't need wild animals, but circus animals that are obedient, dependent and consistently perform tricks without too much thinking about why. Over time this involves such animals to loose all sense of self. Naturally this won't work on everyone and causes all kinds issues for both sides.
I actually wasn't that young, I was 27 when I started and I was already "senior level" before I worked there.
Also, the salary was good but not as amazing as people to think. When I started there in 2018, I was making $165k/year; certainly not "bad" but not spectacular.
The stock grants were huge though. If I were still there I'd be worth more than a million now, I think.
The second part is what I'm dealing with. I didn't even realize I was getting nearly enough the market rate until I started looking around a few months ago. Feelsbadman.