[JKCalhoun]

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.

[tombert]

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.

[JKCalhoun]

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.

[tombert]

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.

[BuckRogers]

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!