Company: Apple
Date: 2016-03-22
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Smart People; Horrendous Hierarchy
Pros: I worked for the internal marketing team (MarCom) on the creative side. The best thing about working at Apple is your coworkers. They do an excellent job of hiring incredibly intelligent, talented people. It's quite humbling to work alongside such accomplished people. You'll always feel like the dumbest person in the room, which is great because everyone has so much to teach you. Most of them are ego-free (about 70% of them) and will help you whenever possible. There are so many personality types, though nearly all of them are perfectionist Type A people. If that is your kind of crew, you'll do well.

The work usually comes in waves. When you're on, you're all the way on. For weeks at a time you can expect late nights and no weekends. On the flip side, when it's slow, it's very slow. You can often work from home or take comp days. During downtimes it is not uncommon to go in for five hours including a long lunch and then go home.

In addition to this, the compensation is good. The stock program is okay. But the pay is more than fair and their annual reviews pretty much guarantee a raise, bonus, and/or more stock.

Finally, Tim Cook seems like a genuinely good person. Even in the relatively short time he's been in his role, he has made enormous leaps to give that company a real set of values that are current with this generation. He feels like a real human being, which is something Apple desperately needs.
Cons: Creatively speaking, this place is hellish. They hire people to do one job and one job only. Great creative happens when you're exposed to a lot of different projects and people, not in a vacuum. Apple will make you sit in your sandbox and churn out a huge amount of work for a single thing. And don't you dare look at someone else's sandbox. They live by the phrase "individual contributor". It's not collaborative in the least. This creates a giant divide between creative teams and roles, a divide that can be frustrating, isolating, and overwhelming.

On top of that the management style and structure is a disaster. Prepare for massive insecurity, nitpicking, micromanagement, unrealistic expectations, information silos, finger-pointing, miscommunication between management titles, and all the unfortunately awful qualities so often associated with the dreaded "middle management". Meanwhile the people at the top, who could actually effect change, have earned the right to be blissfully unaware. There are too many people in leadership positions who have been at Apple entirely too long and have little or no experience with other creative work environments. They are stale, ignorant, and arrogant.