Company: Apple
Date: 2008-06-19
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

UNDERPAID SWEATSHOP!!!  (Apple treats you no differently than the Chinese kids they underpay in their factories)
Pros: You get to work on really cool product (iPod and iPhone in my case) and it is everywhere in the states.  The stock options/RSUs (while it does good).  Benefits are good, 401k price match is pretty decent with a progressive scale over 5 years that ramps up from 50% to 100% matching.
Cons: You get treated like crap.  

"SWEATSHOP!!!  YOU HAVE A FAMILY?  YOU WON'T NOTICE IT"
The schedule during the iPod release was working from 10am to 3am every single day of the week for 3 months (Wife was furious).  You may think that they would compensate with a nice fat BONUS for doing SO much work, but think again.  We received roughly 5% of our salary as a bonus for the year.  If you count your salary per hour, it's not pretty.  Expect to do a LOT of overtime with little compensation for it.

"YEARLY RAISES = INFLATION"
The yearly raises are such that the managers get 4% of the employee's salaries as a raise.  They are then free to distribute the money however they feel like.  So on average, people tend to get ~4% increase/year  (this isn't necessarily bad, but it's also not necessarily good).

"IT'S A ONE MAN SHOW"
It's ALL about Steve.  He dictates everything from the corporate vision down to the position of the pixels.  Although it's a great thing to have him there.  Don't expect that your ideas will really make any headway into the products.  You're more of monkey than a thinker (and that's a good thing for Apple as an investor, but a really bad thing as an employee).

"VACATION TIME?  WE'LL THINK ABOUT IT"
You really have to plan around Apple when you take vacation.  Forget about taking anything longer than 2.5 weeks straight.  They simply can't have you outside of Apple for that long even if you do have the time off.  Every year, Apple has this plan where you can cash in 1 day of vacation if you take one day of vacation.  ie: -2 days of vacations, you get paid for one day on your paycheck.  A lot of people end up taking a day off (although still working on that day) only because they would otherwise have too many hours (it's just that hard to get vacation there).  If the product is about to launch in a couple of months, don't even bother taking time off.