Company: Apple
Date: 2014-12-11
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Senior

A great place to work, but you have to be strong
Pros: Fantastic technical challenges, brilliant people, complex and important problems to be solved.  The benefits are great, of course, and the prestige both during the time you work there and even afterwards on your resume are significant benefits. If you like serious intellectual challenges, and the opportunity to do something that makes a difference in the world, this is the place for you. I think the compensation was very fair compared to other companies, and those people who really are rock stars really get very well compensated.
Cons: The culture (in engineering) is a tough one, hard on people who aren't at the top of their game. I think that Apple actually is a pretty high integrity place in general, but in my experience there certainly used to be a very strong political nature.  This is always true in any organization with a lot of people, of course, but at Apple there was a certain sloppiness about allowing bad managers without a strategic plan to continue to survive and do damage far too long just because they were good at making their bosses feel good. Maybe this was just the case in the group where I worked. Maybe this has changed since Tim Cook has taken over.