Company: Apple
Date: 2008-06-13
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Great products, great engineers in the trenches, but penny-wise, pound-foolish
Pros: Great engineering talent, attracts some great people that care deeply about what they work on. Brilliant people at both the executive level and down in the trenches.
Cons: Apple is extremely penny-wise and pound-foolish, which is not uncommon at many companies, but in particular, they are ridiculously stingy at providing adequate hardware for engineers. It's sad because we make the hardware. Many people have 3rd party CRTs and LCDs because they can't get Apple LCD monitors. Many hours are wasted when every engineer should have at least one loaded top-of-the-line Mac Pro to build and debug as quickly as possible.

Apple also only rewards it very top people for the successes of the last 7 years. Even employees that get exceptional reviews get raises that are barely more than cost-of-living (5% is considered a large raise and same goes for bonuses). Many engineers are hired with no stock options and few are ever given out after that. Long-time employees made great sacrifices during the lean years, giving up benefits on an almost yearly basis. Now that Apple is successful, none of those benefits have been restored, although lately there has been a renewed emphasis on adding some new benefits, so perhaps they are finally seeing the light (or the increased attrition of late).

Compensation is average for the industry (they will even tell you this is their goal), which is sad given they should be trying to attract the best and brightest and allowing them to share in the successes they create. At the same time, senior managment (deservedly so!) gets 50-100% bonuses every year and millions of shares in stock. It wouldn't kill them to hand out a few hundred options a year to highly performing individuals.