Company: Apple
Date: 2008-06-11
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

I drank the Kool-Aid, but I didn't need to. Apple is like no other company in the US.
Pros: Working for a company that people love, admire, and respect, diversity, interesting work, and general coolness.
Having a senior management team that understands its markets, and never is content to ship a mediocre product just to make a buck. At Apple, innovation, excellence, and elegance are all important. One thing I love about Apple is that when I walk into the company cafeteria at 1 Infinite Loop, I look around and see people of all ages and races. Most technology companies I have worked at tend to have a large number of young people and a few older people; at Apple the mix is polyglot, multicultural, and intergenerational. This means that the company has a fantastic talent pool with great breadth upon which to draw. At a recent meeting, when people were asked how long they had been at the company, the answers ranged from two months to twenty six years.
Cons: Hard work, lots of pressure. You really can't sit back and coast, because everyone here is driven. Because of company secrecy, you often won't even know what you coworker is working on. Some people might find this kind of environment hard to work in. Many people I know have issues getting time off because of the breakneck speed.
Some of our benefits are not as good as other companies -- for example no free lunches, and United Healthcare and Kaiser don't make me feel warm and fuzzy. This is a fairly lame complaint however; the coverage is still better than 90% of the companies I have worked for.