Company: Apple
Date: 2018-06-17
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Growing pains are sadly painfully evident
Pros: * Amazing people. 

* Personal relationshaps encouraged as an integral and effective way to get things done. 

* Exciting, home-grown technologies. 

* Good benefits.
Cons: Not only is is not the company I thought I joined - it's no longer even the company I joined (if that makes sense). Things have really been going downhill as growth has increased without sufficient pruning and evaluation. 

The results of that are

* The company is full of processes that work great for a very high average quality engineering population of 1,000 or less, but are terrible for a medium average quality engineering population of 10,000 or more. As a result management is re-inventing the terrible practices of the past, such as: 
  - Making project too big to fail rather than small enough to succeed
  - Adding people rather than competences
  - Treating everybody as interchangeable parts rather than individuals with strengths and weaknesses
  - Restraining employee mobility and growth, presumably to retain head count and talent for local reasons, which hurts the company on a grander scale

* Bad to terrible management on all levels that I encountered. Internal mobility is often curtailed and actively opposed, even though that should be one of the big benefits of working in a big company that does products on the whole stack. 

* HR is definitely not on your side. 

* Too many people seem to think that success is assured, and revert to pointless, zero-sum infighting instead of working hard to keep the products successful by delivering value and delight to the customers.

* 1,000s of uncoordinated, small geeky features added rather than 10s of simple, useful and customer-aligned features.

* Products getting long in the tooth with no new hit in sight. 

* Too many products compromized by tying them to each other without consideration for whether it benefits the customer. 

* Base pay levels below average. Bonus is too high a % of your comp.

In conclusion: Time to trim the fat in products, management and peers.