Company: Apple
Date: 2015-07-03
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

IS&T in general
Pros: Looks good on the resume maybe and get your feet in the door?
Cons: The real problem with this place is the contracting model that started long time ago. The whole IS&T was built on top of it. A lot of the full time including many managers are coming from that background. Technical skill wise they can only offer the very basic and usually have no idea or insight when it comes to design and engineering. Mentally this brings them job insecurity and pushes them the urges to move to managerial role asap. 

Projects in this places usually have tight timelines to meet business needs so quality was never the main concern. In this place you will not learn anything new as you will be working with raw SQL and single methods with 2000+ lines of code embedded within static classes everywhere. Most of the internal business facing systems, if not all, were developed by contractors from various vendor companies. These contractors, as Apple grew, were converted into full time and some later became managers.

Due to the large number of projects taking place in this org and the restriction on the rate of contractor conversion, sometimes outsiders will get hired in to run projects. Don't get me wrong, you are not really making any decisions here and if you are hired as a PM, you will be dealing with politics on a day to day basis. If you are hired as an engineer, you will not have any impacts at all because you are not allowed to code using the best practices. The technologies, methodologies and design patterns that you have learned are going to cause them fear of losing control and that is something they really do not want to see because they have no where else better to go. So they will try everything to stop and 'humiliate' you. After sometime you started to think, maybe this is not the right place and choose to move on. If you are NOT lucky enough to see the lucky ones move on, you will again see this bad cycle happening over and over again: Contractors getting converted, buddies of some higher up getting hired without following proper HR guidelines and occasionally some external hires (when they had no other options)

In IS&T you will see this quick people turnover quite often. It has the tendency of not able to keep the good people around. The ones left there mostly share the same kind of mentality. You will be wasting time if you think you could have it changed. The culture of this organization really isn't what represents the TRUE Apple. Hard work is not recognized, performance review won't make a difference if the BIG boss thinks about you differently. If you are skillful and young, join startup. If you can get an offer from anywhere else but IS&T from Apple, by all means go for it. The culture there will be completely different. If you really want to join the company with no other options at the moment, BE READY TO SUFFER AT LEAST FOR 365 DAYS!