Yeah, really. My last contract was with Apple Online Store which was part of IS&T. IT WAS HORRIBLE. I wasn't working at the time (because of my previous mistreatment by Apple) and my "friend" was a manager in the org and he had a contract for me. It supposedly involved development with microservices, Docker, Ansible, etc. Turns out, he was a pathological liar and that was just his pet project that went nowhere from day 1. He would go out and vape weed in the parking lot every day. I ended up working 9 months just documenting the infrastructure of the AOS on their internal wiki as an "IT consultant". The real reason the other managers said that I was hired as a consultant (not developer) was to fix their broken organization. 80% of the workforce was VISA and they acted like they feared for their lives. I was asked to gather information from managers throughout the department and they would ignore my emails and keep postponing meetings until months later. They knew my contract would just expire so they did not care. They shoved everyone into bullpen cubicles and teams were using conference rooms as offices for their entire teams. Booking a conference room for a meeting or just to make a private phone call was impossible. I had no office - I had to sit on a bench in the hallway, or sit in a woman's office who was actually in another woman's office (who was out on maternity leave). The second that office door shut, my manager and his hiring manager would mock their senior tech lead (who was just doing his job properly), and start gossiping about other mid-level managers non-stop. The level of hostility in the org was amazing.

That was almost as bad as my previous 15-year stint with Apple where I started with my dream job and ended up 15 years later in the same organization being told "You should be thinking about your career" by a new director (who was actually a professionally trained diplomat) because they were going to stop shipping the software I worked on for 15 years. They don't just do layoffs because of the liability. I watched other competent senior engineers and managers be treated the same. They removed all of my areas of responsibility and then claimed that I wasn't doing anything, but still forced everyone to show up every day (instead of working remotely, as we had been doing). For the first time, we had daily standup meetings where the manager would just call in to make sure we were present. In that case, they had told us that we were going to be "guinea pigs" for the new Apple spaceship building. Not once did anyone ask me about my opinions regarding the new work environment. They had me in a shared "office" with other perturbed individuals who only wanted to complain about the situation. I was surrounded by glass walls, put at a "desk" with a glossy monitor with windows (no blinds!) behind me so I couldn't even work once the sun started reflecting off of my monitor. One engineer (who now had to commute every day from Carmel to Cupertino) grabbed a patio table's umbrella and propped it up against the window because of the lack of curtains/blinds. I had to watch people drink beer on the patio in the bezel of my monitor because of the reflection. Directly to my left was a black globe security camera always in my peripheral vision, annoying me. I started calling sick because of this crap, and my sick days were maxed out and weren't accruing anyway, so why not. Eventually I just had to leave, like everyone else. All of this after working HARD for 15 years and even winning an Emmy award with my work. And when I came back to Apple for that contract for the online store, that was even worse and the job was all based on lies from the manager.

Let's just say that I do not display my 10-year glass trophy from Apple or the Emmy award, they mean nothing to me and are in a cabinet somewhere. I just sit and laugh at stories about engineers running into the glass walls/doors in the new building, so much so that they started putting sticky notes on the walls/doors so they wouldn't run into them. So that's what became of me being a "guinea pig" for the spaceship building. Then I switched back to PC/Windows/Linux as my primary platform, just like it had been 15 years earlier. Never again, Apple.