<story><title>I Quit: What really goes on at Apple</title><url>http://roadlesstravelled.me/2015/04/06/why-steve-jobs-motivated-me-to-quit-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway6497</author><text>With this negative image among developers in the Valley, how is Apple able to attract top quality engineers? They probably are not. Anecdotally, I still haven&amp;#x27;t met one single engineer who would love to work for Apple though they love using Apple products.&lt;p&gt;Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quora, other promising startups). Any software engineer who is in the valley for a while (and heard the inside horror stories of working for Apple) wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to work there. There is no way in hell, senior engineers from the new age tech companies (listed above) will go to Apple. Apple will have a hard-time poaching them. Based on this, I have to conclude that most good engineers@Apple are candidates who have a tenure of more than 15 years and are aging. All, relatively new Apple employees are either left-overs in the talent-pool who couldn&amp;#x27;t make the cut to the above top firms&amp;#x2F;startups or really B-grade senior engineers. What is Apple&amp;#x27;s strategy of thriving in a knowledge economy, when the only asset you need are &amp;quot;great people&amp;quot; to succeed in the long term.  They probably have great hardware engineers. It is a travesty that though they are the richest company in the world, they still couldn&amp;#x27;t build a compelling cloud services suite which is better and cheaper than what Dropbox, Google, Box, Microsoft can provide. This comment, will probably ruffle a few feathers. [updated for typos&amp;#x2F;grammar]</text></item><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>One of my friends used to work at Apple.  After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you.  In the form of vouchers.  For frozen dinners.  Meanwhile, all of his friends worked for Google, we got gourmet food every meal of the week as a standard perk, and we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight.  It&amp;#x27;s sorta like &amp;quot;Your &amp;#x27;thank you&amp;#x27; is really more like a giant &amp;#x27;fuck you&amp;#x27;&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;He works for Google now.&lt;p&gt;My cousin also works for Apple, and after complaining about crunch time and how he had to check the bug queue when I was visiting him on a Saturday, I asked him &amp;quot;So, how long has crunch time lasted?&amp;quot;  He replied, &amp;quot;Oh, about 18 months.  Makes it really hard to date when I don&amp;#x27;t get any weekends.&amp;quot;  (He&amp;#x27;s in his 40s now, still no girlfriend.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>golergka</author><text>From the outside, it definitely looks like the closer it gets to hardware, the better engineers at Apple get. Metal is awesome, Metal shading language and recent clang progress not bad too, Swift a little bit wonky but interesting — but the quality of their customer-facing software, especially ui stuff (not design, but I engineering) is getting worse and worse. It just doesn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;just work&amp;quot; anymore.</text></comment>
<story><title>I Quit: What really goes on at Apple</title><url>http://roadlesstravelled.me/2015/04/06/why-steve-jobs-motivated-me-to-quit-apple/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>throwaway6497</author><text>With this negative image among developers in the Valley, how is Apple able to attract top quality engineers? They probably are not. Anecdotally, I still haven&amp;#x27;t met one single engineer who would love to work for Apple though they love using Apple products.&lt;p&gt;Apple is not even on the list of all top graduating kids who wants a job in top valley firms (Google, FB, Dropbox, Twitter, AirBnB, Uber, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Quora, other promising startups). Any software engineer who is in the valley for a while (and heard the inside horror stories of working for Apple) wouldn&amp;#x27;t want to work there. There is no way in hell, senior engineers from the new age tech companies (listed above) will go to Apple. Apple will have a hard-time poaching them. Based on this, I have to conclude that most good engineers@Apple are candidates who have a tenure of more than 15 years and are aging. All, relatively new Apple employees are either left-overs in the talent-pool who couldn&amp;#x27;t make the cut to the above top firms&amp;#x2F;startups or really B-grade senior engineers. What is Apple&amp;#x27;s strategy of thriving in a knowledge economy, when the only asset you need are &amp;quot;great people&amp;quot; to succeed in the long term.  They probably have great hardware engineers. It is a travesty that though they are the richest company in the world, they still couldn&amp;#x27;t build a compelling cloud services suite which is better and cheaper than what Dropbox, Google, Box, Microsoft can provide. This comment, will probably ruffle a few feathers. [updated for typos&amp;#x2F;grammar]</text></item><item><author>nostrademons</author><text>One of my friends used to work at Apple.  After one particular grueling stint of 14+ hour days, management decided to give them a thank-you.  In the form of vouchers.  For frozen dinners.  Meanwhile, all of his friends worked for Google, we got gourmet food every meal of the week as a standard perk, and we were usually home by 8 or 9 PM rather than midnight.  It&amp;#x27;s sorta like &amp;quot;Your &amp;#x27;thank you&amp;#x27; is really more like a giant &amp;#x27;fuck you&amp;#x27;&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;He works for Google now.&lt;p&gt;My cousin also works for Apple, and after complaining about crunch time and how he had to check the bug queue when I was visiting him on a Saturday, I asked him &amp;quot;So, how long has crunch time lasted?&amp;quot;  He replied, &amp;quot;Oh, about 18 months.  Makes it really hard to date when I don&amp;#x27;t get any weekends.&amp;quot;  (He&amp;#x27;s in his 40s now, still no girlfriend.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eastbayjake</author><text>Acqui-hires, amigo... swallow a company, fire the bottom 10%, give the rest offers, see who sticks around after 1-2 years. They&amp;#x27;re gobbling up companies so fast that they&amp;#x27;re running out of office space to house them all.</text></comment>