<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>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>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></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>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>phkahler</author><text>Crunch time is fine when its uncommon and unforseen. Otherwise it is a manag3ment failure. Perhaps its deliberate failure to respect peoples personal life, but that&amp;#x27;s still a failure. I&amp;#x27;ve worked plenty of places where crunch time is uncommon or nonexistent. It doesn&amp;#x27;t have to be that way.</text></comment>