We are the Apple Borg. You will be assimilated, or else. - Senior Software Engineer (Level 4) Apple Employee Review

2.0
17 Jun 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

They make some really cool toys. The campus is great. There are some really smart people to work and play with at Apple.

Cons

Apple corporate memory is very spotty at best strewn across emails and bug reports and the occassional standalone blog. It is very difficult to come up to speed. Information is also highly restricted by project rather than cross-functional which makes work difficult and design from foresight very difficult. Every part of the entire software stack is modified at once throughout a new OS product / version cycle including dev tools. QA is much, much too sparse and Apple depends on all devs eating the dog food while trying to meet their own very aggressive schedules. In the groups I experienced their is very little real design except in the heads of individual engineers. Their software stack sucks. Objective C is archaic and long of tooth as a dev environment. Every developer regardless of seniority and experience is expected to sling fixed bugs (radars) at a certain rate to be seen as worth keeping around. Everyone has to prove they are a good Apple drone before they can do anything creative. And/or they have to work nights and weekends (if they don't already have to to even keep up) to do something that gets them beyond drone mode and have some measure of control over their time and destiny. The people that make it seem to all work 60 hours or more a week.

Explore other reviews about Apple

5.0
8 Jun 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Compensation, location and work-life balance

Cons

I did not experience any.

4.0
28 Aug 2014
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

We work with geniuses - in every department, We create innovative products that thrill our customers and create new product categories - who else can say that?

Cons

ZERO ZERO ZERO work/life balance. Execs have been saying for YEARS that they understand and will make it better. But in actuality, it gets worse every year! It is obviously top management LIP SERVICE because if they meant it, they could fix it tomorrow. They have hundreds of BILLIONS in the bank. If they REALLY cared about employee work/life balance, they could bring aboard the right number of folks to make that issue dissolve. Sick of hearing the lies. Just don't lie about wanting to fix it, when they clearly DON'T care

1500
See reviews by: Helpful|Rating|Date|All