Secrecy: Apple's secrecy is comparable to the U.S. government's in terms of "need to know" and compartmentalization.
This. My roommate is a hardware engineer on the iPad team, and he won't even confirm that there will be another iPad. He takes extra precautions when working at home - he won't take work calls if I'm in the room, and he set up the furniture in his room in an awkward fashion solely so that his computer monitor didn't face towards the door.
Several times I've brought friends or family down to Cupertino. He lets us inside to walk around the inner campus and eat at Caffe Macs, but that's truly all there is to see. Certainly we can't enter any other buildings on Infinite Loop.
One thing this article doesn't mention is work-life balance. We live in SF, and my roommate has a 90-minute commute (each way) on the Apple shuttle, and he usually works 12 hours on top of that. He's out by 8am and doesn't usually return until 11pm. He tells me this is a common topic of discussion at Caffe Macs - the balance between working on groundbreaking technology and, quite simply, having zero personal time during the week (and often on the weekends).
He can be called to go to China with no more than a few days' notice, and the duration of his stay there is never known ahead of time. He often estimates 7-10 days but it frequently ends up being closer to 2, even 3 weeks. Apple covers all of his expenses, of course, but he doesn't much care for Shenzhen.
He really likes working at Apple, but I think he recognizes that it's not a sustainable job for him for more than 3 or 4 years.
While I only worked at Apple for about 8 months (started as a summer intern), I can completely echo this. It's never that we _have_ to stay later, it's that we _want_ to. You really have a dedication to the product because you want your customers to love you; that was the overall mindset. With a deadline, that means you'll do almost anything to meet it and succeed.
As for the secrecy, you're totally right. I roomed with 3 other interns during the summer and none of us would talk shop, ever. When interviewing for other companies later, nearly all my answers about what I did at Apple were "I wish I could talk to you about that, but the most I can do at this point is talk 'around' it, if you will, since that's an unreleased product." Not at all unlike government secrecy.
All that said, it really was a glorious place to work. I miss a lot about it; the seemingly infectious excitement and passion for the products was really driving. I loved being in that environment. :)
It's never that we _have_ to stay later, it's that we _want_ to.
I hear this from people, but I rarely buy it. I'm not saying that you didn't want to stay later, but say Tim wanted to just work 8 to 5 each day, would everyone say, "Hey that's cool. We feel bad that you can't stay later, but it's 100% fine that you work 8 hours per day"?
It just seems like places I've been, if a handful of sufficiently respected productive members of the team stay late consistently (for whatever reason) there becomes strong social pressure that everyone stay late.
I worked in several situations like this - it is toxic. Where overachievers dragged all of the others into slavery (I used to do that too, until I realized what I was doing).
Yes, this matches what I have heard from several of my friends who work there. The rosy picture painted in the article doesn't mention the extreme overwork that Apple employees have to go through, although most employees appear to be okay with that.
Having said that, it's no coincidence that Apple never made it even in the top 100 of US companies to work for, they really don't treat their employees very well from an objective standpoint and any former employee who's had a chance to leave and take a step back can easily see that.
The distortion field obviously applies to Apple employees as well.
For the millionth time: Fortune's "Top 100 Employers" list is not an objective ranking of every employer in the US. It relies primarily on unverified employer-provided data. Many companies, like Apple, realize that it's mostly a PR game and don't bother to participate.
My experience at Apple was that working ridiculous amounts of overtime was not at all required. Most of my coworkers didn't. On the other hand, generally you wouldn't get told NOT to work a lot if you wanted to, and that's the true weakness of the company culture. If you're a workaholic, you can definitely burn yourself out. If you're not a workaholic, you'll do just fine.
>It relies primarily on unverified employer-provided data.
Yea, I mean Walmart scored high on that bogus list once. It's hard to imagine a worse place to work than Walmart (Offices I mean, the stores are probably as crappy as any big box retailer).
At least in my (admittedly short) experience there, I can't say there was much social pressure to stay late. You had deadlines, you had to do what you had to get done, and it had to be done well. How long it took you to get there or at what times of day didn't matter very much, if at all.
Presumably he meant "impossible in a 40 hour work week," so that if you're killing yourself with an 80 hour week to meet deadlines, you're not a counterexample.
Of course, there's a prevalent opinion around here that working over 40 hours a week always decreases your productivity (and not just per hour), and the people who buy into that will likely find this definition of impossible to be silly (since as a corollary, every possible thing is achievable in 40 hour weeks).
I personally would argue that an 80 hour week isn't the same as two 40 hour weeks. It would probably be more like a 40 hour week and a 20 hour week. The end result? You get something done sooner, but you end up putting in a lot more time than you would if you just worked 40 hours a week. It's more efficient for the company because they're getting a product faster and only paying for 40 hours worth of work a week. But it's less efficient for the employee because they're putting in many more hours in total to do the same task but only getting paid as if they were working 40 hours a week.
In my experience, working long hours is only good in the short-term. Sometimes that is necessary. But it is almost never a good idea in the long-term.
I'm not going to dig up a link, but a number of people think your total productivity goes down (not just per-hour productivity, as I emphasized in my post). So if it's a strawman, it's a strawman with internet access and an HN account.
I think your personal experience matches mine - I'm more productive in my initial working hours (maybe discounting the first hour of getting in to it), and are less efficient in my later hours. But my total productivity goes up as I work more, at least up to around 80 hours/week. Whether or not that's good use of my time depends on how enjoyable the work is to me and what kind of non-work I'm coming home to that day.
I may also agree with your position on long hours being a bad idea "in the long-term", but I'd quibble with it the way it's worded. Periodically working long hours can be good for long term progress, but working long hours over an extended period of time leads to burn-out.
Neither do I. The problem is that you didn't present an alternate way of thinking about extra hours. You just posted a link to a product and a statement that it wasn't designed by people who don't work extra hours without much of a link between the two.
Why do you want to work such long days when there is so much evidence that total productive work per week doesn't increase beyond around 40 hours of work for most knowledge worker jobs, especially software development?
You're right to bring this up, and certainly those studies are the best hard numbers we have, but:
Do the studies correct for employee satisfaction with working more, corporate culture, employee skill, employee personal life status, or level of excitement/interest in work? Because I think all of those would be a positive factor at Apple.
I find that I have significantly more than 40 hours of usefulness in any given week. I almost never work 9-5 M-F. I usually show up later, and stay later; in my experience, I feel most awake later in the day and do my best work later as well. Occasionally, if I'm working on a problem, I can get a lot more (efficient) work done keeping at it rather than leaving and having to spin up again on it.
At other times, of course, leaving is the only way to clear my head and find a solution. It all really depends on your working habits; mine just don't tend to be very consistent. :)
How about for a fixed time period, like 6 months, I remember something being posted talking about long term longer hours but I think there is more to look at here.
For instance what if I work 8 hours a day usually but a couple of times a week when I am in the zone put in 12 hours? What if I make up an extra 4 hours casually on the weekends? It'd be hard to say that there is no way to include more than 40 productive hours into a week, using any scheme.
And of course if someone doesn't stay later it means they're not dedicated to the product, so obviously aren't suitable for promotion, salary increases, etc.
No, actually, that wasn't usually how it worked. It was all about performance rather than time spent on-site. If you could get done in 4 hours what took me 8, you would be just as eligible for any promotions as I. Probably more-so, however, since you'd probably have worked 8 hours anyway and gotten twice as much done. ;)
It sounds to me like your saying that if someone wanted to work an 8 hour day, they'd have to match what you do in (say) 12 hours ?
i.e. if someone was equally productive (or even 25% more productive), but still produced less than you purely because they worked the scheduled hours, than they'd be less likely to get promotions, etc. ?
Potentially, but promotions are generally given for work that exceeds expectations; isn't this the way it should be?
Producing the 'minimal expected' amount of work for a prolonged period of time (reliability) is cause for being promoted as well, I suppose, but takes more time.
@stonemetal: I think what he's saying is: if you're more interested in playing this "what's the minimum number of hours I can get away with working" game than in making your customers love you, Apple isn't the right fit for you.
Yeah just like those devs at EA. If you aren't willing to sleep in your cube then you obviously are just "doing the minimum". If making gamers love you isn't what you live for then maybe EA isn't the right place for you. Poor project planing with deadlines that can't be met without 12hr days isn't the problem. Passion, that is our problem we just have way to much of it. Cause you know if we let people have friends and do stuff outside of work then some of that Passion might leak out and we wouldn't want that to happen.
You're doing an awful lot of projecting based on one guy's account of his friend's working hours.
The web isn't exactly swamped with "Apple Wives" blogs, so you might consider the possibility that this grave injustice that you're so worked up about is primarily occurring in your imagination.
And his friends account that it is typical of the environment, and I have a friend who had an internship with Apple. The first rule of his startup was sane working hours no matter how passionate you are, which wasn't a rule he had before working at Apple.
I think that it's obvious that the work culture at Apple is not one of suggesting that you leave at 5:30pm.
It takes an effort by management to prevent working hours from ballooning out when people are working on long projects. It's very obvious that Apple are not doing that.
My company expects people to leave on the dot at 5:30pm. It's great.
It's not a matter of hours. There has to be cause for promotion, correct? Whether that is exceeding expectations (be it by working longer hours, or simply being better, etc.) or being reliable over a prolonged period of time; these are both valid reasons to get promoted. I'm sure there are others as well.
Hours are a flawed metric for engineering, usually, since different people get different amounts done in the same amount of hours. But surely there should be some meritocratic reason for a promotion?
Sure, I'm not disputing that, but it means that if you want to be treated like everyone else when it comes to promotions, redundancies, etc. that you're forced to work 12 hour days when at other companies you could just work 8 hour days to get equal treatment.
And remember while you like your job now, what happens if you start to like it less (or you have a family, etc.) but you can't reduce your hours otherwise you'll get penalized for it. One day you'll wake up and realize you're working for EA.
productive workaholics will get rewarded over regular competent staff; overlooking their contribution is a good way to lose them. as an employer, would you want to lose your most productive staff so you can give "equal" treatment to less productive members?
That being said, i think there should be no exemptions for overtime pay.
Several people on his team have left Apple for very lucrative careers as designers and engineers at hardware or design firms. It's a phenomenal boost to your career.
That's a valid point though. Somehow I confused him as someone senior, since you've said "designing the next iPad" - but then you've said roommate, which does not compute.
Then again, something else does not compute in this story. If I were Apple and were about talked-about level of secrecy, I sure wouldn't let people that are designing key products easily let go. On the other hand, if people that were involved in the process, but were not all that important, how lucrative would they be to the competition (since they weren't key in the process - so no lucrative know-how)?
edit: I apologize for word mess - I have a headache.
Spoken like someone who is punching the clock at Best Buy. If you are in a technical field that deals with anything of any significance, you will work like this for much less world changing projects. Most of the things you touch has a team of engineers that work like this behind it. It could be everyday things like bringing a subway motor , a glucose meter, or a police scanner to reality. Why? I have seen it. Actually, technical staff that work the front end of development the best work/life balance (note that I didn't say good). It the guys that work out the final kinks at the end in manufacturing or testing that really get the pressure. You or team members may not even believe in the project as you go on the death march. At least it sounds like the staff at Apple believe in the final goal.
Think of it as doing a post-grad degree. Games are often like this too. Each one is a masters, but if you do good work, the connections and portfolio can make the rest of your career significantly easier. Plus, you're hopefully working on cool stuff.
Does the compensation reflect the working hours? That is, your roomate is working at least 50% more than normal [1], does he make 50% more than people who work normal hours doing similar work?
[1] I can't comment on the industry standard because Apple is kind of a hybrid between a software and hardware company.
This. My roommate is a hardware engineer on the iPad team, and he won't even confirm that there will be another iPad. He takes extra precautions when working at home - he won't take work calls if I'm in the room, and he set up the furniture in his room in an awkward fashion solely so that his computer monitor didn't face towards the door.
Several times I've brought friends or family down to Cupertino. He lets us inside to walk around the inner campus and eat at Caffe Macs, but that's truly all there is to see. Certainly we can't enter any other buildings on Infinite Loop.
One thing this article doesn't mention is work-life balance. We live in SF, and my roommate has a 90-minute commute (each way) on the Apple shuttle, and he usually works 12 hours on top of that. He's out by 8am and doesn't usually return until 11pm. He tells me this is a common topic of discussion at Caffe Macs - the balance between working on groundbreaking technology and, quite simply, having zero personal time during the week (and often on the weekends).
He can be called to go to China with no more than a few days' notice, and the duration of his stay there is never known ahead of time. He often estimates 7-10 days but it frequently ends up being closer to 2, even 3 weeks. Apple covers all of his expenses, of course, but he doesn't much care for Shenzhen.
He really likes working at Apple, but I think he recognizes that it's not a sustainable job for him for more than 3 or 4 years.