Pros
- Good pay and benefits package, for example, comprehensive medical insurance including dental.
- The RSUs vest on a 6 monthly basis.
- Personal discount is 27% and there is a discount for friends and family too.
Cons
I cannot speak for other Apple orgs, this is just the experience in Apple Pay:
- Archaic engineering: Inverted test pyramid, manual release cycle (3 week manual release cycle for cloud services!), poor code quality with very little test coverage, aversion to normal engineering conventions like CI/CD (there is aggressive pushback from “leaders” on CI/CD because they don’t know what it is). Functionally organised (teams of devs, SREs, DBAs etc.) leading to poorly architected software. This also means that developers are treated as code monkeys. Single devs put on projects or owning services individually. No documentation.
- Archaic management: Managers make derogatory remarks about their wives (and other topics) and this attitude is then reflected in how they treat female colleagues. Blatant favouritism in management means opportunities are unfairly distributed to a few. Escalating issues about unacceptable remarks and discriminatory behaviour yielded no change. Managers continue engineering (and usually do so with outdated engineering knowledge) which results in them encroaching on what should be individual contributors’ domains and the software suffers as a result. No attention to career opportunities or line report wellbeing. Favouritism extends down the management chain (so one favourite promotes another favourite etc.) so there’s no managerial competence or accountability. The managers were highly insecure and would shut down critical analysis.
- Hyper-individualistic: As above, single devs owning single services, tickets can only be assigned/viewed by individuals sometimes, teamwork is not valued, and yet there is no individual autonomy as managers will make technical decisions. No attention whatsoever to team dynamics or formation in general.
- Potential brain drain in Apple Pay engineering, as hiring managers tend to favour experience similar to their own (aka like hires like). Competent and high performing engineers are rare or beaten down into submission. Engineering knowledge and experience are not favoured, but assimilation is. The role levelling cannot be trusted as it is subject to huge bias, favouritism and lack of actual performance management (this therefore makes for a deeply unfair working environment).
- “It’s not just black lives matter, all lives matter.” - An Apple Pay Diversity Lead.
- A culture of fear: Huge egos, longtime Apple employees who fear change and an extremely hierarchical structure means that fresh ideas and honest feedback are never discussed, either with regards to team/people processes or engineering processes, because there is no safe space to do so.
- No transparency in pay and promotions processes (aka the process does not exist, managers simply promote their favourites regardless of skillset).
Don’t let the FAANG label obscure your instincts. Apple Pay has management and engineering that are 20 years behind modern day standards and they have shown no willingness to change. I strongly urge women, in particular, to think twice about joining this institution.