What Apple employees really think about the company's internal corporate culture

"The Apple Campus itself is an amazing place, with the huge building surrounding a central Quad with grass and sidewalks and the amazing cafeteria: You get trays and silverware just exactly like in College, and go pick from a large handful of sushi, Mexican, make-your-own sandwich or salad, or countless other options, then check out at a register before sitting down inside or in their little Outdoor Cafe in the Quad. Even the food is running at 100% throttle, with the Cafeteria crowded and bustling, and even the Chefs dressed perfectly and clean-white smocks with black Apple hats on, doing their part to keep everyone fueled and running their war at 100% efficiency."

Read more of this account here.

"You get an email forwarded to you that’s not to you. It’s from Scott, but it’s a forward from Steve and it’s just coming at this crazy hour, right? You just know that there’s this firehose of emails that are just going out at 2:45 in the morning, and there are VPs or executive VPs who are scrambling to get answers. And that was just week after week, month after month, over the years."

"If you forwarded something to one of your people at 1 o’clock in the morning and they didn’t reply promptly, you got a little annoyed at them ... When someone came into my office and said they wanna be a manager, I asked them, “How did you sleep last night?” And they said, “Oh, fairly well,” and I said, “Good, ’cause that’s the last good night’s sleep you’re gonna get.”

"Sunday is a work night for everybody at Apple because it’s the exec meeting the next day. So you had your phone out there, you were sitting in front of your computer, it didn’t matter if your favourite show was on.

But you could count on the hour that 'The Sopranos' was on that Scott [Forstall] wouldn’t bug you ’cause he was watching 'The Sopranos.' And that was your reprieve. You could go to the bathroom, you could have a conversation with your family."

Ganatra and Melton's quotes are taken from their appearance on the Debug 47 podcast, which has been transcribed by Ole Begemann.

"Apple is a pretty divided mix of typical corporate red tape and politics mixed in with startup level urgency when the direction comes from Steve. If you have a project that Steve is not involved in, it will take months of meetings to move things forward. If Steve wants it done, it's done faster than anyone thinks is humanly possible. The best way to get any cross departmental work done was to say its for Steve and you'd probably have it the same day."

"The secrecy didn't just extend to the public, it was internal too. During a Steve Keynote at MacWorld, I was waiting in the trade show booth. The posters and products were covered with black. As Steve would announce each one, an individual would remove the black covers. It had a theatrical quality to it that only made us more excited.

Secrecy was part of the culture — you simply didn't talk internally or externally about what you were working on unless it was a need-to-know situation. This was drilled into you within the first minutes of the orientation, and reinforced continually.

While it's better for startups to be transparent (a huge topic), secrecy at a talent-driven company is useful because it keeps people "present" and prevents second-guessing what other groups were doing."

"The best example I can give was something of a side-project that I worked on in 2001, called Marklar. This was actually the beginning of the effort to port OS X back to the intel platform ...

… Each time we moved forward we would discover some part of the system that needed some changes. My job was to find the right person to make those changes -- but to do it without revealing Marklar to anyone else. So I would go to the director of their group and inform them about Marklar ... They would then identify a specific engineer for me.

Next I'd scare the engineer by telling them how bad things would be if anyone inside or outside knew what I was going to ask them to do. They would verify with their director, and hopefully be able to fix the relevant problem. We'd slip them some PC hardware if needed or preferably use Virtual PC or the like to be more inconspicuous. They certainly couldn't tell their co-workers about this work.

Personally, I didn't talk either ... my close friends and family knew I was working on some secret project but they didn't find out what until Steve himself made the announcement. Apple had total control of the message. The secrecy paid off big time for the company."

"Generally speaking it is a pressure cooker and all communication is one directional (guess which way that is).

... Paranoid management, disrespect, constant tension, and long hours sum up most of the real culture in operations ... Most of the people in SDM (supply demand management) see it as something they need to suck up for a few painful years after b-school so they can move on to a better gig with the Apple brand on their resume. Like the investment banking of tech. Culture here is strictly top down: any attempt to streamline, impact change, or even discuss a better way to do anything is strictly frowned upon when it comes from the bottom. Work longer/harder, don't complain or try to fix any of the myriad broken systems or processes, and don't forget that there are 10 people lined up outside to take your spot (your manager won't forget).

Work here at your own risk. On the upside, cafe food is pretty good and dress is casual."

"1) There is a fairly heavy corporate controlling hand governing a lot of what Apple locally can / can't 'do' as a business. That made for a fair degree of tension with some senior staff coming in from other parts of the technology industry.

2) The brand is guarded with a zeal that borders on zealous obsession. For instance - I heard (unconfirmed) that all the maple surfaces in all the retail stores are harvested at one particular time of the year in Canada so they all look the same. The store layouts are closely monitored for consistency - often Jobs would go along to the local ones on the West Coast of the US just to 'observe' them..

3) The atmosphere is not as zanily creative as you might imagine. It's very structured, very process driven - and that ties in with the comments from the ex-employees about launches coming together as a 'puzzle'."

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"Everything, and I mean everything, is decided by the marketing team at Apple, and 2 reviewers in east coast newspapers. I was shocked and flabbergasted at the role these reviewers had at Apple. As an engineer, I was told to tend to feature requests that were made by Mossberg and party. Scary, and makes me want to sell all my apple stock."

"Apple is interesting. On one hand, you have 'Think Different' propaganda posters all over the wall (you have all seen these ad campaigns and know what they are about). On the other hand, Apple has the strictest rules of any place I have worked. Apple cares about its brand image above all else."

"They desire and demand a collaborative atmosphere. Your work is peer-vetted -- we had to present our work to the team and take feedback.

At first I found this a bit disruptive, cause I'm used to working on my own projects in a silo, but at the end of the day, the collaboration ensured a better product. And the work didn't progress too far without checks and balances.

More companies need to operate like that internally."

"I don't know what's the internal culture like in the states, in China, it's pretty insane. Imagine, on the quarter meeting, manager stand on the table and shouting "WHO ARE YOU!" All the employees raise their hands over the head and answer "WE ARE APPLE!"

At that moment, it reminded me of Apple's 1984 commercial..."

"It's an older demographic working there, not the 24-year old MBAs, most seem to be late 30's to 40's, super smart but with real life experience, too. There aren't any Nerf guns or any of that crap, just people past all that and at the top of their game. It's not the place for children."

"There are a lot more fit and good looking people at Apple than otherwise. It's actually pretty ridiculous. Almost everyone is really athletic. Many people do triathlons, bike races, and marathon. It's a tough place to be if you're more than 20 pounds overweight, but then again, it can also be that extra push you need to get in shape. I know of people who've lost 60 pounds and are no longer pre-diabetic because they started going cycling with their coworkers over lunch."

They also think the food is great:

"The food in the cafeteria is de.li.cious. I know, I know. It's not free, but all the main dishes are $8 or less, and pretty much restaurant grade. And I've never ever heard anyone working here complain about the price of the food. However, there are free apples all day long. (Free apples at Apple. Get it?)"

"Similar to other tech companies in the Silicon Valley, people tend to dress pretty casually. No Gucci handbags or Versace suits, at least not in my department, and no one goes out of their way to show off how wealthy they are either. You usually only get a sense of someone's wealth after you've known them a while, and see them driving a Tesla, or riding a Cervelo bike, or hear them talking about their horse in their private stable.

On the other hand, not everyone is rich. With housing prices in SF and SV hitting the roof, most people do think twice before splurging on stuff."

"We don't spend every day in shiny state of the art pods drawing out new designs using brainwaves. A lot of our time is spent sitting at our desks, writing code, creating Keynote presentations, trying to make sense of horribly formatted Excel files, on the phone with vendors in China (trying to understand they logic behind their Excel files), etc."