Great products, great engineers in the trenches, but penny-wise, pound-foolish - QA Engineer Apple Employee Review

3.0
Jun 13, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great engineering talent, attracts some great people that care deeply about what they work on. Brilliant people at both the executive level and down in the trenches.

Cons

Apple is extremely penny-wise and pound-foolish, which is not uncommon at many companies, but in particular, they are ridiculously stingy at providing adequate hardware for engineers. It's sad because we make the hardware. Many people have 3rd party CRTs and LCDs because they can't get Apple LCD monitors. Many hours are wasted when every engineer should have at least one loaded top-of-the-line Mac Pro to build and debug as quickly as possible. Apple also only rewards it very top people for the successes of the last 7 years. Even employees that get exceptional reviews get raises that are barely more than cost-of-living (5% is considered a large raise and same goes for bonuses). Many engineers are hired with no stock options and few are ever given out after that. Long-time employees made great sacrifices during the lean years, giving up benefits on an almost yearly basis. Now that Apple is successful, none of those benefits have been restored, although lately there has been a renewed emphasis on adding some new benefits, so perhaps they are finally seeing the light (or the increased attrition of late). Compensation is average for the industry (they will even tell you this is their goal), which is sad given they should be trying to attract the best and brightest and allowing them to share in the successes they create. At the same time, senior managment (deservedly so!) gets 50-100% bonuses every year and millions of shares in stock. It wouldn't kill them to hand out a few hundred options a year to highly performing individuals.

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5.0
Jun 8, 2026
Anonymous employee
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CEO approval
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Pros

Compensation, location and work-life balance

Cons

I did not experience any.

4.0
Aug 28, 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
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