For the engineers who want to have an impact on stuff, if you’re skilled and your ideas are good and you can convince others about that, you can be given as much impact as you can eat. There’s a huge spectrum of how much impact people opt to go for. Apple is a good place to come if you want to change something about how a billion people use some technology. And generally Apple is cool with people shipping those ideas in as quick a product cycle as they can figure out how to get it done. I’ve seen multiple colleagues take something from idea to keynote (or shipping, keynote is just the most visible way in which that happens) in 12 months or less, within the first year or two of arriving. Some of my colleagues do this yearly. You probably don’t get to do that coasting, so it’s up to you.
If you want to coast, you generally don’t work on teams that ship new product. Apple’s a big place. There’s totally teams that are good fits for people who want to have less direct product impact and be off the critical path, but I wouldn’t say that’s the common case.
The best analogy I’ve heard is that working at Apple is a pie eating contest.
And the reward is—more pie.
Each person has different feelings about how much pie they want to eat.
Right, to be clear what I'm not saying is that all Apple engineers are slackers -- far from it.
Just that from what I can tell talking to many FAANG workers (and working with a bunch of them who came from other FAANGS), Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to, Google also being an easy place to do it.
It's why most of the people I worked with left those places -- they got tired of the slackers.
I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon. And I never saw anyone get away with slacking at Netflix.
Totally get you weren’t applying the same brush to everyone!
> Apple seems to be the easiest place to get away with slacking if you want to
You are the first person I’ve heard this one from! I’m almost pleased to see some balance? I worry we have the reputation of being too grindy too often!
I think this can be very org dependent. I wonder if most of the people you know are clustered in a specific part.
> I've never met anyone who talks about how ease it is to slack off at Facebook or Amazon.
Weird. I have. We seem to have very different experiences.
Also whenever I’ve talked to people who work inside Facebook I just. I just couldn’t. I’m certain I’d go stark raving depressed so quickly there. The froyo on campus is nice though.
