Rarity: Apple Employee Talks!
Jens Alfke writes a great insider post on his decision to leave Apple and move into life as an independent developer. The whole thing is worth reading, but the part that gets to me is this:
It’s deeply ironic: For a company that famously celebrates individuality and Thinking Different, Apple has in the past decade kept its image remarkably impersonal. Other than the trinity who go onstage at press events — Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive, Phil Schiller — how many people can you name who work for Apple? How many engineers?
Yay! It worked
As I said earlier, thanks for this post. Very informational.
Yeah, I admit, this one affected me. When I did the apple commercial I remember having this conversation with the VP marketing over dinner in Boston. I asked her what it was like working at the company and if it was as great as all us fanboys dreamed it could be. her response at the time was something as close to crass as I could imagine. “We’re a computer company. No matter how much you love them, they’re still just boxes with electronic components inside. It takes systems and processes and groups of people and just as much politicking as any other big computer company to get it done. You work here for a while, and you realize you’re on less of a crusade, and dealing with more of a job.”
I get it now, now that I’m older, I suppose. Now that I’ve worked at a number of large, political organizations. Still, it sucks to pull back he velvet curtain sometimes.
Testing to see if my gravatar works!
Here we go! It looked sorta teeny in the crop mode…let’s see if you can identify the location.
Comments. A good thing…right?
I’ll check on why that’s not coming up right away. Might be a permissions error. At least this post will be most popular by comment status!
Fixed!