Some Apple engineers rewarded up to $180k in stock bonuses as incentive to stay
Apple is reaching a size where the un-coordination of its leadership and processes as it has grown (while yet rigorously enforcing other negative aspects of corporate culture) are producing a place that is harder and harder to enjoy working for.  It worked for a while when the company was small enough and lines of command were short enough for leadership to control effectively, but it has grown while the people processes have not been consciously updated to fit.<p>Maybe this is just 1% problems.  So let me be specific and you judge.  Promotion within Apple is getting nearly impossible as a career path, because company-wide &quot;standards&quot; on how to promote someone (above a certain level) invite division-wide scrutiny and justification to peers (of the people doing the promoting).  Not to say that it was a huge career path in the past (you had to be lucky), but at least you got paid competitively.   Now, can&#x27;t pay someone market rate because that would be going out of band.   While at the same time, people who come in as &quot;headline&quot; hires from external are given not nearly such scrutiny and instead get $Ms and hiring bonuses and directorships.  AIML, I&#x27;m looking at you.  Strict standards for the masses, bonuses for the leadership.<p>And Apple is also not good at training&#x2F;setting up&#x2F;teaching people how to advance while working inside the company.  So you are practically incentivized to leave and come back for your career advancement (once you realize it and want to stop banging your head against the wall).  But not in any way that was deliberate, which loses the company a good deal.  Maybe doing that better could have saved the company the billions they&#x27;re having to pay now to keep people.<p>I remember a Steve Jobs quote where he said, &quot;we don&#x27;t hire smart people to tell them what to do, we hire them so they tell <i>us</i> what to do.&quot;   It doesn&#x27;t feel that way much at all now, because seems like Apple just wants labor.<p>And the annual review system is a joke.  It serves just to gather feedback from peers and file it away in the drawer, since the salary bumps and bonuses are already all determined top-down from leadership.  So what&#x27;s the point of giving feedback or striving out of your way (unless you have some project that&#x27;s got major visibility on the line)?<p>I thought that Apple was a welcome exception from the college-kids-software-companies, with some more maturity and rigor to it.  Turns out every company has issues.   Eventually you come to accept what the company is in your small pocket of it, and take it or leave it.