How is the work culture at the IS&T division of Apple?

Joining IS&T will be synonymous to Professional Hara-Kiri.

Take it from me - 3 years I have been there and seen it all. Run like hell if you hear groups like Customer Systems, Self Service Engineering, Online Engineering or any of those fancy terms. Imagine that you are a fish looking at a shiny hook tied to a line having a grinning, power hungry fat bellied directorship on the other end.

The commute was great. 5–10 minutes from home. The offer was so-so but the prospect of the office being a stone shows away was too alluring to pass on. I took the bait. I had to come to terms with the shock of my decision within the first week. I instinctively scrambled to my other offers that I shunned away. All the action was in SFO and the commute prospect killed my instinctive reactions.

My manager was an Indian and immediately started seeing me as a threat. The reaction was that he started passing on “good” projects to his cronies even though they were consultants. He would explicitly make it a point to ignore me in staff meetings. I later found out that this was typical of all managers there. there was no escape. He ensured unethically that I didn't move out to other projects. I raised the issue to HR but all HR did was take notes and no action. A little later I realized that HR is always hand in glove with upper management. They don’t want to stir the pot and are totally inexperienced to handle situations like these.

My manager became bolder and started empowering his cronies by giving them false promises. His methods were becoming more and more unethical by the day. It is very hard ( Inspire of stupid open door policies that Apple floats around ). I finally found that the managers are in grown with absolutely zero conflict resolution and people management skills. Apple prides itself in fostering innovation. IS&T is the drag on any form of innovation. Its death by many forms. Out there, in the open, are many tools that anyone least involved in your efforts can easily use to skewer you right were it matters and halt your idea in its tracks and send you down the steps tumbling. You sometimes wonder - and take your hat off in respect - in the sheer ways that a person can skewer you. Well it so happened, the art of back-stabbing, skewering, innovative false promises and excellent maneuvering of the gears to make sure you stay another brick in the wall was the senior management mantra. God forbid you think different. They will come gunning for you from all directions - I mean all directions.

The tools are archaic and you have to “praise” it and bow to the system and make sure you applaud and are “Apple” politically correct in suggestion. Minor criticisms, even positive ones are viewed as infractions and will be severely dealt with in performance reviews.

Performance reviews are the pits. Feedback can be easily manipulated and thereby holding you hostage. Some people live by this system and effectively manipulate it. Credits are easily stolen. Blame is easily assigned. Cronyism is the only way to get promoted. Thinking different (I’m sorry to say this Steve - I adore you buddy), in this cesspool within apple, a wart on Tim Cook’s body, is sacrilege.

SMH.. I started to wonder if this was all worth it. I tried looking out to other groups. As some other posters had mentioned that IS&T can be thought of as a stepping stone into other groups. Nah-huh, twice i had the opportunity, but un ethical managers ensured that I don’t move on. This sent me deeper into depression. Here I was, facing a dilemma of neither being able to stay on nor move. Ideas were brushed aside, hard work unrecognized, Zero training provided, Contractor cronies rewarded. I soon realized over water cooler discussions I was not alone. Some relief but the Apple was looking lesser and lesser shiny.

A new manager manifested as a result of a re-org activity, which btw happens on a dime. IS&T management use this tool like a tennis racquet on weekends. The directorship, on a lazy weekend, will decide to re-org just to ensure cronies get plum positions. None of these guys add value. They sit around in meetings all day, amplify the importance of one being in apple, throw in a few sound bites from Steve as if he was their second cousin and then ask for reports. The guys in the trenches are turning out 14–15 hour days. The mantra of the dictatorship is no news is good news. Performance by escalation. Stewardship is zero. There is zero tolerance for improvement suggestion. Its easier to talk to Tim Cook and Craig frederighi in Apple Macs Cafe than to your director.

A myriad of cross functional tools, processes and mindless shifting of responsibilities will ensure paralysis and constant state of chaos. The middle management thrive in this confusion as upper management care two dimes about what happens down there. I have worked with leaders who know and manage three levels down. Directors in apple IS&T are ivory tower aspirees. Once they get there, they care two hoots about anyone two levels down. Skip level meetings are below their dignity. You can;t get a hello from them in hallways because you are a mere mortal. God forbid you are indian - there will be subtle remarks and racist comments all the time.

Obviously, a crony, my new manager ( re-org opportunist) used this as a diversion to ensure that upper management always see a deluded version of actual. He would ask for problems and solutions. Expose problems as created and solutions as his ideas. Ingenious - hats off again. Young and ambitious - crony nevertheless. There is no way of knowing as information is always one way and there is zero feedback loop and governance.

There are tons of crap that need cleaned up, cronies get “new” stuff the rest get stuff that the cronies leave behind in their wake to clean up. It will be presented to you as an opportunity to “grow” and “shine”. Managers will drop names and ensure that you pray that the director knows your name. SMH

As IS&T grew, my resentment and disdain grew, I’m now a different person. Once happy and full of life. Ideas and initiatives raging through me all the time, now a lifeless body with IS&T dementors having sucked out every little positive aspect of me. Its now a zombie state, that tries to revitalize by changing the same tools again and again into SOS.

I finally threw in the towel and said my goodbyes.

God forbid you take up an offer in IS&T. I wish you luck and resilience if you are a person who joins it to “change the world” or “think different” or “innovate”

The immediate signs are

1. Manager starts marginalizing you. Data and information thins to a trickle and a need to know basis
2. Manager starts leaving you out of the team
3. You sense a difference in attitude from members of the other teams
4. You sense recommendations given where you keno you are strong in
5. Things happen when you go on leave, manager or team mates take critical decisions when you are out on a well deserved treat in Mexico or Hawaii
6. Re-org (if you are in any of these guess teams [Shahid Ahmed, Niall O'Connor, David den Boer, Arun Bhola, Ihab Badr, or Keith Nakashima] don't be surprised ! )
7. You are suddenly pulled out of projects
8. You are told that there is no budget to innovate
9. Prized projects go to other team members or consultant cronies

If you see any off these happening, throw in the towel. You can fight stupid only so much. You will lose your self esteem,dignity, health and your precious family.

14 hour days are normal. Meetings are a must attend even if you have legit conflicts. Overlaps are common and you lose either way. Everything IS important. Criticism is frowned upon. Feedback is frowned upon. Intelligence is rare. The stupid jerks are easy to spot, they always talk technology, throw “tactical” and “engineering” and “product” when all they do is services. Business team, for all of them are glorified call center agents who have stuck on form a long time and absorbed as managers are “gods”. These are the “white” folk that are born to lord upon minorities in IS&T.

For all its glory - Apple has a dark side, this dark side is IS&T. No matter what people on the inside say. Its a cess pool. People who remain are incompetent non-engineers who can't find a decent job in the valley elsewhere. It is a coal mine and you will not survive too long and too far.

Advice to other companies - hire full time employees who “dare” to quit this organization with a year or two. They have gone through much and given up much to make that decision. I could go on days and days on this particular subject but this is enough.

You have been warned.

I wanted to share my experience with working in IS&T. Trust me, when I say - this department is worse than most IT sweatshops in India that you have heard of that are a bad place to work for Engineers - such as Wipro, TCS and Infosys.

My department was Emerging Technology in Apple, also called as ETS (which falls under IS&T). From the day I joined to the day I quit from this department to another, everyday was soul sucking and made me curse my life for joining this department.

This is actually a bunch of managers (who were ex. Wipro, TCS, Infosys, Satyam) that have converted to full time employees at Apple. And they hire only H1B workers from India so that they can hold them by their balls (while waiting for their GC) and literally sucking the life out of them. Hence the managers themselves do not know anything about software engineering. Many managers here actually advocate not to use Spring, for example.

The projects here are all internal projects. This department does nothing that serves the Apple customer (you or me) except Apple online store, and really serves the Apple employees (more like an enterprise IT shop).

The SCM repository is SVN and the issue tracker is a tool from hell called as Radar. Every day there were 100s of radars assigned to me with various issues in production. Nobody has the time or the intellectual capacity to even write unit tests.

There are all day meetings all the days and if you are an engineer, you can only start coding at 6 PM.

You can’t contribute to open source from here - one manager said to me “We don’t want you to get skills, so that you can get a job at another company”

All across you are contractors from TCS, Wipro, Infosys that Apple has hired to work with you. Hence, even if you join as a software engineer, the expectation is to lead them like a project manager. But you are leading a bunch of junior engineers who really don’t know anything than text book Java. And you are responsible for any of their failures.

So really where is the part that as an engineer you are coding? None! Hence your skills slowly disintegrate and die if you stay in this team for 5 years or more.

It is a hard fact that many managers and engineers in this team cannot even dream of getting a job in other engineering focused companies in the valley such as Google, Netflix, eBay, Facebook, Uber and so on.

My manager was the worst. Someone complained to his boss that there is no diversity. Hence he hired whites and treated them differently (they all went home by 6), while he treated the Indians like slaves in front of them. He also made sure they were separated in terms of where they sit. The projects that he gave to them were cool projects that were never going to be used but just given to them so that they don’t quit and my boss could check the diversity check mark. It was actually like working for Hitler.

Now the positive side (if there is one) - why do people stay here? Because if you stay here and suck up your manager - there are chances that you will get loaded with Apple stock. Stay here for 10 years and most likely you will have 2 homes in Cupertino to spare.

Also, for seemingly small projects it takes years to get them done because of whole scale bureaucracy and tons of manual processes.

Once you join IS&T, it is also very difficult to move into other departments. The other departments know that IS&T is a step child and will not even look at your resume.

All trainings for IS&T are managerial and there are ZERO trainings to keep your technology skill set updated.

So, it may be a option for you if your skills are sh** and you have that quintessential Indian slave stereotype, or all you care about is money.

I would definitely stay away from IS&T, specifically from ETS even if you have a small passion in engineering.

BTW, Tim Cook never gives two shits about IS&T as many Glassdoor reviews have said.

I worked for over 5+ years as a software engineer in Apple IS&T, which is really a Support org. So besides the fact that you would be working for Apple and benefiting from its perk(s) there isn’t much you should expect. Having said this, it’s probably a good place for PMs and other admin type folks or others who may not have offers from Apple’s software engineering dept.