Comments on: Remembering Apple: The Start Date

By: Frank Johnson

Frank Johnson — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 23:12:40 +0000

I remember the start date because it was in HRWeb everytime I look at MyPage. I feel terrible for the other people looking for a job at Apple. However, as there are always exceptions to the rule, I am glad you enjoy your time.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 14:11:39 +0000

Mrs. Dorchester: It’s been many years since I worked there so I couldn’t really guess with much accuracy. But during my years there the feeling was always that Apple’s pay was “just average.” Not too bad and not through the roof. For a lot of jobs at Apple I think part of the compensation package is just knowing that you’re working on something amazing.

By: Mrs. Steven Dorchester

Mrs. Steven Dorchester — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 06:15:16 +0000

My husband is looking for a job at Apple. They have contacted him and would like to interview him in a few weeks, judging from what we have read the pay is (or was) out of proportion to other tech companies. How dos the compensation compared to Google, Adobe and IBM? Any insight you can provide will be appreciated.

Thanks

By: Bobby Kinstle

Bobby Kinstle — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:07:14 +0000

Reliability was a real meat grinder. We were expected to put in 20+ hours of overtime every week, even during the christmas shutdown. I worked 47 consecutive days on Kihei. Over time as our staff shrank and shrank, the work load just got worse until we were literally expected to do the work of five people. Anyone who failed to consistantly deliver this herculean task was labelled “lost the faith” and summarily terminated. After seeing that happen to several really good people, and no really bad people while simultaniously fighting a nasty case of burnout myself, I decided to cash out and quit while I still could.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of tremendously talanted people at Apple. I learned an incredible amount of useful skills there. That’s my sense of balance. Apple treated us like dogs, but they paid a whole bunch of money teaching me new skills that I would some day use to make some other company more successful. I use those skills every day to make my current company successful (and me along with it). The stress level at Apple is like the stress level of carrying a full load at a university. Now in comparison, the stresses of a normal job feels like I’m on vacation almost all the time.

By: Blake Seely

Blake Seely — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 00:38:17 +0000

I very clearly remember my PeopleSoft start date – September 7th, 1999.

(And incidentally, I used to see see the name “Jeff LaMarche – from the comment above – quite often while I worked at PS. I always wondered if the name I saw in MacTech, cocoa-dev, etc. was the same. I guess now I know :)

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 21:31:58 +0000

Jeff: thanks for the info about the HR practices. Makes sense in a weird way.

Bobby: Sounds like you had a much more grueling experience at Apple than I did. It was both the hardest and easiest job I’ve ever had. But most of the hard work for me was “fun” in the sense that it was in the form of hardcore dedicated all-nighters with really smart coworkers. When you get 3 or 4 people together who all scratch their head in perplexion over something for 10 hours, it makes the victory all that much sweeter :)

By: Bobby Kinstle

Bobby Kinstle — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 21:23:47 +0000

I don’t remember my exact start date or end date. I started as a contractor in June 1997 and became permanent in April 1998. I *think* it was april 10th. We can all probably remember so easily because our start date was printed on the back of our badges. I quit in april 2004. I remember going to department ceremony to give me my 5 year plaque. They asked me to say a few words so I stood up and said “Wow, 5 years. I quit. Screw you guys, I’m moving to Oregon.”

And I did.

Quitting Apple was the greatest moment of my life, much like I felt on the first day. Over the next 3 months, I decompressed and ended up feeling like someone added 20 years to the end of my life. I’m now much happier. Thankful for the experience I gained, and certainly willing to exploit the presitge of having Apple on my resume, but all the kings horses, and all the kings men could not drag me back to Apple again.

By: Jeff LaMarche

Jeff LaMarche — Tue, 18 Apr 2006 01:12:24 +0000

*sigh* I never worked at Apple, so I have no hire date. I interviewed when I lived in the Bay Area and had an offer in 1999 to come into an entry-level QA position (which I was told by the recruiter was a fairly common practice – spend a year in QA then transfer into software engineering). The only problem was that the salary offered was a good $30k lower than what I was making as an HR software developer (this was the height of the dot-com boom). Had I been younger and without kids, I probably would have taken the job anyway. Turning it down was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. But though I have no hire date to remember, I do vividly remember the date that I turned down the offer from Apple because it happened to coincide with my 29th birthday. :(

Seems weird and historically inaccurate, but what are ya gonna do?

Actually, it’s a fairly common practice in enterprise HR systems. All older HR systems, and even most modern ones like PeopleSoft and SAP calculate length of service using a simple bit of date math (start date subtracted from current date) when calculating tenure, which means that you have to adjust the start date when you have non-consecutive tenures (aka “broken service”) or else people get credit (seniority, pension, etc) for the time when they were gone. This leads to unusual concepts in HR systems such as “original hire date”.

By: Daniel Jalkut

Daniel Jalkut — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 20:22:59 +0000

Alex: I only learned recently about that “moving the start date” trick. That’s so weird!

For everybody else: what he’s alluding to is practice Apple apparently has of “filling the gap” when you leave and come back to the company. So your start date gets moved up such that your total service to the company is the time from your start date to the present.

Seems weird and historically inaccurate, but what are ya gonna do?

By: alexr

alexr — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 19:56:09 +0000

I recall the date I started my first contract at Apple (5/31/88), but I don’t recall the much later hire date, probably because they later moved it.