Career Advice About Apple

Recently, I have found myself just working on the tasks and investigating the bugs that my manager tells me to. However, from a performance perspective this would be considered "meeting expectations" at best. How do I develop a nose for impact and introduce new, innovative ideas to my team that really improve our product or development workflow?

It seems at Apple that getting promoted past ICT4 can take ages. My manager has 3x my YOE and many reports, but we're both ICT4. There is no leveling rubric that I can find, so it's unclear to me what differentiates an ICT5 from an ICT4 here. I'm thinking it might even just be worth abandoning the promo goal for the duration I work here, then aim to be hired into a promo at the next gig in a few years.

A lot of examples of growing to Staff are more oriented around less technical fundamental/soft skills, including the examples in Taro. However, I'm unsure how to find this scope in my team, and I don't think that kind of behavior works to get to Staff at Apple overall. I spend ~90% of my time coding, and the culture is more top-down at Apple compared to a company like Meta.

Given all that, how can it be possible for me to grow to Staff? Are there paths to Staff that are heavily technical?

As a followup to the talk I gave 2 weeks ago, , I'd like to give y'all the chance to ask me any question. Whether that is about interviews, engineering, career, or general interest.

Work History

• Apple Music Android (2016-2020): Worked on migrating code from the legacy Beats to a new app, creating the tablet version, constructed the general platform level code, and initiated the migration to Kotlin and other general app modernization.
• Uber (2020-Present): Lead the construction of the donation feature () that got run during the Super Bowl. Currently migrating our codebase from Buck to Bazel. Frequent complainer on Google's Github repo.

General Interest

• Spend too much time studying investing. Returns are pretty okay.
• I have 2 cats: Lina and Shadow
• Represented the US in France and Poland for fencing in 2009 for the Cadet World Cup.
• Dota 2 burnout (last ranked Divine 2). Watching TI though.

I’m nervous about joining since my past internships were very relaxed and I didn’t actually do much coding. The probation period makes me think that it may be more “sink or swim” when I join. How can I ensure I get enough support and survive the probation period?

My future manager asked me to read “Effective Java” as preparation for starting. However, it’s really not making sense to me. I have a fear that they’ll ask me how much I understood from the book. How should I answer the question without making myself look bad?

I've had a lot of friends tell me that they didn't negotiate their offer, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to negotiate. What are the costs of trying - Is it possible to lose anything if you try to negotiate and fail?

I come from a non-Computer Science background, and I'm exploring other paths in tech, one of which is software engineering.

I have a vision of a software engineer working on the same piece of logic daily: Is that what it's like and if so, can that get lonely? Or is that actually what most SWE love and find exciting?

I'm working on a part-time master's degree in Computer Science while being employed. My goal is primarily just to learn for fun, but I'm wondering if there are any career advantages?

For context, I work at Apple

I’m currently having difficulty with my manager, who’s made remarks in front of others and micro aggressions, which goes against the inclusion and diversity values of Apple. My manager has been doing this in my 1:1s as well

I’ve been considering talking to HR but I am worried of any repercussions. I know Apple hasn’t laid anyone off yet but they could and I could be the one in my team to be let go (my team’s headcount increased by one person during the pandemic for context). He’s made references to layoffs in my 1:1s

What’s the best thing to do in this situation? I’ve spoken about this with him in the past

Hi,

I have 6 years of experience in the software engineering field, mostly working as a software consultant and at not well known startups. Having done MSc in the field AI, I got an offer to interview with Apple for an interesting role that seemed to have the best from 2 worlds - Software Engineering & AI/ML. To my surprise, after 6 interviews over the span of 2 months and an emotional rollercoaster, I got the job at ICT3 level and moved to another country. I thought I might be underleveled at first, but I kept thinking I actually don’t have experience in AI/ML so they’re levelling me as ICT3 must be right, I also don’t feel like a senior yet.

The situation I’m in now at work is very frustrating and disappointing to me, because of the following :

• I’m still onboarding after 9 months in, without being in a senior role. There is no serious documentation, I have to “network” in a forced manner, to find out vital information for an engineer like “do we have 2 prod environments and when do releases happen”.
• up until now I have not received any tasks or projects to sharpen my skills or keep the ones I worked hard for so far
• I had to beg for 8 months to be included in a project, the explanation was “we’re in the planning stage, we’re waiting for OKs to get started”
• I get neither serious SWE experience from this, nor ML/AI related one.
• Over the past month, after telling my manager I would apply for other jobs if this situation (not participating in anything palpable - just meetings) did not change, they finally moved me to another team that’s closest to SWE that this role can get.
• in the new team, they advertised this project that would mostly be backend work in Go. It turns out the codebase belonged to another team and the role that I’m in, does not imply bettering/maintaining their codebase or adding new features, it’s mostly data hillclimbing and adding some strings in the right places, so super humiliating after having prepared from DSA , system design & design patterns
• I don’t get to touch any AI/ML models yet or work with them, because I don’t have experience with AI/ML
• My manager is a new manager and has half the experience in the field as I do. I talked to him about my disappointment of being so undervalued and his take on this is, I first have to learn the tech stack to participate in “more advanced” projects. However my male colleagues, who joined the company a few months earlier than me, have been given more responsibility faster (participating in 2-3 projects after aprox. 6 months in)
• Time spent in the office is not productive at all, I can’t do focused work there at all. People chat and socialise all the time in the open spaced office we all work in and there are at least 60 people working there. This forces me to work overtime & during weekends, to achieve deadlines for the project and to learn the needed tech stack
• I’m starting to feel trapped in this job because it’s consuming my time, including my free time and I’m actually worried that if I continue like this without coding, participating in code reviews & other healthy SWE practices I’ll get out of hand and have a hard time getting another software engineering job or staying relevant in the industry
• Maybe what I’m experiencing in this particular branch of Apple is unusual for FANG or even other Apple jobs and would be grateful for others’ opinions on this situation.

Background Context

About 7.5-8 YOE, worked at a F500 before and a med tech startup before that. I'm an iOS Developer to be more specific.

I recently joined Apple as an ICT4/Senior SWE, and this is my first time joining FAANG. So far I’ve been assigned a couple of basic tickets which I landed ahead of schedule, and my manager is unsure of what I’ll be focusing on as Apple is wrapping up its last week of feature dev for the year.

I am extremely stressed. And honestly, for no reason other than I’m placing this stress on myself. I feel like I need to prove to my team and manager that I am in fact a senior level engineer, but since I am already at the level I guess there’s no need to? My colleagues who are mostly all a level below have been on this team for years and obviously can code circles around me. What I’m failing to find is what Rahul and Alex call “the engineer who everyone gravitates towards” on my team. I don’t think we have a dedicated Staff Eng, but rather a few senior SWEs (and even that I’m not sure of since everyone’s title is hidden), and honestly I have no idea what the expectations are of me, and I think that also attributes to my stress levels.

My manager says to just sit tight and has given me a few tickets that are supposed to help my designated Apple buddy - who has been amazing btw - and these tickets are fine and all, but I guess I’m just not sure if I can actually perform at the senior level at FAANG. From all the videos on Taro it seems like at the senior levels there’s a lot of leadership and design going on (which held true at my last company), but frankly in the past couple weeks I’ve been here, I’ve only seen engineers across all levels chugging out code as fast as they can (maybe that’s something specific to Apple).

Not sure if Apple just values "solver" archetype or if this is normal and that it's going to just take me a few months to ramp up and get used to everything. I think there's also quite a bit of imposter syndrome going on - I know I deserve to be here, I just need time to deliver more work and for my manager to give me some feedback.

I know I'm very fortunate to be in the position that I am, but I just want to take care of my mental health while doing the past I can to make sure I'm taking care of my career.

My manager is relatively inexperienced (<1 year as a manager, and only a few more years of overall work experience than me). While they have a lot of expertise as a developer in the domain that we work on, when coming them to my previous manager, I don’t think that they have a ton of experience in growing and promoting people, esp. in a deliberate or structured way. How do I make sure that I continue growing, and receive the right growth opportunities and constructive feedback?

Hey everyone,

I'm a senior ML engineer (~4.5 years exp) working at a medium-sized company. My educational background is a BSc and MSc in computer engineering from a not super fancy university in Europe. I wrote a few papers during my university years and as a result of hobby projects, but these were published in mediocre conferences (so not Neurips/ACL-level).

I tried applying to a few ML engineering jobs in the past couple of months (Spotify, Apple and Amazon) but did not hear back. I searched through Linkedin to see the backgrounds of ML engineers working at these companies in my area just to get an idea of the situation. My impression was that a vast majority of these people went to top-tier universities (significant number of people have a Phd), interned at FAANG during their university years, wrote (or contributed to) papers in top ML conferences etc.

I know that ML engineering positions are very competitive at these companies & also the market is very tough now in general, but it got me wondering:

What should someone like me work on to increase my chances of joining one of these companies as a ML engineer? The patterns I see from people working there is hard to achieve at this stage in my life as:

• I already have a MSc degree and doing another one at a better university does not really make sense
• Since I'm working as a senior engineer, I don't know if applying for internships positions (even if it's FAANG) is a sensible choice
• Writing top-tier papers is incredibly time consuming and hardly possible with maintaining a full time job. To be honest, I tried to do this in the past (since I know publications at top-tier conferences matter a lot in these situations), but it really affected my personal life. This is almost like trying to do two full-time jobs, which messed up my WLB.

Some things I was thinking about focusing on that could help me stand out:

• Writing technical blogposts to our company's engineering blog.

• Apply to meetups or conferences as a speaker.

• Certifications (I was thinking of something like or )

• Focus on promotion to staff/principal MLE. It may be easier to step into a higher tier company by down-leveling.

• Keep trying to do research/writing papers as a side project, but need to figure out how to do this without burning out.

I honestly don't know if the above sound sensible, so I'd love to hear your opinion on this or if you have any additional ideas.

Hello, is anyone familiar with the interview process (what questions they will ask) for a sr. python engineer position at apple?

Is it effective when doing this as a tech worker? I'm also wondering how it varies by company type.

I imagine these orgs will be safer from layoffs right? I'm interested in AI/ML fairness, but I have some reservations about pivoting there as they won't directly produce revenue for Apple.

I am a SWE with a few years of experience looking to get promoted to senior-level. A few months ago I switched to a team that works on an area of CS that I do not have much prior experience in, and it is becoming evident that having that domain knowledge is critical to succeeding in this new role. My development velocity has been slow (I don’t have prior experience with the programming language that the team uses either) and I’ve struggled to build trust with people on my team. How do I turn the ship around quickly and succeed in this new position?

Let's start by mentioning my manager has half the industry experience I have, but has just been longer (around 3-4 years) in the company than me. He comes from a data science background, while I come from CS/software engineering. He's been a manager for almost a year now, during which he's just proven over and over how incompetent he is at motivating employees to do great work. He has done and said the following (I know no-one is perfect, but knowing the standards Apple requires from engineers I just think it is too permissive with its managers)

• we’ve had conflict over some presentation slides, where he corrected all my slides (presenting my project from a technical point of view) and insisted I read his exact notes on the matter ( like a secretary ). His points were - he knows the subject better than I do period, he has the final say since it’s a director level presentation . 
• I’ve asked what the requirements are for the next level (was underleveled anyway at hiring ) and he bluntly said for me it might take 4 years - if I’m already mid-senior why should I wait that much inside the company to be given opportunities to grow faster ?!  I could just take the next job as a senior/staff etc. and be on my way … Talking to other colleagues they’ve said something different : you can go faster but it depends on the projects you’re assigned (impact etc.), so again my career depends on the projects he assigns me to. 
• I’ve been treated like a junior since joining the company - yes I’ve changed tech stack for this job but it doesn’t make me a noob. Also during meetings with other teams-  he (the manager) and his “rockstar” would remind me loudly of keyboard shortcuts (simple things like ctrl + F ) which pissed me off because I’ve perceived it as mockery not helpfulness 
• by trying to “motivate” me he’s actually insulting my intelligence every time : for ex. he’s all of a sudden trying to convince me I wouldn’t get better opportunities than I get at Apple “look you get to train an ML model, you can only do this at Apple” - absolutely hilarious, given the multitude of companies that are in the AI field these days … 
• I’ve avoided going to HR with these matters because I don’t feel like I have solid evidence, at the same time I despise working with him

What kind of managers do you have or have encountered and what’s your opinion about this ? I would have expected Apple managers to be a bit brighter and self-conscious. 

Okay I know people mostly say they work on side projects or contribute to open source, but I enjoy self-study & have always done a cert after using a certain technology extensively at work. For example, I was a Java engineer/consultant for years so it appeared only natural to do the OCP cert and keep it updated. In my current job I've used K8s a lot, so after a few training courses from my company, I took the CKAD. I also enjoy filling in the gaps at work (where there's no training or docs from the company) through Coursera courses/specializations, especially ones.

Does all this reflect badly on my resume? I plan to apply to more senior roles, would someone looking at the list of certs/courses tend to underlevel me or dismiss me? Can't contribute to open source because of my company, also can't publish any apps for now. I've also never seen Senior/Staff engineers with courses/specializations displayed on their LinkedIn profile... am I missing something ?

Freedom and autonomy are often mentioned as great perks of working in tech, but I feel like there can be too much freedom, especially for earlier-in-career ICs. As someone who's relatively new to my field, I feel like having more supervision could be good. Is that true?

I interviewed with Meta yesterday for a more junior role (I'm actually more senior) and they said it would kick in immediately for fertility in September upon starting a role with a program which is 18 month long (short term employee program) STE program that converts to Full Time Employment (FTE). They said stock would come then, but not upon start in September.

They said they would allow employees (STE/FTE) options to pick the perks of 4, to individually itemize 4-5 choices to make between medical coverage, which as a section on fertility and co-pays for expenses at the maternity level.

• Healthcare
• Dental
• Vision
• Therapy Stipend
• Wellness Stipend
• Family leave,
• PTO and time away benefits,
• Financial benefits (401k matching, financial coaching/planning)

How long does it take for benefits AND stock (vesting) to kick in typically at any FAANGMULA or OpenAI type of startup company? I personally don't want to wait until September, am likely to accept a more senior role at Apple FTE of course or other AI startup companies where these benefits AND stock kick in right away at an L4-L5 to L6 level depending. That role above it looked like IC4 and I was way overqualified and should be interviewing for at least an L5 position and above.

Hi everyone, I was wondering if it is unethical or rude to not respond to some recruiter messages at all or to random people asking if you're available to start a business on LinkedIn? I have a lot of them and know what's it like to be ghosted by companies as an interviewee so wouldn't want to offer the same treatment, on the other hand it takes me a lot of time to craft even a single answer, what's your take on this ? To be honest some offers are also low-ball offers that it makes me not want to respond at all :)) but I wouldn't want to be rude to people.

My employer pulled a bait and switch on me, my job role (SWE) turned into a non-technical one right after hiring and I feel it’s pushing me out of tech. Even moved to another country for this job, I stayed in the job to pay back relocation money & because it was big tech - did not want to leave after 3-6 months in, I’m close to completing the 2 years mark to end the relocation debt. I’m officially an engineer and paid as one, but since the beginning I’ve not been assigned technical work, only small “scripts” or some “data analysis” my manager supposedly needed.

I’ve never seen anything I wrote go to production and it’s hurting my self confidence. I’ve already moved to another team after 7-8 months in - because of the lack of technical work and encountered very weird behaviour there too: supposedly it takes 1 year (!!) to onboard onto this team, I’ve never been assigned to technical tasks to this day - it’s mostly been data curation and localization. Their strategy to keep people is to give them overinflated performance review feedback and a handsome bonus and raise every year so they keep their mouth shut to upper management (other offices within Apple). It’s a disgusting tactic.

For example in my first year performance review they’ve “made up” projects I had not actually participated in. Management doesn’t care, they say it’s product development and it’s equally important to find solutions that don’t involve code, they have a way of justifying their lies. I’m close to 2 years in and am ashamed of the consequences of this absence from the tech field.

In 1:1s with managers or hire ups they always say it’s technical work, but then eventually one finds out it’s data hillclimbing or data curation. I feel my trust has been abused, I’ve moved to another country for this job (jobs in this market are 3 times lower than what I'm paid now so my only chance is remote I guess) and haven’t grown at all professionally.

Thanks for letting me share this here, I never thought I’d end up with this dilemma when I was offered this big tech job. I was thinking of anonymously reporting this (company has an anonymous line for this), as having internationals move over for this job and destroying their careers should not be an option. I wish I could just forewarn people somehow about applying here.