
With senior jobs being very competitive at Apple, learning that working hard and putting in extra hours is a common trait shouldn’t be a surprise. That being said, two former managers recently spoke in a Debug podcast, sharing that demands are far greater than anyone realizes when they first join. It goes as far as needing immediate responses to emails, even when they are received in the middle of the night. Apparently this was a common theme since Mondays were typically executive meetings.
According to the engineer who started the Safari project at Apple, Don Melton and the former iOS Apps Director, Nitin Ganatra, the 24/7 work culture originally started when Jobs’ was on the throne. The same culture ended up carrying over as Tim Cook took over the position after Jobs’ death. The two continued by stating the following:
You get an email forwarded to you that’s not to you. It’s from Scott, but it’s a forward from Steve and it’s just coming at this crazy hour, right? You just know that there’s this firehose of emails that are just going out at 2:45 in the morning and there are VPs or executive VPs who are scrambling to get answers. And that was just week after week, month after month, over the years [...]
When you hear the so-called apocryphal stories about Tim Cook coming to work in the wee hours and staying late, it’s not just some PR person telling you stories to make you think that Apple executives work really hard like that. They really do that. I mean, these people are nuts. They’re there all the time.
When you hear the so-called apocryphal stories about Tim Cook coming to work in the wee hours and staying late, it’s not just some PR person telling you stories to make you think that Apple executives work really hard like that. They really do that. I mean, these people are nuts. They’re there all the time.
Melton explained that the work they tackled was both fun and fulfilling. Furthermore, as an executive he states that he got the experience of working with many brilliant people, just “workaholic, psychotic, brilliant people.”
As an Apple employee, many tend to love working for the company (at least on the corporate level although the same can be said about many retail employees). The main theme behind the discussion was that even though you have an idea of what you’re getting into, the actual work is likely to be far tougher and more intense than one can imagine beforehand. As a result, the memos that Jobs and more recently Cook send out to employees upon the completion of a large project are memos that are well deserved.
Those of you who are interested in the topic should listen to the podcast by clicking on the source link below!
Source: Debug (Podcast) via 9to5Mac
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