With the extreme competition for senior jobs at Apple, it will come as no surprise that you’re expected to work hard and put in extra hours. But according to two former managers speaking in a Debug podcast, the demands are far greater than anyone realizes when they join, with immediate responses to emails expected even in the middle of the night.
Sunday is a work night for everybody at Apple because it’s the exec meeting the next day. So you had your phone out there, you were sitting in front of your computer, it didn’t matter if your favorite show was on […] You were basically on until, like, 2 o’clock in the morning …
According to Don Melton – the engineer who started the Safari project at Apple – and Nitin Ganatra, former iOS Apps Director, the 24/7 culture began under Steve Jobs‘ leadership and continued when Tim Cook took over.
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 just, they are there all the time.
Cook, like Jobs before him, is rumored to get by on just 3-4 hours sleep a night: “you would never know what time of the day or night you would get email from that man.” Even on vacation, said Ganatra, you checked your email at least four times a day, and felt like you were slacking if you took three or four hours to reply to an email from your boss.
The work, says Melton, was fun and fulfilling, and he got to work with a lot of brilliant people – just “workaholic, psychotic, brilliant people.”
There was occasional respite: apparently Scott Forstall loved watching The Sopranos, so you knew there was one hour on a Sunday night you could relax.
Apple employees may love working for the company (in corporate if not in retail), but the message seems to be that you have to know what you’re getting into – and it’s probably ever tougher and more intense than you imagined. When Tim Cook sends those memos thanking employees for their hard work, you can be pretty sure they earned it.
Via Business Insider
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“Sunday is a work night for everybody at Apple because it’s the exec meeting the next day. ”
Does he really mean EVERYBODY or just senior employees who had the visibility to get one of those forwarded emails from Steve? I find it hard to believe that goes on at all levels.
I highly doubt it’s every single employee. It’s probably those employees that have visibility to the executive team and maybe their directs reports.
With the company I work for yes it trickles down to several layers below senior management. The need for updates on jobs or projects at times can come from a field technician. Our SVP doesn’t email the tech, he emails the department head who emails the manager who emails the on call supervisor who emails the on shift supervisor of the technician’s group who then interfaces with the tech to feed the information back up the chain so to speak. When there is an emergent need for information at any hour especially for an early morning Monday meeting then yes several layers of employees are contacted. Those folks that are participants of that meeting do not want to show up unprepared.
Who do you think these project leads like Ganatra and Melton are going to come to when they need to answer a question from their boss? They’re going down the chain and looking for answers from the people below them on their team.
Yeah, but on a Sunday night? At 2:45 in the morning? I can indeed see leads needing to go to people working under them if they need a question answered, but I guess it really depends on how the organization is run. I’ve always worked under a team lead but I’ve never had to had to make myself available on a Sunday night. In fact, while I’ve had my lead come to me with questions, it has always been during business hours and it has never been for last-minute prep for a meeting. We have recurring one-on-one meetings which allows him to stay up to date on my status and effectively preps him for meetings in that regard.
I’m sure not all businesses run this way (if this article is true then evidently Apple doesn’t) but it shows your mileage may vary in terms of having a job that can be productive and maintain a quality work/life balance.
If you’re a manager it’s what you should expect. If you don’t want to be a manager and have the responsibilities that go along with it find another job.
I’m not talking about just managers, though. Not everyone is a manager. I’m questioning if the person really means these late Sunday night on-call shifts go for everybody as he/she states.
I work similar brutal hours, for a company nowhere near Apple in stature. There are zero to no bonuses as our bonuses are tied to sales, so my bonuses are based on the sales division not in my area. Sales has been horrible these last two years. I don’t get Thanksgiving week off for all my hard work… I could go on. Why don’t I leave? Well, I have a family of four and cannot afford to switch or move to another area.
If you’re killing yourself at a job that isn’t benefiting your family, you need to find a way to leave.
Apparently on the original Macintosh development team they had a saying: “If you don’t come in to work on Saturday, Don’t bother coming back on Sunday!”
I really love the Apple products – but would NEVER want to work there, either in Corporate or retail. Apple is not my Family.
Guess we should all be happy that I don’t work for Apple.
With that attitude, they would have never given you the chance. :)
With his attitude, Apple could learn something.
Family # 1
Work # 2
Otherwise, what the hell is the point of working at all?
I used to work at manager levels and phone got turned off in weekend.
But not withstanding, I put in many many overtime hours and some holidays, but as a rule, weekend time is my time.
No job is worth these things, unless you’re the founder and thats about it.
sounds great. When I was younger I used to work (for my own biz) easily 15 hours a day or more and enjoyed every minute of it.
I wish I were young and had the opportunity to work at Apple.
I would love to work in Cupertino as a developer or as one of these 24/7 managers who complain about having to work hard. I’m willing to put my back into it!
Besides the impact on employee health and safety (e.g. drowsy driving), sleep deficiency also impacts productivity, creativity, and decision-making. I wonder how much better the company could operate if workers got enough restorative sleep for peek performance.
Basically, the Apple Watch would be delayed until 2018. The reason Apple is so impossibly successful is because most of the employees are certifiable. I think that’s a good thing, for both the company and the customers waiting hand and foot for the next paradigm shift. You have to be a special kind of crazy to work for Apple, even in retail, but that crazy is why we’re holding the iPhone 6 now and not the 3GS.
Is this also why my iPad 2 can’t connect to the cellular network ever since updating to iOS8? Why my iPhone 5 is a dog as well since the update? Is this why they had to pull update iOS 8.0.1. just hours after it went live because it was disabling major functions on people’s iPhone 6 and 6+? That’s not even an old model… It’s the current model. Things are sliding at Apple. They are never inovators and I’m ok with that… they take what’s out there and make it better however their blunders seem to be getting more and more common. Look, I know everyone makes mistakes but that’s what testing is for. And the mistakes that make it out there should not affect the big stuff. That’s common sense.
The iPad 2 is old as heck. Anyone with some common sense would know not to install iOS 8 on it right away until all of the bugs are out of it. In the tech world when you have a major launch coming up you have to be ready to support it in the middle of the night. You know what you are getting into. It’s the reason iOS 8.0.2 came out so quickly with fixes for 8.0.1. Those employees were likely given comp time which is the standard for when you have to work extreme hours during product launches.
Well, look at all the things Google does to achieve that. They force people to work on passion projects 20% of the time. They have restaurants, cafes and a cafeteria that is 100% free. They have ping-pong and slides, bikes, roller blades and on-site daycare. They have quiet rooms, and sleep pods. Yoga and gyms. They provide a myriad of ways to take a break and re-charge. They also want people to come in early and stay late – but at least they use fun as there way of doing it.
I’m conflicted now. Should I feel more bad for these managers or the Chinese assembly line workers?
I hope that was snark, because those line workers are in a situation one click away from slavery.
But they’re not forced to work there. they can just quit and get another job. So slavery it isn’t. Dont feel sorry for them one bit.
Unfortunately this is the norm with most companies today. With the proliferation of smartphones and the fact that we are always connected we no longer have any excuse when trying to disconnect ourselves from work. I don’t think we should feel sorry for anyone who works at Apple, obviously they are okay the trade offs they have made and hopefully they are rewarded well financially for the time they give.
I think its sad that companies (not just Apple of course) don’t place any value on a work life balance. When I am older I want to know my kids, I don’t want to look back and wish that I could have been there more for them, to see them grow up, to have gone to their school plays or their hockey or baseball games to have been part of their lives. Unfortunately we are all chasing the almighty dollar and for that we are willing to make a lot of sacrifices.
Just my opinion.
Totally agree
I am in agreement with you. When I started working some 28+ years ago, I realized that I could make a lot more money if I killed myself at my job. I came to realize that it was not worth it for me and now I make a decent living, but am able to leave at a set time and spend night and weekends with my family. It’s not worth it to me to work for a company that will work you to death only to cast you out when they are finished with you. Over the years I’ve known people who have given a company decades of hard work, only to be cast off when the owner of a company decides they want to sell and retire, or when the company wants to get cheaper labor out of the country. Some companies do not deserve any loyalty from their employees.
Apple has work life balance. However, when you have a launch on the horizon you have to work late hours. That’s why they pay you six figure salaries. There is no reason to pay someone hundreds of thousands of dollars per year who doesn’t want to be there and work.
Poor babies… if you want to see “nuts” over a 24/7 work, join the military.
No thanks! They decide to kill you when you need help after serving. Just look at those poor vets who died because the VA didn’t want to spend the $$ taking care of them and wanted bonu$e$.
As an entrepreneur, and the sorts of people in Silicon Valley, even if just employees, are all driven by the similar desire to both make a difference and earn a lot of wallah in the process, because there is so much fun stuff to do and buy out there, I can empathise why they work so hard.
I was up at 5:30am here in the UK today, and as I type this at only 18:12, I will be at the keyboard until the coffee wears off or my desire to socialise or have a quick pint draws me away. Or my brain conks out.
Really managers complaining about having to work manager hours? What will happen next? The sun will rise from the east. I’m OUTRAGED about the injustice of managers having to work manager type hours and be on call or ready for a meeting on a weekend. I think these people are just disgruntled employees. I hate seeing my old managers literally do nothing at all but pushing paper work around and trying to look busy or useful when in actuality they weren’t doing anything.
If you work for Apple, you can’t really “look busy” and not eventually get caught doing nothing. They WILL find out, eventually. The problem is that some people who are managers are working, but they are counterproductive to their teams.
I ate lunch in the Infinite Loop campus in the photo above. The food spread is no joke! That day Angela Ahrendts ate 2 tables away from where we ate and I have the pic to prove it. I rarely get star struck, but it was cool to see. I swear the employee’s had a 2 hour lunch… now I know why!
I work in a reseller and again today i worked 12 hours and now from home i’m replying to costumers email. I usually work 14 hours everyday, i don’t want it but i don’t have choice. I would be happier to work so many hours in Apple instead.
This is nothing new. Companies like Amazon and Apple burn through employees like Duraflames. If you value Work/Life balance these aren’t the companies for you. Employees make up for their lack of brilliance by taking 10 hours to do what should be done in 6.
This is life at today’s mega corporations. Though when I was in High School I worked at a hospital and found that the Doctors routinely did 11 and 12 hour shifts so the work is not unprecedented.
Oh, poor doctor’s doing 11 and 12 hour shifts. Almost everyone at a hospital does 12 hour shifts. The thing is you only work four days like that – with unpaid breaks it works out to 40 hours a week. Then following your work week you get a four day weekend – every week! It provides work-life balance, just not in the same way other jobs do.
Well, this (working too hard; no work-life balance) is a likely explanation for major screw-ups:
Apple Maps
Defective updates
Bendable phones
etc.
Maybe the quality of work would be more consistent if they actually took a break 7 nights a week.
No way to live while having a home and family.
It should be “work to live” and not “live to work”. What’s described is a rat race – which I manged to leave at age 52, and never regretted doing so.
Leave? As in retire, or found another more peaceful job?
Sounds like my typical work week.
It can only be great to work at a place where people are so dedicated…
Everytime I read a comment, “When is the Mac mini update coming?” Or “Why hasn’t Apple revolutionized the TV yet?” I think Apple probably doesn’t have enough employees to make all of these products – and then update them yearly. I’ve personally thought they could get it done if they expand. I think this is a huge motivator behind the current Spaceship campus. It’ll allow them to have even more employees. If you think about everything that goes into each product, it’s a lot of work on its own. Now imagine having to work on multiple products at once. Remember when Apple pulled Mavericks engineers to work on iOS? They need to build up the teams, having one team for each product, or service, or software and then have middle managers looking after multiple products, like a iOS Hardware or Mac manager. Then having Senior managers that look after one aspect of all of Apple’s products like Ive and Design. If they had more employees, they could stop working until 2 am and get back to the good old days where each day wasn’t awaiting with a new sh*t-storm. (Have you read this site in the last month – come on!)
Managers and execs are overpaid
Managers and execs are working too hard and shouldn’t have to do these things
derp derp derp derp