I've used Apple products for years and generally like them a lot as a company, but I have no interest in working for them or any other large US tech company.
The money is good, of course, but the quality of life sacrifices aren't worth it (for me).
That's not contrarianism. That's understanding what matters to me.
Move to California, go back to an office for 60 hours a week, sign my life away and swear to secrecy about my thrilling position on some compiler team? Yeah I think could say no to that.
Nothing I'd love to work on that sort of thing. The point wasn't that the kind of job is bad, but that even if you're working on stuff that shouldn't be secret, you still have to jump through all those hoops.
And imagine how many middle-managers they have who think a) they're the next Steve Jobs, and b) that what drove his success was being a dick to his workmates.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of software engineers employed at companies that are of similar prestige and pay as Apple, and many of them will be on HN. If you're getting paid $500k at Netflix/Google/Meta, why work for $400k at Apple?
Uhh no, have you ever dug into compensation that most companies that post on HN are offering? They are offering regular old CRUD enterprise level compensation and “equity” that probably won’t be worth anything
Sure, but that has nothing to do with what I said. There will be many HN users who are earning as much or more as Apple engineers, even if many are earning much less, so assuming that someone here would definitely jump at an Apple offer is not particularly reasonable.
Would you say the majority of people who claim to be contrarian aren’t actual contrarians, in your experience? I’m not sure you can infer this in general.
Lots of people, including me.