Apple's Dark Work Culture Secretes Revealed- An Insider's View Of Life At Cupertino Giant
Everything you do has to be amazing:
Maislos also know Intel’s work culture since the chip manufacturer invested $32 million in one of Anobit’s financing rounds. He says while Intel engineers are given assignments and are rewarded for ingenuity and creativity, it's a given at Apple that engineers will be at the top of their game. "At Apple, you have to run ahead just to stay in place, and there are very high expectations of everyone. Apple expects everything you do to be amazing.” Then he added "That is not the case at Intel, where no one expects you to be 'amazing', although Intel does reward those who give their ‘A+ game’.”
Maislos reasons that the exceptional pressure is the result of Apple's "near death experience" in the late 1990s. When Steve Jobs was about to return to the company he founded after he got fired, it was thought that Apple was barely three months away from bankruptcy – and that experience still deeply affects the way Apple does business, Maislos said. "Intel, too, has had crises that it recovered from," – and those recoveries have given Intel officials the confidence to believe in the company's continued survival, He added.
This attitude of Apple — "no one can imagine a future in which the company fails", as Maislos said, to see that such eventuality never comes about, the corporate culture demands much greater levels of personal excellence than at Intel, or any other tech company, for that matter. It's those standards, Maislos believes, that has put the company where it is today. "Apple has had several important defining moments since that crisis," he said. "It's a company that is extremely focused on its goals. Working there was an amazing experience."
