>I spent 10 years working at Apple. You could write several books about the darkness that envelopes the psychology of Apple. From store level to executives, I saw a fair amount of unethical and sociopathic behavior in that decade. Impressive and terrifying.

I've been working at Apple for 7 years, my experience has been basically the exact opposite of what you describe. Admittedly when I talk to the Career Experience (CE) folks we host for 6 month internships from the retail stores, the experience of working in retail sounds pretty grueling and awful, and has gotten much worse over the past 10 years. So like, that's a dark side, but I don't think its Apple-specific. Also, none of them can imagine leaving, because any other retail is worse (less choice in hours, much fewer benefits, less certainty in pay, etc).

But within corporate, like, sure, you can find empire-building and micromanagement and inept management and racist managers who hire exclusively foreigners from their home province…but you can find that in any large company. Most folks seem to care about what they do, care about customers' experience, and care about trying to have an overall positive impact. Management that I've worked with (up to VP level) has been occasionally kooky but always with their heart in the right place. My experience is that we'll go way out of our way to make sure that changes we make to improve supply chain integrity (ie not conflict minerals) or achieve eco-friendly goals are REAL improvements rather than just something we could claim without it making any actual difference. Like, tens of millions of dollars just that I've seen in my little corner of Apple to ensure the impact is real.

On the personal front, I fucked up majorly last year, my personal life exploded in a really nasty way, and I basically stopped working for a few months, didn't show up and didn't tell anyone much of anything, which was right during performance review season. My management basically made a formal note in my performance review that was like "we know iamthewaffler can do better and we're committed to getting them back on track" and they were like "hey let us know what if anything you need, also we have all these benefits that enable you to take a few weeks paid off if you're struggling, and you should definitely use them, just please let us know how we can support you, people get worried when you go dark". I feel very supported. So, I dunno. No real sociopathic or unethical behavior to report. I saw way more fucked up shit working in tort litigation with lawyers, and WAY more fucked up shit working in two hardware technology startups.

Just out of curiosity, how have you been able to interface with both store level dynamics and also executives? Seems like that sort of experience is quite uncommon. I have much more breadth at Apple due to my role than is typical, but I'm still not commonly interacting with anyone outside of engineering and above director-level (with the exception of our CEs).