@stonemetal: I think what he's saying is: if you're more interested in playing this "what's the minimum number of hours I can get away with working" game than in making your customers love you, Apple isn't the right fit for you.
Yeah just like those devs at EA. If you aren't willing to sleep in your cube then you obviously are just "doing the minimum". If making gamers love you isn't what you live for then maybe EA isn't the right place for you. Poor project planing with deadlines that can't be met without 12hr days isn't the problem. Passion, that is our problem we just have way to much of it. Cause you know if we let people have friends and do stuff outside of work then some of that Passion might leak out and we wouldn't want that to happen.
You're doing an awful lot of projecting based on one guy's account of his friend's working hours.
The web isn't exactly swamped with "Apple Wives" blogs, so you might consider the possibility that this grave injustice that you're so worked up about is primarily occurring in your imagination.
And his friends account that it is typical of the environment, and I have a friend who had an internship with Apple. The first rule of his startup was sane working hours no matter how passionate you are, which wasn't a rule he had before working at Apple.
I think that it's obvious that the work culture at Apple is not one of suggesting that you leave at 5:30pm.
It takes an effort by management to prevent working hours from ballooning out when people are working on long projects. It's very obvious that Apple are not doing that.
My company expects people to leave on the dot at 5:30pm. It's great.
