Sounds to me like if they own you 24 hrs/day, you should get paid 3x normal wages.

Well, they are pretty close to that then.

A friend of mine recently joined Google as a L5 SWE, and is making around 400k a year (he's on the upper band for L5 - couldn't make the cut for L6).

That's about 3x what very good engineers in high cost-of-living cities in the US normally make. I'd say 135k is probably the median for very good engineers at the average company.

(Of course, you could argue whether they're "very good", but I'd say they are, while noting that Google et al is obviously a different caliber, but one partially achievable with many hours of grinding on leetcode/hckerrank/etc.)

Do they? I suppose that Apple is one of the FAANG which are known for their rather-above-market compensation packages.

No they don't. It's nowhere near 3x .

I'll never work for a company that tried to limit my personal time in any way.

Some ways may be reasonable, e.g. running a commercial side project which is a direct competitor of your employer's product. In this case, the moral hazard of using company's internal knowledge which is under an NDA is very high indeed.

But the list of such disallowed activities should be short and reasonable.

Direct competition would be one area I would allow them to limit, clearly they're paying me to work on their stuff first. However, a product in the same industry that my company wasn't persuing at that time would be fair game. At least that's what I believe is fair.

It might be that Apple has a fair and speedy approval process. My employer is like that.

It doesn't.

Who was the tweet from?

It's in the link - https://twitter.com/mdiep