You left out Disney, IBM, Microsoft... American corporates are awful to work for imho. I worked for one once, never will again, they do make great products but so many abusive middle managers.

I couldn't watch office space for years after - it was too much like real life.

This take seems a bit short sighted IMO. How do you know that if the work culture was better, the product wouldn't be any different?

It does seem unnecessary to strive for a perfect work-life balance for these giant companies to ship good enough products and make boatloads, though.

I work at a company where every junior PM is has a right to put any feature he wants on any piece of screen real estate. Every idea about how to build it is good. Every implementation is good enough to launch. Every launch is successful. We do not have the concept of "no." We do not have the concept of failure.

It avoids a lot of the politics and culture issues that Apple is infamous for, but I think it's also the reason our products could never be mistaken for theirs.

It works because of the booming stock.