Exactly this. I worked in Apple's EMEIA HQ for about 11-12 months. Actually I started about a week before Steve Jobs died, and honestly, nobody on the floor seemed to care that much.

As for my own experience, I moved from a comfortable telecommute job with an amazing team, naively expecting that Apple would be a huge leap in my career experience.

Instead I found a huge factory sized cube farm (office space!) and a beleaguered internal dev team, whose job was to maintain a giant mountain of bockety legacy ball of tcsh/php/mysql. Project management and infrastructure were pretty much nil. Training and documentation didn't exist, it was sink or swim.

There was a bit of a siege mentality in the team because a lot of what they maintained was critical to a lot of people onsite, and these people frequently beat a path to your desk to berate you because 'the site was down'. Which site? There were countless report sites and webpages scattered around the place. There wasn't much time to go back and fix old code because the work pipeline was always gushing forth new work.

One feature of the job was endless, pointless meetings - these happened a lot, and it gave an glimpse into how some management types played the ladder-climbing game. I definitely came across some predatory/aggressive types. This seemed to be a good strategy because it equalled "visibility", which was often lauded as a career-making goal to aim for in the team and the company. A lot of things seemed to be done with the hope that it would "create visibility".

To be fair, I gather that things in that team are a bit better now - there were some bright, really hard guys there, working against ridiculous odds. But I cannot say I found the experience enriching - I found that I was using less of my skill-set, I hated the cube-farm corporate environment, so I took another opportunity as soon as it came along.

This seems to be true. And also, while internet is full of stories of "what it's like to work at Google/Facebook/etc", you will have hard time finding a similar one about Apple.

My explanation for that is that the "tiny innovative core" is way too overworked to write about themselves and everyone else is just irrelevant.

I'm sure apple's "tiny innovative core" is very good at what they do, and works very hard, but I suspect the reason you don't hear as much about the work environment there is that they are subject to much stricter policies concerning what they write about their employer than are employees at many other places including google and facebook.

Add to that a culture that values protecting secrets versus some notion of 'openness', and an incentive to hold onto that job if you really like it and the valuable stock options that may have come with it, and I'm not terribly surprised that you see relatively few insider stories.

This. Someone close to me worked there for 7 years. The level of secrecy is crazy. Like, dysfunctional-hard-to-do-your-work and stay-up-all-night-working-before-a-launch-because-you-are-only-finding-out-about-it-then crazy. Talking in public about your job would not end well.

Therefore I'm surprised about the OP. Sure they have a specific employment contract in place with a batallion of lawyers drooling on their preys, so what does the OP risk?

Business Insider did a few stories last year, and I seem to have lost a pretty long blog post by three or four former executives that illustrated the Apple life.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-confess-all-t...

As a person with direct experience of being affected, these stories ring true to me.

My understanding here is that Apple has pretty draconian policies about writing about it. A friend once told me they had to retract an offer from a candidate because the person tweeted they just got a job at Apple.

Apple has a horrible reputation as a work place that seems to span all layers. Look up online employer reviews. I have a friend who was employed there doing iphone interface design (as I understand it) and he only lasted a year. He said the place was full of insufferable egomaniacs.

Full of insufferable egomaniacs? I believe it. Especially in design, where your work is judged subjectively.

Full of wannabe Mr Jobs.

Nope.