Read Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works for Free Online

roam the inner courtyards and slip into an open door as employees come and go, Apple’s buildings are airtight. Employees can be spotted on the volleyball courts from time to time. More typically, visitors gaping into the courtyard will see a campus in constant motion. Apple employees scurry from building to building for meetings that start and end on time.
    Inside, Apple’s offices are decorated in corporate drab. The office of the CEO and boardroom are on the fourth floor of IL-1. Other Apple buildings—some rented, some owned—fan out around the Infinite Loop cluster in a checkerboard fashion because Apple doesn’t control every building in the neighborhood. These other buildings carry the name of the streets on whiertreets och they sit, like Mariani 1 and DeAnza 12.
    For new recruits, the secret keeping begins even before they learn which of these buildings they’ll be working in. Despite surviving multiple rounds of rigorous interviews,many employees are hired into so-called dummy positions, roles that aren’t explained in detail until after they join the company. The new hires have been welcomed but not yet indoctrinated and aren’t necessarily to be trusted with information as sensitive as their own mission. “They wouldn’t tell me what it was,” remembered a former engineer who had been a graduate student before joining Apple. “I knew it was related to the iPod, but not what the job was.” Others do know but won’t say, a realization that hits the newbies on their first day of work at new-employee orientation.
    “You sit down, and you start with the usual roundtable of who is doing what,” recalled Bob Borchers, a product marketing executive in the early days of the iPhone. “And half the folks can’t tell you what they’re doing, because it’s a secret project that they’ve gotten hired for.”
    The new employees learn that first day of work that they’ve joined a different kind of company than anywhere they’ve worked before. Outside, Apple is revered. Inside, it is cultish, and neophytes are only entrusted with so much information. All new employees attend a half day of orientation, always on a Monday—unless Monday is a holiday. Much of the orientation is standard big-company stuff: a welcome package with stickers saying you’ve joined Apple, HR forms, and the like, as well as a T-shirt that says CLASS OF with the current year emblazoned on the front. Apple quickly makes the employees of the relatively few companies it acquires understand they are now part of the Apple family. Lars Albright, who became director of partnerships and alliances in Apple’s iAd mobile advertising business when Apple bought his start-up, Quattro Wireless, recalled the delight when a bevy of shiny newiMacs showed up almost immediately following the close of the transaction: “People felt very quickly like you were part of something special,” he said. Orientation Monday brings another rare treat. “There’s only one free lunch at Apple, and it’s on your first day,” said a former employee.
    Another highlight of an employee’s first day at Apple is the realization that there’s no one to help you connect your newly issued computer. The assumption is that those smart enough and tech-savvy enough to be hired at Apple can hook themselves up to the network. “Most people are expected to be able to connect to servers,” said an Apple observer. “People say: ‘That shit was hard, but I figured out who to talk to.’ That’s super smart. It’s a clever way to get people to connect with each other.”
    Apple does toss one bone to new recruits. An informal “iBuddy” system provides the name of a peer outside the primary team who can serve as a sounding board, someone for the bewildered new employee to ask questions. Many have said they met with their iBuddy once or twice at the beginning of their tenure—before they became too busy to meet again.
    Reality sets in at orientation in the form of the