That's a very interesting feedback. Can you tell more (here or by PM)? In what division did you work (my ex-colleagues and friends work in the CPU or GPU design divisions)? Was that an engineering role? Was it long ago (company changes and often not for the better alas)?
I think my post made it clear: money is not my motivation, or I would have accepted one of the offers I got. Of course having a correct salary is important but what matters most to me is a challenging work, freedom of speech (including criticizing management/company decisions), flexible work rhythm, great colleagues, freedom to choose what I work on (as long as it is useful to the current project(s) obviously).
When someone tells you that when he sat at his desk in an Apple building, the guy seating next to him was not allowed to even tell what he was working on, that's definitely killer for me.
I worked in QuickTime from about 1992 to about 2002. I started off doing the MPEG code, moved to the codec guts of the DVD player, and then became the sort of general codec optimization guy working to speed up everything from Sorenson to JPEG2000 to AAC.
I did not experience any sort of paranoia or feel like things I needed to know about were being held from me. But I suspect a lot of this is cultural/personality. Some people feel that they have the right to know everything about everything, from the salary of everyone in the company to the strategy ten years out to M&A plans. Other people are quite willing to accept that some degree of secrecy (in personal life, in politics, and inside a company) is inevitable. I don't think the company makes much difference -- if you demand total transparency you're going to be unhappy anywhere. If you demand the right to blab company secrets to anyone, you're going to be unhappy anywhere. If you feel the you have the right to make political rants about your colleagues or management, don't be surprised when they decide they're not interested in hearing yet another of your rants.
I knew what I needed to know to do my job. I was as surprised as anyone else by new Apple stuff that wasn't relevant to my job --- new models, new OS features, iPods, ...
Most of the things you are talking about are issues about which reasonable people come down in different places for different topics and different circumstances. If you are willing to be a reasonable person, and to accept that other people --- perfectly DECENT REASONABLE people -- have different opinions, then act like an adult, find a job you love, and accept that it's a job, it's not a marriage, where you expect every single detail to be shared with you, and agreement on every single aspect of how life is to be lived.
I would say one final thing. The happiest people are people who are honest with themselves. They know what they are good and bad at. They know what they want from life and from a romantic partner. They know what they want from a work environment.
Then they choose and optimize based on that.
That all may seem obvious. But in fact 95% of the people I know don't honestly know themselves. They started projecting a persona sometime around 8 years old, and have projected it so long they can no longer tell that's it's not their true self. This is especially obvious when it comes to socially contentious matters, where they have spent so much time stating more and more extreme political claims that, in fact, they kinda just slid into. But it seems like now they're stuck in this loud persona that just isn't them. And of course it's even worse if you have 20yrs of public social media statements along these lines...
So that's my point. What I hear (maybe I'm wrong, but this is what I hear in your comment) is someone who has been swept up in various aspects of techno-hysteria over the past few years. For some it became privacy hysteria. For some it became walled-garden hysteria. For some it becomes work environment hysteria. But in all cases close to zero knowledge coupled with massive echo-chamber feedback led people to lay down lines that (honestly) they just don't care about. But now it feels like they've told everyone that Apple (or Google or Samsung or Microsoft or Intel) is the devil because [...] and they can't walk that back to go work there.
So that's the issue:
- Do you know your real self as opposed to the persona you've constructed?
- Are you brave enough to destroy that persona and create one that better matches who you now are?
- Are you smart enough to ignore the next wave of hysteria (and the next, and the one after that) to admit "I don't need to have an opinion on that"?
- Are you willing to accept that not everything has to be viewed as a political battle to the death, to accept that some people, people smarter than you, even people more ethical than you, may have looked at the same facts you have, and concluded something different? And still be willing to treat those people with respect?
- Is your response to any disagreement going to be "can we figure out a solution that works for both of us"? Or is it going to be "someone is TRAMPLING ON MY RIGHTS. I DEMAND SATISFACTION!"
Almost none of this has to do with Apple. But this is what life in large organizations is like. If that is not the sort of person you are, stick to small organizations.