intro to the real world
Oct. 27th, 2006 01:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
godreamSo yesterday (in a fit of incredible motivation) I went by Apple's info session (read: recruitment session) at my college. It was actually the first one I'd gone to so far (which says really awful things about my likelihood of finding a good internship this summer).
In any event, their tactics were sort of interesting, both in what they did say and what they didn't. They opened with one of the recent ipod ads, flashy brightly-colored nanos leaving dust trails on a field of black, went through a few slides in praise of their allegedly warm and fuzzy corporate culture and the benefits they offer (evidently "Apple-recognized holidays" covers a lot). They talked about their devotion to good design inside and out, to simplicity and elegance and brought up all the examples you'd expect.
Then, straight into talking about the company's financial success. (And boy have they made money hand over fist in the last few years.) They talked a lot about the company's reaction to changes in the tech market, hit heavily on their success in spite of the nasty trends in the industry lately, and in comparison to other companies that haven't done as well. It was all very impressive, and I think a very calculated play on our insecurities about another dot-com-bubble-burst and about the whole tech sector being offshored to India. Even if it's all going to hell, we'll keep you safe if you work for us. And, of course, no one else can or will do that. And I'd imagine that if they change their presentation at all across schools, we'd get the least conservative version: given the number of startups MIT spawns, students here aren't necessarily looking for safe and secure above all else.
On the other hand, while they talked a bit about cool products they've come out with lately: itunes and the new generation of ipods, the jungle of updates to OSX, the transition to intel chips, a little about the xserve, they didn't really talk about potential projects interns or new hires might actually be working on. Not all that surprising, because they're Apple and they're madly secretive -- but at the same time, you'd think an interesting project should be the most seductive lure of all.
-- Of course, in spite of all my big talk, I still wanted to leave my resume with them at the end of the talk. :p Either I'm as easily cowed and bought and impressed as they think, or else I just have that much trust in their ability to produce Interesting/Awesome, or both, or else it's just that there's really nothing to lose by doing so.
Anyways, I don't know how much of these strategies are just par for the course for info sessions, but it was definitely a very educational hour or two in a lot of ways. We'll see how the next batch go...
In any event, their tactics were sort of interesting, both in what they did say and what they didn't. They opened with one of the recent ipod ads, flashy brightly-colored nanos leaving dust trails on a field of black, went through a few slides in praise of their allegedly warm and fuzzy corporate culture and the benefits they offer (evidently "Apple-recognized holidays" covers a lot). They talked about their devotion to good design inside and out, to simplicity and elegance and brought up all the examples you'd expect.
Then, straight into talking about the company's financial success. (And boy have they made money hand over fist in the last few years.) They talked a lot about the company's reaction to changes in the tech market, hit heavily on their success in spite of the nasty trends in the industry lately, and in comparison to other companies that haven't done as well. It was all very impressive, and I think a very calculated play on our insecurities about another dot-com-bubble-burst and about the whole tech sector being offshored to India. Even if it's all going to hell, we'll keep you safe if you work for us. And, of course, no one else can or will do that. And I'd imagine that if they change their presentation at all across schools, we'd get the least conservative version: given the number of startups MIT spawns, students here aren't necessarily looking for safe and secure above all else.
On the other hand, while they talked a bit about cool products they've come out with lately: itunes and the new generation of ipods, the jungle of updates to OSX, the transition to intel chips, a little about the xserve, they didn't really talk about potential projects interns or new hires might actually be working on. Not all that surprising, because they're Apple and they're madly secretive -- but at the same time, you'd think an interesting project should be the most seductive lure of all.
-- Of course, in spite of all my big talk, I still wanted to leave my resume with them at the end of the talk. :p Either I'm as easily cowed and bought and impressed as they think, or else I just have that much trust in their ability to produce Interesting/Awesome, or both, or else it's just that there's really nothing to lose by doing so.
Anyways, I don't know how much of these strategies are just par for the course for info sessions, but it was definitely a very educational hour or two in a lot of ways. We'll see how the next batch go...
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-30 05:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-31 04:05 am (UTC)(One would hope the answer, if I hadn't, would be "one a year". But pfft, logic.)