Reading that story made me feel sick. As a young Engineer my dream was to work at Apple, but I'm happy I never did.
I don't understand why people tolerate that kind of treatment. Never in a million years would I work nights or weekends or allow anyone to scream in my face. That's just not life.
There’s a fair number of people who work weekends voluntarily - I’ve even gotten bug reports on odd days when corporate is shut down like Dec. 26th.
My manager and some on my team at Apple generally discouraged me from working on weekends - I’ve worked some on weekends mainly to de-risk accomplishing certain tasks due to me being in an optimal state to tackle some issues & having some spare time. Occasionally I have to fix operations issues on weekends too, but those get resolved generally pretty quickly.
All in all it’s a YMMV situation. Most people in my org keep to normal hours, have same development timelines, and are pretty happy (no yelling/screaming, most operate somewhere in the 10-4 time range give or take, 5 days a week).
Flash-in-the-pan stories like this are fascinating to me. I've never seen this kind of drama at work. No nights, no weekends, no screaming, no passive-aggressive snubs like the gift-bag iPods. I did a double take on the dates when I first saw this on Daring Fireball--who has this much to write about in a year or two?
On the other hand, I've never built a product from scratch so quickly. Google and Facebook didn't exist when I started my current job. Now they're gazillion-dollar companies. I've had projects on my wish list longer than Aperture was a product.
Aside from a hospital or a life-or-death situation, I can't think of any other time where screaming in a workplace would ever be remotely acceptable. Ever.
I don't understand why people tolerate that kind of treatment. Never in a million years would I work nights or weekends or allow anyone to scream in my face. That's just not life.