> I mean, it’s not that it’s not fun, it’s not that it’s not fulfilling, it’s not that you don’t get to work around all these brilliant people. The bad side effect is they’re all, like, workaholic, psychotic brilliant people.

For me, one of the best things in life is the opportunity to work hard at work worth doing. Apple gives me that, and I feel extremely fortunate.

I've been at jobs where the stress is very low and I had time to browse the internet at all hours and didn't have much expected of me. This is 100% the opposite of that, and I'm happier now than I ever was then. It's been 4 years and I've never had anything close to burn-out, because I've never felt that the work wasn't "worth it". (To me, burn out is a result of feeling like you're not getting anywhere, and that just plain isn't the case at a company where we consistently ship things with huge scopes, on time and to resounding success.)

Yeah, there's exec demos, and yeah there's dry-run meetings for them, but you know what? The execs here are fucking smart. Every meeting I've had with execs has left me awestruck at the level with which someone can be simultaneously so big-picture oriented while still being able to sweat little details. There's a reason they got to where they are, and I really feel that at Apple it's a true meritocracy.

It sounds like it's even harder work if you're in the direct email line-of-sight of an exec (which I am not), and I feel for the authors of your linked post about how hard that must be, but to me that comes with the territory of being so close to the success or failure of a product that you are under that kind of scrutiny. What else would you expect?