Working for a certain Cupertino company is a dream come true for many Silicon Valley engineers, but Apple's not the place for everyone. It takes much more than a polished resume, top-notch recommendations, and the willingness to give one's heart and soul to land oneself a gig at Apple.
Being a member of the club is even tougher than getting in. You work under constant pressure of being thrown out of the window over trivial reasons beyond comprehension - Jobs allegedly fired an assistant for bringing him the wrong brand of mineral water.
Of course, folks are also asked to leave for tangible reasons. For example, Apple's hardware chief Mark Papermaster was ousted last week over mismanaging the iPhone 4's antenna engineering, but also because he fell out of favor with Steve Jobs and didn't fit in.
People got fired on the spot or while riding in the elevator with Steve Jobs and the level of paranoia is said to be related to the closeness to Steve's office. Matter of fact, the terror in Cupertino begins with a job interview.
Although Jobs didn't personally interview every person that knocked on Apple's door (34,300 souls work for the company), one never knows when he might abruptly interrupt your carefully prepared pitch and destroy you in an instant.
One of my favorite urban legends is about Steve Jobs burning a prospective employee by asking if he was a virgin. Numerous references of this can be found on the web and the purported event has been nicely portrayed in the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley," as seen in the scene below.
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