What It’s Like to Work Inside Apple’s ‘Black Site’

a unifying theme with all of these corporate "campuses" and shit seems to be that all of them are seemingly awful places to work in, even more so than a traditional office space under a dictatorial boss:

Inside the building, say former workers, they came to expect the vending machines to be understocked, and to have to wait in line to use the men’s bathrooms. Architectural surprise and delight wasn’t a priority here; after all, the contract workers at Hammerwood almost all leave after their assignments of 12 to 15 months are up.
It’s not uncommon for workers not to make it that long. According to 14 current and former contractors employed by Apex Systems, a firm that staffs the building as well as other Apple mapping offices, they operated under the constant threat of termination. “It was made pretty plain to us that we were at-will employees and they would fire us at any time,” says one former Hammerwood contractor, who, like most of the workers interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity because he signed a nondisclosure agreement with Apex. “There was a culture of fear among the contractors which I got infected by and probably spread.”

The Apple Maps operations staffed by Apex provide a dim view of contract work, according to current and former Apex workers. Some took jobs there with the hope of landing full-time work at Apple—a possibility they said Apex played up—only to find the chances were small. As Apple has faced headwinds in recent months, it has further reduced the practice of converting any contract workers to full-time positions, according to a person familiar with Apple’s operations.

Other Apex workers took the job just to put Apple on their resume. Even that benefit was tenuous. Apex managers initially distributed specific wording they could include on their LinkedIn profiles referring to their employer as Apple, via Apex Systems. Last summer, Apex said they had to remove the word “Apple,” describing their employer only as “A Major Tech Company Via Apex Systems,” according to two former employees.

Apex has also changed aspects of employment suddenly. In November, it cut the maximum amount of paid sick time employees could take annually from 48 hours to 24 hours, saying the policy would go into effect in two days, according to two current employees and an internal email viewed by Bloomberg. The email, which Apex workers received on a Thursday afternoon, inspired a rare moment of collective action. A group of over a dozen workers said they had suddenly fallen ill, and left, according to one current Apex employee who participated in the protest.