There was also another incident, where my manager's manager's manager emailed me, I hadn't replied …

There are absolutely good teams at Apple. I left a toxic one (Photos) to follow an co-worker I liked a lot who had become a manager (and his team had an opening). Honestly, it was a back-water project with just a handful of engineers on it. But my manager was awesome, my team was cool. My favorite stint at Apple was when I was working on MacOS frameworks. It was chill, you got no significant bonuses to speak of, no special attention during WWDC Keynote presentation. You just did your job and the developers were grateful for the fixes and features you enabled.

I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm kind of glad that "indexing and caching" is not the worst part of it, apparently ;-)

> It was three hours of nearly-continuous meetings, all with the same subject of how bad it was to email a higher-up without first emailing every single person in-between first. There is a famous scene, in the movie Office Space (1999), where the low level coder is constantly harassed about an idiotic memo because he forgot a cover sheet on his TPS reports.. he is reminded of this 3 times and then some by other people.. It's unreal how the "modern" corporate environment, remains the same as it was in early 90s.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsLUidiYm0w

It really is amazing how uptight people are and the lengths they'll go to ensure your managers know how much you've "offended" them. I've left all non-work Slack channels as a result of such an incident. Employees will also ask you questions as if they genuinely care about you and rather than correct you or give friendly advice, will go to your manager. I've worked at startups for most of my career so I'm used to people talking to me directly with misgivings. The passive/indirect bullshit is super frustrating.