There are plenty of us that would love to just sit and fix things all day, but then you get a poor performance review for not shipping new features and find yourself out of a job :)
That's not how Apple works. You'd be given requirements specific to your team and expected to implement them. End of story. You wouldn't be empowered to seek out other teams and fix their stuff (or even necessarily talk to them). It's deliberate and intentional to have very few people with that cross-functional power.
You're right and not right. There were the infrequent occasions when an engineer would be tracking down a problem they were having and end up in another teams framework/code. A Radar would be created, a polite code diff attached and, often, the team would take the patch and roll it into the next build.
I thought this once, it's a disappointing experience. You'll hear all the right things, and 3 years in, realize nothing you do matters to anyone, and that's because all the managers who were so excited about your passion for software quality haven't met with you in a 2 years. And then it clicks, they got promoted by knowing the game: features, resembling the rushed planning deck, delivered yearly. (This is a whole lot easier to whine about after banking the salary for 7 years, of course)
You know, money fucked up Apple. When I started there (1995) no one came to Apple as a "career move". Everyone there was passionate about the machine, the code, the UI.
100%. You nailed it. Very heartening to hear this, always been unsure of my most personal analysis, as it was limited to one corp in one era.
Vastly different circumstances (shitty state school x print design gig => 2008 philosophy dropout waiting tables => build a point of sale app startup, iPhone OS 2 => sold it => 2016 Google).
I had at nigh-religious appreciation for the things I learned from the culture of roughly that era. folklore.org type stuff. Grew up on Gruber. And learning so many of your cohort on Twitter. Took me from a waiter to an engineer.
I ended up being ashamed to mention stuff I learned from it, people rarely were in touch with the culture as I understood it. Many soulless vampires afoot once the money comes in.
I'll never forget asking a (wonderful!) colleague why they wanted to work on Team X, expecting "I'm really passionate about [form factor] because [use case]" or "Well, given $LOCATION, my options were [Google Cloud | this team | Google Play Books]"...instead it was "well, coming out of $IVY_LEAGUE with $STEM_MAJOR, my best options were finance or programming, and finance seemed worse"
I had far too many out-of-left-field interactions like that. And it poisons the place in many ways that, to me, ultimately damn it to mediocrity.