Former Apple employees try a different management approach at Pearl Automation | Hacker News Reader

Former Apple employees try a different management approach at Pearl Automation

nytimes.com

80 pointshackuser80 comments

The article is all Apple, Apple, Apple. That's not Pearl's problem. Pearl is in the auto accessory business, selling through all those cheesy stores in the auto-parts part of town. Their product is not novel. It's so not novel that there's an Amazon Vehicle Backup Cameras Store.[1] Pearl is in it, at $499, alongside comparable products starting at $32.99. That's Pearl's problem.

Not only that, the competing products come with a display. Pearl's product assumes you have a phone on your dashboard, running their app. User comment: "any time you backup, you need to manually launch the app and wait through a 3-5 second lag as the video feed loads."

Those guys are automotive noobs. Their recommended temperature range is -4°F (-20°C) to 113°F (45°C). You can easily exceed those on a car body. Automotive temperature range for components is usually considered to be -40°C to 125°C. Their device is also battery powered, so it will need a recharge or a new battery regularly. Everybody else wires into vehicle power, so it's install and forget.

They say they're going to do self-parking next. As a retrofit. Right. Those guys need to get out of Scotts Valley, move to Detroit or some place with auto parts plants, and get their hands dirty.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Vehicle-Backup-Cameras/b?ie=UTF8&node...

Many raised similar sounding complaints about Tesla in their early days. "Stupid programmers and electrical engineers don't know jack about building a car..." Yeah, they skipped a lot of the "important" parts, but they recognized before anyone else that there was value much deeper worth ignoring those common-sense features.

Time tells if its a worthwhile gamble.

The point is that they're not designing their product from any sort of first-principles, it's more a style of design whereby they are using a single hardware widget augmented with a phone. They didn't tailor their product to the problem, which Tesla did.

The article makes a lot more sense if you look at it as an acquihire solicitation.

You may be right. I don't see those guys ten years downstream with hundreds of RetroDrive installation shops and a factory turning out many models of steering box adapters. On the other hand, they're not MobilEye, which has innovative vision processing technology. They're just a camera sales operation.

Kind of feels like an ad for Pearl they agreed to publish in exchange for anecdotes about working at Apple.

The Apple PR statement at the end made me laugh for some reason:

“Pearl Auto is a great example of the creativity and innovation driving the iPhone ecosystem,” said Josh Rosenstock, an Apple spokesman. “We wish them great success with their new product.”

Yes, this is obviously paid content marketing material.

EDIT: The Pearl team mass downvoted me. :(

It's certainly marketing material but I don't think the NYTimes publishes paid content in the way you describe.

NYTimes definitely offers native advertising just like everyone else. It's way too lucrative a market to pass up.

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/as-print-fa...

"There is, however, an inherent problem: If native ads look too much like journalism, they damage credibility; if they look nothing like journalism, they lose their appeal to advertisers."

Yeah agreed. For the record, they're clearly marked as sponsored posts. The URL is even marked as "paidpost.nytimes.com."

Here's an example: http://paidpost.nytimes.com/cole-haan/grit-and-grace.html?_r...

The New York Times does not allow genuine native advertising. Pearl Automation was not able to pay the ad department a check, in exchange for writing a "native advertising" story about them.

They could have instigated it. But they didn't pay for it. This wasn't paid for out of their ad budget.

It's a huge win for their PR department - because they got the NYT to write that article (or were very pleasantly surprised to see it). Not paid for it.

>But they didn't pay for it.

So the paidpost subdomain means nothing? I'm curious if that's true as it seems a rather odd choice for a subdomain.

The Pearl Automation story, which 'logicallee refers to, doesn't have a paidpost subdomain. The Cole Haan paid post which 'achompas linked to does.

Though it isn't necessarily implied that _all_ paid articles have that subdomain (somehow I feel like that would be a tricky thing to enforce at a big journalism outfit like NYT).

Why would that be the case? Ads are handled differently than content. Paid posts I'm sure have their own process independent of content. That's what CMS does. It's also clearly marked Paid Post, and it's styling is distinct from other NYT content. [edit to add: Indeed, given the size of the NYT, adherence to a well-defined process is a necessity. The likelihood that a paid post was mistakenly displayed as content would arguably be much less.]

The subdomain isn't the point, however. I was clarifying a misunderstanding in the thread.

If you're aware of paid content in the NYT that isn't marked Paid Post or something similar, please let me know.

I'm not sure how this one slipped under the radar then? Sounds like you might have an idea?

Also, describing the NYT in such a manner is an "appeal to authority."

I disagree with the contention that the Pearl Automation article is a paid post or "obviously paid content marketing material". It reads more casually, more like long-form journalism than a straight up article, but not like paid content.

Prior to this comment, I don't see where I'm arguing anything other than clarifying a difference between the Cole Haan paid post and the Pearl Automation article and that a larger organization needs more process to efficiently produce content at scale, neither of which I think is particularly contentious. Neither of which I see requires or is an appeal to authority. If you think otherwise, please feel free to point out where.

Do you agree with @harryh that the article is marketing material?

Also, @achompas's sibling post was the appeal to authority, not yours, sorry for the confusion.

Do you agree with @harryh that the article is marketing material?

I don't know what answer you're looking for beyond what I've just expressed above:

I disagree with the contention that the Pearl Automation article is a paid post or "obviously paid content marketing material".

If you consider good press to be marketing material, then yes, but I don't think this is an proper understanding of "marketing material". Or is it the idea it wasn't paid for? Even then, I don't think this article is the result of anything unethical, which I understand the label "marketing material" to imply. If you know of actual evidence that indicates such, I'm open to be convinced otherwise.

I'm baffled as to how my comments can be read as appeals to authority. A brief Google search surfaces clear comments by the NYT itself on its native ad policy.

I also think you're suffering from the conflation of marketing and advertising material.

I believe 'Hydraulix989 is interpreting the following as such:

[T]he NYT is a traditional institution with strong publishing process and serious concern for "separation of church and state,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13313026

I think they're saying that they can't be trusted to be honest about their own intent. I'm not sure if that's actually an fallacious appeal to authority, as I think that entails referencing some unqualified third party, but I may very well be mistaken.

Regardless, if 'Hydraulix989 doesn't trust the NYT, I can't imagine anything short of an audit by a trusted third-party would be convincing on this issue. To be fair, I would only be convinced that the Pearl Automation article is a marketing piece if there were some concrete evidence of unethical behavior along these lines.

Ah, I get you. I could understand that if, say, someone had not read comments from the NYT's public editor. One example:

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/as-print-fa...

Thanks for the link! I fear that in today's polarized environment, distrust of the media, and the serious missteps made by the NYT in recent years, the fact that the public editor is a NYT employee and published in the NYT would make them untrustworthy to a great many people. And that seems to often taint those who would give them the benefit of the doubt.

And I don't see this as an issue that's unique to any one political persuasion. The level of automatic distrust if not suspicion of bad intent all around greatly concerns me. I find myself actively and repeatedly checking myself to extend the benefit of the doubt and charity. We're increasingly and alarmingly encouraged to view things in a binary fashion, bucketing everyone into one or the other, rather than recognizing there's a wide range of values on all different issues, and that we share many even when we disagree on others.

</soapbox>

I think the opposite is true: the NYT is a traditional institution with strong publishing process and serious concern for "separation of church and state," as publishers call the sales/journalism divide.

If someone is publishing a paid article, it _absolutely_ needs to be marked as such.

We actually agree. I think there's miscommunication going on here. Two facts:

1. NYT does have a native advertising unit. They produce posts like the one I linked earlier -- that article was sponsored by Cole Haan.

2. The Pearl article is not a native ad. If it were, it would be clearly marked as such (like the article I linked). It could be PR, but that's par for the tech industry (see: Apple's controlled leaks via WSJ/NYT over the years).

No, but it may have come to them via a press release.

Paul Graham on PR from 2005: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

"PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren't dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won't bug reporters just because the client tells them to; they've worked hard to build their credibility with reporters, and they don't want to destroy it by feeding them mere propaganda.

If anyone is dishonest, it's the reporters. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. Or, to put it more nicely, overworked. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. But it's so tempting to sit in their offices and let PR firms bring the stories to them. After all, they know good PR firms won't lie to them."

It's not dishonesty; it's just biased, and I wasn't necessarily pointing the finger at Pearl either.

I didn't mean to comment on the honesty or otherwise, those were just the paragraphs that contained the key info: PR firms feed valid facts to journalists.

If a news outlet so much as carries an article about a given topic, they are exercising discretion and leaving themselves open to accusations of bias... Really it's NPoV that is the unachievable ideal.

I see, you did seem to imply that I implied that NYT/Pearl (pg favors the former when it comes to possible "bad actors") were being dishonest.

I think it's an important lesson to learn how to discern whether articles are "paid marketing" or "content marketing" (or biased in other ways). Not many people know how to do this kind of critical thinking -- look at the "fake news" debacle (if anything, there is a certain blind trust people place in authority figures like the NYT).

The transparency (or lack thereof) of this particular article is an important observation to note.

This quote is nice, but Graham doesn't touch on dishonest PR - it does exist, and it is a problem. Look at Theranos.

The guidelines ask you to please not complain about downvotes like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

@sctb: Can't reply directly for some reason, but sorry. To wit, after that edit, the score became a positive number again.

This is the most interesting part of the article for me:

> Apple, which has about 110,000 employees, breaks big projects down into smaller tasks. Those are assigned to small teams, and each subtask is given to a specific employee, who must get it done — what Apple calls the “directly responsible individual.”

> Pearl has copied this system. “In leading small teams, that’s very effective,” Mr. Gardner said.

Apparently this directly responsible individual (DRI) approach is famous, but it's the first I've heard of it. Is anyone able to comment on how effective this is?

Say you have a multi-disciplinary team of UX designers, a PM, front-end and back-end devs - I'd be accustomed to seeing a team lead in charge of the project who is the DRI for the whole thing, but do subtasks for the project also get parcelled out in formal, DRI-fashion? E.g. user stories for a web app like, "As a user I can log in securely", would this get a DRI assigned to it? What happens when the DRI doesn't have time for that task, are they able to pass it along to someone else, and would the decision to punt it over to someone need to be run past someone, typically, or is the DRI empowered to make decisions on delegation/task transferring?

The way it worked a few years ago, at least, each year new tent-pole features were pushed down from the top. These features came from marketing, design, and Steve Jobs himself. There was always a much larger list of wants than possible for a given release, so the ever powerful hands of EPMs (engineering project managers) would help delegate the tasks and schedule a years worth of work.

The company as a whole loves small teams, they find them effective, and most managers are only given 5-10 engineers before there's pressure to split up into smaller teams.

During each start of a new release, engineers would pick and chose which features they wanted to work on. Depending on the team, some influential engineers and managers could fight for ranking the features they thought most important.

Features weren't always user visible things, one year, one of the tent-pole features was porting everything over to 64-bit. Of course this feature affected the entire software organization, so that radar was broken up into large teams, and then each framework and application had a radar.

Usually the person responsible for the feature at the team level was the DRI and anyone on the team could complete any of the radars associated with it, but the DRI was the main contact. They would be the direct line to the higher level radar DRI and so on. If at any point in the chain you didn't have NDA visibility, the EPM would be your contact.

Pardon my ignorance, can you explain what a "tent-pole feature" is (I'm guessing a feature that enables others, but that seems too general), and what a "radar" is?

IIRC, Radar is an issue in the Apple Bug Tracker.

Radar is the company wide task/bug tracking system, you'll see rdar://0000000 attached to random things across the net, those point to issues. See http://www.openradar.me for publicly tracked issues.

Tent-poles are the those bullet points that you see in a keynote. https://9to5mac.com/2016/06/13/ios-10-features-developers/

Isn't this how every organization in the world operates?

How can anything resembling non-hobby work get done without a "directly responsible individual"?

Two thoughts:

1) That's not something my department handles. Contact department B; a committee will review your question and their analysis will be considered at the next management committee team meeting at the end of the quarter.

2) Parliament / Congress

Implicitly, yes, some person is always doing the work. But in my experience a "DRI" culture is one where at the end of a meeting it's 100% clear what needs to be done and who is doing it. That doesn't happen in a lot of companies, because a lot of companies call meetings to brainstorm.

$500 for the PearlVision product and you have to supply your own phone for the display. That is some hefty markup. You can get some decent ones that include a display in the range of $50-$150 on Amazon.

I'm sure they're just intending for this to be an initial product, but I agree, I don't understand their business plan at all. The people willing to pay 3x over a "good enough" backup camera are also the people who'd be first in line to buy a new car with all the bells and whistles in the first place. The market for this product has to be exceedingly small.

what if the business plan is 'get acquired by another company looking to get into the self-driving car business'?

It wouldn't be surprising if they're angling to be acqui-hired. I think that's why they're so forthright about the Apple pedigree.

What would they be offering to that company, they haven't shown any prowess for integrating into the cars systems. Besides don't most car manufactures have self-driving features under development/deployed already?

I'm not saying it's a _good_ idea :P

You think that people willing to spend $500 would rather just spend tens of thousands instead for the same value proposition?

the tens of thousands is for all the other similar value propositions they'd want in a car.

Come on, that's just silly and it's a deliberate strawman. The options are not just between a $500 camera and a brand new car. The whole point is that the type of person who eschews the myriad of much cheaper camera options is also the type of person least likely to own a car that doesn't already have a built-in backup camera.

Seems to me the main advantage is that you don't have to wire anything up (or pay someone else to do that).

And personally I already mount my phone for navigation & music, so I wouldn't WANT to have the extra display.

I definitely don't want a backup camera display that I can't see without unmounting my phone.

I paid about $75 for a rear view camera setup on Amazon and another $75 for someone to install it in an hour hooked into the existing entertainment display. No worry about wires, charging, etc. Still better than a $500 product which needs a phone that I need to mount and dismount, charge, etc.

There are tons of wireless / wifi backup cameras already. The top search on amazon for such a beast is under $40...

Seems like they also copied Apple's pricing strategy

> Apple, for its part, appears to hold no hard feelings toward Pearl, despite the steady poaching of employees.

This has made me wonder, why does offering people a better option for employment than what they currently have get described with the word for illegally killing/stealing animals? Was there some concerted effort years ago to associate the two, to make leaving one company for another seem like a bad thing?

Because it's viewed as a breach of loyalty. It used to be that employees were expected to be loyal to their company, and in return the company would take care of them. Things have changed now so companies don't take care of their employees anymore, but they still want to push the narrative that their employees should be loyal to the company.

I can't speak to the history of the term, unfortunately, but the term poaching in a hunting context means more than just killing an animal illegally; it has a connotation of trespassing to gain something otherwise inaccessible. Employee poaching has the same connotation because the former employee uses their familiarity with the old company to hire employees that other companies can't access as easily.

I see your definition and that of the first definition I saw from the internet, and coming from a family of hunters/fishers, it surprised me a bit. I associate poaching almost entirely with killing of animals illegally. I think that is because in my home state, there were fewer problems with people trespassing to hunt than with those hunting with no regard for licenses/hunting laws. The Wikipedia article on poaching in the USA[0] is more what I associate with poaching.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching#Poaching_in_the_USA

Yes: http://www.hightechemployeelawsuit.com/

Interesting they're based in Scotts Valley. I have to wonder if California tech in Santa Cruz and Monterey have dwindled in recent years because of the emphasis on San Francisco and Palo Alto.

Don't think ever was much at that side of SV to begin with. People who work in tech and live in SC just travel to SV. From what I remember its a ~1 hour drive from SC to SFO airport or SJ. Quite doable if you love living in SC.

Sounds like a vanishing market, though.

People don't buy new cars because theirs are "outdated". They buy the new shiny because they deserve the new shiny godammit. Not unlike computer hardware geeks who only buy new devices when they need it.

Are you kidding me? Have you ever worked in/or visited a vehicle dealership? It's over -run with 1st-movers, and most of the time the owners and salesmen always have the newest and latest.

Not like it used to be.

See: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...

I work with a group of well paid engineering types. About 50% have cars < 5 years old. I have the third oldest -- a 2003 model year. My boss drives a 1991 Accord, although this will be its last winter.

How do people gain satisfaction from working for a dead on arrival product?

> More than 50 of the company’s 80 or so employees worked for Apple at some point.

I understand how/why this happens, but as an engineer who's not an Apple "alumnus" (ugh), I would never work at a place like that. A company needs diversity in more ways than one.

I don't understand. Would you work at Apple itself?

Maybe. Apple's too large to have 70% of their employees come from the same company. I've worked at "startups" like this before, and there is a caste system with the former $BIG_CORP-ers and everybody else. No thanks.

Wouldn't it be a great networking move if you wanted to someday work at Apple, though?

Sure, plug a mobile app directly into your OBD-II, what could go wrong?

Does OBD-II have any direct control capability? I had thought it was a diagnostic (read-only) interface.

I'm pretty sure diesel performance kits (small PDA-like device) that let you alter engine and transmission performance connects via the OBD-II port.

It depends on the manufacturer as to what custom protocols/capabilities they have on top of OBD-II.

OBD-II diagnostics are mandated by law, but manufactures often connect almost all microcontrollers to that connector. This allows updating all of your firmware from one port. That can be a security problem when connected to the internet.

I was not aware of this; I assumed it was read-only except for reset flags, thank you for pointing this out.

There are numerous holes in various firmware that allow cross-talk between the various CAN busses anyway. I don't think anyone who set out to research automotive security has ever had to move on to another vehicle due to lack of exploitable flaws.

Nothing?

I am less concerned with who they are and more concerned with what they're doing. What does their company do?

The sell an aftermarket rear view camera for your car.

https://pearlauto.com/

I don't know if there is a huge need for this in the market though. I would rather spend to upgrade the media and other controls in the car than the rear view camera if I have to. For someone used to driving without a rear camera there is no need for one. They need more products.

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