1. Secrecy is part of the culture.
2. Engineers work hard at Apple, and many teams are surprisingly small. There are no 20% projects at Apple because nobody has the time.
EDIT: Going on the Apple jobs listing for Cupertino, there is plenty of openings for engineers.
One of the assertions in the article is that a hacker culture is a necessary ingredient for a successful technology company. I see Apple as a counterexample to this argument. And it's a counterexample that shouldn't be ignored. Apple is driven by design (industrial design, product design, graphic design). They think about products, not technology. They often invent new technologies to enable their products, but that's very different from thinking primarily about technology (a mistake, I would argue, that Google is guilty of frequently).
Taking as an example a project like Google Wave, I would even go as far as to say that a strong hacker culture and an obnoxious elitist culture of hiring only the best programmers can be serious detriments to a technology company. YMMV, but, culture-wise, I'd much rather build (and work for) an Apple than a Google.
Edit in reply to your reply: I thought it was any company that needs to have good software. But even so, surely Apple doesn't pay significantly more than Google (a hacker-centric company) and surely they're in roughly the same domain (iOS/Android, iAd, etc.). I think the real problem is in your next sentence: Otherwise you can't attract good programmers to work in a suit-centric culture. That's a big false dichotomy. Sure, suit-centric technology companies will fail. And hacker-centric technology companies sometimes succeed. I think Apple shows that a culture that is neither suit-centirc nor hacker-centric is the best option of all. If many of your YC companies are trying to build great technology companies, they should take that to heart.
I would actually disagree with the last part of that. I think Apple is always thinking about technology, but in the context of design. The Apple difference is not simply that design comes first, technology second, but that design is the gatekeeper for technology.
The iPod is the shining example. Could Apple have made a music player before the mass-production of the 1.8" hard drive? Sure, but it wouldn't have been the wonder to hold in your hand that the iPod was. It was when the technology was ready for the design requirements that they pounced on the opportunity.
Same thing with the iPhone. Apple could have made a smartphone before affordable capacitive multi-touch screens, multi-gigabyte flash drives, and fast-enough-for-desktop-browsing SoCs, but they likely didn't feel they could make a user experience to their standard with anything less.
No it isn't. I said that you either need that or to pay people a lot or to be in an interesting industry where there are no competitors who have hacker cultures. If Apple doesn't have a hacker culture, then it would probably be an example of the latter.
Although this may not be as nice as a hacker-centric culture (if you are a hacker), it is still leagues better than an utterly non-hacker centric culture, because the devs are respected for what they do at Apple. This seems to be a critical difference necessary for producing great products.
Two essential qualities of good hackers is an abundant ability to synthesize elegant solutions from disparate details, and a desire to create great things. Jobs may not write code but he clearly has these two qualities. So even if Apple does not have an engineer-centric culture, a design culture driven by Jobs can be directly compatible. You see the differences of course, in the products Google and Apple make, but I think the point is that great hackers can work at Apple because they can get behind Jobs vision.
Contrast this with a "suit-driven" company where decisions are made by looking at statistics and market research, and executives strategize about how to maximize sales based on the superficial product understanding they have. Even worse, places where you actually have people in power who couldn't give a crap about the product as long as they have a $500k+ salary rolling in every year.
Exactly. Apple isn't really about winning or losing; they're rewriting the game. Does it really get more "hackerly" than that?
I'm not going to venture more complete definition here, but I think a lot of the themes around "unix culture" (e.g., small pieces loosely joined), open source (e.g. bazaar vs. cathedral approach to design and architecture), and even agile methodologies (e.g. "the simplest thing that could possibly work") could apply. But there's more to it than that.
From this perspective, I agree that you could easily characterize Y Combinator as "hacking" VC. I just don't see what Apple is doing as hacking.
In fact, in some ways it seems to me that Apple is doing the opposite of hacking (or at least trying to give that impression). Apple seems to want to create an impression of "intelligent design" around their products--they've got it all figured out and are delivering it to you complete, fully-formed and flawless. To my mind "hacking" connotes a more evolutionary approach: let's just try this and iterate.
This isn't a value judgement on either approach, I just have a hard time aligning Apple's behaviour as an organization with my personal understanding of "hackerly".
My girlfriend studies industrial engineering and knows quite a bit about innovation and product development. If I combine everything I've heard from her with everything I've heard about Apple, then I conclude that Apple simply excels at leveraging/executing all the well-known 'best practices'. There's nothing 'hackerly' required to do proper innovation and product development, unless you expand 'hackerly' to include 'doing business the way it should be done'
The "dictating specs to programmers" practice seems to stem from the silly notion of applying manufacturing processes to software development. In the view of companies with this notion, programmers are little more than unskilled translators - the parallel of line workers in manufacturing jargon.
In my experience, one of the worst abusers of this "square peg/round hole" paradigm are internal IT departments.
I read a study in IEEE Computer sometime in the Summer of 2001 or 2002 that showed how bad the application of Waterfall was for software development. Does anyone know of a study on the application of manufacturing processes to software development?
Very pitifully few of Google's projects have either created new markets they can dominate, or have penetrated existing markets to the point they can drive billion dollar business units. Gmail, Maps and Android exception to that point, but Google is woefully incompetent in most other respects. And the first two in that list are simply different takes on the search paradigm while Android is a knock-off of the iPhone OS (a really good knock-off, but certainly not a game changing original new idea).
Those are very big exceptions.
I've not seen that many software products which were so obviously disruptive; it's no wonder they became giant-killers. Facebook is the only other one I can think of.
On the other hand, some of their other big products have not be a huge success precisely they haven't been game-changers. Google Docs, for example, might be a good example of a web office suite; but it's hardly a game changer as far as office suites go, because it doesn't do some of the core things that people do daily with office suites. It was clear from the beginning that it would be a slow starter. Whereas Maps for example, you knew at the beiginning that nothing else could touch it
Google's products are mostly software running on servers in datacenters. Facebooks products are the same way. Yahoo's products were mostly software.
Apple's products are not mostly software. Apple sells consumer devices run by software. It's an important distinction, and looking at it that way lets you compare with different sorts of companies, like the technology startup Emotiv Systems[1][2]. They're developing consumer devices that read brain activity like an EEG. They likely spend a lot of time developing their SDK and other software, but they also have to focus on the physical product, like Apple does.
Sometimes people forget or don't realize that "hacker culture" has always had a contingent of hardware guys building solar-cars and robots[3] and kites with cameras.
How can you be so sure about their thought process? Maybe it is the other way around, they just turn it around when it comes to presenting it to the public.