Working at Apple (2011)
worrydream.com
worrydream.com
Personally I'd rather spend my time at a company that allows for some discussion.
... to people outside of Apple. Apple has 137,000 employees in 25 countries. I’m sure you’ll find someone to discuss your work with.
Honestly, the reality is most engineering is tedious and boring and mired in context. The old 10% inspiration 90% perspiration quote always rung true for me. I think you’ll struggle to have anything other than a superficial conversation of any hard problem or question with any engineer whose not closely associated with your team.
[1] Examples abound but this is my favorite: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37638098-creative-select...
We're also all able to talk freely about what aspects of our jobs and employers we like and don't like. This is valuable information - for instance, I've heard enough first person anecdotes from various teams to know that I'm not interested in working for Amazon unless all other avenues to pay my mortgage have failed.
The Apple experience sounds like my interview with the NSA years ago. All of my attempts to ask any questions were met with a "no comment" for the most part. Very frustrating experience. I walked away with not much more idea of what a job there would be like than you could get from reading Wikipedia.
Very true but it is interesting that Apple is often used as an example to follow on avoiding a monoculture. In the business press anyway.
https://www.torbenrick.eu/blog/strategy/avoid-an-organizatio...
Edit: outside of the service industry, I’m hard-pressed to think of a job where you can ethically talk about any and everything you do in your job...
...yes? I like working on interesting stuff so that my days aren't boring.
A lot of things are secret at Apple, others not so much
(And not after-the-fact hires of already famous people like Rob Pike, Dan Abramov, etc).
For Google, dunno, maybe Yegge?
People used to get famous working for Apple too. Jony Ive? Andy Hertzfeld? Susan Kare?
Oh well.
You can rest assured that their work mattered, even if they couldn’t talk about it.
That's probably because the Enigma code breaking has been mythologized. The war would have won without it (and it mostly was on the Eastern front anyway).
And then without the next advantage, and then without the next one, etc.? At some point everything counts.
https://webkit.org/blog/5852/introducing-the-b3-jit-compiler...
They work in much smaller teams.
What you describe is some IBM carricature of the 1980s.
This is also the case for folks that work on classified projects such at the NSA. There’s more to working than bragging about it to others.
Lots of places understand that there are strict confidentiality agreements (whether those are by convention, contract like NDA, or law like Official Secrets) and they often welcome this.
Recommended reading either way!
The Laundry series is very good!
Doesn't sound like you'd need any luck...
1. I worked at Apple. 2. I worked I’m MacOS division. 3. I worked on MacOS UX. 4. I worked on MacOS dock enhancements.
I worked there and my friends and family knew what product team I was on. I couldn't tell anyone anything specific about the work, but it wasn't a total mystery.
Some people need to be publicly associated with work for it to matter to them. Others don’t. It’s just a personal choice. If you work on a lifesaving drug inside a big pharmaceutical company and never get any extra money or accolades for it, you still saved those lives. Your work still definitely matters.
Now my company is very different, we have respect for our workers and let no part of the employee go to waste. When you've outlived your usefulness your ulna will be fashioned into a long spoon for serving gruel, and the dome of your skull becomes a fine bowl. We actually use half of my former cofounder's pelvis as a frisbee during offsites!
Your work will outlive you, and continue to aid the company for many years after you've been decommissioned. That should be enough to comfort you in your final moments, as you await incineration.
Shortly after he left we were having a drink, and I say: "Just tell me this, did you like it there?" He thought for a fair bit and eventually said "no comment".
Often, I’ve blamed my employers for being miserable, but I realize now that they can contribute to happiness or unhappiness but they aren’t the primary reason for frustration or unhappiness.
My health, primarily my mental health, affects how I act and how I interpret things.
Even the best people that aren’t mentally unwell can be unhappy.
However, being unhappy most of the time is mental illness, whether it’s because of what seems like an unreasonably difficult environment or one that’s seemingly reasonable.
Some may bounce out of it and others can’t seem to, but being stuck in a mode of “I had promise and they killed it” doesn’t help anyone.
In this case maybe the “no comment” was a joke, maybe it was a bad fit, but those that aren’t unhappy most of the time should get help.
> but those that aren’t unhappy most of the time should get help.
I think you meant
"but those that aren’t happy most of the time should get help".
My father was in the CIA, in the late '40s thru '60s.
We didn't find out until the late '90s.
One of his brothers was almost certainly a Company Man, too, but that has never been confirmed; even though he’s been dead for decades.
Apple's OPSEC is probably tighter than the CIA's.
It is in the very nature of a spy agency that the general public does not know what they are up to.
The fact that they leak positive stuff sometimes, and coupled along with the fact that they run a global network of torture sites (and hacked the computers of their own congresspeople who are their oversight, then lied about doing so) means that they probably aren't as do-good and trustworthy as you seem to think they should be assumed to be.
I was questioning the original point made by AsyncAwait, which was that "CIA does very little guarding national security as far as I can tell." The "as far as I can tell" part of that comment makes the rest just silly, since making sure you can't tell is 90% of spy work.
I've put the "as far as I can tell" part in there precisely BECAUSE from what we CAN tell i.e. has been declassified or leaked, it pretty much all terrible shit that has nothing to do with protecting national security.
Of course there's a lot we can't tell, but given the stories we can tell the ratio of good/bad is way out of whack in favor of the bad, especially given CIA's tendency to selectively leak good stories about itself and its extensive declassified historical record, the amount of 'good' should be a lot higher than it is.
Destroying torture records for example shows that it is way more concerned with illegally concealing bad behavior than avoiding it in the first place.
She got an award. She did something that was a big deal. They had a ceremony and her close family was allowed to attend.
However, my friend said the ceremony was congratulations and handshakes, but zero details about what it was for.
That being said, I told people the comment thing more than once. Always to people I know and people that know me well enough to get the meaning. In other cases I just said I won't answer certain questions. Much different than the bo comment trope.
A coworker of mine went to a foreign country once on a business trip. When he asked what he could tell his wife about his trip, the guidance he got was "You can tell her either where you're traveling or why you're traveling. Not both."
There's no reason for all of this.
It's perfectly reasonable for people to say 'I work on iOS' or I work on 'new hardware but I can't say much more than that', or 'I work in production for Apple TV'.
Most people at most companies are not allowed to talk about the details of what they do.
But, yeah, I very much talk about what I did. Would be quite difficult to pass interviews and get projects, wouldn't it?
Same goes for the real secret stuff. Saying you worked abroad for the CIA is much different from saying you served as a CIA operative in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2004. Unless, of course, you get an official legend fot your life after.
You don't think that was the point? "No comment" is a very common way to express that you weren't happy.
It’s hard work but much more interesting than my previous jobs, and people _really_ believe in the values like privacy which I like.
Unfortunately, this doesn't extend to upper-management, which is why we see things like Apple 'forgetting' to implement cloud-wide E2EE at the behest of the FBI, or turning over iCloud servers to the Chinese government, creating a massive corporate-sponsored state-surveillance network.
If you leak from Apple (and they find out) then Apple can sue you and maybe get a civil judgement against you take your assets and possessions, but you remain a free person.
Huge difference.
A friend bought his house with cash a couple of years ago with stock purchased through their EPP program as a retail employee from 2007-2011.
Once it became evident that this was a clear competitive disadvantage in ML hiring, policies evolved…
In comparison, Apple's reaction to a prolific leaker was fairly mild, and left him far from unemployable (I happen to know what company hired him next), let alone homeless: https://www.macworld.com/article/1018725/workerbee.html
When I was working on new hardware, for instance, to access it I would: enter the building (locked), enter my floor (locked, separate from the rest of the building), enter my office (locked, different key), remove the hardware from my cabinet (locked, another key). For some projects, the hardware could only be stored in offices in a certain building, so I’d have to walk a few blocks away and perform the same steps to access a temporary office where I could work on it (eg for the Watch before its release).
Sometimes this caused serious problems. For a while I was running the project which evolved circuitously into SwiftUI and Combine. We spent months iterating on designs dependent on the proclivities of Objective-C and changes which could be made incrementally to it—which obviously constrained us a lot. Meanwhile the Swift project had been going on for about three years... but only about 70 people inside Apple knew. I was talking regularly to some of the people who were working on Swift, and they’d try to subtly nudge my designs, but there was only so much they could do. After many months of this my boss got me and my colleagues disclosed on Swift (required pulling tons of teeth). The project would be so different in Swift (and would require language changes which the team wouldn’t be able to get to for years) that we canceled our project the next day, after many months of wasted work.
I’m kind of gobsmacked by your story. I guess Apple’s real innovation is implementing what appears to be a multi-domain, cross functional strategy in silos. You get the benefit of ‘experts’ in their function, while getting a cohesive interdependent product from higher level direction — and the beauty is that when it’s all assembled the pieces fit.
Goodbye Apple, great machine.
Grind and polish, smooth and shine.
I couldn't catch your match with mine.
But I will always say I tried,
and if a hundred fires died, perhaps the embers smolder on,
to be remembered when I'm gone.
I guess that's a hypothetical risk, but in reality they'll ask you a few behavioral/situational questions and if your caliber is off they'll know pretty easily.
It's important to remember people who really love their job and do well don't tend to leave so you almost always get stories from people who don't fit that description (though not always - sometimes people leave a workplace for personal reasons).
I've seen the opposite of your thesis -- that people who have opportunities and actively work on their careers tend to change jobs often so whoever does not must be stagnating.
You have to be creative and toe the line. I have just spent some time interviewing after working at a place with a hardcore non disclosure agreement.
My LinkedIn for this job is a brief blurb that reveals the scope of my work/seniority without revealing details about the company. In the Apple case it could be something like "led team of X engineers developing the core server side infrastructure for payments." This is OK because everyone knows that Apple deals with payments and that there must be people working on the backend of it, and its meaningful that you led people in that context. (or whatever one did.)
My resume goes into a tiny bit more detail but also says "details protected by NDA." It's important because w/o saying that it just looks like you had no accomplishments.
In interviews you can usually manage by being abstract enough. EG: you can say "I had to design a system that handled millions of transactions per day" and then talk about high level things that go into the design of such things, you don't need to say what the system specifically did or exactly how many millions of hits it got. You can be explicit about the NDA here too and people have always been very respectful of it.
However, in my case - most of my experience was prior to this company so even if the question is "tell me about how you did X at your last job", I just say "that gets too close to the NDA, but let me tell you how I did that at my previous role."
Basically, it's not a problem, and you gain way more from having Apple on your resume than you lose from not speaking about certain details.
Generally speaking, in an interview, I'm trying to assess /what you can do/. Which is not "what you have done".
I've interviewed at least 2 people, who were hired against my recommendation, in different companies, that clearly fleeced everyone else. In both cases, the candidate walked the walk & talked the talk, but something seemed off. "Sociopath" is a term that is thrown around loosely but I think it applies to both candidates (one man, one woman). In both cases, they'd convinced most of the interviewers they were very strong in areas they'd never professionally tackled before.
I'm less interested in what the candidate claims to have done; that could be reality, or a well-rehearsed and "lived" fantasy. But by talking about hard engineering problems in real-time, with "curve balls", I can usually tell if the candidate has "the right stuff" or not. Even if it's just aptitude. I can train smart people who handle themselves well. But if the candidate can't field tough questions and unexpected (off-script) questions, that's enough for me to pass on the candidate at the level I'm hiring.
More realistically, interviewers delve into specifics. Applied to a computer security position? Well, you'll get interview questions that touch those.
You don't have to hide your knowledge - you just have to hide what exactly you worked on at Apple.
His job title had "inventor" in it, and he mentions making many things, but he describes the impact of his inventions in the passive voice:
"These concept apps were shown around internally, presumably to inspire the people who did the real work."
I gather from this that he didn't see his role as advocacy or promotion of his work, and from "presumably" that he didn't really know what the purpose was of all this showing-round. My question: would he have been able to get into production some of the things he made and cared about, had he engaged in advocacy, or would that have been problematic in Apple's culture?
Prototyping is nice and thinking about solutions is cool but then comes reality
I mean Apple has to see a good bit of value in prototyping things and letting people come up with new stuff, or they wouldn't have job positions with the title "inventor", right? Or is that just part of its self-image, and not really encouraged in reality?
It would stand to reason that he simply wouldn’t have the ability to advocate for his work outside of his design group.
It’s funny, a friend of mine who’s been jumping around tech companies and recently joined a (non-Apple) FAANG had told me that I was taking the Apple secrecy way too seriously.
It’s kind of a unspoken rule at Apple that you just don’t talk about what you worked on while you’re there, and I just normalized that kind of behavior at future ventures for better or for worse. Every former employee I’ve spoken to agreed. HR had (and I’m sure they still do) meetings almost annually showing that leaking has serious implications, from factory checkpoints (even though we’re in SWE) to prevent parts from being leaked to post-mortems on how various HW and SW leaks that end up on MacRumors.
That was quite some time ago. I’ll bet it no longer applies.
Happy Christmas, to those that celebrate it!
The quality curves mostly overlap (interview processes are noisy), but historically, Google has grabbed the very top -- the people who get offers everywhere. I think that's Facebook/Twitter now. I know fairly few really top people at Amazon -- the one-sided employment agreement, and harsh work conditions don't quite have the same appeal as work-life balance, fancy perks, and all the other stuff that comes with Facebook/Google/Twitter.
Compensation's similar, though, and about double what one would get outside of FAANG.
When someone here writes "I work at FAANG", that usually means Amazon.
Amazon: 5, 5, 40, 50
Google: 40, 30, 25, 5
Quite a difference in what they expect their employee tenure to be / be like I think.
They do split it up, vesting every six months, so it’s actually 8 straight 12.5% chunks.
1) Who is hiring top people in my group of colleagues
2) Who is described by people who work there as having a healthy work environment (i.e. people want to work there)
For Twitter, I'll admit I have a small enough N that I can't speak with very much confidence at all. I have one or two friends there, but they seem very happy, describe their peers as smart, etc. They're competent and I trust them, but well, one or two anecdotes doesn't make data.
But Twitter did put out a few high-profile things like Bootstrap. I don't like or use Bootstrap myself, but it's predominant in that area.
I had a friend that was a derivatives (remember them?) analyst at a big Wall St. firm.
She told me about how they brought catered meals to your desk, and arranged car services to take you home at ungodly hours.
It was all about keeping you at your desk.
She made damn good money, though.
I think I accumulated more time re-reading it than any other (single) web page over the years.
That site looks like the old sites that we could generate from mac.com.
His articles, for me at least, are the most influential ones on how I think about creation and solving hard problems.
Here's a couple
Up & Down the Ladder of Abstraction http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
Inventing on Principle: https://vimeo.com/36579366
But... Isn't that the whole point?
Yes, it can be abused, but it’s kinda like copyright. It’s just like parents having a limited term: it (in theory) catches everyone up to best of X years ago.
Of course, relying upon NDAs in lieu of real trust is trash anyways. Ideally, an [extremely well treated and compensated] team could maintain strict confidence based on ideology alone. Your mission just has to actually change the world for the better in some dramatic way.
To play devil's advocate, myself and quite a few other people probably have a keen interest in precisely what the nature and vision of Apple's long-term research was, even a decade ago. People like Bret think far beyond time scales that measure a single decade.
It's kind of unrealistic to expect a human being to somehow rigorously partition their creative process to respect a myriad of complex legal restrictions.
Imagine your profession is to envision the future. Now imagine the companies you've worked for all have very restrictive NDAs. You can't reason out the future very well when pieces of this thought tree have veritable locks on them; their presence alone jarring to creativity itself.
Such this. Everything I build, regardless of for who, ends up having a very similar smell. I reached conclusions about how things work well years ago. It’s difficult to reinvent the wheel when you already feel like you’ve perfected it.
I would rather claim that this is a peril of laziness.
Like say Apple, the most valuable company in the world.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
It took me a couple years to realize I was the type that invents over 10 years out. It is fun to do, but the tricky part is knowing when to file IP.
It was deleted within hours if not minutes.
Source: worked at Apple, Google, and Facebook among many others and have signed many many NDAs.
#krueger #epstein #...
Found the tweet: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/791767756928462848?s=2... (Tweeted on the day TouchBar was announced; 8 years later)
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37638098-creative-select...
I definitely have a problem with companies claiming the right to your brain 24/7 outside of office, in the proverbial shower, dreaming up an idea entirely unrelated to one's employment. But the very nature of the transaction to work on UI ideas for Apple is that Apple would "own" those ideas.
Also, my Firefox browser twice popped up warning about a slow page when I enabled JS for that page, and I finally gave up. And all this, simply to see a basic text with an empty box. So, this will be an unpopular thought, but it is possible that his prototypes were in fact carefully considered and considered non-optimal, for a variety of practical reasons.
It feels like I am leaving some sort of legacy, no matter how small, and that makes my existence a lot more meaningful.
Did you exchange a walking part in a war for a lead role in a cage? –Pink Floyd
[1] https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/pink-floyd/wish-you-were-he...
"Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value."
Found the tweet: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/791767756928462848?s=2... (Tweeted on the day TouchBar was announced)
Which is increasingly important in the current political climate. Apple doesn't want their employees to be associated with any political views.
A really fine example of capitalism (academically speaking).
I left after two years.
I'd see it as protection of both parties. The company doesn't want any reputational damage or off-message communications. The employee doesn't want to fall afoul of any liabilities they might place upon themselves or the company by revealing or promising anything they shouldn't. So personal social media activity is not prohibited, but social media activity in the context of your employment by the company is.
I suspect Apple might be far harsher than most companies if people step over the line, based upon previous examples.
I’ve just moved out of an R&D group, and yes, there’s things I won’t talk about because Apple pay me very well to keep their “surprise and delight”, well, just that
There’s no culture of fear though, like some are saying, it’s just that there are projects I’ve spent years bringing up from bare bones, then there’s the time it takes to turn that into a product that Apple will sell. I’m willing to wait for that to happen, good news can always wait.
Now I work in icloud. I’m the DRI for privacy in my group, which is something that Apple take very seriously, it’s a fun job although there’s a lot of “it’d be really cool to do that, we could offer X, but we need a good way to keep the users data private under circumstance Y, so we can’t”. There’s going to be some interesting work along those lines in the future.
In the past I’ve worked in software (Aperture, Final Cut), and on technologies (precursor to Spotlight, and then the mechanisms behind Spotlight itself).
None of the above is anything that Apple would have any problem with me talking about, though they’d obviously not want me to disclose anything in the future that I might be working on. I’ve also worked for the Ministry of Defence, and frankly no company I’ve ever worked for has the security of a government agency like that. To compare the two situation borders on the absurd.
I like the various jobs I’ve had at Apple, it’s the longest I’ve ever stayed at any company, even ones I owned! I’m in the fortunate position of being able to choose where I work, and I choose Apple. That’s the strongest statement I can make.
Also your reply seems to be very much in contrast with some other replies here. Which leaves me puzzled.
The thing that they won't do though, is engage in a discussion about Apple products or features, particularly when the issue is an active industry discussion. Apple PR is very explicit about who speaks for the company, and how the company feels about unapproved spokespeople. All corps do this, but Apple takes it very seriously.
For what it's worth, the people I know who work at Apple today, either directly or through acquisition, have the usual set of opinions about big companies, but are well-above-average happy at Apple. I don't know anyone who wouldn't change a thing or two here or there...and the folks that came through acquisition are more mixed, but that's all to be expected.
That being said, you’ll see the last two a lot more than the first, because “I work at Apple” predictably gets people thinking that you are also speaking for the company in an official capacity.
I do think that the overall organization’s relative lack of participation in industry conventions and conferences (unlike the rest of FAMNG) seems to percolate to the rank and file as well, though you do see occasional tech talks from Apple engineers[0]. There’s also a sense that Apple is a world unto itself, there’s certainly enough decades worth of technology to work on and to study, that perhaps there’s relatively less interest in the outside.
Perhaps you just haven’t noticed it because frankly it’s rarely germane; at best it’s an aside to add colour to an argument. This time the topic is Apple and it’s relevant...
Well, we do hear about their issues... when people start rioting (such as with Wistron in India in the last weeks) or jumping out of windows (Foxconn had to install nets to catch suiciders).
Subcontracting out work should not absolve Apple from responsibility.
When it comes to labour rights, they practically do. Thats why it is so cheap to produce there. Thats why apple uses them.
No, please don't try to claim that work could be done in the US. It can't.
Apple could build and operate the factories themselves.
At the scale of Wistron and Foxconn we're not talking about "some assholes", we're talking about the companies' leadership.
Apple (and other companies) specifically source stuff out to have that "liability shield" while being able to extract as low prices as possible. If their "labor rules" were worth the paper they are written on they'd hire the people themselves.
Usually this happens though when companies outsource their core business (construction or package delivery), so that applies not that well to Apple.
You'd think so, but no - with the media economics being what it is, media outlets have to think 10-20 times before publishing anything negative about corporates because then you potentially lose out on their advertising money.
Don't mix marketing with work conditions.
I've worked with Apple extensively over the last 10 years or so, and what I see from the outside looking in is that they are quite a bureaucratic and very siloed organisation that appears much more "typical" compared to other similarly large organisations than you would assume from their shiny exterior.
Anyone who knows anything about large organisations knows how bad communication between departments/divisions can be by default. The phrase "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" often applies here.
So for Apple, this plays somewhat into their hands. The various parts of the organisation are heavily siloed, with strict controls on cross-communication and even global teams involved in say the roll-out following new product launches, only get to hear many of the details (sometimes any of the details) on the day of launch.
It's a bit like the difference between Zero-Trust computing and the castle-and-moat paradigm. Apple operates Zero-Trust on strategic details internally. Each department/division is firewalled off from others and communication is heavily managed, orchestrated and most importantly carefully timed, much like their public communication is.
This leads them to being very good at keeping secrets within the org. The downside (as you would imagine) is that working with them can be quite a challenge. And I imagine working for them is very tough if you're at the outer edges and in one of the teams that are always "the last to know".
Edit: typo
When I worked on Google Wallet, I remember most of the leaks coming from people running "strings" on the Android binaries. Stuff that wasn't released would ship in release builds but be turned off by feature flags. The feature flags had, apparently, easy to decipher names. I don't really know how actual names ended up in release builds (they're just enum values on the wire), but there was quite a push to remove some of this stuff before release to keep leaks to a minimum. Lots of tooling created, and I never heard about it again. (I feel like there are some authors that have some trademark method of getting scoops, and when that changes even in the slightest, they disappear into the ether never to be heard from again.)
Overall, I found all the secrecy kind of pointless. I spent most of my time at Google working on a project that was an open-source embedded device, and nobody ever wrote articles about upcoming features... even though they could clone the Git repository, read all the code, read all the incredibly-detailed commit messages, run it on their machine, and send us a pull request. My conclusion is that nobody really cared.
So I guess that helps. But it seems wildly inefficient to me. I guess it helps to have a giant pile of cash.
Part of it is also regular training. And that training does not just involve sticks (You can and will be fired for leaking) but also carrots — leaks hurt Apple's stock price, and since most people in a position to leak own stock, you'd be taking money out of your own pocket (and your colleagues').
> It’s a real problem for those who want to showcase their portfolio
Once a product has shipped, you can generally talk about it to some extent. The article linked here seems to be talking more about research, which is more problematic because it's not really tied to a specific, shipped product.
We still don't know how Glacier works.
Can't say.
"What were the biggest challenges at your last job?"
Can't say.
"Can you describe a situation in your last job that taught you about professionalism?"
Can't say.
"OK, did you like your last job?"
Can't say.
----
So you could've done absolutely nothing of value or done something amazing, but the simple fact that you worked at a multinational company is supposed to make you stand out positively.
I suppose working at Apple was that mistake?
I was at Apple from August 2007 to November 2010.
My job was to play with experimental hardware platforms and input technologies, and come up with new user-interface and application concepts for them. I would then design and prototype apps to demo these ideas. These concept apps were shown around internally, presumably to inspire the people who did the real work.
A few things I became known for include pervasively direct-manipulation interfaces (where users do their thing by moving and gesturing with meaningful objects, instead of relying on verb buttons and other indirect controls), new forms of creative tools and new ways of learning information, and being easily frustrated with the realities of corporate research.
I made many, many things. The ones I cared deeply about mostly didn't catch on.
I would love to show you these things -- maybe they'll inspire you instead. In the box below, I have put all of my creations that I can show publicly:
FAQ:
Q - But that box is empty! It's an empty box!
A - Yes, exactly.
Q - Oh, okay, I thought you had made some sort of mistake.
A - Yes, exactly.
Edit: With JS enabled, the design just amazed me
In summary, everyone seeing and commenting on everything has two consequences:
(1) too much politics and need to potentially justify everything to everyone at the company and their dogs, not just stakeholders, literally everyone in the company, on Memegen, on TGIF, and to the world when stuff inevitably leaks, before the product is ready. This leads to groupthink and no one gets the courage of their conviction. [sometimes this is good and prevents poor products from get to the customer, but usually when that's the case, the team were incompetent and deliberately ignoring prior feedback under the ever-applicable excuse of "you are not the target customer" and could have prevented them if they cared.]
(2) when you have a siloed culture, you put the integration job, responsibility, and accountability on the management who coordinate. Therefore you have to be careful who you put in charge and the organization does not scale magically. But once you put the right person in charge, they are accountable and cannot slack off, nor make poor choices forever and expect others underneath them to fix them and expect them to be accountable. The buck stops with the integration point, which is singular. They have to make clear and concrete decisions, leaving less room for spray and pray or blaming stuff on others.
Point #2 has synergies with the way Apple is structured: not P&Ls, rather each person is an expert on some aspect of the product and the editing function and discussion on what to build happens very transparently at the top (evidently through heated discussions mediated by Steve who was not afraid of conflicts [contrast with Google execs.]) One person handles software, another handles hardware, another one silicon, etc. and they fight at the top not through proxy wars at the bottom. My sense is this aspect is what Steve "signed-off" on, and the rest naturally followed with that plus product secrecy aspirations (for marketing reasons and due to scar tissues from a past era).
This is so laden with internal contradictions that I can only presume it was part of an internal Reality Distortion Field training. Are you suggesting that Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi don't have budgets? And that every detail the 50k engineers work on are mediated by 5 people?
I think you know exactly what I mean. If you’re just trying to engage in an argument at the margin, you are not going to get one.
No, instead you have some finance team model the revenue split, to simulate the P&L you would have otherwise (and then the execs fight over the model, whether it's fair to give iOS any money for Apple Music when they support Windows and Android, etc.). This is a bog standard approach that many SV firms take. Even non-SV firms have to deal with this sort of thing when the IT department reports to the CFO.
Yes, Alphabet has 'side bets' but there are still _many_ products and services under the Google umbrella, and has even rolled some into their own. As best I can tell, this was a tool to quarantine specific executives from infecting the rest of Google -- when your acquisitions are holding quarterly all hands with an opener of 'Fuck being Googley' then you have a problem to solve.
It's hard to reconcile the 'ignorance is strength' argument you've offered here -- if employees aren't allowed to know what anyone else is doing, or even what the org chart looks like, then you can't have the collaboration it would take to make things work together well. And you would expect to end up with a lot of duplicated efforts, since middle managers are kept in the dark about one another's work.
It also shows the internal mailing lists, how to get yourself on it (if it’s not self-add) etc. Then you can find the disclosures you might need for black/ultra-black projects...
It’s actually relatively simple to get access to anything you need, if you have the need and aren’t just curious.
I cannot fathom people preferring to work there over Google or Facebook, however everyone does have different ethics and pov’s.
Anybody else get it too or am I the only one?
This is while on Firefox Developer Edition on a Windows 10 PC.
I very rarely see discussions about the internal politics, or disclaimers about working for Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix or Apple.
But Apple folk tend to talk about non-NDA Apple stuff, Apple gossip and politics, and "guess which famous product lead I once swapped words with!" nonsense, and nothing else.