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urthor

Keep in mind this attitude makes total sense to hardware engineers.

The hardware business is...

Let's just say that the difficulties you face definitely exist for hardware engineers.

But, difficulties involving negotiations plus recalcitrant South Korean factory owners are WORSE.

In "South Korean factory owner negotiations," secrecy is paramount.

Particularly if said South Korean factory owner is the biggest supplier of iPhone screens. And also makes an entire line of competitor phones to your products.

Apple's CEO, COO and "head of services" all have degrees from Duke University and 30 year careers in supply chain management. The company is widely regarded as being run by a Gang of 4, those 3 plus the general counsel.

From the outside, Apple is very much a hardware company that knows nothing about software.

The software is only good because Mac fans join the company and slave hard enough to make it that way.

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> Keep in mind this attitude makes total sense to hardware engineers.

> The hardware business is...

> Let's just say that the difficulties you face definitely exist for hardware engineers.

I’ve worked in hardware and I’ve worked with multiple Korean CMs and I’m still struggling to understand what you’re trying to say. I don’t agree that this makes “total sense”.

Instead of being intentionally vague, can you please just describe what you’re trying to explain without the “Let’s just say…” and other totally unnecessary secrecy? This entire thread is about how toxic and unproductive it is when people use unnecessary secrecy and vagueness, so it’s kind of ironic to read comments using unnecessary vagueness.

I don't see the comment you replied to as being that vague: that are claiming that the information asymmetry with the hardware manufacturers/suppliers (including Samsung) in terms of things like price negotiations and "what's the next big thing" is more valuable than the downsides of internal engineer productivity.

Maybe? They didn’t claim anything at all. I didn’t see anything in that comment about price negotiations. Frankly I’m as confused as the grandparent as to what was being said.

I'd say the reason I was keeping it ambiguous is that I wasn't really making a point about hardware or price negotiations specifically. I'm not a hardware person at all.

I was maybe close to making a point that with supply chains, there's many reasons that might justify that kind of secrecy.

Really I just want to create empathy about non-software engineering reasons for secrecy.

Not ram home a particular hypothesis about a corporation I've never worked for. I have a habit of thinking from the perspective of corporate titans.

re: price negotiations which is my jam (3-D Negotiation and Never Split the Difference are excellent bedtime reading).

Keep in mind secrecy is often not JUST about withholding information to negotiate the best price. Sometimes the information is something the other person in the negotiation would also like you to keep secret.

' I have a habit of thinking from the perspective of corporate titans.'

Thats sounds a bit presumtious, have you ever validated how accurate that perspective is? Maybe the perspective you imagine is totally different from reality.

Well I don't think I'm right haha. I haven't met these people and asked them exactly what they were thinking.

But I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided.

Saying "assuming a corporation made a smart decision, why did xxx make that decision?" is usually a very fruitful line of thought.

> I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are foolish and misguided.

I honestly think we're very biased towards assuming our senior corporate leaders are gods and not fallible mortals.

All humans make mistakes. Very bad mistakes. Even very smart people. Depending on circumstances and level of power, some people suffer the consequences of their mistakes, and others don't.

One common mistake of leaders is to surround themselves with "yes men" who never criticize them or tell them the truth. Leaders can become very detached from reality, but their power allows them to survive and even thrive in a state of reality detachment. And these leaders always have people who will defend them no matter what and paint them as infallible geniuses because of their power, which is part of what contributes to never suffering the consequences of mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes.

But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23771902/

Diagnostic errors by Doctors are probably the gold standard of being error free. My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were.

What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the decision.

> But when they committed to that mistake, they thought they were right at the time

I never met a person who commited to a mistake, and thought they were wrong at the time. Have you?

> My estimate is that CEO types are usually right at least 60% of the time with these big decisions as it were.

How do you arrive at this number? For a doctor there is a clear correct and wrong diagnosis. For a corporate CEO, who decided against doing a merger, how do you even know that decision was taken at all? How do you known if it was right or wrong? You can't simulate an alternative business.

Suppose you could simulate it accurately, and the revenue were up, profit margin is down, and stock price is up - is that good or bad? You can't even determine, non subjectively, which option is better

> What I'm curious about is why they thought they were right when they made the decision.

This may be important to determine liability in a malpractice lawsuit, but otherwise I'm not sure why we should care much why someone was mistaken if we're all agreed that the decision was mistaken.

The difference here is that we're not even agreed that Apple's culture of secrecy is wrong. It's a controversy. If we're talking about a diagnostic error by a doctor, we're assuming there's no controversy over whether it was actually wrong.

Two vastly different scenarios:

1) Tim Cook made a mistake but made the best decision he could given the information at the time.

2) Tim Cook didn't make a mistake.

If you're willing to agree on 1, and that Apple's culture should change, then I'm happy to grant you "made the best decision he could given the information at the time", or at least not argue it too much, because the culture is the important matter, and not the thoughts inside Tim Cook's brain.

"Assume he's smart" is vastly different than "Assume he's right".

There are many times in my career when I look at code that I'd previously written and wonder "What the heck was I thinking???" It's an interesting question psychologically, but still, I fully recognize that the code I wrote was bad. And regardless of how much time I spend on post-mortem analysis, the crucial thing is to fix the code.

> corporate leaders are foolish and misguided.

> corporation made a smart decision

The bankers who traded subprime mortgages and fucked off with their gains made an excellent decision. The corporations didn't, because they are not real, they don't make decisions.

Just because something is in the interest of a senior leader, does not mean it's in the interest of the whole company.

I totally didn't get that all. But could be me.

Seems like very Tim Cook thing to do. But the cost on innovation... doesn't really matter to him.

The "open secret factoid" that OP is dancing around is that Samsung makes screens for iPhones, and is also obviously Apple's biggest competitor as the default "Premiere Android phone" brand.

I don't really see what this detail has to do with OP's point about hardware engineer logic/gang of four/etc

I regularly work for companies working for Apple, have a number of ex-coworkers who worked, or went to work to Apple.

Lose tongues are everywhere, and Apple can't seem to keep anything secret in its China RnD unit.

Shenzhen is a city of 17M on the paper, but very few people are working in Hardware now. It's a very small industry. I feel I know more than half of all companies on somebody's resume. Most of 30-40 years olds in the industry were already working for 10+ years.

Btw Most of AirPods RnD was done in China, not California.

I would also add that hardware unit side in Apple is said to be very conservative, and a mirror image of their software team. At least in China, they hold a lifelong negative score system, where -30 is you are out under any conditions, and 15 minutes late counts as -3. They also use USB sticks to move files around, and work on offline computers to prevent leaks. Also, WinXP everywhere.

I agree that there is an element of logic in the process, but I also think that it's being done today to a large extent because "this is how we do things at Apple" rather than because it fits the needs of that particular project.

To your example, imagine that the full-time Apple employee responsible for negotiating with that SK factory owner also doesn't know that Apple wants the factory to produce iPhone screens. Just go sign a factory that satisfies our hundreds of requirements, none of which you know, and by the way we need it in a month and everyone else knows what is required but they can't / won't tell you.

There is just no way to get the best results when you operate that way internally.

Yes, absolutely.

Keep in mind as well, all corporate policies follow a normal distribution.

Most of the time, I find corporations never aim for 90th percentile high performance. Perfect is the enemy of cost effective.

They want "works pretty well 80% of the time. And the 20% that's balls up, make sure it's not so bad."

In your case I suspect the reason is they think "too much secrecy" has much less downside than "too little secrecy."

Now, whether that's incompetence or malice, we can never know. But those are the gears turning in the head of the Director/VP who's classifying these projects.

You're exactly right that companies don't want pure efficiency, and they shouldn't -- there will always be competing priorities to be weighed.

Here's the rub for me, in this particular role at this particular time in this particular company: the workload was extremely heavy, the deadlines were extremely unrealistic, the threat of failure was extreme (up to and including terminating the entire org for failure to meet objectives), and yet it must be done blindfolded and with both hands tied behind our backs.

I'm sure it isn't always like that at Apple, but that was toxic and it contributed to all sorts of toxic behaviors throughout the org. It's no wonder to me that this behavior leads to burnout across the company.

100%. All I'd say is that I've seen it happen at every large corporation.

At any one time a project or team gets chewed up and spat out.

Corporate one size fits all policies, and the Darwinian competition for resources, inevitably creates this.

That's just the story of corporate life in a nutshell. Shit goes wrong, you gotta get ready & job hop at the first sign of trouble.

Have you expanded on the toxicity somewhere? I’m tying to understand how an organization like apple can be so toxic and successful. Makes a really bad impression to me.

Besides my comments here, I haven't spoken about it before.

For what it's worth, Apple is hugely siloed and also just plain huge. It's entirely possible that the culture in other orgs was completely different from what I experienced, because it was very hard to interact with anyone outside of your org or the current project scope.

How are they so successful despite this culture? In the case of the project I worked on, I saw a few reasons for success:

1. Management expressed that failure was not an option, so a few people (myself included) out of hundreds pushed ourselves beyond the limit to deliver.

2. Spending a TON of money. I had a different approach to Apple's way of controlling costs (they were very much in the "buying DRAM for iPhones" mindset), and easily shaved millions off of the project. But the inefficiencies inherent to the project's timeline and secrecy and other stakeholders meant the project came in probably 2-3x more expensive than I would have otherwise spent.

3. Leveraging existing institutional resources. Already having a global network and datacenter footprint helped immensely on the time to ship, but it also came with a ton of bureaucratic baggage.

4. Being so large that it ultimately didn't matter. While the project was essential for a key initiative to succeed, and many people (perhaps the entire org) would have been let go if it had failed, ultimately the company would have been fine if it didn't happen. They probably would have just postponed the launch by a year or two and had another org handle the project. It's very hard for a company Apple's size to have anything be an existential threat, so you get a lot of chances.

My impression as outsider privy only to public information was that this culture was seeded by Steve Jobs, who disliked leaks, partly because he liked their product announcements to be glamorous and surprising. I do know that company culture can be very sticky so not surprised this would persist to this day.

How much of an advantage are you really getting here? The first day they are sold samsung has the airpod torn apart and rendered on a computer screen with all specs known. There are no big secrets here, these aren't warheads. It didn't take long for the gas stations around me to start selling knock off airpods along side the knock off lightning cables. If you get it early vs not, its not going to make a big difference. People who want to be in the apple ecosystem will buy the airpods anyway and people who don't care about that will buy whatever alternative is on the market, probably whats on sale at the time when they look.

I imagine the brand recognition of being the innovator here (whether or not they really have innovated on anything, I won't judge that here) is a bigger factor in the market than it appears at first. At the very least, that lasting, prestigious reputation of being a global innovator fits the bill for the type of "personality" that the corporation exhibits and must tickle something's fancy there, and at most it causes a skew in the market towards Apple whereupon they can charge their exorbitant prices per unit because they did it first.

Something that's telling of my conjecture is the use of the phrase, "knock off airpods" in your comment - I imagine that came about subconsciously, and yet such a phrase seems to have a powerful effect on every other product that comes after.

e: formatting, I get markdown rules mixed up with HN's!

I don’t think apple can charge higher prices because they’re first. If anything it’s because they are consistently good. Or just consistent.

Plenty of android phones have plenty of technological leaps over iphones but the market is pretty much oblivious seemingly

That’s just the issue. You can’t get all of the “innovations” in one phone and they are all hampered by janky software by hardware manufacturers who can’t do good software.

If you want an Android phone with decent software and hardware, you’re stuck with only being able to choose a Google produced phone.

It’s not about preventing knockoffs, apple is not built on first mover advantage.

It’s about protecting price on contracts for supplies that are locked in well before launch. When AirPods launch apple has contracts lined up already for production of many thousands of them if not millions.

So if samsung knows apple wants to use some part from some vendor they will actually go to that vendor and attempt to buy out their stock? Seems like there is a market for unscummy vendors who won't do that to you then.

> Apple's CEO, COO and "head of services" all have degrees from Duke University

Why do you mention this? Duke awards thousands of degrees every year. It's a highly ranked university, but the number of people in the world with degrees from highly ranked universities is massive. It's not rare.

The chances of the top three (four?) executives at any given giant multinational company all holding degrees from the same institution is pretty small. I don’t think there is an intent to malign Duke, but it is noteworthy.

> The chances of the top three (four?) executives at any given giant multinational company all holding degrees from the same institution is pretty small.

Not really. Colleges are social networks. Alumni favor each other. Facebook and Google were both founded at colleges.

> I don’t think there is an intent to malign Duke

I read it the opposite way, as attempting to say that having degrees from Duke somehow makes Apple leadership uniquely capable: "all have degrees from Duke University and 30 year careers in supply chain management".

> but it is noteworthy.

It's some interesting trivia. But it's not clear why it's noteworthy in the context of the discussion of secrecy at Apple.

Tim Cook got an MBA at Duke, Jeff Williams got an MBA at Duke. Tim Cook was at IBM, Jeff Williams was at IBM. Tim Cook joined Apple in operations, Jeff Williams joined Apple in operations. Do you think those are all just random chance coincidences?

> The software is only good because Mac fans join the company and slave hard enough to make it that way.

What does this even mean? This could easily just say "they have good software because the workers care about what they are making"

> The software is only good because Mac fans join the company and slave hard enough to make it that way.

The software hasn't been good for years now.

Compared to what? Android? windows? Linux?

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