I know a guy who once worked on Apple Silicon and then moved to Google to work on their CPUs. Something he told me really struck me. He said he liked Google because they’re really cool and he told me that he liked that they had this thing called a “blameless post mortem” (very familiar to us software folk) and he thought it was cool.

He said that when they missed a deadline for tape-out, there was a blameless post-mortem and it did a good job of identifying the problem. And it was quite effective.

I asked him why he was surprised. Was Apple different? He’d been there almost a decade “Oh, I don’t know if there was a process. The idea that we could delay tape-out was unthinkable”.

That stuck with me for the difference between the two organizations.