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Comment by moralestapia | Hacker News Reader

What an absolute ass was that Apple engineer ...

For an off the books meeting with someone who was concerned about getting banned, that seems like a lot of candor. Perfectly reasonable.

I hope we both get surrounded by the kind of people each of us prefer :)

My experience is limited, but no one I've engaged with at Apple has ever admitted fault for anything. I think it's a liability/culture thing.

The feeling I get reading that is that you shouldn't interpret that conversation as a verbatim quotation. Even though the author did everything possible to make it seem like it was verbatim; a hunch I get reading the entire thing is that its summarized and viewed through the author's eyes.

E.g. maybe they actually said some variation of "your app is bricking iPhones? how did you get through app store review..." and the author interpreted it as "squashing his company like a bug".

I might be wrong here, but based on the context, I read the "I don't want to know about your names or your company" as CYA for both parties: "I can't be legally obligated to disclose things I don't know, so please don't tell me anything you don't want Apple to know. I can't say that outright, though, so instead I'm going to say something that could be reasonably read as 'I'm busy and don't want to hear your pitch'".

He did an hour of technical discussions, and found the issue. It’s not his fault apple makes him sign an employment secrecy contract so strict he has to be that careful or lose his job.

It's obviously exaggerated for humor. Has no one ever told anyone else a story before? No one talks like this.

"Off-the-books" meetings are just friend-based connections. I got a bug in the Linux nvidia driver fixed that was affecting me by just hitting up an old friend. I could write that story as him saying "Keep this top-secret" if I wanted because that's just fun storywriting.

OP here: I can see why you'd think "this can't possibly be real," but I assure you that the story is real, not exaggerated. I was there.

So the quotes are direct and not paraphrased? Looks like I’m the one without my finger on the pulse of human interaction then.

I mean, to be fair, these events happened several years ago. My memory is as faulty as any other human being's, but as far as I remember, this is exactly what happened. These were very memorable events that I remember distinctly. It's possible my memory is distorted, but this is literally what I believe happened to the best of my ability.

Obviously, there was more to the conversation that what I wrote, but these are the actual words that I remember being said.

For more context, the PM at Apple in question was a former colleague of my then girlfriend. I reached out to her to have a friendly catch up. It wasn't positioned as meeting officially with Apple. I was literally just going through LinkedIn trying to figure out who I knew at Apple. So I hit her up on LinkedIn and asked to catch up, then told her about the situation. And this is how she responded. Worth noting: English is not her native language.

Amusing to get the Trisolaran response to a warm intro. I suppose there’s all kinds of people in the world. Unlucky there.

I can’t imagine anyone treating me like that and I’ve dealt with billionaires. Hilarious to have some L3 FAANG act like Genghis Khan.

Yeah, this is why I was begging investors for a high-level intro to someone at Apple, because I was very afraid that I’d run into some random bureaucrat that would have a similar response.

Your bar is higher than mine.

Unlike Apple's formal "developer evangelist" and several others I contacted, the guy actually took the time to talk to us, and I was/am grateful for that. He's a cog in a very large corporate machine. Apple is Apple. He's not the CEO. He was doing his job and did me a favor. I am grateful to him.

He was a part of Apple. So by default he was an …

But he was pretty professional in the way he went about it, “no names, no company”. And “You found a security bug! Show me. But you won’t get credit”

The engineer (second convo) or the PM (first convo)?

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