Why do I hardly ever see an Apple employee on the internet? | Hacker News Reader

Why do I hardly ever see an Apple employee on the internet?

24 pointsbe5invis10 comments

I see Google, Microsoft and Facebook employees often, but why there is no Apple?

Also this : http://worrydream.com/#!/Freedom

I've noticed this too, and can only imagine that Apple clamps down hard. People I admired before they joined Apple (such as David Betz, Jordan Hubbard and Doug Field) became practically invisible, as if they'd fallen into a black hole.

I suppose they're well cared for, but I also suppose that it can be lonely in there.

A bit late, but I worked in the Hardware Org there for ~3 years. There are notable limits on any sort of public comment or contribution. Just about everything has to approved by an external comms group, legal, and an open source approval group if it's software. This applies to both communications & public software contributions. Email messages to public mailing lists have to be approved. Release notes for software, xquartz CUPS etc, have to be vetted and approved. Contributions to open source projects are even more arduous as there's yet another group asserting authority. As far as the company is concerned that applied to anything created by the employee, there is no software work unrelated to employment.

The fear of the eldritch powers of The GPL run deep with lawyers and (some?) upper management. Circa ~2010 my group was told NO GPLv3, not even binaries. "Exceptions" were made once reality was explained. ZFS for OSX was another casualty of licensing fear. Internal builds worked pretty well until approval for CDDL fell apart.

In reality everyone I worked with participated in public forums without mentioning employer or anything that would obviously track back to Apple. Going to conventions etc was as a private citizen and then expense the costs later. Public code contributions were either under pseudonyms or private patches.

Apple has notoriously strict security protocols. I actually wrote a book about it, but here's some resources (near the bottom) http://theriseofsiri.com/inspiration/

Hmmm...what do you mean exactly? Multiple ones are on twitter etc. http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-you-should-fo...

There's also a certain amount of fear involved: I know some Apple employees online (not blogs), but does sharing information about it endanger that? Who knows...

You don't see them at conferences either. :/

What do you mean by the "internet". If you go on linkedin for example, can you not search for people working at Apple ?

I think that by saying 'internet' he wanted to say on HN or social networks. For example you see tons of Google's guys having a public blog but not Apple's.

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