I worked at Apple relatively briefly, in a lead role on an Important Project that required its own form to be disclosed on it (besides the general agreement you sign to begin employment). A truly toxic work environment that I couldn't get out of fast enough once I shipped the project.
All kinds of projects at Apple have their own disclosure forms, and you are only given one to sign if it's deemed necessary to your work. My responsibilities on this project didn't entitle me to be disclosed on it, which led to all manner of hilariously frustrating guessing games as I tried to deliver on the requirements without actually being told what they were. Conversations regularly went like this: "I can't tell you that that approach won't satisfy the requirements, but I would think twice if I were you." Ultimately I think that I puzzled out what was needed and successfully delivered it, but the method was pure madness.
This wasn't even some new silver gadget launch, it was an infrastructure component to a future product launch down the road. Yet everything and anything can be given the top secret treatment.
Why is that? Running a disclosure-required project is prestigious. Being disclosed on projects is a badge of honor, almost even a high score board, and not being disclosed is used as a weapon in big or small ways.
Anything that Apple manages to ship (in my experience) is in spite of their corporate culture, not because of it.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
I’ve been “ultra violet” on a bunch of projects there and it’s more hassle than it’s worth. I too was very happy when I left. Even though I met a ton of wonderful and brilliant people the company itself is insufferable.
I’m disclosed on many many projects at the fruit company and I don’t think there is any prestigiousness. What happened to you is super super rare and that’s what makes it entertaining to read about.
To me as an outsider, this sounds like the Apple pendent to white privilege. I don't really want to doubt your experience but how do you know that there is no prestigiousness when you seem to be in a position with an abundance of disclosures?
Maybe there is this prestige somewhere in Apple, like the people who work at Apple Park are isolated from the rest of us, but I am such a pleb that I never got the memo. Almost everyone has to be disclosed on stuff to work at all.
Apple seems to have a very strange way of doing things when it comes to secrecy.
When I was working for the defense industry, we would just vet people more extensively than needed to give us some margins and while things were on a need to know basis, you would never have been impaired on requirements like that, it’s just too costly.
Don’t most most big tech companies have these? At Microsoft it is pretty common for most people to be in a few “tents” (project specific NDAs).
What is more rare are agreements _outside_ the in place system…
I think the best skill I learned at Google was figuring out how other people's code works. You read the documentation, and then you make some RPC. It doesn't work as documented. You go read the other service's logs and see an error message, but it doesn't make any sense. You search the codebase for that error message. You find that the super deprecated do not include field is mandatory; it's sent to some other service that thinks it's important. 10 minutes later, you fix your code, the RPC works, and you're on to the next thing. No meetings, no calls, no emails, no time zone coordination, no bugs languishing in some queue that you're not even sure it's the right one... just a solution!
I was really surprised how uncommon this is outside of Google. People will hit an issue with a library, file a bug, and just sit there blocked without ever opening up the malfunctioning code and reading through it. Why turn a one player game into a multiplayer game unless you really have to? Reading code is what you do for a living!
Like anything, it's a skill that you need to develop, but it's one that will make you really productive.
I find this difference also between people who grew up on open source vs proprietary software.
I'm nervous about running in production software I can't open up and look at how it works under the hood. I often use that ability to understand my systems better.
Some people just don't care about that. They're used to paying a support agreement and opening a ticket or calling a support rep instead. I will never get it but clearly that's how some people like to, or are at least used to, operate.
People do do this. The problem is the docs never get fixed and everyone needs to do what you just did. Great if you have essentially infinite money; otherwise bad.
To me documentation is largely a lost cause, it starts out behind the code and stays that way forever, because the machine can't execute the documentation. Yes, the human maintaining the code is more important than the computer running the code, but when you have an infinite number of tasks to get done, what the computer accepts is a pretty good stopping point for most people.
Personally I see a lot of value in documentation (that's how I learned the basics of programming and the systems I use), but since it's always out of date and wrong, I tend to undervalue it. Maybe that's a mistake.
So I guess the other side of the coin is that some people are very good at managing their vendors, internally or externally. This is another useful skill to learn. I'm not that good at it, but it's good to have both options in your toolbox.
FB is eons ahead of Microsoft in this regard. Their homogenous development experience eliminates tonnes of learning curve and busywork that you get with thousands of unique repos, build pipelines and and environments.
At Amazon, at least AWS, I as a consultant can ask any service team about features coming down the pike and the expected timeline. We can even share with customers with permission if they sign the appropriate NDA. As far as I know, MS is the same way. Enterprise customers want to be kept in the loop and we need to validate an offering and get customer feedback. AWS often makes changes to products before they are released publicly. That’s why you already have customer testimonials before a product is released.
It's ironic when they talk about "office collaboration" and "bumping into colleagues" but in reality you can't even talk about what you're doing to most (internal) people
I take that to mean that “office collaboration” is letting people know what they need to know “off the record” and you don’t want any chat logs showing it.
>Anything that Apple manages to ship (in my experience) is in spite of their corporate culture, not because of it.
You can say this about probably every large company out there and yet in the end they deliver. The saying "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" applies to corporate cultures as well imho. Once the target becomes to optimize against the culture then the culture ceases to be a good culture.
In some ways I can see secrecy diluting the usual backstabbing politics of larger corporations since different groups lack as much information with which to wage such politics against each other.
lots of stuff isn't disclosed that isn't important. sure some things may be secret or require that not everyone can be added but that's the same as top secret projects.
it's not toxic in and of itself. i think there are a lot of toxic teams but not every team and not every org are that way. if you can't get disclosed on something that you manage then you have some toxic issues but i wouldn't shit on the entire concept because of that, i would question why the org and company are that way as a whole and fix the root issues
> Secrecy is a value it held dear, to preserve the “surprise and delight” for customers.
I think the last time I felt this way about an Apple Event was the launch of the iPad. Not only are they burning out engineers, they're optimizing for a value that isn't part of their secret sauce anymore. I expect innovation, but not surprise. An N'th generation anything just won't have the same zing as it did the first few times.
Imagine the counterfactual: an Apple engineering blog that routinely publishes in depth articles describing the awesome challenges that their engineering teams are overcoming in an org as vertically integrated as Apple. That would make me more hype about their products than anything.
Apple (at least their security org) has done this before with their talks at Blackhat [1] where they've detailed pieces of their boot chain and interesting challenges they solved while building Find My's offline location feature
I would personally be very interested in such a blog, but so would Apple's competitors. I've read that being too open about methods can let competitors catch up to once-unique advantages quickly, especially as it lets them design a roadmap of future features to work on.
Suppose Apple had an engineering blog that released a roadmap about the M1 chips before their release. Then, Apple's laptops might not have such a massive lead on Intel/AMD processors today, as laptop manufacturers may have invested more in ARM processors by seeing them as viable due to Apple's work.
Oh please. There's no need for any engineering blog to publish a company's 2 year product roadmap slides moments after presenting them to leadership, or ever. There are surely a bazillion problems solved every year at much finer detail than would be useful as a decision tree for competitors. How about OS engineering? Apps? Physical manufacturing? Logistics engineering? CAD design? At the level of detail. None of these things if covered at a small enough scope would provide competitors an undue advantage, but each would definitely inspire a young or aspiring engineer to up their game. Maybe they can just hoard the best talent with money to keep them away from competitors, but how much future and potential talent are they leaving on the table by forcing their engineers to bottle up their innate human desire to share their wisdom? It's a short-sighted local minima, they can do better.
>Then, Apple's laptops might not have such a massive lead on Intel/AMD processors today
That's giving Intel a heck of a lot of credit. Intel is a massive ship moving along at full speed. They aren't the most agile of companies to say the least. Intel's x86 giant hammer convinces themselves that everything is an x86 nail. How else do you explain the fact that they are so woefully behind in the times? Apple and Intel worked together in CPUs before. Intel knows what Apple wants/needs, and refuses to give it to them. I seriously can't imagine that Apple and Intel never met about how the Intel chip just wasn't advancing, yet Intel plodded on anyways.
Whilst I acknowledge that the M1 macs are pretty good, Intel power pcs on everyone else's desks that work just fine for the standard Microsoft Office workload. Intel are not miles behind, they are just not ahead. In the world of Enterprise Applications x86s compatibility with legacy code is going to be important to many large organisations.
Meanwhile Apple with probably pull support for Rosetta2 in a couple of years (like last time), but Photoshop and Logic will keep working and the most users won't care.
So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world.
> So whilst Intel have not innovated at the speed us techies would have liked, x86 is here to stay in the non-apple world.
Not necessarily! A lot of office needs boil down to the Office 365 suite, Adobe and the SAP GUI - all of which now have native M1 variants. The only thing that's needed is someone other than Apple and Qualcomm actually putting out a desktop-worthy ARM CPU so that Microsoft can provide Windows-on-ARM for everyone (there are rumors of a secret deal between MS/QC that is bound to expire soon-ish). Once the price point gets low enough for corporate beancounters to buy a ton of ARM Windows devices for paper pushers, they will do so - and by that point, Intel is doomed. AMD is eating their lunch in the server market, and Intel doesn't have anything that can compete with ARM on power-per-watt and price.
What if Apple ended up supplying older M1 designs, not cutting edge but efficient on batteries and forced down to a really low price… to Google, for making chromebooks with? Bottom end craptops not even being handled by Apple anymore but still running an older generation of M1 cpus, with the lesser but still substantial benefits and the battery life?
On the extreme low end it's not only about Windows. Chromebooks are a thing. Eventually M1 chromebooks and Apple leveraging the fact that now they're a CPU designer? After they do some more upgrades to their own tech for their own purposes?
Who would be manufacturing these older M1 chips after Apple is currently having the later generations? Apple's current needs would mean TSMC capacity will be focused on these newer chips. It's not like there's a new fab with each generation of chips.
That’s a very Pyrrhic victory for Intel to be dominant in the personal computer space. Apple alone sells more ARM based devices than the total non server market and it only has a 15% market share in phones worldwide. Even in the server space, the cloud providers are moving toward ARM where it can.
“Surprise and delight” is just the PR line, the point is having more control over the marketing and positioning of a product on launch. We could debate whether that’s worth the R&D inefficiency, but Apple hasn’t exactly failed by deferring to their marketing folks over the years.
People have been calling for/or expected Apple to switch to ARM/make their own chip for years and years before they actually switched. At that point people were just surprised to see Apple actually do something.
Most of their regular users don't even know what Arm or Intel is, let alone cares about it. A macbook is a macbook. The fact that it's faster is lost on most people as well, since their daily use consists of opening the browser or video conferencing or (if they have a PC) gaming.
Computers have plateaued for their current use case. The only innovation that will make a difference in the near future is AI.
The m1 gains are more impactful than just speed, namely battery life and thermals. The fact that I can get a full workday or more depending on load, all without a loud fan screaming at
me all day honestly makes this the first laptop I've owned that works as a genuinely fully portable workstation. It's basically eliminated charge anxiety. It's not a complete game changer or anything like the original iPhone, but it's a pretty massive upgrade over the machines of 2 years ago.
And "regular people" definitely care about battery life in a laptop - it's probably the most important parameter for someone who genuinely needs a laptop over a desktop.
I was a PC gamer but primarily use Macs for work. But I bought the MacBook Air and aside from one game (Elden Ring) every game I usually play works on the MacBook Air, some with Rosetta and some with native ARM support.
Heh. "Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the game selection?"
I'm an Apple guy, I just thought it was funny. And my Airpod Pro observation isn't on how great they were at creating it, rather 'can you please help me get mine to switch back out of mono mode, after I put them in my ears one at a time and inadvertently convinced 'em that life is mono now?' (mind you, I kind of know: they freak out if asked to play 96k content and you get a mono low-res version)
I stopped giving a shit about MacBooks when they started limiting RAM to 16G, and put in that stupid bar thing instead of function keys.
If anyone was excited about the new MacBook, I'm guessing it's because they're already deep into Apple as a brand.
Me, I just want a computer that works, has decent specs* and doesn't treat me like an imbecile, or refuse to ship Bash >3 because the legal team got antsy about GPLv3. (I just loooove when I'm writing shell scripts that might be used by coworkers running Macs and I need to make sure that I either limit myself to sh functionality, or Bash 3 functionality)
Which is why I've been running Linux laptops since then.
*And no, 16G is not enough, but I've had many fans try to explain to me why it was.
Why not just install a newer version of bash? It’s trivial to do so with homebrew. I’m sure your team has other dependencies that must be installed in order to run your software.
Because a shell script is supposed to be a lowest common denominator. Run this, and it'll ensure you have Maven, it'll ensure you have Java 11+, then it'll build the thing and run the thing.
And now I'm needing to sniff your OS, detect whether or not Homebrew is installed, install it if not, then install Bash >3, then run the actual meat of the script.
All because of Apple's lawyers being scared of GPLv3.
At this point, I may as well insist that you install pyenv and Poetry and deliver it as a Python package.
Bash is not a common denominator anywhere except Linux. Just write what you want as POSIX shell and it will work in a lot of places.
You already have to deal with platform-specific differences even (nay - especially!) across Linux with things like apt vs yum vs dnf vs pacman vs Nix. One more is really a non-issue.
Your bash scripts won't work on Windows, either. If we are here talking about bash being a "common default" maybe we shouldn't leave out the operating system that has about a 90% global marketshare.
If your development team doesn't have the time and resources to support a multi-platform development environment, they shouldn't do so.
Apple didn't change their business model, the GPL changed their license, and it's a license that's simply not compatible with any closed-source software business. Does your employer let you integrate GPL v3 code into your products?
Who besides industry geeks actually cared about that?
ipod was innovative for the common man.
iphone was innovative for the common man.
ipad was innovative for the common man.
The rest? Meh.
Nowadays it's just an upgrade treadmill, consisting of "To re-pair my old watch I first need to update to the latest watch software (even though it worked fine before I unpaired it). But to update the watch software I need to update my phone software to a higher version than it supports, so now I need a new phone, which now won't work with my computer unless I update that, but it doesn't support the latest OS so now I need to buy a new computer..." For want of a nail.
My wife doesn’t care about CPU architectures, but she was astonished that her new MacBook Pro didn’t get hot on her lap, and how she could work through the day on one charge. Then she was astonished by the sound quality of the speakers. It’s not a revolution but people care about the end result of those incremental innovations.
We had Bluetooth earpods in the early 2010s used by a lot of people. What's innovative in releasing the same product but for two ears something revolutionary. Capacitive touch is revolutionary, a Bluetooth earpiece is not
Apple Pencil = Apple Drawing Stylus, with Tilt, Pressure, and Interesting Choices About Friction And Power Management. I’m an artist and more and more of my fellow artists are using Procreate or Clip Studio on an iPad as their main tool for serious work now that there’s a decent stylus.
Yes I forgot airpods, mostly because I don't use headphones, sorry.
Webkit is nice but not groundbreaking. Their GUI work isn't much better than the competition, although I do hope SwiftUI goes somewhere...
So I listed 3 products (should have been 4 products) that changed the world, but the meh is not for those (they were quite good!). The meh is for a return to 1990s Apple. Most of the existing technologies have largely plateaued and are being pushed ever higher in diminishing return increments (battery life being the final frontier). Without a product visionary, this is where we'll be for awhile.
It is absolutely groundbreaking, so much so that every major browser that the entire population of the planet use, sans Firefox, is based on technology that was born in WebKit.
As for the “apple can’t innovate”, I don’t buy it. Apple of the 90s was full of poorly conceived ideas. I see little difference in the “world changing product development velocity” of Apple then and now.
I do miss the flavor of old apple though, grey has somehow replaced beige as the “boring color every computer uses”
There is enough bullshit in the leaks to make it still a surprise on the day. Almost all of the truth gets leaked beforehand but it only makes up 40% of the leaks published.
There is technical debt associated with operating at a high level of secrecy.
I used to work in a place that did classified work for the three-letter agencies. The teams working on the most classified projects tended to stagnate. They had advanced technology in narrow areas, but had fallen behind commercial technology across the board. They were still building minicomputer-based systems a decade later than they should have been. And they'd get stuck in dead-end niche technologies.
As a rule of thumb for bidding purposes, we assumed that classifying a project doubled the cost.
I had a taste of that experience when I was an intern. Interned for a government contractor that did some classified work. Like you said, thing go so slowly on this do projects, and in government contracting in general, that now I have a line in my LinkedIn bio saying I am open to any role as long as it’s not with the Government or a Government Contractor.
> He said it was so bad that engineers didn’t even know who they could and couldn’t talk to about their work.
This sounds off. When I worked there 7 years ago there was an internal website where you punch in the person’s name and it tells you about all the mutual disclosures you have. I would expect it’s integrated into Directory by now.
Also, I don’t recall AirPods development as being particularly more open considering I was in the same rough org and the only reason I heard about it in advance of launch was because I happened to be in an exec review where it was being demoed along with other forward looking products. I guess that could be considered “more open” but that wasn’t an experience many engineers got.
not in directory, but slack, meetings, and all sorts of shit integrate. you can see anyone who has disclosures you have and also use the site. it's not a big deal, and you don't want everyone to have access to every project. idk why people think it's difficult
First half of the article: "Teams were innovating for months in silos only to finally converge in the eleventh hour before launch, ending up in five- or six-hour-long daily meetings, causing tremendous friction and burnout. People were frustrated."
Second half of the article: "regular cross-staff sessions, transparency, and shared voice" created the AirPods Pro
Frankly, pretty skimpy on the details – ironic considering the topic.
I wonder how much cross-team collaboration was required for AirPods Pro? Do they have some kind of iOS or hardware integration that regular AirPods don't?
I know there are sometimes developer betas that accidentally include pre-production hardware info and strings[0], or features that would have no use outside of rumored products, eg WebXR[1], so they exist in iOS. I imagine a bad merge can get internal features into public builds, but they seem to be incredibly rare.
It's pretty funny that they had to break through this insane cultural wall just to make yet another pair of headphones I don't want. I don't really think of "more headphones, but better somehow" as innovation.
I know that Apple is incredibly secretive about their launches, and I'm not surprised that carries over to their internal culture, but, I'm incredibly skeptical of stories told from the point of view of an HR person that has every single incentive to hype up their revolutionary new process that unleashed productivity and improved morale.
Every single time I read a similar story and I had first or second hand knowledge of how things actually played out, the role of the person telling the story was massively stretched out.
Agreed. Also, to cite AirPods Pro as breaking the mould on a secrecy culture…it was pretty obvious that the airpod product would develop to have noise cancelling. The stakes for secrecy were much lower.
I once worked under a research grant where the leader is trying to impress by delivering more than promised, i.e. doing a related side project that is not part of the original plan. Upon learning about this "secret" side project, this didn't please the grant giving agency so the side project was made "official" while funding remained the same. An increase in official deliverables without an increase in funding and staff was just a recipe for burn-out. Worse, the engineers that had to toil in the side project did not get as much recognition or networking as those in the official deliverable, as it was not the priority among the collaborators. On the other hand, the leader only had to demand more from engineers to appear prolific to the eyes of the public.
It's aggravating for sure. I've cancelled interviews with them before because they couldn't confirm that I was actually interviewing for the team and product I knew I was interviewing for. The secrecy often crosses the line into silly and even disrespectful.
For real, was it their self driving division? The faux secrecy in that was astounding. Like everyone knows what is going on here just tell that the computer vision machine learning job focused on high definition video and LiDAR data is for the car, we both know it’s for the car.
Got it in one. It was the only division I was interested in, they reached out to me, and I made that extremely clear upfront. There were already 6 other offers on the table and having been through Apple's fairly exhausting process before, didn't want to waste time interviewing for a team at the wrong level in the stack.
I assumed I was interviewing for the self driving car because it was rumored back then, and then the secrecy might make sense. Also it's good for my ego lol. Then I asked a friend that works for them about it years later and she said apple is secretive about any position... I could've been interviewing for a help desk position in the cafe for all I know.
One thing I love about my company is that most information is not siloed. There are product lines that I have no business known about, but I have access anyway.
It’s not only exciting to know what’s cooking in ankthwr group’s kitchen, it’s also great when experts from other teams volunteer to help when you’re stuck on a problem that’s their domain.
In larger companies, knowing what others are working on makes it a lot easier to find experts at something. And I’ve never experienced any of them being reluctant to share due to fear of disclosing information about the products they’re working on.
My conversatons with my brother who works at Apple goes something like this.
Me: "What are you working on?"
Him: "All I can tell you is that I am working on a project which will launch later this year and you hear about it in the news."
There’s a middle ground. We make fun of “stealth mode” start ups and non-technical idea people demanding an NDA for a coffee chat, we should pick on the big companies too, when they take themselves too seriously (Eg. non-Apple companies copying Apple’s way of working, without recognizing what works for Apple is unique, it’s got an outlier track record over its 46 years).
And, maybe you’re not as close with your brother as grandparent. Some siblings are very close.
Lets take a moment to appreciate that obnoxious auto-playing video that covers half the screen on mobile. Bonus points for it staying there when scrolling. I am really wondering what it will take to make the web more like wikipedia and less like a casino.
It'd be interesting to see a comparison of Apple's "Strictly controlled interface between groups on a need to know basis" and Amazon's "All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces."
I'm guessing most companies have a more leaky abstraction approach
The two are orthogonal. Amazon’s culture of building and intercommunicating with service interfaces doesn’t mean there aren’t secret projects in the works. For example, new AWS services are often introduced at re:Invent to the surprise and delight of both customers and employees.
I work in the consulting department at AWS. I touch a lot of different services. The service team will often tell me about upcoming features and tell me not to tell my customers without signing an NDA.
I’ll be thinking about a solution to work around a limitation of an AWS service, reach out to the service team to get their thoughts and they will tell me, they are working on something similar. They will either tell me they are working on it or for me to go for it. I’ve never had an instance where I found out six months later that I wasted my time because they wouldn’t share their roadmap with me.
For the past five years I have wondered: what is an “HR business partner”? This seems like a recent (ca. 2015? earlier?) euphemism for HR goon, or at more charitably an HR fixer. Is this indeed a new term for an existing job, or a new role? Where dig this term come from? SHRM? B-school academics?
HR business partner is assigned to a specific department/division/whatever of the company to be their “HR person”. If you’re in that division you talk to your HR BP, they’re the one who will do the yearly baselining exercise with the managing director etc. So basically the public face of HR for that division
As opposed to the people working on company-wide stuff like salary guidelines, rulebooks, “the way we work” brochures, recruitment, etc
Some HR departments gets so large and fluffy that a significant amount of employees do "HR for HR". Internal stuff that is completely disconnected from the rest of the business.
Those that sometimes actually do talk to the business are called "HR business partners".
I just can’t read this with that uncloseable ad about an electric snowmobile at the top (Firefox, iOS). It’s truly one of the most annoying ads I ever saw.
I don't see how they can come up with software hardware integration and optimisation by working in silos that converge at the eleventh hour. In fact the closed ecosystem criterion would mean lots of internal dependency and more communication.
It's a job title in HR with a certain level of seniority. It doesn't imply that the business is organised as a partnership.
It's a dumb title, but very common. I think the root cause is a lack of a general job title for a senior contributor in that field. With the debasement of the word engineer, I'm just glad they're not called senior HR engineer.
It’s not just that, it’s also the fact that they are assigned to a part of the business, as opposed to internal/company wide stuff (like the global compensation guidelines, or organizing graduate recruitment drives)
However, I suspect that a submission with the original source's headline would have led to less engagement (as it is "How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro," as opposed to " Apple’s secrecy created engineer burnout").
All kinds of projects at Apple have their own disclosure forms, and you are only given one to sign if it's deemed necessary to your work. My responsibilities on this project didn't entitle me to be disclosed on it, which led to all manner of hilariously frustrating guessing games as I tried to deliver on the requirements without actually being told what they were. Conversations regularly went like this: "I can't tell you that that approach won't satisfy the requirements, but I would think twice if I were you." Ultimately I think that I puzzled out what was needed and successfully delivered it, but the method was pure madness.
This wasn't even some new silver gadget launch, it was an infrastructure component to a future product launch down the road. Yet everything and anything can be given the top secret treatment.
Why is that? Running a disclosure-required project is prestigious. Being disclosed on projects is a badge of honor, almost even a high score board, and not being disclosed is used as a weapon in big or small ways.
Anything that Apple manages to ship (in my experience) is in spite of their corporate culture, not because of it.