Working at Apple (2011)

by sturza • 6 years ago

297 300 6 years ago

I’ve often wondered how Apple manages to keep secrets across such a big organization. It’s fascinating and as an outsider I wonder if it’s because of a (cult like?) culture or because of fear (of legal consequences). It’s a real problem for those who want to showcase their portfolio and experience though, and that seems unfair.

izacus2• 6 years ago

I wonder how they avoid all the issues that Google is facing - workplace diversity issues, labor practices and other social justice issues. How does their HR handle those since we never hear about it in public?

mschuster914• 6 years ago

How does their HR handle those since we never hear about it in public?

Well, we do hear about their issues... when people start rioting (such as with Wistron in India in the last weeks) or jumping out of windows (Foxconn had to install nets to catch suiciders).

skc• 6 years ago

There is an aura around Apple that might make it difficult for anyone to risk being on their bad side.

Bud4• 6 years ago

I imagine it starts with not being nearly as evil as Google. It helps when you don't have as many issues to "handle" in the first place.

tailspin20192• 6 years ago

I’ve often wondered how Apple manages to keep secrets across such a big organization.

I've worked with Apple extensively over the last 10 years or so, and what I see from the outside looking in is that they are quite a bureaucratic and very siloed organisation that appears much more "typical" compared to other similarly large organisations than you would assume from their shiny exterior.

Anyone who knows anything about large organisations knows how bad communication between departments/divisions can be by default. The phrase "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" often applies here.

So for Apple, this plays somewhat into their hands. The various parts of the organisation are heavily siloed, with strict controls on cross-communication and even global teams involved in say the roll-out following new product launches, only get to hear many of the details (sometimes any of the details) on the day of launch.

It's a bit like the difference between Zero-Trust computing and the castle-and-moat paradigm. Apple operates Zero-Trust on strategic details internally. Each department/division is firewalled off from others and communication is heavily managed, orchestrated and most importantly carefully timed, much like their public communication is.

This leads them to being very good at keeping secrets within the org. The downside (as you would imagine) is that working with them can be quite a challenge. And I imagine working for them is very tough if you're at the outer edges and in one of the teams that are always "the last to know".

Edit: typo

rvz• 6 years ago

It's called signed NDAs. Every secretive company does this.

kilroy123• 6 years ago

Exactly, only a crazy person would risk the wrath of the Apple lawyer army.

jrockway• 6 years ago

I think they keep the teams isolated from each other. Google never did that until recently, and most of the product leaks seemed to come from random people not working on the product that was leaked. (A great way to kill the company culture, and that's about it. It's not like you're being paid 7 figures to leak some detail about some inconsequential Android app.)

When I worked on Google Wallet, I remember most of the leaks coming from people running "strings" on the Android binaries. Stuff that wasn't released would ship in release builds but be turned off by feature flags. The feature flags had, apparently, easy to decipher names. I don't really know how actual names ended up in release builds (they're just enum values on the wire), but there was quite a push to remove some of this stuff before release to keep leaks to a minimum. Lots of tooling created, and I never heard about it again. (I feel like there are some authors that have some trademark method of getting scoops, and when that changes even in the slightest, they disappear into the ether never to be heard from again.)

Overall, I found all the secrecy kind of pointless. I spent most of my time at Google working on a project that was an open-source embedded device, and nobody ever wrote articles about upcoming features... even though they could clone the Git repository, read all the code, read all the incredibly-detailed commit messages, run it on their machine, and send us a pull request. My conclusion is that nobody really cared.

afavour• 6 years ago

I knew someone that worked at Apple around the launch of the iPhone. They worked on the macOS (then OSX, I guess) team and said they had very little idea that the iPhone was coming, despite it heavily using OS work they’d done. They were called into a few meetings and asked obscure questions but were never told why.

So I guess that helps. But it seems wildly inefficient to me. I guess it helps to have a giant pile of cash.

discordance• 6 years ago

By instilling fear. When I was there, there were many stories of ‘the yellow team’ coming down on you if you were ever under suspicion

microtherion6• 6 years ago

Part of it is indeed internal compartmentalization — sharing certain things on a need to know basis. As an example, I was one of two engineers in our team who had done early work making our software little endian ready (possibly without even our manager being informed; I don't recall). But I knew the work was not complete, and no further work was asked from me for more than a year. So when a MacWorld keynote rolled around, I was convinced rumors of an Intel transition could not possibly be true. What I did not know was that for the final stage of the little endian cleansing, the engineering team was further reduced in size, and on our team, the other engineer had been tasked to do the rest of the work without my involvement.

Part of it is also regular training. And that training does not just involve sticks (You can and will be fired for leaking) but also carrots — leaks hurt Apple's stock price, and since most people in a position to leak own stock, you'd be taking money out of your own pocket (and your colleagues').

It’s a real problem for those who want to showcase their portfolio

Once a product has shipped, you can generally talk about it to some extent. The article linked here seems to be talking more about research, which is more problematic because it's not really tied to a specific, shipped product.

person_of_color• 6 years ago

The secret/silo culture at Apple is insane and I can’t believe Steve ever signed off on it.

mehrdada3• 6 years ago

I used to think that way till I saw Google, which is pretty much the opposite, and now I understand it is important to take into account the cons as well as the pros [I'm still more biased towards the G model but less so than before].

In summary, everyone seeing and commenting on everything has two consequences:

(1) too much politics and need to potentially justify everything to everyone at the company and their dogs, not just stakeholders, literally everyone in the company, on Memegen, on TGIF, and to the world when stuff inevitably leaks, before the product is ready. This leads to groupthink and no one gets the courage of their conviction. [sometimes this is good and prevents poor products from get to the customer, but usually when that's the case, the team were incompetent and deliberately ignoring prior feedback under the ever-applicable excuse of "you are not the target customer" and could have prevented them if they cared.]

(2) when you have a siloed culture, you put the integration job, responsibility, and accountability on the management who coordinate. Therefore you have to be careful who you put in charge and the organization does not scale magically. But once you put the right person in charge, they are accountable and cannot slack off, nor make poor choices forever and expect others underneath them to fix them and expect them to be accountable. The buck stops with the integration point, which is singular. They have to make clear and concrete decisions, leaving less room for spray and pray or blaming stuff on others.

Point #2 has synergies with the way Apple is structured: not P&Ls, rather each person is an expert on some aspect of the product and the editing function and discussion on what to build happens very transparently at the top (evidently through heated discussions mediated by Steve who was not afraid of conflicts [contrast with Google execs.]) One person handles software, another handles hardware, another one silicon, etc. and they fight at the top not through proxy wars at the bottom. My sense is this aspect is what Steve "signed-off" on, and the rest naturally followed with that plus product secrecy aspirations (for marketing reasons and due to scar tissues from a past era).

russelldjimmy• 6 years ago

Your reply was eye-opening. Thank you!

ghaff6• 6 years ago

Another aspect of this is that some percentage of people conflate transparency/empowerment/etc. with democracy. The result can be that, if they disagree with some decision, they will just not let go. So you can end up with some decision being an ongoing tug of war to reverse it.

yowlingcat• 6 years ago

Great explanation and thanks for the valuable experience based insight. Which one do you prefer?

Apocryphon6• 6 years ago

On the other hand, a more siloed culture with managers given carte blanche to run their reports as they see fit can easily fall prey to toxic environments of abuse, especially if the management above only cares if the EPMs are filing satisfactory reports and enough radars are being closed. The only thing protecting employees from abuse are then a weakened HR system that lacks full visibility into the system’s workings. And thus in parts of the organization, subcultures of toxicity and dysfunction are protected by a code of silence- of being siloed.

jldugger4• 6 years ago

Point #2 has synergies with the way Apple is structured: not P&Ls, rather each person is an expert on some aspect of the product and the editing function and discussion on what to build happens very transparently at the top (evidently through heated discussions mediated by Steve who was not afraid of conflicts [contrast with Google execs.])

This is so laden with internal contradictions that I can only presume it was part of an internal Reality Distortion Field training. Are you suggesting that Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi don't have budgets? And that every detail the 50k engineers work on are mediated by 5 people?

ckocagil• 6 years ago

Didn't Jobs fire employees on the spot after asking them questions in the elevator and not liking his answers? Which prompted people to avoid taking the elevator with him.

agustif• 6 years ago

Lol he refined the elevator-pitch...

yourapostasy2• 6 years ago

I heard that only happened during the bleak years right after he came back from NeXT, and there were legitimate doubts Apple could survive the cash crunch they were in. I hadn't heard about summary on-the-spot firings since that era, could anyone worked through that era and later comment on this?

microtherion6• 6 years ago

To warm up the old catch phrase, I regret to inform you that the cossacks do in fact work for the czar…

Zenst• 6 years ago

Would be interesting how Apple installs such an ethos of secretivity - is it loyalty, respect or fear. Maybe a combination of all, and the fear may well be down to the aspect that if you are happy to dish secrets upon a past company then why should this company trust you with our secrets.

tomcam2• 6 years ago

What a profound question. Annoyed I never asked it myself. Always assumed it was because of Apple’s position in the SV caste system.

netfortius• 6 years ago

You need to remember that Apple is a US based company, country which is by far the most litigious in the world. They (Apple, or any other powerful company, for that matter) can bring you to homelessness just by dragging you through courts.

amelius3• 6 years ago

Yes. But how do you attract scientists if they can't publish their work at conferences, in journals, et c.?

microtherion6• 6 years ago

I don't think Apple is known for being particularly litigious when it comes to going after ex-employees (except in cases of fairly blatant industrial espionage, e.g. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/apple-concerned-china...).

In comparison, Apple's reaction to a prolific leaker was fairly mild, and left him far from unemployable (I happen to know what company hired him next), let alone homeless: https://www.macworld.com/article/1018725/workerbee.html

ghaff6• 6 years ago

I assume it's mostly cultural--perhaps as reinforced by NDAs. I dare say that most people have a reasonable sense of what things involving their company are OK to talk about with outsiders, or perhaps even with other groups within their company, and which aren't.

jedberg• 6 years ago

It's a combination of fear and "I know something you don't know". I have a lot of friends that work there, and they won't say anything because they fear not only getting fired but getting sued by a trillion dollar corporation. But they also get quite giddy when something new comes out and they can then talk about how they worked on it a few years ago and how cool it's been using it before everyone else.

andymatuschak• 6 years ago

It’s a strange thing... in my experience, it’s mostly a cultural phenomenon. By induction: everyone around you takes secrecy incredibly seriously, so you do too.

When I was working on new hardware, for instance, to access it I would: enter the building (locked), enter my floor (locked, separate from the rest of the building), enter my office (locked, different key), remove the hardware from my cabinet (locked, another key). For some projects, the hardware could only be stored in offices in a certain building, so I’d have to walk a few blocks away and perform the same steps to access a temporary office where I could work on it (eg for the Watch before its release).

Sometimes this caused serious problems. For a while I was running the project which evolved circuitously into SwiftUI and Combine. We spent months iterating on designs dependent on the proclivities of Objective-C and changes which could be made incrementally to it—which obviously constrained us a lot. Meanwhile the Swift project had been going on for about three years... but only about 70 people inside Apple knew. I was talking regularly to some of the people who were working on Swift, and they’d try to subtly nudge my designs, but there was only so much they could do. After many months of this my boss got me and my colleagues disclosed on Swift (required pulling tons of teeth). The project would be so different in Swift (and would require language changes which the team wouldn’t be able to get to for years) that we canceled our project the next day, after many months of wasted work.

anonymouse008• 6 years ago

Thank you a million times over for SwiftUI and Combine — you can just tell this workflow will be the future for the whole Apple ecosystem, and we may finally see a reincarnation of webobjects!

I’m kind of gobsmacked by your story. I guess Apple’s real innovation is implementing what appears to be a multi-domain, cross functional strategy in silos. You get the benefit of ‘experts’ in their function, while getting a cohesive interdependent product from higher level direction — and the beauty is that when it’s all assembled the pieces fit.

dannyw2• 6 years ago

What if confidentiality agreements had a maximum duration? The author worked at Apple a decade ago. Perhaps their NDA agreements should expire about now.

Yes, it can be abused, but it’s kinda like copyright. It’s just like parents having a limited term: it (in theory) catches everyone up to best of X years ago.

rl32• 6 years ago

I think visions can play out far beyond ten years, and their disclosure could potentially further cement existing power structures, such as Apple.

Of course, relying upon NDAs in lieu of real trust is trash anyways. Ideally, an [extremely well treated and compensated] team could maintain strict confidence based on ideology alone. Your mission just has to actually change the world for the better in some dramatic way.

To play devil's advocate, myself and quite a few other people probably have a keen interest in precisely what the nature and vision of Apple's long-term research was, even a decade ago. People like Bret think far beyond time scales that measure a single decade.

H8crilA• 6 years ago

NDAs are a joke at larger scale (and pretty much anything important is of larger scale). A lot of Facebook internals are an exact clone of Google's due to poaching.

mensetmanusman• 6 years ago

This.

It took me a couple years to realize I was the type that invents over 10 years out. It is fun to do, but the tricky part is knowing when to file IP.

ksec2• 6 years ago

There were a few tweets about HomePod and AirPod Max's NDA being signed around 5 years ago from ex-employees.

It was deleted within hours if not minutes.

vlovich123• 6 years ago

NDAs generally have a 5 year duration. It’s possible there are longer ones, just the one’s I have signed have not contained anything longer.

Source: worked at Apple, Google, and Facebook among many others and have signed many many NDAs.

woofie113• 6 years ago

MIT's NDAs never expire.

#krueger #epstein #...

flixic2• 6 years ago

I have a memory of Bret Victor tweeting something about how TouchBar was something he worked on. TouchBar was released more than 5 years later after he left.

Found the tweet: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/791767756928462848?s=2... (Tweeted on the day TouchBar was announced; 8 years later)

egsmi4• 6 years ago

They expire. People legally write whole books about their time at Apple.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37638098-creative-select...

garmaine4• 6 years ago

Having met some people that work at Apple... they never stop talking about working at Apple.

tumblewit• 6 years ago

If i was part of something that was used everyday by literally hundreds of millions of people around the world then even I would love to talk about the ones who gave me the opportunity to be part of it.

garmaine4• 6 years ago

I would hope that you have hobbies and interests outside of work.

drcross• 6 years ago

Your comment made my skin crawl. You're the type of person I desperately avoid at parties.

dvfjsdhgfv• 6 years ago

I think many people share this point of view. Personally, this cult of Jobs & co. seems a bit strange to me. We know the guy was not really a nice person. He had many ideas - some of them failed, some of them were a success. But would I like to be a friend of such a person? Honestly, not so much.

kd913• 6 years ago

Nowhere near as bad as Googlers in my opinion.

I very rarely see discussions about the internal politics, or disclaimers about working for Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix or Apple.

garmaine4• 6 years ago

Oh don't get me wrong, they take their NDAs very seriously. To the point where if I casually ask "oh, so what do you do?" I'm treated with suspicion as a potential secret Gawker plot to find out what the new product launch is going to be.

But Apple folk tend to talk about non-NDA Apple stuff, Apple gossip and politics, and "guess which famous product lead I once swapped words with!" nonsense, and nothing else.

mypalmike2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure how this relates to Apple specifically, apart from their reputation for secrecy. What large tech company allows its employees to disclose details of cancelled projects?

cowsandmilk• 6 years ago

I’ve been on cancelled projects that produced patents, which inherently is disclosure if details.

mypalmike2• 6 years ago

Protected disclosure is rather different than random blogging. The latter is often specifically called out in employment contracts as requiring comms sign off.

mxfh• 6 years ago

Good clue: How many Victors work at apple? https://patents.google.com/?q=(inc.)&inventor=Victor&assigne...

fourthark• 6 years ago

And that was the mistake.

eternalban• 6 years ago

Bret thinks the work he did at Apple are his: "my creations".

I definitely have a problem with companies claiming the right to your brain 24/7 outside of office, in the proverbial shower, dreaming up an idea entirely unrelated to one's employment. But the very nature of the transaction to work on UI ideas for Apple is that Apple would "own" those ideas.

Also, my Firefox browser twice popped up warning about a slow page when I enabled JS for that page, and I finally gave up. And all this, simply to see a basic text with an empty box. So, this will be an unpopular thought, but it is possible that his prototypes were in fact carefully considered and considered non-optimal, for a variety of practical reasons.

Apocryphon6• 6 years ago

That page was made in 2011 and doesn’t seem to have been updated since.

topynate2• 6 years ago

This question is about understanding invention in large companies, not as a knock against Bret Victor:

His job title had "inventor" in it, and he mentions making many things, but he describes the impact of his inventions in the passive voice:

"These concept apps were shown around internally, presumably to inspire the people who did the real work."

I gather from this that he didn't see his role as advocacy or promotion of his work, and from "presumably" that he didn't really know what the purpose was of all this showing-round. My question: would he have been able to get into production some of the things he made and cared about, had he engaged in advocacy, or would that have been problematic in Apple's culture?

raverbashing2• 6 years ago

It might not even be an issue of advocacy or engagement, it just might have been the right answer to the wrong problem. Or it requires new technology or it wouldn't really be useful

Prototyping is nice and thinking about solutions is cool but then comes reality

topynate2• 6 years ago

Sure, you can have a great idea and do everything right with it, but not see it succeed. I'm asking more about the corporate culture at Apple and more generally – is this sort of advocacy encouraged or discouraged, does it improve the chances of a new idea, that sort of thing.

I mean Apple has to see a good bit of value in prototyping things and letting people come up with new stuff, or they wouldn't have job positions with the title "inventor", right? Or is that just part of its self-image, and not really encouraged in reality?

notretarded• 6 years ago

Anything he invents becomes IP of Apple in perpetuity. This is smart

brandall10• 6 years ago

Apple historically has a fair bit of separation between design, software, and hardware departments.

It would stand to reason that he simply wouldn’t have the ability to advocate for his work outside of his design group.

kubanczyk2• 6 years ago

I recommend http://worrydream.com/#!/quotes by the same author.

I think I accumulated more time re-reading it than any other (single) web page over the years.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 6 years ago

Cool quotes.

That site looks like the old sites that we could generate from mac.com.

pasiaj• 6 years ago

Sure, but I recommend you take a closer look.

His articles, for me at least, are the most influential ones on how I think about creation and solving hard problems.

Here's a couple

Up & Down the Ladder of Abstraction http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

Inventing on Principle: https://vimeo.com/36579366

jeffreygoesto• 6 years ago

The first quote is spot on for the people living in the eastern block in the 70s and 80s. Almost no money but very much everyday creativity. At least from what I remember from my relatives there...

hliyan• 6 years ago

This is an excellent collection, even though I don't agree with every quote I've read so far. The author has done a really good job in distilling long forms into points that like-minded individuals will find interesting. That's an immense amount of labor saved.

kubanczyk2• 6 years ago

I don't agree with every quote

But... Isn't that the whole point?

archagon• 6 years ago

Great list, spent a while reading through it today. I admit it gives me some anxiety that someone could have read and internalized enough media that just a sampling of interesting quotes takes hours to get through. Perhaps I should spend less time on HN and more time with my nose in books and lectures.

tnsittpsif• 6 years ago

Something seems off, am getting a "403 - Forbidden" while visiting the page.

Anybody else get it too or am I the only one?

This is while on Firefox Developer Edition on a Windows 10 PC.

jpgvm• 6 years ago

Yes, exactly.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 6 years ago

I remember that Guy Kawasaki once wrote that “Working for Apple is like being paid to go to Disneyland.”

That was quite some time ago. I’ll bet it no longer applies.

Happy Christmas, to those that celebrate it!

bartvk• 6 years ago

For the decently paid people, that may still be true. I'm not so sure for the common retail folks, or the freelancers that Apple used to hire to categorize and correct Siri recordings.

phendrenad22• 6 years ago

This is a common outsider view, and one that BigTechCorp's actively encourage. Outsiders don't see the long hours, stressful deadlines, office politics, they just see the colorful beanbag couches and free catered meals.

aikinai• 6 years ago

But Apple doesn’t have beanbag couches or free catered meals.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 6 years ago

The beanbag chairs and foozball tables tend to have dust on them.

I had a friend that was a derivatives (remember them?) analyst at a big Wall St. firm.

She told me about how they brought catered meals to your desk, and arranged car services to take you home at ungodly hours.

It was all about keeping you at your desk.

She made damn good money, though.

saagarjha10• 6 years ago

They have a bunch of womb chairs, though.

bitwize3• 6 years ago

You're going to Disneyland all right, because you're going to be a mascot. Here, put on this Mickey costume and head. If you need to puke (and you will), there's a scupper inside the head. Now get out there and greet the kiddies for eight hours.

amelius3• 6 years ago

I've noticed that we never see people who work at Apple here in the comments section of HN and I wonder what the reason could be. Perhaps Apple forbids employees to post here? Perhaps they have even blocked the domain? Or perhaps Apple employees have no interest in HN because they simply have no entrepreneurial aspirations?

lnsru• 6 years ago

I don’t work for Apple, I work for another big Corp. We have very very strict social media policy. Couple people get fired each year for posting sensitive information on their LinkedIn. I guess, Apple has even stricter policy regarding their (even personal) opinions.

ksec2• 6 years ago

Apple has even stricter policy regarding their (even personal) opinions

Which is increasingly important in the current political climate. Apple doesn't want their employees to be associated with any political views.

sz4kerto• 6 years ago

Actually, I'd go even further: you don't really see comments from _any_ bigco employees except a few SV-based ones, Google might be the most well-represented here. Maybe that's because Google has/used to have a culture internally that promoted activism and openness of opinion,

daniel_reetz• 6 years ago

Employees are encouraged to "go dark" on social media. There's significant internal training on secrecy. Public association with the company is strongly discouraged. I'm using soft words.

I left after two years.

ghaff6• 6 years ago

Even a lot of companies that don't have such secrecy in their DNA don't necessarily encourage social media posting. And, frankly, a lot of employees look at the risk-reward of being active on social media, at least in a professional context, and decide it's not worth it.

matwood• 6 years ago

I don't think it's forbidden or nefarious. It's just easier to say nothing, and avoid the risk of saying something that is secret.

ghaff6• 6 years ago

Secret, a bit too much candor, someone takes offense, etc. A lot of people just see it as safer to avoid activities they see as potentially harmful for no real benefit.

rleigh• 6 years ago

Many companies have policies which prohibit this. It's not even specific to SV or the USA.

I'd see it as protection of both parties. The company doesn't want any reputational damage or off-message communications. The employee doesn't want to fall afoul of any liabilities they might place upon themselves or the company by revealing or promising anything they shouldn't. So personal social media activity is not prohibited, but social media activity in the context of your employment by the company is.

I suspect Apple might be far harsher than most companies if people step over the line, based upon previous examples.

sys_64738• 6 years ago

To protect yourself from being pressured by external actors. If somebody is able to manipulate an Apple employee then they could gain access to insider information.

spacedcowboy5• 6 years ago

shrug I work at Apple

I’ve just moved out of an R&D group, and yes, there’s things I won’t talk about because Apple pay me very well to keep their “surprise and delight”, well, just that

There’s no culture of fear though, like some are saying, it’s just that there are projects I’ve spent years bringing up from bare bones, then there’s the time it takes to turn that into a product that Apple will sell. I’m willing to wait for that to happen, good news can always wait.

Now I work in icloud. I’m the DRI for privacy in my group, which is something that Apple take very seriously, it’s a fun job although there’s a lot of “it’d be really cool to do that, we could offer X, but we need a good way to keep the users data private under circumstance Y, so we can’t”. There’s going to be some interesting work along those lines in the future.

In the past I’ve worked in software (Aperture, Final Cut), and on technologies (precursor to Spotlight, and then the mechanisms behind Spotlight itself).

None of the above is anything that Apple would have any problem with me talking about, though they’d obviously not want me to disclose anything in the future that I might be working on. I’ve also worked for the Ministry of Defence, and frankly no company I’ve ever worked for has the security of a government agency like that. To compare the two situation borders on the absurd.

I like the various jobs I’ve had at Apple, it’s the longest I’ve ever stayed at any company, even ones I owned! I’m in the fortunate position of being able to choose where I work, and I choose Apple. That’s the strongest statement I can make.

amelius3• 6 years ago

Thanks for your reply, but your comment still doesn't explain why we never (except now) see Apple employees in forums chiming in on things. There's never a "Hi I work at Apple, let me correct that...", or even a "disclaimer: I work at Apple, but my opinion on this is ...". This can't be because of what you say, that Apple wants to "keep their surprise and delight".

Also your reply seems to be very much in contrast with some other replies here. Which leaves me puzzled.

bzbarsky• 6 years ago

Several people who work on WebKit at Apple are regulars in HN comments, fwiw. You may just not have noticed because they may not advertise that they work at Apple.

fenomas3• 6 years ago

A good friend of mine worked at Apple in a mid-to-senior role for about two years; when he joined he told me not to ask him anything so I didn't.

Shortly after he left we were having a drink, and I say: "Just tell me this, did you like it there?" He thought for a fair bit and eventually said "no comment".

academi• 6 years ago

Mastery of something to serve or help and seeing good things happen from that is one of the things that bring happiness to me.

Often, I’ve blamed my employers for being miserable, but I realize now that they can contribute to happiness or unhappiness but they aren’t the primary reason for frustration or unhappiness.

My health, primarily my mental health, affects how I act and how I interpret things.

Even the best people that aren’t mentally unwell can be unhappy.

However, being unhappy most of the time is mental illness, whether it’s because of what seems like an unreasonably difficult environment or one that’s seemingly reasonable.

Some may bounce out of it and others can’t seem to, but being stuck in a mode of “I had promise and they killed it” doesn’t help anyone.

In this case maybe the “no comment” was a joke, maybe it was a bad fit, but those that aren’t unhappy most of the time should get help.

dman• 6 years ago

Lot of insight in this comment. Thanks for writing it!

the_arun• 6 years ago

Last line

but those that aren’t unhappy most of the time should get help.

I think you meant

"but those that aren’t happy most of the time should get help".

eplanit2• 6 years ago

To be honest, that doesn't sound like a "good" friend to me. Doesn't trust you enough to share not only any work details, but not even an opinion either? Maybe too much self-importance?

ChrisMarshallNY5• 6 years ago

You've never worked in a high-security environment, have you?

My father was in the CIA, in the late '40s thru '60s.

We didn't find out until the late '90s.

One of his brothers was almost certainly a Company Man, too, but that has never been confirmed; even though he’s been dead for decades.

Apple's OPSEC is probably tighter than the CIA's.

fenomas3• 6 years ago

That's certainly one possible way to interpret what he said. Here's another: he wasn't refusing to answer my question, he was sardonically answering it.

mayankkaizen• 6 years ago

I'm baffled. Why couldn't he say he was happy at Apple if he was happy? The "no comment" answer kinda implies he wasn't really happy.

bedhead2• 6 years ago

Because you sign various employment contracts that contain all sorts of landmines even after you’re gone, and out of self-preservation it’s a helluva lot easier to just not comment.

username90• 6 years ago

The "no comment" answer kinda implies he wasn't really happy.

You don't think that was the point? "No comment" is a very common way to express that you weren't happy.

fenomas3• 6 years ago

I can't speak for him, but I understood him to be sardonically answering my question. If he was genuinely afraid to say anything bad about the place I imagine he'd have said "it was okay" or the like.

aplummer2• 6 years ago

You’re allowed to talk about what it’s like to work at Apple (good or bad), just not the work at Apple.

jldugger4• 6 years ago

Yea, but if you did, nobody would accept the offer.

ttul• 6 years ago

Sounds like NSA. A friend worked there and couldn’t even tell her husband what she did. Like not even a general idea.

chris11• 6 years ago

One benefit of that is that you can't take work home, although I think Covid is forcing them to make some changes.

sneak3• 6 years ago

If you leak from NSA they either attempt to assassinate you, or you get put in prison. Due to the massive illegal spying programs run by the NSA, they have lots of avenues for finding out who leaked the data.

If you leak from Apple (and they find out) then Apple can sue you and maybe get a civil judgement against you take your assets and possessions, but you remain a free person.

Huge difference.

baby• 6 years ago

That’s the reason why I think I couldn’t work for Apple.

thrwn_frthr_awy• 6 years ago

I worked at Apple for 5 years in two different groups and this really isn’t that normal. The person in the article worked on experimental hardware which is not most people’s experience. Most people have no problem talking about what they work on, the technology they use, and what they like about Apple. Unfortunately rarely people find those blog posts interesting enough to share leaving a disproportionate number of posts like in the article.

phendrenad22• 6 years ago

This is the same as working anywhere. It's best to maintain a strict work/private split. All company files, screenshots of company work, and the like go back to the company when I leave. If I want to re-create, from scratch, some of that work (and put enough of a spin on it to not run afoul of any patents or copyrights the company holds), and show it off, that's acceptable of course.

jprupp• 6 years ago

I am very grateful for my job to be writing free software. Everything is made available for the world to use or change without strings attached.

It feels like I am leaving some sort of legacy, no matter how small, and that makes my existence a lot more meaningful.

Did you exchange a walking part in a war for a lead role in a cage? –Pink Floyd

michaelcampbell• 6 years ago

I always thought that was "walk-on part".

ratww• 6 years ago

You are correct, it is.

yourapostasy2• 6 years ago

It is [1]. For those not catching the reference, it is a line from Pink Floyd's song Wish You Were Here.

[1] https://www.songfacts.com/lyrics/pink-floyd/wish-you-were-he...

tomcam2• 6 years ago

Of course we need to hear how you get to work on free software!

_delibash_• 6 years ago

and why shouldn't we?

blkhp19• 6 years ago

Sure, but the impact you’re having has the potential to reach many orders of magnitude fewer people. It’s a trade off, and I personally wouldn’t feel a sense of superiority.

trangon• 6 years ago

Isn’t this comment and the Pink Floyd quote a bit patronizing?

newbie578• 6 years ago

Every new article like this confirm the common thesis that Apple is more like a cult than a company.

I cannot fathom people preferring to work there over Google or Facebook, however everyone does have different ethics and pov’s.

jpxw• 6 years ago

Interestingly (for UK readers), Dominic Cummings is obsessed with Bret Victor (the author of this article).

raverbashing2• 6 years ago

Care to elaborate more?

tobr• 6 years ago

I have some vague recollection that Bret Victor was involved with the design of the Touch Bar. Is this something that has been confirmed?

flixic2• 6 years ago

I think he tweeted about it when TouchBar was announced (3 years ago?)

Found the tweet: https://twitter.com/worrydream/status/791767756928462848?s=2... (Tweeted on the day TouchBar was announced)

Keyframe• 6 years ago

Or audio world can do what video and vfx world did, you know - move away from Apple platform altogether.

sharken• 6 years ago

So on one hand you get to do some cool stuff for one of the most successful companies in the world. On the other hand you cannot talk about anything you do at all, as if the time spent there does not exist.

Personally I'd rather spend my time at a company that allows for some discussion.

egsmi4• 6 years ago

On the other hand you cannot talk about anything you do at all

... to people outside of Apple. Apple has 137,000 employees in 25 countries. I’m sure you’ll find someone to discuss your work with.

mrwh• 6 years ago

Yes, this. I could talk about the things I've worked on at [big company], but really, no one outside of [big company] would find it interesting anyway (and not all that many inside [big company] to be honest).

underdeserver• 6 years ago

Rumor has it Apple is very siloed internally as well, so likely you can't talk to other employees outside your team either.

Spoom• 6 years ago

I haven't worked there, but isn't Apple famously siloed, even internally? My impression was that there were many areas that could not tell even other Apple employees what they were working on.

nrp2• 6 years ago

Actually, Apple is siloed internally as well. I worked there for a little over three years and had friends there in other departments with whom we could mutually not share what we were working on. It both makes for a worse working culture and causes issues in practice as people relearn the same lessons and reinvent the same solutions in different areas.

Arainach• 6 years ago

Monocultures reinforce bad habits. I have friends at a wide variety of tech companies - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tableau, AirBnB, and more. All of us know, in broad terms, what the others do. We don't discuss trade secrets or specific unannounced projects, but we're able to talk about things like "X works on Storage Spaces for Windows, Y works on WebXR, Z works on security, etc."

We're also all able to talk freely about what aspects of our jobs and employers we like and don't like. This is valuable information - for instance, I've heard enough first person anecdotes from various teams to know that I'm not interested in working for Amazon unless all other avenues to pay my mortgage have failed.

The Apple experience sounds like my interview with the NSA years ago. All of my attempts to ask any questions were met with a "no comment" for the most part. Very frustrating experience. I walked away with not much more idea of what a job there would be like than you could get from reading Wikipedia.

Fezzik• 6 years ago

Maybe I’m jaded as an attorney, but aren’t most professional jobs relatively confidential? Thinking of things like ad agencies, insurance, finance, law, teaching (what specific students are doing), any tech job with clients... you can’t go talking about trade secrets and advice others are paying you for. That’s business 101.

Edit: outside of the service industry, I’m hard-pressed to think of a job where you can ethically talk about any and everything you do in your job...

aborsy• 6 years ago

But what prevents the employees of these secretive companies from posting anonymously here or elsewhere?

bladegash• 6 years ago

Probably a combination of integrity, honoring one’s commitments, and fear of the consequences they would face if they are caught.

saagarjha10• 6 years ago

They do occasionally. I assume the reason why you don’t see it is because people are {scared, loyal} enough to not do it much.

Apocryphon6• 6 years ago

How the author left-

Goodbye Apple, great machine.

Grind and polish, smooth and shine.

I couldn't catch your match with mine.

But I will always say I tried,

and if a hundred fires died, perhaps the embers smolder on,

to be remembered when I'm gone.

http://worrydream.com/Departure/

vishnugupta• 6 years ago

Q - Oh, okay, I thought you had made some sort of mistake. A - Yes, exactly.

I suppose working at Apple was that mistake?

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

"What can you tell us about what you did in your last job?

Can't say.

"What were the biggest challenges at your last job?"

Can't say.

"Can you describe a situation in your last job that taught you about professionalism?"

Can't say.

"OK, did you like your last job?"

Can't say.

----

So you could've done absolutely nothing of value or done something amazing, but the simple fact that you worked at a multinational company is supposed to make you stand out positively.

tug0fwar• 6 years ago

I went there with JS disabled and was very confused–it just showed a list of links. Not pleasant.

Edit: With JS enabled, the design just amazed me

burntoutfire3• 6 years ago

How do people get the next job after Apple? Let's say someone has worked there for a good couple of years - are they not allowed to share anything about that period in the job interviews or on Linkedin?

tmpz22• 6 years ago

That sounds like an intentional feature for Apple.

bitwize3• 6 years ago

They say "I worked at Apple".

burntoutfire3• 6 years ago

Probably not enough to get a better position in another FAANG.

xenadu02• 6 years ago

You can talk about things you worked on after they ship and are publicly known.

It's important to remember people who really love their job and do well don't tend to leave so you almost always get stories from people who don't fit that description (though not always - sometimes people leave a workplace for personal reasons).

wanderer23232• 6 years ago

People leave all the time, for all sorts of reasons, e.g. to get side-promoted, to work on something different, to get more money.

I've seen the opposite of your thesis -- that people who have opportunities and actively work on their careers tend to change jobs often so whoever does not must be stagnating.

xyzelement2• 6 years ago

> How do people get the next job after Apple? Let's say someone has worked there for a good couple of years - are they not allowed to share anything about that period in the job interviews or on Linkedin?

You have to be creative and toe the line. I have just spent some time interviewing after working at a place with a hardcore non disclosure agreement.

My LinkedIn for this job is a brief blurb that reveals the scope of my work/seniority without revealing details about the company. In the Apple case it could be something like "led team of X engineers developing the core server side infrastructure for payments." This is OK because everyone knows that Apple deals with payments and that there must be people working on the backend of it, and its meaningful that you led people in that context. (or whatever one did.)

My resume goes into a tiny bit more detail but also says "details protected by NDA." It's important because w/o saying that it just looks like you had no accomplishments.

In interviews you can usually manage by being abstract enough. EG: you can say "I had to design a system that handled millions of transactions per day" and then talk about high level things that go into the design of such things, you don't need to say what the system specifically did or exactly how many millions of hits it got. You can be explicit about the NDA here too and people have always been very respectful of it.

However, in my case - most of my experience was prior to this company so even if the question is "tell me about how you did X at your last job", I just say "that gets too close to the NDA, but let me tell you how I did that at my previous role."

Basically, it's not a problem, and you gain way more from having Apple on your resume than you lose from not speaking about certain details.

thr0w__4w4y• 6 years ago

Interviewing someone like yourself isn't hard at all... I've interviewed hundreds of people (which isn't thin air here on HN) and I've pretty much seen it all.

Generally speaking, in an interview, I'm trying to assess /what you can do/. Which is not "what you have done".

I've interviewed at least 2 people, who were hired against my recommendation, in different companies, that clearly fleeced everyone else. In both cases, the candidate walked the walk & talked the talk, but something seemed off. "Sociopath" is a term that is thrown around loosely but I think it applies to both candidates (one man, one woman). In both cases, they'd convinced most of the interviewers they were very strong in areas they'd never professionally tackled before.

I'm less interested in what the candidate claims to have done; that could be reality, or a well-rehearsed and "lived" fantasy. But by talking about hard engineering problems in real-time, with "curve balls", I can usually tell if the candidate has "the right stuff" or not. Even if it's just aptitude. I can train smart people who handle themselves well. But if the candidate can't field tough questions and unexpected (off-script) questions, that's enough for me to pass on the candidate at the level I'm hiring.

xvector5• 6 years ago

Street cred!

More realistically, interviewers delve into specifics. Applied to a computer security position? Well, you'll get interview questions that touch those.

You don't have to hide your knowledge - you just have to hide what exactly you worked on at Apple.

soulchild37• 6 years ago

So the tradition of hijacking web browser history navigation (back and forward), started from Apple?

cbsks• 6 years ago

I interviewed at Apple and talked with 8 engineers. Some had been working there for 6 years and none of them could tell me anything that they had worked on. They couldn’t even tell me if anything they had worked on had shipped. Sounded like a really interesting place to work, but if you can’t tell anyone about it, does it matter?

endtime• 6 years ago

Sounded like a really interesting place to work, but if you can’t tell anyone about it, does it matter?

...yes? I like working on interesting stuff so that my days aren't boring.

systemvoltage3• 6 years ago

In other companies, you can build a personal + professional goodwill by inventing things and making breakthroughs. At Apple, the brand encapsulates your achievements without anything to show for it. You're dust at the end of your career in exchange for a salary and a stack of non-disclosure agreements that expire on upon your death.

andreilys• 6 years ago

There were countless of individuals that worked on breaking Enigma encryption machine employed by the Nazi’s during WW2.

You can rest assured that their work mattered, even if they couldn’t talk about it.

gcheong2• 6 years ago

Yeah so far I don’t think Apple has done anything equivalent in importance to the Enigma code breakers to warrant the comparison so when someone from Apple says they can’t tell me what they’re working on it just sounds like corporate arrogance or paranoia, smoke and mirrors to play up a carefully crafted and managed corporate image, not something I’m counting on for the future of society.

kyawzazaw• 6 years ago

yeah, it does. I don't tell other people much about my work.

chrisseaton• 6 years ago

There are normal engineers at Apple that can and do tell people about what they’re working on like anyone else would.

https://webkit.org/blog/5852/introducing-the-b3-jit-compiler...

saagarjha10• 6 years ago

I wouldn't call that "like anyone else would". Those blog posts are planned in advance and get approval before being put online, as they are essentially considered to be official statements from the WebKit team.

coin• 6 years ago

but if you can’t tell anyone about it, does it matter?

This is also the case for folks that work on classified projects such at the NSA. There’s more to working than bragging about it to others.

whatshisface• 6 years ago

Good luck getting your next job when your resume has a 6 year blank spot.

webble12• 6 years ago

I worked at Apple, and they told me when I left I could not put anything about my work on LinkedIn. I didn't work on anything that would be considered remotely classified to any other companies. Apple treats EVERYTHING as super secret. It sort of worked for me, because when my current company asked what I worked on I just said "sorry I can't talk about it ;)" instead of "I was paid almost 200k a year to make one spreadsheet look like another"

alsetmusic• 6 years ago

Sounds like you may have interviewed with engineers working on an upcoming product that hadn't been announced.

I worked there and my friends and family knew what product team I was on. I couldn't tell anyone anything specific about the work, but it wasn't a total mystery.

spoonjim2• 6 years ago

but if you can’t tell anyone about it, does it matter?

Some people need to be publicly associated with work for it to matter to them. Others don’t. It’s just a personal choice. If you work on a lifesaving drug inside a big pharmaceutical company and never get any extra money or accolades for it, you still saved those lives. Your work still definitely matters.

courtf2• 6 years ago

The work matters, no question, just not enough to be compensated proportionally to its value. No, the money and prestige don't belong to the people who actually make the things we use and enjoy, it all goes to the top where it belongs. If you're obedient they'll keep you around, but certainly some other slave could have done the same work for cheaper so don't get too comfortable.

Now my company is very different, we have respect for our workers and let no part of the employee go to waste. When you've outlived your usefulness your ulna will be fashioned into a long spoon for serving gruel, and the dome of your skull becomes a fine bowl. We actually use half of my former cofounder's pelvis as a frisbee during offsites!

Your work will outlive you, and continue to aid the company for many years after you've been decommissioned. That should be enough to comfort you in your final moments, as you await incineration.

suyash• 6 years ago

I've also heard they are very strict on what employees can and can't do in their free time. Most of the stuff is not allowed even though it's completely separate from day job from what I've heard, which keeps me away from applying at Apple.

kbcuk• 6 years ago

It's the same guy who designed Alesis Micron! The best and the funniest synth there is, still have it, and I don't even play keys. TIL.

forgotmypw17• 6 years ago

For the no-js peeps:

I was at Apple from August 2007 to November 2010.

My job was to play with experimental hardware platforms and input technologies, and come up with new user-interface and application concepts for them. I would then design and prototype apps to demo these ideas. These concept apps were shown around internally, presumably to inspire the people who did the real work.

A few things I became known for include pervasively direct-manipulation interfaces (where users do their thing by moving and gesturing with meaningful objects, instead of relying on verb buttons and other indirect controls), new forms of creative tools and new ways of learning information, and being easily frustrated with the realities of corporate research.

I made many, many things. The ones I cared deeply about mostly didn't catch on.

I would love to show you these things -- maybe they'll inspire you instead. In the box below, I have put all of my creations that I can show publicly:

FAQ:

Q - But that box is empty! It's an empty box!

A - Yes, exactly.

Q - Oh, okay, I thought you had made some sort of mistake.

A - Yes, exactly.

dang• 6 years ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2535606

acwan93• 6 years ago

(Former Apple engineer)

It’s funny, a friend of mine who’s been jumping around tech companies and recently joined a (non-Apple) FAANG had told me that I was taking the Apple secrecy way too seriously.

It’s kind of a unspoken rule at Apple that you just don’t talk about what you worked on while you’re there, and I just normalized that kind of behavior at future ventures for better or for worse. Every former employee I’ve spoken to agreed. HR had (and I’m sure they still do) meetings almost annually showing that leaking has serious implications, from factory checkpoints (even though we’re in SWE) to prevent parts from being leaked to post-mortems on how various HW and SW leaks that end up on MacRumors.

sneak3• 6 years ago

Lots of comments in this thread talk about the secrecy culture at Apple, as if it's an outlier in tech.

We still don't know how Glacier works.

jarmitage• 6 years ago

Ironically, perhaps we have Apple to thank for Bret Victor (the author) going on to make all of his work post-Apple public domain, including the non-profit https://dynamicland.org

MaintenanceMode• 6 years ago

I worked at Apple in the late 90s, they wouldn't even tell me what I'd be doing during the extensive interview process. There was so much secrecy. After all the paperwork was signed, I met with the team (on a Saturday) and found out what it was and that I'd be working 7 days a week, 14 to 16 hours a day for the foreseeable future. I wasn't disappointed, but it was a really strange way to start a job.

stretchwithme• 6 years ago

I worked on several contracts at Apple. Since the secrecy supports Apple's success, I don't see the secrecy as an issue. It all helps pull off that "one more thing" moment.

Working at Apple (2011)

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