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
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.