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How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

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Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#111

Post by flatiron »

skuhn wrote: post #21

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 wo…

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.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#113

Post by stingraycharles »

raverbashing wrote: post #10
88913527 wrote: post #5

> 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 time…

Exactly Most of the stuff is "officially leaked* to some places before the new releases anyway When was the last time people were surprised by what they saw? I think it was on the iphone unveiling.

The point is that Apple wants to stay in control of the messaging, which is still the case with these “leaks”.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#114

Post by rjsw »

Animats wrote: post #11

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 shoul…

> As a rule of thumb for bidding purposes, we assumed that classifying a project doubled the cost.

There is a similar statement in the "Skunk Works" book.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#115

Post by marcinzm »

skuhn wrote: post #21

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 wo…

>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.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#116

Post by _fat_santa »

Animats wrote: post #11

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 shoul…

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.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#118

Post by lapcat »

urthor wrote: post #24
skuhn wrote: post #21

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 wo…

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…

> 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.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#119

Post by foobarian »

skuhn wrote: post #29
urthor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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. Ju…

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.

Re: How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro

#120

Post by ianai »

skuhn wrote: post #42
urthor wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. 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…

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…

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.
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