81–90 of 157 posts
Because Apple is not a webapp company, and webapps are the easiest and most common kind of startup.
Mobile app startups are a big #2 at the very least, and what with apple being a manufacturer of a very popular phone I'd expect more from there.
(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this) My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.” It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more pron…
Please...stop the madness! The trend of prefacing every criticism or, indeed, observation with an apology to the fanbois or a cheery positive "Apple is awesome, but.." statement has gone too far. It's actually quite amazing how many articles and comments follow this template. And it has to stop. The Cupertino Thought Police is not going to kick your door in and drag you to the Infinite Loop basement for a Think Diffe…
(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this) My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.” It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more pron…
Please...stop the madness! The trend of prefacing every criticism or, indeed, observation with an apology to the fanbois or a cheery positive "Apple is awesome, but.." statement has gone too far. It's actually quite amazing how many articles and comments follow this template. And it has to stop. The Cupertino Thought Police is not going to kick your door in and drag you to the Infinite Loop basement for a Think Diffe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really an answer. Many companies offer just that and more.
But with Apple there is the "aunt and your friends and family factor". Everybody has heard of Apple and a large swath of people would tend to be impressed by the fact that you worked there. It would also tend to be the type of place that obviously looks good on your resume if you need to get another job in the future so it offers that as additional security. Techies might care that you worked at Tesla, much of the re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do people do that? I'm fairly new in the game, but right after Christmas I had to work 3 weeks, about 70 hours each in a row. I was _exhausted_ after that. By the end of the third week, my head was just spinning and I went on a low morale and creative drought for 3 months... I could barely code deserialisation functions without losing focus.. So basically, how do you do it and keep sane?!
When I worked for a former employer we had mega pushes leading up to CES. There's one month, we called it Red October, where most of my team was doing 100+hr weeks for the full month. How did we do it? Combination of lots of Red Bull (as in buying it by the pallet), free meals, onsite shower, and an amazing QA team who would consistently find all the stupid bugs coded bleary eyed at 3:30am.
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you cannot exactly rent a scalable 14nm chip fab from AWS to try to build it on your own and sell it market. To Amazon's credit, I can imagine Bezos reading your comment, frowning, and muttering, "Why the hell not?"
I am obviously not Jeff Bezos but I asked myself the same question. Could such an extreme outsourcing service (not necessarily only fabricating chips) paired with the accessibility of AWS be viable? Does such a company exist?
Maybe another reason why Apple spawned comparatively few startups might be that some of the areas of expertise for Apple and their employees are harder to do in startup-sized companies; namely hardware engineering and mass manufacturing innovation. Apple does a lot of work in hardware and hardware manufacturing, both areas which are pretty capital-intensive and might not lead themselves as easily to the startup world…
you cannot exactly rent a scalable 14nm chip fab from AWS to try to build it on your own and sell it market. To Amazon's credit, I can imagine Bezos reading your comment, frowning, and muttering, "Why the hell not?"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup. That's funny because I've always considered Google a place where great people disappear and never come out except for a small number who start a company only to be aquihired by Google. I could be wrong about that as well.
Apparently that's not true as their average tenure is only 1.1 years, at least according to http://www.geekwire.com/2013/amazon-google-employees-ranked-...
Like others, I'm not sure that Apple has spawned few startups. The evidence here is weak. Apple's innovations have been primarily about hardware design. I would think there are many fewer hardware startups than software startups due to the amount of capital required to build hardware. It might be more apropos to compare the number of startups from other hardware companies (Intel, Nvidia, TI, HP, Sun).
Still, don't they employ something like 100k software engineers?
(I really hope I don’t offend any Apple people saying this) My impression, which comes from meeting a handful of Apple employees and several friends who took jobs and later left, is that the culture of Apple is that of “show up, do good work, cash the paycheck, and go home to your family.” It is not one of “Let’s conquer the world and become bazillionairres while we’re at it” — the Google culture — which is more pron…
the Google culture — which is more prone to eventually jumping ship and creating a startup. That's funny because I've always considered Google a place where great people disappear and never come out except for a small number who start a company only to be aquihired by Google. I could be wrong about that as well.
Any workplace can get old after a while for all kinds of reasons. Or perhaps they just couldn't figure out how to navigate the internal politics to end up on teams doing world-changing stuff (let's be honest, the vast majority of engineering going on at google is pretty boring maintenance and bug fixing like anywhere else).