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Former Apple employees try a different management approach at Pearl Automation
- Apocryphon 10y agoInteresting they're based in Scotts Valley. I have to wonder if California tech in Santa Cruz and Monterey have dwindled in recent years because of the emphasis on San Francisco and Palo Alto.
- Fnoord 10y agoDon't think ever was much at that side of SV to begin with. People who work in tech and live in SC just travel to SV. From what I remember its a ~1 hour drive from SC to SFO airport or SJ. Quite doable if you love living in SC.
- sillyrabbit 10y agoSure, plug a mobile app directly into your OBD-II, what could go wrong?
- ams6110 10y agoDoes OBD-II have any direct control capability? I had thought it was a diagnostic (read-only) interface.
- dghughes 10y agoI'm pretty sure diesel performance kits (small PDA-like device) that let you alter engine and transmission performance connects via the OBD-II port.
- atomical 10y agoIt depends on the manufacturer as to what custom protocols/capabilities they have on top of OBD-II.
- casylum 10y agoOBD-II diagnostics are mandated by law, but manufactures often connect almost all microcontrollers to that connector. This allows updating all of your firmware from one port. That can be a security problem when connected to the internet.
- nickbauman 10y agoI was not aware of this; I assumed it was read-only except for reset flags, thank you for pointing this out.
- xenadu02 10y agoThere are numerous holes in various firmware that allow cross-talk between the various CAN busses anyway. I don't think anyone who set out to research automotive security has ever had to move on to another vehicle due to lack of exploitable flaws.
- jklinger410 10y agoNothing?
- thanatropism 10y agoSounds like a vanishing market, though. People don't buy new cars because theirs are "outdated". They buy the new shiny because they deserve the new shiny godammit. Not unlike computer hardware geeks who only buy new devices when they need it.
- smpetrey 10y agoAre you kidding me? Have you ever worked in/or visited a vehicle dealership? It's over -run with 1st-movers, and most of the time the owners and salesmen always have the newest and latest.
- Spooky23 10y agoNot like it used to be. See: https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_26.html_mfd https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu... I work with a group of well paid engineering types. About 50% have cars < 5 years old. I have the third oldest -- a 2003 model year. My boss drives a 1991 Accord, although this will be its last winter.
- IBM 10y agoKind of feels like an ad for Pearl they agreed to publish in exchange for anecdotes about working at Apple. The Apple PR statement at the end made me laugh for some reason: “Pearl Auto is a great example of the creativity and innovation driving the iPhone ecosystem,” said Josh Rosenstock, an Apple spokesman. “We wish them great success with their new product.”
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Hydraulix989 10y agoYes, this is obviously paid content marketing material. EDIT: The Pearl team mass downvoted me. :(
- harryh 10y agoIt's certainly marketing material but I don't think the NYTimes publishes paid content in the way you describe.
- jarjoura 10y agoNYTimes definitely offers native advertising just like everyone else. It's way too lucrative a market to pass up. http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/as-print-fades-part-4-native-advertising-on-the-rise/ http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/as-print-fa... "There is, however, an inherent problem: If native ads look too much like journalism, they damage credibility; if they look nothing like journalism, they lose their appeal to advertisers."
- achompas 10y agoYeah agreed. For the record, they're clearly marked as sponsored posts. The URL is even marked as "paidpost.nytimes.com." Here's an example: http://paidpost.nytimes.com/cole-haan/grit-and-grace.html?_r=2#.VDvda15SKtw http://paidpost.nytimes.com/cole-haan/grit-and-grace.html?_r...
- azdle 10y ago> Apple, for its part, appears to hold no hard feelings toward Pearl, despite the steady poaching of employees. This has made me wonder, why does offering people a better option for employment than what they currently have get described with the word for illegally killing/stealing animals? Was there some concerted effort years ago to associate the two, to make leaving one company for another seem like a bad thing?
- eridius 10y agoBecause it's viewed as a breach of loyalty. It used to be that employees were expected to be loyal to their company, and in return the company would take care of them. Things have changed now so companies don't take care of their employees anymore, but they still want to push the narrative that their employees should be loyal to the company.
- 1123581321 10y agoI can't speak to the history of the term, unfortunately, but the term poaching in a hunting context means more than just killing an animal illegally; it has a connotation of trespassing to gain something otherwise inaccessible. Employee poaching has the same connotation because the former employee uses their familiarity with the old company to hire employees that other companies can't access as easily.
- will_pseudonym 10y agoI see your definition and that of the first definition I saw from the internet, and coming from a family of hunters/fishers, it surprised me a bit. I associate poaching almost entirely with killing of animals illegally. I think that is because in my home state, there were fewer problems with people trespassing to hunt than with those hunting with no regard for licenses/hunting laws. The Wikipedia article on poaching in the USA[0] is more what I associate with poaching. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching#Poaching_in_the_USA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaching#Poaching_in_the_USA
- gohrt 10y agoYes: http://www.hightechemployeelawsuit.com/ http://www.hightechemployeelawsuit.com/
- thesmallestcat 10y ago> More than 50 of the company’s 80 or so employees worked for Apple at some point. I understand how/why this happens, but as an engineer who's not an Apple "alumnus" (ugh), I would never work at a place like that. A company needs diversity in more ways than one.
- furyofantares 10y agoI don't understand. Would you work at Apple itself?
- thesmallestcat 10y agoMaybe. Apple's too large to have 70% of their employees come from the same company. I've worked at "startups" like this before, and there is a caste system with the former $BIG_CORP-ers and everybody else. No thanks.
- taneq 10y agoWouldn't it be a great networking move if you wanted to someday work at Apple, though?
- pkaye 10y ago$500 for the PearlVision product and you have to supply your own phone for the display. That is some hefty markup. You can get some decent ones that include a display in the range of $50-$150 on Amazon.
- adevine 10y agoI'm sure they're just intending for this to be an initial product, but I agree, I don't understand their business plan at all. The people willing to pay 3x over a "good enough" backup camera are also the people who'd be first in line to buy a new car with all the bells and whistles in the first place. The market for this product has to be exceedingly small.
- Naritai 10y agowhat if the business plan is 'get acquired by another company looking to get into the self-driving car business'?
- thesmallestcat 10y agoIt wouldn't be surprising if they're angling to be acqui-hired. I think that's why they're so forthright about the Apple pedigree.
- PretzelFisch 10y agoWhat would they be offering to that company, they haven't shown any prowess for integrating into the cars systems. Besides don't most car manufactures have self-driving features under development/deployed already?
- Naritai 10y agoI'm not saying it's a _good_ idea :P
- taco_emoji 10y agoYou think that people willing to spend $500 would rather just spend tens of thousands instead for the same value proposition?
- yalogin 10y agoI don't know if there is a huge need for this in the market though. I would rather spend to upgrade the media and other controls in the car than the rear view camera if I have to. For someone used to driving without a rear camera there is no need for one. They need more products.
- zump 10y agoHow do people gain satisfaction from working for a dead on arrival product?
- adriand 10y agoThis is the most interesting part of the article for me: > Apple, which has about 110,000 employees, breaks big projects down into smaller tasks. Those are assigned to small teams, and each subtask is given to a specific employee, who must get it done — what Apple calls the “directly responsible individual.” > Pearl has copied this system. “In leading small teams, that’s very effective,” Mr. Gardner said. Apparently this directly responsible individual (DRI) approach is famous, but it's the first I've heard of it. Is anyone able to comment on how effective this is? Say you have a multi-disciplinary team of UX designers, a PM, front-end and back-end devs - I'd be accustomed to seeing a team lead in charge of the project who is the DRI for the whole thing, but do subtasks for the project also get parcelled out in formal, DRI-fashion? E.g. user stories for a web app like, "As a user I can log in securely", would this get a DRI assigned to it? What happens when the DRI doesn't have time for that task, are they able to pass it along to someone else, and would the decision to punt it over to someone need to be run past someone, typically, or is the DRI empowered to make decisions on delegation/task transferring?
- jarjoura 10y agoThe way it worked a few years ago, at least, each year new tent-pole features were pushed down from the top. These features came from marketing, design, and Steve Jobs himself. There was always a much larger list of wants than possible for a given release, so the ever powerful hands of EPMs (engineering project managers) would help delegate the tasks and schedule a years worth of work. The company as a whole loves small teams, they find them effective, and most managers are only given 5-10 engineers before there's pressure to split up into smaller teams. During each start of a new release, engineers would pick and chose which features they wanted to work on. Depending on the team, some influential engineers and managers could fight for ranking the features they thought most important. Features weren't always user visible things, one year, one of the tent-pole features was porting everything over to 64-bit. Of course this feature affected the entire software organization, so that radar was broken up into large teams, and then each framework and application had a radar. Usually the person responsible for the feature at the team level was the DRI and anyone on the team could complete any of the radars associated with it, but the DRI was the main contact. They would be the direct line to the higher level radar DRI and so on. If at any point in the chain you didn't have NDA visibility, the EPM would be your contact.
- rocky1138 10y agoI am less concerned with who they are and more concerned with what they're doing. What does their company do?
- mdonahoe 10y agoThe sell an aftermarket rear view camera for your car. https://pearlauto.com/ https://pearlauto.com/
- Animats 10y agoThe article is all Apple, Apple, Apple. That's not Pearl's problem. Pearl is in the auto accessory business, selling through all those cheesy stores in the auto-parts part of town. Their product is not novel. It's so not novel that there's an Amazon Vehicle Backup Cameras Store.[1] Pearl is in it, at $499, alongside comparable products starting at $32.99. That's Pearl's problem. Not only that, the competing products come with a display. Pearl's product assumes you have a phone on your dashboard, running their app. User comment: "any time you backup, you need to manually launch the app and wait through a 3-5 second lag as the video feed loads." Those guys are automotive noobs. Their recommended temperature range is -4°F (-20°C) to 113°F (45°C). You can easily exceed those on a car body. Automotive temperature range for components is usually considered to be -40°C to 125°C. Their device is also battery powered, so it will need a recharge or a new battery regularly. Everybody else wires into vehicle power, so it's install and forget. They say they're going to do self-parking next. As a retrofit. Right. Those guys need to get out of Scotts Valley, move to Detroit or some place with auto parts plants, and get their hands dirty. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Vehicle-Backup-Cameras/b?ie=UTF8&node=1253823011 https://www.amazon.com/Vehicle-Backup-Cameras/b?ie=UTF8&node...
- noobiemcfoob 10y agoMany raised similar sounding complaints about Tesla in their early days. "Stupid programmers and electrical engineers don't know jack about building a car..." Yeah, they skipped a lot of the "important" parts, but they recognized before anyone else that there was value much deeper worth ignoring those common-sense features. Time tells if its a worthwhile gamble.
- boxcardavin 10y agoThe point is that they're not designing their product from any sort of first-principles, it's more a style of design whereby they are using a single hardware widget augmented with a phone. They didn't tailor their product to the problem, which Tesla did.
- ghughes 10y agoThe article makes a lot more sense if you look at it as an acquihire solicitation.