6 ms·

When I worked at Apple, the culture of secrecy was enforced primarily by fear of MarCom (Marketing and Communications) and Legal. It might sound ominous, but I

When I worked at Apple, the culture of secrecy was enforced primarily by fear of MarCom (Marketing and Communications) and Legal. It might sound ominous, but I always felt it was quite the opposite. Instead of being treated like children, with hands tied and every interesting piece of technology locked behind layer upon layer of approval and access restrictions, probably 80% of all of Apple's source was available to anyone within the company. This promoted a sense of ownership, a feeling that no matter what your "product" was, we all worked on the entire OS, together. It also allowed for the free exchange of ideas and enabled engineers to be self motivated when faced with a challenge. More than once, when I was stuck, I would dive into the code archives and look to find some bit of code that someone else wrote that might do what I needed, and then I'd call them up and see if we couldn't work on a common solution. All of this was possible because Apple made it very clear on day 1 that we were being entrusted with the secrecy that is such a core facet of who Apple is, and that if we violated that trust, there would be consequences. I feel sorry for this "Low-Level" employee, because I suspect they are soon going to find out just how much of a price tag Apple puts on their trust and valued secrecy. On the bright side, they're probably too young to have any real estate holdings Apple could go after, and Chapter 7 gets wiped out after, what? 10 years?

sgift 9y ago
> When I worked at Apple, the culture of secrecy was enforced primarily by fear of MarCom (Marketing and Communications) and Legal. It might sound ominous, but I always felt it was quite the opposite. > I feel sorry for this "Low-Level" employee, because I suspect they are soon going to find out just how much of a price tag Apple puts on their trust and valued secrecy. On the bright side, they're probably too young to have any real estate holdings Apple could go after, and Chapter 7 gets wiped out after, what? 10 years? Replace MarCom with Stasi and I know why I have a profound dislike for all things Apple. Culture of fear, not my cup of tea.
- nextlevelwizard 9y ago
  >Replace MarCom with Stasi and I know why I have a profound dislike for all things Apple. Culture of fear, not my cup of tea. Replace fear with love. Why you hate love man?
  - sgift 9y ago
    You mean the love of loosing all you have if you "misbehave"? Funny.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - pdpi 9y ago
      Replacing fear with love was about as reasonable as replacing MarCom with Stasi. They were only carrying on playing a game of your choosing.
    - dkersten 9y ago
      Suggesting that there should be no consequences for violating the NDA doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  Are Apple the only tech company who will take legal action for violating an NDA? I'm not Apple fan either but this stance is ridiculous.
- simonh 9y ago
  Suppose you were an author and had recently completed a manuscript for a new book. You hire a company to help you move house and one of them copies the manuscript and publishes it on the internet. Or maybe some other personal, private and damaging records or material, such as images of you naked or making love, or compromising images of your son or daughter. If you went to the police, would you be fine if they refused to investigate because "this isn't some police state and we're not the Stasi"? Where would you draw the line on the responsibilities of people you pay to protect your privacy?
ksec 9y ago
>On the bright side, they're probably too young to have any real estate holdings Apple could go after, and Chapter 7 gets wiped out after, what? 10 years? It is hard to imagine one could get penalty of bankruptcy instead of going into Jail for this. I actually value this working model a lot. The comment below suggest this is culture of fear, instead I call this a culture of utmost trust. ( Well he did say he hate Apple, haters are going to hate whether it is rational or not )
- jballanc 9y ago
  > It is hard to imagine one could get penalty of bankruptcy instead of going into Jail for this. IANAL, but I believe for a charge of grand larceny you'd have to show intent to steal, and the "Low-Level" employee seems to have a pretty legitimate case that this was negligence, not theft. On the other hand, I think it's a pretty straight-line open-n-shut case for Apple to sue for damages, and I'm not sure that ruining a young software engineer's financial life for a decade is less of a deterrent than jail.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    The negligence was only in losing control of the code. I guess successfully maintaining tight control of the code would be a mitigating factor (or, more likely, lead to not getting caught), but taking the code from Apple for the purpose of sharing it with these researchers in the first place is clearly premeditated (so, showing intent) theft.
    - yeukhon 9y ago
      Yes, it’s stealing afterall. Taking screenshots using one’s phone is still possible to steal the code, although the effort would be tedious for a large codebase. But for an active adversary, if that’s the only method, he/she would do it. I fear there is no way around that, even with logging enabled (there will be thousands of accessing the codebase per day). If the proposal is to lock down the repository and requires approval, that will make the development very slow. Not even in the banking would a manager want to ask “why” all the time...
Bromskloss 9y ago
> the secrecy that is such a core facet of who Apple is, I wasn't aware. What's so secret?
username8884547 9y ago
>>I feel sorry for this "Low-Level" employee, because I suspect they are soon going to find out just how much of a price tag Apple puts on their trust and valued secrecy Maybe there's no better way but this is a bad security policy. With thousands of employees with such access, odds are that one might do it, either because he can, bragging, ideology, $$ from competitor or NSA /FSB etc etc. Punishment is a possibly but "I will not get caught" etc
mempko 9y ago
The only thing Apple has to worry about with the release of any source code is if that code does something harmful to their customers. Apple should open source all their software.
mattnewton 9y ago
A coworker put it this way to me: “You can do anything you want, on your last day at Apple”
fooker 9y ago
>probably 80% of all of Apple's source was available to anyone within the company. This hasn't been true for quite a while. I worked on developer tools a few years ago and had a lot of trouble finding internal code written in swift to test my tools on. This was when Apple had a few dozens (that we knew of) sort of mature swift codebases.
jarjoura 9y ago
Ah yes, Purplefish <3. A very magical tool for us OS peeps. Not sure of the breadth of code in there though, as it seemed every org had its own way of managing its own source code. At the beginning, iPhone OS was basically a mono-repo, but I don't think you could find the iBoot source code in there. Plus, there was this whole hyperbolic "security clearance" leveling that only those working closely with Forstall and Jobs were given full access to UI code. Everyone else had some janky non-ui variant that worked well enough to test the lower level code. To be fair, factory workers were known sources of leaks, so it was a smart move to hide upcoming features. At every software job I've ever worked, you were entrusted to take care of the companies IP. It's a lot of responsibility when you think about it, because so much of the worlds most powerful IP sits on laptops all over the place. How many of those get stolen or hacked and still thankfully never have things leak?! I've always been impressed. This is another reason we get paid so well when you think about it.
- w0de0 9y ago
  Send some your thanks to Apple itself & its commitment to device/encryption & privacy; most importantly, send some thanks to all the Silicon Valley Macadmins/Macops/CPE/IT teams. No doubt their work has prevented more leaks than we can now!

sgift 9y ago

> When I worked at Apple, the culture of secrecy was enforced primarily by fear of MarCom (Marketing and Communications) and Legal. It might sound ominous, but I always felt it was quite the opposite. > I feel sorry for this "Low-Level" employee, because I suspect they are soon going to find out just how much of a price tag Apple puts on their trust and valued secrecy. On the bright side, they're probably too young to have any real estate holdings Apple could go after, and Chapter 7 gets wiped out after, what? 10 years? Replace MarCom with Stasi and I know why I have a profound dislike for all things Apple. Culture of fear, not my cup of tea.

nextlevelwizard 9y ago
>Replace MarCom with Stasi and I know why I have a profound dislike for all things Apple. Culture of fear, not my cup of tea. Replace fear with love. Why you hate love man?
- sgift 9y ago
  You mean the love of loosing all you have if you "misbehave"? Funny.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - pdpi 9y ago
    Replacing fear with love was about as reasonable as replacing MarCom with Stasi. They were only carrying on playing a game of your choosing.
  - dkersten 9y ago
    Suggesting that there should be no consequences for violating the NDA doesn’t seem reasonable to me.
SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
Are Apple the only tech company who will take legal action for violating an NDA? I'm not Apple fan either but this stance is ridiculous.
simonh 9y ago
Suppose you were an author and had recently completed a manuscript for a new book. You hire a company to help you move house and one of them copies the manuscript and publishes it on the internet. Or maybe some other personal, private and damaging records or material, such as images of you naked or making love, or compromising images of your son or daughter. If you went to the police, would you be fine if they refused to investigate because "this isn't some police state and we're not the Stasi"? Where would you draw the line on the responsibilities of people you pay to protect your privacy?

ksec 9y ago

>On the bright side, they're probably too young to have any real estate holdings Apple could go after, and Chapter 7 gets wiped out after, what? 10 years? It is hard to imagine one could get penalty of bankruptcy instead of going into Jail for this. I actually value this working model a lot. The comment below suggest this is culture of fear, instead I call this a culture of utmost trust. ( Well he did say he hate Apple, haters are going to hate whether it is rational or not )

jballanc 9y ago
> It is hard to imagine one could get penalty of bankruptcy instead of going into Jail for this. IANAL, but I believe for a charge of grand larceny you'd have to show intent to steal, and the "Low-Level" employee seems to have a pretty legitimate case that this was negligence, not theft. On the other hand, I think it's a pretty straight-line open-n-shut case for Apple to sue for damages, and I'm not sure that ruining a young software engineer's financial life for a decade is less of a deterrent than jail.
- mseebach 9y ago
  The negligence was only in losing control of the code. I guess successfully maintaining tight control of the code would be a mitigating factor (or, more likely, lead to not getting caught), but taking the code from Apple for the purpose of sharing it with these researchers in the first place is clearly premeditated (so, showing intent) theft.
  - yeukhon 9y ago
    Yes, it’s stealing afterall. Taking screenshots using one’s phone is still possible to steal the code, although the effort would be tedious for a large codebase. But for an active adversary, if that’s the only method, he/she would do it. I fear there is no way around that, even with logging enabled (there will be thousands of accessing the codebase per day). If the proposal is to lock down the repository and requires approval, that will make the development very slow. Not even in the banking would a manager want to ask “why” all the time...

Bromskloss 9y ago

> the secrecy that is such a core facet of who Apple is, I wasn't aware. What's so secret?

username8884547 9y ago

>>I feel sorry for this "Low-Level" employee, because I suspect they are soon going to find out just how much of a price tag Apple puts on their trust and valued secrecy Maybe there's no better way but this is a bad security policy. With thousands of employees with such access, odds are that one might do it, either because he can, bragging, ideology, $$ from competitor or NSA /FSB etc etc. Punishment is a possibly but "I will not get caught" etc

mempko 9y ago

The only thing Apple has to worry about with the release of any source code is if that code does something harmful to their customers. Apple should open source all their software.

mattnewton 9y ago

A coworker put it this way to me: “You can do anything you want, on your last day at Apple”

fooker 9y ago

>probably 80% of all of Apple's source was available to anyone within the company. This hasn't been true for quite a while. I worked on developer tools a few years ago and had a lot of trouble finding internal code written in swift to test my tools on. This was when Apple had a few dozens (that we knew of) sort of mature swift codebases.

jarjoura 9y ago

Ah yes, Purplefish <3. A very magical tool for us OS peeps. Not sure of the breadth of code in there though, as it seemed every org had its own way of managing its own source code. At the beginning, iPhone OS was basically a mono-repo, but I don't think you could find the iBoot source code in there. Plus, there was this whole hyperbolic "security clearance" leveling that only those working closely with Forstall and Jobs were given full access to UI code. Everyone else had some janky non-ui variant that worked well enough to test the lower level code. To be fair, factory workers were known sources of leaks, so it was a smart move to hide upcoming features. At every software job I've ever worked, you were entrusted to take care of the companies IP. It's a lot of responsibility when you think about it, because so much of the worlds most powerful IP sits on laptops all over the place. How many of those get stolen or hacked and still thankfully never have things leak?! I've always been impressed. This is another reason we get paid so well when you think about it.

w0de0 9y ago
Send some your thanks to Apple itself & its commitment to device/encryption & privacy; most importantly, send some thanks to all the Silicon Valley Macadmins/Macops/CPE/IT teams. No doubt their work has prevented more leaks than we can now!