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Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional softw

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally every group of 4 people is in a little silo with no incentive to go outside it - Broken management structure. I have had many managers (a red flag in itself) but even worse none of the managers take suggestions from engineers. Everything is purely top down. If an engineer realizes there is a problem on a macro scale they cannot fix it. It is literally impossible to unite more than 1.5 teams to get anything done. - So what happens is that you’re working on a product that’s part of another product but you never talked to any other teams or orgs on how to make your product fit in - 10 different teams working on the same products and services. Zero unification means you are literally wasting developers and internally fragmenting every tool. Even worse, these teams compete for internal market domination - Culture of secrecy means nothing gets fucking done. You file a bug report and you can’t even see it any more for some orgs This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are fundamental and serious problems at Apple that no one in management gives a shit about solving. Any time engineers try to congregate or work on anything constructive with another team, they are shot down. The only time I have seen cross-team developers working together has been to deal with critical bugs. Because of the lack of communication, none of management’s goals align. They are all out of sync and poorly thought out. So year after year your manager has something they want you to implement but the feature for the year is bullshit because it makes no sense and is just there to pad the manager’s resume. And you can’t speak out about this. Apple doesn’t take well to employees complaining. Even then, because of the lack of organization there is no one you could raise these issues with.

snapples 7y ago
I should note that most developers here really do care, and that’s probably why products can be released in the first place. You have to have really dedicated people willing to cut through the organizational bullshit to get things done. All of the engineers I’ve met here are smart and innovative. Only if we could organize, things would be much better.
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- tpmx 7y ago
  What do you mean when you say "organize"?
  - m12k 7y ago
    Not OP, but I'm guessing they mean something like 'make sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing'. Making sure the effort to produce something is done collaboratively by all teams instead of each team working in isolation without coordinating with others, with the risk of duplicated effort or one team tripping up others.
    - devdas 7y ago
      Or you know, things like unions.
  - nickcox 7y ago
    I think they meant to say, ‘organise’.
techntoke 7y ago
> Culture of secrecy means nothing gets fucking done. You file a bug report and you can’t even see it any more for some orgs > And you can’t speak out about this. Apple doesn’t take well to employees complaining. Even then, because of the lack of organization there is no one you could raise these issues with. Sounds similar to a cult.
- oneplane 7y ago
  No, it sounds like any large multinational. In the end, all commercial entities turn into the same thing where they only differ in branding, segment and origins.
  - jen729w 7y ago
    Agreed. Any sufficiently large organisation is, by definition, staffed by average people. Why would we expect that organisation, as a whole, to be above average?
    - smoofles 7y ago
      Right. The poblem is when you focus on and optimize for hiring excellent developers only. Then all the non-excellent people that contribute to the average are in middle-to-higher-level management.
zanny 7y ago
It absolutely isn't the individual employee developers job or responsibility to try to fix corporate culture. Almost anyone on here or reading this is a line worker developer and trying to take on the job responsibilities of C level staff is setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. Any company larger than a few dozen people is entrenched - there will be a hierarchy and the top will dictate the order of things. If they are paying you to write pointless software then you are either content with the paycheck and probably a lot of free time at work if nothing really matters or can go somewhere else to find meaningful work. But seriously, the larger the company the less you should ever consider thinking yourself as some engineering talent can change the system. You change the system in those circumstances by realizing the failure, networking with your peers, and starting your own company to do it better. Assuming you didn't sign a deal with the devil by noncompeting your way into being stuck. You were hired to write code, not fix corporate culture. Largely because most large corporations have layers of management dedicated to insuring it is not fixed.
- kbenson 7y ago
  > Assuming you didn't sign a deal with the devil by noncompeting your way into being stuck. Well, in California it's basically impossible to enforce a non-compete, so there's that going for anyone who wants to do this as a current Apple employee.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I think the issue is that culture at Apple is very much not supposed to be this, and this probably isn’t what the C-suite is intending to push. So you’re not really going against them; rather, you’re going with them but against the current status quo.
  - yabadabadoes 7y ago
    In the sense that everyone wants cake and to eat it sure.. But really everything anyone wants is stack ranked and their management prefers the apple demo to the world format long after the luster has gone in no small part because of the secrecy, silos and paranoia it requires. In a financial sense their management is right and an employee wanting to be part of something less bland and Oracle like is wrong.
m463 7y ago
From what I understand about Steve Jobs - he the great integrator. He got lots of disparate folks to work together. I mean, he got music folks talking to computer folks. But I think he did this on a smaller scale every day and that might have been his secret sauce for apple.
- threeseed 7y ago
  I worked at Apple for a few years and he was not running around bringing teams together. At the senior leadership team level sure. But not at the engineering or middle management levels. It sounds quite similar to what OP was experiencing i.e. lots of siloed, secretive teams across a very large, 100K employee organisation.
  - ivebeenthere 7y ago
    Hmm, Apple was nowhere near that big in Jobs' era. Everybody was in one or two floors in infinite loop 1 and 2
- rusk 7y ago
  Absolutely. Based on various anecdotes it seems apple succeeded nearly in spite of him, but he surrounded himself with people like Wozniak, John Carmack, Tevanian etc people who’s confidence in what they knew could always win out against Steve’s bluster. Steve brought people together, but also brought creative tension. He was also pretty good at spotting opportunities and trends. Apple really does feel rudderless without him. There’s no coherence of vision between products. Quality doesnt even really seem to matter. Apple still operates in a very top down manner, but it just doesnt seem as though there’s anyone at the top with much in the way of interesting ideas. Watch did okay, but was hardly a game changer. Earbuds are a success, but they cant be making that much on them ... Steve’s gone, and more’s the pity for all concerned.
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saagarjha 7y ago
I feel like there are people who get around the secrecy/isolation veil, they just have long-standing friends in other projects and can rely on them to push features and bugs though the bureaucracy. If you don’t have that, well, expect your Radars to sit in “punted from this release” until the end of time.
- threeseed 7y ago
  Or just escalate to your Product Manager. It's not like cross communication doesn't happen it's just via a formal process.
  - renaudg 7y ago
    And what do PMs tell engineers on their team once they're back from their super secret meeting with the PMs from the other team ? "Do exactly this, I can't give you context but it'll make sense on release day" ? Sounds like extreme Fordism (and basically a hellish way to work for creative minds) and a great way to prevent people from spotting problems early.
  - finnthehuman 7y ago
    That's hilarious and cute. I'm pretty sure I'd be told off if I tried to push cross-project collaboration up the management ladder beyond making an introduction happen. This thread is really helping me understand why I can never see eye to eye with anyone on Hacker News. What I had assumed would be engineering companies are companies with engineers but without engineering culture, and there is zero autonomy to be had without getting into management in an over-stratified org-chart.
- robryan 7y ago
  Seems crazy to hire the best engineers and pay them top dollar only to put a bunch of organizational barriers in the way they have to try and navigate if they want to get anything done.
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    The prestige from hiring very highly paid people is obviously higher than the one attained when hiring lower paid ones. Managing 20 people on-site at Apple is different from managing 20 off-shore cheapos (even though they could potentially be just as skilled).
gumby 7y ago
When my friends at apple talk to me I feel any of them could write your post except...none of them would say "I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software" (well, maybe one would). I'd like to work with these folks again* but the incredible secrecy would bug me. I understand that some things have to be secret, and I don't at feel I need to know what that group over there is doing but I'd like to talk with my (NDAd, same company) friends about what I work on! So I don't even apply for a job there. But some people seem to consider it OK. * The subset of friends there who used to be colleagues of mine, I mean.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  I’m not surprised by that line. Honestly I think many employees would say the same of their employers if they could.
jfb 7y ago
Yeah, this rings pretty true.
IshKebab 7y ago
I used to work at Dyson and it was a similar story. I think the secrecy thing is key. They went on and on about "protecting our secrets" (ha) and operating on a need-to-know basis. It just meant communication was really bad, and getting help from anyone who didn't know you was impossible.
newacctwhodis 7y ago
I’m on an internal infra team, and even tho we’re supposed to be making tooling for the rest of the company, it’s just as much of a clusterf*. I’ve been interviewing with other teams, but with this disaster of a release and us demonstrating that our corporate values are just empty words in the face of opposition from China, it’s likely time for me to make my exit. The overt sexism that I’ve been witness to in iCloud management certainly doesn’t help either.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > The overt sexism that I’ve been witness to in iCloud management certainly doesn’t help either. Yikes! Is this something you could share the nature of?
  - newacctwhodis 7y ago
    There is shockingly little female representation, especially in management. I’m well aware software engineering skews male, and infrastructure even further so, but the numbers are absurd. In one section of iCloud, there’s zero female managers in a 200+ person org. In another, after recent re-orgs, there’s only one remaining female manager in a 600+ person org, and even then, she only has a small team of engineers. No representation in upper management whatsoever. With multiple recent re-orgs caused by poor management, there has been ample opportunity to address this imbalance, but upper management has doubled down, cancelling nearly every project managed by a female manager before the changes, or giving their projects to male managers. I raised this as a concern with HR months ago, but they have yet to take any action or even follow up.
    - thezealot 7y ago
      Why does every accusation of sexism always end up sounding like a conspiracy theory? Shouldn’t you be more concerned with someone’s competence than what is between their legs? Besides, women aren’t happy in the workforce.
tpmx 7y ago
Two observations: 1) You seem credible. 2) There's not really a mad rush for questions. It seems like the magic really is over. ( :/ )
tpmx 7y ago
Over the years I've been surprised a number of times by seeing Apple hire a particular software engineer that I wouldn't hire for my own little company. You're still kinda junior @ 4 years there, but.. have you seen seen any slippage in hiring standards?
- novok 7y ago
  Apple hiring is independent per team. You can literally interview forever at apple and the way each team interviews is wildly variant. Had some pretty cool interview loops. I got rejected and then got an offer after interview 4 or 5 with a team on a high profile app that I really liked. Apple doesn't give good offers although, so I took another one at a company / team I also really liked with a better offer.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    Ah, interesting!
guelo 7y ago
I have a buddy who's an old Apple QA who tells me similar jaw dropping stories about the silos and secrecy. When I marvel how they can possibly ship all those wonderful products he says it's done through grueling brute force manual QA testing. Which also sounds insane but somehow it has mostly worked through the years. But maybe they're reaching the level of complexity where brute force manual testing is not scaling well enough.
- esaruoho 7y ago
  yet, interestingly enough, Apple are never looking for manual QA testers, just Senior Automation Engineers. Or so it seems to me, a lone brute force manual QA tester who every once in a while wonders what kind of an effect he'd have at Apple.
m12k 7y ago
This sounds largely as I feared. The organization was built to serve the will of an omniscient god-king who knew better than anyone else. And now he's gone, and the organization is still set up to make orders trickle down from on high (despite no-one qualified or interested being there to make those calls) and hasn't learned make good decisions by communicating internally either. So the acolytes and high priests try to just keep doing what they were doing before god died.
- yuchi 7y ago
  If you read other insiders’ comments here you can notice that this is not the case at all. Under Jobs the Mac OS team was more open and collaborative, so probably this happened “by chance” and the death of Jobs was probably a force toward closeness.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    It sort of makes sense to me. The god-king likely demanded answers and accountability, that must make people cooperate somewhat. With stagnation, power plays and petty turf-wars take over.
    - matwood 7y ago
      Agreed. When Sj died a power vacuum opened. His presence really was so big that there is no way a single person or even a couple people could fill the charisma and power he wielded over the company. Anytime there is a vacuum, the power plays and turf wars become the goal over delivering product.
renaudg 7y ago
> - So what happens is that you’re working on a product that’s part of another product but you never talked to any other teams or orgs on how to make your product fit in I'm surprised to read this, because I've always thought tight integration and clever synergies between product lines were precisely one of the things Apple excelled at. And I was wondering how exactly they managed to make that happen in such a famously secretive organization, where very few people have the 10.000 feet view required to come up with these ideas. How do you make Mac Catalyst or Sidecar happen with 4 people silos who hardly ever meet and adjust ? How do you redesign the iOS photos app to the capabilities of the new hardware, in a way that will make sense once software+hardware become a product ? How do pictures of unreleased Airpods end up in recent iOS beta releases ? I mean, at some point you've got to make these things work together, and one decision on one side that's oblivious to the other side's constraints might make things impossible to them, and they'll want to push back. This is how "normal" companies function. One more example, not something especially clever but more something that would have been a huge bummer if it hadn't happened : it seems like the Pro Display XDR has charging capabilities way beyond what any current Apple device might require, and it's speculated that it's for the upcoming 16" MBP : https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/04/16-inch-macbook-pro-96w-rumor/ https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/04/16-inch-macbook-pro-96w... Again, how do you even achieve that if people don't communicate ? Through extremely well defined internal interfaces and specs ?
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- rjblackman 7y ago
  the fact that GP is complaining about it may be an indication. by hiring good people who see the structural problems and work around them works. you can brute force work around poor management and a bad structure. Edit: you can see this explained in one of snapples sibling posts.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > How do pictures of unreleased Airpods end up in recent iOS beta releases ? By the OS Mastering team dropping the ball…
eanzenberg 7y ago
You are probably segregated away from where the real work is happening. This is by design, because you haven't proven yourself yet or they don't trust you yet. Good work is being done in Apple every day. You're just not a part of it and are not seeing it.
- kevingadd 7y ago
  After four years? Seriously? Why would a bad hire not be laid off at that point? What's the difference between "real work" and "not real work"? How many engineers are on-site at HQ who don't do real work?
- draw_down 7y ago
  Come on
- saagarjha 7y ago
  There might be teams working on "secret" things that are better, but as far as I can tell the "we don't trust you yet so you can't work on anything until you do" is largely a myth.
- smoofles 7y ago
  Yeah, like iOS 13, Catalyst, and Catalina. It’s all rather amazing. Ship on time, ship all features that were announced, heck, their hardware teams can barely keep up!
afturner 7y ago
I'm on an internal tooling team @ PlayStation and man do I appreciate how much the company encourages cross-site and cross-team collaboration. Reading your comment made me cringe :/ so so sorry for you folks working at Apple.
jv22222 7y ago
> The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. Elon Musk says something interesting about this here: "Product errors reflect organizational errors." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be&t=200 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be... He's specifically talking about how the product subsystems are effectively mapped out by the product departments and that they should try to interface with each other with minimal constraints. But, my take was that there needs to be a LOT of communication between departments and an ongoing debate between them as well. Edit: The more that I think about it... This might a big reason why Musk companies defy the odds, and why it is so difficult for incumbents to catch up. The over the air updates of Tesla are a good example of hardware & software departments working together to make something very difficult to compete with (if you're a regular old school siloed company).
- adadgar 7y ago
  Not dismissing what Elon said but it is commonly know as Conway's law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Yeah, I’ve been trying to teach my organization that if the input to my team is crap, the chances of anything but crap coming out are fairly low. Crap >> Team >> Crap We’re front-end, and basically the lowest part of the pipeline, so literally everyones crap gets dumped on us.
  - baq 7y ago
    On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"
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webwielder2 7y ago
And yet most of Apple's products are consistently best-in-class, so I guess it's working for them? And a bumper crop of bugs in a point zero macOS release doesn't count as a disaster. They've been shipping super buggy point zeros for two decades.
- smoofles 7y ago
  You do know that hardware and software teams are not the same thing, yeah?
  - webwielder2 7y ago
    The integration of hardware and software is and has always been one of the things that make Apple's products best-in-class. I'm not sure what your point is.
- vor_ 7y ago
  Fans like you are a major factor in why Apple won't change. They can do no wrong.
ssalka 7y ago
If things are so broken, as you describe, why not just pack up and go work somewhere else? Personally I love many of Apple's products but wouldn't be willing to put up with that kind of workplace just for the sake of it being Apple.
00N8 7y ago
thank you. this really validates my decision to work as a backend Python engineer at a well-established startup.
- jonahss 7y ago
  What is a "well-established startup"?
  - smoofles 7y ago
    It’s an enterprise full of hipsters that tell themselves they’re changing the world in order to be able to take the punishment (or to be ok with unethical work). :P
  - andrewflnr 7y ago
    Probably a decent-sized one with a proven business model, or at least revenue stream.
jarjoura 7y ago
When I worked there under SJ, the Mac OS org (then under Betrand Serlet), it was sort of open amongst the org itself. It was really easy to walk to someone's office and strike up an interesting conversation. Many late nights were spent working through collaborative problems. Or randomly, I had a friend who would pop by my office and spend hours explaining how he figured out some complex Javascript compiler bug of the day. It always felt like we were in a mission to ship Mac OS together. What Apple did do back then was create these special versions of the OS that had a few key hidden/secret products that SJ was going to demo, like iTunes or iPhoto. So while I could install the latest internal developer build of the OS, it would have a feature or two missing. You would then get radars that mentioned the code-name and explained a bug that you had to fix for the feature, but you had to fix the bug blinded and send the bug back to verify. (Radars could never be closed until the original creator verified them) The secrecy didn't really get in the way and it made for an interesting culture. Then it all started to change when Forstall was promoted to VP of the iPhone effort. He took what was probably meant to be a short term secret launch team culture and expanded it to create this massive secret island in the company. The program office and by extension, the original founding engineers were all promoted to management that expanded on the secret culture. I think if management meant to open the culture back up to the same level as Mac OS in 2009, they would have been burned by Samsung and Palm WebOS making exact copies of the software coming out at the time. So the hyper locked down culture persisted and SJ passed away. Then Forstall was fired and Federighi was promoted to replace him and merge both the Mac OS and iOS orgs finally killing off any of the remaining openness that once existed. Then came all the ridiculous tools such as checking someone's security clearance when you had a meeting with them. [Apple Confidential] :-P
mch82 7y ago
Ever considered emailing Tim Cook? Don’t throw your managers under the bus, stay optimistic, anchor your message in whole company success. You might be surprised at the impact you can have & the replies you’ll get. Here’s a formula you can try... Hi Tim, At <company presentation> you talked about <goal>, which I’m excited about! I/we’ve been experimenting with <new approach>. We’ve seen <results>. What other teams should I/we collaborate with to help Apple get to <Tim’s goal> faster?
- LeoNatan25 7y ago
  Cook is a corporate bureaucrat. in the best case scenario, he’d point you to your management chain, and in the worst, summon an inquiry into why you contacted him in the first place.
virgilp 7y ago
> No one fucking communicates. We all laughed when Tim Cook said that Apple will double-down on secrecy[1]. Who's laughing now? Turns out he was dead serious. [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/tim-cook-were-going-to-double-down-on-secrecy/ https://www.cnet.com/news/tim-cook-were-going-to-double-down...
arondeparon 7y ago
Perhaps a silly question, but if it is so broken, then why do you keep working there? Is it purely a money-thing? Is there still hope that things can improve? Not judging, but I am genuinely curious about what drives engineers to stay.
zulln 7y ago
Have you worked at a company of similar size before?
- jrnichols 7y ago
  was thinking.. the complaints listed above sound very much like an aerospace manufacturer/defense contractor i worked for before. little silos everywhere, and further complicated by gov security clearances. getting anything done was like mud.
inthezone 7y ago
Of all the elements you mention, the most deadly is the inability to speak out about the problems. The first step in improving anything is to acknowledge the areas that need work.
musicale 7y ago
The best workaround I've found for this in large companies has been to sidestep the formal management structure as needed to actually get things done and working properly, and then give management credit for it. The cleverest way to get rid of bad bosses (besides moving to another group yourself) is to get them hired by another company or promoted to irrelevance (though both strategies can backfire.)
diehard88 7y ago
that's samsung.

snapples 7y ago

I should note that most developers here really do care, and that’s probably why products can be released in the first place. You have to have really dedicated people willing to cut through the organizational bullshit to get things done. All of the engineers I’ve met here are smart and innovative. Only if we could organize, things would be much better.

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tpmx 7y ago
What do you mean when you say "organize"?
- m12k 7y ago
  Not OP, but I'm guessing they mean something like 'make sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing'. Making sure the effort to produce something is done collaboratively by all teams instead of each team working in isolation without coordinating with others, with the risk of duplicated effort or one team tripping up others.
  - devdas 7y ago
    Or you know, things like unions.
- nickcox 7y ago
  I think they meant to say, ‘organise’.

techntoke 7y ago

> Culture of secrecy means nothing gets fucking done. You file a bug report and you can’t even see it any more for some orgs > And you can’t speak out about this. Apple doesn’t take well to employees complaining. Even then, because of the lack of organization there is no one you could raise these issues with. Sounds similar to a cult.

oneplane 7y ago
No, it sounds like any large multinational. In the end, all commercial entities turn into the same thing where they only differ in branding, segment and origins.
- jen729w 7y ago
  Agreed. Any sufficiently large organisation is, by definition, staffed by average people. Why would we expect that organisation, as a whole, to be above average?
  - smoofles 7y ago
    Right. The poblem is when you focus on and optimize for hiring excellent developers only. Then all the non-excellent people that contribute to the average are in middle-to-higher-level management.

zanny 7y ago

It absolutely isn't the individual employee developers job or responsibility to try to fix corporate culture. Almost anyone on here or reading this is a line worker developer and trying to take on the job responsibilities of C level staff is setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. Any company larger than a few dozen people is entrenched - there will be a hierarchy and the top will dictate the order of things. If they are paying you to write pointless software then you are either content with the paycheck and probably a lot of free time at work if nothing really matters or can go somewhere else to find meaningful work. But seriously, the larger the company the less you should ever consider thinking yourself as some engineering talent can change the system. You change the system in those circumstances by realizing the failure, networking with your peers, and starting your own company to do it better. Assuming you didn't sign a deal with the devil by noncompeting your way into being stuck. You were hired to write code, not fix corporate culture. Largely because most large corporations have layers of management dedicated to insuring it is not fixed.

kbenson 7y ago
> Assuming you didn't sign a deal with the devil by noncompeting your way into being stuck. Well, in California it's basically impossible to enforce a non-compete, so there's that going for anyone who wants to do this as a current Apple employee.
saagarjha 7y ago
I think the issue is that culture at Apple is very much not supposed to be this, and this probably isn’t what the C-suite is intending to push. So you’re not really going against them; rather, you’re going with them but against the current status quo.
- yabadabadoes 7y ago
  In the sense that everyone wants cake and to eat it sure.. But really everything anyone wants is stack ranked and their management prefers the apple demo to the world format long after the luster has gone in no small part because of the secrecy, silos and paranoia it requires. In a financial sense their management is right and an employee wanting to be part of something less bland and Oracle like is wrong.

m463 7y ago

From what I understand about Steve Jobs - he the great integrator. He got lots of disparate folks to work together. I mean, he got music folks talking to computer folks. But I think he did this on a smaller scale every day and that might have been his secret sauce for apple.

threeseed 7y ago
I worked at Apple for a few years and he was not running around bringing teams together. At the senior leadership team level sure. But not at the engineering or middle management levels. It sounds quite similar to what OP was experiencing i.e. lots of siloed, secretive teams across a very large, 100K employee organisation.
- ivebeenthere 7y ago
  Hmm, Apple was nowhere near that big in Jobs' era. Everybody was in one or two floors in infinite loop 1 and 2
rusk 7y ago
Absolutely. Based on various anecdotes it seems apple succeeded nearly in spite of him, but he surrounded himself with people like Wozniak, John Carmack, Tevanian etc people who’s confidence in what they knew could always win out against Steve’s bluster. Steve brought people together, but also brought creative tension. He was also pretty good at spotting opportunities and trends. Apple really does feel rudderless without him. There’s no coherence of vision between products. Quality doesnt even really seem to matter. Apple still operates in a very top down manner, but it just doesnt seem as though there’s anyone at the top with much in the way of interesting ideas. Watch did okay, but was hardly a game changer. Earbuds are a success, but they cant be making that much on them ... Steve’s gone, and more’s the pity for all concerned.

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saagarjha 7y ago

I feel like there are people who get around the secrecy/isolation veil, they just have long-standing friends in other projects and can rely on them to push features and bugs though the bureaucracy. If you don’t have that, well, expect your Radars to sit in “punted from this release” until the end of time.

threeseed 7y ago
Or just escalate to your Product Manager. It's not like cross communication doesn't happen it's just via a formal process.
- renaudg 7y ago
  And what do PMs tell engineers on their team once they're back from their super secret meeting with the PMs from the other team ? "Do exactly this, I can't give you context but it'll make sense on release day" ? Sounds like extreme Fordism (and basically a hellish way to work for creative minds) and a great way to prevent people from spotting problems early.
- finnthehuman 7y ago
  That's hilarious and cute. I'm pretty sure I'd be told off if I tried to push cross-project collaboration up the management ladder beyond making an introduction happen. This thread is really helping me understand why I can never see eye to eye with anyone on Hacker News. What I had assumed would be engineering companies are companies with engineers but without engineering culture, and there is zero autonomy to be had without getting into management in an over-stratified org-chart.
robryan 7y ago
Seems crazy to hire the best engineers and pay them top dollar only to put a bunch of organizational barriers in the way they have to try and navigate if they want to get anything done.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  The prestige from hiring very highly paid people is obviously higher than the one attained when hiring lower paid ones. Managing 20 people on-site at Apple is different from managing 20 off-shore cheapos (even though they could potentially be just as skilled).

gumby 7y ago

When my friends at apple talk to me I feel any of them could write your post except...none of them would say "I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software" (well, maybe one would). I'd like to work with these folks again* but the incredible secrecy would bug me. I understand that some things have to be secret, and I don't at feel I need to know what that group over there is doing but I'd like to talk with my (NDAd, same company) friends about what I work on! So I don't even apply for a job there. But some people seem to consider it OK. * The subset of friends there who used to be colleagues of mine, I mean.

saagarjha 7y ago
I’m not surprised by that line. Honestly I think many employees would say the same of their employers if they could.

jfb 7y ago

Yeah, this rings pretty true.

IshKebab 7y ago

I used to work at Dyson and it was a similar story. I think the secrecy thing is key. They went on and on about "protecting our secrets" (ha) and operating on a need-to-know basis. It just meant communication was really bad, and getting help from anyone who didn't know you was impossible.

newacctwhodis 7y ago

I’m on an internal infra team, and even tho we’re supposed to be making tooling for the rest of the company, it’s just as much of a clusterf*. I’ve been interviewing with other teams, but with this disaster of a release and us demonstrating that our corporate values are just empty words in the face of opposition from China, it’s likely time for me to make my exit. The overt sexism that I’ve been witness to in iCloud management certainly doesn’t help either.

saagarjha 7y ago
> The overt sexism that I’ve been witness to in iCloud management certainly doesn’t help either. Yikes! Is this something you could share the nature of?
- newacctwhodis 7y ago
  There is shockingly little female representation, especially in management. I’m well aware software engineering skews male, and infrastructure even further so, but the numbers are absurd. In one section of iCloud, there’s zero female managers in a 200+ person org. In another, after recent re-orgs, there’s only one remaining female manager in a 600+ person org, and even then, she only has a small team of engineers. No representation in upper management whatsoever. With multiple recent re-orgs caused by poor management, there has been ample opportunity to address this imbalance, but upper management has doubled down, cancelling nearly every project managed by a female manager before the changes, or giving their projects to male managers. I raised this as a concern with HR months ago, but they have yet to take any action or even follow up.
  - thezealot 7y ago
    Why does every accusation of sexism always end up sounding like a conspiracy theory? Shouldn’t you be more concerned with someone’s competence than what is between their legs? Besides, women aren’t happy in the workforce.

tpmx 7y ago

Two observations: 1) You seem credible. 2) There's not really a mad rush for questions. It seems like the magic really is over. ( :/ )

tpmx 7y ago

Over the years I've been surprised a number of times by seeing Apple hire a particular software engineer that I wouldn't hire for my own little company. You're still kinda junior @ 4 years there, but.. have you seen seen any slippage in hiring standards?

novok 7y ago
Apple hiring is independent per team. You can literally interview forever at apple and the way each team interviews is wildly variant. Had some pretty cool interview loops. I got rejected and then got an offer after interview 4 or 5 with a team on a high profile app that I really liked. Apple doesn't give good offers although, so I took another one at a company / team I also really liked with a better offer.
- tpmx 7y ago
  Ah, interesting!

guelo 7y ago

I have a buddy who's an old Apple QA who tells me similar jaw dropping stories about the silos and secrecy. When I marvel how they can possibly ship all those wonderful products he says it's done through grueling brute force manual QA testing. Which also sounds insane but somehow it has mostly worked through the years. But maybe they're reaching the level of complexity where brute force manual testing is not scaling well enough.

esaruoho 7y ago
yet, interestingly enough, Apple are never looking for manual QA testers, just Senior Automation Engineers. Or so it seems to me, a lone brute force manual QA tester who every once in a while wonders what kind of an effect he'd have at Apple.

m12k 7y ago

This sounds largely as I feared. The organization was built to serve the will of an omniscient god-king who knew better than anyone else. And now he's gone, and the organization is still set up to make orders trickle down from on high (despite no-one qualified or interested being there to make those calls) and hasn't learned make good decisions by communicating internally either. So the acolytes and high priests try to just keep doing what they were doing before god died.

yuchi 7y ago
If you read other insiders’ comments here you can notice that this is not the case at all. Under Jobs the Mac OS team was more open and collaborative, so probably this happened “by chance” and the death of Jobs was probably a force toward closeness.
- jacobush 7y ago
  It sort of makes sense to me. The god-king likely demanded answers and accountability, that must make people cooperate somewhat. With stagnation, power plays and petty turf-wars take over.
  - matwood 7y ago
    Agreed. When Sj died a power vacuum opened. His presence really was so big that there is no way a single person or even a couple people could fill the charisma and power he wielded over the company. Anytime there is a vacuum, the power plays and turf wars become the goal over delivering product.

renaudg 7y ago

> - So what happens is that you’re working on a product that’s part of another product but you never talked to any other teams or orgs on how to make your product fit in I'm surprised to read this, because I've always thought tight integration and clever synergies between product lines were precisely one of the things Apple excelled at. And I was wondering how exactly they managed to make that happen in such a famously secretive organization, where very few people have the 10.000 feet view required to come up with these ideas. How do you make Mac Catalyst or Sidecar happen with 4 people silos who hardly ever meet and adjust ? How do you redesign the iOS photos app to the capabilities of the new hardware, in a way that will make sense once software+hardware become a product ? How do pictures of unreleased Airpods end up in recent iOS beta releases ? I mean, at some point you've got to make these things work together, and one decision on one side that's oblivious to the other side's constraints might make things impossible to them, and they'll want to push back. This is how "normal" companies function. One more example, not something especially clever but more something that would have been a huge bummer if it hadn't happened : it seems like the Pro Display XDR has charging capabilities way beyond what any current Apple device might require, and it's speculated that it's for the upcoming 16" MBP : https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/04/16-inch-macbook-pro-96w-rumor/ https://www.macrumors.com/2019/10/04/16-inch-macbook-pro-96w... Again, how do you even achieve that if people don't communicate ? Through extremely well defined internal interfaces and specs ?

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rjblackman 7y ago
the fact that GP is complaining about it may be an indication. by hiring good people who see the structural problems and work around them works. you can brute force work around poor management and a bad structure. Edit: you can see this explained in one of snapples sibling posts.
saagarjha 7y ago
> How do pictures of unreleased Airpods end up in recent iOS beta releases ? By the OS Mastering team dropping the ball…

eanzenberg 7y ago

You are probably segregated away from where the real work is happening. This is by design, because you haven't proven yourself yet or they don't trust you yet. Good work is being done in Apple every day. You're just not a part of it and are not seeing it.

kevingadd 7y ago
After four years? Seriously? Why would a bad hire not be laid off at that point? What's the difference between "real work" and "not real work"? How many engineers are on-site at HQ who don't do real work?
draw_down 7y ago
Come on
saagarjha 7y ago
There might be teams working on "secret" things that are better, but as far as I can tell the "we don't trust you yet so you can't work on anything until you do" is largely a myth.
smoofles 7y ago
Yeah, like iOS 13, Catalyst, and Catalina. It’s all rather amazing. Ship on time, ship all features that were announced, heck, their hardware teams can barely keep up!

afturner 7y ago

I'm on an internal tooling team @ PlayStation and man do I appreciate how much the company encourages cross-site and cross-team collaboration. Reading your comment made me cringe :/ so so sorry for you folks working at Apple.

jv22222 7y ago

> The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. Elon Musk says something interesting about this here: "Product errors reflect organizational errors." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be&t=200 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ36Kt7UVg&feature=youtu.be... He's specifically talking about how the product subsystems are effectively mapped out by the product departments and that they should try to interface with each other with minimal constraints. But, my take was that there needs to be a LOT of communication between departments and an ongoing debate between them as well. Edit: The more that I think about it... This might a big reason why Musk companies defy the odds, and why it is so difficult for incumbents to catch up. The over the air updates of Tesla are a good example of hardware & software departments working together to make something very difficult to compete with (if you're a regular old school siloed company).

adadgar 7y ago
Not dismissing what Elon said but it is commonly know as Conway's law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
Aeolun 7y ago
Yeah, I’ve been trying to teach my organization that if the input to my team is crap, the chances of anything but crap coming out are fairly low. Crap >> Team >> Crap We’re front-end, and basically the lowest part of the pipeline, so literally everyones crap gets dumped on us.
- baq 7y ago
  On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"

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webwielder2 7y ago

And yet most of Apple's products are consistently best-in-class, so I guess it's working for them? And a bumper crop of bugs in a point zero macOS release doesn't count as a disaster. They've been shipping super buggy point zeros for two decades.

smoofles 7y ago
You do know that hardware and software teams are not the same thing, yeah?
- webwielder2 7y ago
  The integration of hardware and software is and has always been one of the things that make Apple's products best-in-class. I'm not sure what your point is.
vor_ 7y ago
Fans like you are a major factor in why Apple won't change. They can do no wrong.

ssalka 7y ago

If things are so broken, as you describe, why not just pack up and go work somewhere else? Personally I love many of Apple's products but wouldn't be willing to put up with that kind of workplace just for the sake of it being Apple.

00N8 7y ago

thank you. this really validates my decision to work as a backend Python engineer at a well-established startup.

jonahss 7y ago
What is a "well-established startup"?
- smoofles 7y ago
  It’s an enterprise full of hipsters that tell themselves they’re changing the world in order to be able to take the punishment (or to be ok with unethical work). :P
- andrewflnr 7y ago
  Probably a decent-sized one with a proven business model, or at least revenue stream.

jarjoura 7y ago

When I worked there under SJ, the Mac OS org (then under Betrand Serlet), it was sort of open amongst the org itself. It was really easy to walk to someone's office and strike up an interesting conversation. Many late nights were spent working through collaborative problems. Or randomly, I had a friend who would pop by my office and spend hours explaining how he figured out some complex Javascript compiler bug of the day. It always felt like we were in a mission to ship Mac OS together. What Apple did do back then was create these special versions of the OS that had a few key hidden/secret products that SJ was going to demo, like iTunes or iPhoto. So while I could install the latest internal developer build of the OS, it would have a feature or two missing. You would then get radars that mentioned the code-name and explained a bug that you had to fix for the feature, but you had to fix the bug blinded and send the bug back to verify. (Radars could never be closed until the original creator verified them) The secrecy didn't really get in the way and it made for an interesting culture. Then it all started to change when Forstall was promoted to VP of the iPhone effort. He took what was probably meant to be a short term secret launch team culture and expanded it to create this massive secret island in the company. The program office and by extension, the original founding engineers were all promoted to management that expanded on the secret culture. I think if management meant to open the culture back up to the same level as Mac OS in 2009, they would have been burned by Samsung and Palm WebOS making exact copies of the software coming out at the time. So the hyper locked down culture persisted and SJ passed away. Then Forstall was fired and Federighi was promoted to replace him and merge both the Mac OS and iOS orgs finally killing off any of the remaining openness that once existed. Then came all the ridiculous tools such as checking someone's security clearance when you had a meeting with them. [Apple Confidential] :-P

mch82 7y ago

Ever considered emailing Tim Cook? Don’t throw your managers under the bus, stay optimistic, anchor your message in whole company success. You might be surprised at the impact you can have & the replies you’ll get. Here’s a formula you can try... Hi Tim, At <company presentation> you talked about <goal>, which I’m excited about! I/we’ve been experimenting with <new approach>. We’ve seen <results>. What other teams should I/we collaborate with to help Apple get to <Tim’s goal> faster?

LeoNatan25 7y ago
Cook is a corporate bureaucrat. in the best case scenario, he’d point you to your management chain, and in the worst, summon an inquiry into why you contacted him in the first place.

virgilp 7y ago

> No one fucking communicates. We all laughed when Tim Cook said that Apple will double-down on secrecy[1]. Who's laughing now? Turns out he was dead serious. [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/tim-cook-were-going-to-double-down-on-secrecy/ https://www.cnet.com/news/tim-cook-were-going-to-double-down...

arondeparon 7y ago

Perhaps a silly question, but if it is so broken, then why do you keep working there? Is it purely a money-thing? Is there still hope that things can improve? Not judging, but I am genuinely curious about what drives engineers to stay.

zulln 7y ago

Have you worked at a company of similar size before?

jrnichols 7y ago
was thinking.. the complaints listed above sound very much like an aerospace manufacturer/defense contractor i worked for before. little silos everywhere, and further complicated by gov security clearances. getting anything done was like mud.

inthezone 7y ago

Of all the elements you mention, the most deadly is the inability to speak out about the problems. The first step in improving anything is to acknowledge the areas that need work.

musicale 7y ago

The best workaround I've found for this in large companies has been to sidestep the formal management structure as needed to actually get things done and working properly, and then give management credit for it. The cleverest way to get rid of bad bosses (besides moving to another group yourself) is to get them hired by another company or promoted to irrelevance (though both strategies can backfire.)

diehard88 7y ago

that's samsung.