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I’ve often wondered how Apple manages to keep secrets across such a big organization. It’s fascinating and as an outsider I wonder if it’s because of a (cult li

I’ve often wondered how Apple manages to keep secrets across such a big organization. It’s fascinating and as an outsider I wonder if it’s because of a (cult like?) culture or because of fear (of legal consequences). It’s a real problem for those who want to showcase their portfolio and experience though, and that seems unfair.

izacus 6y ago
I wonder how they avoid all the issues that Google is facing - workplace diversity issues, labor practices and other social justice issues. How does their HR handle those since we never hear about it in public?
- blargmaster42_8 6y ago
  They do not hire SJW activists to do HR.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > How does their HR handle those since we never hear about it in public? Well, we do hear about their issues... when people start rioting (such as with Wistron in India in the last weeks) or jumping out of windows (Foxconn had to install nets to catch suiciders).
  - rapsey 6y ago
    Those are not apple employees.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      For all intents and purposes, they're only doing work for Apple. Subcontracting out work should not absolve Apple from responsibility.
      - rapsey 6y ago
        Apple has rules regarding labor for their subcontractors with penalties if they break them. It is not anything goes by any means. That does not mean some assholes wont try. Placing the blame solely on the back of Apple is absurd. Those factories don't exist in lawless places.
        corty 6y ago
        > Those factories don't exist in lawless places. When it comes to labour rights, they practically do. Thats why it is so cheap to produce there. Thats why apple uses them.
        Bud 6y ago
        The other reason is that Apple has no choice. There's no other place that can produce what Apple needs to produce, in the quantities it needs. At any price. No, please don't try to claim that work could be done in the US. It can't.
        mschuster91 6y ago
        > There's no other place that can produce what Apple needs to produce, in the quantities it needs. At any price. Apple could build and operate the factories themselves.
        legulere 6y ago
        Japan and Germany show that you can have industry in high wage countries. Your factories have to be more automatized though.
        mschuster91 6y ago
        > That does not mean some assholes wont try. At the scale of Wistron and Foxconn we're not talking about "some assholes", we're talking about the companies' leadership. Apple (and other companies) specifically source stuff out to have that "liability shield" while being able to extract as low prices as possible. If their "labor rules" were worth the paper they are written on they'd hire the people themselves.
- skc 6y ago
  There is an aura around Apple that might make it difficult for anyone to risk being on their bad side.
  - kergonath 6y ago
    I’m not sure about that. The media always like a bit of Apple bashing; I’m sure they would jump at any opportunity. We don’t even have many anonymous stories.
    - webmobdev 6y ago
      > The media always like a bit of Apple bashing; You'd think so, but no - with the media economics being what it is, media outlets have to think 10-20 times before publishing anything negative about corporates because then you potentially lose out on their advertising money.
- Bud 6y ago
  I imagine it starts with not being nearly as evil as Google. It helps when you don't have as many issues to "handle" in the first place.
  - izacus 6y ago
    What the heck does that even mean when it comes to corporate empoyement? Don't mix marketing with work conditions.
tailspin2019 6y ago
> I’ve often wondered how Apple manages to keep secrets across such a big organization. I've worked with Apple extensively over the last 10 years or so, and what I see from the outside looking in is that they are quite a bureaucratic and very siloed organisation that appears much more "typical" compared to other similarly large organisations than you would assume from their shiny exterior. Anyone who knows anything about large organisations knows how bad communication between departments/divisions can be by default. The phrase "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" often applies here. So for Apple, this plays somewhat into their hands. The various parts of the organisation are heavily siloed, with strict controls on cross-communication and even global teams involved in say the roll-out following new product launches, only get to hear many of the details (sometimes any of the details) on the day of launch. It's a bit like the difference between Zero-Trust computing and the castle-and-moat paradigm. Apple operates Zero-Trust on strategic details internally. Each department/division is firewalled off from others and communication is heavily managed, orchestrated and most importantly carefully timed, much like their public communication is. This leads them to being very good at keeping secrets within the org. The downside (as you would imagine) is that working with them can be quite a challenge. And I imagine working for them is very tough if you're at the outer edges and in one of the teams that are always "the last to know". Edit: typo
rvz 6y ago
It's called signed NDAs. Every secretive company does this.
- kilroy123 6y ago
  Exactly, only a crazy person would risk the wrath of the Apple lawyer army.
jrockway 6y ago
I think they keep the teams isolated from each other. Google never did that until recently, and most of the product leaks seemed to come from random people not working on the product that was leaked. (A great way to kill the company culture, and that's about it. It's not like you're being paid 7 figures to leak some detail about some inconsequential Android app.) When I worked on Google Wallet, I remember most of the leaks coming from people running "strings" on the Android binaries. Stuff that wasn't released would ship in release builds but be turned off by feature flags. The feature flags had, apparently, easy to decipher names. I don't really know how actual names ended up in release builds (they're just enum values on the wire), but there was quite a push to remove some of this stuff before release to keep leaks to a minimum. Lots of tooling created, and I never heard about it again. (I feel like there are some authors that have some trademark method of getting scoops, and when that changes even in the slightest, they disappear into the ether never to be heard from again.) Overall, I found all the secrecy kind of pointless. I spent most of my time at Google working on a project that was an open-source embedded device, and nobody ever wrote articles about upcoming features... even though they could clone the Git repository, read all the code, read all the incredibly-detailed commit messages, run it on their machine, and send us a pull request. My conclusion is that nobody really cared.
afavour 6y ago
I knew someone that worked at Apple around the launch of the iPhone. They worked on the macOS (then OSX, I guess) team and said they had very little idea that the iPhone was coming, despite it heavily using OS work they’d done. They were called into a few meetings and asked obscure questions but were never told why. So I guess that helps. But it seems wildly inefficient to me. I guess it helps to have a giant pile of cash.
discordance 6y ago
By instilling fear. When I was there, there were many stories of ‘the yellow team’ coming down on you if you were ever under suspicion
microtherion 6y ago
Part of it is indeed internal compartmentalization — sharing certain things on a need to know basis. As an example, I was one of two engineers in our team who had done early work making our software little endian ready (possibly without even our manager being informed; I don't recall). But I knew the work was not complete, and no further work was asked from me for more than a year. So when a MacWorld keynote rolled around, I was convinced rumors of an Intel transition could not possibly be true. What I did not know was that for the final stage of the little endian cleansing, the engineering team was further reduced in size, and on our team, the other engineer had been tasked to do the rest of the work without my involvement. Part of it is also regular training. And that training does not just involve sticks (You can and will be fired for leaking) but also carrots — leaks hurt Apple's stock price, and since most people in a position to leak own stock, you'd be taking money out of your own pocket (and your colleagues'). > It’s a real problem for those who want to showcase their portfolio Once a product has shipped, you can generally talk about it to some extent. The article linked here seems to be talking more about research, which is more problematic because it's not really tied to a specific, shipped product.

izacus 6y ago

I wonder how they avoid all the issues that Google is facing - workplace diversity issues, labor practices and other social justice issues. How does their HR handle those since we never hear about it in public?

blargmaster42_8 6y ago
They do not hire SJW activists to do HR.
mschuster91 6y ago
> How does their HR handle those since we never hear about it in public? Well, we do hear about their issues... when people start rioting (such as with Wistron in India in the last weeks) or jumping out of windows (Foxconn had to install nets to catch suiciders).
- rapsey 6y ago
  Those are not apple employees.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    For all intents and purposes, they're only doing work for Apple. Subcontracting out work should not absolve Apple from responsibility.
    - rapsey 6y ago
      Apple has rules regarding labor for their subcontractors with penalties if they break them. It is not anything goes by any means. That does not mean some assholes wont try. Placing the blame solely on the back of Apple is absurd. Those factories don't exist in lawless places.
      - corty 6y ago
        > Those factories don't exist in lawless places. When it comes to labour rights, they practically do. Thats why it is so cheap to produce there. Thats why apple uses them.
        Bud 6y ago
        The other reason is that Apple has no choice. There's no other place that can produce what Apple needs to produce, in the quantities it needs. At any price. No, please don't try to claim that work could be done in the US. It can't.
        mschuster91 6y ago
        > There's no other place that can produce what Apple needs to produce, in the quantities it needs. At any price. Apple could build and operate the factories themselves.
        legulere 6y ago
        Japan and Germany show that you can have industry in high wage countries. Your factories have to be more automatized though.
      - mschuster91 6y ago
        > That does not mean some assholes wont try. At the scale of Wistron and Foxconn we're not talking about "some assholes", we're talking about the companies' leadership. Apple (and other companies) specifically source stuff out to have that "liability shield" while being able to extract as low prices as possible. If their "labor rules" were worth the paper they are written on they'd hire the people themselves.
skc 6y ago
There is an aura around Apple that might make it difficult for anyone to risk being on their bad side.
- kergonath 6y ago
  I’m not sure about that. The media always like a bit of Apple bashing; I’m sure they would jump at any opportunity. We don’t even have many anonymous stories.
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    > The media always like a bit of Apple bashing; You'd think so, but no - with the media economics being what it is, media outlets have to think 10-20 times before publishing anything negative about corporates because then you potentially lose out on their advertising money.
Bud 6y ago
I imagine it starts with not being nearly as evil as Google. It helps when you don't have as many issues to "handle" in the first place.
- izacus 6y ago
  What the heck does that even mean when it comes to corporate empoyement? Don't mix marketing with work conditions.

tailspin2019 6y ago

> I’ve often wondered how Apple manages to keep secrets across such a big organization. I've worked with Apple extensively over the last 10 years or so, and what I see from the outside looking in is that they are quite a bureaucratic and very siloed organisation that appears much more "typical" compared to other similarly large organisations than you would assume from their shiny exterior. Anyone who knows anything about large organisations knows how bad communication between departments/divisions can be by default. The phrase "the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" often applies here. So for Apple, this plays somewhat into their hands. The various parts of the organisation are heavily siloed, with strict controls on cross-communication and even global teams involved in say the roll-out following new product launches, only get to hear many of the details (sometimes any of the details) on the day of launch. It's a bit like the difference between Zero-Trust computing and the castle-and-moat paradigm. Apple operates Zero-Trust on strategic details internally. Each department/division is firewalled off from others and communication is heavily managed, orchestrated and most importantly carefully timed, much like their public communication is. This leads them to being very good at keeping secrets within the org. The downside (as you would imagine) is that working with them can be quite a challenge. And I imagine working for them is very tough if you're at the outer edges and in one of the teams that are always "the last to know". Edit: typo

rvz 6y ago

It's called signed NDAs. Every secretive company does this.

kilroy123 6y ago
Exactly, only a crazy person would risk the wrath of the Apple lawyer army.

jrockway 6y ago

I think they keep the teams isolated from each other. Google never did that until recently, and most of the product leaks seemed to come from random people not working on the product that was leaked. (A great way to kill the company culture, and that's about it. It's not like you're being paid 7 figures to leak some detail about some inconsequential Android app.) When I worked on Google Wallet, I remember most of the leaks coming from people running "strings" on the Android binaries. Stuff that wasn't released would ship in release builds but be turned off by feature flags. The feature flags had, apparently, easy to decipher names. I don't really know how actual names ended up in release builds (they're just enum values on the wire), but there was quite a push to remove some of this stuff before release to keep leaks to a minimum. Lots of tooling created, and I never heard about it again. (I feel like there are some authors that have some trademark method of getting scoops, and when that changes even in the slightest, they disappear into the ether never to be heard from again.) Overall, I found all the secrecy kind of pointless. I spent most of my time at Google working on a project that was an open-source embedded device, and nobody ever wrote articles about upcoming features... even though they could clone the Git repository, read all the code, read all the incredibly-detailed commit messages, run it on their machine, and send us a pull request. My conclusion is that nobody really cared.

afavour 6y ago

I knew someone that worked at Apple around the launch of the iPhone. They worked on the macOS (then OSX, I guess) team and said they had very little idea that the iPhone was coming, despite it heavily using OS work they’d done. They were called into a few meetings and asked obscure questions but were never told why. So I guess that helps. But it seems wildly inefficient to me. I guess it helps to have a giant pile of cash.

discordance 6y ago

By instilling fear. When I was there, there were many stories of ‘the yellow team’ coming down on you if you were ever under suspicion

microtherion 6y ago

Part of it is indeed internal compartmentalization — sharing certain things on a need to know basis. As an example, I was one of two engineers in our team who had done early work making our software little endian ready (possibly without even our manager being informed; I don't recall). But I knew the work was not complete, and no further work was asked from me for more than a year. So when a MacWorld keynote rolled around, I was convinced rumors of an Intel transition could not possibly be true. What I did not know was that for the final stage of the little endian cleansing, the engineering team was further reduced in size, and on our team, the other engineer had been tasked to do the rest of the work without my involvement. Part of it is also regular training. And that training does not just involve sticks (You can and will be fired for leaking) but also carrots — leaks hurt Apple's stock price, and since most people in a position to leak own stock, you'd be taking money out of your own pocket (and your colleagues'). > It’s a real problem for those who want to showcase their portfolio Once a product has shipped, you can generally talk about it to some extent. The article linked here seems to be talking more about research, which is more problematic because it's not really tied to a specific, shipped product.