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The SV “campus culture” is a contributing factor to the area’s overall social dullness. The downsides of this are not immediately apparent but there is an oppor
by trzy 5y ago
The SV “campus culture” is a contributing factor to the area’s overall social dullness. The downsides of this are not immediately apparent but there is an opportunity cost to eating all your dinners with the same group of (mostly) guys and salad bar take-home scavengers.
One thing I liked at Apple is that at 4pm, almost everyone went home (many commuted via the company bus). A coworker of mine who had moved from Apple to Google and back to Apple preferred Apple because people there have more “fire in their belly” and a bias toward getting things done rather than availing themselves of benefits and treating work as a retirement home.
- jcims 5y ago> preferred Apple because people there have more “fire in their belly” and a bias toward getting things done rather than availing themselves of benefits and treating work as a retirement home. I would guess this has more to do with Apple’s cohesive product line creating a laminar flow of ideas through the environment versus Googles emergent order out of turbulence. I worked at the MV campus for a spell and all of the campus ‘bennies’ cognitively evaporated within a month or two. The only thing of durable appreciation for me was the shuttle service.
- trzy 5y agoThat’s how it looks from the outside but internally, Apple is also turbulent and decentralized. Products are incubated by engineering teams and only much later in the process do HI and ID get involved. PMs analogous to Google’s don’t seem to exist either (as far as I know it is purely a marketing function with little direct influence). Admittedly I’m not too sure how it works once a product gets released and matures into a flagship like the iPhone but bottom-up incubation work definitely continues even on those.