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I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple’s AI/ML organization. It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page

I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple’s AI/ML organization. It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of. They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.

LeoPanthera 2y ago
I'd love to hear from anyone else who work(s/ed) at Apple to confirm or deny this story.
- rustystump 2y ago
  Can confirm.
  - whynotminot 2y ago
    Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software org at large? I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths. Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead. Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.
    - exBarrelSpoiler 2y ago
      Apple is a huge organization with a lot of internal variance. Knew someone doing localization testing for Siri and reported severe understaffing issues. There are some very small teams with crucial tasks that are badly under-resourced.
      - dep_b 2y ago
        These happen to be the Xcode and macOS-parts-not-copied-from-iOS teams?
    - rustystump 2y ago
      To be clear, I was not in the AI/ML org but the news org so make of that what you will. I can also confirm a similar and at times even more bonkers experience. I also think it is expected for any sufficiently large bureaucracy. Scale is hard.
    - lawgimenez 2y ago
      As an iOS/macOS developer I can’t say the same. Developing for Apple has been either frustrating or boring.
- mattnewton 2y ago
  One of my coworkers at Apple once wondered aloud to his manager “What does anyone actually have to do around here to get fired?!” (About a coworker who effectively only made work for other people) There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you were likable and didn’t leak you could work there seemingly forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying the “do your life’s work” pitch. I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you could get fired was becoming the “directly responsible individual” for something important to a senior person and dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior people didn’t trust or care about that there was ample opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me did.
  - nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
    Wonder if that's still the case today when seemingly every software company has now been laying people off en masse for the better part of three years. That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest" in the late 2010s.
- msephton 2y ago
  Can confirm. I was a Technology Evangelist (adjacent t,o but not the same as, Developer Relations) for certain web and app technologies. The dept I reported to was laid-off en mass in late-2015/early-2016. I interviewed for the iOS design team later that year and after several months and two interviews was ghosted and never heard from them again.
DidYaWipe 2y ago
Apple also cultivates "pets" who suck, but for some personal-connection or political reason have received or curried favor that results in them being retained and even promoted through Apple's organization despite high-profile and embarrassing failures. See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive. When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from experience. Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor. And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI" BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a different time zone. There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?
- gffrd 2y ago
  That does seem like it would be confusing, especially the first time around. That said, you are able to fix your calendar to a specified time zone: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-events-a-time-zone-iph69525c028/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-even...
  - DidYaWipe 2y ago
    Thanks for the link, but I don't think that fixes the problem. If anything, it looks like it'll make it worse. If I'm traveling from CA to NY and I enter a bunch of meetings and flight, and then get to NY and enter some additional ones... they're going to be wrong.
    - 2y ago
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
Based on the FHE work being done at Apple, I wouldn’t say the organization is completely ineffective as an outsider. Based on this, is it fair to say that the issue is of dead weight in the company?
- ksec 2y ago
  FHE as in fully-homomorphic encryption ?
cultureulterior 2y ago
Was interviewing for a role. Interviews lasted for 7 months total, 12 interviews, for 2 teams, and then they closed the roles and didn't hire anyone. Not really impressed by Apple.
- seec 2y ago
  I had a similar story. But it makes sense. Because of the image and brand value they project, they get a lot of people who just want to work for them because of that. Thus, they have a lot of options and can be wasting people's time without much downside since they have the bankroll to finance all that inefficiency. But it's really not fair for the people applying, that's for sure. In any case, I don't think it's worth applying for a job at Apple unless you already are a well-known (semi)authority in your field so you can have a minimum amount of power to somewhat dictate the terms. Apple treats their supplier very badly, there is no reason they would do otherwise with people they don't really need. If Apple were to be personified it would be the narcissistic mean girl that is extremely popular because of her beauty.
- zero-sharp 2y ago
  7 months to go through interviewing is outrageous, no?
clort 2y ago
That reminds me of the Microsoft of 20+ years ago, I remember reading an interview with Bill Gates where he had been frustrated with something in the new software and tried to pursue getting it fixed, but was stonewalled and diverted until he simply gave up. Contrasting this with Steve Jobs reportedly being a massive dickhead, barging into developer offices, shouting and screaming and firing people who didn't jump to do what he wanted immediately, but the Apple software worked and didn't have the cruft in the end.
- Someone 2y ago
  Possibly “Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker” (https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-movie-maker https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...)
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  Something that amuses me is that this method demonstrably works, but is unpleasant to almost everybody involved. Fundamentally, kicking people up the ass is... not nice. However, it must be done, because otherwise large organisations have a natural tendency towards disorder and indolence. Whenever you hear people bitching about CEOs like Jobs, Bezos, or Musk, just keep in mind that most people's opinions are second-hand from people who got their arse kicked. Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.
  - seec 2y ago
    Yep and this is why many modern organizations are going to shit. Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but also very often punished. You need to have a lot of power to get away with it. In my opinion all of this comes from submitting from the feminine way of working. Most women get shit done from men just by asking nicely (even when it's not really in their interest). Then they wrongly assumed that is how everything should work and pushed the "asking nicely" way of working everywhere. Here is some anecdote. In in youth, I learned/played the french horn. Most of my teachers where nice feminine men, I was making progress but very slowly. But one year I got a guy that was out of the army music, he didn't take bullshit and forced me to work in a way the others never did. This year my progress was orders of magnitude better than any other year. At the time I thought he was a bit of an asshole, but now I know that if I had to choose, I would rather have someone like him. I quit french horn 3 years after, there were many reasons but not having a strong inspiring teacher was one of them for sure.
timewizard 2y ago
> a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean This is what a "job security fortress" looks like when management has more money and less sense than they know what to do with. > a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment. They need to rethink their entire strategy. What on earth possessed them to believe I wanted "summaries" of communications which have an average length of far less than 100 words anyways. If "prompt engineering" and "phantom husbands" are a thing you don't have a viable mass market product.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI. Everyone is building out capabilities so they can quickly implement one when it arrives, while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime. Currently text summarization (as realized) isn’t the killer app, but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.
  - timewizard 2y ago
    > Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI. There's literally millions of them. The gulf is that the current technology cannot possibly do any of those things. > Everyone is building out capabilities They're burning billions on a method that has already started showing diminishing returns. There's no exponential growth on the horizon with the current stack. > while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime If you told me this was your business plan I would short everything of yours I could. > but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless. An infrastructure that will be outdated and unjustifiably expensive in 5 years. It's like we're pretending that the history of business for all time has nothing to do with the business of AI. Those unwilling to stare history in the face will be eaten by it.
  - 8note 2y ago
    chatgpt is undeniably the killer app for LLMs
MagicMoonlight 2y ago
This is why I don’t believe in private sector efficiency. You go in any company and most of the employees are morons and they’ll be paying contractors £1000/day to write a hello world service in new azure WorldGreeter(tm)
- walthamstow 2y ago
  The private sector efficiency is they’re willing to lay off some of the morons each time the economic cycle dips. Public sector keeps their morons for 40 years, then they get pensions Or a new cost-cutting government comes in, lays off all the best people and keeps the morons.
griomnib 2y ago
The most recent versions of macOS and iPhone OS have me seriously considering a Linux desktop for the first time. That is almost completely due to the fact that Apple Intelligence is so bad and I’m forced to disable it across every single app. This is not the type of stuff Steve Jobs would’ve shipped.
- barbazoo 2y ago
  > The most recent versions of macOS and iPhone OS have me seriously considering a Linux desktop for the first time. What about it? I often hear this sentiment but I hardly ever notice the OS having updated in the first place.
  - griomnib 2y ago
    My primary complaint is the aggression to turn it on. You don’t get an option of “No” any more just “Not Now” which is openly user hostile as it implies I can’t make my own choices, I can only delay the inevitable. They’ve been doing that for a while now and each time it pushes me a little closer to leaving the ecosystem. Then there’s the fact that I hate photos, mail, and the rest of it - which they turn on by default and then you have to disable. The fact that Apple Music works fine in my car but for some reason all other music apps are buggy. Apple News won’t let me block news sources, anything I try to block stays in my feed just greyed out. Like, I’m not allowed to keep BuzzFeed out of my feed? Wtf. Then there’s the sick charade of their “privacy” claims, which I won’t even get into, but it’s laughable. They went from being the most user-focused company to nakedly extracting rent from a captive audience. I no longer feel I own my Apple devices, they own me, and I’m sick of it.
    - barbazoo 2y ago
      Yeah, sounds like you need a break from them. Just for some context, many people have older phones so they're not getting the AI shoved down their throats yet. their built in apps, OS updates don't really change anything there. I don't use mail/photos either but I have yet to notice it annoying me in any way, definitely it doesn't "turn on" in any way for me after an update. I don't use their music or news apps, maybe that's the issue, maybe their apps just suck.

LeoPanthera 2y ago

I'd love to hear from anyone else who work(s/ed) at Apple to confirm or deny this story.

rustystump 2y ago
Can confirm.
- whynotminot 2y ago
  Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software org at large? I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths. Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead. Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.
  - exBarrelSpoiler 2y ago
    Apple is a huge organization with a lot of internal variance. Knew someone doing localization testing for Siri and reported severe understaffing issues. There are some very small teams with crucial tasks that are badly under-resourced.
    - dep_b 2y ago
      These happen to be the Xcode and macOS-parts-not-copied-from-iOS teams?
  - rustystump 2y ago
    To be clear, I was not in the AI/ML org but the news org so make of that what you will. I can also confirm a similar and at times even more bonkers experience. I also think it is expected for any sufficiently large bureaucracy. Scale is hard.
  - lawgimenez 2y ago
    As an iOS/macOS developer I can’t say the same. Developing for Apple has been either frustrating or boring.
mattnewton 2y ago
One of my coworkers at Apple once wondered aloud to his manager “What does anyone actually have to do around here to get fired?!” (About a coworker who effectively only made work for other people) There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you were likable and didn’t leak you could work there seemingly forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying the “do your life’s work” pitch. I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you could get fired was becoming the “directly responsible individual” for something important to a senior person and dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior people didn’t trust or care about that there was ample opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me did.
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  Wonder if that's still the case today when seemingly every software company has now been laying people off en masse for the better part of three years. That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest" in the late 2010s.
msephton 2y ago
Can confirm. I was a Technology Evangelist (adjacent t,o but not the same as, Developer Relations) for certain web and app technologies. The dept I reported to was laid-off en mass in late-2015/early-2016. I interviewed for the iOS design team later that year and after several months and two interviews was ghosted and never heard from them again.

DidYaWipe 2y ago

Apple also cultivates "pets" who suck, but for some personal-connection or political reason have received or curried favor that results in them being retained and even promoted through Apple's organization despite high-profile and embarrassing failures. See: the Aperture fiasco. And also: Jony Ive. When will it substantially harm the company, enough so that someone ("activist" investors?) raise a hue and cry? Developers clearly can't wield enough influence; I say this from experience. Nor customers. Apple's shoe-horning of "AI" shit into its products to pander to "pundits" and "analysts," shames the company that once held itself out as a rebel and disruptor. And even Apple adherents have noted profoundly slipping quality. Absurd defects persist, and new ones arise. The "AI" BS reminds me of one of my favorite longstanding Apple blunders: If you are going on a business trip and you enter all your appointments and flight info into Calendar, you're in for a surprise (and potentially embarrassment) when Apple CHANGES THE TIMES of all of them simply because you TRAVELED to a different time zone. There is no way to tell Calendar to simply USE THE TIME SHOWN ON THE PHONE. If you set up an appointment and then travel east, you will miss that appointment (or return flight) because Apple will change the time of that appointment to make it LATER. This is mind-boggling detachment from reality, but that's where Apple operates... and far too often gets a free pass on it. Is it any wonder that its "AI" is just as bad?

gffrd 2y ago
That does seem like it would be confusing, especially the first time around. That said, you are able to fix your calendar to a specified time zone: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-events-a-time-zone-iph69525c028/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/schedule-display-even...
- DidYaWipe 2y ago
  Thanks for the link, but I don't think that fixes the problem. If anything, it looks like it'll make it worse. If I'm traveling from CA to NY and I enter a bunch of meetings and flight, and then get to NY and enter some additional ones... they're going to be wrong.
  - 2y ago

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

Based on the FHE work being done at Apple, I wouldn’t say the organization is completely ineffective as an outsider. Based on this, is it fair to say that the issue is of dead weight in the company?

ksec 2y ago
FHE as in fully-homomorphic encryption ?

cultureulterior 2y ago

Was interviewing for a role. Interviews lasted for 7 months total, 12 interviews, for 2 teams, and then they closed the roles and didn't hire anyone. Not really impressed by Apple.

seec 2y ago
I had a similar story. But it makes sense. Because of the image and brand value they project, they get a lot of people who just want to work for them because of that. Thus, they have a lot of options and can be wasting people's time without much downside since they have the bankroll to finance all that inefficiency. But it's really not fair for the people applying, that's for sure. In any case, I don't think it's worth applying for a job at Apple unless you already are a well-known (semi)authority in your field so you can have a minimum amount of power to somewhat dictate the terms. Apple treats their supplier very badly, there is no reason they would do otherwise with people they don't really need. If Apple were to be personified it would be the narcissistic mean girl that is extremely popular because of her beauty.
zero-sharp 2y ago
7 months to go through interviewing is outrageous, no?

clort 2y ago

That reminds me of the Microsoft of 20+ years ago, I remember reading an interview with Bill Gates where he had been frustrated with something in the new software and tried to pursue getting it fixed, but was stonewalled and diverted until he simply gave up. Contrasting this with Steve Jobs reportedly being a massive dickhead, barging into developer offices, shouting and screaming and firing people who didn't jump to do what he wanted immediately, but the Apple software worked and didn't have the cruft in the end.

Someone 2y ago
Possibly “Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker” (https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-movie-maker https://www.techemails.com/p/bill-gates-tries-to-install-mov...)
jiggawatts 2y ago
Something that amuses me is that this method demonstrably works, but is unpleasant to almost everybody involved. Fundamentally, kicking people up the ass is... not nice. However, it must be done, because otherwise large organisations have a natural tendency towards disorder and indolence. Whenever you hear people bitching about CEOs like Jobs, Bezos, or Musk, just keep in mind that most people's opinions are second-hand from people who got their arse kicked. Meanwhile, these CEOs got fabulously rich by having this exact attitude.
- seec 2y ago
  Yep and this is why many modern organizations are going to shit. Nowadays this behavior is not only heavily shamed but also very often punished. You need to have a lot of power to get away with it. In my opinion all of this comes from submitting from the feminine way of working. Most women get shit done from men just by asking nicely (even when it's not really in their interest). Then they wrongly assumed that is how everything should work and pushed the "asking nicely" way of working everywhere. Here is some anecdote. In in youth, I learned/played the french horn. Most of my teachers where nice feminine men, I was making progress but very slowly. But one year I got a guy that was out of the army music, he didn't take bullshit and forced me to work in a way the others never did. This year my progress was orders of magnitude better than any other year. At the time I thought he was a bit of an asshole, but now I know that if I had to choose, I would rather have someone like him. I quit french horn 3 years after, there were many reasons but not having a strong inspiring teacher was one of them for sure.

timewizard 2y ago

> a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean This is what a "job security fortress" looks like when management has more money and less sense than they know what to do with. > a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment. They need to rethink their entire strategy. What on earth possessed them to believe I wanted "summaries" of communications which have an average length of far less than 100 words anyways. If "prompt engineering" and "phantom husbands" are a thing you don't have a viable mass market product.

matthewdgreen 2y ago
Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI. Everyone is building out capabilities so they can quickly implement one when it arrives, while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime. Currently text summarization (as realized) isn’t the killer app, but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless.
- timewizard 2y ago
  > Nobody currently has a mass-market killer app for AI. There's literally millions of them. The gulf is that the current technology cannot possibly do any of those things. > Everyone is building out capabilities They're burning billions on a method that has already started showing diminishing returns. There's no exponential growth on the horizon with the current stack. > while they fool around with various silly applications in the meantime If you told me this was your business plan I would short everything of yours I could. > but Apple is smart to have built all the infrastructure nonetheless. An infrastructure that will be outdated and unjustifiably expensive in 5 years. It's like we're pretending that the history of business for all time has nothing to do with the business of AI. Those unwilling to stare history in the face will be eaten by it.
- 8note 2y ago
  chatgpt is undeniably the killer app for LLMs

MagicMoonlight 2y ago

This is why I don’t believe in private sector efficiency. You go in any company and most of the employees are morons and they’ll be paying contractors £1000/day to write a hello world service in new azure WorldGreeter(tm)

walthamstow 2y ago
The private sector efficiency is they’re willing to lay off some of the morons each time the economic cycle dips. Public sector keeps their morons for 40 years, then they get pensions Or a new cost-cutting government comes in, lays off all the best people and keeps the morons.

griomnib 2y ago

The most recent versions of macOS and iPhone OS have me seriously considering a Linux desktop for the first time. That is almost completely due to the fact that Apple Intelligence is so bad and I’m forced to disable it across every single app. This is not the type of stuff Steve Jobs would’ve shipped.

barbazoo 2y ago
> The most recent versions of macOS and iPhone OS have me seriously considering a Linux desktop for the first time. What about it? I often hear this sentiment but I hardly ever notice the OS having updated in the first place.
- griomnib 2y ago
  My primary complaint is the aggression to turn it on. You don’t get an option of “No” any more just “Not Now” which is openly user hostile as it implies I can’t make my own choices, I can only delay the inevitable. They’ve been doing that for a while now and each time it pushes me a little closer to leaving the ecosystem. Then there’s the fact that I hate photos, mail, and the rest of it - which they turn on by default and then you have to disable. The fact that Apple Music works fine in my car but for some reason all other music apps are buggy. Apple News won’t let me block news sources, anything I try to block stays in my feed just greyed out. Like, I’m not allowed to keep BuzzFeed out of my feed? Wtf. Then there’s the sick charade of their “privacy” claims, which I won’t even get into, but it’s laughable. They went from being the most user-focused company to nakedly extracting rent from a captive audience. I no longer feel I own my Apple devices, they own me, and I’m sick of it.
  - barbazoo 2y ago
    Yeah, sounds like you need a break from them. Just for some context, many people have older phones so they're not getting the AI shoved down their throats yet. their built in apps, OS updates don't really change anything there. I don't use mail/photos either but I have yet to notice it annoying me in any way, definitely it doesn't "turn on" in any way for me after an update. I don't use their music or news apps, maybe that's the issue, maybe their apps just suck.