3 ms·
In his section on Tech Corporations, he classifies Apple as "Diagnosis: no idea." Is there a reason nobody speaks publicly about Apple's engineering culture? W
by fleaflicker 14y ago
In his section on Tech Corporations, he classifies Apple as "Diagnosis: no idea."
Is there a reason nobody speaks publicly about Apple's engineering culture? We hear a lot about the culture at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. But I've never met an Apple engineer. And I've never read any detailed accounts by an insider.
Does anybody have any good resources? Or is there a very restrictive confidentiality policy?
- outside1234 14y agoApple is not a software culture. It is better to think of Apple like you think about Sony - they do software but it is only to support their design and hardware efforts. That said, I'd characterize Apple is liberal. They put immense pressure on engineers to ship software as soon as possible to "get the new shiny out".
- jfb 14y agoI can only speak as to Apple as of 2004-2009, when I was there. It was intensely pragmatic, much more so than other companies of comparable size I'd been at. The focus was on shipping, and whatever it took to get product out the door. Once projects were no longer directly in the gaze of Barad-dûr, however, politics set in and things ossified rapidly. Day to day in my world was a lot of C, Objective-C and C++, with Python for rapid prototyping and glue code; Java formed the backbone of the store infrastructure, but there was plenty of other stuff going on. Fairly standard architecture (huge Oracle DB, loads of web servers). Teams tended to be undermanned, so there was constant tension between getting stuff done and standardization; much of the time, the wrong balance was struck, meaning that people couldn't easily switch roles, but still had a lot of bureaucratic scutwork to manage. Things were improving when I left, and I imagine that they have continued to do so.