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Apple's Secrecy Extends to Putting New Employees on Fake Projects

ugahairydawgs said:
To each his own for sure, but that does not sound like a very fun place to work. I get that there is a reason for it all, but I could never work at a place where there is a inherent and built-in lack of trust for all new team members.

Just sounds like a miserable place to be on a daily basis.
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Yeah, but you have to admit that as a *customer*, you're happy that they do it.

It's sort of like San Francisco - it's a lovely place to visit, but I'm glad I don't pay property taxes there.
 
ugahairydawgs said:
To each his own for sure, but that does not sound like a very fun place to work...Just sounds like a miserable place to be on a daily basis.
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Oh, I don't know...

mreed911 said:
Apple doesn't treat new hires like employees. It treats them as contributors... as general "partners" in its success. There's no domineering "we tell you what to do and you do it" attitude - it's more a "here's what needs to be done, contribute" mentality.
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...it doesn't sound so bad to me...
 
Chupa Chupa said:
Maybe if you were clairvoyant you'd know it wasn't a decoy project. I'm pretty sure whatever assignment Apple is giving the new hires it's a realistic one. And even if a new hire did realize it was a "test," they aren't going to high-tail it out of Apple because their feelings were hurt.
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Just a possibility: While some engineers with tons of experience build new APIs, someone has to write real-world applications to check if these APIs work as intended, are as reliable as intended, and easy to use as intended, and whether the documentation is good enough. For example, _someone_ had to write an application that presses CoreData to its limits. The engineers building CoreData don't have the time to do that, and are anyway not the right people to do the testing.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

You know what's amazing about this book? It's the fact that you can buy this controversial book on the iBookstore without any problems. Who knows, maybe this is the new Apple being more restrained about censorship?
 
Andronicus said:
Hey! I'm no stranger to sarcasm! :p

You should check out a (much) smaller blog called iPhone Download blog. They somehow manage to have lives AND post 24/7. I'm not saying arn should be chained to his desk 24/7, there are others that could post on the weekends. And I'd be very surprised if they (macrumors) didn't have bloggers worldwide because you know just because it's my weekend doesn't mean it's the rest of the worlds weekend. :rolleyes:
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Working seven days a week in a media job is a quick way to get burned out.

Source: personal experience.
 
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I'm sure some of these fake projects actually become real.

I'm thinking Apple's Cards app was one of them.
 
Originally Posted by Kilamite
I'd love to know what the fake projects were.

I think Final Cut Pro X was one of them.
 
ILikeTurtles said:
It must be a complete thrill and a total nightmare to work for Apple.
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Once the initial excitement is over, they're pretty much like any other company. Most people regardless of rank were pretty much in the dark about most things.

Although those in the senior ranks definitely talked like they were members of a cult, like they were in on a secret - which they weren't privy to, but acted like they were.
 
ugahairydawgs said:
To each his own for sure, but that does not sound like a very fun place to work. I get that there is a reason for it all, but I could never work at a place where there is a inherent and built-in lack of trust for all new team members.

Just sounds like a miserable place to be on a daily basis.
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Engineers get to work on projects that end up changing the world. As an ex-engineer myself, I would imagine pretty much anybody in that field would find maximum personal gratification in this situation.
 
gnasher729 said:
Nice post. Apart from insulting a dead person who can't respond, do you have any evidence?
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That was hardly an insult - more an observation.
ugahairydawgs said:
To each his own for sure, but that does not sound like a very fun place to work.
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You get to work on technology that people will not see for years, sometimes even a decade. Remember how fancy you felt when you bought that new revolutionary smartphone? Thats how an engineer felt. 10 years before you. And in most cases, such prototypes were even more capable than the actual final product. (A lot of small things can cost an outrageous amount to manufacture)
 
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Andronicus said:
Hey! I'm no stranger to sarcasm! :p

You should check out a (much) smaller blog called iPhone Download blog. They somehow manage to have lives AND post 24/7. I'm not saying arn should be chained to his desk 24/7, there are others that could post on the weekends. And I'd be very surprised if they (macrumors) didn't have bloggers worldwide because you know just because it's my weekend doesn't mean it's the rest of the worlds weekend. :rolleyes:
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I was commenting more on the expectations. Macrumors is a free site that aggregates news from all over the place and posts pretty regularly throughout the week. I've seen them post on weekends if the post merits it.

I'm sure it would be wonderful if they posted 20 times over a weekend so that you and others could have something to read during work breaks.

I guess I just see things a little different. When someone gives something that's really good to me for free, I try not to complain that I'm not getting enough of it. I'd rather consider myself fortunate that I even have it to begin with.
 
Exhale said:
You get to work on technology that people will not see for years, sometimes even a decade. Remember how fancy you felt when you bought that new revolutionary smartphone? Thats how an engineer felt. 10 years before you. And in most cases, such prototypes were even more capable than the actual final product. (A lot of small things can cost an outrageous amount to manufacture)
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Like I said....I get why they do it, just wouldn't be for me.

Then again, it would be hard for me to ever work for a large corporation like Apple. I prefer the family feel of a small business.
 
carboncow said:
please you act like a new OS never has an issue or more...Lion is far from Vista status and with the exception of a couple changes I didn't like and a handful of bugs...it's just fine, Leopard 2.0. Relax...
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Lion is most certainly not Leopard 2.0.

Snow Leopard was a ste
p forwards in speed and reliability. Lion took that step back. Its no where near as reliable and has a number of odd undesired quirks. Just because you yourself have yet to find one, it doesn't mean they dont exist.

You'll find people like myself who work on a Mac for the best part of 9 hours a day will notice a lot more.

One such issue that is very easy to replicate is finders list view - if you've got a large number of items in your download folder, and open it in list view, the second you go into a sub-directory the list view craps out and overlaps all kinds of files. Scrolling stops working and the window has to be closed as its unusable.
 
Am I surpised by Apple doing this no.
But at the same time it is a HUGE waste of money at the tune of 100k/year per employee for the cheapest one and it only goes north of there. That means Apple is spending at least 100k/year for the lowest employee on said project.
That is a huge waste of money.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
Am I surpised by Apple doing this no.
But at the same time it is a HUGE waste of money at the tune of 100k/year per employee for the cheapest one and it only goes north of there. That means Apple is spending at least 100k/year for the lowest employee on said project.
That is a huge waste of money.
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No...its not.

If said employee leaked that they were working on a 7" Carbon Fiber tablet with built in projector, you'd find all Apples competitors releasing exactly that BEFORE Apple, thus resulting in a multi million dollar loss for Apple in R&D alone, not to mention the loss in sales.
 
Rodimus Prime said:
Am I surpised by Apple doing this no.
But at the same time it is a HUGE waste of money at the tune of 100k/year per employee for the cheapest one and it only goes north of there. That means Apple is spending at least 100k/year for the lowest employee on said project.
That is a huge waste of money.
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You sure you should be telling Apple how to allocate their money and resources?

http://mashable.com/2012/01/24/apple-quarter-by-the-numbers/

https://forums.macrumors.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=322009&d=1327792490

Their "wasteful" strategy seems to be working. And all in little more than a decade.
 
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