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by andymatuschak
1999 days ago
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It’s a strange thing... in my experience, it’s mostly a cultural phenomenon. By induction: everyone around you takes secrecy incredibly seriously, so you do too. When I was working on new hardware, for instance, to access it I would: enter the building (locked), enter my floor (locked, separate from the rest of the building), enter my office (locked, different key), remove the hardware from my cabinet (locked, another key). For some projects, the hardware could only be stored in offices in a certain building, so I’d have to walk a few blocks away and perform the same steps to access a temporary office where I could work on it (eg for the Watch before its release). Sometimes this caused serious problems. For a while I was running the project which evolved circuitously into SwiftUI and Combine. We spent months iterating on designs dependent on the proclivities of Objective-C and changes which could be made incrementally to it—which obviously constrained us a lot. Meanwhile the Swift project had been going on for about three years... but only about 70 people inside Apple knew. I was talking regularly to some of the people who were working on Swift, and they’d try to subtly nudge my designs, but there was only so much they could do. After many months of this my boss got me and my colleagues disclosed on Swift (required pulling tons of teeth). The project would be so different in Swift (and would require language changes which the team wouldn’t be able to get to for years) that we canceled our project the next day, after many months of wasted work. |
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I’m kind of gobsmacked by your story. I guess Apple’s real innovation is implementing what appears to be a multi-domain, cross functional strategy in silos. You get the benefit of ‘experts’ in their function, while getting a cohesive interdependent product from higher level direction — and the beauty is that when it’s all assembled the pieces fit.