[skuhn]

I agree that there is an element of logic in the process, but I also think that it's being done today to a large extent because "this is how we do things at Apple" rather than because it fits the needs of that particular project.

To your example, imagine that the full-time Apple employee responsible for negotiating with that SK factory owner also doesn't know that Apple wants the factory to produce iPhone screens. Just go sign a factory that satisfies our hundreds of requirements, none of which you know, and by the way we need it in a month and everyone else knows what is required but they can't / won't tell you.

There is just no way to get the best results when you operate that way internally.

[urthor]

Yes, absolutely.

Keep in mind as well, all corporate policies follow a normal distribution.

Most of the time, I find corporations never aim for 90th percentile high performance. Perfect is the enemy of cost effective.

They want "works pretty well 80% of the time. And the 20% that's balls up, make sure it's not so bad."

In your case I suspect the reason is they think "too much secrecy" has much less downside than "too little secrecy."

Now, whether that's incompetence or malice, we can never know. But those are the gears turning in the head of the Director/VP who's classifying these projects.

[skuhn]

You're exactly right that companies don't want pure efficiency, and they shouldn't -- there will always be competing priorities to be weighed.

Here's the rub for me, in this particular role at this particular time in this particular company: the workload was extremely heavy, the deadlines were extremely unrealistic, the threat of failure was extreme (up to and including terminating the entire org for failure to meet objectives), and yet it must be done blindfolded and with both hands tied behind our backs.

I'm sure it isn't always like that at Apple, but that was toxic and it contributed to all sorts of toxic behaviors throughout the org. It's no wonder to me that this behavior leads to burnout across the company.

[urthor]

100%. All I'd say is that I've seen it happen at every large corporation.

At any one time a project or team gets chewed up and spat out.

Corporate one size fits all policies, and the Darwinian competition for resources, inevitably creates this.

That's just the story of corporate life in a nutshell. Shit goes wrong, you gotta get ready & job hop at the first sign of trouble.

[ianai]

Have you expanded on the toxicity somewhere? I’m tying to understand how an organization like apple can be so toxic and successful. Makes a really bad impression to me.

[skuhn]

Besides my comments here, I haven't spoken about it before.

For what it's worth, Apple is hugely siloed and also just plain huge. It's entirely possible that the culture in other orgs was completely different from what I experienced, because it was very hard to interact with anyone outside of your org or the current project scope.

How are they so successful despite this culture? In the case of the project I worked on, I saw a few reasons for success:

1. Management expressed that failure was not an option, so a few people (myself included) out of hundreds pushed ourselves beyond the limit to deliver.

2. Spending a TON of money. I had a different approach to Apple's way of controlling costs (they were very much in the "buying DRAM for iPhones" mindset), and easily shaved millions off of the project. But the inefficiencies inherent to the project's timeline and secrecy and other stakeholders meant the project came in probably 2-3x more expensive than I would have otherwise spent.

3. Leveraging existing institutional resources. Already having a global network and datacenter footprint helped immensely on the time to ship, but it also came with a ton of bureaucratic baggage.

4. Being so large that it ultimately didn't matter. While the project was essential for a key initiative to succeed, and many people (perhaps the entire org) would have been let go if it had failed, ultimately the company would have been fine if it didn't happen. They probably would have just postponed the launch by a year or two and had another org handle the project. It's very hard for a company Apple's size to have anything be an existential threat, so you get a lot of chances.

[foobarian]

My impression as outsider privy only to public information was that this culture was seeded by Steve Jobs, who disliked leaks, partly because he liked their product announcements to be glamorous and surprising. I do know that company culture can be very sticky so not surprised this would persist to this day.