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Apple: Losing Out On Talent and In Need of a Killer New Device (theguardian.com)
mspohr writes with a link to an interesting (and rather dour) take at The Guardian on the state of Apple, which holds that: "Despite its huge value, Silicon Valley developers are turned off by [Apple's] 'secretive, controlling' culture and its engineering is no longer seen as cutting edge." From the article: "Tellingly, Apple is no longer seen as the best place for engineers to work, according to several Silicon Valley talent recruiters. It's a trend that has been happening slowly for years – and now, in this latest tech boom, has become more acute. ... Or as Elon Musk recently put the hiring situation a little more harshly: Apple is the "Tesla graveyard." "If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple," Musk recently told a German newspaper. The biggest issue for programmers seems to be a high-stress culture and cult of secrecy, which contrasts sharply with office trends toward gentler management and more playful workdays."
Apple is dead. I don't see them ever launching another hit like the iPhone which by all means won't be the last massive hit in the tech sector. Apple will slowly fade away. Without their (relatively low yield) dividends and the massive 218 billions in cash the stock would be pretty much worthless now.
The other Steve was what made Apple technically great
From TFS, what's the deal with expecting playful workdays? Most of us in the world have expectations to meet, management that holds us to those expectations, and a culture of needing to get the work done. It doesn't mean that management has to be harsh and unreasonable, but they expect work to be productive. Why would people expect playful workdays? I get providing incentives for exceeding expectations, which is very beneficial in raising productivity. But playful workdays implies lowering expectations and less time working, which is the antithesis of productivity. Why is this a good thing, and why do millennials expect to be coddled and not have to work hard on the job? Success comes from working hard and being better prepared than the competition, whether as an individual or as a company.
The lack of innovation is perhaps a legitimate criticism, but there really isn't a massive amount of innovation going on with smartphones and computers right now. Apple has always been reluctant to adopt technologies quickly (e.g., 3G, LTE) and is known for removing features quickly that they think will become antiquated (like Firewire). It's worked for them over the past 15 years with all their products, so I don't see why they should change now. The innovation is usually coming up with a completely different and new product, not in providing the latest features in hardware and software. The culture of secrecy is probably necessary to prevent the competition from beating them when it comes to developing new ideas. That really isn't a legitimate criticism.
The ghost of Steve Jobs walking the halls with you, at your side, talking to you, day in, day out, never letting you get a word in edgewise. Ah, Apple. Eve, what hath thou done!
It's the end of Apple again?
Why is Apple In Need of a Killer New Device ?
Who...bases a business on jumps from device to device? Car companies and small minds.
The article simple repeats the competitors opinion, i.e. that of Musk.
But, when a CEO talks about you, you are a threat to their business model!
hugs not thugs,,, no bomb us more mom us... cease fire stand down,,,, truth+mercy=justice,,, one bad apple....? ask ed snowden your questions here on /.continues
At one point in time Apple was attracting new blood with cutting edge technology ideals. They still have some of that, but after their initial success those people now move away from Apple to other projects. I think too the designs of Jony Ives puts a constriction on engineering making everything super thin and eliminating ports, and other useful function to devices simply dumbs down a device not improves it. Apple though has always been a more design conscious technology company then a engineering company. The design comes well before engineering and that is because you have a Jony Ives obsessed with design not necessarily function.
You also see plenty of good engineering people working for other companies who probably get more freedom to advance a product beyond what the corporate minimalist ideal is. Apple's problem is they have simply become a limitation of their own philosophy.
Apple just needs to hire more women and minorities and forget this meritocracy nonsense. That will surely jumpstart their performance in the sectors they compete in.
Umm... care to inform us what Apple has done marketing-wise but to claim they reinvented the wheel every time they came out with a new device?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
As insane and nasty as Steve Jobs apparently was as a person, he at least seems to have had a technological vision. Which seemingly cannot be said of the current CEO, whose vision seems to extend as far as adding new Emojis to the line-up.
The sad thing is that Apple would be uniquely positioned to introduce a whole range of new technologies into the consumer marketplace. On their devices, they control the entire technology stack: from hardware to software, it is all theirs. And they are the only player who has this sort of position that allows paradigm shifts to be done in-house.
For instance, they would be the only ones who could, conceivably, do a seamless job of integrating HDR into the user experience. Or WGD (Wide Gamut Displays). The latter would be particularly cool: if you are capable of doing something like a Retina display with its minuscule pixels, there is nothing that limits you to good old RGB anymore. Make it RGCB (Red Green Cyan Blue), or R/YG/BG/C/B/P (Red Yellow-Green Blue-Green Cyan Blue Purple - perhaps in some hexagonal pixel arrangement). And watch people swoon when they see the colours such displays can show. Purple and blue flowers, plants, sunsets, skies - all suddenly look vastly more natural than on an sRGB device. Cameras (at least SLRs) record wide gamut colours already, it is the displays that can't keep pace.
And what does Apple do? They now offer pink iPhone case options. Yeah, sure, guys. Makes me want to work for you - such vision, wow! :)
Small companies and startups tend to be more "playful". The only two things they care about are that you have the skills to do the job and you can get the work done on time. if you want to put up pictures of your family/girlfriend on your cube wall, that's OK. One trend with employers is that of "hot desking". You just go into the building, find a free desk/computer, login and start working. Then you leave at the end of the day. Others give you your own desk. Some places just give you a desk that is 1 meter wide and you are sitting side by side with ten other people. Some companies have a "no personal belongings" rule in your workspace (avoids problems with theft). Animators/artists like to surround themselves with action figures, furry toys like giant penguins or spiders, so that rule would drive them nuts. Others have recreation areas like ping-pong tables, console systems, have after-hours Chess clubs, card games, and even Yoga clubs.
If you're late in by 15 minutes because of bad traffic, they understand, so long as you make up the time. Some large corporations expected you to be in by 8am on the dot, no excuses, with the result that everyone leave at 4pm on the dot. For lunch, some companies take a dim view of you going outside/away somewhere for lunch, they expect you to use the work canteen. Other employers are located right downtown, so going to a different eatery each day is expected since they don't have their own food service. And there will be team parties every quarter. You might just get 15 minutes to eat your lunch at your desk, or you get flexitime for lunch.
Some companies dislike employees socializing outside of work, and might just send a couple of "heavies" to keep an eye on you.
With project management, you might have the freedom to view all tasks in the current sprint using Jira, and the whole team gets to decide what the objective will be. Other companies, only the producer gets to see all the tasks and hands them out one by one in no particular order.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
It just needs a device that everyone can afford and needs. Such a shame that they priced their phones way above what the majority can afford, They would be WAY more popular if they had focused on the base instead of the "Elite".
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
...never having to say your sorry.
When the P to E is high, that means the stock is a bubble and everyone should sell. When the P to E is low, that means there's no confidence in earnings and everyone should sell. Meanwhile they are compared to Facebook's 109 P to E in a completely serious manner.
Still increasing sales of desktop computers means the non-phone side of the business is being ignored.
Moving 8 iPhones for every Windows Phone means the former is dead and the latter is a viable product.
Apple's non-iPhone revenue is comparable to Microsoft's *total* revenue. The impact to Apples revenue due to just currency fluctuations is comparable to Facebook's *total* revenue. Maybe a case could be made that that is a business in decline, but no one seems to be doing so.
All it really needs to do is to make the prices of it's existing devices competitive in the marketplace.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Apple have never really invented much. But, they have brought together technology and made it into amazing things.
The imac. It was colourful, compact, got rid of legacy ports. It was insanely great. The iPod put a Hard drive in a MP3 player, and made it easy to hold your entire music collection.... The others on the market just were shite in comparison. This was insanely great. OSX, bringing together open source Unix, with a Java JVM installed as standard, using open API's and with a GUI that was far ahead of anything at the time...... Insanely great.
But now....
Soldered in Ram - not insanely great. Non upgradeable SSD - not insanely great. no USB ports on latest macbook, and charging premium for a USB-c adapter. not insanely great. Charging $1,099 for a 2012 model laptop with 4gb ram and crappy i5-3210M processor......FFS, not insanely great.. For heaven sake, I remember Steve jobs reducing prices of models every single mac world presentation. No more.... Not insanely great.
Apple are dead. Maybe not in the financial sense - they have enough money to keep them going for decades. But, in the sense of what brought them back from the brink of bankruptcy back in 1998, they are dead and buried. I only wish Microsoft were a better company so I could switch back.
The iGun could seamlessly integrate with the whole Apple ecosphere using a low power bluetooth connection
Apple is the "Tesla graveyard." "If you don't make it at Tesla, you go work at Apple," Musk recently told a German newspaper.
It seems that whatever entity it was that possessed Steve Jobs and gave him his boundless arrogance has found a new host.
Other issues aside with displays, you know Apple doesn't make their displays, right? The only thing they had to do with "retina" was the marketing term retina. Their displays are made by LG and Samsung. Apple doesn't do any LCD or OLED research, they just buy what the display makers can sell them.
Starting with this bullshit from someone who's never worked there:
I've worked at Apple three times, starting back in 2002, and nobody ever yelled at me. VPs are too busy to go around doing that shit. As for the 60-80 hour weeks. that's a myth. We put in long hours when a deadline was close, but it was never a constant grind like that.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Just as Microsoft drifts along in a sort of commercial terminal velocity, so too will Apple.
Tech companies that size can't do anything dramatically good or bad in the short to medium term because of their size. There are no dramatic systemic risks in their business model or market either - unlike oil companies with their exploding wells, or pharma companies with their lethal drugs.
Few companies last more than a couple of generations in any case. I would expect Apple to be around in a quasi-zombie state for about another 30 years or so before being broken up into a bunch of smaller obscure entities - a bit like IBM probably. Or Standard Oil... Kodak... Rockwell...
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
...or maybe it's a New Killer Device they need? Grammer's like so compleceted.
apparently we don' know what culture we really want
- apple's is too secret and yell-risky
- google's is too playful and company-religious
- tesla's is too elite
- amazon's is too cost-focused and work-aholicly
- facebook's is what? too much Zuck all day long I would think
- twitter's is too much of a job risk at this time (4000 employees? really? to automatically transport 140-char text messages across the globe? WTF?!
conclusion: different people like different environmens and company cultures. oh and there's bills to be paid...
Although Steven Elop or Steven Cook or whatever his name is sure is no Steve Jobs.
He might be good at milking a cow --- and deserves credit for at least not screwing things up --- but yeah, the empty pipeline ... it's real disturbing.
The idea that phones have reached their peak as far as sophistication goes is a joke --- our phones are quite primitive.
With the technology available, a smart phone should start to rival a Star Trek Tricorder --- able to measure distances by pointing at something, be a stud finder, have a new sensor every year or 2. It's why Steve Jobs made them be able to run apps and gave them a camera and an acceleometer --- to expose capabilities to inventive developers.
I guess Cook views a bigger screen and social media integration and Apple Pay as to height of development of the smart phone. If so, he's pissing away what in retrospect will be a lost opportunity.
Steve Jobs was as much about engineering as marketing, and never trusted people to know what they wanted.
Steve Jobs was captivated by calligraphy and forward looking ideas for a better tomorrow as a new exciting experience. Hence, old black and white Mac, the iPod, the colored Macs, NEXT Step, the Aqua interface in original Mac OS X.
He was a salesman, but that is so missing the point. Michael Dell was a salesman and so was Ross Perot.
Well, let's see, Apple is a high-pressure workplace, to which people go when they cannot make it at Tesla. Wait, what???
The article is mostly based on the opinion of a single hipster jackass who felt that he was too good to apply at Apple, backed up by the opinion of a few other people who don't want to work there, and a recruiter. Note the lack of information from anyone who has actually ever worked there.
All the best programmers used to work for IBM. IBM ruled computing. Who buys anything from them anymore? The great ideas started to come from other places, and IBM couldn't adapt. Apple may go the same way. Remember, IBM is still a big company. Just not cutting edge any more.
There have been a lot of stories like this over the brief history of technology. IBM is a really good example. Their senior management is doing everything they can to sell off the company bit by bit while collecting money, and they still can't kill it. Microsoft is another excellent example, riding Windows and Office through to their current states. They're currently poised to pull the ultimate vendor lock-in trick with Azure and subscription software because they have loads of money to spend. Some companies, especially those with huge cash balances, can manage through transitions. Others will just keep beating money out of their cash cows for as long as possible (again, IBM is the perfect example.) Others, like Sun, end up getting bought at fire sale prices. All of the companies mentioned were absolutely dominant at one time or another. IBM is a total joke these days, but in the 70s/80s they represented the state of the art in all things computing.
Apple's problem is that they are now too consumer-focused and don't have a pipeline of expensive gadgets to sell them. Whether they'll use that huge pile of cash they have to buy into the next trend remains to be seen.
Apple has become a design and fashion company, where all the important decisions are made by simplicity loving rounded corner loving designers. Designers are great, and I have nothing (well, not much) against design and fashion companies (OK, it annoys me when, in the name of simplicity, useful tools such as Aperture are removed from a product).
But as a software engineer, I prefer to work for a company that puts a higher value on my skills. Google and Facebook were founded by coders and have many mechanisms to allow ambitious early code to see the light of day. I like a company with more scope for experimentation. A playful corporate culture is an (imperfect) indicator of experimentation and risk taking, while a rigid controlling culture is an (imperfect) indicator of the opposite.
Also, the best way to strike it rich is to join a company on an exponential growth curve. That was why, int the 1990's, Microsoft could hire the best and the brightest, who would cash out 5 years later as millionaires. Both Apple and Microsoft made a lot of millionaires in their day, but today ambitious folks look elsewhere.
(((posting as AC because I have mod points)))
Calling Apple a superior technology integrator is a tremendous compliment.
That's what state-of-the-art of the window systems were in the late 1980's.
http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/t...
Compared to the early desktop PC's back then, the high-end print workstations that ran PostScript natively in true-color 24-bit mode window display. Hundreds of fonts to choose from of any size and italic slant angle, and in any size. What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get was the rule with a color laser printer. Steve Jobs had attended a talk on display systems and fonts and saw that as the future. Instead of having 50+ different binary files of the same font, each at a different size, a font engine could store a single font, and generate the character bitmaps on the fly only when needed.
Previously, everyone else had to either hand-draw everything or use Letraset catalogs and buy individual fonts at a particular size on transfer sheets, light boxes, stanley knives, scissors, colored filters and any other arts/crafts tool they could find. Early film special effects involved physically editing the film frames on a editing table.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Or maybe all those engineers have taken the news of wage collusion and anti hiring agreements seriously?
Does anyone think that the lawsuit actually changed Apple's internal culture? Maybe if they were a 10 person company, but that mentality is, by now, entrenched in every fiber of the company. Sure, the Steve isn't CEO any more, but lame policies about anti-poach and wage suppression are really formulated and executed by middle management - and there's hundreds of those folks at Apple.
If nothing else, there's an internal equity problem. If they hire new people at fair market wages the new guy or gal is making more than the guy or gal who's been toiling in obscurity for the last 10 years. And nobody at Apple wants to give every engineer a raise to ensure parity, nor a bonus for the back wages they were defrauded out of.
And that right there is what can cause HUGE problems for Apple.
If someone get's Johnny Ives to leave Apple.. Suddenly a shitstorm of magnus proportions will start inside the company. I do think they have faltered a bit, but that is mostly because the guy who started the company is now gone.
This happens to all companies. Microsoft has been in a non stop turd fall since Gates left, HP, etc...
A hired CEO never has the love and drive for a company like the people that built it from nothing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What a load of shit. How about engineers are more attracted to companies that respect a healthy work/life balance. That's it. Really. I'll come to work, bust my ass for 7-9 hours and go home, 5 days a week. You can keep your foosball, cafeterias, yoga, happy hours, . I'll take the perk where you pay me to go on vacation though.
You HAVE to hear what these assholes think about themselves.
15 years down the line, Tesla will become another Apple for a cool company. It doesn't mean shit, except that Elon Musk has a HUGE ego. Not backed by anything that is considered worthwhile engineering, of course.
Elon Musk just happens to have money, with which he's getting good engineers to do the good hard work. But nothing prevents good engineering from outside his stupid company. And remember that before listening to him.
Trained as an engineer, I will say that Apple's apparent problems recruiting those with technical and engineering skills aren't surprising. All you need to do is look at what drives Apple's entire product line. It's what, when I was studying engineering was called the "artsy, fartsy." At Apple, artistic silliness trumps good engineering design. The result are constricted, constipated products that are pretty in a little-girl, Barbie-doll sense, but function poorly.
First and foremost in the pretty above all else madness is Apple's weird, strange obsession with thin that probably traces back to the RAZR cellphone craze of about a decade ago. To save a few hundredths of an inch in thickness, the battery life of iPhones is limited. To save it for their laptops, ports are reduced to as few as one in the current MacBook. The older white MacBook had eight.
The result, in the case of Mac laptops, are products that cost more and deliver less user value than any other laptop on the market. That lack of ports means that users must buy can lug around various adapters for every conceivable situation. It also means Apple's pricey laptops end up stripped of useful features. Apple sells tablets with built-in cellular. It doesn't sell a laptop with that feature. Why? That silly obsession with thin.
Apple's decision makers, particularly its artsy-in-chief Ives, don't seem to realize that for a laptop, thinness is almost irrelevant. The laptop has to be large in two dimensions to accommodate a decent screen and a full-sized keyboard. The remaining dimension makes no difference to a user who much carry it about. It could be two or three times thicker with no change in portability.
Apple, for reasons that defy good sense, still thinks it can sell its laptops to schools. Even a glance at the MacBook Air shows how unsuitable that frail little hot-house plant of a laptop is for middle-school students. A closer look with show that that maintaining it in-house is virtually impossible. The total cost over the lifetime of a MacBook Air for a school must be at least twice that of a competing laptop. Apple used to make an excellent school laptop, their white MacBook. Why they don't still do so defies imagination. Many Apple executives still live in the late 1990s, when Steve Jobs returned to the dying company and justifiably slashed their product line. Now Apple makes too few products for its larger market. And yet Apple still stubbornly refuses to make a great variety of products.
Worst of all are Apple's line of all-in-one desktops, the iMac. I owned one and never want to repeat that blunder again. It was actually better than Apple's current, obsessed-with-thin line. But fixed problems, in my case a jammed-inside DVD, was an utter nuisance. I promised myself I'd never buy an all-in-one computer again.
There's a reason every other PC manufacturer makes and sells few all-in-one computers. They make no sense for business and savvy home buyers. With an all-in-one, any failure is a disaster. Upgrading and repairing is difficult and costly, particularly with Apple's ill-designed products. Any upgrade requires everything to be upgraded. Businesses that might consider Apple for the benefits of OS X don't bother. The hardware downside outweighs those benefits. And people who might consider if they used one at work buy Windows at home instead.
Where's the innovation? Someone needs to create a desktop that builds in Drobo-like functionality. Drobo is, after all, merely a very smart set of hard drives. Apple could do that? Any chance they would? No, that sort of technically superior engineering is foreign to Apple.
From an engineering standpoint, Apple's designs are poor, placing unnecessary burdens and limitations on users. From a marketing standpoint, Apple is also being stupid. It's leaving large holes in its product line, businesses and schools, that competitors can exploit to send Apple sales in design. Apple's chief advantage is its operating systems. Does Apple really think its competitors will let that stand? They'll close that gap and when they do, the many inadequacies of Apple's hardware will pull it down.
.
The AppleTV is trying to find its niche within an already existing market, and in Apple-relative terms, is doing barely just OK.
So where is, what is, Apple's next attention-getting and market-creating product?
None of that sounds like fun. I hear a ton of rules and mgmt interference.
Fun is...being creative.
Fun is...being trusted.
Fun is...managers that largely leave you alone and occasionally ask you reasonable -- i.e. non-cookie-cutter -- questions.
Fun is...systems that correct errors quickly. I know, I know, this almost never happens. But if you are doing some of the above, you might get there one day.
I come here for the love
How fast Apple started "falling apart" after Jobs died, which makes me think Jobs really was Apple and can't be replaced, or now that he's dead people aren't afraid to point out Apple's flaws.
In either case, the Koolaid appears to be wearing off for even the die hard fanbois.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Let me preface this by saying that I believe in giving credit where credit is due, so this will not be an anti-Apple comment despite the fact that I am not an Apple fan. At all.
Apple earned such a strong position on, I believe, two fronts.
The first and foremost prong being a robust philosophy, appealing to users who like to think of themselves as independent thinkers. This was really cemented by their famous Super Bowl commercial rejecting the Orwellian drones: a marketing coup, to be sure, since Apple is and always has been rabidly anti user freedom. People who identify with this take strong pride in their allegiance to Apple. This is brand loyalty. The gadgets Apple makes really take a backseat to the "Why" that people perceive about them. Users display the logo proudly. As Simon Sinek pointed out, Apple's laptops and notebooks are the only major brand where having the lid open displays the logo right-side up to observers.
The second prong is that they have repeatedly entered industries where they did not conventionally even belong, brought novel innovation that both revolutionized those industries and, for a time, allowed the company to dominate them. Take cellphones as the prime example: before the iPhone, there were a handful of shitty flip handsets available, the capabilities and limitations entirely dictated by the phone service carriers. Smartphones did come to exist, but were a niche market almost entirely confined to business people using them as work phones, and a handful of bleeding-edge tech geeks. But when Apple (a computer company) entered the cellphone business, THEY dictated what the phones would do, and the carriers were given the option to cede control or watch the iPhone debut on a different carrier. AT&T accepted, the entire industry was flipped on its head, and now iPhones and Android devices are THE dominant devices.
As a side note, yes: Steve Jobs was famously a lunatic control-freak. But he was a visionary, and together he and Wozniak ensured that his vision stayed consistent by controlling both the hardware and the software, and he wasn't afraid to enter what are nominally considered unrelated markets. With the death of Jobs, the company remains in a strong financial position but may lack the leadership to continue to innovate.
Unfortunately, the genius at Apple is clearly gone. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a computer-enthusiast (and professional) from wayyyyyy back in the day. I would have vastly preferred it if today we were arguing over Commodore, Atari and Be. But we aren't. Mainstream users got stuck with Apple or Wintel, so that's what we have to work with. I build what I need for PC gaming and occasionally buy an Apple product when they produce something I actually want (currently, nothing). Apple under Jobs was brilliant far more often than not. Perfect? Not a chance, but the Windows and Linux fanboys like to pretend that Jobs just marketed. That's blatantly and completely untrue, and if you believe that you are no better, and no smarter, than the Apple fanboys who thought (and for the most part blindly still think) that Apple could do no wrong. You can pretend that Jobs wasn't brilliant. You can pretend that Apple has always made shit. That doesn't make you correct. It doesn't make you smart. Maybe it makes you "cool" in certain crowds of like-minded fanboys. But what it certainly makes you is an idiot, because ALL Fanboys are idiots. What Jobs understood, and what nobody else seems to clearly understand, is that the single most important aspect of any kind of computing device is how it functions when a normal human interacts with it. NOT a computer-geek who can and will simply memorize and repeat any random and meaningless series of computer-related tasks regardless of their intuitiveness or logic. Sure, I can go into Terminal and create basic RAID arrays, but most people can't. Know what though. Pre the El Capitan nightmare all it took for a normal-human to create basic RAID arrays on the Mac was 2 minutes, a Google search and a few clicks. (And that's just one example of how Apple use to be run by a brilliant man and is now run by complete morons: Heck, just look at the bizarre UI decisions post-Jobs at Apple. They have almost completely destroyed their brilliantly intuitive UIs on both the Mac and iThings). It's going to take a while, but Apple is going to take a huge, colossal, fall. Eventually the vast majority of Apple fanboys will wake up and say "hey, Apple has really turned to shit." We've seen it over and over again in other industries that lose their way. Under Jobs they did, probably, 75% of everything right. Now they do 95% of everything wrong. Working in the industry it's a downright nightmare watching the once unassailable usability of Apple products go down the drain with such speed. Apple's new advertising should simply be: "The New Apple, Rotten to the Core."
Musk is 100% as much an asshole boss as Steve Jobs, perhaps more so since Musk demands a high-stress work environment 365 days a year.
In many of those companies I was thinking of, managers are either sitting right next to you. Some places just employ entry-level graduates, so they pack everyone from the project manager to the team and tech leads in together in school desks sitting together in one group. There's only been a couple of companies where managers had their own room and everyone else had cubicles.
Game and animation companies are more fun and creative than general IT software houses who use Jira, Agile and Scrum. But the downside is that you have producers who will break up a task into separate stages but won't tell everyone what all the task are; implement a basic single-threaded animation system. Get the parallel processing guy to make use of multi-threading on the CPU. Get the GPU engineer to optimize it to use the GPU. Now get the VFX artist to add more functionality.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
But playful workdays implies lowering expectations and less time working, which is the antithesis of productivity
Actually in practice most people rarely use those options, and if they do usually it's on break time anyway or as a place to sit down for a meeting. It puts everyone in a good mood, improves morale and encourages breaks which means people aren't burnt out and improves productivity as a result. It also encourages socialisation and bonding, which makes better links between team members and gives a chance to exchange ideas and bounce thoughts off each other. It's a mistake to think that everyone is just playing. They're not, if they were the company would go bust. It's about making a more enjoyable atmosphere which does give real rewards.
Microsoft had Uncle Bill to keep the shareholders at bay. Apple had Steve. Every company needs a borderline celebrity CEO to keep that pack of jackals off long enough to succeed. Otherwise the second profits dip an "activist" shareholder swoops in and they get Bained.
Think of it this way: You know how every layer of Management exists to protect employees from the next layer? The Shareholders are at the top of that, and your CEO is protecting you from them. If a few lucky shareholders can drain the value out of Apple like vampires think about how many billions their pocket for themselves. Sure, everyone else gets screwed, but that's what the "Winner Take all, I got mine, FU" stockmarket is all about. And if you think it can't happen because Apple's stock is set up to prevent it all it takes is one Carly Fiorina to undo all that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
On additive and subtractive color spaces: http://cruxcreative.com/rgb-vs-cmyk-when-to-use-which-and-why/
I see a lot of comments talking about the tech and lack of vision. That's surely part of it. But that sounds like an awful work environment. If you can work someplace that isn't high stress and respects you as a human being (or is even, FUN), then of course you'd lean that way. Hopefully Apple wakes up and changes their tune.
Just a point of order, as I've been with HERE since before Nokia, when we were called NavTec. Apple maps has nothing to do with us. They built it in house after their deal with Google ended. That was a disaster, as you may remember. Apple then poached some of our employees to fix their app, but they have never used our technology and I don't think (although I am not sure) they use our data either. It was Microsoft that bought our tech.
Previously, everyone else had to either hand-draw everything or use Letraset catalogs and buy individual fonts at a particular size on transfer sheets
And of course there was a fairly long period of time where people would send the copy out to be typeset and printed, then they'd get the lino back and physically cut it up with an xacto knife or whatever and then hot wax it down to the board... holy shit that was annoying
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Umm... care to inform us what Apple has done marketing-wise but to claim they reinvented the wheel every time they came out with a new device?
They also like to claim that vendor-lock in is different thinking, or that buying a computer that you can't even open without a special screwdriver and which Steve Jobs didn't want to even let you have an expansion port on is like smashing a fascist state.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think I merged your two scenarios -- big and small companies -- together when I responded. And you never used "fun" but I did. Even though I hate the word "fun" as it is usually so poorly defined: "My idea of fun is to scare the snot out of you when you come around the corner!" So, mod props to you.
I come here for the love
Apple has ~76,000 employees -- there will be "good" departments and "bad" departments, but to paint the entire company with the brush used by the Guardian article is just incorrect.
I work for Apple (that's why I'm posting as AC) but I do not speak for them. The article is wrong on just about all points. The only thing they're right about is secrecy -- it is a secretive environment and I don't see why that's bad. The #1 source for leaks and IP theft is internal employees (in ANY company) and Apple does a great job of keeping a lid on theft.
"Negative, so strict, so harsh"? No way. I am surrounded by smart, competent, supportive co-workers, have great work-life balance, and have never been yelled at or demeaned. I work 40h a week, more if I WANT TO (and I usually do because I love my work).
The food is not free...which is good else I'd be snacking all day and gaining weight. Even if I spent $15 a day on food in the (excellent) Apple cafeteria (a high estimate) that amounts to $3900 a year (5x days/week, 52x weeks/year). It's really not that impressive a benefit relative to total compensation (salary, RSU's, healthcare, 401k match, employee stock purchase plan, etc.)
I've worked at a typical Silicon Valley company with the ping-pong table, free snacks, unlimited vacations, etc. and I do not want to go back. Apple is where the adults work.
The absolutely most incorrect quote in the article is "Apple’s not an engineering culture". I can't overstate how wrong that is.
Won't this exact thing happen to Tesla once they plateau? Things move much slower in the auto sector, but Tesla hits 50% market share in a few years/decades, then they'll be facing the exact same problem. They'll be part of the old established club and fancy new startups will be taking all their talents.
This is just how it works. More at 11:00.
My insight is mostly financial but I've given it here before. While there is no doubt that Apple is a great, very profitable company, people often exaggerate something they heard somwhere and the facts don't support it (mostly things like Apple's profts are larger than the GDP of Australia or whatever). Whatever, I think Apple is awesome. In my house we have at least 15 iDevices/Macs and maybe 6 PCs and other assorted things like GoogleTV and Amazon FireTV.
Now, this is just my observations as a geek dad. I have 5 kids, including 3 pre-teenish girls that have like a bazillion friends. They hang out at our house all the time (we're sort of the neighborhood hub I guess) since my wife stays home and takes good care of all the kids. We have a lot of fun things to do and really good wireless, technology, and toys.
Anyway, what I've notcied is that for the girls Apple products are a status symbols. They bling their iPhones, iPods, watches, all that stuff.
The boys, however, have very little interest in Apple. They like things they can take apart (perhaps metaphorically as well) and that aren't so "girly" or whatever. Moms and girls have iPhones. But the boys around here (and man of their dads) don't use iPhones. iPhones are regarded as girly. My son has an iPhone and he won't take it anywhere. It just sits until the battery drains and I recharge it. I have to stick it in his bag when he leaves so he has an emergency phone. He's embarrassed by it.
Remember, iPhones are almost 2/3's of Apple's revenue. That's a lot of eggs in one basket.
Now, before you go calling me sexist, an Apple hater, or whatever.... I spend a lot of time with all my kids, especially the girls, on STEM, hacking EV3s, showing them what's possible with technology and just having fun with it. I am a coach at a robotics league and I do some extra things to encourage girls to join, explore, and stick with it. Same thing at work. I realize that there are some barriers for them and I'm trying to help them (as best I know how) to not let them get in their way. Also, I'm one of the dads that owns an iPhone because I like them and it helps keep the girls happy.
I also wonder about the Facebook effect (is that even a term?). I don't know a single kid under 18 that's on FB, they're mostly on Instagram. They don't want to be on FB so their parents can't see what they're doing. I have iCloud Family Sharing set up and the kids give me grief about that. But it's more than that, it's natural for kids to want to do their own thing. If mom and grandma are using iPhones I *guarantee* you kids won't be for long.
You might thing I live in some back-country, hill billy, place and perhaps there is a bit of that, but I live in the Midwest near Chicago in a somewhat progressive area.
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I read the report and it gave examples of places that are beating out Apple for talent - Google and Facebook. I can understand Google being competitive but Facebook? I remember reading many times how Facebook was not a place to work if you wanted a challenging and interesting work experience... Sorry, but I don't believe Facebook has better tech challenges than Apple.
My guess would be that until we see something from this, it is just random speculation from a business site. Given that this article is literally from a month ago and is all hearsay, well let's just put a hold on making and kind of conclusions until there some actual information, shall we?
For all your wanking about the greatness of wide gamut displays you seem totally unaware Apple is already there with the retina iMacs, and no doubt the phones will soon follow.
The whole premise is absurd really; industry-leading ARM chips, fingerprint sensors, high-accuracy pressure-sensitive touch panels, etc are in-house designed and take great advantage of the software-hardware integration have all been integrated into Apple products in the last few years. Plus a new open-source programming language that is hugely popular. Yes, it's frustrating there are things we don't know about until they see the light of day (there are always rumors, or things inferred from patents like in this case).
You seem to think Jobs released a revolutionary new product line every year or something. iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad... An average of 4-5 years between each of these things, with straightforward incremental improvement for each product after release. He wasn't a wizard, FFS.
Even if you ignore the fact that any chip designers would find Apple the only interesting place to work at currently, Apple is also the one advancing web browsers (WebKit), compiler toolchains (LLVM) and even one of the few companies doing really unique work in computer language design (Swift) along with all of the integrated tooling (Xcode) to make it happen...
There is not a single large computer company I would consider working for outside of Apple.
The people who don't want to work there as per the article are a bunch of whiny losers afraid of hard work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
He not only saved the company from itself, he also wasnt invested in being an outright spook with the company.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Right over your idiotic head.
Having to explain to your parents why you are gay.
Cook Mandate: Hire ... The Queer.
Could be that Apple has the largest LGBTQ work force on planet Earth.
Trouble is that putting a perversion or sexual preference as a hiring mandate, and paying a graduated scale for L, G, B, T and Q (Queers get the biggest pay check) who do not have any education, skills, training like knowing what BASIC, let alone C++ is, could be Cook's death wish. We wish Cook, bon voyage.
Ha ha
PS All this "Virtual Reality at Apple" started when a "confidont" gave Cook a bootleg VHS tape of the movie "Brainstorm". Now Cook has ordered a significant number of Apple employees who really do know C++, to build him his Gay Sex machine, like the virtual sex episode in the Movie that rendered an employee "stunned" for several months, in the movie story line.
Big Bang Theory
Google are an advertising company. They're not particularly innovative.
I question Facebook, too. I can't imagine anybody in their right minds wanting to work in Menlo Park. IMO, the peninsula is the worst part of the Bay Area in which to work. From anywhere that mere mortals can afford to live, figure half an hour of driving at two miles per hour up 101, and an hour driving back in the evenings. That entire time is basically spent just going through Palo Alto.
And if you don't eat at FB's cafeteria (I assume they have one—I've never worked there, just near there), good luck finding any food at all. There are two tiny shopping plazas that have a couple of restaurants, none of which are walking distance from anywhere. The parking lots are full from about 11 to after 1, so you either drive around for ten minutes waiting for parking or drive a couple of exits up the 101.
Compare this with, for example, Apple, where there are probably a dozen restaurants within an easy walk of the main campus, and where you're right at the confluence of two major highways, one of which is usually passable at any given moment, and right next to De Anza, which is a viable city street alternate for 85 if you're heading south towards Los Gatos, Saratoga, or Santa Cruz or north towards Sunnyvale. (Unfortunately, Stevens Creek isn't a viable city street alternate, in my experience, thanks to very poorly timed traffic lights. Otherwise, Apple's location would be utterly amazing.)
But Google stealing people from Apple? Sure. It happens all the time. And startups steal people away from both of them. Honestly, Apple is a victim of its own success in many ways. Nobody goes to Apple thinking that they'll get stocks and options that will skyrocket in value these days, because the stocks aren't going that direction at any appreciable rate. And lots of the old talent made enough money off of AAPL to let them retire, so the company would have to be God's greatest gift to humanity if it wanted to retain most of those folks.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Hans Reiser might have some insights on killer devices.
A Macbook with a current friggen GPU. Especially for the prices that get charged.
*flips table*
Seriously, this is like an original Apple story on slashdot. Hardly an authority on Apple; the owners regularly short the stock on their doom-and-gloom cycle of stories.
My wife did that for a while, before she got into software development. That worked much better as a career choice.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
On an assembly line, playfulness is inefficiency. The old grind-it-out jobs are going away, and the ones that are going to last either involve skilled mobile labor or creativity. Creative jobs need some level of playfulness.
Ever work hard on a project, find out it wasn't going to work anyway, and realize that if you hadn't been so focused on doing a good job on it that you would have realized what was wrong much earlier? Straight hard work is often inferior to working hard sometimes and spending some time goofing around to see what might be possible and desirable.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The problem was: everyone was sure they had to use every font in a one-page brochure. Boy, was that ugly!
"Forbes shill"?
BusinessWeek called Ballmer "Monkey Boy". (See the link.) In comparison, Forbes saying Ballmer was the "worst" is somewhat mild.
"But playful workdays implies lowering expectations and less time working, which is the antithesis of productivity."
This is the number one thing bad managers fail to understand. Time spent working != productivity. It's quite possible to become more productive if you spend less time working and are more refreshed, happier, and more focused.
There is a balance, but the idea that more time at work inherently means more productivity is complete nonsense, there's a point where your returns not only diminish, but go into reverse. Someone working 7 hours a day who loves their job with a passion will typically still get more done than someone who works 10 hours a day and fucking hates it.
If you're in management, please step out, or learn a few things about how to make sure staff are effective and productive, because based on your comment you're part of the productivity problem.
Article begins with a coder who quits at Goole to do freelance work primarily on iOS apps - but it's Apple losing talent.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.