Actually, Apple is siloed internally as well. I worked there for a little over three years and had friends there in other departments with whom we could mutually not share what we were working on. It both makes for a worse working culture and causes issues in practice as people relearn the same lessons and reinvent the same solutions in different areas.
Apple is a huge company so certainly experiences will vary but all the anecdotes, podcasts, and books written by former employees mention the highly collaborative environment, even within very secrete siloed projects [1].
Honestly, the reality is most engineering is tedious and boring and mired in context. The old 10% inspiration 90% perspiration quote always rung true for me. I think you’ll struggle to have anything other than a superficial conversation of any hard problem or question with any engineer whose not closely associated with your team.
My other reference point for big tech companies is Facebook, which is mostly open internally. There were many times over the years where I was able to search around and find someone who had worked with a specific external partner or tool I was evaluating or developed something relevant internally, where I could reach out and get insights and pointers from them. Occasionally that turned into longer collaborations and a couple of times even people switching teams.
Monocultures reinforce bad habits. I have friends at a wide variety of tech companies - Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tableau, AirBnB, and more. All of us know, in broad terms, what the others do. We don't discuss trade secrets or specific unannounced projects, but we're able to talk about things like "X works on Storage Spaces for Windows, Y works on WebXR, Z works on security, etc."
We're also all able to talk freely about what aspects of our jobs and employers we like and don't like. This is valuable information - for instance, I've heard enough first person anecdotes from various teams to know that I'm not interested in working for Amazon unless all other avenues to pay my mortgage have failed.
The Apple experience sounds like my interview with the NSA years ago. All of my attempts to ask any questions were met with a "no comment" for the most part. Very frustrating experience. I walked away with not much more idea of what a job there would be like than you could get from reading Wikipedia.
I haven't worked there, but isn't Apple famously siloed, even internally? My impression was that there were many areas that could not tell even other Apple employees what they were working on.
Yes, this. I could talk about the things I've worked on at [big company], but really, no one outside of [big company] would find it interesting anyway (and not all that many inside [big company] to be honest).
It may be true in some cases, but it's just a mental model--and all models are wrong. Some are useful.
Worrying about things out of your control--once you've decided to move forward--is not useful.
If you can't stop yourself from doing that, you're probably not cut out for life at an early stage start up. That's not a dig--it's just means you should seek opportunities that better fit you.
I get why businesses should care about ad fraud, but why should I, as a consumer care about it? Frankly I don't even want to know about my traffic, let alone yours.
Yes, ad fraud. We're talking about endymi0n's claim in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25429278 that without IDFA preventing ad fraud is (a) harder and (b) disproportionately harder for smaller players.
"Ninety percent of students think they are more intelligent than the average student."
Does anyone know which study this came from? I was trying to figure out exactly how the survey question was worded because this statistic seems somewhat amazing to me. The driving one I get because drivers are not being routinely graded, but students are.
I googled the phrase and I basically got related quotes, this article (from 2010), and a couple of studies that came after this article was posted, and they were mostly looking at gender differences in preceived intelligence and after a quick glance, didn't seem to support this statement.
I've been routinely graded WORSE than the average student and believe this rather confidently. An impression I get from having had teachers yell at me in the hallway about wasted potential and other students cracking jokes about how my friends had "ruined me" after my grades fell off a cliff after making some new ones. Grading doesn't prevent inflated delusions of intellectual superiority if people believe grades are a matter of hard work rather than intelligence.
What drove a sense of inferiority for me was somebody getting better grades with seemingly less effort.
I understand your point and, as I am sure you know, life can definitely be unfair.
Do you think it's so unfair that 90% of students would feel the same way? It's not impossible but personally, I would be surprised by that. Which is the point. Experiences vary dramatically, especially if we broaden the statement internationally, so knowing who was asked what is just as important as the claim.
I don't see it as unfairness, college mostly gatekeeper business and academia and raw brainpower isn't what you should be selecting for. At least not in isolation.
I do agree the 90% claim seems dubious especially unsourced.
> you can't just revamp the UX for a product used by billions of users without some pretty serious blowback... but it is often difficult to justify the benefits of an improved UX versus the productivity hit to all of the existing users.
What you wrote is not wrong. But if Microsoft can change the office UX then Google can do it too.
Microsoft faced significant blowback for that ribbon change, and billions of dollars were spend on re-training hundreds of millions of office workers to do it. Because that change was in desktop software - users had the option of just sticking with the old version (which millions of users did) but you can't really do that with web applications.
Once you have worked with a product doing these kind of things, you'll understand you'll need to double or even triple the efforts to be able to support two branches of the same feature. Of course this doesn't apply to simple applications.
Confluence removed quite a few features from the new UI.
I don't know Circle CI but they probably have 2 orders of magnitude fewer users. Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.
> Also in my experience with CI tools, few users actually manage them for many people and those people are either experienced or quickly become experienced with the UIs. They are usually not the average user getting confused by UI changes.
Well regardless, they still pulled off the harder technique.
That Atlassian Confluence model you gave had some serious issues, they they are going to turn off the option to keep the old UI as well, and it is an enormous strain on Engineering resources to keep two different versions of an entire application UI up to date.
One company that had done this a bit better was Salesforce with the old UI / Lightening UI switch.
Doesn’t that double the support surface? Bugs are still going to pop-up in the old interface, and so do you still tackle those or move engineer focus to the new interface? It seems weird to continue spending engineer time on an interface that is being phased out.
There's still threads on hacker news today bemoaning the ribbon UI and harking back to the good old days of drop down menus, and how great it was to be a power user back then. If you're after an example of a UI change with minimal blowback then I think this is a poor example!
"About half (47%) of a CEO’s work was done at company headquarters. The rest was conducted while visiting other company locations, meeting external constituencies, commuting, traveling, and at home."
Shockingly I didn't see anything about time spent on Hacker News. There's probably a lesson there, or something. :)
I meant that yes he travels a lot, but no that doesn't make it harder to know in which state he has been the most (or whichever rule applies in the US to determine in which state you officially reside) and thus to figure out where he should pay taxes.
[1] https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm...