Not sure of the breadth of code in there though, as it seemed every org had its own way of managing its own source code. At the beginning, iPhone OS was basically a mono-repo, but I don't think you could find the iBoot source code in there. Plus, there was this whole hyperbolic "security clearance" leveling that only those working closely with Forstall and Jobs were given full access to UI code. Everyone else had some janky non-ui variant that worked well enough to test the lower level code. To be fair, factory workers were known sources of leaks, so it was a smart move to hide upcoming features.
At every software job I've ever worked, you were entrusted to take care of the companies IP. It's a lot of responsibility when you think about it, because so much of the worlds most powerful IP sits on laptops all over the place. How many of those get stolen or hacked and still thankfully never have things leak?! I've always been impressed. This is another reason we get paid so well when you think about it.
It is hard to imagine one could get penalty of bankruptcy instead of going into Jail for this.
I actually value this working model a lot. The comment below suggest this is culture of fear, instead I call this a culture of utmost trust. ( Well he did say he hate Apple, haters are going to hate whether it is rational or not )
IANAL, but I believe for a charge of grand larceny you'd have to show intent to steal, and the "Low-Level" employee seems to have a pretty legitimate case that this was negligence, not theft. On the other hand, I think it's a pretty straight-line open-n-shut case for Apple to sue for damages, and I'm not sure that ruining a young software engineer's financial life for a decade is less of a deterrent than jail.
Did I understand you correctly? Are you saying that being in jail is almost the same as having a bad credit with bankruptcy record?
if you're struggling to stay afloat and have no credit/assets, a short time in jail is way worse than bankruptcy. on the other hand, if you've worked as a SWE for a few years, loosing all your money and having terrible credit for years is pretty awful. you're broke, so you can't buy anything outright, and your losses are compounded by the fact that you pay much more interest on things you buy on credit (if you can even get financing at all). it's not hard to see that this could be worse than a short time in jail. it all depends on the length of the sentence and your total losses from bankruptcy.
also keep in mind we are talking bad credit and all your assets seized by creditors. i'm not saying a bad credit score is literal hell on earth, but if you have no money and no credit you are gonna have a really bad time for a while.
This hasn't been true for quite a while.
I worked on developer tools a few years ago and had a lot of trouble finding internal code written in swift to test my tools on. This was when Apple had a few dozens (that we knew of) sort of mature swift codebases.
I wasn't aware. What's so secret?
Replace fear with love. Why you hate love man?
Maybe there's no better way but this is a bad security policy. With thousands of employees with such access, odds are that one might do it, either because he can, bragging, ideology, $$ from competitor or NSA /FSB etc etc.
Punishment is a possibly but "I will not get caught" etc
Instead of being treated like children, with hands tied and every interesting piece of technology locked behind layer upon layer of approval and access restrictions, probably 80% of all of Apple's source was available to anyone within the company. This promoted a sense of ownership, a feeling that no matter what your "product" was, we all worked on the entire OS, together. It also allowed for the free exchange of ideas and enabled engineers to be self motivated when faced with a challenge. More than once, when I was stuck, I would dive into the code archives and look to find some bit of code that someone else wrote that might do what I needed, and then I'd call them up and see if we couldn't work on a common solution.
All of this was possible because Apple made it very clear on day 1 that we were being entrusted with the secrecy that is such a core facet of who Apple is, and that if we violated that trust, there would be consequences.
I feel sorry for this "Low-Level" employee, because I suspect they are soon going to find out just how much of a price tag Apple puts on their trust and valued secrecy. On the bright side, they're probably too young to have any real estate holdings Apple could go after, and Chapter 7 gets wiped out after, what? 10 years?