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.

Thank you a million times over for SwiftUI and Combine — you can just tell this workflow will be the future for the whole Apple ecosystem, and we may finally see a reincarnation of webobjects!

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.

You need to remember that Apple is a US based company, country which is by far the most litigious in the world. They (Apple, or any other powerful company, for that matter) can bring you to homelessness just by dragging you through courts.

Yes. But how do you attract scientists if they can't publish their work at conferences, in journals, et c.?

By paying them lots of money and giving them interesting work. Obviously not everyone will make that trade but many will. There's plenty of work done in many areas of industry and government that aren't especially open and most of them probably don't pay nearly as well as Apple.

I recall that was an area of complaint about AI researchers a year or two ago. Valley companies were hiring them away from Academia and little research was being published as a result.

Principles are weak in the face of cash.

A friend bought his house with cash a couple of years ago with stock purchased through their EPP program as a retail employee from 2007-2011.

Fuck.. should have worked retail at Apple, self-studied CS and bought my own house instead of a $50k CS degree!

They had issues for a while in that area, actually. I hear that the ML people are now allowed to publish much of what they work on.

Yes, Siri has much more lenient policies for academic publications than other Apple departments, and other parts of Apple are also getting a little bit less strict. It was never entirely impossible to publish at Apple, but it used to be extremely difficult.

Once it became evident that this was a clear competitive disadvantage in ML hiring, policies evolved…

I don't think Apple is known for being particularly litigious when it comes to going after ex-employees (except in cases of fairly blatant industrial espionage, e.g. https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/apple-concerned-china...).

In comparison, Apple's reaction to a prolific leaker was fairly mild, and left him far from unemployable (I happen to know what company hired him next), let alone homeless: https://www.macworld.com/article/1018725/workerbee.html

It's a combination of fear and "I know something you don't know". I have a lot of friends that work there, and they won't say anything because they fear not only getting fired but getting sued by a trillion dollar corporation. But they also get quite giddy when something new comes out and they can then talk about how they worked on it a few years ago and how cool it's been using it before everyone else.

I assume it's mostly cultural--perhaps as reinforced by NDAs. I dare say that most people have a reasonable sense of what things involving their company are OK to talk about with outsiders, or perhaps even with other groups within their company, and which aren't.

What a profound question. Annoyed I never asked it myself. Always assumed it was because of Apple’s position in the SV caste system.