
Apple’s culture of secrecy wore down Swift creator and Xcode lead Chris Lattner - itg
https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/13/why-chris-lattner-left-apple/
======
clprogrmr
The 'extreme secrecy' would be an advantage if they actually managed to
surprise their customers. The reality is, over the last couple of years they
haven't really created something groundbreaking. Why would you want your own
employees to not know that the next big thing they're working on is a minor
product update. Also, despite the extreme secrecy, every product announced
since the iPhone 5s has been leaked in advance. Factory photos, hands-on
reviews of cases, photos of chips, etc. In other words, their employees suffer
from the secrecy, but the outside world (who they want to surprise) aren't
that excited about their launches and already know in advance what's coming
up. So... what's the point really.

~~~
xienze
The trash can Mac Pro was not leaked in advance (and by leaked I don't mean
speculation that Apple was updating the Mac Pro, but actual pictures of it).
Also I believe photos of the Watch didn't emerge ahead of time. Know why? The
Mac Pro was built in the US, same for Watch prototypes.

~~~
jclardy
People complain about leaks, but in reality the only things that leak from
apple are products that are shipping immediately after announcement. New
MacBook Pro, one model shipped day of. iPhone 7 - two weeks later (And pretty
much every iPhone before it.) Apple Watch was announced months in advance of
its actual release. Same with the original iPhone (And iPad as well IIRC.)

It is pretty much impossible to control leaks when you are manufacturing at
that scale, there are just too many low wage workers in the chain that have no
stake in the product. The Mac Pro also had the advantage of being a really
small run in comparison to the iPhone.

------
EdJiang
Chris Lattner on Twitter:

>My decision has nothing to do with "openness". The "friend" cited is either
fabricated or speculating. Folk just want to make [apple_emoji] look bad.
[angry_face_emoji]

[https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/819974025371787264](https://twitter.com/clattner_llvm/status/819974025371787264)

~~~
pfarnsworth
Blogs and shitty news sites like Business Insider don't practice standard due
diligence like newspapers used to. They just print whatever they want, it's
ground zero for fake news. There should be more consequence for sites printing
things like this, but there isn't, and that's why we are suffering with
misinformation.

~~~
argonaut
Stop misusing the word "fake news."

Business Insider is not the New York Times, but even they would not _openly
fabricate_ a source [1]. My guess is they ran a story with an actual source,
but the source was speculating.

[1] Outright making stuff up is the definition of fake news. 100% made up.

~~~
atmartins
How is speculating not equal to fake?

~~~
argonaut
Because it was clear from the article who the source was and that this was
hearsay. Also the article updated itself with a rebuttal from Lattner.

Fake news would not talk about who their source is. Fake news would not
publish Lattner's denial.

There is a difference between fake news and second-rate journalism. If someone
doesn't think there is a difference, I'm guessing they also see the world in
black and white.

~~~
pfarnsworth
Stop making up your own definition of "fake news." You're not some authority,
you're just a random Internet user like everyone else.

------
untog
As a webdev it's occurred to me before that at almost every conference I've
been to there have been employees from Google, Mozilla and Microsoft happy to
chat about their browsers. They're also active online, via Twitter or
whatever.

Apple, on the other hand... I've never once met a Safari dev. How does that
help anyone - including Apple? Feedback with the people who develop on your
product can be very valuable, and it seems Apple aren't interested in any of
it.

~~~
pavlov
Apple expects you to go to WWDC to meet employees and engage in dialogue. This
way Apple controls the setting and the information being disseminated. (One
could call it the "Mountain comes to Muhammad" approach.)

It worked pretty well in the 2000-2009 period when you could just buy a WWDC
ticket like any other conference pass... But after the iOS App Store exploded,
tickets became impossible to get because they started selling out in minutes.

~~~
untog
It also seems like a downer for Apple employees. Do they ever get to leave
Apple's campus?

~~~
realityking
They are around at conferences. They just don't make a big deal out of it and
generally don't appear on stage.

------
bad_user
Apple is a hardware leader, but IMO their culture is toxic for building
software.

Yes, they have great software achievements in OS X, iOS, Safari, etc. however
those happened in spite of their toxic culture, for other reasons. As an
inspiring market leader, Apple is able to attract a lot of talented software
developers and they also have huge pockets, plus whatever faults they have,
it's in Apple's DNA to ship polished products.

However I believe building software is their weakness, because building great
software is also about collaboration, about building communities, about
establishing standards, about reuse and composition. It's what Google and
Microsoft are good at.

~~~
jjuel
Is their software actually any better than anyone else's? Or is it that their
software is only expected to work on their hardware so they can fully optimize
it for their hardware and it seems better? I have a MacBook and an iPhone, but
you would be hard pressed to tell me macOS and iOS are truly better than the
alternatives.

~~~
manmal
One could write a book on that topic. My stance is that they prioritize what
and how they do differently than most competitors, and that would be end user
experience and polish.

E.g., the iPhone UI's smoothness was a result of their prioritizing smoothness
over other factors, like ease of implementation. If you look at how they did
it (view objects are backed by GPU rendered layers), it's not really developer
friendly. Because developer friendliness is not their priority, at all.

So, what you should get from Apple is the most polished experience, and they
exert a great deal of control to make sure that the designed experience
actually arrives at the end user. They got this really right with hardware,
but they still struggle with the software part. Sure, most software Apple
produces is beautiful and works really well. But things are crumbling. Looking
at the various fiascos - Maps, Me, then iCloud Syncing, increasing number of
problems with OSX quality - this controlled approach does not seem to work
that well on software. You can control all possible states and usage scenarios
of a physical device, but good luck with that on a OS consisting of 4 billion
bytes, or a massive neural network (Siri). IMO they need to let go and open up
at the software side.

~~~
Tanegashima
That's ridiculous, Views are backed by objects to the core.

You can even take a PDF screenshot of the whole screen and it will be pixel
perfect.

Their API's are easy to develop and coherent, yes, they are different than
other API's, but more and more other API's start to copy Apple, like Android
did and does, and it's the norm right now.

------
pilif
If the secrecy wore him down, why is he moving to Tesla which is equally
secretive? I'm not convinced by this argument.

~~~
mikeash
Tesla doesn't strike me as secretive at all. Elon Musk is constantly tweeting
about future plans, they frequently discuss new features before they're
released, and they talk about new products and new product lines years ahead
of time. For example the Model 3 was first talked about a decade ago, and they
have explicit public plans (up to and including allowing customers to buy the
option right now) for fully autonomous cars which will no doubt take years to
actually come to fruition.

Tesla in many ways has the opposite problem that Apple does with secrecy: they
talk so much about what they're going to do, and it doesn't always work out,
so people start to mistrust what they say.

~~~
microtherion
I don't know how secretive Tesla is or isn't at the moment, but with their
aggressive approach to rolling out autopilot software, and the results that
can already be observed, it seems likely to me that the autopilot division
will see a significant amount of litigation over the next few years, and it
would seem equally likely that this would lead to considerable caution in
public communication.

------
argonaut
Apple wouldn't have a problem with extreme secrecy if their compensation went
above and beyond the companies they compete with for engineering talent. But
their compensation is basically equivalent, or even less.

So except for some particular affinity for an Apple product or team, or
variance in interviewing success, I typically see undergrad/masters/PhD
graduates vastly preferring Google/Facebook offers over Apple (I use these as
an example because each company typically has a standard offer for each
group).

~~~
FT_intern
and they work more hours... for that lower compensation

------
sync
The source publication is a better read: [http://www.businessinsider.com/how-
apples-culture-of-secrecy...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-apples-
culture-of-secrecy-wears-down-its-top-developers-2017-1?r=UK&IR=T)

~~~
Tanegashima
And it's 100% pure bullshit.

Sorry, iHaters.

------
pawadu
> BI also pointed to an incident in 2015 when Apple’s entire networking team
> quit over Apple’s refusal to allow them to participate in an industry-wide
> network security forum known as the Open Compute Product.

How big is the "entire networking team", how many people are we talking about
here?

~~~
mhurron
And most importantly, is this why my Mac crashes when using NFSv4?

------
bondolo
Culture matters. In 1997 I had offers from both Apple and Sun. I was working
at a Macintosh ISV which was very badly impacted by Steve cancelling the Mac
clones. I knew from friends about the secrecy and siloed environment at NeXT
and in Steve's Apple. While I had respect for Steve's accomplishments and
vision I made a very conscious effort to choose a different work culture.

I ended up working at Sun (and eventually Oracle) for 16 years. It may not
have been great for all those years but I can't imagine that I would have
lasted at Apple that long and I certainly wouldn't have had the mobility
between projects that I did at Sun.

Doing it again I would still choose the company with the culture that I felt
was the best fit for me with that company's potential being secondary.

------
coldcode
This seem more like speculation unless Chris actually says something. Being
frustrated in a giant company is something I understand 100%. Moving up the
food chain to be more in control is something I also understand which often
means going elsewhere.

------
scarface74
I'm not saying it wouldn't be a problem for some, but how would Apple's
"culture of secrecy" affect Lattner? Apple didn't just release Swift as open
source, they released the entire commit history even before it was open
source, the future planned roadmap of Swift is discussed openly on a public
email list, and the whole Tool chain down to llvm is completely open source.

~~~
blinkingled
FTA:

He always felt constrained at Apple in terms of what he could discuss publicly
— resorting to off-the-record chats, surprise presentations, and the like,"
the person told us. "Similarly, I know he was constrained in recruiting and
other areas. Eventually I know that can really wear people down."

Running an open source project with lot of contributors requires open
communication. Recruiting constraints is self explanatory.

~~~
scarface74
That's true for every company. I work at a private mid sized unknown company
as the developer lead. I can't go out an publicly speak about what's going on
at the company or their roadmap even to employees at other locations or
sometimes to my own team. Even though I'm not officially management, I'm privy
to information for planning purposes that the company may not want to get out

Do you think that Tesla is going to allow him to open source the self driving
car software he will be working on?

Even though he's not working at Apple, do you think the head of the Swift
project is going to refuse to take a pull request from him?

~~~
blinkingled
Well not every company. But I think you are oversimplifying it. Culture of
secrecy in Apple's case most certainly means you can't do anything public at
all without going through a bunch of legalese, approval chains and various
other roadblocks. Apple for example did not allow AI researchers employed by
them to publish papers - they hardly got any researcher interested and they
have allowed publishing of one paper so far.

Tesla on the other hand seems to be at least making noises about Open Source
spirit. It looks like Musk doesn't care about keeping things secret as much as
Apple does - [https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-
you](https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you). It is quite
conceivable that Elon Musk will allow Chris more openness to contribute to
LLVM/Swift and whatever Self Driving car stuff he is working on. I mean what
has Tesla got to lose if LLVM is improved or even if Tesla's self driving
software is open sourced (not the data mind you!) and many others adapt it and
improve it?

------
grabcocque
I imagine trying to run a consensus-driven open source project from within a
super-secret topdownocracy like Apple is next to being an impossible task.
That Lattner did it for as long as he did is impressive.

------
shams93
Apple made a mistake choking off iOS safari they're screwing up like MS did in
1999, they're I'm the same position now as MS was when Jobs came back. They're
turning iOS into a second rate system by refusing to implement many html5 APIs
like webrtc. Similar to the browser wars in 99, the original iPhone had the
best mobile browser of its time but in 10 years they've lost that edge.

------
JustSomeNobody
I think what people forget is that engineers are very curious by nature. They
don't want to work on the same things forever. I don't know, but Mr. Lattner
probably took Swift was far as he wanted to go with it and now it was time for
a change.

------
72deluxe
I would still like to know who's replacing him and what the future is for all
of this, particularly Swift given how much Apple was pushing it. As far as I
know, it was Lattner's baby.

Who's running things these days?

~~~
johnzim
From his leaving post on the swift mailing list:
[https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-
Mo...](https://lists.swift.org/pipermail/swift-evolution/Week-of-
Mon-20170109/030063.html)

> I’m happy to announce that Ted Kremenek will be taking over for me as
> “Project Lead” for the Swift project, managing the administrative and
> leadership responsibility for Swift.org. This recognizes the incredible
> effort he has already been putting into the project, and reflects a decision
> I’ve made to leave Apple later this month to pursue an opportunity in
> another space. This decision wasn't made lightly, and I want you all to know
> that I’m still completely committed to Swift. I plan to remain an active
> member of the Swift Core Team, as well as a contributor to the swift-
> evolution mailing list.

~~~
72deluxe
Thanks very much indeed. I do wonder if there is a severe brain drain
occurring at Apple.

------
draw_down
It has long struck me as an intense, unforgiving place to work, with the
upsides that you'll probably make a shit ton of money and possibly work on
things that affect many people. Not the kind of tradeoff I would personally
make, plus it's in the Valley which I wouldn't like either. I can certainly
see it getting old after a time. Especially now, when the bloom is off the
rose a bit.

------
Waterluvian
I wonder what % of Apple employees hare secrecy culture and want to see it die
versus the % who were hired due to a compatible attitude towards it and thrive
in that kind of culture.

I'm very interested in things that make a massive ship very hard to turn. If
they wanted a drastic culture shift, would they have to replace a lot of
managers and leaders?

~~~
argonaut
I don't think _anyone_ likes the secrecy. I don't know anyone who doesn't want
their name attached to their work.

------
hcarvalhoalves
It seems now without Jobs, Apple is just repeating mantras without asking
themselves "why?".

When the company was working on iPhone, iPad, such secrecy made sense. For
other stuff, no.

------
DoodleBuggy
Or maybe he got bored and had a great offer from Tesla?

------
gchokov
Secrecy has always been an advantage. If he doesn't like this, of course, he
should leave. Nothing wrong with the two things.

~~~
sambe
Keeping your best people has always been an advantage. When you keep telling
them "if you don't like it, leave", sometimes they take your advice and the
problems they saw still exist after they're gone.

