
Why do I hardly ever see an Apple employee on the internet? - be5invis
I see Google, Microsoft and Facebook employees often, but why there is no Apple?
======
badman_ting
[http://worrydream.com/Apple/](http://worrydream.com/Apple/)

~~~
31reasons
Also this :
[http://worrydream.com/#!/Freedom](http://worrydream.com/#!/Freedom)

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dandrews
I've noticed this too, and can only imagine that Apple clamps down hard.
People I admired before they joined Apple (such as David Betz, Jordan Hubbard
and Doug Field) became practically invisible, as if they'd fallen into a black
hole.

I suppose they're well cared for, but I also suppose that it can be lonely in
there.

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donavanm
A bit late, but I worked in the Hardware Org there for ~3 years. There are
notable limits on any sort of public comment or contribution. Just about
everything has to approved by an external comms group, legal, and an open
source approval group if it's software. This applies to both communications &
public software contributions. Email messages to public mailing lists have to
be approved. Release notes for software, xquartz CUPS etc, have to be vetted
and approved. Contributions to open source projects are even more arduous as
there's yet another group asserting authority. As far as the company is
concerned that applied to _anything_ created by the employee, there is no
software work unrelated to employment.

The fear of the eldritch powers of The GPL run deep with lawyers and (some?)
upper management. Circa ~2010 my group was told _NO_ GPLv3, not even binaries.
"Exceptions" were made once reality was explained. ZFS for OSX was another
casualty of licensing fear. Internal builds worked pretty well until approval
for CDDL fell apart.

In reality everyone I worked with participated in public forums without
mentioning employer or anything that would obviously track back to Apple.
Going to conventions etc was as a private citizen and then expense the costs
later. Public code contributions were either under pseudonyms or private
patches.

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shloky
Apple has notoriously strict security protocols. I actually wrote a book about
it, but here's some resources (near the bottom)
[http://theriseofsiri.com/inspiration/](http://theriseofsiri.com/inspiration/)

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the906
Hmmm...what do you mean exactly? Multiple ones are on twitter etc.
[http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-you-should-
fo...](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-you-should-follow-on-
twitter-2012-6#thomas-han-icloud-engineer-1)

------
anon110
There's also a certain amount of fear involved: I know some Apple employees
online (not blogs), but does sharing information about it endanger that? Who
knows...

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samspenc
You don't see them at conferences either. :/

------
codegeek
What do you mean by the "internet". If you go on linkedin for example, can you
not search for people working at Apple ?

~~~
Wezc
I think that by saying 'internet' he wanted to say on HN or social networks.
For example you see tons of Google's guys having a public blog but not
Apple's.

