The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Feeds

Ex-staffer: Apple assigns new workers to made up projects

Magical, revolutionary... imaginary

Get a job at Apple and there's a very good chance the company won't tell you what product or project you're working on, says author Adam Lashinksy. According to one ex-employee, Apple may even make up products in order to test your loyalty.

In Lashinksy's new book, Inside Apple - described by Apple fansite TUAW as "a quick, easy read... with large, readable type" - it is claimed that "new hires… aren't necessarily to be trusted with information as sensitive as their own mission".

New workers are hired into dummy positions while their loyalty is established, Lashinsky has said.

The book quotes a one-time Apple engineer who told Lashinsky: "They wouldn't tell me what [my task] was. I knew it was related to the iPod, but not what the job was."

And in a Q&A session with LinkedIn promoting the book, Lashinsky is told by a member of the audience, who claims to be a former Apple employee: "A friend of mine who's a senior engineer [at Apple], he works on - or did work on - fake products I'm sure for the first part of his career, and interviewed for nine months."

Apple's penchant for attempting to maintain secrecy at all costs is well known, and the company has always had a problem with details about future products, even minor upgrades, leaking out.

It's one reason why Apple has a downer on this very site - and a number of other publications we could mention, including the UK's - and the world's - first ever Mac magazine. ®

Its true

All those wasted months in the triangular corner team. I often looked across the hall at the squared off corner guys, wondering how the look and feel of their designs would sit with the work we were doing. Until ... Bam! Secretly, in another building unbeknown to either of us, the round corner team announced their work could at last be made public and the rest, as we all now know, is history.

8
0

@Awwwww

Steve! Welcome back - everyone told us you were dead!

9
1
Anonymous Coward

Hardly suprising.

Cults do strange things especially when money is invoved.

9
1

With 36 billion in the bank I guess hiring someone for nine months on an engineers salary to work on cream filled headphones in the shape of a duck makes perfect financial sense.

They do tell the shareholders that they do this instead of giving out a dividend, right???

11
4
Anonymous Coward

@Fai111F

New here?

5
0

More from The Register

US boffin builds 32-way Raspberry Pi cluster
Beowulf cluster built for the price of a single PC
Nintendo throws flaming legal barrel at YouTubing fans
All your walk-through vid revenue are belong to us
Review: HP Pavilion 14 Chromebook
All roads lead to Chrome?
Borked your iDevice? Pay EVEN MORE to have it fixed by Applecare
Or scream at their hapless techies on their forums
Euro PC shipments plummet into bottomless pit of DOOOOM
11th quarter of decline, 20pc drop on last year - Gartner
 breaking news
Report: AT&T dropping Facebook phone after dismal sales
Turns out folks won't buy that for a dollar
Which petite model likes a fondle and GETTING WET? Sony's Xperia ZR
Take this new mobe swimming. Just not deep, or for long, OK?
Google adds Atari Easter Egg for Breakout's birthday
Cute game born in Jobsian heart of darkness