I worked, fortunately briefly, in Apple’s AI/ML organization.
It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.
They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.
It was difficult to believe the overhead, inefficiency, and cruft. Status updates in a wiki page tens of thousands of words long in tables too large and ill-formatted for anyone to possibly glean. Several teams clamboring to work on the latest hot topic for that year’s WWDC — in my year it was “privacy-preserving ML”. At least four of five teams that I knew of.
They have too much money and don’t want to do layoffs because they’re afraid of leaks, so they just keep people around forever doing next to nothing, since it’s their brand and high-margin hardware that drives the business. It was baked into the Apple culture to “go with the flow”, a refrain I heard many times, which I understood to mean stand-by and pretend to be busy while layers of bureaucracy obscure the fact that a solid half of the engineers could vanish to very little detriment.