I interviewed over 200 people at Apple. I pretty much had a stock set of interview questions that I rotated around. Since I’m gone now, I can tell you what they were. Most commonly, people gave very technical interviews, so I tried to focus more on who the person was …
In a normal company, milestones have dates assigned to them and ship dates are public knowledge, at least internally.
Not so at Apple. We can guess the ship date based on when our planned completion date is. But this is software. It’s perennially late, so you just never know.
One …
One day, around 2005, I got a phone call from a friend and colleague, excitedly telling me: “Come to my office! You’ll never believe what I’m doing!”
His office was dark and the shades drawn. I knocked and he opened the door slowly, motioning me in. He was the type …
Mac OS X Server 1.0 was released the day I was interviewed at Apple and played a substantial role in me accepting the offer. The same day, the Developer Preview also shipped and I started at Apple about 17 months before the debut of Public Beta.
A few …
There probably have been millions of articles written about the Apple of Tim Cook and how it differs from the Apple of Steve Jobs. I’ve always been hesitant to add to that.
Having worked at Apple for 12 years under Steve and 8 years under Tim, that gives me plenty …
This was a feature Apple prototyped but never shipped that was near and dear to my heart. The feature addressed two things.
First, people often remember the app they used to create a document or when they worked on it last. It’s harder to remember the name of the document …
Tech workers believe that they have the best health insurance and all other types of insurance offered by their company. And they are probably right. I don’t have any data to prove otherwise.
What I do know from my own research and experience is that the disability insurance offered by …
In 20 years at Apple, I obviously saw a lot and was sometimes motivated to write long, laborious manifestos about things. Usually they were practices and processes I felt needed to change.
These were initially published on my internal blog at Apple. So if you love manifestos and have a …
I worked on the Mail team from just before Public Beta thru Tiger. One of my proudest achievements on the team (and at Apple) was brainstorming with my team members and pushing an idea we internally called Magic Mailboxes and eventually became called Combined Mailboxes.
Some of the ideas …
In June 2006, Apple shipped the plastic MacBook, available in both black and white. I received a black model at work sometime that year.
It was plastic, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. Little did I know that, at around the same time, a redesign of the …