I used to think that way till I saw Google, which is pretty much the opposite, and now I understand it is important to take into account the cons as well as the pros [I'm still more biased towards the G model but less so than before].
In summary, everyone seeing and commenting on everything has two consequences:
(1) too much politics and need to potentially justify everything to everyone at the company and their dogs, not just stakeholders, literally everyone in the company, on Memegen, on TGIF, and to the world when stuff inevitably leaks, before the product is ready. This leads to groupthink and no one gets the courage of their conviction. [sometimes this is good and prevents poor products from get to the customer, but usually when that's the case, the team were incompetent and deliberately ignoring prior feedback under the ever-applicable excuse of "you are not the target customer" and could have prevented them if they cared.]
(2) when you have a siloed culture, you put the integration job, responsibility, and accountability on the management who coordinate. Therefore you have to be careful who you put in charge and the organization does not scale magically. But once you put the right person in charge, they are accountable and cannot slack off, nor make poor choices forever and expect others underneath them to fix them and expect them to be accountable. The buck stops with the integration point, which is singular. They have to make clear and concrete decisions, leaving less room for spray and pray or blaming stuff on others.
Point #2 has synergies with the way Apple is structured: not P&Ls, rather each person is an expert on some aspect of the product and the editing function and discussion on what to build happens very transparently at the top (evidently through heated discussions mediated by Steve who was not afraid of conflicts [contrast with Google execs.]) One person handles software, another handles hardware, another one silicon, etc. and they fight at the top not through proxy wars at the bottom. My sense is this aspect is what Steve "signed-off" on, and the rest naturally followed with that plus product secrecy aspirations (for marketing reasons and due to scar tissues from a past era).
Another aspect of this is that some percentage of people conflate transparency/empowerment/etc. with democracy. The result can be that, if they disagree with some decision, they will just not let go. So you can end up with some decision being an ongoing tug of war to reverse it.
On the other hand, a more siloed culture with managers given carte blanche to run their reports as they see fit can easily fall prey to toxic environments of abuse, especially if the management above only cares if the EPMs are filing satisfactory reports and enough radars are being closed. The only thing protecting employees from abuse are then a weakened HR system that lacks full visibility into the system’s workings. And thus in parts of the organization, subcultures of toxicity and dysfunction are protected by a code of silence- of being siloed.
> Point #2 has synergies with the way Apple is structured: not P&Ls, rather each person is an expert on some aspect of the product and the editing function and discussion on what to build happens very transparently at the top (evidently through heated discussions mediated by Steve who was not afraid of conflicts [contrast with Google execs.])
This is so laden with internal contradictions that I can only presume it was part of an internal Reality Distortion Field training. Are you suggesting that Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi don't have budgets? And that every detail the 50k engineers work on are mediated by 5 people?
To abstract the way a trillion dollar company operates in 2 paragraph necessitates simplification. Point still stands: you don’t attribute revenue to just iOS or just iPhone hardware or just marketing team.
I think you know exactly what I mean. If you’re just trying to engage in an argument at the margin, you are not going to get one.
> you don’t attribute revenue to just iOS or just iPhone hardware or just marketing team.
No, instead you have some finance team model the revenue split, to simulate the P&L you would have otherwise (and then the execs fight over the model, whether it's fair to give iOS any money for Apple Music when they support Windows and Android, etc.). This is a bog standard approach that many SV firms take. Even non-SV firms have to deal with this sort of thing when the IT department reports to the CFO.
Yes, Alphabet has 'side bets' but there are still _many_ products and services under the Google umbrella, and has even rolled some into their own. As best I can tell, this was a tool to quarantine specific executives from infecting the rest of Google -- when your acquisitions are holding quarterly all hands with an opener of 'Fuck being Googley' then you have a problem to solve.
It's hard to reconcile the 'ignorance is strength' argument you've offered here -- if employees aren't allowed to know what anyone else is doing, or even what the org chart looks like, then you can't have the collaboration it would take to make things work together well. And you would expect to end up with a lot of duplicated efforts, since middle managers are kept in the dark about one another's work.
I’m not sure where you get the idea apple employees don’t know the org chart. Everyone has “Apple Directory” which is recursively click-to-show everyone and their boss and their reports, as well as contact info and even where they sit.
It also shows the internal mailing lists, how to get yourself on it (if it’s not self-add) etc. Then you can find the disclosures you might need for black/ultra-black projects...
It’s actually relatively simple to get access to anything you need, if you have the need and aren’t just curious.
Disinfo. Apple’s internal systems, security policies, and the culture of secrecy is far less blasé than you describe. Discussion of internal tools should be avoided on public forums.
Didn't Jobs fire employees on the spot after asking them questions in the elevator and not liking his answers? Which prompted people to avoid taking the elevator with him.
I heard that only happened during the bleak years right after he came back from NeXT, and there were legitimate doubts Apple could survive the cash crunch they were in. I hadn't heard about summary on-the-spot firings since that era, could anyone worked through that era and later comment on this?
Yeah, when I started at Apple shortly after the iMac was introduced, those firings were already being referred to in the past tense. The rest of the Jobs 2.0 era was characterized more by the near-absence of major layoffs, as far as I can tell. I believe the Power Mac G4 Cube Team was decimated for mistakes that were not entirely theirs. The .mac team was reportedly decimated. But those are the instances I can think of, and neither of these were elevator-style summary firings.
