Thoughts on Apple’s “Brain Drain”

Gone Indie — Thought Palace:

Here’s a career update, for those of you who care: I’ve left Apple, and I’m now working on my own, from home, as an indie software developer. I have plans for at least two kick-ass Mac apps, I’ll probably contribute to a few open source projects, and I may dabble in some web stuff.

(At least, that’s the plan for now! Everything is subject to change without prior notice. This document contains forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ.)

This is kind of a big change for me. I’ve been continuously employed for 19 years, 16 of those at Apple. I clearly like being part of a team, part of a company, and specifically part of Apple. But there comes a time when a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

So, Apple loses another long-term senior employee. Actually, more than one, since Red Sweater notes that Peter Bierman left, too. These are significant losses for Apple — Guys like Jens and Pete were not only significant contributors to Apple’s products, but historical glue that tied Apple together and helped bring the young, new talent up to speed and innoculated them with “the Apple way”.

I wish I could say I was surprised, but I’m not. Jen’s piece (go read all of it) could have been written by me.

After I gave notice, I was a walking corpse for almost two months — everyone knew I was leaving, but it was a long, slow goodbye. One of the things that surprised me, though, was once my departure was made public, how many other Apple people caught up with me not just to say goodbye, but to talk about what I was doing and how they were either wishing they could, or planning to. The amount of pent-up “if things don’t change, I’m outta here”, especially among some of the key senior people I talked to, actually scared me a bit.

I ended up bringing this up with various senior management, trying to get them to see the red flag. Most of the people I talked to about it were some combination of sympathetic, worried and understanding (and in a couple of cases, planning, too!), but the word I kept getting back from people who broached this at the exec level was “look at our turnover rate. There’s no problem!” — which at the point was true, but was ignoring the real point. By the time the turnover rate starts ticking, IT’S TOO LATE. And it’s looking to me like Apple missed the boat here. Beyond sheer numbers, it doesn’t matter how low the rate is if you’re losing key people.

Problem is, Apple seems to not worry about that too much. After I left StrongMail, I spent some time chatting with folks at Apple about options on coming back. Basically, got nothing. One senior manager over in Engineering put it best to me: “all we’re hiring now are kids right out of college and people who’ve already done the job for a while”. For what I wanted to do — not an option, which is fine. But the whole “we’ll hire kids who are dying to work for Apple, work their asses off for three years, and when they burn out, hire another college kid” is a philosophy that only works for a while, and only while you maintain a core of senior folks who can oversee and direct the young studs who love sleeping under their desk.

Just doing a quick glance at my LinkedIn connections, I can count four OTHER ten-year-plus Apple folks who’ve moved on either about the time I left, or since, on top of Peter and Jens. And about half a dozen 5-year-plus, too. Now, my LinkedIn is littered with dozens of people in those categories STILL at Apple, but that’s a braintrust Apple really ought to be encouraging to stay.

But it doesn’t. When I decided it was time to move on from my last project, I made it clear I wanted to stay at Apple, but move into a new role and new challenge. The response, from pretty much everyone in the universe was “hey, keep an eye on the job board, if you see something you like….”

That’s pretty much what Jens ran into, too. I know some of what Jens did at Apple, and someone should have been tripping over people finding a place to let him go and do stuff FOR APPLE. In my case, my last project was lauded by my VP on a number of occasions as having the best ROI to ever come out of Apple IT — it impacted revenues and margins noticably, and it laid foundations for a number of things that allowed Apple to rethink parts of its business and do new things.

Without going into many details, I will say that one SMALL side project we did allowed Apple to save about a few million dollars a year on printing costs involving the retail stores. I also got involved in the Fedex recycling program when they needed some work done that other groups were quoting months to implement — I did it in about 10 days.

My last real project before I left was the code that allowed Apple to implement the ticket code access for the Red Hot Chili Peppers album; the revenue from that one promo probably paid my salary that year… I remember sitting in a conference room with about 15 people from all over Apple talking this over with a “this is what Steve wants done”, and group after group going “my folks don’t know how….”, and suddenly I realize everyone’s stopped talking and are looking at me. So I mapped out how I thought we could do it, went back to my office and wrote about 200 lines of Perl to glue the various pieces together, and there we were. And after the followup meeting where we demonstrated the working solution, a couple of folks came up to me and asked how they’d get these things done after I left. My answer: “not my problem, someone should have thought about that” — a lot of what I did the last year around running my main project were these special hacks that needed to be done on Steve-timeframe; that was, in some ways, my group’s specialty. We were set up to move quickly and change gears on short notice, not things IT is necessarily good at.

It made other folks in IT nuts at times, too, and just as happy that the crazy guy who wouldn’t keep his mouth shut was gone… So, having nurtured a project that impacted the company by tens of millions of dollars a year and working insane hours (happily) in doing so said I was ready for a new challenge at Apple, the response was, well “hey, thanks for everything. good luck”.

Yeah, I was bitter for a while. but in reality, that’s the way Apple is, and I knew it. And to be blunt about it, it sure doesn’t look like Apple’s missed me since I left (which is good, and which means those eight weeks we spent in my long goodbye worked — stuff transitioned with minimal hitches and moved forward in really good ways, as I wanted. The new teams are doing some really great stuff with the project….)

But now, the brain drain I was worried about is happening. It was happening at some level before I left, but it seems to be accelerating. It’s something Apple could have avoided — and I think it puts them at risk down the road. Not because the kids they’re hiring aren’t good (they are!), but because they don’t have the depth of experience to design the kind of products Apple users demand out of Apple. The senior people are the ones who understand how to take a great idea into a good product, or to a great product – and for every Jonathan Ives who we all know about, there are a couple of dozen guys like Jens handling the details and sweating the problems. And when they go? It worries me.

Now that I’ve been out a while, while part of me misses the buzz that working there gives you, I’m really happy to be out. I’m doing fun stuff, good people, interesting product, and I can still have a life, or at least part of one.

So all I can really say is “welcome, Jens, to the real world. There is a life out here”. And I can’t wait to see what he has up his sleeve. It’s going to be great — and it’s too bad it won’t be part of Apple.

update here: http://chuqui.typepad.com/chuqui_30/2008/01/a-quick-followu.html

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