Claims of Apple Putting New Hires to Work on 'Fake' Projects Questioned, Found Unlikely
Just over a year ago, a LinkedIn Q&A session with Inside Apple author Adam Lashinsky generated some attention for an exchange with a former Apple employee in the audience who reported that new Apple hires are sometimes placed on "fake" projects during a probationary period. The audience member's comment was sparked by Lashinsky's discussion of employees being hired into "dummy positions" where they do not know what they will be working on until they start at the company.
Ars Technica has now followed up on those claims of new hires being placed on fake projects and found that the claim is unlikely to be true.
I spoke to Apple employees from various areas of the company at differing levels, some who are still at Apple and others who have moved on, but all expressed the same sentiment. No one reported any direct experience of being put on a fake project at Apple, and no one knew a friend or colleague at the company who had. A single former employee acknowledged having heard about fake projects—but only from a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend, and the employee was quick to acknowledge that the rumor should be treated with a skeptical eye.
Sources noted that virtually all work at Apple is heavily covered by nondisclosure agreements, meaning that there is little need to resort to putting employees on fake projects as tests of their loyalty.
The report also describes how Apple works to track down suspected sources of leaks, occasionally putting an entire room on lockdown with security personnel working quickly to download data from computers and other devices. Such incidents are said to be rare, but they do leave lasting impressions on employees.
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Top Rated Comments
Along with Apple maps.
People care too much about this company.
A couple of examples stick out in my mind. The first being when I purchased my iPhone 5, an employee told me that cases weren't available yet in order to let Ive's design be seen by the world for a few days. I stared at her for a while after that one before finishing my purchase and heading over to the AT&T store for a case that was readily available for me.
The second example would be this nonsense. What business in their right mind would pay people thousands of dollars on fake projects just in the HOPES that they might gain a little bit of secrecy? Has anyone heard of an NDA? I imagine the folks that conjure up this sort of stuff also believe in chemtrails, low wave emissions from cell towers, and that Obama is a Kenyan.
Stop thinking about what Apple does and go outside.
Get a life.