Home > Views > Blogs > Tech Observer > Apple's Secrecy, From the Inside Out
EMAIL
PRINT
RSS
SHARE
TEXT SIZE:
SHARE
Send a copy to me

Separate multiple email addresses (max 20) with commas.

0/1500

Main
First Bytes: Verizon, Alltel, Myspac...   Ask.com and Google's Impenetrable (F...
Oct 6 2008 8:45AM EDT

Apple's Secrecy, From the Inside Out

Kevin Maney writes: Glassdoor.com's employee reviews can be a fascinating lens for looking at any company story. So Glassdoor's lead developer recently used it to make a point about the brouhaha over the strict NDAs that Apple made iPhone app developers sign -- a practice that Apple last week ended. 


Glassdoor's Ron Lussier wrote this: 

The culture of secrecy at Apple is highly apparent when you read the 250 Apple Reviews contributed by Apple Employees on Glassdoor.  Apple employees are 15 times more likely to use the word "secrecy" or "secret" when describing their company compared to employees at other companies. 15.9% of the Apple Reviews use these words compared to just 1% at other companies.  Here are some examples:

Secrecy hurts the company - employees are given limited information about important company news and events."  -- Concierge in New York, NY

The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political, and often is an impediment to actually getting one's work done." -- Senior Software Engineer in Cupertino, CA

The developer goes on to say that he wrote Steve Jobs before Apple dumped the NDA, and Jobs wrote back saying the whole thing was blown out of proportion by a few bloggers. 

For what it's worth, Jobs has one of the highest approval ratings of any CEO on Glassdoor, at 90%. But the "overall rating" of what it's like to work at Apple is a 3.8, which is about equal to the ratings at Microsoft and Cisco, and well behind Google's 4.1 rating. 


See more in

Loading...

Add Your Comment

Required fields are marked with an asterisk (*)
Add a comment

Archive

Previous
Dec
2008
Next


Also in Portfolio.com
Most Read
Most Emailed
Recently Commented