The life of an Apple engineer is a productive and exciting one, but according to Adam Lashinsky’s new book Inside Apple, the job also involved an interesting “initiation” process, in which new hires are put to work on fake products in order to prove they can be trusted.
From Inside Apple:
Despite surviving multiple rounds of rigorous interviews, many employees are hired into so-called dummy positions, roles that aren’t explained in detail until after they join the company. The new hires have been welcomed but not yet indoctrinated and aren’t necessarily to be trusted with information as sensitive as their own mission.
Lashinsky takes a look into the process that Apple’s new hires must go through, pointing out that many are hired with no knowledge of what they’ll be working on, and being sworn to secrecy even before they learn which building they’ll be working out of.
As Business Insider reports (via MacRumors), the story has since been confirmed in a recent interview with Lashinsky and a former Apple employee at LinkedIn’s headquarters.
A friend of mine who’s a senior engineer at Apple, he works on — or did work on — fake products I’m sure for the first part of his career, and interviewed for 9 months. It’s intense.
The entire interview can be viewed below: