Apple Headquarters
Apple recently took a bruising in the blogosphere over its policy of requiring all iPhone developers to agree to a strict NDA (non-disclosure agreement). Developers were forbidden from talking about their development of iPhone applications and even from saying publicly that their application had been rejected from the iPhone App Store.
Now, we developers (I’m a Lead Web Developer at Glassdoor) , are fairly gregarious. We love to brag, show off our code, critique other developers’ code, and generally show our mad skillz. Apple’s iPhone NDA effectively shut iPhone developers off from their community, and they weren’t happy. So Apple developers blogged - They blogged a lot. One developer even created the web site #@*% NDA.com (the real URL doesn’t use grawlixes — not the kind of homage you want from your developers).
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 ...
