- team was not scrapped by jeff, at least not until large number of people walked out due to mismanagement
- prototypes that worked (and were of phone size & shape) existed more than 2 years before launch but then (as mentioned) team walked and it all had to be scrapped
- hw team often undercut sw team by replacing components and not telling anyone about it
- hw team often made mistakes of the very basic variety (two separate sets of pull-ups on a single i2c bus)
- some parts choices were motivated by personal interests of people in the hw team, even against their own data & analyses. This was allowed to proceed
- some of the management made the team look very foolish in front of vendors (asking questions that made no sense in the current millennium)
- sw team was kept busy by endless meetings with no end in sight, which significantly cut into any chance of productivity
Hey there, this is the author of Fast Company's story. Thanks for the note.
While I appreciate your perspective, during the course of reporting, you have to understand that you're going to hear an endless amount of varying perspectives, especially when it comes to emotional finger-pointing and Monday morning quarterbacking. It sounds like you worked on the project for about a year, of a product with roots that can be traced as far back as 2009. It's also not clear to me what "team" you're referring to, since so many teams were involved over this long time period, not just in Seattle but in Cupertino/Sunnyvale/Cambridge/etc, as you know. So I just hope people can keep that in mind when reading about "inaccuracies," which, on the whole, I certainly would disagree with.
As for your complaints, it sounds like many of them are aimed at the hardware teams; during my reporting, I certainly heard just as many complaints leveled at the software teams (e.g. at former VP Howard Look before his departure).
I totally understand that current/former employees get defensive about these kinds of topics, especially when it comes to their work being under the eye of criticism (early Dynamic Perspective team members were especially defensive during my reporting). But it's important to separate fact from emotion, and present a narrative that is clear, accurate, and balanced.
At this point, I've talked to nearly four-dozen sources for this story -- current and former employees at all levels of the company -- and this is the story that's emerged. The feedback I've since received privately from insiders has been incredibly reassuring.
With that said, I'm not dismissing your comments. But if you'd like to provide more insight, feel free to reach out. I'm accessible online, and happy to connect on background, if that's most comfortable for you.
> "- sw team was kept busy by endless meetings with no end in sight, which significantly cut into any chance of productivity"
Sounds like Amazon alright. I was there for two years and this defined so much of my time spent.
We'd have endless meetings with endless stakeholders. This would cut deeply into development time, and all scheduling revolved around PM schedules with no regard for the productivity cost of pulling engineers into meetings every other hour, all day long.
Which would of course result in more meetings to discuss why we're not shipping things quickly enough, and more meetings to remediate the situation...
By the time I left that godforsaken wasteland of a tech company I was easily doing ~3 hours of meetings in a given day, all spread out naturally, because fuck concentrating and getting work done.
I joined during the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, and my entire department was put on a hiring freeze, despite having plenty to do and legitimate need for more people.
So we toiled for two years under a hiring freeze as work piled up - but that wasn't even the biggest problem.
As soon as the hiring freeze was eventually lifted, all the managers went nuts with hiring - I suppose in that kind of environment you hire as many people as you can get your hands on since you have no idea if you'll be allowed to hire later. My team of 3 engineers ended up interviewing for 7 open positions at the same time.
So in a given day my schedule would wind up being: 4 hours of interviewing, 3 hours of meeting explaining to people why dev work wasn't getting done, and 1 hour of real work (which wasn't really productive since it's scattered throughout the day).
I decided to get out of that place pretty quickly - so I suppose a team of 2 engineers ended up interviewing for 8 open positions...
- prototypes that worked (and were of phone size & shape) existed more than 2 years before launch but then (as mentioned) team walked and it all had to be scrapped
- hw team often undercut sw team by replacing components and not telling anyone about it
- hw team often made mistakes of the very basic variety (two separate sets of pull-ups on a single i2c bus)
- some parts choices were motivated by personal interests of people in the hw team, even against their own data & analyses. This was allowed to proceed
- some of the management made the team look very foolish in front of vendors (asking questions that made no sense in the current millennium)
- sw team was kept busy by endless meetings with no end in sight, which significantly cut into any chance of productivity