For example, if you work on Chrome or Chrome OS, most of what people work on is available in public repositories.
For what it is worth, when I read this article one of the people it reminded me of is someone from the Chrome OS team. It might be, however, that with the release of the Cr48 that the situation has changed (I last talked to him days after those shipped). The people I've met from the Chromium team, however, were certainly a different story.
However, I know a /lot/ of people at Google (Chrome OS, Books, Social, Native Client, Ads, Docs, and those are just the people I know a project title for), and for almost all of them the article's content rang true.
I'd add one more thing, though: I often get to hear about just how much fundamentally better their tools are, or how much larger their scale of operation is, with this background attitude of legitimate pity. To be clear, I mean to say that I get a really legitimate positive emotional read from them of "I wish you were here, too, so you could play with me on the other side with all of this cool stuff".
And I'm sure that Apple engineers would be even more constrained!
I never actually knew many people who wanted to work for Apple, but those who did are certainly in a fundamentally different class of secrecy: for all intents and purposes they are now dead to me (which may be a uniquely-me problem: I could see them being fired for even talking to me; the treatment I now get from them is "head down, don't reply, shut down conversation, leave venue").
For what it is worth, when I read this article one of the people it reminded me of is someone from the Chrome OS team. It might be, however, that with the release of the Cr48 that the situation has changed (I last talked to him days after those shipped). The people I've met from the Chromium team, however, were certainly a different story.
However, I know a /lot/ of people at Google (Chrome OS, Books, Social, Native Client, Ads, Docs, and those are just the people I know a project title for), and for almost all of them the article's content rang true.
I'd add one more thing, though: I often get to hear about just how much fundamentally better their tools are, or how much larger their scale of operation is, with this background attitude of legitimate pity. To be clear, I mean to say that I get a really legitimate positive emotional read from them of "I wish you were here, too, so you could play with me on the other side with all of this cool stuff".
And I'm sure that Apple engineers would be even more constrained!
I never actually knew many people who wanted to work for Apple, but those who did are certainly in a fundamentally different class of secrecy: for all intents and purposes they are now dead to me (which may be a uniquely-me problem: I could see them being fired for even talking to me; the treatment I now get from them is "head down, don't reply, shut down conversation, leave venue").