The engineering team is rolling.
Apple, famously, and to their credit, is hard on their partners and suppliers. But not in the “we’re gonna grind you up and toss you to the wind so we get ahead” way.
I’ve had the misfortune of working with those customers. They abuse you on price, time, and effort to lever their competitors and undercut them by pennies. They chew you up, spit you out, and think nothing of it. As a supplier, you can’t succeed. You’re better off without their money.
No, Apple is tough because they do care. They care deeply about what they’re making — the thing that has their name on it. They want it to be awesome. And to make it awesome, they hold themselves and their partners accountable. They demand excellence. You’re in the fire when you work with Apple, but it’s a cleansing fire. Not everybody can handle it.
I can handle the fire. Our team can handle the fire.
All told, we’re about 20 people inside a company of 5000. We’re like an internal startup. Not exactly outcasts, but definitely outsiders because we’re not working on the core product of our business unit, mobile phones.
We’re a bunch of pirates.
We’re small and energized. Innovative and agile. The executives aren’t lording over us. We’re an afterthought, which we thought was awesome. We’re working long, hard, and quite frankly, killing it.
What’s today’s unsolvable problem? And then we solve it.
I’m exhausted, but exhausted in the way I am after finishing a triathlon.
And we knew that at the end of this race, we’d be standing on the top step of the podium. Future Agere Systems executives will point to our team and our project and say, “That’s when we went nuclear. These 20 guys made this company.”
We’re gonna be able to do anything we want. We had the ship, cannons, and the crazies with nothing to lose. We had the power.
Ah, how naive I was.