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Comment by fenomas | Hacker News Reader

I've long felt like Apple is uniquely easy to distrust, due to its almost total lack of visible employees. I assume there are actual people working there, but I've never seen one, say, speak (openly) at a meetup or answer a stackoverflow question, or the like. ~Everything I know about Apple either comes from an advertisement or from a guy who talked to a guy who talked to Gruber, and I have a feeling that that makes it easier for people to assume nefarious behavior behind the scenes.

Actually, with the exception of people working on standards committees, I think your comment may be the first time I've ever seen an Apple employee openly comment in a public forum.

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Yep, I think this is quite right. In fact my first thought after seeing this guy self-identify was "welp, that guy's getting fired"

Yep, same thoughts.

Most of the open-source contributors in my projects that get hit by a bus, get hit by an Apple's bus (they start working at Apple, and cannot say anything publicly anymore or contribute to any project).

I've met an Apple employee at a conference, just once. Talking to him was reminiscent of talking to an employee of GCHQ (which I have also done). Relaxed and affable, but wielded the phrase "I can't tell you that" with the familiarity of one who says it several times a day.

Sounds about right. A pretty good friend of mine worked at Apple for a year or two, and I once asked if he enjoyed his time there. He answered: "no comment".

The general populace generally doesn’t pay any attention to any statements from any employees of any company. Those in the tech industry generally don’t pay any attention to statements from any employees of any company outside the tech industry. Being aware of statements from employees does not appear to be a factor in terms of trust in a company.

I read GP's post (and hence my reply) as being about sentiment here on HN. Obviously I agree that the general public's opinion of Apple isn't heavily influenced by meetup speeches and Gruber's blog :P

I’ve seen an Apple engineer in non-GUI or hardware job talking on his blog about curvatures he encounter over the course of his job, so that definitely happens sometimes.

Their infamous secrecy doesn't exactly help either.

Well there's WWDC of course. But I suppose that's not really "out in the world".

Do you find companies with public facing employees that give talks at meetups and conferences easier to trust?

In other words, you trust Facebook, Google, NSA, and Congress more than Apple?

Seems like an odd standard.

I said P⇒Q; you're asking if that means I believe !P⇒!Q.

That is: I'm not saying a company is trustworthy if-and-only-if its employees speak publicly. I'm saying that my mental model of what a company would or wouldn't do internally is strongly influenced by what I know about its employees.

The alternative is that you believe !P⇒Q, in which case you could have easily just said Q

What if there's an R?

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