To be honest, that doesn't sound like a "good" friend to me. Doesn't trust you enough to share not only any work details, but not even an opinion either? Maybe too much self-importance?
My father was in the CIA, in the late '40s thru '60s.
We didn't find out until the late '90s.
One of his brothers was almost certainly a Company Man, too, but that has never been confirmed; even though he’s been dead for decades.
Apple's OPSEC is probably tighter than the CIA's.
It is in the very nature of a spy agency that the general public does not know what they are up to.
The fact that they leak positive stuff sometimes, and coupled along with the fact that they run a global network of torture sites (and hacked the computers of their own congresspeople who are their oversight, then lied about doing so) means that they probably aren't as do-good and trustworthy as you seem to think they should be assumed to be.
I was questioning the original point made by AsyncAwait, which was that "CIA does very little guarding national security as far as I can tell." The "as far as I can tell" part of that comment makes the rest just silly, since making sure you can't tell is 90% of spy work.
I've put the "as far as I can tell" part in there precisely BECAUSE from what we CAN tell i.e. has been declassified or leaked, it pretty much all terrible shit that has nothing to do with protecting national security.
Of course there's a lot we can't tell, but given the stories we can tell the ratio of good/bad is way out of whack in favor of the bad, especially given CIA's tendency to selectively leak good stories about itself and its extensive declassified historical record, the amount of 'good' should be a lot higher than it is.
Destroying torture records for example shows that it is way more concerned with illegally concealing bad behavior than avoiding it in the first place.
That being said, I told people the comment thing more than once. Always to people I know and people that know me well enough to get the meaning. In other cases I just said I won't answer certain questions. Much different than the bo comment trope.
A coworker of mine went to a foreign country once on a business trip. When he asked what he could tell his wife about his trip, the guidance he got was "You can tell her either where you're traveling or why you're traveling. Not both."
She got an award. She did something that was a big deal. They had a ceremony and her close family was allowed to attend.
However, my friend said the ceremony was congratulations and handshakes, but zero details about what it was for.
There's no reason for all of this.
It's perfectly reasonable for people to say 'I work on iOS' or I work on 'new hardware but I can't say much more than that', or 'I work in production for Apple TV'.
Most people at most companies are not allowed to talk about the details of what they do.
But, yeah, I very much talk about what I did. Would be quite difficult to pass interviews and get projects, wouldn't it?
Same goes for the real secret stuff. Saying you worked abroad for the CIA is much different from saying you served as a CIA operative in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2004. Unless, of course, you get an official legend fot your life after.