Ever heard about Apple's black projects?

While Apple has a team known as the Special Projects Group (SPG), which is rumored to have worked on the Apple Car, the company also occasionally forms special teams to tackle long-term, super-secretive projects. These projects require specific disclosures and are often not even discussed within your own team.

I was fortunate to be part of one of these teams. To this day, I see people speculating online about it. It’s amusing to see journalists get the details wrong, and it always gives me a good laugh. This week’s newsletter covers my experience working on a secret project.

Selection

Let’s start from the beginning: how does one join a black project? It's very simple—you can’t just apply. Someone in the leadership team must believe that you are an expert in a particular area and that the black project team needs your expertise to succeed. Needless to say, you have to be a high performer and a senior-level engineer. Having such a reputation with leadership—at the Director and VP levels—is essential.

The Experience

For the sake of discussion, we’ll call the project Whitebird (this is not the real name!). The only fact I feel comfortable sharing—especially since you can gather it from my LinkedIn—is that it had to do with Siri. It was a very, very, very ambitious project.

I think there are three special things about working on black projects.

#1 The Project

The project itself is often extremely ambitious and large in scope, making it inherently challenging. One reason your own team might not know about the project, even when you're working on it, is because it may never see the light of day. So, why bother sharing it widely?

The technology and tech stack are always more advanced, and sometimes even non-existent, meaning the team often needs to build the technology before building the project.

How cool is that?

#2 The People

This is almost always a team effort, so your new team members are the crème de la crème of the company. If you think you were selected because you were good, think again. Everyone on the team is at least as smart as you, and most of them are actually smarter, with more experience and achievements than you. It can be a little intimidating, but if you look past that and manage to avoid feeling like a fraud, you can learn a lot—and sometimes, you might even be able to teach a thing or two as well.

#3 The Secrecy

I know, Apple is known for its secrecy. But think about a different level of secrecy here. You’re an engineer on a team of seven, and one day your team knows you're working on something secret called Whitebird. But they don’t know what it is, they can’t ask you what it is, and they know you can’t tell them what it is. It’s just cool.

Grand Finale

While I enjoyed working with (most of) the team on the project, I believe we started making some obvious (to me) wrong choices. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to convince the project leader to listen to me. One of my biggest regrets to this day is that I wasn’t persuasive enough to make an impact. I decided to leave the project and go back to my team after four months, and two months later, I left Apple.

During my exit interview, my director asked me if that was the reason I decided to leave. I told him the truth: while it wasn’t the main reason, it was definitely a contributing factor.

The funny (and sad) thing is that two years ago, the project was canceled. I like to believe that I was right to leave early on when I deemed it a (future) failure.

That’s it for this week!

Forward this email to a friend who needs to read this 🚀 

And if you are that awesome friend - Subscribe here to get weekly emails on Apple & Tech from an ex-Apple engineer.

If you are looking to launch your app faster, check out shipappfast.com.

If you are applying for new position and need a resume review, check out roastmyresume.services.

Hit reply and let me know what you found most helpful this week—I’d love to hear from you!

See you next Week!

Luca