The secrets we keep

I now know that saying you work at Apple is like saying you work at the government. Which part matters a lot.

I worked in Security, Engineering, and ARchitecture (SEAR) for the last 5 years as an Engineering Project Manager (EPM). I had a key role in helping Contact Key Verification, Blastdoor, Advanced Data Protection, Forgotten Passcode, Legacy Contact, Child Safety, and some hardware improvements ship. I was doing infrastructural work to continually improve security across the keychain, certificates, cryptography, authentication, insight and detection, endpoint security, and sandboxing. I made sure we got our certifications. I helped Red Teams and fuzzing to be effective. Not all at the same time. But 2-4 releases in flight at a time, and 3-6 teams on board at a time.

A lot of what I worked on I can’t talk about. And I will continue to not talk about until they ship. That was the problem.

I thrive on talking to a wide variety of people about whatever they’re passionate about. I invest in my network, and my network loves me back. It is deep and powerful. I love getting groups of folks to discover something collectively that is new to each of them. I love making weird connections between groups to help them be better. Apple works on the pushing-a-pimple-out-of-a-circle innovation route, a choose-the-best-from-set-options route, and I work the novel-graph-connection-to-make-something-new route. And it was slowly crushing my spirit.

At first, the company was big enough that I was still able to make graph connections. But that wore out quickly as we ran into disclosures and folks not being able to talk about what they actually knew and were passionate about. I still did senior-level technical project manager work while not in my lane. I tracked projects, I mentored folks. Things shipped. But I struggled. I wasn’t happy. I didn’t have anything to talk about with my husband or son when I got home from work. Reed, at one point, pretended that I worked a miniature golf course experience production company. When I vented about a coworker (the only part of work I felt comfortable talking about with non-disclosed folks), he’d sagely nod while thinking “ah, hole 3 is really coming together.”

I tried this experiment for 3 years of trying to have non-productive hobbies. You know, cross stitch and stuff. And it just didn’t work for me. I applaud the folks who can turn off, I will fight for our rights to have time to do things that are not governed by capitalism. I read sci-fi in bed for sure, but I didn’t like trying to take up spare hours on weekends not organizing people. I’m like a Border Collie or something. And I want to talk to people about it. I want to be able to make sense of the world by connecting what I know to what other people know. It’s hilarious to me that Apple TV is what Severance is on. I get the “surprise and delight” thing, but ends up I do not like planning or getting surprises.

Securing a billion people without them having to care or notice is a pretty compelling argument, so I stuck with it for 5 years. I worked with many incredible, driven people. But for me, the same reason I struggle with role playing tabletop games is the same reason I struggled at Apple — I am my whole self, with all of its facets, all of the time. I can keep a secret (snitches get stitches!), but I can’t keep a whole part of my life secret.

So, I’m looking for work. Here’s my portfolio of things I’ve done. Here’s my resume. And I’m dipping my toe back in with the disaster zine, digital estate planning, security consulting implementation with Myeong at Tiny Gigantic, and facilitation gigs in the meantime. Let me know if you have a me-shaped hole, because trying to do not-me-shaped things sure didn’t work. I’m a work horse, and I’m good, and I also really like sharing.