Former Apple engineer says Tim Cook made Apple a ‘boring operations company’

There’s less internal conflict inside Apple — and that’s not necessarily a good thing, according to one former employee.

Bob Burrough, a former Apple engineer, told CNBC that the invention of the iPhone came, in part, out of the chaos of Apple under co-founder Steve Jobs.

“At Apple in 2007, organisationally it was the wild west,” Burrough said. “I was hired under a particular manager, but for the first two years worked on projects that had virtually nothing to do with that manager’s core responsibility. That’s because the organisation wasn’t the priority, the projects were the priority. It was the exact opposite of ‘not my job.’ It was ‘I’m here to solve whatever problems I can, irrespective of my role, my title, or to whom I report.’ It was wild. But it was also very rewarding, because everything you did had maximal impact on the product.”

But today, the “dynamic has clearly and distinctly changed,” and Apple is much closer to his job at Palm, said Burrough, who most recently founded a 3D printing company called Bilt It.

“Working at Palm, the teams were highly organisational, [hierarchical] and responsibilities were siloed,” Burrough said. “There was a clear sense that each person had a clear responsibility, and rarely deviated from it. When you went to someone for help solving a problem ‘not my job’ was a common response.”

Tim Cook, who took over as Apple CEO in 2011, has made the company the richest in the world. Apple has nearly doubled its annual revenue under Cook, from US$108.2 billion in 2011 to US$215.7 billion in 2016. Cook has also replaced challenging leaders from the Steve Jobs era, such as Scott Forstall, who led the iOS platform used on the iPhone and iPad, but reportedly clashed with Cook and other Apple execs.

But while Apple has pumped out money, it has also faced grumbles that it’s been slow to innovate in areas like self-driving cars, TV and video, and the Internet of Things. Despite introducing new products like the Apple Watch, the iPhone still makes up the vast majority of Apple’s sales each year.