Watch Hardware (2016-2017)

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Whenever someone that doesn’t work at Apple asks me what it’s like, I always say “it depends on the team”—and it’s one of the truest things I could say. Some are amazing and wonderful and, in my case, one turned out to be a nightmare, starting with the very first week.

After being separated from the SwiftUI team, I was desperate to find a job and it took me six weeks to find one. It was my first job in Hardware Engineering and it was primarily responsible for Watch hardware.

The team

What this team did was utterly fascinating to me and had many different sub-teams that did very different things.

• There was a robotics team that built robots to test the Watch externally, rather than writing software scripts to simulate user interaction. For example, a robot may flip a watch and a camera could detect how fast the screen went on or perhaps test scrolling speed or the speed of ApplePay. There were robots that could mimic swimming, runnin…