On the Engineering Talent at IO

Jason Snell, pouring some admittedly welcome skepticism on the whole LoveFrom-OpenAI IO endeavor:

I’m skeptical of the composition of the io leadership team, which features an awful lot of product designers and not a lot of hardware engineers. I’m sure there are talented engineers there too — the OpenAI announcement refers to “physicists, scientists, researchers” among the team members — but the fact remains that this is a startup whose leader and key lieutenants appear to all be designers.

Maybe the whole IO thing will come to naught. Maybe it’s all hat, no cattle. Maybe it’s a great idea but a long shot to play out (which is my gut feeling). But there’s a weird internal-to-Apple lingo thing here. At Apple “product designers” are very much engineers. PD at Apple is a hardware engineering discipline, not the kind of “design” you’re probably thinking of as “design”. These are the mechanical and electrical engineers who are doing the “design” work of fitting stuff in the box. The nomenclature is distinct, to the best of my knowledge, from the rest of Silicon Valley, where designers design, effectively, sketches, and then hand those sketches off to engineers to be made. At Apple, and now, IO and LoveFrom, “product designers” are part of the sketching process. They’re trying to figure out how to make things real, what’s feasible, throughout the process.

I think Snell’s overall take is perfectly measured and probably a perfect chaser to my own at-least-slightly exuberant optimism. But make no mistake: the current team at IO is loaded with what every other company would consider mechanical and electrical engineers — they’re just mechanical and electrical engineers who know how to dance with designer designers. Engineers, in that vein, outnumber pure designers at IO already.

★ Tuesday, 27 May 2025