Former Apple Employees: 'Thrilled to Be Gone'

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- In March, a former Apple (AAPL) engineer, Michael Margolis, tweeted something that set the Internet on fire:

@aral Fun fact - those new designs were tossed out 5 years ago because SJ didn't like them. Now there is nobody to say "no" to bad design.

That Tweet came in response to a comment about a new user interface for Apple TV.

Everybody picked that Tweet up -- financial Web sites, tech sites, newspapers as big as The Washington Post.

Over the weekend, Margolis was at it again (or something like that), but his Tweet, as far as I know, flew under the radar. Here's what he "said" in 140 characters or less:

Running into tons of ex-Apple employees these days and they're all thrilled to be gone. I never see that with Google or FB employees...

That happened midday-ish Saturday, June 30. I responded to Margolis's Tweet with "Dying to make news again, eh!? :-)" Margolis replied: "Haha absolutely not."

From there, Margolis (@yipe) and I had a friendly exchange:

The media jumped on the March "say no to bad design" Tweet for several reasons. First, it speaks to a touchy issue in this post-Steve Jobs world we're all trying to make sense of.

Can Apple maintain its dominance under a mere mortal such as Tim Cook? It also makes you wonder if they can't get Apple TV right without Jobs -- in at least one engineer's mind -- how can they possibly get iTV, one of the most anticipated products in the history of tech, right? And, of course, the media jumps on just about anything Apple-related.

Guilty as charged. But, we only cover Apple so extensively because people have an insatiable appetite for news and views on the company.

In any event, I am somewhat surprised that nobody took Margolis's most recent Apple Tweet and ran with it. I even gave it a day before writing something up myself.

Maybe fewer eyeballs saw it because its summertime and we're heading into this weird mid-week floating holiday in the U.S. Maybe the Tweet did not go viral because we all know that Apple employees, at least some meaningful number of them, don't really like working at the company all that much.

It's widely publicized and intensely interesting. At least to me. In Adam Lashinsky's excellent book, Inside Apple, and other accounts, one Apple employee after another says, in some fashion, what Margolis said in a Tweet I did not include here: I did some of my best work at Apple. It was worth working there, but never again.

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