Craig Federighi (B.S. '91, M.S. '93 CS), the senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, Inc., delivers some "Questionable Advice from One Very Lucky Berkeley Engineer." 

This View from the Top conversation with Dean Tsu-Jae King Liu was delivered Nov. 21, 2019, in Banatao Auditorium at UC Berkeley. It was co-hosted by the College of Engineering and the Berkeley chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE).

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to today's View from the Top event.

I'm the Dean of the College of Engineering here, and it's my pleasure to host this seminar's speaker series, which brings leaders from business and technology and the arts to Berkeley so that our community can hear and learn from them.

So today we have our special guest, Craig Federighi from Apple.

He's the Senior Vice President for Software Engineering.

But before proceeding further to talk about Craig, I wanted to acknowledge today's student organization, which is co-hosting the event, the Society for Women Engineers.

Also, I'd like to welcome members of the Dean's Society who have taken time out of their busy schedules to join us here today.

All right, so let me turn back to Craig Federighi, our speaker.

We are proud to note, oh, it's not on the slide here, that he received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and computer sciences here, and afterwards pursued and received his master of science degree in computer science.

So we're really proud to have him join us here to share his personal journey with us.

After Craig graduated, he was already an accomplished software engineer.

He took on a lot of positions at companies in Silicon Valley, including Oracle, and Next Computer, and Apple.

He's taken multiple tours at Apple, and moving up the ranks.

And today, he leads all of software engineering for the operating systems for your iPhones, for your iPads, and for the Mac computers.

He reports directly to the CEO, Tim Cook.

So I first met Craig this spring, and just to reconnect with him, to tell him about the great things we're doing here at Berkeley Engineering.

And we talked about his experience as a student here and also his experience as a leader in industry.

And he really had a lot of thoughtful comments and perspectives about engineering education.

And so this is why I was really delighted that he agreed to come and share his wisdom with us today.

I think he calls it questionable advice, but I think you'll join me in welcoming him to wholeheartedly share his personal journey with us so that we can learn from his experience and his advice.

So please join me in welcoming Craig to the stage.

I'll introduce myself, I guess, a little bit.

And My name sort of looks like an encryption code you get handed out of your, when you're trying to decrypt your disk or something.

It's pronounced roughly like this, Federighi.

If you forget it, you can say Fedechini when I was kind of a persecuted freshman in high school.

Some people would call me Fedechini, I guess.

I think if you, I mean Berkeley, well in an existential sense, it's a huge mystery, but if you look around Berkeley, there are just incredible people.

In fact, if you look to your left, and you look to your right, and probably look at your own hands, there are people more interesting and deserving of being on the stage than me, but here I am.

Here we are, what are we gonna do about this?

So I've gotten a question that I think has given me a reason to understand why at least I was asked to be here.

Recently in the cafeteria at work, a new college grad who just joined the company came up to me and he asked, how can I become you?

Now, needless to say, that's a pretty disturbing question.

I thought my wife might have some issues with it.

I wasn't exactly sure what it would mean to me personally when that occurred.

But I think what he really meant was, how can I get your job?

And I'd be happy working for this young fellow.

So he's really looking for career advice.

In truth, despite my years of going through this journey, I have none of these things to offer you today.

I can offer my story and let you derive whatever wisdom from it you can.

Now unfortunately my recollection of my past is quite hazy.

But I did do a little bit of research, you're not like live blogging or something there are you?

So I did do some research and uncovered a little bit of historical evidence.

Well, as best I can tell, it started about 13.8 billion years ago.

And apparently, stars formed, decayed, exploded.

And eventually, on this planet, about 50, 000 years ago, our species ventured forth out of Africa and into Western Europe.

From there, about 121 years ago, my genetic material migrated and coalesced on this point.

So I began then a 40-year lifetime migration.

This is actually my life's migratory path.

I know what you're saying, wild, wild stuff.

So I could, and in fact, how did I get here?

In truth, it was a 90 minute drive this morning.

Like an aged salmon heading upstream, I rode up through the river of my life up to here, presumably this afternoon.

I'm here to pass on to the next generation and then I guess I presumably I'll find my way back further east, and it'll all end for me there.

So a few more details that might add a little color to my story.

Many of you know it's pretty close, just down 580.

When I was 10 years old, I got a cool shirt, for 1.

My interest back then, I was really into skiing.

In fact, I was pretty sure I was gonna be Dr.

He was my idol and I was gonna join the NBA.

What did happen is there was an after-school program and my mom said, hey son, maybe the NBA is not going to be your thing.

And they're bringing some Apple IIs around after school.

And I said, mom, only posers are into computers.

Just people who want to seem cool, They go and they do the computer thing.

But I went and it was a mind-blowing event.

In fact, there were several hours of like type trying to draw pictures by plotting lines and I thought this is dumb.

But then there was a moment at the very end where they had us write this program.

Input A, print in 10 years, you will be A plus 10.

I was like this, I know exactly the future now and I am gonna be part of it.

I kid you not, I started, I'd had a little nugget of life savings.

It wasn't enough to buy a computer, so I started doing housework and doing weeding and I was doing all these chores because I was gonna buy a computer.

And eventually I did, I bought a TRS-80 color computer, look it up,

processor, decent thing, I couldn't afford an Apple at the time.

But I worked, I got jobs, little odd jobs doing programming after I taught myself some things.

Eventually I was able to afford an Apple.

And then finally in 1984, the Mac came out and I was able to experience the Mac.

And it was at that moment bringing together really the humanities and computer science in this way that previously I couldn't fully imagine, that it all really connected for me.

And I decided at that time that someday I would work for Apple.

I think it was in junior high at the time.

I think it was, Steve Jobs had since left Apple.

And he had introduced the Next machine in San Francisco.

And he came to Berkeley to kind of give a re-performance of the launch of the Mac.

I wasn't going to be able to see that launch online.

But he came to the PSL, and he kind of redid the whole launch of the product and showed off the next cube.

And for me, this was just an absolute revelation.

And so I decided, no, I'm not gonna work for Apple.

In the meantime, coming to Berkeley, of course I had to fit in.

So I got an electric guitar, that was totally key.

And that's really the only explanation for this.

Because now, so the bandana was actually necessary for studying to keep my hair out of my eyes.

If we pan down, you'd see actually the circuit board where in CS 150 we were building a digital answering machine with all these wires connecting it and that's what I was working on apparently with my sunglasses on.

Just for posterity, here's my senior year Berkeley dining card.

Now I was a very generally pretty shy, socially awkward person so this whole look was pretty key because I could walk down the street and people would just clear to the other side, which says something at Berkeley, right?

That people were like, I don't want to be anywhere near whatever craziness is going on there.

So I was at Berkeley, it was a fantastic educational experience for me.

After being so into computers and programming from really age 10 on, when I got to Berkeley, it was like, this is everything I want to know.

Every class is like, I want to learn more about that.

And not just the computer science classes.

I mean, taking philosophy classes and political science classes and business classes.

I mean, all of this was just incredibly eye-opening for me.

When I wrapped up, most students their senior year were thinking, what are they going to do with themselves?

I had completely neglected to keep track of the fact that I was about to graduate and needed a job.

And Fortunately, there was a company that was an incredibly aggressive recruiter.

And since I'd done nothing to try to seek a job, I accepted their offer and headed down to Oracle.

But the key for me was throughout my late high school and college years, I thought, next thing I'm going to do after I graduate is I got to spend a winter Skiing so I headed out west to Colorado and spent spent the winter doing this kind of stuff but the key was I brought my next computer with me and actually worked remotely from a little cabin.

You'd ski in the morning and then come back and code in the afternoon.

But interestingly, I did some of the most, I guess, kind of inventive work at the time, in my time, in this weird environment.

So sometimes inspiration comes in strange places.

So I headed back and ended up coming back to Berkeley for graduate school in

I did all my classes there and just through a modem uploaded all my stuff to the school systems.

But after that I was actually able to fulfill my goal and got to join Next.

And then a strange thing happened, because when I was young, I thought I'd be at Apple, but then I decided I wanted to be at Next, and then I'd show up at Next, and then we'd get acquired by Apple.

There were so many different problems to work on.

And a lot of things I didn't anticipate working on, I got to learn about.

And some of that led to something called WebObjects, like a really declarative user interface kind of environment for building web services.

But then the whole B2B e-commerce, you all know about the dot-com crash.

So before that happened, there was the dot-com bubble and I got to participate in that.

By then I was a management type, I guess, or partly, did a lot of coding, but my job was CTO.

Now this is a good gig if you can get it.

So I did platform architecture, kind of UI and app design, product strategy, I was sort of the demo guy.

So this was good times, but most importantly in this period of my life, I defied all expectations and met a woman, my wife, who agreed to marry me.

Now, strangely, after that, this thing started to happen where these kids started to show up.

Now, we never quite figured out why this was happening, but eventually it did stop after we made 4 of them.

And so after having done a little bit of the CTO kind of semi-executive thing, I actually decided to take a couple years and return to being an individual contributor engineer and did a bunch of open source stuff.

If you go to aribaweb.org, you can probably still see the website I left there over a decade ago.

But that engineering writing code is still, you know, kind of my favorite thing to do in my spare time, and it felt great to return to doing that.

But after that period, I returned to, or yeah, finally came back to Apple.

It was really kind of home for me, and apparently I'm gonna die there.

So, I started with Mac OS, and then went on to do iOS as well.

And it's been an incredible opportunity and journey for me there.

So wherever you're born, stay there and wait for the industry that you need to erupt right around you and then just seek employment there.

I mean, it's very clear that that is a key element of growth.

If any of you were planning on looking for a job, set that aside.

And also, pick 1 haircut in the 80s and just stick with it.

That was just, It was absolutely, haven't changed my instructions to the barber ever since.

So seriously, there are a few things I'd observe that I don't know if these are important or essential, but they are some things that I think seem to be important to me.

Well, in truth, the key part is first, we'll go with 7 easy steps.

I think the most important thing to do is to focus on doing what you love.

If you're worried about where you're going, where this all will take you, if you're too focused on the destination, I think you'll miss the journey.

And when you do what you love, it turns out that the things you do in your spare time.

Like on my time, if I have a moment on the weekend, I'm going to be reading things about programming.

I'm going to be reading things about software, artificial intelligence, because that's what I love.

So it's like, if you do something you love, it's like cheating, because all of your recreational time actually turns into time that helps you develop in your career.

Second, work with people whose work you admire.

I think the thing about me being drawn to Next was I saw this product back in 88 that I said this is, it just spoke to me, this is an incredible piece of work.

I need to be, I need to see what it's like to be among the people who can do that kind of thing.

And so I just felt magnetically drawn to be among the people who did this kind of work that I really appreciated and to learn from them.

And that gets me to number 3, which is pay attention.

1 of my kids actually said to me the other day, they said, you know, I figured out a secret.

Because they're like, all the other kids are not paying any attention.

Imagine how much you could learn if you paid attention.

But during life, I mean, you are, through your working life, through your school life, you're surrounded with all of these opportunities to learn.

And not just in your field, not just in the thing that you think you're studying, but all those things peripheral to the field you're studying.

There's so many fascinating things to learn and for me I carried around a notebook, paper, and a pencil and was just taking notes all the time.

People thought I was like a wandering reporter or spy or something because I was just constantly jotting things down because there's just so many interesting things.

And if you're making use of the time to suck them all in, if you're curious, it really helps.

Number 4, and this is kind of related, never stop acting like the new 1 on the team.

When you first join a team, and for those of you who've done internships, you get to have that moment.

When you first get a job, you show up and no 1 expects you to know anything, and so you get to ask the stupid questions.

You get to say, oh, I don't know anything about that.

That's such a valuable moment to say, it's OK if I don't know everything.

And if you do, it turns out some of those questions are questions that team probably should have been asking themselves and wasn't.

And so if you're asking them, you might get some answers that everybody needs to hear.

But also it's that permission to just be learning and learning and learning, because it's not just about being narrow and wanting to be secure in 1 little area.

And the way you're going to broaden yourself and learn is to just feel the permission to ask the questions all along the way.

Another thing is, I see team more important than self.

When I've joined projects, I've decided that whatever the team's mission is, whatever we're trying to accomplish, I want to be part of making that happen.

I want to do everything that can be done to make that happen.

There's a point I joined a team and they were in a point of the release where it was all about bug fixing.

All I was going to do for a year was fix bugs, which didn't sound like the coolest thing to do.

It turned out to be an incredible learning opportunity.

There was a part we had to work on performance.

Well, I got to learn about performance because we had to fix the performance of the thing I was working on.

If you become part of the, adopt the mission of the team, adopt that project, you find that there's so many different ways you can help, and along the way, so many different ways you can learn.

Where if you're focused more about what does this mean for me, what am I interested in, I think you miss out on all of those opportunities.

And I think related to this is this notion of committing for a period of time.

I guess I always looked at my career as I'm going to spend 4 or 5 years, I'm going to do this, I'm not going to wake up each morning and say, am I doing the right thing?

Instead, I said, this is what I'm going to do.

And my focus is just immersing myself in that thing.

Because it'd be like if you got married, and every day you woke up and you said, am I married to the right person?

Like, That would not be a good relationship, right?

To have that thought in your head the whole time, super bad.

So I do not have that thought in my head.

So, but the same thing can happen in work.

You see these people so worried about, angsty about, am I in the right job?

Make, assess the situation, make a choice.

Give yourself the opportunity to really experience it.

And then set yourself a deadline and say, in a year or 4 years from now, I'm gonna step back from having done all this and then assess what I wanna do next.

But that certainly has been important to me, both in my sanity and in my ability to really commit in a way that I think allowed me to learn and do good work.

Cheesy, but it's been super important for me.

So there have been numerous, sort of the most important decisions I've had to make.

I feel like I made the decision that if you were analytical about it, if you made that, you know, I had an important decision to make and I asked my dad, you know, I'm having trouble, do I do I take this job here or do I go to grad school?

Do I take this position here or do I go over here?

You know, when I went to Next, I took a big pay cut to join a failing company.

Didn't seem like too smart a move, but I felt, he said, my dad said, make a list, write down all the good and bad of this decision, this decision, add it all up, there you go.

I made the list, I obviously shouldn't go work for Next.

But when I thought of making the decision on that side of it, I just got a feeling in my gut like, no, I want to be there.

And it turned out there was probably something wise or intuitive about what was drawing me to the right decision, and the ability to listen to yourself in those moments and make those decisions.

I think over and over in the most important decisions, that's been super important.

And then when you're there, you feel good about it.

So And of course, I say all of this, this is 1 story, 1 data point.

I mean, let's be honest, be very, very lucky.

See all Berkeley Engineering transcripts on Youtube

View from the Top: Craig Federighi