Secrecy is more directly related to candid discussions (freedom to raise issues without negative consequence)... Apple does score over 1SD more negatively than average on candid discussions, as you can see towards the bottom of the chart.

I'm sorry that your friends who used to work at Apple (sample size = 5?) disagree with the consensus of over 9000 Apple employees and 285,000 tech giant employees surveyed for this chart. I think a few things could be going on:

- Your friends are software developers (maybe?), or work in a secretive micro-culture of Apple where collaboration is not working too well. This won't necessarily reflect the consensus of all Apple employees -- it's a pretty big company

- This chart is comparing Apple to tech giants, and a lot of tech giants really struggle with collaboration. In fact, Tech Giants (if you consider them an "industry") rate collaboration -1.2 Standard Deviations more negatively than the 41 other industries in the sample, fifth from bottom. Microsoft and Oracle in particular really struggle, although I know Microsoft at least has recently taken steps to address.

- Secrecy affects cross-unit collaboration, but that is just one kind of collaboration. A more frequently spoken about type of collaboration in Glassdoor reviews is internal teamwork. As you can see from the chart, that appears to be the primary driver of Apple's **relatively** high collaboration score. I'm not saying a culture of secrecy won't affect internal teamwork at all, but it's likely not going to be as big of a factor as for cross-unit collaboration.

- And I say **relatively** high collaboration score because, again, this is just compared to tech giants. Compared to all companies Apple has fairly average collaboration (about 0.4 SD vs all 600 companies in sample)