Farewell
From: Kristoff Malejczuk [kristoff@apple.com]
Date: January 16, 2024 12:35 PM
Subject: Letting Go
Dear all,
With deep gratitude and appreciation, I am writing to inform you that January 19th will be my final day working at Apple.
My time here has been a beautiful adventure. I started my career young, hungry and brash. Infamously, such a disposition led me to garner a level of notoriety at a Tim Cook intern Q&A in 2019. But behind my weakly-reined audacity was also a driving desire to make an impact, do big things and maximize meaning. I saw the eager adoption of responsibility as the ultimate path towards fulfilling these desires. It did not take long for this operational framework to bear fruit — a few months into my graduate internship, my mentor/supervisor resigned, and I aimed to assume as much of his responsibility as I could manage. Shortly thereafter I was sent to Shenzhen, subsequent to which my internship contract was cut short and replaced with a full-time position.
What followed were several years of beautiful personal and professional experiences. Early morning meetings with Israel and late evening calls with China. Business trips to the Middle East and two years of pandemic-induced WFH in Colorado. The great honour and challenge of becoming a manager and leading a small and exceptional team of two. Countless relationships, encounters and debates with engineers across Apple, acutely focussing on product, on doing what’s right, and on delivering the most delightful experiences possible to our customers. The most beautiful moments have been the late night grindsets, tirelessly working in unison against tight deadlines, making short-term sacrifices of sleep and wellbeing, but united by something much larger, by a common mission of making the world’s best products. This culture of obsession, passion and care are part of what makes Apple, Apple, and going forward it is our — and now your — assignment and privilege to gloriously maintain, model and propagate this culture.
I have spent my career at Apple walking along a well-travelled path. Though at times the terrain has presented great challenges, there has always been a general sense of where to place one’s feet, in part due to the supporting structures in place, in part due to the path laid by those who came before. Most of all, there has been a bright guiding light far ahead along the path. This light represents the highest moral values and orienting principles which guide us in our work, and it is what I have been aiming at throughout my time at Apple.
Some time ago, out of the corner of my eye, a new light began to emerge. Slowly but surely, this new light brightened and eventually eclipsed the original light guiding me along my engineering path. This new light is now the brightest light in my sky, the object of highest moral value. There is not a well-defined path towards this new light, and forging towards it will require wading through the tangled undergrowth of a dense forest. With fewer guideposts and more unknowns, it is with deep confidence and faith that I am reorienting, stepping off the path of my Apple career and heading forth in this new direction which I have identified as the path of highest meaning. Expressed otherwise, I am leaving Apple to pursue God more fully. (This is a deeply personal moral evaluation which I do not suggest to be generalized; it pertains solely to me in this moment in time.)
My post-Apple journey will be much more spiritually oriented. I will not be working, in a conventional sense at least, for several years to come. My new path will involve travel, yoga, reading, writing, creation, expression, and meditation, amongst other activities, with particular focus on Eastern spiritual traditions. Though I am not in the pursuit of a specific goal — the path itself is the goal — I believe that this new mode of being will provide more openings into clearer seeing and loving more. I am fortunate to have found myself years ago; this new journey is all about letting go.
If you would like to stay in touch or follow along, you’ll find my social media and personal contact information below.
Thank you all for being a part of my time at Apple. I bow at your feet.
With love,
Kristoff Malejczuk
Image Sciences | Camera HW