Apple’s obsession with secrecy is well-known by this point. The company is borderline paranoid about keeping its forthcoming products under wraps until they can be unveiled on Apple’s terms. But surely that sort of secrecy is just with the public, right? Once you get a job with Apple, you’re in, and the cloak and dagger stuff lets up, right? Well, apparently not. According to both Adam Lashinksky’s book Inside Apple, and a former Apple employee, Apple engineers are not trusted with real Apple projects for at least the first few months after they start work.

During the Q&A section of an interview with Lashinsky at LinkedIn recently, a former Apple employee confirmed that a senior engineer endured a 9-month interview process and during the early part of his career with Apple worked on fake products. Check out the video below: