I commend Apple for hiring someone internally...someone who climbed up the ranks and understands the DNA of the company.

Also think it's cool that John Ternus has only a bachelor's degree with a very down to earth presence. I completely dig his LI page being really bare bones.

I suspect Apple is about to experience another Renaissance era...

> only a bachelor's degree

That people are still judging someone by their school performance (or, less charitably but how I experienced the difference between "poor" and "good" students in about half of the cases: their willingness to deal with arbitrarily set requirements) after being in the workforce for this long says a lot about society. I'm not sure it's a factor when one is comparing devices in a store, which ultimately is what they created right? Shouldn't we judge them by their work?

Also considering this is HN

> Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_culture

Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.

> I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.

Given the level of mathematics I’ve seen involved in hardware, I’d assume the average mech eng. has a better chance than the average software eng.

What would mathematics have to do with internal company politics, a soft/people skill demanding job?

People skills are primarily learned through observation, interaction, and modeling the behavior of others who have already have cultivated social skills. You know, from being around and interacting with people. It's not like studying a certain discipline, such a mathematics, forbids you from ever cultivating these abilities.

Mech E. on the other hand, is perhaps the broadest engineering discipline in terms of foundational principles, application variety, and transferable skills. So shouldn't be all that surprising when it comes to hardware engineering.