6 ms·

What is happening at Apple? I’m honestly worried for them. Is their QA department in disarray?

iagooar 9y ago
Could it be that the amount of bugs have exploded with the ever-growing complexity of their software combined with an unsustainable pace to guarantee solid, reliable software? It seems like a house of cards right now, and it will only get worse as they keep having the next crunch time just to deliver on an arbitrary management deadline...
- DelightOne 9y ago
  You could go slower like everyone else.. with less features..
  - qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
    I believe in general those using devices would always trade security for convenience and new, flashy features.
- derefr 9y ago
  Seems improbable to happen right now; there isn't really a large amount of newly-added complexity. Compare to QA in the beginning of the iCloud Document Sync (Ubiquity) era, where every app and many parts of both iOS and macOS had new features: Ubiquity itself broke down frequently, but the QA and maintenance engineering going into it didn't seem to make anything else in those releases less solid.
- jaxondu 9y ago
  Most of the iOS ui SpringBoard bugs are due to them rewriting the codes in Swift. Many Autolayout bug. Music app can’t even align the play button at center. Also Craig Federighi is busy with Siri, and busy shooting down Note 8 in social media. I was annoyed when the text replacement bug took one beta to solve, where the Calculator bug took 5 or 6 releases to solve. And the third reason is they expect users will actively test iOS for them. With so many bugs surfaced in media and in released version, my guess is no one is telling them the bugs during beta. Another reason is iPhone X is iPhone fragmentation with different home screen UI. You’re are right this will introduce complexity to the code base. I’m thankful for the touchbar in MacBook Pro and the notch design in X, both I dislike. This make me realise the many good points in other platform. Sort of like bursting my Apple fanboy bubble.
  - btlr 9y ago
    Curious to know more about your claim that rewriting stuff in Swift causes a lot of bugs - got any sources on that?
    - tatersolid 9y ago
      Rewriting any mostly-working code in any language—even the exact same language—causes bugs. It’s been that way since the 1960s. It “has to be done” sometimes, but put that day off as long as possible.
      - btlr 9y ago
        That makes sense I suppose.
LoSboccacc 9y ago
they have to invent new things every year or a complex negative feedback starts because people, analyst and ultimately stock holder won't accept that an iphone iteration is just a little faster and has more battery
- ukblewis 9y ago
  I agree that it is stupid that they have to deliver new things every year or they get negative feedback, but that doesn't mean they should deliver features that make their products worse or that QA should quit doing their job. Apple is a company with many many billions of dollars in the bank. There is no excuse for this. If their QA sucks, fire them all and hire 10,000+ new QA staff. They easily have the money to do that. If they pay all the new QA staff $100,000 each, then that's only $1 bn for the new staff and they'd probably pay a fair bit less to let the existing staff go. Apple has more than $250 bn in cash reserves right now. They can easily afford to do that. In fact, I think that probably should hire a few thousand new QA staff, firing the existing staff should be up to their discretion, but not hiring significantly more when it's clear that they have a QA problem, for a company with so much money, is not acceptable.
  - dannyw 9y ago
    Hiring more QA staff doesn’t mean more bugs will be fixed if the bottleneck is engineering output and deadline-driven features. The latter might be better fixed with a re-org.
  - alliao 9y ago
    they have cash reserves but still they issued corporate debt in the US indicating that they're financially savvy AND they don't have free access to their overseas cash hoard. So hiring within US and spending 1bn will cost them a lot more. And if they leverage debt using their overseas cash...well that'd be another pandora's box as they're so big they'll probably move the prices of the entire industry along with every US corporation with funds outside the states...
- PrimalDual 9y ago
  That’s one explanation but if one company has the resources to innovate and keep up quality control it’s Apple. Especially since they have such a limited number of device models to support. I just hope this is a bad year and not an inflection point.
CamperBob2 9y ago
As usual with large vendors nowadays, we are the QA department. From an in-house perspective, QA is a cost center. As far as upper management is concerned, it literally doesn't earn its keep... especially when consumers have shown they're willing to overlook and forgive one gigantic blunder after another.
nautilus12 9y ago
The quality people got sick of living like a peasant in the high cost of living areas surrounding apple and took jobs elsewhere. Its only a matter of time until every silicon valley tech company faces the same problem.
- anyguy2017 9y ago
  I created a separate account to write this comment, since it's going to be harsh. I work for a Bay Area technology company with a decidedly mediocre engineering team. My experience over the past 2-3 years is that the worst software engineers (at our mediocre organization) are being hired by Apple. This is totally anecdotal and the sample size is maybe five. But I just cannot escape the fact that Apple continues to hire our engineers that barely know how to program. Hiring engineers in the Bay Area is hard. I'm sure Apple has a deep bench of talented engineers, but my own anecdotal experience tells me they have very much reduced their standards.
  - yladiz 9y ago
    Why are they the worst? Without directly refuting your comment, it's hard to believe that Apple hired the worst programmers at your company, without knowing why you think they are worst.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - gurkendoktor 9y ago
    Hah. I can't help but wonder if Apple has started mindlessly implementing contemporary "software engineering best practices" (yuck): - Everything must be Scrum or a similar sprint system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734 - Move to an open office layout to foster collaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962663 - Kick out high-performing "heroes" like Scott Forstall - Instead, build teams of mediocre (but probably nicer) engineers. They can then lift each other up through positivity and pair programming. This is of course a lot of speculation (and wishful thinking) on my part, and honestly it's likely that any process would be doomed to failure under Apple's self-imposed deadlines. But I almost want to get a job at Apple only to see what it's like on the inside.
PhantomGremlin 9y ago
What is happening at Apple? Bozo explosion. Things have been getting worse for quite a while. It appears to have finally hit a tipping point.
yladiz 9y ago
I'm under the assumption that, for some reason, the rush and all things surrounding iPhone X caused QA to only happen a bit, and only on the newest devices (I have an iPhone 6S and an iPhone X, and the 6S is noticeably slower in a lot of cases, for example having to wait half to one second to type on the keyboard). I'm giving Apple a general benefit of the doubt and think that iOS 12 will be better since there shouldn't be any major paradigm shifts in the next series of phones, but it is a really bad image to see Apple not able to effectively QA these relatively simple bugs (how did they miss the notification issue? Is all testing done by hand?)
gurkendoktor 9y ago
I don't think they even need a QA department for software, given how many people are donating their free time to file radars. https://blackpixel.com/writing/2012/02/radar-or-gtfo.html https://blackpixel.com/writing/2012/02/radar-or-gtfo.html Considering that some people will continuously adjust their iPad clocks into the future to be able to play Candy Crush without waiting (sic!!!), this bug must have affected people, and was certainly somewhere on Apple's radar. It's just that management then shrugs and sticks to yearly releases instead of working down this mountain of debt.
- traek 9y ago
  > (sic!!!) ?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - htgb 9y ago
    GP is emphasizing the absurdity of the act, I presume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic
gaius 9y ago
Is their QA department in disarray? It's not a matter of one department, it's a matter of culture which starts from the top. Jobs insisted on perfection, and that permeated the entire organisation. Cook is satisfied with gimmicks and is contented to just coast on the reputation Jobs earned. He just doesn't have the personal stake Jobs had, he's a manager not a leader. Just like the iconic HP was never the same once Fiorina took over.
- strictnein 9y ago
  I agree with the rest of your comment, but not this part: > "Just like the iconic HP was never the same once Fiorina took over." HP was in trouble well before she joined the company.
  - intopieces 9y ago
    Yep. Same with Yahoo! and Marissa Mayer. Women get blamed more frequently than men when a company is failing [0]. They are also more likely to become CEOs when a company is already in trouble [1]. [0]https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/female-ceo-blame_us_58100af0e4b001e247df34c5 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/female-ceo-blame_us_581... [1]https://www.glamour.com/story/women-ceos-company-trouble https://www.glamour.com/story/women-ceos-company-trouble
    - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
      Marissa Mayer was a terrible CEO. Period. She was responsible for a string of 48 (!) (mostly) terrible acquisitions[1], banning remote working[2] and wasting company money on things like motivational books[3] or lavish parties[4]. She is getting more flak than the other terrible CEOs, but IMO it isn't caused by the fact that she's a woman. At least not directly. Back when she was appointed as a CEO, media were treating her like a second coming of Jesus (which probably indeed was caused by her gender, she was a perfect role model for feminists). That set expectations bar really high, and when she failed to deliver, people turned against her. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...! [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chief-bans-working-home https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chi... [3] - https://www.recode.net/2016/2/2/11587472/marissa-mayers-big-red-book-a-guide-to-what-the-yahoo-ceo-will-do-next https://www.recode.net/2016/2/2/11587472/marissa-mayers-big-... [4] - http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blows-millions-on-parties-and-sponsorships-says-eric-jackson-2015-12?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blows...

Could it be that the amount of bugs have exploded with the ever-growing complexity of their software combined with an unsustainable pace to guarantee solid, reliable software? It seems like a house of cards right now, and it will only get worse as they keep having the next crunch time just to deliver on an arbitrary management deadline...

DelightOne 9y ago
You could go slower like everyone else.. with less features..
- qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
  I believe in general those using devices would always trade security for convenience and new, flashy features.
derefr 9y ago
Seems improbable to happen right now; there isn't really a large amount of newly-added complexity. Compare to QA in the beginning of the iCloud Document Sync (Ubiquity) era, where every app and many parts of both iOS and macOS had new features: Ubiquity itself broke down frequently, but the QA and maintenance engineering going into it didn't seem to make anything else in those releases less solid.
jaxondu 9y ago
Most of the iOS ui SpringBoard bugs are due to them rewriting the codes in Swift. Many Autolayout bug. Music app can’t even align the play button at center. Also Craig Federighi is busy with Siri, and busy shooting down Note 8 in social media. I was annoyed when the text replacement bug took one beta to solve, where the Calculator bug took 5 or 6 releases to solve. And the third reason is they expect users will actively test iOS for them. With so many bugs surfaced in media and in released version, my guess is no one is telling them the bugs during beta. Another reason is iPhone X is iPhone fragmentation with different home screen UI. You’re are right this will introduce complexity to the code base. I’m thankful for the touchbar in MacBook Pro and the notch design in X, both I dislike. This make me realise the many good points in other platform. Sort of like bursting my Apple fanboy bubble.
- btlr 9y ago
  Curious to know more about your claim that rewriting stuff in Swift causes a lot of bugs - got any sources on that?
  - tatersolid 9y ago
    Rewriting any mostly-working code in any language—even the exact same language—causes bugs. It’s been that way since the 1960s. It “has to be done” sometimes, but put that day off as long as possible.
    - btlr 9y ago
      That makes sense I suppose.

LoSboccacc 9y ago

they have to invent new things every year or a complex negative feedback starts because people, analyst and ultimately stock holder won't accept that an iphone iteration is just a little faster and has more battery

ukblewis 9y ago
I agree that it is stupid that they have to deliver new things every year or they get negative feedback, but that doesn't mean they should deliver features that make their products worse or that QA should quit doing their job. Apple is a company with many many billions of dollars in the bank. There is no excuse for this. If their QA sucks, fire them all and hire 10,000+ new QA staff. They easily have the money to do that. If they pay all the new QA staff $100,000 each, then that's only $1 bn for the new staff and they'd probably pay a fair bit less to let the existing staff go. Apple has more than $250 bn in cash reserves right now. They can easily afford to do that. In fact, I think that probably should hire a few thousand new QA staff, firing the existing staff should be up to their discretion, but not hiring significantly more when it's clear that they have a QA problem, for a company with so much money, is not acceptable.
- dannyw 9y ago
  Hiring more QA staff doesn’t mean more bugs will be fixed if the bottleneck is engineering output and deadline-driven features. The latter might be better fixed with a re-org.
- alliao 9y ago
  they have cash reserves but still they issued corporate debt in the US indicating that they're financially savvy AND they don't have free access to their overseas cash hoard. So hiring within US and spending 1bn will cost them a lot more. And if they leverage debt using their overseas cash...well that'd be another pandora's box as they're so big they'll probably move the prices of the entire industry along with every US corporation with funds outside the states...
PrimalDual 9y ago
That’s one explanation but if one company has the resources to innovate and keep up quality control it’s Apple. Especially since they have such a limited number of device models to support. I just hope this is a bad year and not an inflection point.

CamperBob2 9y ago

As usual with large vendors nowadays, we are the QA department. From an in-house perspective, QA is a cost center. As far as upper management is concerned, it literally doesn't earn its keep... especially when consumers have shown they're willing to overlook and forgive one gigantic blunder after another.

nautilus12 9y ago

The quality people got sick of living like a peasant in the high cost of living areas surrounding apple and took jobs elsewhere. Its only a matter of time until every silicon valley tech company faces the same problem.

anyguy2017 9y ago
I created a separate account to write this comment, since it's going to be harsh. I work for a Bay Area technology company with a decidedly mediocre engineering team. My experience over the past 2-3 years is that the worst software engineers (at our mediocre organization) are being hired by Apple. This is totally anecdotal and the sample size is maybe five. But I just cannot escape the fact that Apple continues to hire our engineers that barely know how to program. Hiring engineers in the Bay Area is hard. I'm sure Apple has a deep bench of talented engineers, but my own anecdotal experience tells me they have very much reduced their standards.
- yladiz 9y ago
  Why are they the worst? Without directly refuting your comment, it's hard to believe that Apple hired the worst programmers at your company, without knowing why you think they are worst.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- gurkendoktor 9y ago
  Hah. I can't help but wonder if Apple has started mindlessly implementing contemporary "software engineering best practices" (yuck): - Everything must be Scrum or a similar sprint system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8836734 - Move to an open office layout to foster collaboration: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14962663 - Kick out high-performing "heroes" like Scott Forstall - Instead, build teams of mediocre (but probably nicer) engineers. They can then lift each other up through positivity and pair programming. This is of course a lot of speculation (and wishful thinking) on my part, and honestly it's likely that any process would be doomed to failure under Apple's self-imposed deadlines. But I almost want to get a job at Apple only to see what it's like on the inside.

PhantomGremlin 9y ago

What is happening at Apple? Bozo explosion. Things have been getting worse for quite a while. It appears to have finally hit a tipping point.

yladiz 9y ago

I'm under the assumption that, for some reason, the rush and all things surrounding iPhone X caused QA to only happen a bit, and only on the newest devices (I have an iPhone 6S and an iPhone X, and the 6S is noticeably slower in a lot of cases, for example having to wait half to one second to type on the keyboard). I'm giving Apple a general benefit of the doubt and think that iOS 12 will be better since there shouldn't be any major paradigm shifts in the next series of phones, but it is a really bad image to see Apple not able to effectively QA these relatively simple bugs (how did they miss the notification issue? Is all testing done by hand?)

gurkendoktor 9y ago

I don't think they even need a QA department for software, given how many people are donating their free time to file radars. https://blackpixel.com/writing/2012/02/radar-or-gtfo.html https://blackpixel.com/writing/2012/02/radar-or-gtfo.html Considering that some people will continuously adjust their iPad clocks into the future to be able to play Candy Crush without waiting (sic!!!), this bug must have affected people, and was certainly somewhere on Apple's radar. It's just that management then shrugs and sticks to yearly releases instead of working down this mountain of debt.

traek 9y ago
> (sic!!!) ?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- htgb 9y ago
  GP is emphasizing the absurdity of the act, I presume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic

gaius 9y ago

Is their QA department in disarray? It's not a matter of one department, it's a matter of culture which starts from the top. Jobs insisted on perfection, and that permeated the entire organisation. Cook is satisfied with gimmicks and is contented to just coast on the reputation Jobs earned. He just doesn't have the personal stake Jobs had, he's a manager not a leader. Just like the iconic HP was never the same once Fiorina took over.

strictnein 9y ago
I agree with the rest of your comment, but not this part: > "Just like the iconic HP was never the same once Fiorina took over." HP was in trouble well before she joined the company.
- intopieces 9y ago
  Yep. Same with Yahoo! and Marissa Mayer. Women get blamed more frequently than men when a company is failing [0]. They are also more likely to become CEOs when a company is already in trouble [1]. [0]https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/female-ceo-blame_us_58100af0e4b001e247df34c5 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/female-ceo-blame_us_581... [1]https://www.glamour.com/story/women-ceos-company-trouble https://www.glamour.com/story/women-ceos-company-trouble
  - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
    Marissa Mayer was a terrible CEO. Period. She was responsible for a string of 48 (!) (mostly) terrible acquisitions[1], banning remote working[2] and wasting company money on things like motivational books[3] or lavish parties[4]. She is getting more flak than the other terrible CEOs, but IMO it isn't caused by the fact that she's a woman. At least not directly. Back when she was appointed as a CEO, media were treating her like a second coming of Jesus (which probably indeed was caused by her gender, she was a perfect role model for feminists). That set expectations bar really high, and when she failed to deliver, people turned against her. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Yahoo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...! [2] - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chief-bans-working-home https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/25/yahoo-chi... [3] - https://www.recode.net/2016/2/2/11587472/marissa-mayers-big-red-book-a-guide-to-what-the-yahoo-ceo-will-do-next https://www.recode.net/2016/2/2/11587472/marissa-mayers-big-... [4] - http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blows-millions-on-parties-and-sponsorships-says-eric-jackson-2015-12?IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-blows...