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Having interfaced with Apple in a different way (apart from owning a new MBP and an iPhone X) I'd say the issue is, and continues to be, growing pains. They're
by yawn_010101 8y ago
Having interfaced with Apple in a different way (apart from owning a new MBP and an iPhone X) I'd say the issue is, and continues to be, growing pains.
They're certainly losing the lead in software engineer talent (giving it away to whom, I'm not sure). But the single most horrible experience I've had with Apple in the last year was trying to get software published on the App Store.
That's a department that's so large that it's become a classic bureaucracy -- middle managers run amok, pettiness, lack of professionalism, etc.
I was trying to publish a piece of software using their less extortionate subscription options and I was told by a young woman manager that I would have to have feature X in order to qualify. I added feature X in a couple days and got back to her. She was surprised (disappointed?) and then told me I'd have to have feature X + feature Y in order to qualify.
I have a couple of contacts from the "good old days" and sent a very angry email. Middle manager woman disappeared, her boss called me and apologized within a few minutes.
If I didn't have that contact I probably wouldn't have gotten past her.
What has happened to Apple that their dev teams work against devs, compile times (this is 2018 remember) are now counted in minutes for small projects, my MBP crashes when plugging in an external monitor, etc?
They've grown too fast. My contact told me that their App Store team is now interfacing with over 2 million developers. How do you grow to accommodate that?
Now, what is the answer to all of this? Fix the marketing driven culture. Thinner isn't better. The number of apps on the app store isn't a meaningful metric. New languages are cool only if you can actually pull them off. Etc.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sandmansandine 8y agoSerious question: Why didn't you mention the genders of the the people from "the "good old days"" but had to say over and over again that you were dealing with "Middle manager woman"
- herpderpsing 8y agoTake your timewasting elsewhere.
- mehrdadn 8y agoI'm confused what the point of this question is. Would you have found it more satisfying if the parent had said "I had a couple of [male] contacts from the good ol' days"?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- not_kurt_godel 8y agoThe subtext, whether it's intentional or not, seems to be that the gender of manager that he (yes, assuming OP's gender) spoke to is relevant to the negativity of the experience. The message can be condensed down to "female + new Apple = bad, male + old Apple = good"
- mehrdadn 8y agoWhat I'm baffled about is why the comparison was made against the contact's gender. How would involving the contact's gender have helped? Or if that's not the question that was intended, then why not ask the actual question that was intended?
- Firerouge 8y agoYour comment seems to be against multiple HN guidelines, particularly those regarding assuming good faith, not post shallow and dismissive comments, and the rule regarding ideological wars.
- paulcole 8y agoSexism is one of the biggest tech issues of the past several years. I don’t think asking someone to consider why they used a specific word– even in “good faith” is a problem.
- daseiner1 8y agoGimme a break. Their comment is clearly not shallow, nor dismissive and is raising a legitimate, albeit fairly mundane, point in my opinion. And I’m sure we can all try to hold ourselves to a high enough standard to not initiate an “ideological debate war” over that sort of comment.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gowld 8y agoBecause it's important for young women to see representation and role models in tech. The real weirdness is why OP thought that the front line customer service drone was a "middle manager".
- jkells 8y agoInterested to know why the gender of the manager matters?
- zmix 8y agoIf one is angry, it does!
- herpderpsing 8y agoTake your time-wasting irrelevant questions elsewhere.
- che_shirecat 8y agoMost charitable explanation is that OP is just adding some color to their characterizations. Least charitable explanation is that subconciously or not OP perceives young "females" in positions of authority as being unfit for their positions and likes to add plausibly deniable fuel to that flame.
- stcredzero 8y agoI'd say the issue is, and continues to be, growing pains. They're certainly losing the lead in software engineer talent (giving it away to whom, I'm not sure). I keep on interviewing recent Comp Sci graduates who have a 3.75 or a 4.0 and who can't tell me how to implement cycle detection -- to the extent that they could write a pseudocode function signature or some kind of concretely implementable design. Many of the same grads try to tell me that a null pointer in a C structure uses no memory and other nonsense like that. You know what I think? I think the CA grad student population no longer knows those things, so they are producing undregrads who know even less. my MBP crashes when plugging in an external monitor, etc? When my Macbook Pro is "locked" it flashes an image of the desktop screen just before switching to the login prompt.
- foepys 8y ago> When my Macbook Pro is "locked" it flashes an image of the desktop screen just before switching to the login prompt. It's the same thing on Android when you are switching users. How something like this can get QA is crazy to me. That is certainly not the way it's supposed to work.
- cobookman 8y agoThose things aren't taught in CS programs as the majority of companies don't need those skills. Most want application development such-as a web or iOS app developer. However Computer Engineering programs teach those concepts as the focus is on low power micro controllers.
- stcredzero 8y agoThose things aren't taught in CS programs as the majority of companies don't need those skills. Most want application development such-as a web or iOS app developer. This sort of thing is very relevant for someone writing an application or a server process. Programmers who can write their own compiler are much better C and C++ programmers, because they have relevant background. Programmers who understand the low level stuff can write faster code when it's important, and they know better where to look when optimizing. Since when has our "field" become so flubby that we're now eschewing the notion of background knowledge? Are you telling me that we are churning out Comp Sci grads who couldn't write their own low level libraries or compilers? Tech people should have at least a working knowledge of how their own tools work, to the extent that if civilization fell, they could have a good chance of recreating primitive versions of those things. However Computer Engineering programs teach those concepts as the focus is on low power micro controllers. Also relevant to high performance code. Also relevant to game engines. Also relevant to interfacing servers with legacy code. Also relevant to technology like WASM. Whoever decided to relegate stuff like that to Computer Engineering seems guilty of the same ignorance I see in these recent students.
- woolvalley 8y agoI wouldn't really say those are the reasons why. The app store and code signing have been fairly bureaucratic to deal with from day one. It's actually improved compared to the initial years from turn around times measuring in a day or two vs a week or two. I remember doing such tricks such as resubmitting the same binary and it getting passed. It really is a dice roll. Compile times comes from swift and promoting it too early because it was too immature. If you write your code in objective-c, your fast compile times will come back. Swift compile times have been improving as time goes on. They also don't pay as well compared to google or facebook. But even then I think it's more a management thing, since they determine the priorities in software dev.
- fooker 8y ago>Swift compile times have been improving as time goes on. Swift compile times will never be close to ObjC or C compile times, no matter how much engineering goes into it. This is because of how the language is designed, it requires a typechecker which solves an NP hard constraint solving problem.
- 14113 8y agoUnlike C compilers which have no NP-hard problems to solve /s
- fooker 8y agoYou can write a C compiler without solving NP hard problems. You can even have pretty good optimizations.
- woolvalley 8y agoThere is a whole bunch of low hanging fruit in the swift compiler as far as compile speed goes. What swift compiler devs complain most about is about how operator overloading causes some sort of O(n^k) or worse check, because things like the '+' operator has dozens of implementers. If your really worried about type inference slowing you down, you can write out all of your types like you didn't have type inference. You could even do it in an automated fashion like your source code was some sort of cache.
- Techonomicon 8y agoDuuuuuude my work macbook freezes at least 3 times a week when connecting up, I thought this was just my issue, I feel like we're part of a brotherhood now.
- stefanfisk 8y agomine does it if I connect my monitors before opening the lid, try everything until you develop your own superstitios routine!
- paulcole 8y ago>I was told by a young woman manager What does this detail add?