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This is utter bullshit, as a cloud Apple employee. Mike was an excellent leader in iCloud, championed a whole bunch of new tech, and took a failing business an

This is utter bullshit, as a cloud Apple employee. Mike was an excellent leader in iCloud, championed a whole bunch of new tech, and took a failing business and made it massively profitable. I don't think anyone in Eddy's org was happy to see him go.

paganel 3y ago
Sure hope iCloud is “massively profitable”, they’ve been spamming me non-stop with their messages both on my phone and on my laptop ever since my cloud hardware disk space there (which I had never asked for in the first place) got “full” or such some time ago. Otherwise great hardware products, both the Apple phone and the Apple laptop.
- vuln 3y ago
  Well for other users they might wonder WHY their data is no longer being backed up. Hell they may not even know they hit capacity until the alert. Should users be able to dismiss the alert? Yes. Should the alert pop back up at a later time to remind the user that their data is still not being backed up? Yes.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > Otherwise great hardware products, both the Apple phone and the Apple laptop. as a person who (prior to the framework laptop) would like to buy macbooks and put linux on them (love apple hardware, hate their software and philosophical approach to things) I used to say this a lot, but I'm stopping. As has become clear to me through conversation, there is no hardware without software in Apple's approach/opinion. It's not really a computer, it's more of an appliance. You don't buy a toaster and be unhappy that you can't put Linux on it. As engineers we like to separate software and hardware, but that's just not how Apple works. You can't just buy in to the hardware, because the hardware and the software are a complete unit. In other words, we've been looking at things the wrong way and once you view it correctly Apple's approach starts to make a lot of sense. If you don't agree with this view, then (as I've been told many times) you're not the target market.
- tmpz22 3y ago
  Hey /u/paganel your 256gb iphone is out of storage due to your 20gb of photos! This is because we defaulted all your photos to icloud to achieve this result. Would you like to pay us $60/yr to remove this static notification from your settings page? You can also pay us $120/yr if you want.
flounder3 3y ago
No, it is not bullshit. And no, he certainly was not excellent. Perhaps he managed to take credit for a few "good" things, but it's interesting to watch you defend someone who was ~so~ widely hated. I could give you a list of 40 tenured engineers and leaders in Eddy's org [along with at least 20 in adjacent orgs] who physically celebrated his departure.
aaplnisider 3y ago
I was an engineering manager in Mike's org. I liked him on a personal level but he was thrown a lot of legacy services from other orgs. Cloud services is just not Apple's forte. The internal tools/infra feels 10 years behind Google (based on friends who've worked at both). I too heard that he was pushed out.
- jjoonathan 3y ago
  2013 Google tooling was pretty decent. Does WebObjects still haunt Apple's cloud services?
  - aaplnisider 3y ago
    Yep, some services still do.
- tgma 3y ago
  Definitely more than 10 years behind Google and probably going to stay shit for foreseeable future based on their hiring patterns and pay. Apple routinely claims they can underpay new hires compared to Google and Facebook and they have to accept it because "it is a privilege to work at Apple." Probably you can hire a bunch of cultists with that message to work closer to iPhone and UI but I doubt the hardcore infrastructure folks particularly count "working as Apple" as a special privilege compared to Google and Facebook.
  - zen_1 3y ago
    I'd prefer working at Apple to F/G because at least Apple pretend to care about user's privacy, and their business model isn't inherently opposed to it. I'm an android/PC user by choice, so working on the iWidgets doesn't hold much appeal for me.
    - tgma 3y ago
      This is not a question that warrants much abstract analysis. Only relevant if you have simultaneous offers or work at one of the companies and get an offer at the other and are faced with the concrete numbers and a choice. Me personally wouldn’t prefer working at a place with sucky tooling (build systems, code review, testing) and comparatively inferior average infrastructure engineering while taking a lower pay simply because the company is great at building iPhones. Sure I commend their attitude towards privacy and I am a happy customer.
manicennui 3y ago
Do you think that iCloud is excellent?
steelframe 3y ago
I spent a year in Apple Cloud Infrastructure (ACI) during the pandemic. From my perspective, Mike didn't invest in the infrastructure in the ways that he probably should have. I am aware of at least one very senior manager in the org who escalated on Mike for that reason.

paganel 3y ago

Sure hope iCloud is “massively profitable”, they’ve been spamming me non-stop with their messages both on my phone and on my laptop ever since my cloud hardware disk space there (which I had never asked for in the first place) got “full” or such some time ago. Otherwise great hardware products, both the Apple phone and the Apple laptop.

vuln 3y ago
Well for other users they might wonder WHY their data is no longer being backed up. Hell they may not even know they hit capacity until the alert. Should users be able to dismiss the alert? Yes. Should the alert pop back up at a later time to remind the user that their data is still not being backed up? Yes.
freedomben 3y ago
> Otherwise great hardware products, both the Apple phone and the Apple laptop. as a person who (prior to the framework laptop) would like to buy macbooks and put linux on them (love apple hardware, hate their software and philosophical approach to things) I used to say this a lot, but I'm stopping. As has become clear to me through conversation, there is no hardware without software in Apple's approach/opinion. It's not really a computer, it's more of an appliance. You don't buy a toaster and be unhappy that you can't put Linux on it. As engineers we like to separate software and hardware, but that's just not how Apple works. You can't just buy in to the hardware, because the hardware and the software are a complete unit. In other words, we've been looking at things the wrong way and once you view it correctly Apple's approach starts to make a lot of sense. If you don't agree with this view, then (as I've been told many times) you're not the target market.
tmpz22 3y ago
Hey /u/paganel your 256gb iphone is out of storage due to your 20gb of photos! This is because we defaulted all your photos to icloud to achieve this result. Would you like to pay us $60/yr to remove this static notification from your settings page? You can also pay us $120/yr if you want.

flounder3 3y ago

No, it is not bullshit. And no, he certainly was not excellent. Perhaps he managed to take credit for a few "good" things, but it's interesting to watch you defend someone who was ~so~ widely hated. I could give you a list of 40 tenured engineers and leaders in Eddy's org [along with at least 20 in adjacent orgs] who physically celebrated his departure.

aaplnisider 3y ago

I was an engineering manager in Mike's org. I liked him on a personal level but he was thrown a lot of legacy services from other orgs. Cloud services is just not Apple's forte. The internal tools/infra feels 10 years behind Google (based on friends who've worked at both). I too heard that he was pushed out.

jjoonathan 3y ago
2013 Google tooling was pretty decent. Does WebObjects still haunt Apple's cloud services?
- aaplnisider 3y ago
  Yep, some services still do.
tgma 3y ago
Definitely more than 10 years behind Google and probably going to stay shit for foreseeable future based on their hiring patterns and pay. Apple routinely claims they can underpay new hires compared to Google and Facebook and they have to accept it because "it is a privilege to work at Apple." Probably you can hire a bunch of cultists with that message to work closer to iPhone and UI but I doubt the hardcore infrastructure folks particularly count "working as Apple" as a special privilege compared to Google and Facebook.
- zen_1 3y ago
  I'd prefer working at Apple to F/G because at least Apple pretend to care about user's privacy, and their business model isn't inherently opposed to it. I'm an android/PC user by choice, so working on the iWidgets doesn't hold much appeal for me.
  - tgma 3y ago
    This is not a question that warrants much abstract analysis. Only relevant if you have simultaneous offers or work at one of the companies and get an offer at the other and are faced with the concrete numbers and a choice. Me personally wouldn’t prefer working at a place with sucky tooling (build systems, code review, testing) and comparatively inferior average infrastructure engineering while taking a lower pay simply because the company is great at building iPhones. Sure I commend their attitude towards privacy and I am a happy customer.

manicennui 3y ago

Do you think that iCloud is excellent?

steelframe 3y ago

I spent a year in Apple Cloud Infrastructure (ACI) during the pandemic. From my perspective, Mike didn't invest in the infrastructure in the ways that he probably should have. I am aware of at least one very senior manager in the org who escalated on Mike for that reason.