6 ms·

IMO, the current dip in quality has been lasting a lot longer than in previous iterations.

by cglong 3y ago

lazide 3y ago
Agreed. I blame post-Covid burnout.
- corbezzoli 3y ago
  Poor developers, making 500k/year working in perfectly safe conditions must be real tough. I don’t think burnout is the reason for the dip in quality, Apple software has been crap for a long time on the Mac.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    I don't think there is any correlation between compensation and burnout. Why would you bring comp into this discussion?
    - corbezzoli 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - meibo 3y ago
        Maybe the fruit bar at Apple Park is only restocked once a week now. Not a joking matter.
      - sgjohnson 3y ago
        And how exactly are those things related?
  - zogrodea 3y ago
    Thank you for the reminder. This random developer (not from Apple) does feel some exhaustion, but I have it lucky compared to some other folk and should be grateful for that. Hoping those other folk who have it worse will have some relief too...
  - lazide 3y ago
    Oddly, being paid more and being safer while others get worse can actually contribute to burnout. Comraderie and morale matter. Burnout is more about a disconnect and dysregulation between workload/emotional regulation/stress/morale than it is about any one of those factors. As anyone who has burnt out at a super boring job, or a pointless but high stress job can attest. A high stress, high risk, job that matters, keeps someone interested, and someone can take breaks from is much less of a burnout risk than one that someone can’t see matters , or they don’t grow in, regardless of the stress level or ability to take breaks from.
- charrondev 3y ago
  I went through a period of burnout at my work during Covid. I was in Canada at the time though and our lockdowns lasted through almost 2 years though (unlike many places in the US that either did not do lockdowns at all, or did only for a very short period). For reference in Quebec the holiday periods in 2020 and 2021 had restricted travel where you could be fined thousands of dollars if you left your neighborhoods. https://globalnews.ca/news/8474592/quebec-covid-dec-26-2021 https://globalnews.ca/news/8474592/quebec-covid-dec-26-2021 In any case during this time period of being stuck, isolated and inside most of the year I had little else to do but throw myself into my work. Today I have the same job and a much healthier balance but that’s mostly due to a really good manager that noticed and helped me out.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  In my experience engineering teams usually always want to fix issues like this. However, this typically come down to something leading to either pressure to ship features relenting and engineering being allowed to clean up debt or awareness of quality issues increasing. Seems like burnout would be a factor if Apple tried to fix it but failed or took forever.
- kandros 3y ago
  Changing to a yearly release cycle is what made quality and stability a non-priority. MacOS has been buggier and buggier since
  - bredren 3y ago
    I’d suggest quality and stability of the rapidly advancing Apple ecosystem became the priority. MacOS has had to keep up with a relentless march in services and devices each with their own peculiarities. iPhone has had to have an annual release cycle, and there are multiplatform apps and crossplatform features to maintain and extend on deadline.
    - bmitc 3y ago
      I have been at a company that transitioned from normal release cycles to arbitrary yearly release cycles. Every year became a literal race to fix issues, improve existing features, and add new features. It was a gigantic mess. The yearly release cycle only really gives a few months to do all of that, because the other months are doing integrations, testing, and bug fixes to get the release out the door. I can certainly see that if the emphasis on new features greatly outweighs that of bug fixes and improvements, then you can extend the implementation months for larger features because you can just bleed the bug fixes and improvements into next year's release. But then that year's feature set takes precedence and dept accumulation occurs. My own experience with macOS is that it stopped "just working" a decade ago Apple stopped caring about it and poured everything into iOS. And then this is exacerbated by today's mode of operating by just treating features like they're free and frequent release cycles.
      - newsclues 3y ago
        It's not the release cycle per say, but the need to pack new features in each cycle for marketing and sales. A regular release cycle that focuses on security, stability and incremental improvements, is fine as long as there isn't a need to constantly push new features in.
  - steve1977 3y ago
- newsclues 3y ago
  I think it started when they decided to add feature bloat like emojis and crap. 2011ish with iOS 5 was the beginning of the downfall. I worked AppleCare, and noticed a trend in bugs after that.
wkat4242 3y ago
I wonder if it's just the sign of the times. When I worked at a (formerly state monopoly)telco around 2000 it would happen that an inspector would come in and look for any warning lights on equipment. If you were around you'd better know how to fix it right away. These days that kind of attention to detail is long lost in the sea of competition and cost cutting. But issues tend to build up now and cause really expensive megaprojects to really fix them. I could imagine software engineering followed a similar trajectory.
xctr94 3y ago
It used to be that even-numbered releases fixed bugs and stabilized the OS, with notable features coming in odd-numbered releases. Now they don’t care. Unifying iOS and macOS has become the goal, and probably some PMs are getting nice promotions thanks to that. The golden stability of macOS (a la Snow Leopard) is gone. Now I get random reboots every other week, so I keep a tight Time Machine schedule.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > It used to be that even-numbered releases fixed bugs and stabilized the OS, with notable features coming in odd-numbered releases. That's a myth. The stability comes from minor bug fix updates, not from major updates. And the even-numbered Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for example had huge new features, such as Spotlight, Dashboard, VoiceOver, etc. Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar also had huge new features. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809469
  - xctr94 3y ago
    I stand corrected, and I’ll rephrase it as “it used to be that every now and then Apple released a version of macOS with notable fixes and small improvements.” I’m not downplaying how much work is going into crazy features that millions probably like. But I make software, and I’m tired of how macOS is now marginally less annoying than trying to maintain an Arch Linux setup.

IMO, the current dip in quality has been lasting a lot longer than in previous iterations.

by cglong 3y ago

IMO, the current dip in quality has been lasting a lot longer than in previous iterations.

lazide 3y ago

Agreed. I blame post-Covid burnout.

corbezzoli 3y ago
Poor developers, making 500k/year working in perfectly safe conditions must be real tough. I don’t think burnout is the reason for the dip in quality, Apple software has been crap for a long time on the Mac.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  I don't think there is any correlation between compensation and burnout. Why would you bring comp into this discussion?
  - corbezzoli 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - meibo 3y ago
      Maybe the fruit bar at Apple Park is only restocked once a week now. Not a joking matter.
    - sgjohnson 3y ago
      And how exactly are those things related?
- zogrodea 3y ago
  Thank you for the reminder. This random developer (not from Apple) does feel some exhaustion, but I have it lucky compared to some other folk and should be grateful for that. Hoping those other folk who have it worse will have some relief too...
- lazide 3y ago
  Oddly, being paid more and being safer while others get worse can actually contribute to burnout. Comraderie and morale matter. Burnout is more about a disconnect and dysregulation between workload/emotional regulation/stress/morale than it is about any one of those factors. As anyone who has burnt out at a super boring job, or a pointless but high stress job can attest. A high stress, high risk, job that matters, keeps someone interested, and someone can take breaks from is much less of a burnout risk than one that someone can’t see matters , or they don’t grow in, regardless of the stress level or ability to take breaks from.
charrondev 3y ago
I went through a period of burnout at my work during Covid. I was in Canada at the time though and our lockdowns lasted through almost 2 years though (unlike many places in the US that either did not do lockdowns at all, or did only for a very short period). For reference in Quebec the holiday periods in 2020 and 2021 had restricted travel where you could be fined thousands of dollars if you left your neighborhoods. https://globalnews.ca/news/8474592/quebec-covid-dec-26-2021 https://globalnews.ca/news/8474592/quebec-covid-dec-26-2021 In any case during this time period of being stuck, isolated and inside most of the year I had little else to do but throw myself into my work. Today I have the same job and a much healthier balance but that’s mostly due to a really good manager that noticed and helped me out.
ajmurmann 3y ago
In my experience engineering teams usually always want to fix issues like this. However, this typically come down to something leading to either pressure to ship features relenting and engineering being allowed to clean up debt or awareness of quality issues increasing. Seems like burnout would be a factor if Apple tried to fix it but failed or took forever.
kandros 3y ago
Changing to a yearly release cycle is what made quality and stability a non-priority. MacOS has been buggier and buggier since
- bredren 3y ago
  I’d suggest quality and stability of the rapidly advancing Apple ecosystem became the priority. MacOS has had to keep up with a relentless march in services and devices each with their own peculiarities. iPhone has had to have an annual release cycle, and there are multiplatform apps and crossplatform features to maintain and extend on deadline.
  - bmitc 3y ago
    I have been at a company that transitioned from normal release cycles to arbitrary yearly release cycles. Every year became a literal race to fix issues, improve existing features, and add new features. It was a gigantic mess. The yearly release cycle only really gives a few months to do all of that, because the other months are doing integrations, testing, and bug fixes to get the release out the door. I can certainly see that if the emphasis on new features greatly outweighs that of bug fixes and improvements, then you can extend the implementation months for larger features because you can just bleed the bug fixes and improvements into next year's release. But then that year's feature set takes precedence and dept accumulation occurs. My own experience with macOS is that it stopped "just working" a decade ago Apple stopped caring about it and poured everything into iOS. And then this is exacerbated by today's mode of operating by just treating features like they're free and frequent release cycles.
    - newsclues 3y ago
      It's not the release cycle per say, but the need to pack new features in each cycle for marketing and sales. A regular release cycle that focuses on security, stability and incremental improvements, is fine as long as there isn't a need to constantly push new features in.
- steve1977 3y ago
newsclues 3y ago
I think it started when they decided to add feature bloat like emojis and crap. 2011ish with iOS 5 was the beginning of the downfall. I worked AppleCare, and noticed a trend in bugs after that.

wkat4242 3y ago

I wonder if it's just the sign of the times. When I worked at a (formerly state monopoly)telco around 2000 it would happen that an inspector would come in and look for any warning lights on equipment. If you were around you'd better know how to fix it right away. These days that kind of attention to detail is long lost in the sea of competition and cost cutting. But issues tend to build up now and cause really expensive megaprojects to really fix them. I could imagine software engineering followed a similar trajectory.

xctr94 3y ago

It used to be that even-numbered releases fixed bugs and stabilized the OS, with notable features coming in odd-numbered releases. Now they don’t care. Unifying iOS and macOS has become the goal, and probably some PMs are getting nice promotions thanks to that. The golden stability of macOS (a la Snow Leopard) is gone. Now I get random reboots every other week, so I keep a tight Time Machine schedule.

lapcat 3y ago
> It used to be that even-numbered releases fixed bugs and stabilized the OS, with notable features coming in odd-numbered releases. That's a myth. The stability comes from minor bug fix updates, not from major updates. And the even-numbered Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger for example had huge new features, such as Spotlight, Dashboard, VoiceOver, etc. Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar also had huge new features. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809469 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809469
- xctr94 3y ago
  I stand corrected, and I’ll rephrase it as “it used to be that every now and then Apple released a version of macOS with notable fixes and small improvements.” I’m not downplaying how much work is going into crazy features that millions probably like. But I make software, and I’m tired of how macOS is now marginally less annoying than trying to maintain an Arch Linux setup.