I was thinking about this when reading John Calhoun's post about Tom Dowdy, which has been doing the rounds recently (probably via Daring Fireball): https://www

I was thinking about this when reading John Calhoun's post about Tom Dowdy, which has been doing the rounds recently (probably via Daring Fireball): https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html https://www.engineersneedart.com/blog/dowdy/dowdy.html This was the 2nd half of the 90's and Apple was at that point in its history when it was circlng the drain. It was another lesson that would be reinforced over and over in my three-decade career as a programmer: if you work very long in this field, know that everything will eventually change. It was the supposed "dark times" to be at Apple: whole teams would be suddenly let go (the rest of us that lingered still might go through the abandoned offices of once co-workers looking to pull RAM out of their hardware for our own development machines). Some engineers like Tom, could see the writing on the wall early enough and knew when to switch teams. Tom ended up moving to the QuickTime team where he was able to continue to use his graphics talents. Later he worked on the iTunes visualizer if I recall correctly. It's possible to join a company at a bad time and still have a good experience there. (I don't know if everyone is aware how bad things got for Apple back then. IIRC they tried to sell the company to Sony, but Sony turned them down. They only survived due to investment from arch-nemesis Microsoft.)