I was not obsolete. A big company like Apple, there are always things that need taken care of.
I assumed with iOS, Swift, etc., maybe the guys on the Cocoa team were obsolete? Of course not. That code is still there, still needs maintaining, interoperability with the new languages, frameworks, etc.
I'm more surprised they want to stay on.
And that is in fact why I left Apple: the job had changed, the "career" had changed. The engineers were no longer steering the ship. It had been that way when I started in 1995 though. A "team", let's say the graphics team, would figure out what API to revisit, what new ones to add — perhaps how to refactor the entire underlying workflow. The "tech lead" (who would regularly attend Siggraph since we're talking about the graphics team) would make the call as to what got priority. Marketing would come around after the fact to "create a narrative" around all the changes to the OS. I hate to say it, but many, those were the good ole' days.
(And let's be clear, in the 90's, Apple's customers were more or less like the engineers, we also loved the machine for the same reasons they did — so we did right by them, made changes they would like because we wanted them too. You can't say that as convincingly for the phone, being a mass consumer device.)
Marketing took the reins long ago though — especially as Apple began to succeed with the iPhone (which, someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think was an engineer driven project initially — I mean most things were up to that point).
I stuck around nonetheless though because there was money to be made and kids still to raise.
When the last daughter flew the coop though, so did I.
There's plenty of people who want to build that thing, and most of us have a good idea how it probably should be, at least at first. The problem isn't building it, it's funding it without selling out the user.
If you have to make a grand reveal to the world and change all of it a la Steve Jobs with a single product, you're dead in the water. But we have the Internet and crowd funding and open source these days. Which part of the thing are you most interested in building? Go build that on top of whatever's closest, open source it (yes, even hardware), and iterate from there. It's a failure of the imagination (or perhaps the wisdom of age, or the lack of the foolishness of youth) if you're blocked by the fear of selling out the user.
I'm too cynical to be a mentor, ha ha. I too aware of all the engineering-led companies that ultimately tanked. General Magic is the first one that comes to mind.
But no reason for me to mentor — really it's just let the engineers drive. Sometimes it works (or sued to in another era), sometimes it does not. Either way, it will be a fin place to work. ;-)
Do not discount the cynic. I persist. Here is my question, for example. How would Apple and its ecosystem have evolved differently if they never adopted Objective-C? Would it be possible to accomplish everything with C and better tooling?
What I don't like is all the bullshit around it. Primarily now the barrier is that I don't have to work, so why would I put up with abusive hazing? I mean of course, hiring processes, which have only gotten worse over time (hallmark property of the cycle of hazing).
I'm not doing on-call rotations anymore. Either allow us to engineer the thing to be resilient, or pay off-duty people (a wonderful opportunity for offshore people that management is so desperate to use).
Finally, I don't want to code in Python or JavaScript. As a long time programmer, it is annoying that we keep going backwards and wasting more and more hardware power.
Nobody is producing anything exciting in software anymore. I can't think of a pure software company doing anything I would be excited for, because google and facebook and the like control the internet.
It doesn't even pay that well anymore, and AI is just another huge excuse to drop wages by management.
Apple is a fantastic example: operating systems are stagnant, hardware outside of the architecture switch is stagnant (and how much of that was simply priority access to the state of the art TSMC node tech).
>Nobody is producing anything exciting in software anymore.
They're not? Some of the newer programming languages seem very interesting, attempting to fix some of the mistakes done in older languages. Of course, most of the really interesting problems are already solved by existing solutions, but perhaps there's room for improved solutions instead of just using the incumbent.
>I like programming. I can still do it. What I don't like is all the bullshit around it.
If you have spare time (you sound like you might be retired), perhaps you should try getting involved in an open-source project that interests you (and isn't in Python or JS of course).
>I can't think of a pure software company doing anything I would be excited for, because google and facebook and the like control the internet.
Personally, I work in robotics and find it quite interesting. I would also find writing software for spacecraft interesting. Neither of those are "pure software", but still I think they're applications that will change the world, hopefully for the better, and don't already have some huge incumbent dominating the market.
I think robotics is going to be the next the thing that I would push programmers to concentrate on
Political shifts probably mean that manufacturing will be onshoring and automating. Software in the last 3 decades has basically mirrored like Conway's law management structures without source manufacturing elsewhere.
The next economy will have a lot more near shored manufacturing. And that means hardware, robotics and hardware software boundaries
The real world/physical materials is also a little bit more resistant to AI replacement
Robotics have been around forever, it's only by being AI driven will it gain interest and funding. No one wants to laboriously hand write gcode to actuate a motor to move an arm. People want to ask the robot maid to make coffee for them in a regular human coffee making fashion. A French press or a pour over or whatever. Traditional programming hasn't been able to achieve that in the decades it's been around, so the only way robotics is getting interesting (which it is) is the addition of AI/ML models.
> It doesn't even pay that well anymore, and AI is just another huge excuse to drop wages by management.
Can you expand on this? I haven’t noticed salaries going down where I’m at (only fewer open positions the last ~1.5 years due to the global economic climate - but I’m sure this is cyclical and will swing back soon enough).
Salaries are not going down but costs of living skyrocketed.
I am in the top 3% earning bracket as a dev in my country (Poland), I live in a relatively cheap area (south-east) and when I reached my 30s I could afford to buy just a ~100sqm city apartment which cost exactly 5x of my parents 200+sqm house which they bought without mortgage as factory workers without higher education.
And each year I can afford less and less with my relatively huge salary.
When your parents bought, your country had few highly-paid jobs, and places like that have low housing costs: the presence of many highly-paid workers is what causes housing prices to be high.
But “not as well paid as it used to be” is relative to other wage earner, not to cost of living. Two uneducated polish factory workers today won’t be able to buy your parents’ house either.
Idk, maybe it's not the exact book definition but I always thought about how well I'm paid in terms of the purchasing power, not the arbitrary value, and especially not by comparison with others (strictly speaking, because costs of living are kind of that, isn't it?).
The software jobs slowly go into the direction of not being worth the effort (I don't really believe that we will reach that point but that's the current direction).
> Two uneducated polish factory workers today won’t be able to buy your parents’ house either.
Of course - because from my point of view factory jobs are currently paid terrible. They used to be paid better (worth the effort due to being able to buy more).
Did you hear that, bruh, you should be totes cool with not being able to afford what your parents could because if they were where you are they wouldn't be able to afford shit either. You just need to understand economics is all. That makes it all ok.
I'm not saying we should be fine with it, just trying to understand what "doesn't even pay that well anymore" mean practically. E.g. if other careers have gotten better compensated while programming has gotten worse, it would have meant they'd be incentivized to change careers.
What I see locally is that cost of living has gone up but no other jobs (aside maybe real estate?) have improved compensation relatively to programming in that time.
There is a lot more value being produced, but the capitalist class has managed to capture a much higher percentage of it, leaving the worker bees with less and less. At least we have lots of toys to distract us!
Outsourcing everything is what's really destroying the salaries in "advanced" countries. And high inflation seems to go hand in hand with the domestic economic shutdown and trade imbalances.
Worry not we started to outsource to India as well...
My wife's company (low code domain-specific software creators) laid off 80% of their workforce and contracted a smaller amount of people from India.
It's not going well but I bet it's gonna take at least a year before anyone notices.
well I'm pretty well paid for Denmark, but my wages haven't really gone up in the last few years and when I look at payment rates in Denmark I'm still pretty much at the top for programmers who don't consult - but my wage used to be the same as the average two person household in Denmark and now it is a couple hundred dollars less.
It could be a nod to a shift into ‘do more with less’. In Sweden hospitals and schools have basically lost all their administrative staff and students per class has grown. Teacher salaries might not have gone down, but expectations are much higher, as they have less support from non-teaching staff.
Assistants, like Copilot, substitute for junior devs, making it possible or more likely that a team will put off hiring. I have seen this silent killer in action.
I'm much earlier in my career than you are but have had serious thoughts about leaving the industry altogether for similar reasons. The interview processes are absolutely toxic these days, much of the industry seems like an outright scam (crypto, AI, etc.) and the trend is to casually waste resources.
Part of my motivation to go into writing code in the first place was that I noticed software getting worse and more user-hostile in the 2010s and I wanted to change that. Turns out the people making software worse think the stuff that makes it worse are "best practices" so you're fighting an impossible battle and nobody is going to dare allowing you to advance into a leadership position or often even get a job in the first place unless they think you're a true believer in the BS.
I also have no interest, at this point, in writing code unless I'm paid to do it. It's hard to find motivation to write code when I mentally associate it with all of the corporate BS and the grifting con artists of the tech industry. The one saving grace was that the money was good and it was possible to switch jobs for more money or because you're tired of 1 particular company's BS. Now, even that isn't possible anymore so what's the point?
> Part of my motivation to go into writing code in the first place was that I noticed software getting worse and more user-hostile in the 2010s and I wanted to change that. Turns out the people making software worse think the stuff that makes it worse are "best practices"
Yea, this has been the biggest change I've witnessed during my career. When I got into computers and programming, it was all about empowering the user, helping the user solve their problems, and providing the user with the tools that make the computer do what he wants it to do.
Now, the software industry is mostly about empowering the software company (and its "partners"), solving the company's problems, and making the user's computer do what the company wants it to do. From the software company's point of view, the user is seen as either 1. an annoying middle-man who just happens to (for now) possess the computer and/or 2. a cow to be milked for money, attention, engagement or time.
I wonder how many other people were at Apple from the mid-90's until a few years ago, that's an incredibly long tenure. It seems like one of the more interesting places to be during several very interesting transformations.
I've had 3 jobs in the ~decade-long range. I was really ready to move on in each case. Partly I was ready for a change and partly the company had changed.
I was not obsolete. A big company like Apple, there are always things that need taken care of.
I assumed with iOS, Swift, etc., maybe the guys on the Cocoa team were obsolete? Of course not. That code is still there, still needs maintaining, interoperability with the new languages, frameworks, etc.
I'm more surprised they want to stay on.
And that is in fact why I left Apple: the job had changed, the "career" had changed. The engineers were no longer steering the ship. It had been that way when I started in 1995 though. A "team", let's say the graphics team, would figure out what API to revisit, what new ones to add — perhaps how to refactor the entire underlying workflow. The "tech lead" (who would regularly attend Siggraph since we're talking about the graphics team) would make the call as to what got priority. Marketing would come around after the fact to "create a narrative" around all the changes to the OS. I hate to say it, but many, those were the good ole' days.
(And let's be clear, in the 90's, Apple's customers were more or less like the engineers, we also loved the machine for the same reasons they did — so we did right by them, made changes they would like because we wanted them too. You can't say that as convincingly for the phone, being a mass consumer device.)
Marketing took the reins long ago though — especially as Apple began to succeed with the iPhone (which, someone can correct me if I am wrong, but I think was an engineer driven project initially — I mean most things were up to that point).
I stuck around nonetheless though because there was money to be made and kids still to raise.
When the last daughter flew the coop though, so did I.