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Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

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Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#21

Post by zbentley »

bsvalley wrote: post #16

Been there done that. A real solution would be to stop hiring new developers, to reduce the size of the current dev team, to reduce the size and responsibility of the QA team in order to force developers to test their own code. To eliminate any new feature requirements, to prioritze regression testing (migration, update, etc) and to allocate a whole release to trim the pile of bugs in radar. Why Apple can’t do that?…

> You can’t hire good developers and ask them to fix bugs for a year because they would run away from you

Really? I've never experienced that in the workplace. However, I'm not that widely travelled and not in SV, so I guess I'd be "unsurprised but depressed" to learn that this degree of idiotic entitlement is common. And idiotic is exactly what it is: truly quality software is the product of lots and lots of bugfixing. It's like the "10% inspiration/90% perspiration" thing, but for initial development and bugfix/gradual improvement work. Especially on huge (OS-sized) software, people hiring on should not be surprised that this is the bulk of their day-to-day.

I get that greenfield development is more fun up front. I just (perhaps naïvely) hope that most professionals understand that a) "fun" and "good for the product" aren't the same thing, and b) that it can also be very personally rewarding to spend a long time fixing bugs (yours or others') and see the quality of/user happiness with a product noticeably increase.

Also, I think being able to say "I fix bugs to maintain an operating system used by millions" is at least as rewarding as being able to say "I make buggy websites for startups whose marketing buzz reaches millions".

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#22

Post by zbentley »

gargravarr wrote: post #7
gkgicccj wrote: post #2

Simple answer - no money in osx, it's all in ios.

Tragically I think this is the answer - all of Apple's talented developers have most likely shunted over to iOS and the quality of macOS has been left to rot. What's infuriating is that High Sierra, as referenced in its naming scheme, is supposed to be minor improvements on top of plain Sierra, but it breaks so many things that I am drawn to compare it to Vista - half-baked, unfinished, should never have been release…

> all of Apple's talented developers have most likely shunted over to iOS

This gets trotted out a lot, but I have trouble believing it. I don't think Apple considers developers to be in short supply--and if they do, it's very stupid of them and they should reexamine that thinking.

I know that demand > supply for skilled developers right now, but Apple has enormous amounts of money in the bank. They can't use a tiny fraction of that to get themselves more, or better developers? I doubt that shareholders would notice/care if a few millions of dollars went towards a hiring blitz for, say, 100 really good engineers with salaries so competitive that Apple could poach them from wherever else they work.

I'm not saying that "throw bodies at the problem" is always a good solution, but Apple can easily afford to throw really, really talented bodies around, and if short-staffing is their problem, it seems like the solution is obvious.

Am I missing something here? Would adding a bunch of beyond-competitive senior developer salaries dent Apple's numbers more than I think they would? Are there really just not that many developers willing and able to work on this at any price? If not, is the problem with "willing" or with "able"?

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#23

Post by codycraven »

wlll wrote: post #10

I have a mid 2014 Macbook Pro (top of the line, discrete GPU and all) and some recent update has made it really slow (not the Meltdown updates, something before that). It now takes an age to switch workspaces, to load the task switcher, to change applications etc. Stuff also seems to go wrong more. App crashes, iTunes refusing to open, Finder crashing etc. The annoying thing is I tried to upgrade to a new Macbook Pro…

Maybe you should replace the battery

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#24

Post by gargravarr »

zbentley wrote: post #22
gargravarr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tragically I think this is the answer - all of Apple's talented developers have most likely shunted over to iOS and the quality of macOS has been left to rot. What's infuriating is that High Sierra, as referenced in its naming scheme, is supposed to be minor improvements on top of plain Sierra, but it breaks so many things that I am drawn to compare it to Vista - half-baked, unfinished, should never have been release…

> all of Apple's talented developers have most likely shunted over to iOS This gets trotted out a lot, but I have trouble believing it. I don't think Apple considers developers to be in short supply--and if they do, it's very stupid of them and they should reexamine that thinking. I know that demand > supply for skilled developers right now, but Apple has enormous amounts of money in the bank. They can't use a tiny f…

I'm not saying Apple themselves have shunted the developers, I'm thinking that the developers themselves have moved jobs of their own accord since they see no future in macOS. It's been obvious for a while now that Apple only considers iDevices as their money-spinners. Their actual computers have been long neglected, and their updates for the last several years have been to include more iDevice-like features, so I would think the macOS developers would willingly believe Apple themselves aren't wholeheartedly behind maintaining their desktop OS. It just feels like there is very little willingness from Apple to build a good desktop OS any more, and no sense hiring macOS developers as a result.

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#25

Post by gargravarr »

BoorishBears wrote: post #17
gargravarr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tragically I think this is the answer - all of Apple's talented developers have most likely shunted over to iOS and the quality of macOS has been left to rot. What's infuriating is that High Sierra, as referenced in its naming scheme, is supposed to be minor improvements on top of plain Sierra, but it breaks so many things that I am drawn to compare it to Vista - half-baked, unfinished, should never have been release…

I hear this all the time but I’m not sure it’s true. iOS is in the exact same place. The number of weird bugs and subtlety broken interactions I’ve seen has been growing exponentially. Even as I type this my Safari address bar is pushed halfway into my status bar, making them overlap. A couple of weeks back my phone became unusable in the middle of the Everglades as I was relying on it to get back to my hotel. A mess…

I'm not saying the developers actually are moving, or would make any difference to buggy software if they did, but Apple can shift iDevices by the shipload, faster than they can build them. They've become a phone company first and foremost, and it feels like their computer lineup is suffering as a result. As such, I can easily believe that developers see no future in macOS and are willingly moving over to iOS.

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#26

Post by wlll »

codycraven wrote: post #23
wlll wrote: post #10

I have a mid 2014 Macbook Pro (top of the line, discrete GPU and all) and some recent update has made it really slow (not the Meltdown updates, something before that). It now takes an age to switch workspaces, to load the task switcher, to change applications etc. Stuff also seems to go wrong more. App crashes, iTunes refusing to open, Finder crashing etc. The annoying thing is I tried to upgrade to a new Macbook Pro…

Maybe you should replace the battery

It's plugged into the mains, but regardless, Apple replaced the battery a couple of months ago, currently has only 19 charge cycles.

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#27

Post by bsvalley »

zbentley wrote: post #21
bsvalley wrote: post #16

Been there done that. A real solution would be to stop hiring new developers, to reduce the size of the current dev team, to reduce the size and responsibility of the QA team in order to force developers to test their own code. To eliminate any new feature requirements, to prioritze regression testing (migration, update, etc) and to allocate a whole release to trim the pile of bugs in radar. Why Apple can’t do that?…

> You can’t hire good developers and ask them to fix bugs for a year because they would run away from you Really? I've never experienced that in the workplace. However, I'm not that widely travelled and not in SV, so I guess I'd be "unsurprised but depressed" to learn that this degree of idiotic entitlement is common. And idiotic is exactly what it is: truly quality software is the product of lots and lots of bugfixi…

I think we're on the same page. I was simply highlighting things I witnessed from my past experience. Bugs (in Mac OS) get really nasty sometimes and frustrating for the most part. It is brain consuming and the reward isn't always worth the energy spent. Management doesn't even reward bug fixing unlike the "new" stuff. Ask any dev from that specific team (or even iOS team) to fix bugs for a whole year and you'll see the reaction. Some actually do because of a "lower" global performance at work. You can easily get assigned on bugs over "new" stuff if you don't hustle 24/7 but that's a whole new topic :)

But to add up to my previous comment - only a few people get to implement new stuff each year, they don't test their code and fall under very tight deadlines, so they produce buggy stuff. This generates tones of new bugs constantly tracked by QA (QA doesn't fix anything, they just report problems), bugs quickly pill-up in Radar and developers are already assigned onto something else. Most of the bugs reported by customers are duplicates... they're usually already tracked, either not assigned yet or simply lower priority than something else. So what it the problem? Well, everything I mentioned ;)

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#28

Post by zbentley »

bsvalley wrote: post #27
zbentley wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can’t hire good developers and ask them to fix bugs for a year because they would run away from you Really? I've never experienced that in the workplace. However, I'm not that widely travelled and not in SV, so I guess I'd be "unsurprised but depressed" to learn that this degree of idiotic entitlement is common. And idiotic is exactly what it is: truly quality software is the product of lots and lots of bugfixi…

I think we're on the same page. I was simply highlighting things I witnessed from my past experience. Bugs (in Mac OS) get really nasty sometimes and frustrating for the most part. It is brain consuming and the reward isn't always worth the energy spent. Management doesn't even reward bug fixing unlike the "new" stuff. Ask any dev from that specific team (or even iOS team) to fix bugs for a whole year and you'll see…

I think we agree as well; my reply was meant to speculate on whether anti-maintenance sentiment comes from developers or higher up (culture etc.).

> Management doesn't even reward bug fixing

I think that's the moral of the story. It's not that developers are childish, stamp their feet, and refuse to do bugfix work; it's that they're incentivized to not do it.

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#29

Post by dddw »

I find this all quite hilarious, seeming I'm running this on a 2009 white Macbook running on High Sierra, running like a dream. Granted I only use it for some media stuff, but it works great on this oldest supported device for HS by Apple. Yes I had to bump the HDD to SSD and RAM to 8GB, but it is still usable.

Re: Ask HN: Why does High Sierra break so much stuff?

#30

Post by scarface74 »

snowwrestler wrote: post #19
Terretta wrote: post #8

An alternative explanation, likely unsatisfactory, but possibly correlated to continued growth of social media such as this very site: Stanford linguistics professor Arnold Zwicky coined [the term "frequency illusion"] in 2006 to describe the syndrome in which a concept or thing you just found out about suddenly seems to crop up everywhere. It’s caused, he wrote, by two psychological processes. The first, selective a…

I think there is another psychological factor at work, which is that people feel more critical toward, or at least more free to express criticism of, very successful people or orgs. When Apple was struggling for success against Microsoft a decade ago, it seemed like a lot of tech folks gave them a pretty big benefit of the doubt. OS releases had problems then, but the reaction was usually balanced by a sense of, "thi…

In 2008, Apple wasn't exactly struggling. The iPod reached its peak in December 2008, the iPhone had just been released and it had a market cap of $500 billion.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/02/apple-inc-valuati...

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