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Broken

tyler.io

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Re: Broken

#521

Post by LeoNatan25 »

mch82 wrote: post #444
snapples wrote: post #131

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

Ever considered emailing Tim Cook? Don’t throw your managers under the bus, stay optimistic, anchor your message in whole company success. You might be surprised at the impact you can have & the replies you’ll get. Here’s a formula you can try... Hi Tim, At you talked about , which I’m excited about! I/we’ve been experimenting with . We’ve seen . What other teams should I/we collaborate with to help Apple get to fast…

Cook is a corporate bureaucrat. in the best case scenario, he’d point you to your management chain, and in the worst, summon an inquiry into why you contacted him in the first place.

Re: Broken

#522

Post by Liskni_si »

als0 wrote: post #91
temac wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite having a lower quality than before since a few years, Windows has login and locking features that actually work (and I don't even really remember of bugs in there, like ever), so no, from what you describe it does not feel like Windows at all, it feels like some completely broken crap.

While on the subject, on Linux I've also noticed that Xscreensaver (or GNOME screensaver, can't remember which) sometimes goes straight into the desktop after wakeup for a few seconds before the lock screen prompt actually appears. You can even run programs. Really bizarre and feels like this issue has been present for a while now. Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me?

I think this is because xscreensaver confines (grabs) the mouse cursor to the area occupied by the "Please enter your password" window. If this area somehow suddenly happens to be out of your screen boundaries (e.g. when xrandr --offing external screens), the mouse is ungrabbed and can be used to interact with the desktop. It takes a while before xscreensaver notices and grabs it again. Someone should probably figure out the exact steps to reproduce this and report it.

As said elsewhere, locking X is really hard, and xscreensaver architecture doesn't help. This week I managed to crash xscreensaver login prompt twice, unlocking the desktop without entering my password, and that was the last straw, I switched to xsecurelock which separates the login entry into another process, making such bugs much less severe.

Unfortunately I can't reliably reproduce the crash. A hardware fuzzer (also known as a faulty ThinkPad keyboard) was involved, and I don't possess the device any more. I think what it did was press certain keys very often ­— the keyboard matrix is sampled at 125 Hz, so I'm guessing it was pressing the keys about 60 times per second, but I'm not sure which keys they were. If anyone manages to reproduce this, please do give me a shout. :-)

Re: Broken

#523

Post by repolfx »

toyg wrote: post #147
mandevil wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: I've worked at SV unicorns that were not public, and did not intend to go public in the near term. And they had a similar "damn the torpedoes! full speed ahead!" attitude. So I think it is more pervasive than just Wall Street.

Everybody reads the same management books as Wall Street.

I don't think it comes from management books.

The problem is deeper, it's psychological. At the level where full time, professional management begins it starts to become very unclear how to judge a manager's success over short/medium periods of time. Yeah in the very long run "is the product a success" can be used to judge, but that captures a lot of people who aren't the manager and may take years to figure out. You need to evaluate their performance before then.

So people come up with heuristics, like "does this manager meet their commitments". But software is inherently unpredictable so the answer to this question is always random. This results in managers trying to look like they're doing a good job by forcing early releases: they are thus seen to be "meeting their commitments" and must be good managers, with the quality issues showing up much later at which point they can just shrug and say, well, all software has bugs. Unless a layer of management higher up digs into individual bug reports and investigates really deeply to conclude, no, you forced an early release before it was ready, they won't be held accountable.

Re: Broken

#524

Post by devdas »

zanny wrote: post #154
snapples wrote: post #131

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

It absolutely isn't the individual employee developers job or responsibility to try to fix corporate culture. Almost anyone on here or reading this is a line worker developer and trying to take on the job responsibilities of C level staff is setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. Any company larger than a few dozen people is entrenched - there will be a hierarchy and the top will dictate the order of thi…

This is what unions are good for.

Re: Broken

#525

Post by devdas »

m12k wrote: post #477
tpmx wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean when you say "organize"?

Not OP, but I'm guessing they mean something like 'make sure the right hand knows what the left hand is doing'. Making sure the effort to produce something is done collaboratively by all teams instead of each team working in isolation without coordinating with others, with the risk of duplicated effort or one team tripping up others.

Or you know, things like unions.

Re: Broken

#526

Post by repolfx »

clopez wrote: post #397
dTal wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting and keeping a Linux Desktop in good working order is harder than it should be at this age of Linux. Maybe because all the developers ran away to Macs, instead of sticking around dogfooding and fixing bugs? Free software is a collaborative social enterprise - it's not really anyone's job to make free stuff for you to use. If, as a developer, you've taken the easy path of proprietary software for years, and n…

This!. Love your reply. I'm also tired of developers criticizing Linux desktop for not being friendly enough and running away to propietary systems instead of trying to help to fix what they don't like of Linux Desktop. That's the good thing of open source: don't like it? Then fix it and send me a patch and stop complaining. Its not like propietary systems where you only can complain (you can't fix)

This attitude really bugs me. Linux is crap because the community around it is dysfunctional and doesn't care about building a working system, not because developers "ran away".

I am typing this on a Mac. I spent years as a desktop Linux user and developer.

For maybe 5-6 years, I invested my evenings and weekends in trying to improve desktop Linux. I fixed bugs in ALSA. I worked on Wine. I fixed bugs in GNOME. I wrote freedesktop.org specs. I did a lot of stuff.

I also watched as lots of other people tried to fix basic problems.

You know what my experience was?

Half the time, attempts to fix things triggered massive flamewars. KDE and GNOME couldn't agree on basic things like how notifications should work; any attempt to come up with a compromise system resulted in the KDE guys screaming and yelling about how everyone should just adopt their own system (which had braindead usability problems). Linux people thought package management was God's Gift to users, even though actual users kept telling them it was awful and they just wanted to download apps from websites. The kernel developers insisted that every driver by GPLd, even though this was incompatible with the business models of key hardware developers, resulting in those firms working around the GPL, ensuring nobody "won". Common distros couldn't play music or video files because of a refusal to pay for software patents.

The other half of the time attempts to fix anything were rapidly undone by pointless ecosystem churn as things were written, rewritten, thrown away, and rewritten again.

There was no coherent plan, no architecture, and competitive evolution turned out to be bad way to create an operating system. Developer experience was a nightmare. Any time something deviated from what was laid down by the original UNIX in the 70s it caused massive schisms and basic APIs split or stopped working.

Linux on the desktop will never be competitive with macOS regardless of how badly Apple screw up their QA because the desktop Linux community is far more dysfunctional.

Re: Broken

#528

Post by goatinaboat »

jdance wrote: post #514
goatinaboat wrote: post #485

Jobs was obsessed with design, but it had to actually work. “Real artists ship” was his famous quote and he was making tools for people who also had to ship. Cook and Ive aren’t making tools for working professionals, they are making exhibits for a design museum. This permeates the culture: no one in Apple management gives a flying fuck about the OS (or the keyboard) because you aren’t meant to use it or even switch…

Someone like Cook is probably very very busy with the logistics of running one of the worlds biggest companies. I dont think he cares that much about products, hes a businessman not a user

You might be right but that is the job of a COO not a CEO.

Re: Broken

#529

Post by ivebeenthere »

threeseed wrote: post #178
m463 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand about Steve Jobs - he the great integrator. He got lots of disparate folks to work together. I mean, he got music folks talking to computer folks. But I think he did this on a smaller scale every day and that might have been his secret sauce for apple.

I worked at Apple for a few years and he was not running around bringing teams together. At the senior leadership team level sure. But not at the engineering or middle management levels. It sounds quite similar to what OP was experiencing i.e. lots of siloed, secretive teams across a very large, 100K employee organisation.

Hmm, Apple was nowhere near that big in Jobs' era. Everybody was in one or two floors in infinite loop 1 and 2

Re: Broken

#530

Post by jrnichols »

zulln wrote: post #502
snapples wrote: post #131

Things are so broken here at Apple. I joined about 4 years ago. I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software. The biggest problem is communication. No one fucking communicates. - No communication between orgs. Tons of bureaucratic tape to cut through just to get a hand on someone working on a different product - Barely any communication between teams. Literally ev…

Have you worked at a company of similar size before?

was thinking.. the complaints listed above sound very much like an aerospace manufacturer/defense contractor i worked for before. little silos everywhere, and further complicated by gov security clearances. getting anything done was like mud.
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