Broken

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 every group of 4 people is in a little silo with no incentive to go outside it

- Broken management structure. I have had many managers (a red flag in itself) but even worse none of the managers take suggestions from engineers. Everything is purely top down. If an engineer realizes there is a problem on a macro scale they cannot fix it. It is literally impossible to unite more than 1.5 teams to get anything done.

- So what happens is that you’re working on a product that’s part of another product but you never talked to any other teams or orgs on how to make your product fit in

- 10 different teams working on the same products and services. Zero unification means you are literally wasting developers and internally fragmenting every tool. Even worse, these teams compete for internal market domination

- Culture of secrecy means nothing gets fucking done. You file a bug report and you can’t even see it any more for some orgs

This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are fundamental and serious problems at Apple that no one in management gives a shit about solving. Any time engineers try to congregate or work on anything constructive with another team, they are shot down.

The only time I have seen cross-team developers working together has been to deal with critical bugs.

Because of the lack of communication, none of management’s goals align. They are all out of sync and poorly thought out. So year after year your manager has something they want you to implement but the feature for the year is bullshit because it makes no sense and is just there to pad the manager’s resume.

And you can’t speak out about this. Apple doesn’t take well to employees complaining. Even then, because of the lack of organization there is no one you could raise these issues with.

Unfortunately, not well enough. Catalina contains security fixes that apparently [0] haven't yet been backported to Mojave, let alone the others. I wonder how early or late into the beta those bugs were fixed; potentially, they've been patched for months.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201222

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/07/apple_catalina_secu...

Did you try connecting to it with a cable?

I can't get Chrome desktop notifications to work anymore, but the worst thing is that all my Apple Music playlists have disappeared from my iPhone.

They do exist in the Catalina Music app, but not on the phone where I need them. I suspect it's because my iPhone 6 isn't supported by the latest iOS release and there appears to be some iCloud version incompatibility that was triggered by Catalina. The iPhone Music app has crashed a few times as well.

They do warn me of just such an incompatibility when I open the Reminders app (which now has a far more convoluted user interface for no apparent benefit). I get the feeling that my decision to just keep using my iPhone 6 until it's not longer good enough will be difficult to sustain.

Catalina also randomly stalls for a second or two and some mouse clicks just don't register for a long time until they eventually do. This seems to have gotten a bit better now so I'm hopeful that it was related to uncached data.

It's always the same – this time out:

• Guy installed beta software and it was buggy. STOP THE PRESSES!!!!

• "I'm a pro user, I've functionally given escalated privs to apps that steal my data, every Electron container POS ever written, and 100 open standards only Chrome supports. How DARE Apple ask desktop users for permissions on upgrade!?!?!? Keep that security stuff for smartphone users – filthy casuals."

• Forgot Password. #classic

• Somehow my hostname changed during a system update.

And the cycle continues. Comments section without fail: 4-5 commenters who maybe used a Mac once are somehow experts on MBP keyboards, no one likes the Touch Bar, software quality, here's a Linux laptop I like (obligatory distro discussion in reply), "Services Company", a WWSJD for good measure, blah blah blah, Apple is DOOOOMED!

Sure, the public at large loves drama, but the ethos of Hacker News supposedly assumes some higher quality of posts + commentariat due to an audience of those involved in building software, startups, products, and hacks that require technical knowhow. Rather, the tendency of the vocal minority who post these anti-Apple Medium articles and comments is quite perverse:

- rail against the mythical "manager" strawperson who hates software quality and is just out to steal money, jobs, or some other vague emotional rallying cry from all us hard working devs.

- "empathize" by infantilizing the industry and software engineers. Neither devs nor tech companies have any responsibility for speaking up on scope, making well-justified technical decisions, keeping in mind the end user or world around them, or voting with their feet, etc.

You hate to see it. Since it's the exact same platform war crap that's been going on forever, it's always big, bad, Cupertino that's at fault...

...and yet, I've been using Catalina (on a separate machine until a late beta), treat my personal accounts as production, assume every process and line of code might be a potential attack vector, and support reasonable software policies which respect I'm both an end user and a software professional.

Isn't perfect, but stable enough for both development and production, just like software since time immortal. Not broken.