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Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

engineersneedart.com

431–438 of 438 posts

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't even have to take their jobs. Here's one example[1] from the OP's former employer: > The base pay range for this role is between $196,000 and $299,000, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location. ... employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in the Employee Stock Purchase Pl…

Can’t see your link, it just asks me to sign into AppleConnect

Aww jeez, and I cant edit the comment. Here's a working link: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200442275/aiml-engineer...

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leetcode is actually one of the things that makes me feel energized about programming... it's just the pure problem-solving part without logging, legacy software constraints, tedious debates about code styling, and the other lame parts of the job.

Definitely worth checking out ICPC problems if you like Leetcode. IPSC is another good one.

...and now you turned the fun part back into comparing different third party services and choosing between one.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leetcode is actually one of the things that makes me feel energized about programming... it's just the pure problem-solving part without logging, legacy software constraints, tedious debates about code styling, and the other lame parts of the job.

Definitely worth checking out ICPC problems if you like Leetcode. IPSC is another good one.

...and now you turned the fun part back into comparing different third party services and choosing between them instead of the direct problem solving.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying “no” is the correct answer. It’s the same as not solving chat request bypassing prioritization. The company is full of incentives to ask that guy for guidance/things, if he doesn’t say no most or all of the time, he simply won’t have time for his IC role, and would remain a lead just not in name. It’s hard that it comes to that extreme measure, but if his requests aren’t being heard, it’s either that or leavin…

I think it's one thing to push back on repeated requests for your input/opinion outside of your role in a way that makes you a "de facto" leader. But I think it's wholly another if you're the person with the best insight, and there is need for your knowledge to be shared. Coders are knowledge workers, not widget makers - they're paid for what they know and can do with that knowledge. This doesn't need to mean you bec…

> But I think it's wholly another if you're the person with the best insight, and there is need for your knowledge to be shared.

But what if you whole day is doing just that? and you just want to spend some time writing some code? Companies are always in need of people to write the code, so there will always be other jobs, obviously it won't pay as much, but self fulfillment is important.

I'm with you, the trade is about theory building, removing ambiguity from requirements, and the update of these, code is just a tool. Still it fells nice building something, it feels nice to see something you build working in prod / to customers. Once base needs are met, it's fine for people to not want more responsibility than necessary.

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes me sad. Do you mean you coded for fun before graduating and not since, or ever? Like you never coded a little game or a shell function to make your commandline usage easier or anything like that just for your own use, for fun? Honestly it’s a double edged sword to like coding because then you get opinions about languages. I could never be a mercenary in anything though. If I didn’t like coding I’d be a des…

Why would I? I spent from 1996 (when I graduated) -2012 as a part time fitness instructor, active runner and a weightlifter. I spent from 1996-2002 and 2006-2012 hanging out with friends and dating (I was married from 2002-2006. From 2012-2022 I spent my time with family (got remarried in 2012). By the end of 2022, my wife and I had gotten rid of everything that wouldn’t fit into three suitcases and decided to be “hy…

For you, maybe. Some of us find it a lot more fascinating than that. But whatever works.

Any marriage advice? (Most of my divorced friends would say "Never marry" lol)

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't do it as a profession, embedded programming grind is worse than conventional cloud/web programming grind

Would you say the same thing considering oncall responsibilities in conventional cloud/web programming?

I work in an IoT company and we have embedded and cloud devs, embedded is a huge pain in the ass because we can't OTA update our devices willy nilly (regulations and client's demands) and supporting older hardware creates a rats nest of backwards compatibility problems

In the cloud I can press deploy to update the servers, fixing a software problem in an embedded of a fleet with thousands of individual devices is a huge undertaking and can take months. Fixing a hardware problems usually means workarounds in software.

Heck a lot of that complexity leaks into the cloud code to fix bad design decisions made years before. Lots of "if deviceHardwareRevision We don't have huge amounts of traffic in our cloud so it is usually pretty reliable even though we don't even enforce a lot of best practices and patching a problem is relatively easy

Re: Same Stop: Life after 26 years as a programmer for Apple

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a current undergraduate, programming for fun is ubiquitous in my peers. Surprises me also that the author has to ask.

In a bit of fairness, I know a lot of very competent engineers who do not code for fun at all. Programming is purely a job for them, and then they go home and hack on nothing. There's honestly nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly valid to do something purely for the pay (so long as what you're doing is ethical, obviously). I suspect there are plenty of young people who see the bloated salaries that software engine…

In the 80s and 90s CS was often seen as a fallback if you couldn't do well in EE.
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