Comment by whynotminot
1 year ago
Is this confined to the AI/ML group? Or across the software org at large?
I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths.
Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead.
Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.
Apple is a huge organization with a lot of internal variance. Knew someone doing localization testing for Siri and reported severe understaffing issues. There are some very small teams with crucial tasks that are badly under-resourced.
These happen to be the Xcode and macOS-parts-not-copied-from-iOS teams?
To be clear, I was not in the AI/ML org but the news org so make of that what you will. I can also confirm a similar and at times even more bonkers experience.
I also think it is expected for any sufficiently large bureaucracy. Scale is hard.
As an iOS/macOS developer I can’t say the same. Developing for Apple has been either frustrating or boring.