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Comment by laweijfmvo

10 months ago

There are plenty of us that would love to just sit and fix things all day, but then you get a poor performance review for not shipping new features and find yourself out of a job :)

I wonder how can I join MSFT or Apple just to fix stuffs? Don't care about salary as long as it's on par with my current one.

  • That's not how Apple works. You'd be given requirements specific to your team and expected to implement them. End of story. You wouldn't be empowered to seek out other teams and fix their stuff (or even necessarily talk to them). It's deliberate and intentional to have very few people with that cross-functional power.

    • You're right and not right. There were the infrequent occasions when an engineer would be tracking down a problem they were having and end up in another teams framework/code. A Radar would be created, a polite code diff attached and, often, the team would take the patch and roll it into the next build.

      It did not happen often though to be sure.

  • I thought this once, it's a disappointing experience. You'll hear all the right things, and 3 years in, realize nothing you do matters to anyone, and that's because all the managers who were so excited about your passion for software quality haven't met with you in a 2 years. And then it clicks, they got promoted by knowing the game: features, resembling the rushed planning deck, delivered yearly. (This is a whole lot easier to whine about after banking the salary for 7 years, of course)

    • You know, money fucked up Apple. When I started there (1995) no one came to Apple as a "career move". Everyone there was passionate about the machine, the code, the UI.

      Not so after the iPhone.

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