Hacker News Reader

Comment by chmaynard | Hacker News Reader

You're joking, right?

No, I am completely serious. This is how things work in big organizations.

As far as I've been able to tell, Apple engineers use "file a radar" to mean "I'd rather let someone else triage that, or even better yet I'd rather you get lost in the system, so here's a quest for you to go on so I can get back to work", particularly as we all know that at the end of that quest the result will be "marked as duplicate", past which point Apple refuses to give you any more information or even a follow-up. I would honestly rather there just be an e-mail address bugs@apple.com to which I could shoot off random issues I run into, from which I know I'd get no response, than Radar.

Is it the best tool in the world? No. Is it the only actual tool to communicate bugs and enhancement requests to Apple? Almost. We've all used issue tracking software to add to backlog ("Open a Jira and I'll take a look when I have time"). Doesn't mean it's not being looked at.

That's a rather insulting comment, and it's completely wrong. Apple engineers tell you to file a radar because if it's not in radar, it won't get done. Period. Radar is the way Apple engineers track work that needs to get done, and if nobody files a radar, it can't be tracked, prioritized, assigned, and completed.

The problem is that none of that is apparent to an outsider. You can tell developers that filing radars is important until you're blue in the face, but as long as dealing with Radar from the outside is functionally identical to talking to a wall, you shouldn't be surprised when you get pushback like the parent's.

If you find that "insulting", consider how it feels to be told to go through the work of filing dozens of most-likely-duplicate reports simply because Apple won't deign to allow searching existing reports. Regardless of whatever excuses they give for that, it sends a very clear signal about how Apple values the time of third-party developers.

> The problem is that none of that is apparent to an outsider.

What exactly isn't apparent? How Radar is the way things get done and you need to file a Radar if you want anything fixed? I'd think that's crystal clear given that every single Apple engineer you talk to will explain this to you.

I worked at Apple for many years, and I'm very aware of how Radar was used internally during my tenure. You're absolutely correct that Radar is taken very seriously at Apple. I won't go into detail, but what we see externally at bugreport.apple.com is almost nothing like the real thing.

It was a big mistake for Apple to ask outside developers to use a bug tracking tool that purports to be a user interface into Radar. I would much prefer a ticket system like those used at other companies. If Apple engineers triage a ticket and decide to open a Radar, that process should be opaque to the outside world.

Once Developer Relations made the decision to allow outside developers to create bug reports, Apple should have given us a modern, full-featured web interface. Instead, they gave us the ridiculous, brain-dead tool that you see at bugreport.apple.com, which looks like it was designed by an incompetent Cobol programmer (apologies to Grace Hopper).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com