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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

I actually think Jobs was responsible for this decline.

If you read stories about the iPhone's development, you come across anecdotes that Apple tapped its top engineers to get the iPhone out the door. They worked long hours and weekends. Many lost spouses and relationships. It was extremely taxing. Again this is another anecdote, but it seems many of these engineers left around the release of the iPhone 4. The iPhone pipeline became a never-ending treadmill.

The tax of losing much of the top talent across all engineering functions has slowly taken its toll on Apple since. I would not be surprised if the institutional knowledge of OSX has either left or been promoted up the ladder, leaving that team with new hires unfamiliar with its inner workings.

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Is there a reason innovative work always seems to feature such insane burn out? You hear it everywhere you see really major strides being made.

The thing I find disturbing is that moving slower doesn't just result in the thing coming slower. It seems to result in never shipping or a lack of innovation. It's like there is some kind of activation energy that must be overcome and the effect is non linear. Real innovation only ships at the threshold of collapse.

I find it disturbing because if true it means innovation is Molech, a god that demands a kind of human sacrifice in the form of burnout, destruction of health, loss of relationships, etc.

I suspect this is nowhere near universal as we might think. Maybe it comes from viewer’s bias or a personality flaw common to individuals obssessed enough to invent, but nothing about progress benefits from personal destruction. There must be examples of progress without pain. Did inventing the internet cause anyone grief?

> Did inventing the internet cause anyone grief?

Well it could certainly be said to have caused Al Gore some grief...

So, essentially the IBM problem of seeing how long brand momentum can keep a train moving?

...and an epic example of the bigger they are the harder they fall in the making. Am typing this from Sierra OSX, btw, not cynical, just kind of bummed about the decline of OSX' quality.

Some of this seems the inevitable fate of all large tech companies.

Apple / Amazon / etc compensates highly to retain engineering talent -> overweight tech salaries -> engineers burning out / leaving for more interesting startup opportunities -> successful startups being reacquired

Unfortunately, doesn't work so well for things like operating system codebases (NeXTSTEP acquisition aside).

I'm not sure the salaries have anything to do with it, and I vaguely recall Apple being middle of the pack there anyway.

I think it's more about appealing to peoples' ambitions and desire to be recognized in this case. Imagine if a VP of Engineering addressed you directly to 'make a big impact' on the company's new secret product. Many engineers would want to impress this person, consequences be damned.

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