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This reminds me of the fascinating NYT story about the lead up to the original iPhone announcement event: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/and-then-steve-s....

A choice excerpt:

> The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.

I guess I post this here as a means to say, while what OP is talking about certainly sucks, Apple seems to have a long history of this. Doesn't make it better, and certainly what he's outlined seems extra bad, but not completely unexpected.

Indeed. Apple's MO for a LONG time has been, "The way things have always worked should always be rethought, and we've come up with a better way for you". Many Apple users on forums like this tend to be Apple apologists until they introduce that one change that's too much, and then it's all "Apple's lost their way!" when the reality is it's just Apple being Apple.

That’s not what the parent comment is saying at all.

There’s a difference between a golden path for a demo for a product that will ship in 6 month and a public release thats still very buggy.

And a public beta that will mess your files on other devices(!?)

Great read! Thanks for sharing. Highly encourage anyone who is on the fence about reading the whole thing to go for it.

Steve, and others like him, do make me wonder. On the one hand, I work four days a week, never stay late at work, and live a good, steady life. But on the other hand, I see these super-stars, these drive-people-to-the-edge, sleep-on-shop-floor types, and see how much change and drive they create, it makes me start to think that maybe I should work _much_ harder. But then again, I quite like all this time I have to think on things. And of course, we don't get all the details about how this style of work _really_ affects home life; I'm sure we'd have much less respect for these super-stars if we knew they _all_ had screwed up lives away from work.

I know what you mean, the appeal of this total dedication. For myself, I've come to the conclusion that I could not do it for long, not as long as I'd have to. I think for those types like Jobs, Musk, it wasn't even a conscious choice they made to put all they had into their work, they are/were just driven. You'd know it if you were, too. They could never have done a four-day work week with zero overtime, it was never an option for them. So, enjoy your life as it is, this is yours, theirs is different, and don't think you're missing out on anything.

Reminds me of an anecdote I heard about starting your own company. It's great, you're the boss. You can work half days if you want. You even get to choose which 12 hours that will be.

Demos of new products always have golden paths, and even demos of production grade software have golden paths very frequently because maintaining complex software in a demo-able state is hard (i.e. historical reports need to show a plausible history without anyone actually using the system).

I've been at Adobe at a time when they shipped Creative Suite, as boxes (even though downloads started to be more prevalent, it was still very much pre-packaged software). People don't give Adobe enough credit for what it was achieving back then - every 18 months, like clockwork, it shipped an entire suite of huge applications, that needed to work well with one another. And they couldn't rely on post-release fixes - because US accounting regulations made it impossible to ship fixes after the GM builds, if I remember correctly. And they did it. Reliably so - at least until CS6 (with the subscription, things changed, you can now ship fixes anytime). What's more impressive than the fact that they did it, is that from the engineering perspective, it was an "of course we'll do it" - there wasn't at any point any doubt that CSnext will be released, and will be released on time. And it had to be awesome - the entire company depended on it.

Thing is, there was nothing really special that Adobe did and I haven't witnessed elsewhere. Extensive testing, pre-releases/ getting the most loyal users involved early. Waterfall, yes - but "waterfall done right" (I don't think the overhead was too onerous). What they probably did "specially" though, even though it sounds mundane and boring... was to relentlessly cut scope. It was no shame to do less than what you initially planed for - but it was a crime to not say ASAP that you may not be able to do what you promised. I know personally of a feature that didn't ship in CS5, at all, because it was deemed "not ready" (even though at the start it was deemed as "required"); almost brought down a development center (that was supposed to ship it), and their biggest sin was not that they weren't ready, but that they didn't say so until it was too late.

The short version of all this, I guess, is that cutting scope can do miracles. I'm surprised that it's not used more widely - and somewhat saddened that even Adobe lost its skill at this (from my pov, the cloud has enticed the management to ship features that are not quite ready yet, and counter-intuitively, I think this actually slows them down now).

I work for a big software corp in SV with a yearly conference where we announce all of our products. Managers give zero shits about product quality as long as we deliver on time for the "big show". Bugs, future maintenance burden, and other shortcomings be damned because they'll probably be long gone after they get their promotion (and probably at another company rinsing and repeating) and by then, these issues become someone else's. This has caused engineers to become incentivized to place priority on delivering over quality. Funny how this short-term growth mindset comes top-down from where it all starts in Wall Street. If we want to fix the system, we need to first fix Wall Street and bring back accountability.

Wall Street "incentivises" the people that are there to supposedly make them accountable. Personally, that's where I believe the problem begins.

Counterpoint: I've worked at SV unicorns that were not public, and did not intend to go public in the near term. And they had a similar "damn the torpedoes! full speed ahead!" attitude. So I think it is more pervasive than just Wall Street.

Everybody reads the same management books as Wall Street.

I don't think it comes from management books.

The problem is deeper, it's psychological. At the level where full time, professional management begins it starts to become very unclear how to judge a manager's success over short/medium periods of time. Yeah in the very long run "is the product a success" can be used to judge, but that captures a lot of people who aren't the manager and may take years to figure out. You need to evaluate their performance before then.

So people come up with heuristics, like "does this manager meet their commitments". But software is inherently unpredictable so the answer to this question is always random. This results in managers trying to look like they're doing a good job by forcing early releases: they are thus seen to be "meeting their commitments" and must be good managers, with the quality issues showing up much later at which point they can just shrug and say, well, all software has bugs. Unless a layer of management higher up digs into individual bug reports and investigates really deeply to conclude, no, you forced an early release before it was ready, they won't be held accountable.

It's the principal-agent problem coming home to roost in a world without principals. Everyone is effectively an agent because the principals are sufficiently "diversified" that they don't really have substantial direct investment in long-term organizational success. What matters most is the short-term boost that you can use to dazzle the next employer.

Every employee knows that they're going to stay for 5 years max because companies have made it impossible for there not to be a massive market disparity if you keep stable employment. There are no perks to long-term loyalty and thus no reason to consider an employer's long-term interests as identical to your own. The outcome of this is the predictable situation we see now.

Like it or not, the company's culture comes from the top down. If the boss doesn't know or care whether the product is substantial, people who do will eventually be replaced at least until the boss is duly insulated from them. No one wants to rain on the parade of the guy who holds hire/fire authority.

There's a wider thing here too, which is that the market doesn't know or care about any of the technical details either. You need the touted features to work correctly just enough to create sufficient ambiguity, probably about 10-15% of the time. If you invest enough engineering effort to get them working correctly 90%+ of the time, that's a great deal more money and time spent on engineering for no market benefit. A competitor who dumps that money into marketing and sales will come out far ahead because technical quality and reliability simply doesn't drive sales.

Regulation for publicly listed companies means that the bottom is actually higher than for VC-funded companies, where nothing of substance needs to be generally known. (wework?)

SV == Wall St. West.

Same short term thinking, same self-aggrandizement, same convincing yourself of how rational you are, when most actions are driven by emotions, but with more casual clothing.

"big-splash release cycle is fundamentally breaking engineering"

I strongly prefer Apple ship functionality incrementally. No more big bang.

Especially be more cautious with new kits (core libraries). Just one or two end user facing features on some fraction of hardware. Then expand over time.

With Apple's installed base, it's an engineering marvel there's so little drama. But I want no drama, which means waiting a bit longer. Which is fine.

Source: Ecstatically happy Apple fanatic.

> I'm beginning to think the average employee or middle manager has even more perverse incentives to make poor short-term decisions.

Quite a lot of that, in my experience, is driven by fear of losing their job in an at-will employment environment.