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Comment by finiteseries | Hacker News Reader

I’ll be following along, hopeful you’ll publish more specifically on hiring as time goes on.

Would also love any other recentish articles about hiring macOS developers if anyone’s got em.

I’m very bearish on native macOS after the most stereotypical “worse is better” experience in the late 2010s working on a macOS (now electron) product, but am increasingly reconsidering.

It’s too early to say and I’m too cynical to anyways, but it’s starting to feel like the release of the M1s really has injected a bit of life and taste back into the scene.

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(Cofounder @ Remotion here.) One challenge with hiring macOS devs is that they don't usually come from cookie-cutter backgrounds. For example, they might have been indy devs, or consultants for a while. And those folks often fare poorly in traditional tech interviews. Hiring for macOS led us to drop standard loops in favor of contracts, projects, or however the candidate can best demonstrate skills. We have a recent blog post about "objective-based recruiting" here: https://www.remotion.com/blog/standardized-interviews-stifle...

not a macos dev, but this is a great hiring approach!

This is a lot like hiring for great iOS / android developers. And also great web developers, FWIW.

IME, the most value-generative and knowledgeable frontend/UI people I've worked with have all had really "weird" backgrounds and would fail a "standard" software engineering interview loop, and most would fail hard.

I've worked at a bunch of companies that tried to have the same hiring process for frontend and backend engineers, and it's never made sense to me.

> It’s too early to say and I’m too cynical to anyways, but it’s starting to feel like the release of the M1s really has injected a bit of life and taste back into the scene.

If anything, this creates a justification for using Electron. "Macs are too fast, even when using Rosetta, so who cares if we use Electron?"

I'm sure that's going to happen -- arguably, it already is, with 1Password moving from native toolkits to Electron on the Mac -- but it at least feels like there's a bit of a pushback on that in the Mac indie dev community in particular. Apple Silicon is part of that, but Catalyst's also starting to get its act together and SwiftUI is...well, arguably a couple years out from getting its act together, but promising.

I guess the question would be if a larger pool of users willing to vote for native apps with their $$$ would counteract the dynamic you mention.

After all the worst possible dev environment will get extensively used if there's money to be made using it (I'm thinking of talking with PS2 developers 20 years ago…).

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