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Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

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 :)

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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.

There are power/perf teams at Apple that have this as their core job responsibilities

I tried to convey that there are exceptions, but I'm not sure I succeeded.

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.

Hi man, you are the John Calhoun that I read about here (https://usesthis.com/interviews/john.calhoun/)

Just want to say thank you for your work.

BTW I never used any 90s Apple product back in the day, but I always appreciated the products, the manuals, the designs.

I am.

HN is a beautiful place that I can directly speak to people I look up to :)

100%. You nailed it. Very heartening to hear this, always been unsure of my most personal analysis, as it was limited to one corp in one era.

Vastly different circumstances (shitty state school x print design gig => 2008 philosophy dropout waiting tables => build a point of sale app startup, iPhone OS 2 => sold it => 2016 Google).

I had at nigh-religious appreciation for the things I learned from the culture of roughly that era. folklore.org type stuff. Grew up on Gruber. And learning so many of your cohort on Twitter. Took me from a waiter to an engineer.

I ended up being ashamed to mention stuff I learned from it, people rarely were in touch with the culture as I understood it. Many soulless vampires afoot once the money comes in.

I'll never forget asking a (wonderful!) colleague why they wanted to work on Team X, expecting "I'm really passionate about [form factor] because [use case]" or "Well, given $LOCATION, my options were [Google Cloud | this team | Google Play Books]"...instead it was "well, coming out of $IVY_LEAGUE with $STEM_MAJOR, my best options were finance or programming, and finance seemed worse"

I had far too many out-of-left-field interactions like that. And it poisons the place in many ways that, to me, ultimately damn it to mediocrity.

If you got hired on as an L4, didn’t mind missing out on promotions, and were ok working with your manager it could definitely work.

Ah it's a pity that they don't hire that many in Canada, especially in Quebec.

Yep, fixing bugs/performance is just not valued by big companies

No one gets promoted doing it

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