Henri Lamiraux, iOS Engineering Vice President, leaves Apple after 23 years | Hacker News Reader

Henri Lamiraux, iOS Engineering Vice President, leaves Apple after 23 years

9to5mac.com

38 pointsprotomyth23 comments

Sounds like more of a story of "he's retiring" (with a massive pile of money from riding AAPL stock to the top) than any sort of story of internal turmoil or schisms in the iOS dev team.

Henri is a great guy: I never worked directly with him but rather with some of his direct reports many years ago around the time the 1st iPhone was launched. We were in various meetings to flush out various details and API that will be used and I could tell that he had great engineering skills, and was well respected by his team. The iPhone team was working full speed under his direction and we got many things moving forward because Henri was supporting us and pushing the right buttons so both team could get their job done.

In a way I am not much surprise to see him retiring: I am sure the last 8/9 years since the beginning of the iPhone projects have had a lot of up and down, including stress. He did achieve a lot during his time at Apple and wish him the best retirement possible -which I am sure will not be an issue.

"The executive also led feature-implementation across the operating system, and he managed both bug-fixing processes and feature distribution to consumers."

This statement is interesting to me. My understanding of Apple's organizational structure is that individual leaders are given broad responsibility for specific things. As I read this, my impression is that Mr. Lamiraux was the buck-stops-here guy for any and all bugs that come through iOS. (Among other responsibilities.)

Inside Apple, is it that literal? I contrast that with other software companies, where those responsibilities are largely delegated out to many different people, but there is rarely a single person who is accountable. For example, I could never imagine a single, go-to individual at Microsoft who would be responsible for the bug-fixing process in Windows 8.

I file an unusually large number of bugs with Apple so I am familiar with their process, or as familiar as someone on the outside can be. There are definitely a lot more than one engineer involved in fixing bugs on ios.

That said, Apple is a fraction of the size of MS, so it would not at all surprise me if I learned that he has seen my name on bug reports.

I interpret this "managed bug-fixing processes" statement to mean "used Radar (Apple bug tracker) often enough to identify specific process improvements for radar which he then designed and led implementation".

Heh, I didn't mean to imply he's the only individual involved in bug resolution. Rather, it's his job to ensure bugs are resolved, whether he or some entire division of engineers are working on the problem.

Apple is big on having DRIs, or Directly Responsible Individuals. It really helps limit buck-passing.

That's an important consideration, and it's one I wish Apple would contribute in terms of thought leadership to the industry. We need more of this, not less of it. I'm sure it's a huge competitive advantage for Apple, but if more companies took that approach -- individual ownership vs. management-by-committee, it seems less likely things would fall through the cracks.

a bit off topic but does anyone here knows what Scott Forstall has become ?

Probably waiting for his non-compete to expire.

I have read that Non-compete agreements are void in California[1]. However, I'm not sure whether there are exceptions applicable when execs are involved.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#California

He's probably not in a real "non-compete" and more likely is still an employee getting paid for a year to do nothing.

It's probably more along the lines of an agreement that he'll get a huge payout if he doesn't work at a competitor for a year. He could certainly go and work for another company right now (there's no legal way to prevent him from doing that, as you pointed out), but he'd lose out on part of his severance pay.

Conan O'Brien worked in Los Angeles, when he left The Tonight Show and NBC, and he had a non-compete, until he started his gig with TBS, so I'm sure it's not as clear-cut.

I would like to know this too.maybe he starts his own company?

From what I read about his personality, I can't see him as anything but either this or he takes over at CEO.

Microsoft is an interesting thought. He could certainly wrangle the reputed "warring factions" but would he want to? If he is as individualistic as they come, he'd want to start out as the de-facto leader and visionary. And he has the funds to do it. Why bother with Microsoft?

Individualistic; leader; visionary... but possibly (guessing on reasons for this shift) getting too old to have the constant energy to execute directly on that himself.

Maybe he'll become a VC?

I don't know, I think it was more he lost the power struggle against Jony Ive, so he may have one more stint in front of him. Hard to top building iOS though...

Or maybe get hired as CEO at another.

Microsoft is looking. Wouldn't that make all the rumor blogs explode.

I have heard there was a French mafia inside Apple, was he part of this? His name sounds French.

There is in fact such "French Mafia" inside Apple, it was in fact started at NeXT and it did continue internally at Apple. The NeXT French mafia was a lot smaller back then.

is jlg part of this (or rather, was he?)

Nope! As I mentioned the French Mafia started at NeXT while jlg was already running BeOS...

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