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Ryan
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Promise Land of Trustafarians
 
2016-02-09, 10:33

I actually do think someone at Apple has taken notice. Their efforts in recruiting software engineers have stepped up significantly over the last twelve months—we've lost three people to Maps and Siri just in our department. They're pretty tight-lipped about exactly what's going on (unlike the rest of the big SV firms, where there are no mysteries about tech stack—everyone knows the underpinnings of Twitter and Netflix), but based on who they've been hiring lately—skillsets, experience—it's clear they're making efforts to improve quality and reliability.

Even just reading their recent job listings, their underlying tech stack is clearly moving away from Apple's own tech and towards major open-source efforts. Part of their historic difficulty in recruiting software engineers is that their tech is completely unlike everyone else's, so engineers start at zero and build up their knowledge—introducing plenty of bugs along the way, I'm sure. Moving closer to the rest of the industry should reduce some of that ramp-up time and improve operational reliability.

Turning around a ship that size can take a long time and of course it's possible that whoever is spearheading that effort will fail. But I think somebody over there is trying to make a difference.

With the rest of Silicon Valley on the rocks, Apple is going to find it pretty easy to pick off talent from everyone not named Google or Facebook, as engineers seek refuge in firms with enough cash to weather the coming storm.
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