Re: Jobs

FROM : Steve Klingsporn
DATE : Sat Nov 16 23:20:53 2002

Hi,

I agree that there is a lot of noise on VersionTracker.  My game
(Aquataxx) is pretty cool, and there are usually between 3 and 15
people hanging out, playing games.  The logs for the public roster
server show that there are several hundred unique visitors a week
logging in.  I have 4 shareware registrations ($5), and one of them is
from a friend of mine who works from Apple.

Then again, I'm not so sure that you're correct that more radical
products would not be "discovered," though it definitely is easy to be
down and depressed about the state of the tech market nowadays.  I've
been programming for 20 years, 10 professionally, and for what? 
Recently, the answer hasn't been at all clear.  I just recently
remembered why I do it -- aside from being able to pay rent, I actually
love programming.  Love that creative control.  The sad thing is if you
can find a programming job nowadays, 99% of software shops have no idea
how to manage programmers or the process.  "Programming at gunpoint,"
as I call it, is no fun at all.

This is why I purposely look for QA jobs.  They don't suck my creative
energy.  I'm not forced to work with 10 other engineers on a shoddy,
bug-riddled piece of software, and I still have some interest left in
programming at the end of the day.

Back to the point:  Programs like NetNewsWire Lite have taken off out
of nowhere.  I don't believe that VersionTracker is the only place to
advertise your software, either.  There is the Apple downloads area,
MacUpdate.com, MacGameFiles.com (for games), and I'm sure there are
others out there.  Apple's lists are pretty good -- they don't "just
list anything," they're kinda picky about what they list.  I was
talking to a woman the other morning on Aquataxx who said "There was a
list of software on my hard drive, and I went to games and found your
game."  (I think she's talking about the URL link file for finding OS X
software).

I agree that there needs to be a better place to find stuff than the
VersionTracker cesspool.  I personally don't really look on there very
often because there's so much crap up there, and the audiences there
are kind of a tough crowd.  "Make the AI better," they said -- so I did
(using a real AI algorithm).  Now they say "make it easier, it's too
hard!" -- Not going to do it.  Some of the suggestions are
constructive, and others are just ridiculous.  Furthermore, only one of
the users who commented about my app actually got involved -- in a
great way, doing a lot of good testing and making a lot of good
suggestions.  The others can't pay the $5 to help out, but sure can
voice their opinions.

The point of writing my game wasn't to make money, even though it would
have been nice.  I do feel, however, that if my app was some kind of
"breakthrough app," people would get wind of it by word of mouth --
like Watson or NetNewsWire, or Napster, or Netscape.  Remember back in
the day, there wasn't all that much in the way of places to meet up
online and what-not, but word of Mosaic and Navigator spread like
wildfire.

The tech industry indeed is in the toilet right now.  Great
technologies like BeOS are gone, and we have -- what we have today. 
I'm betting it will take another 3-4 years for Mac OS X to be as good
as Be was in many areas, though it eclipses Be in a number of areas. 
Apple's obviously working hard on OS X, which is good news and evident
by 10.2 and the updates.  There is very little innovation in the
software industry right now, and I agree these shoddy markup and
HTTP-based technologies are a lot of the problem.

So many people in the last 10 years have taken the tone with me of
"Come here, son, sit on my lap and I'll show you how it's done." 
They've advocated the technology of the moment they were fascinated
with, and told me how I should do things and what-not.  Most of these
companies and people are long gone.  The sad thing is the coolest
people and the coolest technologies are mostly gone as well.

> Where do Apple and great technologies like Cocoa go from here?  Well,
> here's a clue:
>
> https://jobs.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Employment.woa/wa/
> jobDescription?RequisitionID=1854805

That's actually excellent news.  Objective-C might be a great language,
and superior to C++, but there are a lot of pitfalls in using it
(memory management seems to be a big issue, and the syntax is very hard
to read).  Java is a great language to develop on.  Note I don't say
"platform."  The core java packages (io, util, lang, etc.), and some of
the other technologies (JDBC, servlets) are really great -- Java is
definitely the way to go.  No point having a religious language battle
on that one -- Java and C++ are a lot more popular languages (love them
or not) than Objective-C is.  This is the best news I've had all day --
great news, indeed.

> So is ObjC Cocoa is headed for the same graveyard as ObjC WebObjects?
> Absorbed into an inferior technology and destroyed in the process by
> the "genius of the market"?  Not that you could even blame Apple at
> this point, as I no company seems able to withstand the tidal wave of
> cynicism and mediocrity sweeping tech right now.  Apple's Bangalore
> office can't be far behind.

Apple does outsource work to India.  Don't ask how I know this, but
they do.  It honestly seems to me in this age of worrying about
security and "intellectual property" that if you outsource everything
including your SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT (intellectual property), what the
hell do you do here on the mainland?  Manage the process?  Act as a
shell corporation?  Apple has outsourced its manufacturing for a long
time now -- to places like Singapore where they don't necessarily
believe in human rights or labor laws the same way we do...

Get used to the best or favorite technologies not winning.  Be
developed an OS that is arguably much better than OS X, and it died for
all sorts of reasons, including Be's own marketing stupidity and being
forced out by Microsoft *and* Apple.  BeOS booted in 10-15 seconds.  It
had a much better file system, it solved the type/creator vs. filename
suffixes problem by using MIME types, peeking at the "magic numbers" of
certain types of files to sniff what they were, and mapping filename
suffixes.  It had a node monitor at the FS abstraction layer level so
you don't have to poll the FS for changes in a Finder-type app (and
other great uses), there were FS-level dynamic queries, a great
messaging system -- all stuff that Mac OS X doesn't even come close to
having, and it booted in 16MB, preferred 32MB.  Try using OS X on a 256
MB system.

Not the point.  Be isn't around anymore.  Bothers me every day, in
fact...  But that's life.

> You learned a difficult professional skill but were too "smart" and
> "libertarian" to unionize.  Now welcome to the race to the bottom,
> gentleman.  We've been expecting you.

Well, it's hard for me to think completely down about the tech industry
for one good reason:  We're on the verge of wiping ourselves out as a
race -- with all this talk about chemical weapons, and being attacked
by desperate people who hate the US (and often for good reason), and
talk of war, and losing our civil liberties -- kinda puts everything
into perspective.

And then there's talk of a pole shift in 2003, but I don't want to seem
completely like a nut. ;o)

-Steve
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