I’m off to Las Vegas tomorrow evening for the National Association of Broadcasters show. If you happen to be attending the show and feel like saying hello, I’ll be demoing Soundtrack Pro in the Apple booth Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. See you there!
Sheesh–sometimes I forget how many people actually read this stuff. Now that Robert Scoble and Daniel Jalkut have taken notice of my decision not to go ahead with my CocoaRadio interview, I feel compelled to offer some further context.
First, to address Scoble’s comment, I wasn’t ordered by Apple PR not to go through with the interview–I was simply reminded by a higher-ranking colleague that Apple has certain procedures employees are supposed to go through before talking to “the media,” and that I had not gone through them. So, to be clear: I was not “officially” shut down–I just hastily did what I thought was prudent in light of what I was hearing.
Second, to address Jalkut’s criticism: yes, I did silence myself. I do appreciate his appraisal of my legal situation, however, I would remind him that Apple is an “at will” employer, and as such, may terminate me without providing any reason (as long as it’s not related to age, sex, national origin or disability). I’m not saying that would necessarily have been the result of me going through with the interview, but I think it’s important to note that the legal protections he describes would probably not apply.
The issues involved in my giving an interview to Blake are complicated. I would argue that I wouldn’t have said anything on CocoaRadio that I wouldn’t have also said on my weblog, and that the interview would actually have been beneficial PR for Apple. I planned to tell the story of how I became a Mac developer (which I think could be very inspirational to aspiring shareware authors), what it takes to develop a successful Mac app, why the Mac is a great platform to develop for. I would also argue that what I would have done there was no different from what Apple employee/former indie developer Eric Peyton did by appearing on a panel for Evening at Adler. Essentially, I’d be talking enthusiastically about my personal interests. Unfortunately, my personal interests overlap pretty strongly with my employer’s, and my employer has policies (and cultural aversions, I might add) about employees being too visible in discussing Apple-related matters.
That said, I’m not really sure what I’ll do now. I may try going through the prescribed chain of command to get permission, but I’m not sure that would be worth the scrutiny it would bring me. Most likely I’ll just maintain the status quo, and continue walking the fine line I’ve been walking for years now.
Now that I’m leaving my position in Mac OS X Integration for a spot in Pro Apps, my team is going to have a job opening to replace me. This position is a great opportunity for a recent college graduate or less experienced person to get a foot in the door at Apple and work with a fantastic team (I’m not just saying that, by the way–they really are the finest group of people I’ve ever worked with) on an operating system that is used and admired by millions.
If you have good CS fundamentals, know your way around UNIX, have enthusiasm for making OS X the best it can be, and are creative and entrepreneurial, we would very much like to talk to you. Feel free to drop an email to “buzz” at this domain if you’re interested!
(Update: Please note that current geographic proximity to Cupertino is not necessarily a prerequisite here. We’re interested in hearing from qualified candidates wherever they may be.)
As many of you may have guessed based on my weblog post about interviewing, I’ve been in the market for a new job recently. My current gig with Software Update Integration (a branch of Mac OS X QA) at Apple has been a great experience, and I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to people like my boss, Dennis Gately and my colleagues Andrew Wooster and Peter Ammon, who moved me to California and gave me the biggest break of my life. In many ways, their willingness to take a chance on me has had a decisive impact on my life, and I have benefitted enormously from the time I’ve spent with them.
Even so, I came to Apple almost exactly two years ago with one goal in mind–to eventually do development work on a shipping Apple product–and I’ve never lost sight of that. Thus, while I’ve been working to ensure the quality of Mac OS X updates, I’ve also been looking around for an engineering position that would be a good fit for me. Today, I finally accepted an offer for what I think will be a fantastic opportunity: an engineering position on the Soundtrack Pro team.
I’m excited about this position for a number of reasons. First, it will be an opportunity to finally devote my full attention to what I consider to be my real interest and forté: Cocoa programming. Second, in the long-term it could give me exposure to some fascinating programming topics I’d be unlikely to encounter otherwise (e.g. real-time programming, signal processing, Core Audio, etc.). Third, it gives me an opportunity to reconnect with one of my earliest uses of computers (I’m fond of telling people that my first use of the Internet was to FTP guitar tablature from OLGA, and my favorite thing to do with my old Amiga 500 was to spend hours with my friends constructing primitive mashups using a crude, serial port-based sampler). And lastly, corny (and vaguely Marxist) as it may sound, it allows me to be a part of the ideology that, in my estimation, has always made Apple special as a company: the quest to democratize creativity by bringing powerful production tools to the masses.
Many thanks to Corey Peterson, Dan Schimpf, Jason Marr, and everyone else on the team for giving me the opportunity. I look forward to learning a lot from you and, as my colleague Jonathan Deutsch is fond of saying, exceeding your expectations.
Req. ID: 2347376 - Mac OS X Crash Reporting Engineer
The above position is with my friend Jon Barbero’s team, working on the Mac OS X crash reporting back end. If you think you might be a good fit, drop us a line (perhaps with a link to a resumé or CV) in the comments or by email (my first name at this domain)!
The first person I ever got to know at Apple was a really smart guy named Eric Albert. I read his weblog back when I was an Apple-obsessed Java developer in Colorado, eventually he started reading mine, and when I started interviewing for my current job, Eric helped me a lot by explaining how the Apple interview process works and what I should expect.
When I finally got to California, Eric and I would do lunch occasionally and talk shop. The only problem was, it tended to be a bit of a one-sided conversation. I would tell Eric about how the latest OS update was going and so on, and he would tell me…not much. Eric was unusually secretive about his work–even by Apple standards.
More recently, though, Eric started talking optimistically about his super secret project actually shipping. My co-workers and I thought we had a pretty good idea what he was working on (based on his background and the kinds of bugs he tended to file), but we all had a fun time coming up with wild, rumor site-grade theories about what it would actually be used for.
Then, last weekend, while I was hanging out in Los Angeles, I woke up to find CNet’s scoop on Apple’s Intel switch in my del.icio.us links, and I immediately knew that Eric’s long hours at work recently were about to pay off.
Yes, it’s true: Eric is one of those mysterious people Steve Jobs mentioned in the keynote–the people who have been secreted away making sure OS X works on Intel. Now that the truth can be revealed, I think Eric and the rest of his team deserve a hearty round of applause–both for doing a lot to improve the long term prospects of the Mac platform, and ensuring that what could have been a nasty transition will likely be almost transparent (he even spent a lot of time enthusiastically helping developers port their apps in the Intel lab at WWDC, as the screenshots I posted to Flickr attest).
Nice work Eric–enjoy your vacation!
If I’ve ever introduced you to my colleague and friend Peter Ammon, you’ll probably remember me describing him as “one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.” Evidently I’m not alone in thinking that, because he was recently awarded what many of us Cocoa devotees would consider a dream job: an engineering gig on Apple’s AppKit team.
Before Peter left my group for the big time, a lot of us were trying to get him to start a weblog so that his frequent, witty insights about things like the horrors of object oriented Perl (he vociferously renounced Perl once after we sat through a presentation about its OO facilities), the perversity of C++, or what exactly happens in Objective-C when you message nil, wouldn’t be wasted on our daily lunch conversation.
Peter liked the idea, but true to overachieving form, kept us all eagerly waiting while he set about perfecting a fancy (and previously unknown, as far as I know) CSS box corner rounding technique as part of his site design. Fortunately, he now seems to be ready to go, and has launched his weblog at ridiculousfish.com. Mac developers who have been around long enough to have suffered through the incomplete early Cocoa documentation will undoubtedly smile at his first post.
Only time will tell how much Peter will feel he can write about his work, but I for one think having a weblogger on the AppKit team could be a great thing. Whatever he ends up writing about, I’m sure it will be worth reading, so I encourage everyone to give Peter a warm welcome to the blogosphere.
I’m not going to say too much about this because I want to be careful not to short-circuit the proper HR processes, but I wanted to briefly mention that my group at Apple (Software Update Integration) is in hiring mode right now, and that the following job postings are ours:
(UPDATE: I changed the session encoded URIs above to ones that correctly link to the job descriptions. This has been an advertisement for the principles of REST.)
If you’re a smart, enthusiastic, OS obsessive with good CS fundamentals and a desire to positively impact the quality of Mac OS X, these might be a good fit for you. Extra brownie points for some level of previous Mac development experience.
Since the blogosphere seems to be increasingly in the grip of MacWorld Fever, I suppose now might be a good time to mention that I’ll actually be there, in Apple’s Tiger booth, pretending to be a marketing person, on three occasions next week. My schedule is:
If you’re going to be there, feel free to stop by, say hello, and check out Tiger!
One of my friends (and former co-workers) just got back from the great Pacific Northwest, where he was interviewed for (and ultimately offered) a position with Microsoft’s Longhorn team. Being someone who conducts a fair number of interviews these days, as well as someone who has suffered through the terror of technical interviews on the other side of the table, I was naturally very curious about the whole affair.
The one thing that really stuck out in his account was that nearly every coding question he was asked was some sort of tree problem. Now, I do realize that tree questions are extremely common in job interviews (and that their prevalence could have had something to do with the specific job he was interviewing for), but this overwhelming emphasis on one particular data structure in two days of interviews reminded me of something I’ve noticed about Apple: for a great many people there, the hashtable seems to be something of a pet data structure. One can certainly see this in Cocoa, with its frequent use of NSDictionary objects to pass data around, and I and many other people I know have been subjected to grillings about the characteristics and implementations of hashtables in Apple interviews.
Being a person who loves to extrapolate grand cultural critical theories from probably inconsequential observations like this, I’m very tempted to ponder what this says about the two organizations’ values. My pet theory? That Microsoft emphasizes tree problems because their culture puts a high value on the kind of mental gymnastics often necessary to solve such problems, while Apple emphasizes hashtables because its aesthetically-oriented culture prizes their combination of zen-like simplicity and seemingly impossible speed. This is a broad generalization, of course (I’m sure people ask hashtable questions at Microsoft, just as people ask tree questions at Apple), but I still think it’s an interesting theory.