flatline3

> HN has been a pretty strong critic of the way tarsnap is being run (specifically from a marketing point of view), the collective view is not that it is too expensive but rather that it is not yet expensive enough and that it needs to appeal more to non-techies.

If that's the collective view, then I strongly disagree with the first half. Tarsnap isn't cheap for an organization with data of any appreciable size.

It would be far easier if they simply sold the new version.

Relying on the good graces of the user population hasn't prevented them from integrating Amazon advertisements, and won't likely prevent other bad decisions in the future.

Ubuntu never gave me the option to purchase hardware and an OS of Apple-level quality. So I haven't. I would like to.

> Of course, Apple apologists will jump to say that you can just get a 3rd party app ...

I don't think Apple "apologists" will be jumping in on this one. In this particular case, Apple has, objectively, significantly reduced (or outright eliminated) the usability of a core feature of their phones.

Anyone in a significant population center will find this to be incredibly irksome, and by the very definition of population centers, there are a lot of people in significant population centers.

I largely agree with your point, but I have to respond to this:

> I'll never understand why people think these huge multi-bazillion dollar companies are being run by total morons. And make no mistake, if you write a blog post about how billion dollar product X is broken because they changed its color or something then you're taking the position that the company has as its decision makers a bunch of morons taking shots in the dark.

Many, many large companies do have morons taking shots in the dark, based requirements and data that have little-to-no basis in reality, coupled with broken bureaucracy and individual incentives that are not even remotely aligned with what actually matters to their customers.

Apple isn't one of those companies.

The skills you list involve very simple knowledge acquisition. Once you have core CS competency, you can pick those things up very easily, and do a better job by far than the person that lacks the core CS competency.

To use your examples:

* I'd never worked with web CSS, but I built a CSS styling system for iOS, and used the CSS spec for inspiration.

* I've never worked with web analytics, but I ran a team that built a real-time (non-web) custom analytics/logging/querying system for a huge consumer-facing corporation.

* My team had never written any sizable JavaScript, HTML, or CSS, nor had any familiarity with prototype languages, but we were able to bang out a comprehensive HTML/JS XMPP client using BOSH in a couple weeks. We had an external HTML and web design expert on-hand to actually make it look pretty.

I think the real reason the engineers don't adapt is that we'd have to go work in environments that are filled with less skilled people using frustratingly knee-capped technologies. I might be able to stomach HTML/JS/CSS despite their myriad of flaws, but I'm not sure I could do it if I also had to use Rails and Ruby working for one of the existing players.

The WiFi on Virgin America has grown steadfastly slower as more people became aware of it, and despite the $10-$17 price point, has now reached the point of being nearly totally unusable on most of my flights.

Unless Jet Blue has a solution to provide significantly more bandwidth, I can't imagine that free WiFi is going to be less saturated than the paid option on Virgin.

$84k average salary is surprisingly high for non-production-ready engineers who are still in training, especially when compared to the rest of the industry.

I wouldn't have expected there to be so much money in a field that is so approachable. Is there a dearth of quality rails engineers, or is it related to web engineers in general?

To tell you the truth, this makes me wonder whether there's significant opportunity in the web space for senior engineers with traditional software engineering backgrounds. If people are so desperate that they're willing to hire brand-new engineers at an $84k average and spend months/years training them, how much will they pay for people that require no training at all?

Factor in RTT/latency and concurrency. There's no reason multiple requests can't be in-flight at once, up to the point where you're overloading your uplink or the server.

They advertise as being accessible to individuals with no prior experience whatsoever.

If you do have prior experience, can you tell me why you want a $12K bootcamp instead of just learning Rails yourself?

9 weeks isn't enough time for anyone to be learning how to write production-quality code, much less take a job as anything more than an engineering intern.

The fact that TapJoy is hiring people straight out of DevBootCamp makes me seriously question the quality of their engineering organization, rather than causing me to think highly of DevBootCamp (which may be an excellent program).

You failed to address the parents point entirely: it's a lot easier to start strict and loosen restrictions later, than it is to start loose and add restrictions.

Hopefully he's not wasting a bunch of time debugging cross-browser javascript because A) He already knows how to fix it, or B) It didn't break to begin with. JavaScript is hardly difficult material.

As for documentation, I'm not sure quite what to say. The best person to document code is the person that's writing it. The best person to document things that aren't code is a technical writer, not an engineer.

Sell software and a service. Make it so I can install your code and run it indefinitely. Provide your source to paying customers.

See Atlassian for an example.

Not only can I not think of a way to do it, I have never, in 15 years, seen an organization that successfully managed junior engineers in a way that resulted in the production of code on par with what senior engineers would produce.

Getting good work out of junior engineers requires a management investment greater than the cost of simply hiring experienced engineers to begin with, and they still will not produce code to the same level of robustness and quality.

I can see from your company that you don't operate this way. I assume this choice expands the apparent pool of available applicants, but it also ensures that your company is likely completely uninteresting to senior, experienced, genuinely expert engineers.

In my experience, there are two kinds of engineering managers. The first is the kind that has figured out (or thinks they've figured out) how to get decent enough code out of inexperienced or just plain bad engineers. The second is the kind that realizes that they don't have to work nearly so hard or jump through so many procedural hoops if they just hire people that know what they're doing to begin with.

What's more, those experienced people tend to have extensive contacts and make it easy to hire their friends.

That said, I'm happy to let you spend the time, money, and energy training and managing junior engineers, while dealing with their subpar work output.

No, it's simply impossible to babysit junior engineers to a sufficient degree as to prevent bad implementation without effectively doing their job for them. It's not worth the effort.

Does j2objc ensure that internal exceptions never bubble through framework stack frames? Also, I believe arc itself is not exception-safe.

That sounds like too much logic is in your UI.

> Technically cute, but works only for non-UI modules, which comprise approximately 4% of a mobile app.

Where on earth did you get that number?

UI code in a well-structured application is a thin-shim on composed, testable backend code. It should be the least of the code, by far.

How are you handling translation of exceptions to ObjC given that none of the OS frameworks are themselves exception-safe?

I've never worked with a top-notch young engineer. Brilliant, yes, top notch, no. Every single one has had misguided priorities, significant experience gaps (leading to both bad engineering decisions and misguided priorities), and -- even in the best of them -- hubris.

Despite their intelligence they've always required constant senior level supervision, and have generally been the ones most likely to create maintenance-heavy components due to inexperience.

I'm not sure why our experiences differ so substantially, but I'm happy to hire only senior engineers and let other companies pay to train the young ones. The senior engineers are more than worth the minimal financial premium.

In the US, age is only a protected class for the range of 40+, as per federal law.

However, what we're talking about is experience. Those with little experience are not members of a protected class.

There are always bad engineers, which is what you're really describing above.

All other things being equal, I'll always pick the older engineer with more experience and maturity than the young engineer without.

> Are you replying to yourself below? flatline responds to flatline3. Suspicious.

No. Caused me to raise my eyebrows too.

> Yes but that doesn't mean any 25 year old must be wiser than any other 18 year old.

On the flip side, it means an equally applied 25 year old will be just that much wiser than the 18 year old.

> Like it or not, it is a reality that the Mail & Calendar are broken ...

They work just fine for me, when using servers that conform to standardized protocols.

> And again, Exchange is one of the most used corporate infrastructure, that's the state of the market, and Apple should support it the best they can.

You say this as if Exchange was some sort of common standard, instead of a proprietary walled garden that has been nearly impossible for 3rd-party clients to support completely and reliably for nearly a decade and a half.

Do you also expect 3rd-party office suites to interoperate perfectly with MS Office?

> There are plenty of people with wisdom well beyond their years.

I still haven't met any. I've met plenty of smart kids, and I'm pretty sure I was one, 15 years ago. However, I had no idea what I was doing, and worse yet, had the hubris to think I did.

I was insufferable, and I'd never hire 15-years-ago me. I also won't hire any other young engineers -- I'll let them find out how little they actually know on someone else's dime.

On the other hand, if I was in the VC game, I'd absolutely leverage young engineers as grist for my mill. They're the most amenable to the risk, and it doesn't really matter if the vast majority of small investments fail (and they will, especially given the inexperienced teams), if you hit just a few home run exits.

> Bad news! It gets worse. At some point, just when you start to feel like you know what you don't know, you realize that they are making new things up faster than you can keep track. Talking to people a generation younger than me can be a humbling experience. I have to tread carefully, as you do when you're talking with a person from another country.

That's unnecessarily defeatist. There are steady advances, but there's very little that's genuinely new under the sun, and quite a bit of what the youngsters get excited about is just the cyclic rediscovery of what we already knew.

The pitchforks are out because this demonstrates complete incompetence on their part.

> Calendar~ I use it with an Exchange server ...

Ah, there's your problem.

> Mail~ Not mentioning the poor user experience, the modal dialogs complaint apply as well, mails are not often sent, HTML signature is a pain to setup, often becomes unresponsive, or simply crashes.

I haven't had this problem. Then again, you sound like you live in the MS world, in which case the problem really isn't Apple.

I have somewhere between 15-20GB of e-mail in IMAP and Mail is quite responsive, and search is both fast and reliable.

Perhaps it's related to either your specific hardware, gmail, or Mail's support for gmail?