whogivesashirt

Your first point raises the question of how to approach someone with an idea, when I don't necessarily have funds to back it up. Is there an accepted protocol for this? In spending time on this site, I've noticed that's a pet peeve of most developers.

Excellent point. Storyboarding certainly helped. It also helped me realise how I was thinking in big pictures and my developer pal preferred the mechanics.

Thanks for your response.

One of my irons in the fire is an iOS game. Can you give me an example of how these get carved up into work units? This is exactly the kind of thinking that is fuzzy to someone like me.

I'm earwormed with the Billy Bragg song, myself.

"No smoking."

I left a few years ago, and once I left the reality-distortion/no-disclosure zone I was amazed at how paranoid we all were over computer accessories. When you're in the mix, it feels like the most important thing in the world. And yet, since leaving, I haven't been able to find a job that challenges or stimulates me anything near what Apple did.

Yep. Pre-Jobs, the Apple offerings were as muddled as the PC examples given above, especially with the introduction of the PPC boxes, which were all assigned names like 7200/75 or 7215/90. Steve did away with all of these and offered only four core products (iBook, PowerBook, G-series and iMac) until the intro of the Cube, which nobody remembers, and the iPod, which nobody can forget. :)

I was going to create a new answer, but the "meet tons of girls" thing made me think this would be a good place to reply. :)

I haven't been an employee myself, but I took a few cruises in 2007, and got to know some of the staff members. The pay is pretty basic, and the food apparently sucks, but there was no denying how much fun (and how much sex) they all seemed to be having, and seeing passports so full of stamps they had to order new pages every few months was pretty impressive as well. They hired computer-literate types for tech positions (the ships all have sat Internet) and newsletter-publication jobs - there are probably others for which I didn't speak to the employee.

If you were up for an adventure-type job, this might be something to explore.