essays – Tech Reflect

The power of dopey ideas

2020-07-15

After a protracted move to Portland (Oregon), I’m back to writing about parrots.

Steve used to say to me, and he used to say this a lot. Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea. And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room. And they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet, simple ones. Which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.
Jony Ive, Steve Jobs memorial service, Apple Campus, 2011

One of the secrets of Apple’s success comes in this wonderful quote from Jony Ive. The part he didn’t mention—partly because it wasn’t relevant to the story—is that sometimes the magnificent ideas came out of the dopey ideas.

All of us are capable of bold, crazy, or magnificent ideas, but if we’re not allowed the freedom to have dopey ideas and voice them, …

2020-05-18

In the context of this article, “bug screening” means taking a bug report filed by an employee or developer or someone else. Then, doing any number of things:

Clean it up to make it more clear and understandable
Figure out if it’s already a known issue
Try to reproduce the problem
Send the bug report back if more information is needed
Route the bug to someone
Set a priority and perhaps a milestone where the bug should be fixed

Most of my jobs at Apple involved screening bugs and in one 30 month period I screened over 45,000 bugs. Not surprisingly, it was 100% of my job. The reason this is important to mention (other than it gives me a lot of credibility) was that 15 years earlier, the bug flow was small enough that it was only a small fraction of my …

2020-05-14

Tech workers believe that they have the best health insurance and all other types of insurance offered by their company. And they are probably right. I don’t have any data to prove otherwise.

What I do know from my own research and experience is that the disability insurance offered by Apple and other tech companies could leave you in dire straights much more easily than you know.

There are two types of disability: short-term (12 weeks), and long-term (indefinite with a big asterisk). A disability is something that partially or completely prevents you from doing your job. It could be anything from a serious physical injury to a debilitating mental illness.

Remember, this could be some terrible infection you get and end up in the hospital for months. Medical insurance covers the bills but your employer will only pay you via disability insurance. Same goes for an inherited mental condition …

2020-04-29

While auto-correct frustrates every iPhone user at one time or another, I imagine it’s an insanely complex feature to get right. After using it for 13 years now, I find that I have a list of small things I’d love to see change rather than a few number of really big changes.

I wanted to make this more a list of suggestions that to just rip into auto-correct. Note that I can always keep a very close eye on the completion bar but to have to look at three possible spellings as I type a word is cumbersome.

1) Never auto-correct a word that is already a valid word

Auto-correct likes to outsmart us by choosing a more common word than we actually typed.

In some cases, it might be a welcome surprise, but I feel it’s outweighed by the frustration when it changes my valid word. If I really …

2020-04-27

I ask myself the question why I bother writing this. There are hundreds of articles on the web comparing these two products but I may offer a unique perspective.

I used Apple Maps from long before it shipped until today
I was a Quality Engineer at Apple for 20 years, which gives me a unique perspective
I use maps 100% of the time when I drive, walk, plan trips, even if I’ve been there hundreds of times

I’ll break this into categories that are in no particular order of importance, except the first. Well, the first one is the most important.

Search

Google was founded on search. They were so much better than anyone else when they burst on the scene. Today, the gap is narrowed but I think most people would admit they are the best, especially if you ignore privacy concerns. Google is so good at search in …

2020-04-20

All across macOS and iOS, when you search for something, the ordering of results in most cases is:

A top hit (unclear how this is generated)
Suggestions (unclear how this is generated)
Your own data that you spent valuable time entering

Maps

I’ll provide several examples. First up, Maps. Let’s say I want to search for my doctor in Maps. She is in my Contacts.

Let’s start with a search for “se” just for grins. Note how we have a Top Hit, Suggestions, and then my own data at the bottom.

Let’s type two more letters, but this time in Contacts. Note that we have one hit, my doctor.

Maps has something different to say. First, we have 4 results for places, one of which is 35 miles away and an offer to search nearby for “serralheiros”—and my doctor at the bottom.

Just for fun, how about my entire doctor’s …

2019-06-05

I’ve written a lot about work/life balance, including this one: Slow down and improve your health and job.

Monday this week was the first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, featuring a keynote address highlighting new products soon to make their way out the door.

But I felt like turning it off after the opening movie.

As background, there is a lot of concern about the intrusion of technology on our lives and how it affects us. Apple has recently claimed to care about balancing the use of technology and brought us great features like Screen Time to help:

Screen Time, these new tools are empowering users who want help managing their device time, and balancing the many things that are important to them.
iOS 12 introduces new features to reduce interruptions and manage Screen Time

According to the WWDC opening video, writing apps appears to …

2019-04-30

Many large companies with excess cash do share buybacks or offer a dividend. Both of these are intended to benefit shareholders. However, the waters are muddied in that some employees are also shareholders.

Let’s look at the numbers for Apple.

Cook said that Apple had returned $27.5 billion to shareholders last quarter
Apple […] also approved a 77 cent dividend per share.
Apple stock spikes after reporting strong guidance and earnings beat—CNBC—April 30, 2019

As of September 29, 2018 , the Company had approximately 132,000 full-time equivalent employees.
Apple Form 10K—SEC—September 29, 2018

I’ll extrapolate a little since I couldn’t find complete numbers.

$27.5 billion x 4 quarters = $110 billion in yearly share repurchase
77 cents x 4.72 billion shares x 4 quarters = $14.5 billion annual dividend
$110 billion + $14.5 billion = $124.5 billion given to shareholders yearly

Divide that by the number of employees. Check my …

2018-06-22

This is based entirely on personal experience, but I thought it might be useful to others. Tech companies tends to do highly technical interviews in engineering and overlook the soft skills. Over the years, when I’ve been given the freedom to do so, I tend to focus more on soft skills. Here are some things I often ask. There really aren’t right and wrong answers, but it’s more about how they handle what is thrown at them.

How do you think code should be tested?

Here I’m generally looking for a few things:

Recognition that having only engineers testing their own code is not adequate. If they think it is, I will usually point out that if you know how your code works, it might be hard to stumble upon bugs. Then I see how they respond.
Familiarity with the different types of testing and their strengths and weaknesses. For

…

How to easily create documentation

2018-06-19

Some undeniable truths about documentation:

People hate to write it
People really need it

When someone needs some help, it can consume a lot of resources, especially when a company is continually hiring new people or losing people to other teams or companies.

There are a couple types of documention:

Simple questions and answers
More detailed documents

The usual way things are done

Simple questions and answers are done in person or in chat, usually lost forever except to the recipient of a chat who could search their chats.

Write emails containing more detailed information to someone, a group of people, or a mailing list.

Proposed way

For short questions and answers, create a page on your wiki (e.g. Confluence) for frequently asked questions and quickly add it after providing it to someone in email and chat.
After sending an email, create a wiki page and paste in the contents

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Tech Reflect

Reflecting on 25 years in tech

Category: essays

The power of dopey ideas

2020-07-15

Confessions of a retired bug screener

2020-05-18

Becoming disabled while working a tech job

2020-05-14

12 things I’d change about auto-correct