Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by zbentley 3064 days ago
> all of Apple's talented developers have most likely shunted over to iOS

This gets trotted out a lot, but I have trouble believing it. I don't think Apple considers developers to be in short supply--and if they do, it's very stupid of them and they should reexamine that thinking.

I know that demand > supply for skilled developers right now, but Apple has enormous amounts of money in the bank. They can't use a tiny fraction of that to get themselves more, or better developers? I doubt that shareholders would notice/care if a few millions of dollars went towards a hiring blitz for, say, 100 really good engineers with salaries so competitive that Apple could poach them from wherever else they work.

I'm not saying that "throw bodies at the problem" is always a good solution, but Apple can easily afford to throw really, really talented bodies around, and if short-staffing is their problem, it seems like the solution is obvious.

Am I missing something here? Would adding a bunch of beyond-competitive senior developer salaries dent Apple's numbers more than I think they would? Are there really just not that many developers willing and able to work on this at any price? If not, is the problem with "willing" or with "able"?

2 comments

I'm not saying Apple themselves have shunted the developers, I'm thinking that the developers themselves have moved jobs of their own accord since they see no future in macOS. It's been obvious for a while now that Apple only considers iDevices as their money-spinners. Their actual computers have been long neglected, and their updates for the last several years have been to include more iDevice-like features, so I would think the macOS developers would willingly believe Apple themselves aren't wholeheartedly behind maintaining their desktop OS. It just feels like there is very little willingness from Apple to build a good desktop OS any more, and no sense hiring macOS developers as a result.
Money won't be enough to attract the best developers. The best developers want to do the new and shiny. Apple is in maintenance mode as far as software - no judgement but working on the next iOS release is nothing exciting. On the hardware side there is still some exciting stuff going on.