Apple used to be known for their ability to pay attention to the details, but in recent times that’s proving to be the opposite, where recent software releases have contained bugs that really shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Apple had previously attributed these to a “bad week”, but it seems that the problem could be much deeper than that.In a post on Reddit by user jarjoura who claims to have been a former engineer at Apple, they claim that this isn’t so much to do with the skills of Apple’s engineers, but rather the work culture in which project managers were too focused on meeting deadlines, resulting in features being released that weren’t quite ready yet.
Jarjoura also talks about how project managers would assign a priority number to certain things, and that sometimes these priorities could be changed on a whim from being high up on the list to suddenly becoming something not so important. “Ultimately, engineers lost the freedom to decide when a feature was ready to ship. So here I see some ‘leak’ about quality and I think, this is just PR spin for a buggy iOS 11. Unless the company is willing to take power away from the all-mighty EPM org, I just don’t see how engineering will really change.”
Of course it’s hard to say if this post is an accurate description of what goes on behind the scenes, but it seems to line up with a recent article on Bloomberg in which Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi wants to implement a new strategy that focuses on quality releases. This also corroborates an earlier report that claims that new flashy features won’t be a priority with iOS 12 and will actually focus more on reliability and stability.
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