Apple Now Seeking More Software Engineers Than Hardware Engineers

[cmaier]

Not really.
I'm a hardware guy and while I can write C/Objective C/C++; my main language for development is Verilog.
It would be such a rare occurrence for me to write software for release that you might see a unicorn first.
The hardware people I know don't cross the line into software development. They might write a System C model occasionally, but almost never core for release. I understand software but have no desire to do it.

My recompile costs a million or more and takes 6 months.

In the same vein, a CS major or software engineer is normally not qualified to do hardware design.
The mentality is very different.

He didn’t say the software had to be for release. I wrote lots of software when designing CPUs. RTL in C++ or Verilog, static timing tools, power analysis tools, buffer insertion tools, block pin assignment tools, chip integration scripts, DRC or LVS decks, prerouters, track assignment tools, spice deck flatteners, etc. Was I a software engineer while writing those millions of lines of code? Maybe. I dunno. I was an electrical engineer so I didn’t think about it that way even when I was running our EDA group, but I definitely wrote a ton of code.

 

[iRutherford]

To be fair, making Apple Music suck on android is good business sense ;-)

Actually quite the opposite. I have co-workers who I convinced to try out Apple Music and vowed not to purchase an iPhone because of how bad the software was. They all went back to using Spotify. It sucks because the company I work for actually offers corporate discounts for plans and phones, and many of them chose the Note 9.

 

[cmaier]

Actually quite the opposite. I have co-workers who I convinced to try out Apple Music and vowed not to purchase an iPhone because of how bad the software was. They all went back to using Spotify. It sucks because the company I work for actually offers corporate discounts for plans and phones, and many of them chose the Note 9.

You didn’t see the ;-) ?

 

[maverick28]

Of course, hiring more software engineers makes sense: the pace at which they've been moving since introduction of Lion impedes quality of the work riddled with abnormal amount of bugs and misses. I wish they started increasing their manpower much earlier.

 

[falainber]

This data is meaningless without information about attrition rates. In Silicon Valley in general, there are way more software jobs than hardware jobs. I would not be surprised if Apple had hard time retaining good software engineers. They have a lot of options in SV (including companies like Google and Facebook which are mostly software). So the fact that current job listing has more software designer positions does not necessarily mean that Apple is hiring additional software designers.

Edit: now that AAPL stock is doing nothing (or badly) there is a big incentive for Apple employees to look for jobs in startups.

 

[kwikdeth]

I'm sure recoding everything for ARM is a labor-intensive process....

 

[smirking]

For a large and wealthy company, it baffles me how Apple can only focus on one thing at a time.

Who said they're only focusing on one thing?

Regardless, not even a company of Apple's size has the resources to do everything they want to do. Engineers and designers don't grow on trees and the elite engineers and designers that they really need are even harder to come by. There are diminishing returns with hiring more people.

 

[cmaier]

This data is meaningless without information about attrition rates. In Silicon Valley in general, there are way more software jobs than hardware jobs. I would not be surprised if Apple had hard time retaining good software engineers. They have a lot of options in SV (including companies like Google and Facebook which are mostly software). So the fact that current job listing has more software designer positions does not necessarily mean that Apple is hiring additional software designers.

Edit: now that AAPL stock is doing nothing (or badly) there is a big incentive for Apple employees to look for jobs in startups.

No that is not a big incentive. A temporary flattening of the stock vs go work at a startup and maybe get a high six figures payout after 3 years of hard work, when there is a 9 in 10 chance that that will never happen? People understand that unless you are one of the first handful of people in a startup you aren’t going to get rich. Apple stock grants and options are a pretty good source of high income without any of the massive risk.

 

[aylk]

When I was designing CPUs it was pretty hard to decide most days whether I was a software engineer or hardware engineer. I wrote buttloads of code. And a lot of hardware engineering is writing code in specialized languages.

(Narrator: he was a hardware engineer)

This makes sense, but you're still a hardware engineer that writes hardware code, just like there are visual designers that write some front-end code. Now, the skillset of specialized software engineers is very different from the skillset of a visual designer or a hardware engineer. Understanding software design is nowadays a required skillset for many occupations, but you still need pure software engineers to solve a lot of the problems in the field.

So saying that "People do not work only on software and not hardware anymore" is not a true statement. There are plenty of software engineers that have never touched a piece of hardware in their whole careers, and thats ok because their competence is solving computer science problems that do not require the application of hardware design concepts. I guess that's probably the kind of people Apple needs the most now, since they're trying to become a services focused company rather than relying on their hardware for most of their profits.

 

[boast]

I wouldn't consider Verilog/SystemC/etc... hardware. Just a software guy who will let synthesis do the actual design.

Apple RSU's vest every 6 months or so, right? That's pretty nice.

 

[falainber]

No that is not a big incentive. A temporary flattening of the stock vs go work at a startup and maybe get a high six figures payout after 3 years of hard work, when there is a 9 in 10 chance that that will never happen? People understand that unless you are one of the first handful of people in a startup you aren’t going to get rich. Apple stock grants and options are a pretty good source of high income without any of the massive risk.

To each his own but startups is a factor (especially for younger workforce). Besides, stock options are generally good only if the stock grows. If it does not, they are useless.

 

[rp2011]

Well software has been their weakness since 2012. Hopefully they can start catching up.

 

[falainber]

I wouldn't consider Verilog/SystemC/etc... hardware. Just a software guy who will let synthesis do the actual design.

Apple RSU's vest every 6 months or so, right? That's pretty nice.

Of course Verilog etc. is hardware. The result of this work is implemented in silicon. Driver developers are in between. They do produce software but the job often requires special skill set where one needs to be familiar with the hardware.

 

[cmaier]

To each his own but startups is a factor (especially for younger workforce). Besides, stock options are generally good only if the stock grows. If it does not, they are useless.

That’s not how it usually works anymore usually in big Silicon Valley companies. You get grants typically. Also you can usually take part of your salary and buy stock at a discount to the Lower of the price at the start or end of the quarter and same day sale it.
[doublepost=1551474865][/doublepost]

Of course Verilog etc. is hardware. The result of this work is implemented in silicon. Driver developers are in between. They do produce software but the job often requires special skill set where one needs to be familiar with the hardware.

The result of verilog is not always implemented in silicon. Often times the result is simply compiled (or run via an interpreter) and used to verify the design. At AMD we never compiled verilog to a netlist. We would use it to create a simulator, would hand create the netlist and extract verilog from that, and then compare the results of running test vectors on each. You can run verilog code on a host machine just like C++ or anything else, and we often did. Of course, it’s a bit different if you are coding structural verilog (like INV0 INV(.a(in), .b(out)); INV1 INV(.a(out),.b(out2))). (Though that’s often how we coded the netlists).

 

[az431]

Most software engineers do not do hardware.

Some do. But the other problem with the "data" and the conclusions drawn from it, is that an advertised position may be for more than one opening. There is also no way to know why the position is open (e.g., attrition, new position, or expansion). Apple has also been known to place ads for fake positions to hide what it is working on.

In short, the data is incomplete and without more information, you can't draw the conclusions that MR and Thinknum attempt to draw.

 

[chucker23n1]

The days of just being a web developer that uses backend created by someone else, or just hardware guy that create a device and throws it over the fence are coming to a close.

I highly doubt this.

If anything, cloud computing makes it even less necessary to have deep knowledge of the whole picture.

It is the reason top college programs have Computers Science-EE degree programs.

If anything, an increasing amount of programmers really don't need any academic degree at all, and when they do, it should often be an SEng degree, not a CompSci one.

Even a "full-stack" developer (which is already a needlessly jack-of-all-trades position) typically isn't expected to do hardware (or even embedded) development, just front-end, database, etc.
[doublepost=1551475590][/doublepost]

All job openings are in the Bay area only.

I see Apple software engineer listings in Zürich, DC, Warsaw, Vancouver, Tokyo, Taipei, Sydney, …
[doublepost=1551475675][/doublepost]

You do release emoji is a standard, and when they add new ones they are just complying to that standard.. right?

To be fair, Apple themselves also keep pushing to add new emoji to the standard.

But, still, this "haha everyone at Apple is busy working on emoji" trope is tired.

 

[cmaier]

Today I am writing a Machine Learning Model that I will train on my Linux system through a user facing web site I created and deployed to the cloud. When it is trained I will deploy it via the driver I wrote to an edge device.

This moving back and forth is not uncommon as ML and AI becomes embedded into lives. A lot of other people I work with and know do the same thing. The days of just being a web developer that uses backend created by someone else, or just hardware guy that create a device and throws it over the fence are coming to a close. It is the reason top college programs have Computers Science-EE degree programs.

Back when I was at RPI they offered a CSE (computer systems engineering) degree. It was essentially electrical engineering without thermodynamics and some of the other core engineering classes, and without some of the mid-level EE classes (fields and waves, lumped parameter systems, etc) and instead you took data structures, etc. I chose to go with EE because most employers had no idea what CSE was, and it seemed easier to learn data structures, computability/complexity theory, etc. on my own than it would be to learn how to do smith charts and tune amplifiers on my own. Most of my friends who went the other way ended up regretting it. But, of course, that was a different time.

(Postscript: I ended up learning all the computer science stuff on my own to study for my computer science oral and written exams to get into the Ph.D. Program for electrical engineering, and then, later, I found that most of my E.E. jobs ended up involving extensive coding in C, C++, Perl, etc., and eventually I got pretty good at it. Luckily I had already been coding in C, FORTRAN and assembler prior even to college).

 

[chucker23n1]

Aside from the fact that you probably get paid really well, being an engineer for Apple must suck... They probably come up with some great innovative ideas only to get stifled all the time because Apple trickles out updates and changes so slooooowly.

Or they're really happy because they're being given the time they feel they need to actually deliver a good result.

 

[ipponrg]

If anything, an increasing amount of programmers really don't need any academic degree at all, and when they do, it should often be an SEng degree, not a CompSci one.

Computer Science focuses more on theory. I’d argue that both are applicable. The UC college I graduated from did not have a Software Engineer degree. They had a Computer Science degree from the College of Engineering.

There are a lot of good engineers that don’t have degrees, but also a plethora of bad engineers that don’t have degrees. The degree is just one of many metrics some companies use as a baseline for filtering candidates

 

[chucker23n1]

He didn’t say the software had to be for release.

The assertion in the original post was that the MacRumors post is "misleading". MacRumors makes a distinction between software and hardware engineers (as does, incidentally, Apple's jobs site, which nobody in this thread seems to actually have taken a look at), whereas this poster believes that line is blurry.

Yes, hardware engineers will write software tools to help with their job, and tend to have a general high-level CS understanding of how computer programs work, but I don't think it follows at all that the lines are blurry, and if anything, with the increasing amount of abstraction in recent years, they've become starker. More and more code gets written against a VM, and software deployed on a VM or container, and concrete servers replaced by abstract clouds. A web developer doesn't need to know (and increasingly will not know) whether their TypeScript code ultimately runs on ARM or x86, on a physical machine or a Docker container, or even whether it's one server hosting it or a multitude with a reverse proxy doing load-balancing.
[doublepost=1551478368][/doublepost]

Computer Science focuses more on theory.

Yes, but with IT still being in its infancy, a lot of people study CompSci just to have any formal IT background at all, while at the same time not having any intention of further researching the theory, but actually to make their money as a developer at a commercial entity.

It's a weird temporary quirk that exists for historical reasons, and will balance itself out over the next decades.

There are a lot of good engineers that don’t have degrees, but also a plethora of bad engineers that don’t have degrees.

Definitely.

The degree is just one of many metrics some companies use as a baseline for filtering candidates

Yeah, and I've personally found it to be not a very good one (because of your previous sentence).

 

[ipponrg]

Yes, but with IT still being in its infancy, a lot of people study CompSci just to have any formal IT background at all, while at the same time not having any intention of further researching the theory, but actually to make their money as a developer at a commercial entity.

Im not sure about that. IT is a very vague term and it’s usually not what people pursue when it comes to IT. You actually want an Information Systems degree for IT.

I will say from an interviewer POV for my company, the ones with no CS background tend to struggle more thru the process.

 

[project_2501]

does this mean the new Apple keyboard will entirely do away with pesky hardware?

 

[chucker23n1]

Im not sure about that. IT is a very vague term

Definitely, and I was wary of using it.

and it’s usually not what people pursue when it comes to IT. You actually want an Information Systems degree for IT.

I really meant the field of computing in general.

I will say from an interviewer POV for my company, the ones with no CS background tend to struggle more thru the process.

I'm not going to say the opposite, but I've seen a fair share of people with a master's degree in CS who can barely write code. Which is fine in the sense that it's not really CS's goal to teach that, but conflicts with the popular expectation on the applicants' end that they can, in fact, get a job as a developer.

 

[routine_analyst]

Does this mean real hires? or the kind that's through APEX direct where these poor souls get the grey badge, no access to the gym, a broken vending machine and are told "remove Apple from your Linkedin"?

 

[cmaier]

Does this mean real hires? or the kind that's through APEX direct where these poor souls get the grey badge, no access to the gym, a broken vending machine and are told "remove Apple from your Linkedin"?

Yeah empty vending machine. It’s just like slavery.