Apple only has 350 engineers for OS X?!?!?

[treblah]

From a NYTimes article on the Windows Vista delay...

It is also costly in terms of time, money and manpower. Where Microsoft has thousands of engineers on its Windows team, Apple has a lean development group of roughly 350 programmers and fewer than 100 software testers, according to two Apple employees who spoke on the condition that they not be identified.

Can't wait to see that these guys/gals have been doing for the last year…

 

[iMeowbot]

They have software testers at Apple? What do they do?

 

[pknz]

They have software testers at Apple? What do they do?

Test software I guess.

 

[bousozoku]

There used to be over 1000 people working on Mac OS X in the early days. I'm sure that you don't need the most developers when part of what you do is co-ordinate updates with open source utilities and code. Windows is a much bigger deal because they're creating everything from scratch--probably over and over. In the old days, Microsoft probably had 50 developers just to thwart other companies.

 

[iMeowbot]

Test software I guess.

I suppose so. Maybe it's that whole Apple secrecy thing, and they're not allowed to report problems back to the programmers.

 

[greatdevourer]

And to think IE has roughly the same number of engineers, yet Omniweb needs just 2

 

[Marky_Mark]

They have software testers at Apple? What do they do?

Heh heh! I thought exactly the same thing when i read this!

 

[Mord]

testers debug, see when you combine many bits of the OS to work together sometimes they create unforeseen effects, thats why windows generally blows because it's a disorganized mess, the fewer programmers the better.

 

[link92]

And to think IE has roughly the same number of engineers, yet Omniweb needs just 2

Remember that the OmniGroup doesn't create it's own rendering engine though.

 

[Stella]

Too many developers on a project can seriously **** things up - just adds fuel to the fire, especially if things are going wrong ( Vista ).

I wouldn't read too much into the numbers.

 

[0939084]

It's a good thing they only have 350 engineers too. Too many woftware engineers makes for too much overhead and makes it difficult to collaborate on projects. Just look at Vista, the software that never shipped, even though Microsoft has thousands of engineers. Compare this to OS X which always ships on time. Apple also doesn't announce the software until it's almost ready, so if it missed ship dates nobody would really know anyway, within reason.

 

[bousozoku]

Remember that the OmniGroup doesn't create it's own rendering engine though.

They don't anymore.

 

[LaoTzu]

mistake?

MS has 14,500 software engineers..... and Apple has 2500 on Mac OS X. According to Apple & MS.

Source - iCEO @ shareholder meeting, last year.

 

[TMA]

MS has 14,500 software engineers..... and Apple has 2500 on Mac OS X. According to Apple & MS.

Source - iCEO @ shareholder meeting, last year.

So that's one bug introduced into the OS for each staff member?

 

[mkrishnan]

Too many developers on a project can seriously **** things up - just adds fuel to the fire, especially if things are going wrong ( Vista ).

Yeah....

Also, you don't need lots of developers when your development architecture and framework are lean and efficient. You think you need lots of developers when you get fragmented. Although in the end, it doesn't make things any better....

Beyond that, just think about how many more drivers Vista ships with than Tiger does or Leopard will. There's a lot of development to ensure that Vista will work on that morass of different hardware profiles in the Windows world.

 

[virus1]

So that's one bug introduced into the OS for each staff member?

nah that was for xp. i am sure they have been upping those numbers with a few performance boosts every once in a while. i am thinking more like 2-3 bugs per developer now.