Linked List: January 28, 2016

Thursday, 28 January 2016

Weird Guardian Piece on Apple and Recruiting ★

Nellie Bowles, writing for The Guardian:

When developer James Knight was on the job market recently, he considered applying to several of the big tech companies and immediately crossed Apple off his list.

“Apple’s culture is one that’s so negative, so strict, so harsh,” said Knight, a talented 27-year-old coder who left a job at Google for more lucrative freelance work. “At Apple, you’re gonna be working 60-80 hours a week and some VP will come yell at you at any moment? That’s a very hostile work environment.” […]

Knight says he and many of his friends value lifestyle over salary. “I’m the kind of person who likes to show up to work sometimes at 11, or maybe work from home one day. And Apple’s not the place you can do that,” Knight said. “Apple can move away from that culture but culture takes time. A lot of time. And stock prices drop hourly.”

I’ve been saying for a while now that recruiting and talent retention are the single biggest problem Apple faces. But my take on it is subtle. Apple is driven by A-team talent, and A-team talent is in high demand across the whole industry. And as Guy English has pointed out, it’s a lot less exciting to be working on the tenth-generation iPhone than the first-generation of something new. The other problem Apple faces is that it’s not just any A-team talent that Apple needs, Apple needs A-team talent that understands and appreciates Apple’s design-focused culture.

That said, this Guardian piece by Bowles seems to be trying to argue that Apple is having trouble hiring anyone, period. That sounds like nonsense to me. And this James Knight guy sounds more like someone who Apple wouldn’t want to hire in the first place than someone who Apple covets but can’t get.

Jim Henson’s Hilariously Violent Wilkins Coffee Commercials ★

Open Culture:

Henson made 179 ten-second spots for Wilkins Coffee, a regional company with distribution in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. market, according to the Muppets Wiki: “The local stations only had ten seconds for station identification, so the Muppet commercials had to be lightning-fast–essentially, eight seconds for the commercial pitch and a two-second shot of the product.”

Within those eight seconds, a coffee enthusiast named Wilkins (who bears a resemblance to Kermit the Frog) manages to shoot, stab, bludgeon or otherwise do grave bodily harm to a coffee holdout named Wontkins. Henson provided the voices of both characters.

I laughed out loud at a bunch of these.

The Verge: ‘Windows Phone Is Dead’; Rest of the World: ‘Duh’ ★

Tom Warren, The Verge:

With a lack of hardware, lack of sales, and less than 2 percent market share, it’s time to call it: Windows Phone is dead. Real Windows on phones might become a thing with Continuum eventually, but Windows Phone as we know it is done. It won’t stop Microsoft producing a few handsets every year as a vanity project, but for everyone else it’s the end of the line.

With a lack of hardware, lack of sales, and less than 2 percent market share, Windows Phone has never actually been alive. It’s never gotten off the ground.