Safe from the Losing Fight

I got an IM from an acquaintance today. He works for Apple these days and was asking me if I was interested in a job. It would involve me moving back to California, but I would get to work for the Mothership.

I told him no, there’s only one reason why I’d move back to California at this point.

Although I wasn’t interested in the offer, its always nice to hear things like this. Its good to know someone’s keeping you in mind, and it definitely helps the ‘ol ego.

I’m about three weeks into my new partnership at Order N Development. Its a lot different from my previous job as a full time software engineer at Macromedia.

First, I’m an actual partner, meaning I own a large part of the company. That comes with a lot more responsibility. I have to fill out a lot more paperwork and just in general do a lot of non-engineering tasks. Expense reports, reading contracts, making bids, and so on. Of course, the fact that there only four of us influences this too.

There’s a lot more multitasking involved. For example, I’ve already written up a spec for a potential client, hammered out a rough schedule for another client, reviewed a couple of contracts from potential clients, and brainstormed ideas for our own product. Oh, and somewhere in there I did some actual coding on a contract that we already have. Hopefully this is making me more “well-rounded” as opposed to “crazy”.

I have to say, the contracts are the most disturbing part of the whole process. I can deal with generating product ideas, writing specs, architecting a feature, coding it, and debugging it. Contracts are a whole ‘nother story. They aren’t written in code or English, the only written languages I happen to understand. Contracts are written by lawyers with the express intent of trying to pull a fast one on you. The contract is a legal attempt to put all the responsibility on you while removing all responsibility from the client. But that’s not clearly stated, its written in legalese so you have to spend $400 paying another lawyer to tell you how screwed you really are. A good measure of screwedness appears to be how hard the lawyer is laughing when he hands the contract back to you.

I’d go into specifics, but a lot of contracts say we’re not allowed to mention the client’s name without their express written consent. I understand that the clients are trying to protect their name, but come on. I just did a bunch of work and I’d like to be able to tell people about it. I’ll admit that telling people “I can’t tell you who I’m working for” sounds all cool and mysterious, but it doesn’t really seem to bring in more contracts.

The other scary part is the money doesn’t come in regularly. Well, since we’re working several contracts right now, it kind of does, but nothing is guaranteed. I don’t draw a salary; I just get money when the company actually makes money. The flip side is I’m not limited in how much money I can make. And that’s kind of cool.

One of the things I am enjoying is ability to freely think of product ideas. What’s so “free” about it is that I own any idea that I come up with. Yep. I’m not sure how many people would want a hamster powered beanie, but that’s my idea, and I get to keep it. Seriously though, knowing that I get to keep any idea I generate is a pretty liberating feeling. It also makes the whole brainstorming process a lot more fun. I’m not trying to come up with an idea to make some large corporation another $100 million, I’m trying to come up with an idea that I’d like to work on and that I’m interested in.

And that’s my goal: work on something that interests me.

I’m convinced it is impossible for a Mac engineer to be happy at a large company. It simply can’t work; it is fundamentally flawed.

For the past 5 years I’ve worked for Macromedia as “the Mac guy” on various projects. I started out on Fireworks for a few cycles before moving on to Dreamweaver. My job as “the Mac guy” was to maintain the Mac porting layer, write any significant Mac specific code, fix Mac specific bugs, help the other engineers get stuff working on the Mac, and in general handle anything relating to the Mac. For most part, I was the only Mac guy on the team.

When I first started at Macromedia, working for a well known company on a pretty well known product was an attractive proposition. People would know what I did, and lots of people would see and enjoy the fruits of my labor. I could influence an important product to be more Mac friendly. To me my greatest asset to the team was helping ship a great Mac product. Unfortunately I personally feel that I’ve never shipped a great Mac product. Fireworks was pretty good and Dreamweaver can only be described as “adequate.” Neither lived up to my expectations.

I began examining myself and the development process to figure out what went wrong to cause the Mac product to not live up to my expectations. It wasn’t a lack of observation; I knew what was holding us up. It wasn’t a lack of knowledge; I knew how to fix all the various problems. It was a matter of resources. I wasn’t given enough time to fix all the problems or add all the enhancements we needed. Furthermore I became increasingly aware that I was doing the job of two people, and we really needed at least two Mac engineers.

But the real problem wasn’t resources; it was economics. Both Fireworks and Dreamweaver are cross platform products. They run both on Windows and Mac. I’m not sure what the exact platform splits are, but the Windows product definitely sells more than the Mac product. Therefore it makes sense that the company invests more in that platform since it yields better results. It only makes sense to invest in the Mac platform so that the investment is lower than the returns. In this case, that apparently means only having one Mac engineer per team.

Its hard for me to fault Macromedia. Their decision makes perfect business sense. But it doesn’t make sense for me personally. My goal isn’t to make as much money as possible; I just want to write some software that I can be proud of, for the platform that I enjoy. Oh, and make enough money that I can eat.

My point is Mac engineers can’t be happy working for a large company that builds cross platform products. The goals of the engineer and the company contradict each other. The company wants to invest as little as possible into the Mac platform, while the engineer will want to invest as much as possible [1]. The engineer will end up stressed out, with no free time, a substandard Mac product, and a lot of frustration .

At the beginning I thought I could influence Macromedia to spend more money and time on the Mac product. After a while I realized that wasn’t in their best interest. My second idea was to try to do as much as I could personally. That had a small effect when I worked on Fireworks because the project was small enough and well designed enough. But when I arrived on Dreamweaver I realized that the project was too huge for me to make a difference alone. Unless the company decided to devote more resources I was only go to burn myself out. As I stated before, it wasn’t in Macromedia’s best interest to add more resources.

This is the reason I’m leaving Macromedia. It is a losing fight that I can’t win. Continuing there would only serve to burn me out even more. Of course, this begs the question: if not work for Macromedia, who? Given most large companies that have Mac products would be in the same boat as Macromedia, that didn’t leave many options. I am convinced the only way to ensure that my and the company’s goals align is to either own the company or work for a company that only makes Mac products. To that end, I am joining Order N Development.

I realize this post might sound like a whiney “I can’t win so I’m taking my ball and going home” rant. But its not. I’m saying I can win. I just have to play for a different team.

[1] The only contrary example to this is the Microsoft Mac Business Unit. Although Microsoft takes a lot of abuse from the Mac community, as far as I’m concerned they’re the only large company that has gotten it right. The Mac products are split out into their own business unit and can focus on making on a great Mac product.