So in the last week and change, Apple has:
* Let go Sal Soghoian, the legendary Apple director for automation technologies – the drum major for AppleScript, Automator and support for scripting technology within Apple products. He is not being replaced.
* Reassigned the engineers working on Apple’s AirPort and Time Capsule routers and backup devices to…something else.
* Released a $300 coffee table book of Apple’s design in the last 20 years, dedicated to the late CEO who upon returning to Apple sent all of its historical memorabilia to Stanford rather than dwell on the past.
Something is going on in Cupertino and I don’t care for the direction it’s taking. The new MacBook Pro has come in for more of a lashing than any Apple product in recent memory, and most of the heat is coming from actual professional users frustrated not only by the too-little-too-late of just now shipping a Skylake-based laptop and prioritizing thin and gimmicky over high-end firepower. Made worse, no doubt, by the fact that the Mac Pro – “can’t innovate any more my ass” – literally hasn’t changed in any way since it was introduced three years ago.
It’s difficult to get the impression that Apple is more convinced than ever that it’s a phone-and-tablet company, and that the Mac is not only no longer the bread and butter, but not worth committing high-end resources to. The ancillary technologies that support the Mac, that allow you to easily have an integrated experience – the AirPort line, the Thunderbolt Display – are gone by the boards. The additional technology that helps with using Macs in an enterprise environment is going – there isn’t so much as a rumor around Apple Remote Desktop 4 and Apple has basically relinquished enterprise support and management to JAMF in every way that matters, never mind the absence of a rackable server product since the demise of the late lamented XServe. (Not that I lament picking up those RAIDs, though. Those bastards weighed 110 pounds each fully packed.)
When I left Apple in 2007, it was out of fear that the role I was in was insufficiently technical – my job was six hours a day of scheduling and checking inventory and tasks that could have been handled by a competently-designed database and a few well-crafted scripts, and two hours a day of dockwalloping and forklift-pulling. I wanted to be working on computers and with computers, not just moving them around. The problem is, since 1994, my life has largely been built on the use of and support of the Macintosh. And now, on the eve of my 20th year in the IT sector, it’s rapidly becoming apparently that the Macintosh isn’t that much of a priority for Apple anymore.
On the one hand, fine. I’m about to embark on a career as a JAMF administrator, in addition to my other duties, and JAMF is basically the whole of enterprise-grade Mac management at present. It’s also an iOS management solution, and the perfect bridge to a world where, to be honest, the Apple-made market share in business is greater (the instances of iPhones in enterprise FAR outstrip the presence of Macs). It’s also, insh’allah, a job that doesn’t require as much of a physical on-site presence once things are up and running – the sort of job that could be based in the Bay Area but actually carried out remotely from the Central Coast. Or the Oregon Coast. Or a village in Ireland an hour’s train from Dublin, perhaps.
It’s also a job doing something that may not have the long-term demand to carry me the rest of the way home. Like it or not, I’m probably only about halfway through my working career. I don’t have a realistic path to retire before 65 – which gets even more unrealistic if they decide to kill off Medicare for anyone too young to be a Trumpshaker – so I’m going to have to be able to do something for twenty more years. And to be honest, modern workstation IT is less than thirty years old. During my ill-fated temp stint before I started my first real job out of school, I was told “the computer has an internet explorer” as if it were an unusual feature. LAN-type setups for anything but printing and maybe some basic file storage were new (hell, when I started at National Geographic, internet access was a function of what floor you were on and whether the switch passed TCP/IP). So to assume that the world of “workstation support” will look anything like 2017 in, say, 2027 – let alone 2037 – is an awfully big ask.
And we’ve already established that Silly Con Valley, as currently constituted, is a bad place to be in your 40s if you’re not already a millionaire VC. It’s definitely a bad place to be if you’ve been in the same job for seven years, which is apparently a red flag about your lack of ambition and never mind how much more you were doing in the same role with the same title by year six of the seven. It’s not the sort of neighborhood where I’d want to find myself looking for work at age 58, let alone 63.
So maybe I try to stick around where I’m at. If I could somehow carve out a niche where “platform engineering” becomes “platform support system administrator” for a little more money and a lot more remote-working, where we could easily go someplace else to hide out from the rest of the world when need be, where I could just punch the clock and let something else be how I measure my life…that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, right?