EyeCandy QA (2017-2019)

All in-depth articles about my Apple career:

• How I ended up at Apple (1999)
• AppleCare (1999-2000)
• Mail team (2000-2004)
• Aperture: Senior QA (2004-2005)
• Eye Candy QA (2005-2011)
• Flipboard interlude (2011-2013)
• Calendar and Contacts (2013-2015)
• SwiftUI (2015-2016)
• Watch Hardware (2016-2017)
• Eye Candy QA (2017-2019)
• Why I left Apple (2019)

This was the last job in my Apple career. However, I worked on the Eye Candy team before for 6 1/2 years, the longest job I held at Apple.

After the disaster of the Watch Hardware team, I really needed an anti-dote. I called up my old manager, John Louch, and asked him if there was a spot on the team. As incredible luck would have it, the person that replaced me 6 years earlier had just been fired.

I was back on the team!

There were two new members, both of whom I liked and respected greatly. They were working on some cool stuff, including Sidecar which recently shipped and the new screencapture. Also, they were rewriting everything in Swift! Bonus.

Sad trombone

What I discovered was the previous job just sucked the life out of me. I had never felt so disrespected and unvalued in my entire career. It was a waste of a whole year of my life.

Plus, the health problems that were caused by the job continued and I found it increasingly hard to do my job.

Most importantly, I just could not get motivated. Maybe a day or two a week, I had a spurt of productivity, then I just couldn’t do anything.

Twenty years

One month after my twentieth anniversary of starting, the year after the first iMac shipped and when $50m was considered an amazing quarterly profit and the company was worth $4 billion, I quit.

As I mentioned in my first post, my original plan was to stay 2 years and see if Apple survived. Now it’s a $1 trillion company.

RIP: April 12, 1999—May 1, 2019

More details about why I left Apple.