Early on (15+ years ago) I spent a few weeks there on contract and I noticed they used Java EVERYWHERE, and not always well. They had a CS app named after a key Star Wars character that was in all likelihood a breach of the Geneva Convention. A code atrocity with the performance of a sloth on its 8th bong rip with a UX from hell.
If it helps that CS app was rewritten about 10 years ago (when I worked there, but not on that app) in part due to the complaints you mention. It's totally true that most resources were spent on customer facing apps. Internal apps were definitely not of the same quality, because they didn't need to be.
Good to hear. The fact that in 2005 you had an app that required seemingly petabytes of memory to operate, and put on machines barely powerful enough to play minesweeper, was in and of itself a series of bad decisions...but the app itself, and it's layout were just maddening. It's like MC Escher was the UX lead.
For some reason whenever I'm on my work's VPN, Apple Music lets me play 1 album and then the next time I try to start a song it will tell me I'm not logged in and I'll have to force quit and relaunch (frequently a few times) before it will let me play another album.
Apple Music is the only app that has this problem.
When I was there a decade ago, it started becoming more polyglot friendly (node apps had to use a jvm sidecar to do internal communications originally!)
My team wrote some of the Python libraries for internal services just so we could avoid that Java sidecar! It took 10 times longer to boot the sidecar than the Python app.
Another reminder that acronyms are pretty terrible for communication. Every time I onboard with a new org there’s a whole new set of acronyms to learn that’s barely faster than typing out the unabbreviated version. Nice to save a couple seconds when the cost is only a bunch of people not able to follow along when people are communicating.
To be clear: not ragging on OP in particular at all but more at the widespread practice at a company level.
> Another reminder that acronyms are pretty terrible for communication. Every time I onboard with a new org there’s a whole new set of acronyms to learn that’s barely faster than typing out the unabbreviated version
My (cynical) take on the matter is that software engineers want to prove how smart they are to other software engineers, and they think using obscure jargon and abbreviations is a good way to do it.
I’m sure that’s some part of it. I think another part, kind of similar, is acronyms being used as a form of in-group/out-group behavior. “I know the lingo so I’m in the club. You don’t so you aren’t”
