My advice: learn iOS development
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The other day I was talking with one of the interns we have working at the office. He is all into web development and I over heard he was looking to getting with .Net (would have given the same advice if it was anything web related though)
"If I may give you an advice, get into iOS development. You'll probably get a job in cool company or startup. You won't have to fight with painful shit like browsers, JavaScript and SQL. You'll find a job in days and maybe make some money on the side with your own apps. With Apple releasing new hardware and iOS every year, lots of apps need to be maintained or upgraded"
Funny thing, I don't do iOS development, so, am I wrong and have a wrong view of it?
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Sounds like the sort of advice given by an evangelist to me
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The only Apple product I have is a iPad 1st gen and it was a gift, so no, I'm no Apple fanboy, far from it. What I see is iOS developers switching jobs each year and getting fat checks"
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"If I may give you an advice, get into iOS development. You'll probably get a job in cool company or startup. You won't have to fight with painful shit like browsers, JavaScript and SQL. You'll find a job in days and maybe make some money on the side with your own apps."
Yes! Abuse yourself with Swift and Objective-C! Pay an annual developer's fee to Apple just for the privilege of being able to submit an app to their store, which they may reject for unspecified raisins! And if they do accept your app, better keep paying your annual fee to keep your app in their store so that they can take their percentage of your sale price! Don't forget that you'll be paying 💰💰 for your dev hardware!
Honestly, there is a market for people with such skills, and it does pay well. Leave it those who love it.
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and getting fat checks
Read that as
getting fat chicksat first and was kinda confused.Filed Under: Not that there is anything wrong with fat baby chicken #NoDiscrimination
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What I see is iOS developers switching jobs each year and getting fat checks
Sounds like they're just going from start-up to start-up, moving on when each company overspends and collapses
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If I may give you an advice, get into iOS development.
Guaranteed to be a small fish in a large pond.
You'll probably get a job in cool company or startup.
Or the local transit authority. Everybody has iOS apps right now; there's nothing more "startup" or "cool" about iOS development than anything else. That ship sailed back in 2010.
You won't have to fight with painful shit like browsers, JavaScript and SQL.
That one is true.
You do have to fight with Objective-C, however.
And if you ever make a cross-platform app, which is what most employers will want, you're right back into the HTML5 mess.
You'll find a job in days and maybe make some money on the side with your own apps.
Where are you where iOS developers are in such demand? Not true here in Seattle.
With Apple releasing new hardware and iOS every year, lots of apps need to be maintained or upgraded"
Yeah, and they take 30% of all your revenues, and they can say "fuck you" and pull your app at any second for literally no reason at all.
Funny thing, I don't do iOS development, so, am I wrong and have a wrong view of it?
The best advice is to learn enough languages, and truly understand enough software systems, that you can be valuable to almost any employer for almost any task.
Until recently, I worked in web analytics. I now work in healthcare. How did I bridge that gap? I learned how to build well-structured programs. I learned how HTTP and TCP/IP works. (An incredible number of people have absolutely no idea.) I learned enough JavaScript to be valuable to my current company's front-end people. I've done some work in C#, JavaScript, SQL, Python, Ruby, etc.
What I see is iOS developers switching jobs each year and getting fat checks
Again: where do you live?
Also, are you aware of the phenomenon of "confirmation bias"? You heard of X people getting fat checks, do you know how many didn't? X2? X10? X*1000?
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iOS isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so it's a solid career advice.
It's not for me, though. The gold rush is over as far as hobbyist world is concerned. And, while there should be enough work in the corporate world, it seems kind of isolated. You'll get siloed into a specialist role, assembling thin clients out of native pre-made components. Write a bunch of rote code, connect this socket to that function, etc. Mobile app development might be exciting on the bleeding edge of the app store, but at the level you're likely to end up, I bet it's more like the wordpress theme market.
Both web frontend and backend seem more vibrant and interesting from my perspective.
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being able to submit an app to their store, which they may reject for unspecified raisins
Don't forget a minimum one week wait for them to get around to reviewing.
And also that their reviewers are very hit and miss in quality, and also can request you contact them over the phone if the app in question apparently hits close to home with that tester.
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iOS isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so it's a solid career advice.
It's not bad career advice, but it sounds to me like he gave it from 2009, not from 2015. And I still want to know where iOS developers are in such high demand that they can get hired in "hours".
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London, Madrid, Barcelona, Stockholm and Munich are the places I have a frequent enough overview of iOS devs coming and leaving.
And about the 2008 thing, I think my advice has more weight today, after 7 years since you can see the platform is here to stay and with enough traction as to not change in a few more.
About the hybrid apps, those are a joke and if HTML is a pain, adding mobile is just torture.
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London, Madrid, Barcelona, Stockholm and Munich are the places I have a frequent enough overview of iOS devs coming and leaving.
Freakin' Europeans. Why don't you invent your OWN phone OS, lazy bastards.
And about the 2008 thing, I think my advice has more weight today, after 7 years since you can see the platform is here to stay and with enough traction as to not change in a few more.
I agree it's a platform here to stay, I disagree that the companies hiring (the vast majority of) iOS jobs are "cool" or "startup".
About the hybrid apps, those are a joke and if HTML is a pain, adding mobile is just torture.
Right; but if you want to stay employed, it's going to come up sooner or later.
If he/she's up against another guy, and the other guy has cross-platform experience, well, there's a lost job.
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Freakin' Europeans. Why don't you invent your OWN phone OS, lazy bastards
We did. It was called Symbian and it was a bit shit
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And if Stephen Elop (the Microsoft guy) hadn't infiltrated Nokia and halted all development, we might have had a newer one:
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And if Stephen Elop (the Microsoft guy) hadn't infiltrated Nokia and halted all development, we might have had a newer one:
What is with IT people and really stupid petty conspiracy theories?
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What is with
ITpeople and really stupid petty conspiracy theories?
People are stupid
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Even assuming MeeGo was a failure, there was literally not one single rational reason for Nokia to NOT release Android phones around 2010-2011. It was the only company to "focus on Windows Phone". By explicit decision of their CEO, who had been Vice President of Microsoft Devices & Services.
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How is that different to Samsung not releasing WinPhones? There's no rational reason for them not to.
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In this case, it's not a conspiracy theory.
It's a pretty good description of what happened.Elop killed the Symbian replacement stone dead, replaced it with Windows Phone 7, also a burning platform with a lot of baggage.
Nokia then proceeded to crash and burn, and finally sold the phones division to Microsoft for a song, while Elop took his golden parachute back to Microsoft.
Perhaps it wasn't planned from the beginning, and Nokia was in trouble before, but it doesn't half look suspicious.
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The conspiracy theory isn't the events, but the motives you've assigned to them.
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Here's an alternative explanation:
- MS wanted to make WinPhone a more attractive platform
- Nokia make some of the better handsets on the market
- MS decides Nokia is a suitable partner
- After a while, they decide to bring the device side in-house to make things easier
- Nokia thinks 'eh, why not?' It's one less thing for them to worry about, after all
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Freakin' Europeans. Why don't you invent your OWN phone OS, lazy bastards.
We invented you, Yanks, so you can do that boring shit for us.
I agree it's a platform here to stay, I disagree that the companies hiring (the vast majority of) iOS jobs are "cool" or "startup".
In the local market, it's mostly NET and Java right now (about 35% each) and some bundled PHP / frontend (say another 20%). The remaining 10% is the mobile stuff, seems equally split between Android and iOS. But I suppose better developed markets, especially US, will be more iOS oriented.
BTW, I recently got an iPad, and I have to say, the app store feels kind of dead from my perspective. Sure, you can get you daily fart app or flappybird clone, but the kind of productivity apps I was looking for (native js playground stuff, for example) seem to have hit their peak a few years ago and then the updates ceased.
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Well, I was not thinking about personal apps but making them for others, and almost every company has an iOS app.
BTW, my perception is totally different for Android devs which are a dime a dozen.
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You won't have to fight with painful shit like browsers, JavaScript and SQL.
Instead you'll have to fight painful shit like objective-C, unavailable APIs and, corporate bureaucrats and self-righteous morons setting evil policies.
And I would not be so sure with the job. Applications that could almost be done as web apps, but won't be so they can get their own icon on the phone will often be done in HTML5 using Cordova anyway and apps that need to be done natively will have big part done in a portable way, tested on something more developer friendly (Android, desktop), so I would not bet on the job demand anyway. Mind you, I work on a native mobile app. There is at least 10 developers working on it at any time, but one of them handles all the porting to iPhone and he learnt it on the job.
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The best advice is to learn enough languages, and truly understand enough software systems, that you can be valuable to almost any employer for almost any task.
QFT.
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How is that different to Samsung not releasing WinPhones? There's no rational reason for them not to.
A lot. They are already releasing Android. And I really doubt Microsoft can beat it's zero cost.
However Nokia was looking for system to use to recover from the crappy situation they painted themselves in by stopping development of Symbian and failed development of new system, likely due to loss of direction. At that point, they could have used Android and they could have used Qt Extended (or whatever former Utopia was called at that point), both ready for production at that point and both available to them (Android because it is free, Qt because they owned it already), yet they chose Windows Phone which were not ready and the version 7 was only a temporary measure with no chance to get the useful applications ported.
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And I really doubt Microsoft can beat it's zero cost.
They can match it easily enough; just do the same as Google. That is, free license for the OS, make money on the Marketplace.
@Bulb said:yet they chose Windows Phone which were not ready
It had plenty enough features and was more than useable; why not use it?
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Also, they'd have been just one company in a sea of other Android phone companies.
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What I see is iOS developers switching jobs each year and getting fat checks"
.NET devlopers around here can job hop each year to inflate their pay check. Do it too much and it bites you, though.
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It had plenty enough features and was more than useable; why not use it?
It did not have many application and the fact WP7 was .net-only impeded the speed at which it could get them (many applications were never ported to WP7 and are only ported to WP8, because that now has C++).
Also, they'd have been just one company in a sea of other Android phone companies.
Yes, that might be.
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It did not have many application and the fact WP7 was .net-only impeded the speed at which it could get them
iOS and Android had no apps when they were first released; didn't stop them
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iOS and Android did not have to compete with Android.
Before iOS applications were fewer and hard to find. And since iOS was only high-end devices, when Android came it was still the case for low-end devices. Now the applications are there and any new system is at disadvantage.
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Right, so they shouldn't bother?
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If they want to…
Actually I should probably correct myself. I said
And I really doubt Microsoft can beat it's zero cost.
but thinking about it again, Microsoft was really desperate to break into the smart phone and tablet market that was quickly filling up with iOS and Android, so they might have poured quite a bit of money into it.
And I don't expect Google would try to fight them. Google does not care what system low-end phones and tablets run as long as they are being made and they are cheap, so people can use them to browse web and see Google ads all over it.
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I don't know if it's still the case but a few years ago, because of various patent cases, Microsoft were taking a royalty for each Android phone sold, to the extend that they made more profit from an Android thana Windows phone
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I thought that's why Google bought Motorola mobile division—to get some patents to threat Microsoft and Apple and Samsung with and be able to tell them to shove it.
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@Bulb said:
It did not have many application and the fact WP7 was .net-only impeded the speed at which it could get them
iOS and Android had no apps when they were first released; didn't stop themNot only that, but .Net apps were being written for Windows mobile as early as WinMo 2003 or so, so it's not as if people didn't know how to do it.
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I was very neutral towards Apple until I had to write an iOS app for work. After dealing with 400-page license agreements that basically boil down to "Lube up and take it like a man because we're Apple"; Xcode being the buggiest, most unstable piece of
software package I've ever experienced in my life; the App Store approvers being sadistic morons (they seriously forced us to remove our in-app help screen because reasons); and them not syncing iOS and Xcode versions forcing us to go weeks at a time without a dev tablet because someone accidentally updated the iPad and now Xcode can't talk to it; and lots more I'm forgetting because it's better to not remember the horrors; ever since all of that I've decided I will never willingly buy an Apple product ever in my life.
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.NET yes. But:
- The big important applications have C++ core that is compiled for all the platforms. No way anybody would rewrite those to C#.
- The new UI framework is almost, not completely, unlike the previous. It's not like you could actually reuse anything in the user interface.
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The new UI framework is almost, not completely, unlike the previous. It's not like you could actually reuse anything in the user interface.
And you wouldn't want to; compared to WinPhone's Metro interface, WinCE on touch devices sucks cheesy donkey balls.
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WinCE on touch devices sucks and Win32 API sucks. I agree. I programmed in/on them. But it still means effort and most application developers are not going to spend (much) effort to port to platform with 1% market share.
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Just noticed this flying by:
Developers reflect on a year of learning, teaching, and using Apple’s Swift
The new language has proven quite popular, though hurdles remain.
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Or the local transit authority. Everybody has iOS apps right now; there's nothing more "startup" or "cool" about iOS development than anything else. That ship sailed back in 2010.
You can also use:
- Phonegap for HTML5-based apps.
- Xamarin for C#-based apps
I couldn't vouch for either, although our mobile guy was using Phonegap for our mobile apps before he left for a job closer to where he lived.
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Xamarin seems nice, but it's expensive, and you still have to develop separate UIs for each device. Xamarin Forms supposedly helps with that, using a XAML variant, but appears to have no binding, meaning that very little of what you know about WPF/Silverlight/Windows Store helps at all.
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Xcode being the buggiest, most unstable piece of software package I've ever experienced in my life
TRWTF is that the thread got to post 38 before anyone mentioned this.
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Xamarin seems nice, but it's expensive, and you still have to develop separate UIs for each device. Xamarin Forms supposedly helps with that, using a XAML variant, but appears to have no binding, meaning that very little of what you know about WPF/Silverlight/Windows Store helps at all.
No bindings? Gah.
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The best advice is to learn enough languages, and truly understand enough software systems, that you can be valuable to almost any employer for almost any task.
QFT -- I'm fairly close to that point myself, albeit with some definite preference biases language-wise based on my experience. (I just wish that learning how to write C# atop Mono didn't throw you at odds with every C# book out there...)
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albeit with some definite preference biases language-wise based on my experience.
You'll always get there.
I just wish that learning how to write C# atop Mono didn't throw you at odds with every C# book out there...
Really? I'd be interested in hearing more about this, since that doesn't make much sense. The best C# books are the language spec and Framework Design Guidelines anyway.
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And if Stephen Elop (the Microsoft guy) hadn't infiltrated Nokia and halted all development, we might have had a newer one:
Then again, it does have its own share of little annoyances.
It can be nice though if you want to play with Qt or Android, as accessing it can either be done through Microsoft's MTP (default, might be trouble on Linux and Mac) or SSH (simply configured in the Settings app) — no rooting needed.
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Text from Xcode
