iPhone last frontier for a grizzled embedded engineer
What’s an embedded designer to do these days? You are accustomed to writing tight, elegant code in memory constrained devices, usually in a C derived language, on a not that powerful machines.
Now it seems that most of embedded jobs, at least in Italy disappeared from the map entirely, including some of the firms I had consulted for closed doors altogether. Well, I have converted my skills and started an iPhone development company based in Milan, FWLAB, a very small one (it’s actually a family run business, we are very literally a Mom and Pop operation), is now formally a firm and not anymore just a website or an informal group of mostly embedded technologists as it started a few years ago.
We at FWLab do iOS App development for corporate users, and also put some apps of ours on the App store, from time to time. We have strong iPhone and iPad development skills, honed in decades of professional software development for corporate users, as consultants. I still have all my equipment available for development with embedded micros at hand, but most of my job now is based on the iPhone and iPad, which are wonderful and elegant instruments. We try to put some elegance in everything we do, and minimalism is one of my preferred architecture styles, and I’m not even mentioning music.
Of course I am still a master in Java, pity that Italy has gone the Indian route when we are talking about brainless corporare software development: let’s place throw as many low quality, low paid programmers as possible, in order to try to get something together, coupled with a notorious dislike for anything which could resemble a managerial skillset in “project managers”. Do you know what is wrong with thirld world software development approach? (beware, it’s practiced in “top brand” American multinationals as well I will not name).
If you are talking about a large multinational company, US, French or whatever, bear in mind that Italian branch managers are often the same inept bunch you will typically find in most places in Italy: they are, above all, not a “multinational”, the Italian branch is, culturally speaking, first of all an Italian company. I defiinitely remember that IBM Italy about 12 years ago was definitely not a “non smoking company”, although IBM proclaimed proudly to be everywhere else in Europe.
If you are a large corporation based in Italy, you probably would like to have me as a software architect and a designer, but you won’t get me from a large consultancy anymore, they are too starved for cash in order to offer my services to clients. After all, minimalist designs mean a lot more reliability, less downtime, and a lot less consulting hours charged for development: let’s say they are not completely aligned with the best interests of their clients if the best and more experienced you are, the less you seem to find work seems to be the rule.
Well, these roots are well founded in ruthless and reckless lack of meritocracy, in the “I tell you do” approach, and utter inexcusable ignorance. Above all it’s about not being able to admit, recognise and thus correct errors. I once read a “scholarly paper” prepared by a fellow MBA type based in India. It was about software development pitfalls and reasons for missing objectives. I have lackluster experiences with third world software guys, both Indians and Iranians. They seem to adapt only too well to Italian corporate culture and function perfectly as lakeys, and is suprisingly hard to surclass the worst of our ilk in this role, Italians are “grand masters” in these dark arts.
This funny scholarly paper mentioned “impossible to determine causes”, “unfathomable difficulties” “inherent in the discipline of software project management”. Ha! Let’s not call a spade a spade, for fear that we might offend someone who is in charge… I responded to his paper (some Royal Institute) that if a manager cannot identify reasons for failure, in reality that is a clear indicator that the corporate culture of the place does not allow to pinpoint causes, which are very often quite evident, and betrayes a culture of fear and lack of communication. Our country as a whole, Italy, is going down the drain for this lack of meritocratic culture, but let’s not talk about our country dirty laundry. If you read the press, you are probably quite familiar with the gory details of our “ruling class”, clowns and corrupt politicians.
We normal, hard working types struggle a lot just to get by.
If you are in charge of software development in a big corporation, never, I repeat never allow a third worlder to verify processes and assess quality, as they don’t have the culture and the level of personal integrity required to do the job properly, which requires the ability to talk frankly and openly about problems, not hiding them till they explode, for fear of making someone “look bad”. If you are hiring an Italian manager, be wary as even our universities have no real academic credibility. We have very clever and intelligent people, but very rarely in positions of power, which are usually achieved because of genetic reasons or personal ties, never because of skills or performance.
There is still a chance to make beautiful software in this forsaken country, and that chance relies on Apple systems, certainly this opportunity is nowhere to be found in Microsoft, which I personally abandoned, or in Oracle/Sun based Java.
I’ll keep you posted on my new adventures.
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