Having consulted at a lot of these big businesses, I can tell you that a lot of the staff classified as "engineers" by CEOs in their posts & stock holder messaging, are in fact "tool configurators" that these orgs are using to setup, update, and modify the configuration of their internal tools, and a lot of last mile "solutions" for making clunky enterprise tools work well enough or often report well enough for internal middle management needs. I have no doubt that AI can help with these jobs more reliably than it can with full on coding. That being said, even these tend to build up tremendous technical debt within orgs with tons of bespoke naming, duplicate and repetitive automation, and new ongoing costs.

Tl;DR; Most big orgs often like to message to Wallstreet that these jobs are "the expensive ones" vs the reality of what they're really covering workwise.

Managing these products with separate OS's and requiring different software for use on both, helps insulate Apple from cannibalization of their own revenue by someone buying an ipad instead of a laptop or vice versa. Part of their pricing strategy with the keyboards & such for ipad is to help ensure price parity between these two platforms, and to disincentize as many as possible from thinking they can get away with just an ipad.

Mysteriously foreigners with expensive and fine goods will find themselves routinely mugged by peeps with access to this dataâ¦

Great point, there is a system in place for these things, and in the case that Google doesn't trust the commit access that the maintainers have, they should probably be publicly highlighting that too vs just trying to route around any issues.

https://www.mapbox.com/
Not exactly proect management oriented, but could be an easy bolt on to Trello or your project management tool of choice

In June, we released SCO OpenServer 6, which was a multi-year, multi-million dollar development effort that resulted in a product that goes beyond simply leveling the playing field with Linux. Based on the feedback from our strategic partners, customers, resellers, engineers, and many others, I believe SCO OpenServer 6 outshines Linux on a number of fronts:

Sorry, Darl. Things like large file support, additional processor support, and many other "advances" in OpenSewer 6 are things that Linux has had for a while now.

Friend Speaks my mind.

As a current government contractor I can say with some authority that at least in my little nitch just about any code you demo to a manager and get even a mild grunt of afrimation from is both going to be used and expected to work as if you had spent 4 months carefully crafting it, refining it, load testing it, and what not.

I've found that there's a real lack of technical savvy in the people who actually make the decisions about how to do things, and what to do. Most of the time contractors bid on a problem, get the problem, and then figure out what the real problems are, and then have to pitch a solution to the "real" problems to managment. It's pretty rare that their vision of the solution really jives with what some practical and scalable solutions might be.

I'd also say that there is an appalling lack of automation in many government systems. Even routine things such as "is the disk filled" or "is a mission critical webserver up" are novel advances when automated.

But even given all of this, my experience has been that most contractors are putting out very high quality work compared to Federal FTEs, and that usually after a year or two of wrestling with the existing architecture contractor built systems tend to be fairly good.