Apple and Judgmental Devs are Against Me
It’s all coming home to roost. I need to admit one thing: change is scary. It might be the incoming AI implosion. It might be constant layoffs, it might be leadership dictats. All we actually know is that the changes come one after another, and don’t often get an opportunity to rest in between crisis.
Fellow developers keep claiming that my machine is “unusable” though, and I think that they are missing the point entirely.
I simply ignore their judgmental moans and continue to do what I’ve always been doing, but I get the feeling that one day this will not be enough.
Haters Gonna Hate
They hate, of course they do. In some businesses it is about the way you dress, or the time you come into the office in the morning.
I’ve found that certain developers have an obsession with dark mode. Others have had an obsession with my trackpad scoll direction, but it amounts to the same thing.
The Issue/Non-Issue
I keep ny Macs scroll direction the some way as it has been since 2011. That is natural scrolling. Am I wrong, am I a bad developer for using this setting?
I know who I want to avoid asking, that is my fellow developers.
Because I don’t like the judgement. I dislike being told that I’m doing something all wrong because it does not match the tastes of one of my colleagues.
Dev Teams vs. My Muscle Memory
“Your machine is unusable,” one of my colleagues told me while trying to debug an issue on my MacBook. “The scroll feels backwards!” To which I replied: “It’s natural. To me.” This minor rebellion against Cupertino has caused countless awkward pair-programming sessions and raised questions about my adaptability.
Someone’s it is not about trackpad direction at all. Sometimes the devs around me don’t like me using light mode rather than dark mode. Recently a dev didn’t like me using Claude to make a pull request. They judged me for all of these things, and have got me to question whether I am a “real” developer at all. They’ve got me questioning whether I am capable, whether I’ll be able to do anything at all. Maybe I just don’t have it in me, I just can’t say anymore.
A Decade of Holding Out
I know you might be thinking “what is it about the trackpad, just change it”. My holdout has outlasted tech trends, since Apple only introduced “natural scrolling” (that is, the current scrolling direction) in 2011.
So in 2011 Apple effectively reversed the scroll direction so the content moves in the same direction as your fingers, a play to make MacOS work like an iPhone. My Mac usage, sadly, predates 2011 by some time.
You want me to change? Steve Jobs didn’t manage to do so.
In the same easy as your deadline of “the 31st July” is arbitrary and meaningless, your insistence that I change my scroll direction is simply a demonstration that your development practices do not really make sense.
Conclusion
Apple makes decisions that are about control rather than usability. Look, Apple have never truly cared about the consumer, and feel empowered to charge you incredible amounts for “game-changing” software and hardware that has been in the wider industry for years.
Yet I draw the line at scrolling.
The next time someone tells me to “adapt” I’ll tell them that I’m not at Apple’s whim for scrolling. My habits are, and will remain, mine. That’s it.
About The Author
Professional Software Developer “The Secret Developer” can be found on Twitter @TheSDeveloper.
The Secret Developer will never find you, they’re hiding.