Apple wants another Mail Team Engineer
Apple is advertising for another software engineer to join the Mail Team.
According to the job description 
on the Apple web site:
The Mac OS X Internet Technologies department is looking for a software engineer to join the Mail.app team. Email is one of the most important programs for today’s computer users, and we are looking for engineers eager to help us expand the work that Mail can do for people.
Our top requirement for this position is someone with energy and ideas for extending our application to make it work better and do more for our users. This engineer will have responsibility for designing features, implementing features, and fixing bugs in Mail. In general we prefer to have engineers who can work both the UI level and lower level implementation details.
Last time the Mail Team wanted new blood, I got an email from “Deepthroat” inside the Cupertino Bunker, asking me to promote it on Hawk Wings. Nothing this time.
In fact, I haven’t heard from Deepthroat for a while, which either means that I have somehow offended him or he has been kneecapped by some kind of internal Communication Prevention Squad. Or maybe he has quit and this is his job.
This is the third engineer-level position advertised this year. Last time the Mail Team put their pictures inside the Mail.app package, there were nine of them. Either this is a time of expansion or a time of high job rotation and, perhaps, unhappiness. One hopes the former.
Anyway, if you think this is you, you can apply for the job on the Apple web site. The position’s requisition number is 2757917.
Helping to “expand the work that Mail can do for people” would be a noble calling.
Tags: Apple, Apple Mail, engineer, jobs, Mail team, mail.appRelated posts
November 10th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
Just one nitpick: times of high job rotation don’t necessarily have to be linked to unhappiness. People in such a position could, for instance, be getting coaxed out of their old happy jobs into new, even happier ones.
Also remember that the Aperture “shake up,” in which many members of the original team apparently moved on to other projects, preceded the release of what people seem to think is a much improved version of the application.
November 10th, 2006 at 11:55 pm
And if you spend enough time on a project you can be irreplaceable, and hence unpromotable.
November 10th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
@Daniel: Fair point. It is tempting to think of them all giving up in disgust as stationary, eye-candy and all kinds of window-dressing is foisted on Leopard Mail, or for some more plausible reason but they may be leaving happily, not least for the reasons Plaid Cow suggests.
I’ve made a tweak in your honour.
November 11th, 2006 at 5:49 am
I wish they’d make some of the functions of Mail available system-wide. If I’m reading a cool PDF in Preview or Safari and want to send it to someone, why can’t I just click a button to send it? Instead I have to download it from Safari, find it in Finder, and then drag it to the Mail icon in the dock. So much dragging is a … drag.
November 17th, 2006 at 8:35 pm
Well, actually, all you have to do email an open document in ANY application in OS X is to hold down CMD+OPT and click+drag the tiny icon in the title bar of the document down onto the Mail.app icon.
Admittedly this functionality is rather hidden but it’s bloody useful once you learn it.
November 18th, 2006 at 6:42 am
Nice tip, Mr Warne! Thanks for pointing that out.
December 2nd, 2006 at 1:38 pm
I agree with Dan that proxy icons are a really valuable, albeit hidden, shortcut; I’m always dragging the proxy icon of documents to open then in different apps (e.g. previewing HTML in various browsers), or dragging a web site icon into Mail, to send the URL (…you did buy OmniWeb during Nov., right!?) …(in the others you can drag the site icon from the URL field, of course.)
…but I’m afraid Opt-Cmd doesn’t come into this, Cmd-clicking a proxy icon gives you the path to the file’s location so you can open it’s containing folder etc., and decent browsers (read: OmniWeb and Safari) give you the heirarchy of the web page, such that you can navigate back to a preceeding level of the site (or again, just the containing directory, e.g. when viewing an image/file Cmd-click to view a directory listing, assuming you’re allowed.)