I have bought more than a few of them lunch / dinner when they're in town, some of the top writers I've written recommendations for and helped them find jobs.
But it wasn't because of any substantial income, those nice lunches & dinners probably got me a net operating loss for the year...
They were interns looking to fill out their resume and clips with writing samples. There wasn't much of a pitch, some of them started contributing before they even responded to the ad
You're right, supporting IE9 isn't hard at all. IE8 is the problem. It's amazing how many people still use 8 -- and it's because of corporations who are slow to update software. The thing that annoys me is that Microsoft knows that businesses will use the current version of IE for many years to come, so they should be as cutting edge as possible, but they don't seem to care.
The reason for a large IE8 contingent is because its the latest version of XP will support. The fact that businesses are using a TWELVE YEAR OLD operating system is the main issue here. Sure, maybe they could've made IE9 work with XP, but if people aren't even willing to update their OS once a decade, are we really sure they'll upgrade their browser?
The author probably could not have gotten an internship with Apple. The one person I heard of Apple hiring like you explain was @comex, who worked on jailbreaks. By hiring @comex, they did 2 things:
1) Put an end to a jailbreaker's work
2) Hired someone to find security holes
While this is a pretty neat story, the author probably wouldn't be as valuable for Apple as someone like @comex would be.
For what it's worth, quite a few of the original iPhone Dev Team members got hired by Apple, and they tried to recruit all of us. Not sure about the later iPhone hackers, but in the early days they were trying hard to get all of us.
