[HN Gopher] Apple avoids job cuts because it didn't overhire lik...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple avoids job cuts because it didn't overhire like Google and
Amazon
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 381 points
Date : 2023-02-10 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| tablespoon wrote:
| Or maybe the current tech layoffs are a fad not driven by
| necessity, and Apple tends to set trends, not mindlessly follow
| them?
| mclouts91 wrote:
| Most layoffs are happening in growth businesses that aren't
| even profitable on paper. Apple, make things, things people
| want and quite often need. they are a solid business that are
| unlikely to suffer much in a short term tightening of people's
| finances interest rate rises.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Most layoffs are happening in growth businesses that aren't
| even profitable on paper.
|
| Google? Facebook? Microsoft? All very profitable, all doing
| layoffs.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| My guess most of these companies were also borrowing money.
| You can look on their balance sheets for the stock. When
| that rate is low it makes a lot of sense to grow and
| borrow. When that rate goes up the math changes. No matter
| how profitable you are. There could be quite a bit of
| 'someone had to go first' fad going on too. Adding
| headcount just because you make tons of money does not
| necessarily make sense. It just means you are probably
| overcharging for your existing products and really should
| be passing those cost savings onto your customers. If you
| do not do that you risk a competitor doing exactly that.
| Interest rates plus decent inflation plays into how much
| debt/risk you can take on what your headcount will be plus
| what you charge your customers.
| lapcat wrote:
| > My guess most of these companies were also borrowing
| money. You can look on their balance sheets for the
| stock.
|
| You don't have to guess. These are publicly owned
| corporations. Their published balanced sheets include
| debt.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| The 'guess' piece is what they were borrowing for.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| I'm guessing Google and Facebooks profit centers are much
| more narrow? Eg. Google Ads. Facebook has the Metaverse
| Black Hole whereas has Googles countless endeavours (eg.
| Chat)
| pydry wrote:
| If this were about cutting unprofitable divisions rather
| than cutting people/wages then the Metaverse would
| probably have been killed. Still kicking.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| lol only time will tell since they basically went all-in.
| Do they change the name back to Facebook if they start
| reversing course? :P
| bbor wrote:
| Yeah but they're still some of the most profitable
| companies in the world, and Google at least has many
| billions in the bank. I feel you're moving goalposts?
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| Yes true but they overhired and most growth has stalled.
| The idea I'm getting are the layoffs are happening in the
| less profitable parts of the business.
|
| Also, I was told because of the severance packages, these
| companies aren't going to be saving any money until a few
| months down.
|
| That said I read a few days ago Apple may start doing
| cuts in the future. iPhone sales are down 8% and
| smartphone sales in general are down 18%!
| zinekeller wrote:
| > on paper
|
| This is the important word. Although Alphabet, Meta and
| Microsoft overall are profitable there are parts of it that
| a) was (and still not profitable) and b) was in demand in
| the last three years but are now softened enough that it
| turns "okay, unprofitable but manageble" into "this has
| become a money pit". Since that they are cutting off
| anyway, why not throw laggards and undesirables into the
| mix? I estimate that around half is genuine cost-savings
| and another half is euphemistic firing, which I'll be
| honest muddies the explanation up a bit.
|
| For Google, their focus was on the cloud and productivity
| products. Even discounting the already-planned Stadia
| layoffs, it is well-known that Google has targeted 2023 as
| its Google Cloud break-even point. If they can't profit on
| user acquisition then they need to cut up costs. This is
| why they're now aggressive on closing up GCP products so
| that the core GCP product can be operated with less
| expense. Additionally, their Workspace and ChromeOS team
| were also gutted because the Chromebook boom induced by the
| pandemic is now over (will expand over at Microsoft's
| explanation).
|
| Microsoft's cuts are also focused on productivity suites.
| The boom times for PCs is over so they need to cut costs
| there, and it shows hard. Both the Windows and 365 subteams
| were gutted further since that companies have now time to
| actually count up how many licenses they need, plus since
| Windows 11 is "free" the only revenue is from OEMs and
| business. OEMs now buys fewer licenses because the boom
| times is over. Businesses are not thrilled at Windows 11
| and are secretly waiting for a Windows 12 or a 10 ESU.
| Azure is now slightly profitable but as you might have
| guess "slight" is unacceptable to shareholders so some were
| also let go too.
|
| Meta no longer grows in its traditional business in social
| media and fails to crack the secret to an enjoyable
| metaverse, with most people passing it off as a fad and
| even metaverse believers flocking to competitors that were
| already there and have better products. It's plain obvious
| why they need to reduce headcount.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Meta no longer grows in its traditional business in
| social media
|
| "Almost 20 years in, Facebook is still growing. The
| social network now has 2 billion daily active users, Meta
| reported alongside its fourth-quarter earnings. The
| report marks the first time Facebook, which added 16
| million users last quarter, has reached 2 billion daily
| users." https://www.engadget.com/facebook-2-billion-
| meta-q4-2022-ear...
| zinekeller wrote:
| > 16 million users
|
| Which in shareholders' terms would be practically
| nothing.
| [deleted]
| gigel82 wrote:
| Apple avoids job cuts _for now_ , because they're sitting on a
| big pile of cash
| [deleted]
| lowatt wrote:
| These may be dimwitted questions but still want to ask: 1. Did
| Google, Amazon, Meta, etc benefit by over hiring during the
| pandemic? 2. Did the benefit of over hiring outweigh the cost of
| job cuts? 3. If both 1 and 2 are yes, then did they know about
| the possible layoffs and still intentionally over hired to max
| benefits?
| [deleted]
| blackflame7000 wrote:
| [dead]
| voytec wrote:
| Apple was always all about Jobs.
| magic_man wrote:
| None of the other companies really had to do layoffs. They are
| still printing money.
| pydry wrote:
| Apple got burned bad the last time they were caught organizing a
| wage fixing cartel:
|
| https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
|
| It's different this time around though, because economy. The tech
| layoffs started at the least profitable companies with the
| weakest balance sheets first (Google, Microsoft), and besides the
| whole economy is doing massive layoffs because of the recession
| and high interest rates:
| https://www.nar.realtor/blogs/economists-outlook/instant-rea...
| lapcat wrote:
| > the whole economy is doing massive layoffs because of the
| recession
|
| "U.S. reports blowout job growth; unemployment lowest since
| 1969" https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-job-growth-
| accelerates-j...
| pydry wrote:
| I probably should have added /s :)
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> and besides the whole economy is doing massive layoffs_
|
| Although last week the US announced an unexpectedly strong jobs
| report, roughly 80% higher jobs growth than expected. (180,000
| projected, 300,000 actual iirc).
| pinewurst wrote:
| Read "they" as "Steve Jobs personally".
| asdev wrote:
| this won't age well
| ineedasername wrote:
| Some PR & HR folks at Apple right now might be slapping
| themselves in the face over this disrupting their plans. Slow
| news day Fridays, companies often wait until the end of the day
| to release bad news. So they maybe wait a week.
|
| Although the article is paywalled so I don't know, maybe the
| author has a quote from Apple with some statement minimally
| confirming this.
| lapcat wrote:
| https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/02/apple-layoffs-tim-cook/
| jungledeuce wrote:
| You mean to tell me that Apple could have created thousands of
| high paying jobs, if only for several years, but didn't. And this
| is good? I can never remember who to be mad at.
|
| More seriously, I realize this is just clickbait, but I wonder
| how you could determine objectively which approach (hiring slow
| and needing to catch up, hiring medium, hiring fast and needing
| to fire) is "better for business". Seems very hard to control
| variables.
| Clubber wrote:
| >I can never remember who to be mad at.
|
| It's so exhausting too.
| krab wrote:
| Hiring many people and firing them shortly after isn't very
| productive use of human minds. Those people were doing probably
| something more valuable instead.
| renewiltord wrote:
| And now they can. It is good that people are being laid off.
| They can now go do the valuable thing. Perhaps Google's true
| target should have been 50% layoffs so that they can release
| people to go work on their valuable stuff instead of working
| at Google.
| krab wrote:
| That's mostly Google's decision. :shrug:
|
| Anyway, I see a difference between hiring and laying off
| vs. not hiring in the first place with regard to disruption
| in worker's lives.
| jungledeuce wrote:
| The disruption of making _several hundreds of thousands
| of dollars more_ than they would have outside of FAANG?
|
| I'll take some of that kind of disruption, please.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Even better if one of these "valuable things" topples
| Google.
| skylanh wrote:
| Depends on if you have comb-selections of the people hired.
|
| If we follow one path all the way to the end: If you can bring
| on a large number of people, then you can potentially evaluate
| them as "up-and-coming" high-quality talent. Those talents can
| be soaked in your business and technology stack, and become
| internal experts. Over that talent's life within the company,
| you may also underpay them relative to bringing in the same
| equivalent 10+ year veteran and training them on your internal
| assets.
|
| On another path: You can also develop a broader population of
| mid-grade, quality talent which can strength workforce
| resilience.
|
| During the mass layoff, procedures are different, and you may
| not have to follow quite the same fire-process as with an
| individual, and without some of the individual recourse
| processes regarding discrimination.
|
| FWIW, Microsoft used to (still does?) had a certain percentage
| of layoffs every year. In a good environment, it's weeding; in
| a bad environment, it culls good talent.
| r00fus wrote:
| > You mean to tell me that Apple could have created thousands
| of high paying jobs, if only for several years, but didn't. And
| this is good?
|
| Yes, I consider it good management and judgement. Apple is a
| company, not some charity. Amazon, etc didn't hire out of the
| goodness of their hearts they felt they could capitalize on
| something that didn't materialize.
| bbor wrote:
| I think it's a joke :) the point is companies aren't
| charities and layoffs aren't cruel, just business. Which is
| capitalist propaganda, of course!
| qaz_plm wrote:
| https://archive.ph/Wfsfr
| atum47 wrote:
| I remember this one month where I was receiving an amazon email
| every other day calling me for a job interview. I thought: man,
| they are really looking for people to hire.
| ryanjshaw wrote:
| Why is Apple being compared to Google and Amazon in this context?
| picardo wrote:
| Lazy journalism. They're all tech companies and all tech
| companies have the same business model, of course.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Why is it lazy when journalists compare Apple and Google, and
| yet it's rare to go even a few comments before FAANG being
| dropped into any tech discussion?
| djha-skin wrote:
| However, being that Apple sales probably shot through the
| roof, and how popular microchip commodities were in general,
| I'm sure they had almost more recent hire than Google did.
| dmix wrote:
| Id have the same question why every layoff gets a headline on
| HN but I guess it's newsworthy when it's a trend.
|
| Otherwise they are pretty similar sized "Big Tech" companies.
|
| Apple: 164,000 employees
|
| Google: 150,000 employees
|
| Amazon: ~800,000 corporate employees (this one was harder to
| find but the tech/software team is probably similar to above)
| kristianc wrote:
| c. 65,000 of the Apple employees are retail employees though.
| It's not really 'apples for apples' to compare that with
| Google's entirely tech and product headcount.
| bryan0 wrote:
| Because people are criticizing the tech layoffs and pointing to
| Apple as an example of why layoffs are not currently necessary.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/273439/number-of-employe...
|
| 137k in 2019 -> 164k in 2022
|
| like ~6% a year growth compounded
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I remember when Apple bloated up by thousands, started a score of
| new products. Then consolidated and combined until they had one
| uber-product proposal that could do everything. Then they
| cancelled it and laid everybody off.
|
| Maybe they learned their lesson.
| rbanffy wrote:
| I wish Apple overhired a bit to fix a couple issues I have with
| their Terminal app... The color support thing doesn't bother me
| as much as the lack of an overline attribute (so I get my
| favorite 3278-like status bar). And, quite frankly, I'd love to
| see smooth scrolling for those rare moments where things are not
| scrolling past the window at relativistic speeds. In terms of
| VT-100 compatibility, Terminal.App is already on the very top
| tier.
|
| And yes, of course, I know there are other terminal apps for
| macOS. I just want the built-in one to get fixed.
|
| And don't get me started about Tektronix and ReGIS graphics...
| college_physics wrote:
| Many business sectors go out of their way to dress up as tech in
| order to get "tech valuations". Being able to project an image of
| owning the future makes wonders for stock price and thus
| incentives. But the big picture in the last few years (pre-
| pandemic) has been that tech was maxed out and saturating.
|
| With the pandemic there was an excuse to pretend again that the
| sky was the limit. That attitude seems now being corrected -
| reverting to a cash-cow model. Some companies can do cash-cows
| better than others ;-)
|
| P.s. another factor where Apple tries to differentiate itself is
| the privacy front. What it believes in practice is a different
| matter, but to the degree that there are visible legislative
| headwinds this would make any tech company that directly or
| indirectly draws revenue contingent on current rules might be
| more cautious going forward.
| neom wrote:
| Apple went public in 1980, Google went public in 2004. Apple has
| seen many more cycles than Google and Amazon. I'd suggest they're
| a little more gelled out?
| 1sembiyan wrote:
| This doesn't explain Microsoft, which is just as old and laid
| off as much people.
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| It all comes down to Apple being a very focused company. They
| know their customers, what they want and they have a much better
| business model. Steve Jobs once explained it by saying they say
| no to a lots of things even to those who seem on paper great
| ideas. All that to stay focus.
|
| On the other hand, Google is all over the places, they are very
| distracted and confident that they will always be the
| indisputable kind in ads and search so they didn't invest much in
| generating other long term major revenue streams.
|
| Their incentives for promotions is all wrong and has led to tons
| of products being launched just for the sake of some manager
| aspirations and empowered, bored engineers who wanted to work on
| yet another green field project.
|
| They missed the boat on the cloud, and unless they turn the ship
| very quickly they are gonna leave a big chunk of search and ads
| to Microsoft.
|
| I'd argue they should also review their hiring strategy that have
| intoxicated the whole industry and clearly hasn't led to better
| results.
| sanderjd wrote:
| > On the other hand, Google is all over the places, they are
| very distracted and confident that they will always be the
| indisputable kind in ads and search so they didn't invest much
| in generating other long term major revenue streams.
|
| I think this is a very muddled analysis. You seem to be saying
| that the lack of focus is caused by the perception of a
| permanent easy revenue stream. But I think the causation is
| actually the reverse of that. The lack of focus is more like a
| breadth first search for additional sustainable revenue streams
| undertaken _because_ they know the golden goose can 't lay eggs
| forever.
|
| And similarly backwards: it is Apple who has the luxury of
| focus because high-end consumer computing hardware is a stable
| revenue stream with very little risk of drying up over a very
| long time horizon.
| cinericius wrote:
| > You seem to be saying that the lack of focus is caused by
| the perception of a permanent easy revenue stream. But I
| think the causation is actually the reverse of that. The lack
| of focus is more like a breadth first search for additional
| sustainable revenue streams undertaken because they know the
| golden goose can't lay eggs forever.
|
| I think the difference is urgency. They probably do know that
| the golden eggs will stop coming at some point, but they
| don't believe it'll happen for a long while. Perhaps as a
| consequence of this, they very rarely commit to projects in a
| life-or-death way. At this point it's a HN trope to state
| this, but I do believe the reputational damage done by this
| lack of commitment to any of its fledgling projects is doing
| massive harm to Google's ability to find new revenue streams.
| sanderjd wrote:
| Again, this analysis is exactly backwards. The reason they
| axe flailing projects quickly is that they know they need
| to find a small number of promising new revenue streams to
| focus on. What HN wants them to do - commit to small
| projects indefinitely - would be exactly the lack of focus
| and urgency being criticized!
|
| I think what people are saying is something like "Google
| needs to focus on a small number of new successful large
| revenue sources". Which, yes, of course! But they don't
| know what those are, and none of the backseat drivers do
| either.
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| What about AI/ML, Cloud, Workspace ? (+ of course ads and
| search).
|
| Why didn't they launch something like ChatGPT? Even if it
| was half baked, they should have made more noise and
| marketing PR on what's cooking ... instead they let
| OpenAI and Microsoft take the stage.
|
| Cloud? They basically invented the cloud! They were
| running in the cloud when the rest of the world was still
| copying files to production .. and yet they left that to
| AWS and Azure ...
|
| Don't get me wrong, I loved Google, I had much respect
| for them, and that's why I am so disappointed!
|
| They doubled down on monetizing on user data, search and
| ads, and completely neglected other areas they could have
| dominated hands down.
| sanderjd wrote:
| > What about AI/ML, Cloud, Workspace ? (+ of course ads
| and search).
|
| "AI/ML" isn't a product, it's a tool, and one that is
| used effectively in a number of successful Google
| products (including the big moneymakers).
|
| Cloud and Workspace are the non-ads bright spots, which
| is why they keep receiving plenty of investment, but they
| are both still very far from dominant in their markets,
| behind both Amazon and Microsoft. They are good
| businesses but not at all a full solution if the ads
| business declines substantially.
|
| > Why didn't they launch something like ChatGPT?
|
| Because billions of people would have used it
| immediately, and it's way too expensive for that. I
| suspect nobody yet has a way to serve these chats without
| the marginal revenue being negative. Google can't launch
| search features with rate limits, they can only launch
| things that are capable of serving billions of requests
| per day.
|
| I'm not sure what argument you think I'm making that the
| Cloud thing is a counterargument to... My point is very
| much not "Google has always done everything right and
| made no mistakes". They absolutely missed the Cloud
| opportunity, and that's probably the only thing they've
| tried that could have been big enough if they'd entered
| the market early enough. (Maybe also if they had started
| making their own iphone-competitive hardware much
| earlier.)
|
| But they thought going the social route, competing with
| Facebook, was going to be the answer, and the failure of
| that strategy was a major setback.
|
| It could still be the case that this new era of AI is
| their saving grace. They still have a very real chance to
| be the first ones to figure out how to turn it into an
| economically sustainable product in some form. For all
| the hype, I sincerely doubt anyone has accomplished that
| yet. Definitely not OpenAI, and I'm guessing this Bing
| integration is a loss leader.
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| >they can only launch things that are capable of serving
| billions of requests per day
|
| They did not have to launch something like ChatGPT at
| full scale. I understand very well the cost associated
| with it. But, they should have been the one setting the
| stage and the narrative. Building expectation releasing
| cool demo, experimental features backed into Docs. Things
| that could show where "potentially" Google could have
| taken the technology in time ..
|
| But, it seems like, that while they were working on the
| "perfect working money printing AI product", they
| completely left the stage to OpenAI and friends.
|
| I think, that was definitely a strategic error.
|
| Perhaps Google will come ahead, who knows. I hope this
| was a wakeup call for them.
| ewarrenG wrote:
| Your statement that Google is "all over the place" is at odds
| with what you say later "they didn't invest much in generating
| other long term major revenue streams."
|
| Maybe the investments weren't successful or didn't pan out, but
| that is not to say they didn't invest.
| eitally wrote:
| I think Google _was_ all over the place until roughly covid,
| but for the past few years the mission has solidly
| crystallized. Ads (dragging Search along), Youtube, "Platforms
| & Ecosystems" (Android, Assistant, Play & Chrome), Hardware
| (Nest, Fitbit, Pixel), Cloud. That's not really a very broad or
| convoluted set of priorities at the top level.
|
| The problem is the culture. Google is an exceptionally poorly
| managed company as a rule I claim this is by design from the
| beginning: as an engineering meritocracy, the technically best
| ideas won (over time) and employees voted with their feet. That
| doesn't scale. I'd argue that it began to fail pretty
| dramatically around the time Diane Greene took over Cloud and
| Prabhakar moved over (you could probably also argue that those
| org changes were lagging indicators, and the real start to the
| "problems" began when Ruth was hired) to run Ads/Search. As the
| board became increasingly business focused, the lack of solid
| management or even strategic leadership became more
| problematic.
|
| What's rule #1 of B2B? Being responsive to your customers'
| needs and acting predictably. The lack of top-to-bottom
| management combined with the legacy meritocratic culture have
| not lent themselves to the same sort of command-and-control
| hierarchy you see at places like Apple & Microsoft, both of
| which have been almost entirely market driven for decades.
|
| If you look at this[1] org chart cartoon from about ten years
| ago, you see what things looked like then. You had the Cult of
| Jobs at Apple, where a singular leader compartmentalized the
| entire company. You see the Sales & Marketing driven Microsoft,
| where Ballmer created stupid internal coopetition, and you see
| the insane messes at FB & Google. I suggest these are no longer
| accurate representations. As all of these big tech businesses
| have matured, everyone is converging on Amazon's & Oracle's
| command & control model, which is the traditional strategy for
| managing large organizations. It has been easier for some to
| get there (MSFT, for example, just had to remove the "guns"
| from their org chart), but at places like Google & Facebook
| there are fundamental changes that are required for the
| corporations to run efficiently that are also orthogonal to the
| founders' principles of how things should work, and (in my
| opinion) what you've been seeing in the past few quarters are
| "light" attempts at dealing with that. For Google it was the
| "cut off your nose to spite your face" 12k layoff. For FB it
| was a more existential staff cut but also the more recent
| notice to middle management that many of them are expected to
| become ICs again, to remove redundant layers.
|
| I don't think it's in Google's current culture to "turn the
| ship quickly". Frankly, under the circumstances, I think the
| only way to legitimately force this would be to divorce Ads
| from the rest of the business (or even just make it its own
| Bet). Anything else will likely fail, slowly, and feel like
| death by a thousand cuts for the rank & file and like pushing a
| string uphill to the leadership.
|
| [1] https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-
| amazon...
| jimbokun wrote:
| Which is interesting because the whole purpose of setting up
| Alphabet was to diversity revenue streams. But I don't think
| any of those efforts have generated significant revenue
| relative to their core business.
| azinman2 wrote:
| Waymo has the most promise and I think has always been seen
| that way.
| eitally wrote:
| Verily is a $1b+ business now.
| flappyeagle wrote:
| At almost every place I've ever worked, there were about 10-20%
| of employees who were unproductive. Sometimes it's because they
| were bad hires, or they were just working on projects that
| added no value.
|
| I was at a series B startup that did 15% layoffs during the
| first pandemic wave. The result: we moved faster, code quality
| went up, morale increased over time. Some layoffs are driven by
| necessity, and some are opportunistic ways for companies to
| retool and mass-fire low performers.
|
| This applies at higher levels of abstractions too. When google
| did their layoffs, multiple entire unprofitable teams and
| business units were eliminated. It doesn't matter if "they
| could pay for it". They had an opportune excuse to remove some
| ugly looking lines from the balance sheet all at once and they
| took it.
|
| It's impractical for them to try to differentiate high and low
| individual performers at that scale. No matter how talented you
| are, you were contributing to a loss-making part of the
| company.
|
| Apple seems to have been better at not having useless teams and
| divisions. Tim Cook is a disciplined guy, so I'm not surprised.
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of
| people, in which case the obvious question is why couldn't
| those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to
| find a different position or to improve their performance? At
| Google specifically, many high performers were laid off
| without explanation. When entire programs were cut, many
| general-purpose programmers were lost simply due to being in
| the wrong place at the wrong time rather than having the
| wrong skills or having low performance.
|
| Given that the evaluation of who to cut is made by outside
| groups, in a short period of time, without appeal, it seems
| more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about
| cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people
| the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is
| overpaying. Without changing that mismanagement, the result
| won't be a better environment. The message to employees is
| rough also: "don't trust our performance evaluations".
| flappyeagle wrote:
| It's not "don't trust out performance evaluations". The
| point of perf evals is rarely to fire people, it's primary
| use is to manage expectations of promotion.
|
| > This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of
| people
|
| Layoffs often don't target the right group of people when
| it comes to perf. There's error in human judgement abound.
| But it's 100% accurate when it comes to which business
| units are bringing in revenue, or costing a lot.
|
| > why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been
| given a choice to find a different position or to improve
| their performance
|
| Human attention is a scarce resource. Executives will
| tolerate inefficiency during up markets because it's more
| valuable to try to capture growth vs become efficient. When
| there's no growth to be had, then they turn their attention
| towards cutting costs.
|
| > it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less
| about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of
| people the company is mismanaging, or people that the
| company is overpaying
|
| The larger a company gets, the more these are effectively
| the same thing. Money in, value out. Too much money, too
| little value, you're just changing two sides of a ratio.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Apple's job losses are hidden because they don't build anything
| physical, they let their suppliers fire and hire.
| rcarmo wrote:
| That logic is broken because it does not apply uniformly across
| the FAANGs.
| lapcat wrote:
| Is there any evidence of Apple supplier mass layoffs? If
| anything, Apple has had supply chain problems of not being able
| to produce hardware fast enough to meet demand, due to
| pandemic-related closures in China.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Suppliers like Foxconn have laid off about 100k in the last
| half year or so, that's just one in 1000+. Suppliers in the
| technology area I am working in have also seen 1000+ layoffs
| related to fewer orders.
| mabbo wrote:
| Apple's underlying economics haven't changed, so they have not
| had any reason to over-hire in the first place.
|
| Amazon, Google, Meta, Shopify and others are all e-commerce
| based. There was a clear trend that e-commerce had shifted up due
| to the pandemic, and looked to be permanent. That bet was wrong,
| so they all had layoffs.
|
| Other companies were willing to hire lots of developers because
| the ROI on devs was good compared to low inflation and low
| interest rates. Then both of those things changed, so the ROI on
| a dev compared to investing in other things became much worse- so
| there's less money for developers.
|
| Meanwhile, Apple has a mostly-stable massive chunk of the
| consumer device market and has always had a profit margin that is
| startlingly high. Not much has changed as far as they're
| concerned.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| > looked to be permanent
|
| I don't believe that any CEO/CFO with half a brain actually
| thought this. Sure, things wouldn't return to pre-pandemic
| levels necessarily, but the COVID-induced state was not going
| to permanently change human behavior.
|
| > ROI on devs was good compared to low inflation and low
| interest rates. Then both of those things changed
|
| this is more the reason; the "mea culpa, how could we have
| known" excuses is just to cover a regression to the mean they
| knew was eventually going to happen.
| motoxpro wrote:
| For CEOs that thought this would be permanent see Shopify and
| Amazon. Both have said this publicly and Amazon spent
| billions on transportation infra. They are not stupid.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Amazon is a different case altogether (see my other post
| about them) as they deal in physical goods; that
| transportation infrastructure allows them to capture
| greater market share even if online sales drop.
| drawfloat wrote:
| I still can't believe major corporations thought the shift to
| ecommerce from the pandemic "looked to be permanent". More
| people than not spent 2 years complaining they couldn't leave
| the house and rushing out to the pub/shops/holidays the minute
| restrictions dropped.
|
| It was certainly a possibility, but staggers my mind that
| companies of this size all decided it was a sureity.
|
| If I were to be uncharitable, this is the effect of senior
| staff at these companies having been completely detached from
| the pandemic experience of the majority of the population. Lots
| of people still had to go to work F2F, lots of people spent it
| cooped up in 30m2 apartments with flatmates they hate.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The question isn't "is it permanent" it's "what are the
| chances it's permanent". I can imagine that if they come to
| the conclusion that there's even a 10% chance then it makes
| sense to invest resources as if it will happen because they
| can always just lay people off, but it's much harder to catch
| up.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Lots of people still had to go to work F2F, lots of people
| spent it cooped up in 30m2 apartments with flatmates they
| hate._
|
| I assume by `F2F` you mean "face-to-face"?
|
| I think that's a matter of perspective. In my echo chamber,
| people live with flatmates that they get along with just fine
| and are _happy_ that they don 't have to go to an office to
| do work that could be done at home.
|
| > _More people than not spent 2 years complaining they couldn
| 't leave the house_
|
| So... perhaps they do indeed want to "leave the house". But I
| think they still don't want to go to the office when they can
| work from home.
|
| I think e-commerce is indeed shifted-up relative to the start
| of the pandemic. I think things that e-commerce _can 't_ do
| well are still where people want to leave the house. As you
| said, pubs/window shopping (not quite shopping
| itself)/holidays.
| qqtt wrote:
| I don't think they thought it was permanent as much as no one
| really knew when it would stop. They had to make a choice
| whether to hire enough to sustain the current growth rates or
| scale back growth in which case competitors might be able to
| capture that market share. No one had a crystal ball
| regarding when exactly the growth would stop and what the
| post-growth period would look like, so from that perspective
| using all available evidence, the play was to capture market
| share and worry about the future when it happens.
|
| It's a reasonable strategy, the risk being their cost
| structure gets unbalanced and they might have to lay off
| people. Contrary to what people here seem to think, laying
| off people isn't the end of the world, and many of these
| companies are very comfortable doing it once their growth
| calculus changes. It was a calculated risk and if we are
| being honest, it paid off very well for most of the companies
| which are currently doing layoffs. In many cases the
| alternative would be to forfeit growth just to potentially
| save jobs down the line - but what would that look like for
| companies like Amazon? I don't know if people remember but
| when the pandemic hit Amazon was scrambling to meet the
| demands of customers and prime shipping times shot up from 1
| day delivery to sometimes more than a week. Those situations
| would give competitors like WalMart an opening to capitalize
| on taking market share.
|
| At the end of the day, no one had a crystal ball, and while
| companies probably shouldn't have assumed whatever growth
| rates of the quarter were permanent, to ignore the growth and
| not hire in that environment carried it's own risks. And
| besides, are the current growth rates permanent with all the
| macro-economic factors at play? Of course not, most likely
| the economy will pick up at some point, but companies don't
| know when exactly that will be, so the prudent thing is to
| prioritize their workforce on high priority revenue
| generating products and balance their cost structure around
| the current economic realities.
| ted_bunny wrote:
| A more concrete uncharitable explanation: if you're one of
| those execs who only cares about next quarter, convincing
| people that a temporary situation is permanent would be one
| way to leverage your ideas.
| Dwolb wrote:
| It doesn't matter if the management team thought the shift
| was permanent or not.
|
| What matters is not getting fired.
|
| It's hard to get fired if your actions are in line with the
| consensus.
| jeromegv wrote:
| That's not exactly what they bet, because anyone knows that
| it would be dumb, including them.
|
| What you have to look at is e-commerce adoption as a % of
| retail. This % is increasing every year since the end of the
| 90s. It was about 10% pre-pandemic.
|
| Of course they knew that the huge jump from COVID wouldn't be
| permanent. What they bet however is that once things re-open,
| SOME of that conversion to e-commerce would be permanent and
| that trend of % of retail on ecom would keep increasing at a
| faster pace than if COVID had not happened. Which wasn't the
| worse bet to take, you'd think that if people get used to a
| certain way of shopping and we invest in all this ecom
| infrastructure, some people would prefer the convenience of
| it in the long term.
|
| Tobi explained it well in his announcement for layoffs last
| year at Shopify (which came much earlier than other tech
| companies, likely because their revenue is much more strongly
| related to ecom revenue) https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-
| shopifys-team
| lapcat wrote:
| > Meanwhile, Apple has a mostly-stable massive chunk of the
| consumer device market and has always had a profit margin that
| is startlingly high. Not much has changed as far as they're
| concerned.
|
| Apple had a big bump in pandemic-related revenue too, inspired
| by mass WFH hardware purchases. And now Apple revenue has gone
| down as well: https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/02/apple-results-
| and-charts-...
| cguess wrote:
| But they were selling the same thing, just because more
| people buy laptops doesn't mean you have to hire more
| hardware engineers. The design is the same, you scale your
| outsourced manufacturing instead. With e-commerce you
| absolutely need more engineers to maintain the software and
| you need to buy more servers and hire more sysadmins etc.
| underbluewaters wrote:
| Is software supposed to be a low marginal cost business?
| Why would I need more engineers if my site has 50% more
| traffic?
| prewett wrote:
| Strictly speaking, software as a low-cost marginal
| business originally referred to shrink-wrapped
| application software. If your website is basically a buy
| button with a download link, you fall into that category.
| But now your distribution needs have scaled, so either
| you hire more people to deal with shipping out CDs, or
| make sure your website scale. And if your software _is_
| the distribution (as is the case for websites, SaaS,
| cloud apps) you might need more engineers.
| intrasight wrote:
| Your assertion makes no sense. If anything, physical goods
| should take more people than does cloud software.
|
| These dotcoms hired more people because that's what dotcoms
| do when they can.
| lapcat wrote:
| > you absolutely need more engineers to maintain the
| software and you need to buy more servers and hire more
| sysadmins etc.
|
| Apple makes software, you know. ;-)
|
| They also have many internet services, such as iCloud, App
| Store, Apple Music, TV+, etc.
| cguess wrote:
| None of which scaled significantly due to the pandemic.
| Everyone at companies that use Macs had Macs already, so
| if they're not using the one at work anymore there's not
| a net increase of Mac users.
| lapcat wrote:
| Um, Mac sales skyrocketed during the pandemic. Anyway,
| Apple makes other products that use internet services
| too, like iPad, and... have you heard of iPhone? ;-)
|
| App Store downloads also increased a lot during the
| pandemic.
| klodolph wrote:
| Amazon, Google, and Meta all seem to make riskier bets, too.
|
| Both strategies make sense--make big, risky investments, or
| grind out more profits in existing, highly lucrative markets.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Amazon, Google, and Meta all seem to make riskier bets,
| too.
|
| What are those risky bets I wonder?
|
| Meanwhile Apple rolled out a completely custom CPU and
| transitioned all its hardware to it.
| sofixa wrote:
| > Meanwhile Apple rolled out a completely custom CPU and
| transitioned all its hardware to it.
|
| Amazon literally did the same with Graviton (to be fair
| they acquired a company doing this and used their work as
| the basis, but still). Google literally developed TPUs in
| the same timeframe, while also trying a few other things
| (Stadia, rip, comes to mind).
| dmitriid wrote:
| Neither of those were risky in the sense of "if it fails,
| it takes the company with them".
| jsnell wrote:
| Apple making their own CPUs would also not have taken
| down the company. They took small incremental steps; at
| any point, a failure of their own CPU program would at
| worst have meant using a commercially available SOC (with
| probably great terms), or alternatively skipping the SOC
| refresh for a year.
|
| In fact, by your criteria, I doubt that Apple has made a
| single risky bet this millennium. Even the iPhone failing
| would not have taken down the company at that stage.
| lnsru wrote:
| Look, if you want some new hardware using latest node
| it's expensive. You must sign nice expensive contract
| with foundry and pay pay pay before anything comes out.
| It's risky, there is no guarantee, that all produced
| chips work as expected. And it's done in secret for years
| with insane stress for engineers. They can leak or chip
| can be a failure. There is no way to get any SoC on the
| marked in desired quantities for Apple with short lead
| times. Changing processor was risky for them.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Riiiight. iPhone is not risky, but small scale Graviton
| production by Amazon is.
|
| Gotcha.
| jsnell wrote:
| I don't know where you got that from. You defined the
| criteria. By that criteria, neither Apple or Amazon ran a
| risky CPU project.
|
| Now, the reason is that your criteria for what is risky
| are pretty stupid, as evidenced by not even the iPhone
| meeting that bar. But don't blame me for it: again, you
| are the one who set the bar at the failure of the entire
| company.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I get putting Meta on that list because of its bet that worse
| Second Life can be a hyper-lucrative business model, but the
| other two?
| kenjackson wrote:
| Not only that, but you have to recall there was the chip
| shortage before and during the pandemic. Given Apple's reliance
| on HW sales, it would be foolish to ramp up hiring when you
| can't obtain the materials for your products. While at the same
| time people moved to buying everything online and having
| Teams/Zoom calls for all work and school. The situation was
| just very different for Apple vs Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Zoom.
| wincy wrote:
| There was a chip shortage for old machines, bigger
| fabrication sizes, and because car manufacturers and others
| stupidly canceled their contracts with chip makers,
| anticipating a downturn when instead there was a huge boom in
| demand.
|
| Apple was largely unaffected by this because they are first
| in line for new fabrication processes, did not cancel their
| existing chip orders, and uses mostly modern fabs anyway, not
| bargain basement 40nm+ stuff.
|
| The M1 and other 5nm and smaller chips largely kept pace with
| demand. It's never been difficult to find a Mac throughout
| the pandemic.
| jsnell wrote:
| > Other companies were willing to hire lots of developers
| because the ROI on devs was good compared to low inflation and
| low interest rates
|
| Was the ROI good though? Did any of these companies seem to
| deliver new products or features faster? Do their financials
| suggest that these devs somehow improved operational efficiency
| (e.g. improved gross margins)?
|
| Or was it just that they hired because they could afford to?
| trilobyte wrote:
| I think it was more of a tragedy of the commons where some
| companies started aggressively hiring, and other companies
| followed suit to avoid losing access to talent. The pandemic
| was a huge societal event, but nothing indicated it was going
| to be the new normal and CEOs who grew headcount expecting it
| to go on indefinitely made a huge, and arguably an easily
| avoidable, misstep.
| jonfw wrote:
| Most orgs claim that they need X% more money to serve X% more
| users, and they use that money to hire X% more devs. Since
| the users and money are both there, they get it in the short
| term, and nobody looks at the big picture until money
| tightens up
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Was it even mostly devs that were hired/fired? Anecdotally on
| the firing side it's mostly recruiters and business ops even
| for these companies
| jjirsa wrote:
| > Apple's underlying economics haven't changed, so they have
| not had any reason to over-hire in the first place.
|
| The bloomberg article has a visual showing revenue-per-employee
| going up from 1.17M/employee (2017-2019) to 2.51M/employee
| (2020-2022), so ... some of the underlying economics changed
| somehow?
| orangecat wrote:
| _revenue-per-employee going up from 1.17M /employee
| (2017-2019) to 2.51M/employee (2020-2022)_
|
| The pandemic probably contributed to that, but also during
| that period they went from their worst line of Macs in recent
| years to their best.
| wand3r wrote:
| > Apple, meanwhile, was more cautious. Its headcount increased
| just 20% from 2020 to 2022
|
| At Apples size this is still pretty huge. At least, I thought it
| was until I saw that Amazon, Meta and Salesforce basically
| DOUBLED in 2 years.
|
| If this data is correct isnt that insane? How can you effectively
| double orgs of this size over a 2 year period? Its not like a
| startup with 50 people or something. I guess I was out of the
| loop on just how big the hiring was over the pandemic. Not that
| layoffs are good for employees and workers like me, but these
| companies must still have retained tons of the hires as RIFs in
| tech seem to be about 7-20%.
| rvz wrote:
| Yes. Apple's size is still large but isn't ten times as large
| as Amazon, nor has it grown as much in a short space of time.
|
| But surely someone must have questioned the industry mass over
| hiring with the Covid bubble and VC cheap money fuelling it for
| decades to result in these mass layoffs?
| kypro wrote:
| I can't speak to Meta, but Saleforce and Amazon probably needed
| to hire during the pandemic to keep on with demand.
|
| Amazon saw a massive spike in their ecommerce business due to
| lockdowns so they had to hire to ensure they had the labour to
| deal with all the extra orders and deliveries. And even with
| this extra hiring I remember my deliveries being delayed often
| in 2020.
|
| Saleforce is a weird software company because my understanding
| is a lot of their staff are there to help clients with
| integrations, manage accounts and to upsell. Again, assuming
| Salesforce saw a spike in demand during the pandemic they
| probably needed more employees because of the nature of their
| business.
|
| My guess is that Apple also had to ramp up manufacturing
| significantly during the pandemic to meet demand, but obviously
| they don't employee people directly to do their manufacturing
| which probably gave them more flexibility when it came to
| meeting pandemic demand without increasing head count.
|
| For the most part I don't understand why people act like tech
| companies were hiring recklessly during the pandemic. Are
| people forgetting how much demand was pulled forward by
| stimulus and lockdowns? These companies were forced to hire or
| lose market share. That's really the only two options they had.
|
| Personally I'd be blaming politicians and the Fed for creating
| an impossible economic environment to operate in. If you were a
| company in 2020 your demand was either skyrocketing from
| lockdowns or at zero because you were forced to close your
| business. There was no in-between. Tech employees as initial
| beneficiaries of lockdowns are only now seeing the impact of
| job losses, but these were happening on mass elsewhere in the
| economy while lockdowns were in place.
| twblalock wrote:
| I definitely blame the Fed.
|
| It's pretty hard to be in charge of a public company and say
| no to the shareholders who want you to take advantage of the
| sudden bubble in demand.
|
| Companies would have been punished for not growing, and now
| they are being punished if they don't shrink.
|
| Who created that perverse system of incentives? The Fed, by
| making a number of mistakes in the past decade that kept the
| economy overboosted, by boosting it even more during 2020,
| and then by taking drastic action to kill the monster they
| created.
| kypro wrote:
| Where this logic irritates me the most is in the housing
| market.
|
| Similarly to those who blame companies for over hiring to
| meet pandemic demand, I've seen some people suggest the
| average home buyer was being reckless for buying a home
| during the pandemic, because "they brought the bubble!"
|
| I guess it's strange to me how the Fed can pump every asset
| class to the moon, force companies to over hire to meet
| demand, and cause a huge inflationary problem for consumers
| - all while promising not to raise interest rates - then
| rug pull everyone but get no blame for any of it.
|
| Instead I find I'm invited to blame the average business or
| home owner for being "reckless" for hiring to meet demand
| for buying a home for their family, while praising the Fed
| for "doing what's necessary"? Give me a break.
| twblalock wrote:
| It was a symptom of the bubble economy, particularly in
| e-commerce and online services, that materialized during the
| pandemic and was egged on by a series of mistakes made by the
| Fed.
|
| Demand looked like it was growing massively with no end in
| sight, valuations were insane, and money was easy to get.
|
| A lot of companies didn't stop to think that maybe it was all
| just a bubble. So they hired to avoid missing out.
|
| Basic things like running a sustainable business with a sane
| balance sheet were not scrutinized by investors. Now they are,
| and in the layoff emails to employees we see CEOs talking about
| how that is important, as if they suddenly realized it for the
| first time.
|
| To be fair, some of those companies probably did make a lot
| more money than they would have if they hadn't taken advantage
| of the situation -- and they probably would have been punished
| by their shareholders if they didn't.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| So, like everything, that's not the whole truth. Apple was much
| more restrained, but that's because it's always been
| restrained. I commented this before here, but not all tech
| companies substantially changed behavior wrt hiring...
|
| We forget that many of these companies have been doubling every
| few years already. Google and meta were startups in the 2000s,
| apple and Microsoft are 20+y older.
|
| Basically, most of these tech companies have been hiring at a
| constant rate for years, and also experiencing constant
| attrition. Once the economy soured, and then hiring freezes
| started, attrition rates had crashed, and the employee count
| wasn't as affected by freeze as desired. The layoffs have been
| roughly a reset towards the headcount before the freeze for
| many companies.
|
| While the whole article is paywalled, I'll quote an excerpt
| from ben Thompson:
|
| > The popular narrative right now about these layoffs is that
| tech companies dramatically over-hired during the pandemic, but
| while that seems to have happened with Amazon -- and for
| arguably very good reasons given the way that e-commerce shot
| up during lockdowns in particular -- the reality is that the
| rest of the tech companies largely increased at the same rate
| they always had. Sure, the number of employees they added was
| large, but that was a function of keeping the same hiring rate
| off of an ever increasing base.
|
| > In short, no one was giving up a job at one of the big five
| tech companies this year as fear spread about a broad-based
| slowdown in hiring... These companies, though, adjusted more
| slowly to the slower rate of attrition, which means they
| accidentally increased their headcount... the relatively
| limited size of the layoffs to date actually reflects that:
| these companies are not returning to their pre-pandemic levels
| of employees, but rather to where they would be had they kept
| up roughly the same rates of hiring this year that they have
| over the last ten
|
| [0] https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-
| hiring-r...
| pbreit wrote:
| Working and then getting severance seems better than not
| working...
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Correct on all counts. The hiring was insane and even with the
| cuts the number of employees is still higher than 2020
| steve1977 wrote:
| > How can you effectively double orgs of this size over a 2
| year period?
|
| Apparently you can't.
| fragmede wrote:
| Given the number of orgs that have done this quite
| successfully in the BC (before Covid) era, it seems like you
| can.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I dunno about that. I was at Facebook for five years, it
| doubled in headcount basically every year. The culture when
| I joined was very, very different to the culture when I
| left. And even after the layoffs they're still double the
| size they were when I left.
| blockwriter wrote:
| Was there any federal program that encouraged hiring at these
| large corporations as part of the COVID bills?
| slt2021 wrote:
| companies borrowed billions (startups via equity raise,
| publics via debt offering at almost zero % rates) and quickly
| increased headcount in the name of chasing growth
| strangattractor wrote:
| If your attitude is adjust your workforce at will then who
| cares. If I can hire twice as many people and get X done twice
| as fast then do it. At some point it is likely X is done and I
| don't need the people. Dump them on the streets. Unethical
| maybe but not irrational.
| trilobyte wrote:
| When Google announced 12,000 layoffs, for anyone reading past
| the headline this came on the back of hiring 41,000 people over
| the last two years. 41,000 is about 1/2 the total employees of
| Salesforce as of October 2022.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I wonder what it tells about employees selection and their
| level. Was it harder to get into Google/Meta 5-10 years ago
| than within the hiring boom?
| baxtr wrote:
| Do you have a link to data supporting the doubling? I would
| love to see the numbers!
| wand3r wrote:
| It was in TFA. Unfortunately I can't get past the paywall
| again. There was a graph that had employee growth. I left out
| a couple companies but Meta and Google were mid 90's% and SF
| was something like 104% from 2020-2022. The source in the
| article was "Bloomberg" presumably they are from public
| filings.
| Wojtkie wrote:
| The numbers are in the article...
| baxtr wrote:
| Ok, thanks. I admit am lazy and mostly read just comments
| :/
| williamcotton wrote:
| It was all totally insane. The actual narrative of the layoffs
| is this:
|
| High performing public tech companies went totally insane and
| doubled their head counts. Everyone else was a cargo cult with
| an open checkbook so they insanity-squared their head counts.
| No one could possibly manage such a gigantic influx of
| knowledge workers so resources were obviously being poorly
| allocated industry-wide. This first had an impact on low
| performing public companies, followed by the higher performing
| public companies, and then the cargo cults.
|
| The places that didn't go insane were not only unaffected but
| stand to benefit immensely.
| blackflame7000 wrote:
| [dead]
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| If someone is insane, is their next move sane?
|
| Are they a good investment?
| etempleton wrote:
| Growing too fast is damaging to both culture and productivity.
| You have a bunch of people starting that are still learning.
| Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to
| be fully competent in a job.
|
| Apple was smart to move slower. They are probably one of the
| best run companies in the world.
| mbesto wrote:
| > Growing too fast is damaging to both culture and
| productivity.
|
| This seems to be general sentiment here lately. Do you have
| any evidence to support this or is purely conjecture?
| spacephysics wrote:
| Not that I have a rigorous source, but I feel we can
| generally agree the following:
|
| New hires take anywhere from 3 months to 8 months or more
| depending on the position to ramp up
|
| During ramp up period, there's a productivity toll taken on
| the team via teaching the new hire
|
| Thus during this time, productivity is hampered
|
| ----
|
| For culture, I think it's a bit more subjective. But if you
| have a team of 5 who then gets 1 new hire to teach over 6
| months, generally it allows them to "mesh" better in the
| culture.
|
| Both in terms of team mates learning about the new hire,
| and the new hire having room to fit in within the culture,
| and bring their own value to the team (assuming an already
| existing good culture.
|
| Now say you have 3 new hires on a team of 5. If we further
| presume productivity is also hampered more as more people
| are onboarded at once, that creates additional stress on
| the team to teach them.
|
| Further, it could be harder to have the new hires feel part
| of the team if less time is spent getting to know each one.
| But assume this isn't the case:
|
| Business will most likely expect _at least_ the same
| productivity from the team. Now they're stressed from
| teaching, higher expectations on their output (onboarding a
| team member is tiring work), and the business is going to
| soon expect productivity to increase further after
| headcount is upped by over 50% in this example.
|
| Now take that, and add on new teams created to interact
| with, additional communication layers, and it's pretty
| straightforward to assume growing too fast can be negative
| mbesto wrote:
| Okay cool. But, none of this addresses the opportunity
| cost. What happens if you _don 't_ hire fast and you miss
| revenue opportunities.
|
| As the saying goes "revenue solves everything".
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Cash flow solves everything, or profit solves everything
| are perhaps better phrases, since apparently people
| forgot that the purpose of a company is to make profit,
| not just revenue.
| mbesto wrote:
| You can have run a company for zero profit and it can
| still be a benefit to society, so no the "purpose of a
| company is to make profit" is not necessarily true.
|
| _" If we want to know what a business is, we have to
| start with its purpose. And the purpose must lie outside
| the business itself. In fact, it must lie in society,
| since a business enterprise is an organ of society. There
| is only one valid definition of business purpose: to
| create a customer. The customer is a foundation of a
| business and keeps it in existence. The customer alone
| gives employment. And it is to supply the customer that
| society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the
| business enterprise.
|
| Because it is the purpose to create a customer, any
| business enterprise has two - and only two - basic
| functions: marketing and innovation. These are the
| entrepreneurial functions. Marketing is the
| distinguishing, the unique function of the business."_
|
| - Peter Drucker
| kefirlife wrote:
| Apple does a lot right. However, I find their insistence on
| keeping their teams in an office to be strange. My experience
| with Apple internally was an overly positive and optimistic
| culture, to the point where they had a hard time identifying,
| or discussing, what did not work well.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I predict that Apples in office culture is going to be key
| to their success.
| etempleton wrote:
| Apple built one of the most expensive office complexes in
| the world. They are going to want people in the office.
|
| Additionally they deal a lot with hardware design. Being in
| the office is going to be easier for certain things,
| particularly when you are as secretive as Apple.
| cjohnson318 wrote:
| Aside from all the talk about the crazy ones, the misfits,
| the rebels, etc. I found Apple to be very conservative and
| buttoned up, which I found very reassuring. I've never
| worked anywhere else in the FAANG-sphere, but it seemed
| like the polar opposite of "Googley".
| paulmd wrote:
| there is a cultural mindset especially among startups that
| it's better to be alive and having to make layoffs than to
| move conservatively, have a faster mover overtake you and
| push you out of the market, and be dead. "The graveyards are
| full of businesses that moved appropriately for the market
| conditions", to warp a saying.
|
| apple is an enormously stable company in ways that (to be
| very honest) even most other tech blue-chips are not. even
| microsoft or google have the sword of damocles hanging over
| them - given a sufficiently long and severe position of
| mismanagement it is possible that even google or MS could be
| unseated or even go under. arguably that is the trajectory MS
| was on in the 00s, and google could be similarly unseated by
| AI.
|
| intel would be a great real-world example of that. Even 10
| years ago the thought of big blue losing control was
| unthinkable, _un-thinkable_. And here we are, they 're
| circling the drain right now and need to make very deep cuts
| and refocus on the essentials or they're going to be in
| bankruptcy in 5-10 years, during a down market in general and
| a specific market that they glutted during the pandemic (a
| lot of customers have enough PCs/laptops/servers for quite a
| while). And in contrast Apple is still making money hand-
| over-fist despite the market conditions - now _that 's_
| stability.
|
| I'm not going to say that google or MS doubling their size on
| a short-term timescale sounds like a _good_ idea but it 's a
| ride-or-die industry, you're pretty much either getting
| bigger or getting smaller, and mere homeostasis is a rare
| luxury.
| ben7799 wrote:
| This is kind of a west coast SV/social/adtech type of
| startup mentality.
|
| Working east coast in more traditional tech companies this
| has never really been a thing. It's always been
| conservative, staying profitable, etc.. It is the older
| way.
|
| Apple, MS, etc.. were built this way too of course.
| ghaff wrote:
| Well, of course, how many of the east coast minicomputer
| companies are still around? That said, I agree in
| general, there's probably a general difference in
| approach between east coast and west coast. (And the mix
| of companies--and government--is generally different and
| reflects that.)
| inetknght wrote:
| > _[Apple is] probably one of the best run companies in the
| world._
|
| I would argue that perhaps Apple's _business_ side of things
| is arguably well-run. I personally disagree; I think that
| since Tim Cook has taken over, Apple 's business focus is
| more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality.
|
| But I would also strongly argue that their software side of
| things has been trending downward ( _especially_ in terms of
| quality) since Tim Cook took over.
| simonh wrote:
| I don't know, people have been lamenting the poor quality
| of Apple software and how much better it was in the old
| days since I got my first Mac in 2007, at least that's when
| I became aware of the complaints. If it was really on a
| substantial continual down trend from then, by now nothing
| would work at all. Apple continues to invest massively in
| software, that means a ton of new code, which means a ton
| of new bugs. You can't develop new software and not have
| quality issues.
|
| Apple continues to make extremely long term highly
| strategic investments. You don't get to develop a highly
| original, industry leading SOC architecture without long
| term investment in technology. Bankrolling new process node
| development and thereby locking in capacity in strategic
| contracts doesn't happen by accident or on a whim.
| Development and implementation of the Apple watch happened
| entirely in the post-Jobs era.
|
| So I just don't see it, they continue to commit to heavy
| long term investment in capital intensive technology
| projects and innovative new products. Not everything works
| out. The touch bar and butterfly keyboards were notable
| misses. But then that's always been true. I look at the
| phones, desktops, laptops, watch, Airpods, iPads, etc.
| They're the most Apple-y products Apple has ever produced,
| and not a single one of them is a me-to product slapped
| together to ride a trend.
| smm11 wrote:
| It was a very dark era for Apple, but the Power Computing
| years were the best time to be an Apple fanboy IMO. You
| had commodity firebreathing PC hardware running OS 8
| better than Macs did, more ports and connectivity, the
| software was best-in-class, and this was the era with no
| spyware, telemetry and all the BS we face now.
|
| And yes, I was still buying legit Macs and software, and
| a lot of stock when it was at $11. It was a blast, I tell
| you.
| bgm1975 wrote:
| Uhh, speak for yourself. As a fanboy myself back then, it
| was kinda terrifying. Sure Power Computing was able to
| bump the bus speed beyond what Apple seemed to to able to
| do, but they also cannibalized Apple's hardware market
| which they needed to stay alive. Also it became clear
| that the wheels were falling off the "new" OS rewrite
| (Rhapsody) project with no real plan for remedying. It
| was scary times when Microsoft had to help bail them out.
| Honestly, buying NeXT was the accidentally smartest move
| Apple executives made. I remember how cool BeOS was but
| was glad they chose NeXTStep over it. Mostly, because I
| was a Unix fanboy by that time too.
| inetknght wrote:
| You can pry my Motorola StarMax out of my cold dead
| hands.
|
| ... the fact that the StarMax product hasn't been powered
| on for over two decades is beside the point. I want my
| nostalgia!
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > the Power Computing years were the best time
|
| No, it really wasn't.
|
| I know people who were techs for retail stores at the
| time.
|
| The sheer volume of shit cheap-ass clones that crossed
| their workbenches during that era....
| hailwren wrote:
| Ehh, Apple has some big misses. Their software
| objectively sucks. OS X has gotten buggier and slower
| over the years. I traded "it just works" for the speed
| and customization of linux years ago and would _really_
| like the benefits of Apple hardware but can't bite the
| bullet on Apple software (Asahi isn't in a good enough
| spot yet to be my primary computer imo).
|
| The iPad pro line is a travesty. IPadOS is horrible,
| Apple need to take it out back and shoot it. The hardware
| fits a great niche but Apple have ruined it with their
| gimmicky software.
|
| IPhones have been getting bigger, heavier, and last less
| time with each generation. I recently upgraded from the
| 11 to the 14 pro, and the hardware feels strictly worse.
| It's snappier and has a digital island, but it's
| significantly heavier and is the first iPhone I've ever
| really been worried about dying during the day (even
| after turning off the stupid always on display).
|
| AirPods have probably been their biggest win in recent
| years. The original were amazing, Pros, and Pro 2 were
| significant upgrades and they're a big reason (along w/
| apple ecosystem integration) I won't jump ship for
| android. Maxs are horrible, heavy, and I just don't
| understand why people like them at all (bose + sony both
| make better headphones for cheaper here).
| gsinclair wrote:
| For my use case (education) iPad Pro is a godsend. I
| don't see anything wrong with it.
| hailwren wrote:
| What feature of the pro makes it worth $150 ($650 if you
| have the larger screen) more than the comparable iPad?
| selectodude wrote:
| 120Hz + Apple Pencil.
| hailwren wrote:
| So, 120hz is only on the 12.9. If it's worth twice the
| price to you, that's your decision.
|
| The apple pencil difference is magnetic charging and
| magnetic storage on the side of the ipad. Which is nice,
| but it also means you have the camera in the absolutely
| most annoying spot in the world. Good luck using faceID
| while you're browsing and you're always going to have the
| worst angle/look like you're staring into space during
| video calls.
|
| iPadOS just doesn't cut it for multi-tasking/any pro
| workload that would justify an M2 chip
| scarface74 wrote:
| People have been lamenting about MacOS software quality
| since I got my first Mac in 1992.
| scarface74 wrote:
| You mean "short term" of a decade? Apple created two hugely
| profitable segments since Cook - wearables, services.
|
| The Macs are better than ever.
|
| What else should he be doing?
| bell-cot wrote:
| >...more on short-term gains instead of long-term
| quality...
|
| Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and
| things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems
| pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short
| term.
|
| (FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)
| dumpsterdiver wrote:
| Speaking of software quality, anyone notice in Apple
| Music how the categories all start with Apple? Apple
| Dance music, Apple Country, Apple Pop... like are they
| trying to make it intentionally difficult for me to use
| my eyes to find music? I know that I'm using Apple
| Music... why does every category need to remind me of
| that while simultaneously impeding my ability to locate
| things alphabetically? Of course, when I use Siri I can
| just say "play Dance music" and it works. Hmm.
| eitally wrote:
| It could be worse. If you were on Android, about half of
| Google's 1P apps start with "Google", and about half
| don't, even ones that probably should (like Google Home).
| brnt wrote:
| Soon in supermarkets near you: the Apple Apple.
| Beautiful, healthy, tasty; no buttons!
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Cutting it into quarters requires a special knife that
| costs $500
| covercash wrote:
| But it's the nicest knife I own... and I'm saving the
| box.
| flangola7 wrote:
| And what's the last revolutionary consumer technology
| that has come out of Apple? The original successful Macs,
| the iPod, the iPhone, iTunes, those were all under Jobs.
| Adraghast wrote:
| Quite the standard you've set there!
| yunwal wrote:
| You might dismiss it, but for me AirPods are the biggest
| QOL improvement from tech since smartphones. Bluetooth
| headphones were atrociously hard to use before them.
| infotogivenm wrote:
| Watch and airpods are both rather successful products
| that capture about 30% industry market share every year.
| sneak wrote:
| M1, M2, AirPods
| anthomtb wrote:
| What revolutionary consumer technology has emerged since
| the iPhone, from any company?
| GeekyBear wrote:
| I don't know about revolutionary, but Apple's service
| revenue alone for 2022 was larger than the revenue of
| McDonald's and Nike combined. Things can be wild runaway
| successes without being revolutionary.
|
| https://finbold.com/apple-services-2022-statistics/
| nobaddays wrote:
| M chips, airpods, watch
| scarface74 wrote:
| When the iPhone was introduced , there were already 1
| billion phones being sold each year. Sj said he wanted
| Apple to sell 10 million to capture 1% of the market.
|
| There can't really be anything bigger than the phone
| market that has 90%+ world wide penetration.
| naravara wrote:
| I people tend to have a bit of rose tinted glasses on
| about Apple's software quality of yore. There have always
| been big stability issues with new features and apps. And
| they've simply never been good at the UX for anything
| that involves a network connection or has to sync across
| multiple systems (besides Safari). The big difference is
| that more and more computing requires syncing and
| networking, which is their traditional weak point.
| lapcat wrote:
| > There have always been big stability issues with new
| features and apps.
|
| But they got fixed. At times there were 2 full years
| between major Mac OS X releases. 2 years of bug fix
| updates. And that was when Apple only had 1 major
| operating system! Now with the relentless yearly
| schedule, there's never time to fix bugs before they
| start working on the next big thing and adding brand new
| bugs. The problems just keep piling up year after year.
| The software is now underwater in technical debt.
|
| Part of OS stability is simply not shipping new major
| versions too often. The new major versions are always
| buggier than the previous major version with many minor
| patches. Not to mention, Apple now pushes everyone to
| install the latest OS immediately. In the old days, you
| had to go out to the store and buy a new Mac OS X version
| on disc, so everyone wasn't upgrading to 10.N.0 on day
| one. Slower adoption means that fewer consumers have to
| suffer the early growing pains of new software.
| ynx wrote:
| Been on macOS since 10.3. In general, the .1 or .2
| patches were solid, and if one release seemed like a
| stinker the next one tick-tocked its way into
| stability/quality pretty reliably, and staying on N-1
| version while N was out was a pretty good choice if you
| wanted to keep your setup as-is without falling TOO far
| behind.
|
| Also, Safari was really bad, early on. It was rendered
| unusable for me when a runaway bookmark sync problem with
| iCloud turned the default set of bookmarks into 30+
| thousand copies.
| ben7799 wrote:
| You're thinking of recent Apple. You have to consider the
| first half of Apple's lifetime too.
|
| Especially in the second half of the 1990s Apple was in
| very very tough shape due to poor software and
| uncompetitive hardware. Their fans wouldn't admit it but
| the company definitely knew what they were up against.
|
| There's pretty much been no point 2000-present where
| Apple quality has been worse than it was Pre-2000, and
| their prices have never been more competitive either.
| brookst wrote:
| Usually people decrying short-termism mean focuses on
| quarters rather than years. Are you saying Cook's 10+ years
| that took the company from $100B/year to $400B/year are the
| short term, and it is at the expense of the next 90 years?
| inetknght wrote:
| > _Are you saying Cook's 10+ years that took the company
| from $100B /year to $400B/year are the short term_
|
| Yes, however it's clearly successful.
|
| > _Are you saying Cook's 10+ years that took the company
| is at the expense of the next 90 years?_
|
| Apple is slowly pulling away consumer ownership of their
| devices and is turning into an advertisement company. I
| honestly believe that _is_ at the expense of the next 90
| years. And this is rather more the point that I tried to
| make: short term profits at the expense of long-term
| customer satisfaction.
| scarface74 wrote:
| "Apple is doomed any day now". That's been the narrative
| for over 40 years.
|
| So which customers aren't satisfied? The people on HN
| that want to run Linux on the Apple Watch?
| com2kid wrote:
| > "Apple is doomed any day now". That's been the
| narrative for over 40 years.
|
| And they almost went out of business at least twice, once
| they survived because MS bailed them out.
|
| Apple pre-iPod was a source of amusing commercials. Pre
| iPhone they were the catalyst for change in the music
| industry, but they were still a consumer goods company
| with one product that had pretty wide, but still overall
| limited appeal.
|
| Apple still doesn't have a diversified revenue stream. If
| Microsoft had to stop selling Windows today, they'd still
| make a fortune from Office. If Microsoft had to stop
| selling Office and Windows today, they'd still make a
| (much smaller) fortune from Azure.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Just Mac revenue by itself would be the envy of most
| companies.
|
| But you can easily look at Apple's revenue breakdown
| between Mac, iPads, services, wearables, etc and see that
| it is well diversified.
|
| And Microsoft never "bailed them out". Before the MS deal
| was signed, Apple had already gotten a line of credit for
| a couple of billion. The $250 million that Microsoft
| invested in Apple was nothing.
|
| Apple turned around and used $100 million to buy out
| PowerComputings Mac license. It didn't become profitable
| for another two years. The little money that Microsoft
| invested didn't make a difference.
| com2kid wrote:
| What % of those wearables and services are tied to
| devices?
|
| If iPhones vanished tomorrow, how much trouble would
| Apple be in? Wearables are 100% attach rate to iPhone,
| and I'd presume so are the vast majority of service
| subscribers.
|
| > Before the MS deal was signed, Apple had already gotten
| a line of credit for a couple of billion. The $250
| million that Microsoft invested in Apple was nothing.
|
| As others said, the software support, browser + office
| were huge.
| scarface74 wrote:
| They would still have Mac revenue that is more than they
| ever had pre-iPhone.
| brookst wrote:
| Microsoft's financial contribution was nothing, but
| Office on Mac was huge. Had there been some third OS that
| was thriving so Microsoft didn't feel the need to prop
| Apple up for antitrust reasons, the world would be
| different.
|
| But so what? I can't believe someone is seriously arguing
| that the failures of the Scully era are somehow damning
| to Apple under Cook. Sure, every company _can_ fail.
| Apple is the most profitable company in the world right
| now, so it's an odd time to sing doom songs.
| scarface74 wrote:
| Office had been on the Mac since the 80s. Microsoft
| didn't just wake up one day in 1997 and decide to port
| Office to the Mac.
|
| They promised to keep doing what they were already doing.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Are you saying that "any day now" and "next 90 years" are
| the same narrative?
| scarface74 wrote:
| Seeing that Apple and Microsoft both have a history of
| staying relevant for over 45 years, Microsoft has been
| one of the most valuable companies in the world for two
| decades and Apple for over a decade, I would bet on these
| two companies before any other company.
|
| But it's not good enough just to be right, you have to be
| right at the right time. How many products categories
| failed during the dot com bust that are doing well now?
|
| It's like me predicting the heat death of the sun. There
| is a big difference between saying it will happen
| eventually and that it will happen tomorrow.
| brookst wrote:
| Look, if Apple just made the watch open source with
| fully-user-upgradable parts and modular CPU + display +
| battery, and a command line interface, they would reach
| _dozens_ of new customers.
| brookst wrote:
| > turning into an advertisement company
|
| Apple 2022 revenue: $398B[0]
|
| Apple 2022 ad revenue: $4B[1]
|
| It is possible, with a lot of effort, that Apple could go
| from advertising representing 1% of revenue to maybe 10%
| over the next 10 years. I don't think that's realistic,
| but maybe. "Turning into an advertising company" is maybe
| overstating?
|
| Besides, the whole reason Apple is in advertising is that
| free-with-ads is an important business model for media
| and developers, and the other players are pretty
| horrible. Me, I hate ads and will always pay directly for
| apps/media, and I don't like what Apple's doing in ads.
| But I think you're being a little over-dramatic there.
|
| 0. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/r
| evenue
|
| 1. https://www.vox.com/recode/2022/12/22/23513061/apple-
| iphone-...
| rcarr wrote:
| "I think Apple is one of the strong companies and will stay a
| strong company, I think it's ungodly well-managed." - Charlie
| Munger
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > I think it's ungodly well-managed.
|
| So satan is involved? That might explain how Jobs came back
| after getting boot #1.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year
| to be fully competent in a job."
|
| Some of us never become competent.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| And if you do become competent, you're soon promoted to
| another job you're not competent for.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| And if you aren't promoted out of your competent zone,
| you will need to job hop out of your competent zone in
| order to obtain an actually competitive salary.
| AdamN wrote:
| Until eventually you are promoted to a role where you
| never become competent and there you stay.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is why I turn down promotions. A promotion
| (especially to a management position) means another step
| toward the sort of work I don't enjoy and don't want to
| do.
| giantg2 wrote:
| You have to be careful how you do it. I was punished for
| turning it down.
|
| I was told that all I needed to do was work one extra
| hour per day (in addition to normal support, elevation,
| etc). Why would I take a position with higher
| expectations for a 7% raise and a 13% increase in hours -
| a rate cut? Plus, if I'm a high performer in my current
| role I should be getting bigger bonuses.
|
| I have a skip level where the department head asked what
| my career goals were. And my answer was to stay in my
| role. After all, I worked as a tech lead for a year and a
| senior dev the year after, with no talk of advancement
| until what I previously mentioned (which would be a rate
| cut).
|
| My manager got me from my desk the next work day and you
| could tell he was pissed. He asked me why I would say
| that sort of stuff and said that was "stupid". I
| generally tell the truth and am pretty honest - I guess
| I'm stupid that way.
|
| I heard through a friend thst they wanted to get rid of
| me for those comments and I managed to switch teams in
| time. My career has been in a downward spiral since.
| sosull wrote:
| I can empathise. Telling them that you didn't want a
| management-style position was probably the right move
| given all the reasons you laid out, but it's also an
| implicit rejection of everything that the people around
| you are striving for. They equate management with
| productivity and respect. You're thinking of it like the
| difference between a pilot and an air traffic controller.
| Jobs with vastly different purposes. But still, your
| decision called their value system into question in a
| very profound way. It's not like saying that you don't
| want that kind of job, it's more like you didn't want to
| work with them more closely. And most people, myself
| included, don't have the emotional intelligence to handle
| rejection maturely. It all gets very petty.
| giantg2 wrote:
| That all makes sense, but this was for a promotion to
| senior dev.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > You have to be careful how you do it. I was punished
| for turning it down.
|
| Not only that - you may be perceived as a threat to
| anyone who takes the post that was offered to you and,
| since you turned it down, you have no actual power to
| control what happens.
| JohnFen wrote:
| True, you don't want to burn bridges.
|
| But taking the description of your situation at face
| value, I would have quit that company. Its values are so
| different from mine that I'd feel I have no business
| being there.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I didn't feel like I was burning bridges. I obviously
| worded it more gently and stuff.
|
| It's consistently ranked as a best place to work. The
| written policies are great, but they don't matter because
| there are unwritten backroom policies. They are also one
| of the largest employers in the area and I can't move due
| to family issues. I was screwed, but sure, if one has
| other options, one should take them.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yeah, that's a tough spot.
| gnicholas wrote:
| What would you do if this came up again? Would you still
| demur, but perhaps give a different reason (family needs
| right now, etc.)?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Possibly the family needs thing (which is true for me
| now, but wasn't then). I'm not sure it would have even
| worked though. Once _they_ bring up the prospect of a
| promotion, they 've already used a bunch of political
| capital to open that spot for you and it's an insult to
| say no. I get is different for other companies or even
| just other departments, but that's how it was for that
| one.
|
| The other thing is, my company measures your engagement
| and potential by how ambitious you are. The reason they
| wanted to get rid of me is because they thought with an
| answer like that I would be disengaged and didn't have
| any potential.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I don't know if it helps, but what I've done when turning
| down promotions is to be sure they know that I'm pleased
| and honored by the offer and value it. And that the
| reason I'm turning it down is because I feel I can
| provide the greatest value to the company in the position
| I'm currently in.
|
| All of which is true, and phrases things so they know
| you're not turning your nose up at anything and that you
| have the company's best interests in your mind.
| hbn wrote:
| I haven't necessarily turned down promotions, but I've
| been at my job for over 2.5 years and have no desire to
| make the jump from "developer" to "senior developer" like
| most do, because while I'm sure you get a nice pay bump,
| I know firsthand it just means you're in way more
| meetings (of which I already think I'm in too many of)
| and writing less code.
|
| I don't even know what the extra pay would be, but it's
| probably not enough to be worth making my job less
| enjoyable.
| JohnFen wrote:
| It depends on what "senior developer" means, though. With
| my last 4 jobs, I was hired with the title "senior
| developer" -- but what it indicated was my pay grade, not
| my responsibilities. I was just a regular developer in
| them all.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Those are probably the ones being let go.
|
| That has always been a concern to me about being laid off
| in one of these massive layoffs efforts. If it is pretty
| much understood that in these moves the companies are
| removing dead weight, does that stigma get attached to you
| as you search for a new job.
| noodlesUK wrote:
| It's pretty hard to be choosy at that scale. I don't get
| the impression that these large scale layoffs were
| targeting individual low performers, but are rather
| slashing entire business units. (I might be mistaken, but
| that's the impression I've got)
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, from what others have said, entire teams are being
| cut.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Yep. This wasn't about low performers, at least not in my
| company.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| If they can't hire competently, why do yoy think they can
| fire competently?
| apetresc wrote:
| I think it's easier to identify a low performer after a
| year of work than it is to identify a high performer
| after an hour of whiteboarding.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Low-performers are not relevant to this discussion.
|
| The accusation is that the companies hired more people
| than they knew what to do with / could apply productively
| in their business.
|
| If such a basic task is beyond the capability of
| decisionmakers, who is to say that they are capable of
| collecting the feedback from rank-and-file employees
| required to assess who needs firing?
|
| Mangers have many concerns apart from Performance,
| suppose we have Steve and Bob, and Bob is 50% more
| productive than Steve, but Steve is in the middle of
| delivering a critical project, millions of dollars are on
| the line. Meanwhile Bob is in between projects, and today
| they decided they must fire some staff, who do you think
| will get fired?
|
| Also, is performance one metric? Suppose Steve writes
| worse code, but the business folks love his
| presentations, he is really good at explaining the issues
| facing the team. They can put Steve in front of a
| corporate client and win business. They never see much of
| Bob, even thought he is doing most of the 'real' work, so
| who is more valuable?
|
| Unless you are dealing with someone totally incompetent,
| these questions are usually 'which skillset do we need
| most' and they are not so simple.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| While you're generally right, you'd be surprised. You can
| go pretty far by throwing out a few buzzwords and sitting
| through youtube how-tos.
|
| IME, it's when the crunch time hits, or an outage, or
| some other nasty surprise or fire, where you see the
| competency show itself (or not).
| JohnFen wrote:
| This is not as true as you think, but it does depend on
| the specific company. When I've been part of the hiring
| process at various companies, I've never seen anyone
| penalized for having been laid off.
| danudey wrote:
| Ideally it takes a full year for them to realize that
| you're not competent, at which point you hit your 1 year
| cliff and can snag 25% of your options or RSUs before you
| get PIP'ed out.
| glomgril wrote:
| If you're at Amazon you'll walk away with 5% after one
| year, and only 20% after two years.
| jedberg wrote:
| Plus the cash sign on bonus worth as much as 50% of your
| stock. You actually come out ahead if you work at Amazon
| for only two years, that's why a lot of people duck out
| after two years.
| mancerayder wrote:
| And you hope the stock doesn't go down by 30 percent
| after 6 months.
| scarface74 wrote:
| This is misleading. You get a prorated sign up bonus for
| the first two years that makes up for the back heavy
| vesting schedule. With all of the tech sectors stock
| price dropping, this has been a preferable outcome over
| the last two years.
| Gh0stRAT wrote:
| True, but misleading. Amazon gives big cash bonuses to
| new hires in years 1 and 2 in order to compensate for the
| back-weighted vesting schedule.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I've been at my company for 10 years. It went: competent
| -> high performer -> competent (promotion) -> high
| performer -> competent -> low performer
| arooaroo wrote:
| This is known as the Peter Principle.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
| giantg2 wrote:
| I mean, not quite. My performance at the same level went
| from high performer to low performer. So I was doing the
| role very well for a while, even getting good reviews for
| filling the role above mine (intermediate dev filling
| tech lead role). Performance gradually atrophied
| following my disenchantment and mistreatment.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| Did you go from high performer to low performer at the
| same role? what has changed?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Things that changed: subdivisions/teams, tech stacks,
| managers, areas of the business, enterprise
| procedures/processes. Basically everything. They even
| outsourced my job, then laid off my entire old department
| to ship that entire business unit to another contract
| company.
|
| Then at home, kids and multiple family health issues. I
| guess my age plays a role too.
| a4isms wrote:
| I use "Eternal September" for the cultural effect on
| businesses that suddenly gorge themselves on new hires that
| have no exposure to the existing culture or context. The
| negative effects are loosely parallel to what happens when a
| social medium breaks out of being a subculture and goes
| mainstream.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| > They are probably one of the best run companies in the
| world.
|
| I would disagree with this. Although their risk is spread
| much better than it was in the early 00s, a huge amount of
| their recurring revenue right now teeters on the brink of
| destruction in the form of their 30% app store cut and the
| walled-garden nature of their app store. All it would take is
| a morally principled, non-lobbied regulator to step in and
| regulate that down to something reasonable like 5% or 3% and
| require allowing third party app stores (both actions would
| be equivalent economically because their current fee only
| works because of their monopoly), and I don't see someting
| like this not happening in the next decade.
|
| It will be a huge and deserved adjustment when this does
| happen, and stock speculation will only amplify the blow in
| the form of lost stock value. There are many, many long-time
| holders of apple stock who might see the threat of such an
| event as a time to finally sell. Then we'll see how much
| value is really there.
|
| Additionally, they have sunk billions of dollars in a brand
| new campus at a time when WFH is here to stay. That
| investment will also likely turn out to be worthless in the
| coming decades as the value of CRE races to $0.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I mean it is public information how much Apple makes from
| services. It doesn't take much research to realize you are
| wrong.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Commenting on the campus bit.... Apple makes devices, not
| just software. Good luck developing device from home and
| dealing with the constant headache of shipping samples
| around the world. The campus was not a mistake.
| officeplant wrote:
| Trusted engineers get to take home prototypes. Usually
| also loaned a maxed out Mac Pro so they have something
| with enough memory to unpack MacOS's built in system
| process recording mode. (digging through a 5 minute
| recording of MacOS took ~~200GB of system memory to
| unpack and evaluate.)
| guhidalg wrote:
| I assume by your answer that you work at Apple or know
| someone who works there so let me clarify that I'm
| talking about the messy work that happens before you have
| a take home prototype for a device. I'm talking about
| building the prototype with in-house machinery before
| asking the manufacturer to make samples at the factory.
| If you do work at Apple, do you hand assemble prototypes
| at the office or do you just ask the manufacturer to
| build them and overnight them to your house? If so, do
| you have lab equipment at home to inspect and test it?
| briandear wrote:
| > regulate that down to something reasonable like 5% or 3%
|
| How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not
| something up for a vote -- that's up to the market.
|
| Let's say you have an iOS app.
|
| If you sell it for $5 on the App Store, you keep $3.5. And
| you sell 100,000.
|
| App Store nets you $350k.
|
| And let's say you sold the app direct to users and did
| everything yourself:
|
| $5 sales price, you keep $5 however, you also have to
| collect and remit sales tax for jurisdictions in which you
| sell. Your street price is $5 + tax, and you keep the $5
| but you incur some expense for sales tax compliance.
|
| You have to use a payment processor. That's 2.9% + $0.30
| per transaction. So if you sold 100k apps at $5, that's
| $455,500 in revenue after credit card fees are paid.
|
| However, there's also chargebacks. Chargeback ratio
| averages roughly 0.6% across all industries (it's much
| higher for digital goods and CNP transactions -- so let's
| call it 1.5%) So from 100k sales, you really sell 98,5000,
| so your revenue is $448,667 (after cc fees.) However, you
| have 1500 in chargebacks that cost $20 each (per stripe.).
| So that's $30k in chargeback fees. So now your revenue is
| $418,667. Apple rarely loses chargebacks and refunds are
| extremely rare. So that sales loss is negligible.
|
| You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads and
| pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth. As well as shipping
| updates to all of your customers. As well as ensuring
| updates are compatible for any iOS version your customers
| might be using. There's going to be some level of customer
| support required. That's a non-zero cost.
|
| Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You
| aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise. You'll
| need to market. And -- convince people that you aren't
| going to infect their device with malware.
|
| Let's just assume that you sell just as many outside the
| App Store as you would doing it yourself. (That won't
| happen, but let's assume your marketing is so good that
| it's the case.)
|
| The difference is $419-$350k. (That's assuming zero expense
| for hosting, marketing, customer support, etc.) So you're
| "losing" $69k per year. After tax however -- $280k from the
| App Store, $335k doing it yourself. So $55k additional. Yet
| you have hosting, customer support, marketing -- etc. $55k
| per year as a salary for doing those tasks is tiny and that
| doesn't include the cost of the hosting and bandwidth.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not
| something up for a vote -- that's up to the market.
|
| If you ask _Apple themselves_ to split the payment
| processing from the hosting and 'marketing', they claim
| it's 3% and 27%.
|
| So if you could use their payment processing by itself,
| that would put you at $485k before server costs, not
| $419k. So you can have very nice servers _and_ over a
| third more revenue.
|
| You'll have to decide whether being in the main app store
| is important enough to pay a big percentage. And
| advertising and updates and customer support are costs
| either way, so please don't imply you only pay them if
| you avoid the app store.
| lapcat wrote:
| > If you sell it for $5 on the App Store, you keep $3.5.
|
| Try $0. Look at the App Store charts. The 200 top
| grossing apps are ironically all "Free":
| https://appfigures.com/top-apps/ios-app-store/united-
| states/...
|
| This is the real problem, the crApp Store race to the
| bottom. Apple's cut was never really the problem. The cut
| is obscene, but only because the prices are already
| obscenely low. I'd be happy to give Apple 50% if I could
| sell my software for higher prices.
|
| > And you sell 100,000.
|
| Good luck with that.
|
| > You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads
| and pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth.
|
| Cheap.
|
| > As well as shipping updates to all of your customers.
| As well as ensuring updates are compatible for any iOS
| version your customers might be using. There's going to
| be some level of customer support required.
|
| You have to do these things anyway.
|
| > Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You
| aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise.
| You'll need to market. And -- convince people that you
| aren't going to infect their device with malware.
|
| You have to do all of this stuff regardless of whether
| you're in the App Store. As an App Store developer
| myself, I can tell you that Apple absolutely does not do
| these things for you.
|
| Notice how many Mac developers, given the choice, choose
| to distribute themselves rather than via the Mac App
| Store. They don't see the App Store as a win like you do.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Playing the game according to the current rules seems
| preferable than playing the game according to rules that
| may or may not come into existence.
|
| Also, they will still be one of the, if not most,
| profitable businesses in the world even if they lose all
| the App Store revenue, so it does not seem reasonable to
| expect more.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| Companies of this size need to play the long game, but
| quarterly OKRs and a beuracratic structure ensure they
| only ever play the short game. The 30% is great this
| quarter and next quarter, and every quarter until the
| quarter where it goes away completely. Keeping it this
| high is extremely risky behavior, literally taunting for
| regulation.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If you look at Apple's results and products and think
| they are playing for next quarter, I do not know what to
| tell you.
|
| The App Store model has served them well for years. If it
| stops serving them well next quarter, so what?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| This old myth will never die.
|
| If it was true, these short sighted companies would fade
| away in the long run.
|
| Empirically, top companies stay on top for decades.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| If facebook qas so well run, it wouldnt need to buy up
| all the competition to stay relevant, like Whatsapp and
| instagram.
|
| Once you are that huge and cam but competition, you don't
| fade away unless you go full-on Lehmon Brothers
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _this quarter and next quarter_
|
| Apple Silicon was a decade-long play, largely by Cook.
| Even if the App Store is threatened, Apple remains plump.
| dmix wrote:
| So you're saying Apple isn't a well run company because
| they haven't properly managed their regulatory risk around
| the app store? What should they do hire more lobbyists? Not
| have built a $100 billion/year business because of a vague
| threat of future regulatory change?
|
| We've seen pushback on the 30% but mostly for a select
| group of major companies who want to offer alternative
| payments. The majority of apps aren't going to be asking
| customers for their credit cards separately vs a single
| "subscribe" button, nor do they all have CCs already in
| their existing DBs. Even worst case if 25% of the revenue
| gets lost due to secondary subscription payment support
| (assuming they don't somehow still take a cut), that 75% is
| still a monster that could support Apple for a long time.
|
| Not to mention the rest of their businesses.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| I'm saying they have over-extended to the point where
| they are begging for regulation. Much wiser to not over-
| extend to the point where regulators are pissed off. Now
| they could lose it all instead of having a more
| reasonable rate.
|
| At this point they should self-regulate, like any
| misbehaving child who realizes they are in the wrong
| should before they get punished. It's not a risk and it's
| not going to hurt their stock if it's self-imposed.
| People always praise anything that comes from within with
| Apple so it would actually be a pretty savvy play, given
| what's on the horizon.
| dmix wrote:
| So what should they have done? Conceded to a group of
| Epic type companies on a VIP-type basis so regulators
| don't eat their lucrative subscription model? Without
| bigco lobbying the gov I doubt there'd be as much
| regulatory pressure. So the best bet might have been to
| work with the major companies hiring lobbyists and
| getting PR.
|
| Rumour is Apple is opening up side-loading so the "walled
| garden" thing might be neutered.
|
| Not sure what other regulatory risks they have.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| No no they should have never had it above 10% to begin
| with. The case with Epic never should have needed to
| happen. They've been over-extended all along.
| azinman2 wrote:
| I think you lack a lot of historic perspective of how
| software was sold and distributed, and the cuts involved.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I agree that the cut is too big, but its entirely
| reasonable to think that setting and keeping the cut at
| 30% is the rational profit-maximizing course even in a
| long run that includes new laws throttling them to some
| lower number.
| taylodl wrote:
| Have you ever sold anything in a retail channel such as
| Walmart or Target? Do you know how much they charge to
| put your product on their shelves?
|
| Welcome to the world of retail!
|
| If Apple tried to make it so that you couldn't make an
| app and offer it both on Android and Apple, i.e. it had
| to be an Apple exclusive, then I'd say you have a point.
| The regulators aren't concerned with the 30%. Their
| concern is with the fact you can't go to another store
| and shop for a better price. THAT is what they're trying
| to fix. Watch out though - deregulation and market
| competition all-too-often leads to _higher_ prices.
| People always act surprised by this.
| deelowe wrote:
| My experience is in cloud and I can give some insight on what
| we were thinking at this time. In cloud, infrastructure is
| key and our theory was that we needed to beat the other
| companies in terms of scale and capability. So we were
| aggressively trying to scale to get ahead of the competition.
| The environment was highly competitive all the way down to
| even the PCBA manufacturers. As an example, at one company,
| to get their "A teams" you need to be their top customer in
| terms of volume.
|
| So while it looks odd by comparison, cloud providers were in
| a bit of a different environment than Apple.
| nashashmi wrote:
| > one of the best run companies
|
| They off-source all of their factory efforts to other
| companies. The other companies are doing the hiring and
| firing.
|
| Probably the best run company is Qualcomm. I have never heard
| them do layoffs. And they are based in San Diego.
|
| edit: Just googled it and found
| https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1l5vLinG
|
| edit2: also, https://www.thelayoff.com/apple
| [deleted]
| simonh wrote:
| >The other companies are doing the hiring and firing.
|
| And this is evidence they're not so well run? On the
| contrary...
| no_wizard wrote:
| I know that everyone is looking at this as "by the numbers" and
| there is truth to be had there, I offer a different take
| though.
|
| Apple's culture is not all that amendable to high growth of
| headcount[0]. Its not in their DNA. Steve Jobs in his return
| back to Apple setup a cultural legacy around hiring smart,
| hiring smart, and being intentional. That its better to invest
| in hiring the best you can and people who fit. When I was
| there, it was another huge boom time for most of the industry,
| and Apple still wasn't hiring fast like Meta (then Facebook) or
| Google was. Some _departments_ in Apple do scale quickly, but
| typically there is a targeted plan behind that scaling.
|
| In essence, they don't like to take shots on scaling the people
| aspect of the business, because they value culture fit
| extremely high and intentionally put it ahead of many other
| metrics internally.
|
| That was and I believe still is the case
|
| [0]: one can argue no company can take rapid headcount rises,
| but setting that aside, clearly a lot of companies thought it
| could work
| EricHolden12 wrote:
| Companies over hired during the pandemic because they issued
| stock to new employees to artificially boost their share price.
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Companies don't need to hire people to issue new stock. They
| can do it anytime.
|
| People forget these days but the entire point of the stock
| market is to give companies a money-printing machine. More
| accurately, it's an on-demand way of obtaining investment by
| sucking up value from the people who hold your shares.
| jsnell wrote:
| That really is not how this works. Issuing shares decreases the
| share price, rather than increase.
| filoleg wrote:
| Yeah, you typically increase the share price "artificially"
| by doing stock buybacks, not by handing out more shares to
| new employees.
| edwnj wrote:
| [dead]
| nblgbg wrote:
| It may be an unpopular opinion but every one is celebrating too
| early. It depends a lot on the economy in next 6 months. I hope
| this will put a pressure on Apple and they won't resort to
| layoffs.
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| > There's a reason why Apple Inc. is under less pressure than
| tech peers to slash jobs during the current slowdown: It hired
| more efficiently in the first place.
|
| So there is no official statement from Apple saying that they are
| not planning a layoff round in the coming months, just the
| opinion of 2 analysts? Apple isn't avoiding anything.
| lapcat wrote:
| There was an official statement directly from Tim Cook a week
| ago: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/02/apple-layoffs-tim-cook/
| shmatt wrote:
| He literally says "you can never say never"
|
| Every CEO says its a last resort, they tried everything, etc.
| Cooks statement isn't any different
| htrp wrote:
| If he says never and ends up doing it.... it officially
| becomes securities fraud.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| I'm curious where all the talent came from in the recent hiring
| frenzy. It didn't just come out of thin air, somebody lost a lot
| of people. Anyone see any research on the flows of people?
| shmatt wrote:
| All of these "company X has avoided layoffs" articles are pretty
| foolish, are all the big layoffs done? Are we even sure there
| won't be second rounds by summer?
|
| Apple could layoff 4% in a week and these same analysts will try
| to explain why there was no other way
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| These aren't even real analyst. They are propagandist.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Apple could layoff 4% in a week
|
| Highly unlikely: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/02/apple-layoffs-
| tim-cook/
| boshalfoshal wrote:
| Have you ever worked at a high profile company that laid off
| people? I have. Everything is good and the narrative is "We
| aren't like other companies" until it actually happens.
|
| Its suboptimal to explicitly telegraph layoffs from an
| employee morale perspective. As leadership, its better to ask
| for forgiveness after the layoff than to ask for permission
| to lay off.
|
| They may actually get through this without laying off, but
| its certainly not guaranteed just because the CEO says "no
| layoffs."
| lapcat wrote:
| > They may actually get through this without laying off,
| but its certainly not guaranteed just because the CEO says
| "no layoffs."
|
| It's not _just_ because of what the CEO said. The CEO 's
| words are justified by the company's actions:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34742642
| paraph1n wrote:
| Highly unlikely? Tim cook literally said in the quote "You
| can never say never."
| [deleted]
| shmatt wrote:
| This just means the letter will include the wording "last
| resort" and "we tried everything to avoid this"
| lapcat wrote:
| This ignores the headline of the article, which is "it
| didn't overhire". Thus, not only is Cook downplaying the
| possibility of layoffs, but Apple clearly doesn't need to
| do them.
| [deleted]
| bryan_w wrote:
| And they failed to hire enough people to bring their AR headset
| to market which is the other side of the coin.
| Someone wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks's_law:
|
| _"Brooks ' law is an observation about software project
| management according to which adding manpower to a software
| project that is behind schedule delays it even longer."_
|
| I also think they're doing research, not development most of
| the time. Such projects can't be time-estimated, so they can't
| be late (managers or outsiders still might call them late,
| though), and often can't be parallelized well ("9 women cannot
| make a baby in one month"), so starting out with a larger team
| may not have helped, either.
| 65 wrote:
| An AR headset that's supposed to do what, exactly?
| chaostheory wrote:
| To help bring the next paradigm in computing interfaces. I
| don't understand why people have forgotten all of the sci-fi
| movies that have been showing what's possible
| r00fus wrote:
| Let me know when someone has solved the "glasshole" creep
| factor. Clearly Apple is the most capable in shifting
| consumer sentiment but that's a challenging hurdle.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Challenging is different from impossible, and yes we are
| talking about Apple, a company who's proven time and time
| again that they're up for solving UX challenges
| chasd00 wrote:
| don't put a led on the front for one. i think people
| would largely not care if they largely didn't notice.
| This is why surveillance cameras are placed somewhere out
| of the way.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I've personally solved it by striving to care less about
| what other people think. I realize that doesn't work for
| everyone in all circumstances, though.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > I've personally solved it by striving to care less
| about what other people think.
|
| Google Glasses was lunched before Google was widely known
| as a creepy spyware company too. I don't even think
| computer geeks would be impressed anymore.
| r00fus wrote:
| The problem isn't your adoption of new tech (e.g. google
| glass) it's that your behavior using new tech engenders
| blowback from others (they call you a glasshole) and THEY
| won't adopt the new tech.
|
| Adoption is a key metric that differentiates a successful
| product vs. failed product.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Ah yes. Sci fi movies that have to show flashy special
| effects that would never work this way in real life: from
| headache-inducing colors and animation to having to hold
| your hands up fir an extended period of time to do the
| simplest things to see-through interfaces.
| astrange wrote:
| My memory of the Nintendo 3DS says those flashy special
| effects look way cooler and more physical in 3D when you
| can see the depth in those particle fields. But I'm sure
| they get even more expensive to make.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > show flashy special effects that would never work this
| way in real life
|
| This is only true if you can't see the future that's
| right in front of your eyes. Also unless something will
| violate laws of physics, it's not wise to say that never
| will happen or is impossible to achieve
|
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/oblong-minority-report-
| john-...
|
| We also already have Quest 2 as a pretty good VR device
| that's shipped, not to mention stuff from other companies
| like valve
| dmitriid wrote:
| > This is only true if you can't see the future that's
| right in front of your eyes.
|
| It really isn't in front of my eyes, and won't be for a
| long time.
|
| > <link to fantasy interfaces>
|
| No idea why it's here. And yes you are restricted by the
| laws of physics and human biology.
|
| > We also already have Quest 2 as a pretty good VR device
| that's shipped
|
| VR is a) distinctly different from AR, b) requires bulky
| headsets, and c) borderline unusable for any extended
| periods of time
| chaostheory wrote:
| > yes you are restricted by the laws of physics and human
| biology
|
| Yeah, you didn't cite any laws that restrict this future.
| You're wrong.
|
| Let's also not be disingenuous. those "fantasy
| interfaces" are working prototypes and not just movie
| CGI. There are also real world products like NReal.
| You're not familiar enough with the subject despite being
| confidently wrong
|
| > VR is a) distinctly different from AR, b) requires
| bulky headsets, and c) borderline unusable for any
| extended periods of time
|
| 1. There is pass through AR which what Quest headsets and
| the new Apple headset will support
|
| 2. Bulky headsets are the past and present. That isn't
| the future, or even the near future
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Yeah, you didn't cite any laws that restrict this
| future. You're wrong.
|
| I'm not wrong. I just don't call wishful thinking "the
| future", "reality" etc.
|
| > Let's also not be disingenuous. those "fantasy
| interfaces" are working prototypes and not just movie CGI
|
| Prototypes are not "actual usable interfaces that are
| used by real humans for any extended periods of time".
| Note how his own company uses none of these interfaces.
|
| > There are also real world products like NReal
|
| Ah yes. A pair of galsses with 46 degree field of view
| that you need to connect with a cable to the actual
| device where all the processing and control happens.
|
| > what Quest headsets and the new Apple headset will
| support
|
| Ah yes. The new Apple headset that you know literally
| nothing about will one hundred percent will have this...
| Even though it's rumoured not to be VR device
|
| > Bulky headsets are the past and present. That isn't the
| future, or even the near future
|
| Oh? We've solved the question of batteries? Of compact
| CPUs and GPUs capable of processing this? Etc. And all
| this is coming in _near_ future?
| Maursault wrote:
| No, what Apple failed to do was not bother developing a product
| that can't be successful. It just isn't possible to role that
| thing into the Apple Lifestyle, no matter how much better it
| could possibly be than all the other losing attempts.
| aliqot wrote:
| nobody wants an AR headset
| revskill wrote:
| Except me, especially if it's free.
| TheRealNGenius wrote:
| [dead]
| s3p wrote:
| Is that really relevant?
| melling wrote:
| Steve Jobs and Apple were a fan of small teams...
|
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/leading-apple-with/9781...
|
| But some people still have this belief that 9 women can make a
| baby in a month.
| arthurwu wrote:
| this comment serves
| icehawk wrote:
| How did they fail at doing that?
|
| Did they announce an AR headset, not bring it to market and
| someone else's got wildly popular or...?
| bryan_w wrote:
| This is what I'm referring to:
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23560097/apple-ar-vr-
| glas...
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Based on my reading, it sounds like these job cuts are happening
| because other job cuts are happening. Google didn't layoff 8% of
| its workforce (or whatever the percentage was) because they were
| in financial straits.
|
| They did it because everyone else is doing it.
|
| IMO that makes Apple even more commendable. If my understanding
| is correct, that would imply they have more of a spine than these
| other morally ambiguous companies. Not saying Apple isn't morally
| ambiguous, but in comparison it seems like a fair conclusion.
| dakial1 wrote:
| Another source, No paywall:
| https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/companies/arid-410683...
| varelse wrote:
| [dead]
| jarjoura wrote:
| I can only speak to my experience in the engineering org at Meta
| and past experience at Apple.
|
| One key difference between Apple and Meta is that each individual
| (on the ground) team at Apple is responsible for its own hiring.
| Whereas at Meta, they have a general company-wide engineering
| pool that is mainly driven by recruiters to fill.
|
| A manager at Apple will get a batch of resumes and start hiring
| with a recruiter and the team members will then interview each
| candidate and decide to move forward or not with a candidate.
|
| A manager at Meta, on the other hand, is constantly trying to
| sell their team to potential engineers looking to either switch
| from another team internally, or come from the general pool
| (bootcamp).
|
| Make no mistake, both companies get headcount budgets driven by
| org-wide budgets set by the very top and HR uses that budget with
| very complicated formulas for determining how fast they need to
| hire to maintain or grow headcount to stay ahead of people
| leaving. Also, engineering managers absolutely have endless work
| to assign to new hires. So given the headcount, they will
| definitely make use of it.
|
| All that to say, I do think Meta's internal team structure made
| it far easier to over-hire and Apple's intentionally inefficient
| structure prevented doing the same.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I had the impression Google and Amazon use the same model as
| Meta. But in working in the field since the 1990s I have never
| encountered or worked at any company that used their model. I
| think their model is likely superior in terms of hiring the
| most people in the shortest time. With the shortcoming that it
| might make it easy to overhire, and it might not fill the job
| with the best person as often.
|
| Lots of small to massive very successful companies don't need
| to use their model of hiring a pool of people and then only
| later figuring out which role they will fill. If you're only
| hiring someone when you have identified a specific role and
| identified the correct person for that role it might take
| longer to hire someone, but you won't overhire as easily and
| you're probably more likely to have a higher hit rate in terms
| of getting the right person.
| WWLink wrote:
| The funny thing is my personal experience was the opposite. I
| have a lot of experience in embedded software. The recruiters
| I interacted with at Google knew about my specialization and
| targeted positions that were embedded-related (like, at waymo
| or their other projects). However, the actual phone screen
| interview was with a web programmer that had very little C++
| background and seemed pretty uncomfortable with me using that
| to solve their quiz. I ended up being weirded out by that and
| not moving forward. I figured I'd have to go back and
| practice a lot of stuff I hadn't touched in a while to
| actually impress their interview panel.
|
| Meta was different. I interviewed with someone from the
| reality labs team and it was super specific. Our discussion
| and the software quizzing they did was right up my alley.
| Like, they specifically had a reason to want to hire me, and
| given what they described, I had a reason to be very
| interested in the project they were hiring for. It was a big
| shock, because the last time I spoke to someone hiring for FB
| they seemed to have no idea what they were doing lol. I still
| didn't move forward! But I was really tempted to.
|
| I had a similar experience when I talked to someone at Apple.
| Unfortunately that time they wanted someone even more
| specialized than I was (they wanted someone to work on things
| to manage multiple JTAG devices - that was already innately
| familiar with doing that sorta thing at a hardware level).
| Still, 10/10, I'd apply to Apple again. I'd also apply to
| Meta again... although I think they basically killed the
| entire reality labs thing. I was so impressed by Meta. Still
| am.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I wasn't trying to make it about me.. I am not in embedded
| software, though I've dabbled in it and that would have
| been a nice path to take instead.
|
| But we all specialize in something and I don't really think
| I've gone down a path where any of those big companies
| would really ever be a good place for me now. I think
| whatever path you go down in terms of specialization would
| certainly influence your interactions with their
| recruiting.
|
| I have been working/interviewing since the late 90s.. when
| I interviewed with various companies is over a 25 year
| period at this point, so they were not the same companies
| they are today. I interviewed at Apple in the late 90s when
| they were a mess, and I thought they were a mess. I didn't
| own a Mac, they were too expensive for me as a student, so
| I'm sure that didn't help. I turned down a job at MS out of
| college because they put a delay in the process and I'd
| gone elsewhere by the time they contacted me. MS would have
| been a better place for me to go to start. Google & Amazon
| I interviewed at > 10 years ago when public/industry
| opinion of them was much higher. By the time FB/Meta really
| got going I declined.. I have not had a strong opinion of
| them. However, of all my friends who have worked at the
| FAANG companies the ones who work at Meta seem the
| happiest, with the ones who worked Amazon having had the
| most unhappy experience and Google seemingly in the middle.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Google is very similar. You go through a pipeline to send you
| to the hiring committee, then once you are cleared and
| leveled, you can now interview with managers who can read
| your scores etc.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Reaction: Sounds like Apple's method encourages managers to
| select and hire one person, who is a very good fit for his
| team's actual current need. Vs. Meta's encourages managers to
| cast a net, haul in a load of fish, and hope that one of 'em is
| a passable fit for his team's current need. But many keep a few
| extra fish regardless - since he'll have more needs in the
| future, and fishing is a crap shoot.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Apple is known for going with tiny teams rather than the
| gigantic, bloated trees of VPs and Directors that other companies
| have. Their CFO even spoke[1] publicly about it, a rarity.
| Sometimes you just need a team of two people reporting to the CFO
| to do something. You don't need 2 SVPs, with 10 VPs, with 80
| Directors, each with trees of management/ICs to do the same
| thing.
|
| 1: https://twitter.com/workmj/status/1595324607984271360
| ayewo wrote:
| That's a neat find. Thanks for linking to it.
|
| I think I found the full interview on YouTube [1] _Managers:
| From Italy to Top Global Businesses. Luca Maestri, CFO of
| Apple_
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHWwq5--nEw
| jcheng wrote:
| Nice find--the Twitter video wasn't loading for me, but your
| link did. The relevant part is at 52:30.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| I've seen recent job listings at Apple that seem to strongly
| indicate that they're still trying to make an EV ("automotive and
| electric drive train experience preferred"). So they still seem
| inclined to throw money away in that direction.
| CHSbeachbum420 wrote:
| It's still early...
| raincom wrote:
| Supply chain issues forced Apple not to overhire. Apple is
| strictly enforcing RTO 3 days a week, even if teams are
| distributed, I heard.
| xyzelement wrote:
| I think this is more to do with scope rather than caution,
| although of course those are related.
|
| Apple has a fairly finite set of offerings and they probably
| didn't feel the need (or maybe didn't have an opportunity to)
| rapidly grow their scope during the pandemic.
|
| In contrast, Google and Amazon have broader scope and obviously
| much more of their scope had intersection with pandemic-driven
| opportunities.
|
| To list some obvious examples - as people shifted to work from
| home, Google had the opportunity to establish gSuite as the place
| where such work happens. Amazon obviously had to opportunity of
| people having no interest to go into a store. Those are just two
| out of many many areas where both companies had more "surface" to
| engage than Apple did.
|
| Did they over hire? Well, they had an opportunity and they went
| for it. If the size of the opportunity was misjudged, they could
| always shed some of the new size, as they are now doing.
| m1117 wrote:
| I thought that the job cuts is a conspiracy for battling
| inflation and overprice tech talent.
| O__________O wrote:
| Given Apple's headcount increased during same period was
| significantly less than comparable companies, one might take the
| position that they in sum contributed significantly less to labor
| market than similar tech companies.
|
| For example, if Apple grew headcount by 20%, but laid off zero
| percent -- percentage wise, they're still significantly behind
| contributions made to labor market of a comparable company that
| double in size and then laid off 20% of its workforce; meaning
| not only did the comparable company increase the percentage of
| people being paid during the period, but also at the end of the
| period had increased the overall percentage of new employees.
| psychlops wrote:
| A few days ago we were criticizing Nintendo because it was making
| too much money per employee and didn't hire enough. Also, we
| criticize Google for laying people off and Amazon for everything
| else (overhiring?).
|
| One wonders why Apple gets high praise for "hiring cautiously".
| zamalek wrote:
| Because there would be praise if they were "firing cautiously."
| etempleton wrote:
| I think Nintendo is a wonderfully run company. They are
| probably a bit too set in their ways of doing things, but they
| always seem to be ready to take advantage of an opportunity or
| minimize the damage of a bad product launch. How many companies
| could have survived the WiiU?
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| Not only survived the Wii U but followed it up with a smash
| hit. The Switch is now the third best selling console of all
| time, behind only the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation 2.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| I think it would be fair to question those who criticize
| Nintendo for not hiring enough. Nintendo and Apple are run
| similarly in this respect. Very cautious companies.
|
| But I think if you go back and look at who is criticizing
| Nintendo, they're not the same people criticizing Google and
| Amazon. They're opposing sides. It's move-fast-and-break-things
| versus do-it-right-the-first-time. Both have their merits.
|
| But when you move fast and overhire, you upend people's lives
| when you have to let them go.
|
| When you move slow, you provide fewer opportunities for people,
| but noone upends their lives over it.
|
| For my comfort, I choose employers who prioritize keeping the
| team intact, even if that does mean fewer opportunities during
| boom times.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| There are many different approaches and some may be good and
| some may be bad?
| Jcowell wrote:
| > A few days ago we were criticizing Nintendo because it was
| making too much money per employee and didn't hire enough.
|
| From what I recall Nintendo's _hiring_ was never the issue but
| the _pay_
| version_five wrote:
| It's not immediately obvious which has the greatest net
| benefit, if one can even think in those terms. Is it worse to
| make hay when the sun shines and then cut back later? Didn't
| the good period provide a productive exchange of money for
| work, that would have been absent in a company that just sat on
| the sidelines?
| mbesto wrote:
| > One wonders why Apple gets high praise for "hiring
| cautiously".
|
| Have you not read this forum for the past week? It's been
| riddled with techies ragging on tech CEO's for "blaming the
| economy" and not blaming themselves for over-hiring.
| gruez wrote:
| >It's been riddled with techies ragging on tech CEO's for
| "blaming the economy" and not blaming themselves for over-
| hiring.
|
| I think the "I take full responsibility ..." that seems to be
| a regular fixture of layoff announcement suggests otherwise.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| The part I don't quite get (except insofar as it's an
| understandable emotional reaction) is why people are mad at
| companies hiring more people than they should have and then
| eventually laying them off a few years later. Would it have
| been better _for those people_ if they were never hired in
| the first place, never had a few years of getting paid for
| extraneous work? Is the trauma of getting laid off really so
| great that they wish they had never been hired in the first
| place?
|
| Okay, so the job wasn't the last of your career, you didn't
| get to commit the rest of your life to the company. But come
| on, it's not the 1950s anymore. People change jobs all the
| time, it's normal. If a company overhires for a few years
| then eventually corrects itself, that's the company screwing
| itself over but I think workers offended by this are getting
| emotionally over-invested. You got paid for your time and you
| got more out of the relationship than the company which never
| actually needed your labor in the first place. That's a win
| for you and a loss for the company, but not all good things
| can last forever.
| mbesto wrote:
| I don't get it either. 100% agree with your sentiment.
|
| The HN mob in general is pretty level headed, but its like
| someone kicked over the beehive.
| lapcat wrote:
| It all depends. The main problem is that nearly every tech
| company is now doing mass layoffs nearly simultaneously.
| This could lead to long-term unemployment for many
| engineers, even driving some out of the industry
| altogether, which could wipe out any short-term salary
| gains of the past couple years.
|
| Mass hiring distorts the entire job market. It draws people
| out of safer, more stable jobs. It draws people into the
| industry from other industries. It draws students into the
| industry, and into industry-related academic areas. If the
| gains were only short-term, that's not necessarily a good
| tradeoff for employees.
| goalieca wrote:
| The frenzy drove wages up. I'm very grateful.
| pdntspa wrote:
| Tech management has such a hard-on for headcount it is
| sickening. It is like the managers brag about how many people
| are under them.
| slt2021 wrote:
| It is in Indian culture.
|
| In India the size of organization that you manage signals the
| status of your position, and since a lot of engineers are
| from India - no wonder this practice becomes norm in the US
|
| If you let manager choose whom to manage: 10 brilliant
| scientists in a research group, or 100 engineers building a
| product - almost every Indian manager will choose the latter
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I like Nintendo's approach, and I like Apple's approach as
| well. I think it shows a lot more respect for employees than
| "hire as much as possible, then cut deep ASAP if fortunes
| change"; big firing rounds can be devastating to both the folks
| who go and the folks who stay.
| ep103 wrote:
| I've generally found that if you can't measure something
| well, large American companies act extremely poorly with
| regards to that thing.
|
| Its well understood that layoffs destroy the morale of your
| employees, and that they drive out a huge percentage of
| employees, and specifically the ones who have the best
| alternative options.
|
| But I imagine that measuring the impact of brain drain from a
| layoff after a subsequent overhire compared to potential
| growth losses from not overhiring during the boom is one of
| those things that is extremely hard to measure.
|
| Good on Apple and Nintendo for having strong enough and
| competent enough leadership to make that call, instead of the
| typical metric based CYA.
| trilobyte wrote:
| > I've generally found that if you can't measure something
| well, large American companies act extremely poorly with
| regards to that thing.
|
| You've got it. The number of companies I've worked with who
| talk about being "data-driven" and who do not use any data
| for a majority of their decision making is ridiculous.
| danaris wrote:
| > I've generally found that if you can't measure something
| well, large American companies act extremely poorly with
| regards to that thing.
|
| This is true, and goes double (at least) for anything that
| is at odds with maximizing superficial short-term profits,
| or with absolute control by management over employees'
| existences.
|
| There are many studies at this point showing how much more
| productive and profitable companies can be when they treat
| their employees well and pay them at or above market rate,
| but the neofeudal mindset and the idea that this quarter's
| profit growth are the _only_ metric are so deeply ingrained
| into so many people 's heads that it's very, very hard to
| make any inroads.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| There are three ways to make more per employee. You can get
| better at making money. You can have fewer people. You can pay
| your people less.
|
| So as a metric it's very context-dependant.
| nickelcitymario wrote:
| You can also do all 3 at the same time. They're not mutually
| exclusive.
|
| If priority #1 is shareholder value, then doing all 3 of
| those makes sense.
|
| If priority #1 is something other than money, then maximizing
| profit can lead to a negative impact on the true mission.
|
| So I do agree it's context-dependant, but perhaps a slightly
| different context than you had in mind?
| krab wrote:
| These three things aren't mutually exclusive but they go
| against each other.
|
| For example paying people less might impact your ability to
| improve your money stream. Similarly having fewer people
| may lead to some missed opportunities.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I wouldn't lump Amazon in with the others, unless the additional
| hiring/cuts were to AWS. That's because Amazon __had__ to
| increase its distribution/warehouse staff during the pandemic
| just to handle to the __huge__ increase in online purchases,
| regardless of how long that pattern lasted. So it's going to have
| a more cyclical hiring/firing pattern than pure tech companies
| who don't need to double their engineering staff just because
| there's a temporary surge in their software/services.
| bojo wrote:
| Solid point. It's easy to forget what Amazon actually does and
| only focus on the tech side.
| pixelfarmer wrote:
| But they did that, too. You read about 18000 people being
| dropped by Amazon, but you didn't read about the 80000 which
| have been "silently" let go on top of that. Thing is, somewhere
| in the news you may have stumbled over the downsize from ~1.6
| million to ~1.5 million, and 18000 isn't enough for that. These
| 80000 are part of that cycle you mentioned.
| mabbo wrote:
| Amazon laid off thousands of corporate employees, many of whom
| were in tech. I know some personally.
| hummus_bae wrote:
| [dead]
| birdymcbird wrote:
| was at amazon at peak covid.
|
| distribution/warehouse problem and over hiring problem are two
| separate problems.
|
| i will explain overhiring problem.
|
| from 2018 to 2021 many amazon executives and director leave
| company. this continued in 2022.
|
| these "tech" leadership very hands on..strong technical acumen.
| they have vision..manage people..understand
| business..understand the tech and how to scale.
|
| these people not perfect. under them it very hard burnout
| factory of place to work. good chance if you work here you need
| therapy.
|
| these people all start leaving.
|
| they replace by "professional" managers. professional manager
| has one goal: grow headcount and build empire so they get
| promoted.
|
| entire teams exist with no valuable output. team of 8 people
| supporting a service built 10 years ago maybe doing patching
| like replace outdated java log4j library and redeploy. no
| feature work. entire team can be fired and service ownership
| could be given easily to some team doing feature work in
| another space.
|
| this problem happening all over amazon. innovation at amazon is
| on how to increase revenue. what they do is hire mba grad, put
| pressure on them to deliver. Mba grad does obvious shitty
| thing... let show more ads. if you see amazon.com and search it
| is now flea market but before you buy any cheap trash first you
| see walls and walls of "sponsored" recommendation or what is
| actually fucking ad.
|
| it a massive grift.
|
| amazon need Bezos to return like bob iger do at Disney. jassy
| only focus on aws
| manimino wrote:
| Apple hasn't cut employees so far. But nothing is stopping it
| from announcing layoffs tomorrow.
| asah wrote:
| the "overhire" story doesn't match reality, because the layoffs
| included too many senior and long-tenured staff who know how to
| get things done at these companies.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Apple is able to see demand signals way in advance of many
| businesses and industries. Obviously product reports can quickly
| tell people up their chain of command. I commend such an
| organization.
| jnwatson wrote:
| Hiring at Apple was limited because they don't pay competitively
| and they only get the "true believer" types that are willing to
| work more hours at a discount.
|
| Source: a low level manager at Apple.
| rcarmo wrote:
| That is plain not true (and that is all I will say about it).
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Source: a low level manager at Apple
|
| You or a friend?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Can anyone from Apple comment on the progress of their Public
| Cloud offering they're (seemingly) still building? I would have
| expected them to get the axe
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