[HN Gopher] Apple Expands Hiring Freeze, Delays Bonuses for Some...
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Apple Expands Hiring Freeze, Delays Bonuses for Some Employees
Author : Octokiddie
Score : 110 points
Date : 2023-03-14 19:51 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.macrumors.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.macrumors.com)
| ladberg wrote:
| > Apple normally provides bonuses and promotions once or twice
| per year depending on division, with the extra money paid out in
| April and October, but the company is shifting entirely to a
| once-per-year bonus schedule
|
| FWIW my understanding was that it was already once-per-year 99%
| of the time, with the off-cycle bonus being intended for weird
| circumstances (starting at an unusual time that left a big gap in
| between bonuses, retention for employees likely to leave).
| Someone correct me if I'm wrong though!
|
| EDIT: Clicking through to the Bloomberg article actually provides
| the context I was lacking:
|
| > The majority of Apple's divisions had already moved to a once-
| a-year schedule for bonuses and promotions, including software
| engineering and services, but staff in operations, corporate
| retail and other groups had still been on the outgoing biannual
| plan.
|
| I wasn't aware that non-engineers were on a different schedule,
| but I wouldn't regard this change as "cost cutting", just
| consolidating some differences across orgs.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-14/apple-del...
| makestuff wrote:
| Once per year promotions seems rough. If it is denied for some
| reason you can't try again in 1-2 quarters. Although maybe that
| is a good way to prevent people from creating promotion
| oriented systems (ask POS).
| testfrequency wrote:
| [removed]
| [deleted]
| oblio wrote:
| We live in truly crazy times:
| https://companiesmarketcap.com/apple/earnings/ (the company that
| made $500bn in PROFITS over the past 5 years is delaying bonuses
| to employees, sheesh!)
|
| Also, I swear, if 10 years from now Apple goes through rough
| times, they'll ask for a government bailout.
|
| Morality only works when you're small and weak.
| testfoobar wrote:
| Does anyone have info on two things:
|
| 1) Will FAANG+ companies hire college interns this summer?
|
| 2) Will FAANG+ companies hire new college graduates to start in
| the fall?
| ro_bit wrote:
| > 1) Will FAANG+ companies hire college interns this summer?
|
| I sure hope so. I've signed an internship offer for this summer
| but I am very anxious about it being reneged on
| haram_masala wrote:
| Reminder, with Facebook's restructuring, it's no longer FAANG,
| it's G-MAAN.
| adamwk wrote:
| MANGA
| l33t233372 wrote:
| I like MAMMAA more
| tester756 wrote:
| Meta Apple Microsoft M? Amazon Alphabet
|
| What is under 3rd M?
| l33t233372 wrote:
| It may be a bit too far, but I added Musk to combine
| Twitter/SpaceX/Tesla as premier tech jobs. I can see
| arguments for and against these.
|
| MAMAA would also make sense.
| 01100011 wrote:
| You probably don't want to go to a FANG. Start your career
| somewhere else. It's easier to 'level up' and if you want to go
| FANG later on you can leverage that.
|
| I am the highest level of Sr. SWE at my FANG w/ very little
| work to get there vs the folks I work with who are grinding
| themselves to death trying to get promoted from within.
|
| Edit: I'll add that your first job or two is pretty important
| for setting the tone of your career. Going to a FANG and
| learning toxic habits, like putting yourself above your team
| and thinking only of compensation/promotions, can make you an
| asshole for life.
| gretch wrote:
| To the GP: I'm FANG now, started my career at non-FANG.
| Largely I agree with this advice, but for a completely set of
| different reasons.
|
| In particular -> "Going to a FANG and learning toxic habits,
| like putting yourself above your team and thinking only of
| compensation/promotions, can make you an asshole for life."
|
| I think you'd be unwise to think that FANG will teach you
| toxic habits and putting yourself your team. Or if it
| happens, that other companies on average are better and FANG
| is the bottom of the barrel.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| I always thought the faang horror stories come from new
| grads, since there is so much operational stuff you have to
| navigate. Not sure I'd want to start my career there. Going
| in as a senior wasn't bad though.
| roland35 wrote:
| I feel like it's a lot easier to avoid assholes at a bigger
| company. One bad coworker can ruin the entire experience at a
| startup because there's no avoiding them!!
| actuator wrote:
| Wrong advice.
|
| If you want to be leveled up fast in a FAANG, you should
| start in one. I know of 4+ YOE people jumping one level per
| year, they are an exception but the argument is, it is faster
| if you are born into the culture, rather than if you adopt
| it.
| boshalfoshal wrote:
| Disagree. Imo, you should be at a FAANG company at least
| once. I liked all the jobs and internships I took and a few
| of them are arguably better than FAANG (hft/unicorns), but
| when it came time to interview for other places, I had a much
| harder time getting past resume screens vs my friends who
| were from a FAANG company.
|
| Imo having a FAANG company on your resume provides
| flexibility. Also, FAANG jobs are just nice. You have a lot
| of creature comforts that will make your first few years out
| of college much easier (Good 401k matching, liquid stock,
| good benefits, plenty of locations to chose from, wide
| selection of teams, etc.)
|
| If you are dead set on some career path that doesn't require
| you to be at a FAANG company (i.e you got a job somewhere and
| you are satisfied with being there for a while), then sure it
| may not matter, but for a general SWE, the flexibility,
| resume value, and scope going to a FAANG company gives you is
| very valuable.
| fsociety wrote:
| Strong disagree, going to FAANG or alternatively a larger
| company respected for engineering chops will open a lot of
| doors. It definitely did for me. Also the sore reality is
| assholes are everywhere, and smaller companies have less rail
| guards to prevent them from gaining authority in an org.
|
| Whereas at larger companies you have more leeway in moving
| teams and finding an org with wonderful people.
|
| That doesn't mean a startup is a bad choice for a new grad,
| it can be the best choice for many. But I would not count out
| larger companies so quickly.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Not sure if I am reading you right but are you saying the
| options are either to go to a FANG or a startup? If so, I'd
| add startups to the set of places new grads should avoid.
|
| Assholes are everywhere, so learning to deal with them is
| essential, but, in my experience(which, arguably, mostly
| comes from another era), the valley has a lot more assholes
| per engineer than, say, a small to medium sized company.
| Not only that, but the valley has an overall social
| environment which is... unsupportive to many. It is, based
| on my experience and the general feeling I've encountered
| talking to coworkers and online folks, a very difficult
| place to find friends and support.
|
| Depending on your role, there are a lot of places that look
| down on FANG experience. That is going to vary a lot with
| which part of the SW elephant you work on. My experiences
| as an embedded SWE who deals a lot with HW folks won't
| necessarily map to someone doing games or front end web
| work.
| spacemadness wrote:
| Nobody is going to look down on FAANG experience. Come on
| now.
| rimliu wrote:
| There are people who respect F (M) for engineering chops?
| Interesting. To me they more look like "that's how not to
| do things" than the opposite.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| How did you come to believe that Meta doesn't have
| engineering chops? They have done so much cutting edge
| engineering work I don't even know where to start.
|
| Think what you want about the company itself, but they've
| done a shit ton of amazing work.
| linkregister wrote:
| The amount of recruiter spam increases by an order of
| magnitude once a FAANG-level technology company appears
| on one's resume. It has a dramatic change in the amount
| of technical interviews that are granted to an applicant.
| Silhouette wrote:
| At what kind of company? Looking from outside and in
| particular from outside the US the whole FAANG culture
| seems very strange. There is - or was - a huge amount of
| money available in compensation that seems almost
| completely disconnected from the value of an individual
| developer's contribution to the business or the level of
| useful skills and experience the developer has. And it
| seems there's this kind of clique effect where those who
| have worked in a FAANG or a high-profile startup are
| assumed by others who have worked at FAANGs or high-
| profile startups to be somehow better than everyone else.
| But IME once you're outside that bubble a more likely
| assumption is that ex-FAANG people will demand more than
| they're worth and won't necessarily be any more competent
| or productive than anyone else. And ex-multiple-FAANGs
| with rapid job hopping at the start of a career is a huge
| red flag.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It sounds impossible to characterize a bigco, which is
| like a trillion competing and independent duchies and
| fiefdoms, with any sort of sweeping statement about how
| good their engineers are.
| sethhochberg wrote:
| Not to mention the entire disciplines of engineering that
| really only exist at the megacorps - Meta is still on the
| relatively bleeding edge of datacenter design, both
| physical plant and networking.
| irrational wrote:
| Or, go to work at a large company (my company has nearly
| 100,000 employees) that is not a FAANG company. No bs
| leetcode interviews, much better work-life balance (I maybe
| put in 30 hours a week and have enough vacation stored up
| that I could potentially take off 5 months right now), I've
| never met an asshole engineer or manager, etc.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| TC?
| irrational wrote:
| I don't know what TC is.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Then GTFO, as Blind would say.
|
| (TC is total compensation, it's a meme on Blind to
| mention what one's TC is when talking about working at a
| company. Those that don't are told to GTFO. Interestingly
| enough, the salary sharing is quite beneficial to
| employees on Blind, since it incentivizes salaries to go
| up.)
| 01100011 wrote:
| "Total compensation" which is valley-speak for what you
| get paid plus what you make from stock and other forms of
| compensation.
|
| This is one of the big things you'll run into in the
| valley: folks who value that extra $150-250k of
| compensation every year vs proximity to friends+family,
| work/life balance, etc.
|
| If the folks I work with are any indication, the extra
| money is what you'll tell yourself you'll spend one day
| while you blow the best years of your life grinding away
| at work. This is how you end up one of those weird, 60+,
| friendless engineers living in, I don't know, Las Vegas,
| driving a supercar and married to a foreign woman who
| only loves you for your money. But there are folks who
| will argue that that is a great life and if you want to
| work with them, the valley is there for you!
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| I'm not in a FAANG, but another quite large tech company.
| This has been a really good place for me to 'level up' so I
| don't quite understand why you would recommend non-FAANG
| companies, which presumably means a non-tech company?
|
| The timeline for reaching senior+ in FAANG is also likely to
| be a lot longer if you start from outside vs working up from
| inside.
| durandal1 wrote:
| You earlier described working at a "FANG:ish" company, do you
| actually work in M-FAANG? Where I work you get nowhere
| without convincing XF partners to do work for your area of
| responsibility, and if you come across as an asshole, they
| will find a reason to not do it. Assholes get held back in
| promos and this is clearly communicated in reviews.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| Being on the inside, these companies are really not
| innovating. Just optimizing existing platforms
| beebmam wrote:
| I agree. But in my opinion, that's the perfect kind of
| company to start your software engineer career in.
| 01100011 wrote:
| I'm not getting into that debate, but I'll say that the
| most important thing for a new engineer isn't being at an
| innovative company. It's just learning the ropes, making
| your first mistakes, fixing them, learning team skills,
| etc. Sure, you want to avoid the bureaucratic nightmares
| like the defense industry, but I think many SW shops will
| teach you a lot vs school.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| I bet you alot of the engineers at openAI doing impactful
| work are just a few years out of school, if that. Big
| tech is filled with bureaucrats
| 01100011 wrote:
| Aren't a lot of those projects built on top of FANG
| outputs? I.e. pytorch, tensorflow, CUDA, AWS, etc?
| [deleted]
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| Amazon is interviewing interns.
| nocsi wrote:
| Amazon is always hiring. It's also always firing
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| No, Amazon is in a hiring freeze at the moment. They just
| reopened for interns, and only for interns.
| oofta-boofta wrote:
| If you're a new grad or an intern applying for a "brand name"
| tech company, you're gonna have a rough time.
|
| There's lots of companies out there that pay well, offer far
| better wlb, and aren't nearly as "picky" as FAANG.
| babypuncher wrote:
| I don't understand how FAANG companies are able to vacuum up
| new recruits the way they do. There are so many better
| opportunities.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The $$$ after 3-4 years of accumulating RSUs at those
| companies have, up to now, been something that you can't
| beat in most of the rest of the industry.
|
| It also has, historically, been very good on the resume.
| And they have tended to be on the whole respectful places
| to work with good perks / benefits.
|
| Whether this all still holds in a year or two, we shall
| see.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| TBH, even in the last few months you've been able to get
| comparable comp packages at the high end of senior and
| staff levels at public unicorns. G is no longer
| particularly competitive comp-wise.
|
| I suspect the issue was that FAANG was massively
| overpaying junior talent fresh out of school (and hiring
| leetcoders without any engineering background) and now
| they're correcting.
| shagie wrote:
| The biggest issue for a new grad or intern with going to a
| Big Tech company is the "Big Tech or Bust" attitude where
| they won't accept anything _other_ than a job at one of those
| spots.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| The biggest issue with all the new grads or interns doing
| this is that it's just led to a big homogenous tech culture
| where the industry just cargo cults whatever thing Google
| (etc) is doing, applicable or not.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| Some MAAMMA companies are offering internships this summer, but
| some are not.
| roland35 wrote:
| There will be some interns hired but not as many
| zen_1 wrote:
| 1) No clue
|
| 2) Yes, I know people with start dates in the fall at F and A
| (the fruit, not the river), and it looks like they intend to
| honor those offers.
| biggestriverman wrote:
| my team at amazon has an intern starting may 1st
| summerlight wrote:
| My pure guess is that those will hire some interns and new
| grads, but the # will very likely be substantially reduced.
| It's going to be a quite rough year, so better have a plan B.
| colonCapitalDee wrote:
| My org at FAANG+ has had hiring frozen for a while, and while
| we're getting interns we're getting much fewer than in previous
| years.
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