It may have been worth it for the author to mention that Apple is sitting on the biggest pile of cash in the known universe.
That cash pile belongs to investors and stock holders.
When it should belong to customers and employees
Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
61–70 of 405 posts
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#62I don't recall whether this was ever stated explicitly, but I always had the impression that this is one of the elements of Apple's strategy that is still driven by the tribal memory of the late 1990s turmoil. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were there at the time, and especially the former (who also had witnessed a 1980s bust) was determined to never be in this position again. So as a consequence: * Apple is hoarding c…
So essentially the basics of building any resilient system. Sad that our market economy punishes this approach in the general case.
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#63Apple is a generally more well run, mature, patient, and scrupulous company than most others.
I can't think of a company more blatantly engaged in anti-competitive practices than Apple, but I'm glad to see all that unfairly amassed wealth benefitting even the lowest rungs of its corporate hierarchy through the unusual benefit of not being terminated at the drop of a hat. Bravo!
> I can't think of a company more blatantly engaged in anti-competitive practices than Apple
In a world where Amazon, Meta, Google, Wal-Mart, Time-Warner, Comcast, etc exist, you think Apple is the most anti-competitive?
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
That cash pile belongs to investors and stock holders.
When it should belong to customers and employees
Most Apple employees are shareholders.
I don't get the point that the money should belong to the customers. They gave it to Apple freely upon exchange for a product. Your argument kind of sounds that products should be sold at cost.
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the company but yes. Stripe, as an example, drastically slowed down hiring when the pandemic hit expecting an economic slowdown. It then turned out that so much commerce moved to online—rather than stopped—so they ramped up hiring to meet demand. The bet that companies like Shopify and Stripe [1] made was that COVID created a “new normal”; much of the economic activity that went online would stay there. Th…
Is it called a "bet" when you stand to win big, but if you lose it's the people you hired who've lost, and you don't lose basically anything?
You lose great people, you take a huge hit to culture and productivity, you spent a lot of capital that you otherwise wouldn’t have. It create doubts in leadership and cut projects with maintenance debt.
People quit after layoffs, which means attrition isn’t as balanced as when the layoffs were planned. Talent isn’t distributed equal to business need, meaning the company will lose great people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Depending on how it’s executed, the company could burn bridges. Even if they do it well, some people would never come back.
It’s not like the people hired were working for free so I’ve never personally put much stock in the, “employees were screwed over.”
But again, it depends on some of the items above. If a company is doing well, less-direct revenue teams are fine. In a sketchier environment, not so.
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#66https://techpp.com/2023/01/25/tech-layoffs-apple-2023/ > Amazon, for instance, hired about 780,000 people during the pandemic. Meta, too, had more than doubled its staff in this period, going from about 40,000 to 87,000. Even Microsoft had hired about 77,000 people just before the pandemic. > Apple, in comparison, is believed to have hired under 20,000 people during the period of the pandemic. Can't layoff people you…
Where did all these people come from?
LinkedIn
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#67I don't recall whether this was ever stated explicitly, but I always had the impression that this is one of the elements of Apple's strategy that is still driven by the tribal memory of the late 1990s turmoil. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were there at the time, and especially the former (who also had witnessed a 1980s bust) was determined to never be in this position again. So as a consequence: * Apple is hoarding c…
This is all true, but
> not nearly as much so as in the pre-iOS times, admittedly
deserves better than a parenthetical. Zoom out, and Apple's been on a serious hiring binge for the last decade, from 72,800 employees in 2012 to 164,000 in 2022.
(Both numbers include retail; in 2012, 58% were retail, and they don't seem to break it down anymore in 2022.)
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#68It may have been worth it for the author to mention that Apple is sitting on the biggest pile of cash in the known universe.
As if Google was on the verge of bankruptcy...
Microsoft, Google, Apple all have enormous amounts of cash stored thanks to their fantastic earnings for so many years.
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make them sound like saints. They are not, and they have a history of being less scrupulous than some of these other companies. Here's just a small example of what they're capable of when their obsession for secrecy and control makes them flex their corporate muscle: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/mobile/09/07/iphone.5.probe/ind... And we didn't even talk about their sweatshops in China which has always had persist…
Curious about where you source any Fair Trade silicon you might be using?
Thousand metric tons a year
Russia 580 Brazil 390 Norway 350 United States 310 France 120 Iceland 110 Malaysia 80 Bhutan 70 Kazakhstan 67 India 60 Spain 58 Canada
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#70Apple is a generally more well run, mature, patient, and scrupulous company than most others.
Apple is the only one that doesn’t seem to start up hundreds of obviously useless projects.
Google will hire thousands to work on an obviously doomed streaming service, to build a new OS, and so many other obviously bad ideas and then just fire them all later.
Vanishingly few Apple products seem to be discontinued. Usually after a long life like the iPod.