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Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
301–310 of 405 posts
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are over twenty years old with some pushing thirty
Age doesn't change facts.
But it does change what makes sense to talk about in terms of "Apple" as it exists today.
Otherwise you might as well talk about why IBM is an undefeatable behemoth that dominates the industry...oh, wait, what's that? That hasn't been true for over 30 years now? I thought age didn't change facts?
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#303I 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…
The pile of cash just reminds me of Carl Icahn and others. It's "fortunate" that Apple is so highly valued that a corporate raider can't purchase a controlling interest and pay out to investors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_stripping
Carl Icahn has actually been a quite prominent investor in apple at times and has been quite vocal about what apple does below the line.
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something that the pandemic has rammed home with my wife and I is just how poor the out of home dining experience is in general. The food is lackluster, the ambiance is awful, being surrounded by other people eating is terrible (my wife is a quiet talker and being fat always makes eating in public a shameful experience), so we'd MUCH rather eat at home. The quality of the ingredients are far higher, the food is tasti…
For people that like to cook for sure it's better. My anecdata would put that number around 20% of people.
Whether the average person likes to cook or not, I'm pretty sure that between lack of easy access to good restaurants and or reluctance/inability to spend on eating out, the majority of people make most meals at home.
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you feel like this, you shouldn’t take a job that can’t guarantee in writing that they will keep you for X number of years. If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you.
> If you feel like this, you shouldn’t take a job that can’t guarantee in writing that they will keep you for X number of years. Those jobs don’t exist. If there are they are such a minuscule number of openings it is not worth thinking about them. > If you took a calculated risk and took the job anyway, well that’s on you. Let me break it to you: almost everyone works because otherwise they would go hungry, loose the…
> Are you saying that by having the misfortune of not being born independently rich and working basically any job the poster “took a risk” which is “on them”?
He is saying that. Its the Puritan Christianity's mentality of blaming the poor for not working hard. Repurposed into the modern free market capitalist ideology where its used to blame the ills of the system on the victims - "You havent worked hard enough" "You werent smart enough" etc...
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure I believe that. It honestly sounds like an excuse to fire people. Or leadership has no clue. The biggest thing I got from the pandemic is flexible work arrangements. But I and everyone I knew all wanted to get back out there. Just not back out on public transport to work. We were doing things online because there was no other option. But once the borders opened and restrictions eased, everyone did what t…
> It honestly sounds like an excuse to fire people. Or leadership has no clue. Neither of these are true. The truth lies somewhere in the grey area between these two things. > Who in their right mind would think they would continue to stay home and do everything online? Hindsight is a helluva drug. Covid has made several lasting, possibly permanent, marks on society and our habits. Nobody could say what those were go…
There were a lot of predictions during the pandemic about permanent change. My observation is that a lot of those changes were either largely temporary (e.g. widespread grocery pickup or delivery) or were mostly limited to limited groups (e.g. full remote work).
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did the pandemic really increase business so much that they had to hire that many people?
The government incentives were based on employees.
Wow. That makes it even more horrible. So they did it to get PPP money - the public's money - and now they are dumping the very people who paid them that money. ~160,000 people laid off means up to ~500,000 people involved when you count in the families, relatives etc. This feels more like theft than anything else when you count in the PPP - they took taxpayers' money, they ate it with stock buybacks etc, now they are dumping those taxpayers...
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, Tim Cook started by halving his compensation. I didn't hear anything like that from his fellow CEOs who all "took full responsibility" for the choice of going for mass firing instead.
It's not like him halving his compensation makes any material difference in the ability of the company to avoid layoffs.
And yet, it's still better than all the other big tech companies, that cut thousands of jobs and did not reduce executive pay in any way.
If cutting the CEO's compensation lets them keep even one regular employee who would otherwise have been laid off, then that's made the world a materially better place, if only for that employee and their family.
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Don't they have an Apple Car? Like a literal car they were working on making? I guess that's the exception though. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/apple-is-allegedly-work...
Or Airpower.
I would say that their push for smart speakers has also yielded mediocre results, at best. Let's see what will happen with their AR headset, as they have been working on AR since at least 2017 [0].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/05/the-full-saga-of-app...
Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options. People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time. Investing a year learning the ropes at a company, finding ways to fit into the structures, etc. only…
> People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time Then those people are naive. I never plan my life around an employer. I plan my life around my employability . I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area. Well now I wouldn’t work at any company that wasn’t fully remote
>I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area.
While a good principle, I'll posit there are a lot of more or less specialized professional jobs--especially at more senior levels--where you can't just walk across the street and slide into a similar role at a different company. Even if it's in the same general area, a 2 hour commute each way is probably not sustainable.