311–320 of 405 posts
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No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. All this guy does is wake up at 4, work till 10, and sleep. Cuts his own pay voluntarily. Didn’t double his headcount while revenues fell like so many. Tim Cook is such a beast. Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook.
He did not cut his pay voluntarily. He pay was cut by the board.
The recent push by Apple to promote privacy controls has attracted and renewed trust in the brand. That's my theory as a partial explanation of recent success. They correctly identified privacy controls as something people actually want for real, even just knowing it's there is a nice feeling. Knowing my front door is reinforced with 7 optional locks, is much better than a fly-screen door with a privacy policy attach…
Apple is the one commercial entity that could completely disrupt surveillance capitalism and reboot the digital space to an era reminiscent of the Microsoft monopoly - but now with their huge attached and interoperable mobile user base. What they simply need to do is make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy and support a number of new/updated protocols for decentralized online interactions (messaging, blo…
They did this for years: every Mac starting with the first release of Mac OS X had a built-in Apache webserver, and activating it was just the click of a button in the Sharing preference pane.
Problem is, the segment of people who a) are willing and able to create web content, and b) only want the very basics as provided by Apple (including whatever versions of Perl and other server-side languages happened to ship with the OS) is a fairly slim one.
The other problem is, almost no one has an ISP that's friendly to self-hosting from your home.
I believe Apple removed Web Sharing from the Sharing preference pane a few years ago now.
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This is nonsense because the people that were laid off at Google (as one example) were not selected by their tenure or having been hired during pandemic or during the remote phase, nor was it based on performance reviews. People who had been there 12, 13, 16 years; people who had been just promoted. People who were senior management. People who were engineers. People who were on mat leave... Management there effectiv…
Not to minimize how much it must suck to get laid off when you haven't prepared for it, but when you say: > And people who (IMHO naively/foolishly) gave their lives to the company suffered. they didn't "give their lives" for nothing, right? Didn't they trade it for an incredibly desirable compensation package?
But my experience when working there is that there are definitely people whose emotional (and physical) engagement with their jobs goes well beyond just what is required to get that compensation.
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> 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.
Yes I’m self aware enough to understand the irony of the only reason I fell into my role at $BigTech at 48 years old is because I did become overly specialized in enterprise dev + cloud.
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No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. All this guy does is wake up at 4, work till 10, and sleep. Cuts his own pay voluntarily. Didn’t double his headcount while revenues fell like so many. Tim Cook is such a beast. Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook.
> No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. It’s unfortunate (and it says a lot about our current situation) that that behaviour is worthy of note. > Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook. I don’t understand the obsession with shareholders. It’s all about money money money, good products and respect for the customer be dammed. Cook was a fant…
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> No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. It’s unfortunate (and it says a lot about our current situation) that that behaviour is worthy of note. > Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook. I don’t understand the obsession with shareholders. It’s all about money money money, good products and respect for the customer be dammed. Cook was a fant…
As a longtime apple customer, the quality and innovation in my M1 pro is absolutely in line with their old values.
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>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.
And thats why I have a 25 year of paranoia about being overly specialize. Yes I’m self aware enough to understand the irony of the only reason I fell into my role at $BigTech at 48 years old is because I did become overly specialized in enterprise dev + cloud.
If you're an embedded systems programmer, maybe you can hack on some Javascript but no one is probably going to pay you very senior comp to do junior programmer work.
It is certainly true you don't want to be too specialized in general. You didn't want to be the Y2K guru in 2001 or the world's expert in performance optimization for some specific computer architecture that isn't manufactured any longer.
When I took my current job, there were probably a few companies in the general area that would have been somewhat obvious potential matches. But it was sheer coincidence that the one I connected with first through a connection happened to be the closest major tech company to my house.
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> 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).
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Why does apple hoard cash instead of buy back their stock? 5 years ago they had 90 billion cash in hand. If they put that into their stock then, It would be up at least 260% by now even with the losses last year, then if they need cash they could just take a loan against the stock.
Setting aside the fact (pointed out by several siblings) that they do buy back stock... Why should they? Who does it benefit? Not their customers. Not their products. Not their future prospects. Not their employees, for the most part. ...Oh, the shareholders? You mean they should throw massive amounts of money—their hedge against future problems—into enriching people who are, for the most part, already vastly wealthy…
Massive stock buyback programs are a symptom of and contributor to a disconnected market.