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Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

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Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#61

Post by dmitriid »

chaostheory wrote: post #18
65 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An AR headset that's supposed to do what, exactly?

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

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.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#63

Post by mbesto »

psychlops wrote: post #13

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".

> 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.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#64

Post by jsnell »

EricHolden12 wrote: post #62

Companies over hired during the pandemic because they issued stock to new employees to artificially boost their share price.

That really is not how this works. Issuing shares decreases the share price, rather than increase.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#65

Post by Dwolb »

drawfloat wrote: post #57
mabbo wrote: post #32

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 comp…

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…

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.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#67

Post by cguess »

lapcat wrote: post #44
mabbo wrote: post #32

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 comp…

> 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-...

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.

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#68

Post by jeromegv »

drawfloat wrote: post #57
mabbo wrote: post #32

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 comp…

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…

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

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#69

Post by jsnell »

mabbo wrote: post #32

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 comp…

> 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?

Re: Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon

#70

Post by deelowe »

etempleton wrote: post #53
wand3r wrote: post #33

> 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…

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.

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.

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