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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

#131

Post by dylan604 »

giantg2 wrote: post #118
etempleton wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job." Some of us never become competent.

Those are probably the ones being let go.

That has always been a concern to me about being laid off in one of these massive layoffs efforts. If it is pretty much understood that in these moves the companies are removing dead weight, does that stigma get attached to you as you search for a new job.

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

#132

Post by underbluewaters »

cguess wrote: post #67
lapcat wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is software supposed to be a low marginal cost business? Why would I need more engineers if my site has 50% more traffic?

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

#133

Post by noodlesUK »

dylan604 wrote: post #131
giantg2 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job." Some of us never become competent.

Those are probably the ones being let go. That has always been a concern to me about being laid off in one of these massive layoffs efforts. If it is pretty much understood that in these moves the companies are removing dead weight, does that stigma get attached to you as you search for a new job.

It’s pretty hard to be choosy at that scale. I don’t get the impression that these large scale layoffs were targeting individual low performers, but are rather slashing entire business units. (I might be mistaken, but that’s the impression I’ve got)

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

#134

Post by kenjackson »

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…

Not only that, but you have to recall there was the chip shortage before and during the pandemic. Given Apple's reliance on HW sales, it would be foolish to ramp up hiring when you can't obtain the materials for your products. While at the same time people moved to buying everything online and having Teams/Zoom calls for all work and school. The situation was just very different for Apple vs Amazon/Google/Microsoft/Zoom.

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

#135

Post by goalieca »

LarryMullins wrote: post #75
mbesto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The part I don't quite get (except insofar as it's an understandable emotional reaction) is why people are mad at companies hiring more people than they should have and then eventually laying them off a few years later. Would it have been better for those people if they were never hired in the first place, never had a few years of getting paid for extraneous work? Is the trauma of getting laid off really so great tha…

The frenzy drove wages up. I’m very grateful.

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

#136

Post by insane_dreamer »

I wouldn't lump Amazon in with the others, unless the additional hiring/cuts were to AWS. That's because Amazon __had__ to increase its distribution/warehouse staff during the pandemic just to handle to the __huge__ increase in online purchases, regardless of how long that pattern lasted. So it's going to have a more cyclical hiring/firing pattern than pure tech companies who don't need to double their engineering staff just because there's a temporary surge in their software/services.

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

#137

Post by BurningFrog »

giantg2 wrote: post #118
etempleton wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job." Some of us never become competent.

And if you do become competent, you're soon promoted to another job you're not competent for.

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

#138

Post by HDThoreaun »

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…

The question isn't "is it permanent" it's "what are the chances it's permanent". I can imagine that if they come to the conclusion that there's even a 10% chance then it makes sense to invest resources as if it will happen because they can always just lay people off, but it's much harder to catch up.

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

#140

Post by wand3r »

baxtr wrote: post #122
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…

Do you have a link to data supporting the doubling? I would love to see the numbers!

It was in TFA. Unfortunately I can't get past the paywall again. There was a graph that had employee growth. I left out a couple companies but Meta and Google were mid 90's% and SF was something like 104% from 2020-2022. The source in the article was "Bloomberg" presumably they are from public filings.
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