181–190 of 439 posts
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".
From what I recall Nintendo’s hiring was never the issue but the pay
It all comes down to Apple being a very focused company. They know their customers, what they want and they have a much better business model. Steve Jobs once explained it by saying they say no to a lots of things even to those who seem on paper great ideas. All that to stay focus. On the other hand, Google is all over the places, they are very distracted and confident that they will always be the indisputable kind i…
Maybe the investments weren't successful or didn't pan out, but that is not to say they didn't invest.
> 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!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apple could layoff 4% in a week Highly unlikely: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/02/apple-layoffs-tim-cook/
This just means the letter will include the wording "last resort" and "we tried everything to avoid this"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My guess most of these companies were also borrowing money. You can look on their balance sheets for the stock. When that rate is low it makes a lot of sense to grow and borrow. When that rate goes up the math changes. No matter how profitable you are. There could be quite a bit of 'someone had to go first' fad going on too. Adding headcount just because you make tons of money does not necessarily make sense. It just…
> My guess most of these companies were also borrowing money. You can look on their balance sheets for the stock. You don't have to guess. These are publicly owned corporations. Their published balanced sheets include debt.
You mean to tell me that Apple could have created thousands of high paying jobs, if only for several years, but didn’t. And this is good? I can never remember who to be mad at. More seriously, I realize this is just clickbait, but I wonder how you could determine objectively which approach (hiring slow and needing to catch up, hiring medium, hiring fast and needing to fire) is “better for business”. Seems very hard t…
If we follow one path all the way to the end: If you can bring on a large number of people, then you can potentially evaluate them as "up-and-coming" high-quality talent. Those talents can be soaked in your business and technology stack, and become internal experts. Over that talent's life within the company, you may also underpay them relative to bringing in the same equivalent 10+ year veteran and training them on your internal assets.
On another path: You can also develop a broader population of mid-grade, quality talent which can strength workforce resilience.
During the mass layoff, procedures are different, and you may not have to follow quite the same fire-process as with an individual, and without some of the individual recourse processes regarding discrimination.
FWIW, Microsoft used to (still does?) had a certain percentage of layoffs every year. In a good environment, it's weeding; in a bad environment, it culls good talent.
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 st…
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 st…
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 st…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hiring many people and firing them shortly after isn't very productive use of human minds. Those people were doing probably something more valuable instead.
And now they can. It is good that people are being laid off. They can now go do the valuable thing. Perhaps Google's true target should have been 50% layoffs so that they can release people to go work on their valuable stuff instead of working at Google.