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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

#311

Post by com2kid »

scarface74 wrote: post #280
inetknght wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company from $100B/year to $400B/year are the short term Yes, however it's clearly successful. > Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company is at the expense of the next 90 years? Apple is slowly pulling away consumer ownership of their devices and is turning into an advertisement company. I honestly believe that is at the expense of the next 90 years. And th…

“Apple is doomed any day now”. That’s been the narrative for over 40 years. So which customers aren’t satisfied? The people on HN that want to run Linux on the Apple Watch?

> “Apple is doomed any day now”. That’s been the narrative for over 40 years.

And they almost went out of business at least twice, once they survived because MS bailed them out.

Apple pre-iPod was a source of amusing commercials. Pre iPhone they were the catalyst for change in the music industry, but they were still a consumer goods company with one product that had pretty wide, but still overall limited appeal.

Apple still doesn't have a diversified revenue stream. If Microsoft had to stop selling Windows today, they'd still make a fortune from Office. If Microsoft had to stop selling Office and Windows today, they'd still make a (much smaller) fortune from Azure.

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

#312

Post by Dylan16807 »

briandear wrote: post #218
sam0x17 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are probably one of the best run companies in the world. I would disagree with this. Although their risk is spread much better than it was in the early 00s, a huge amount of their recurring revenue right now teeters on the brink of destruction in the form of their 30% app store cut and the walled-garden nature of their app store. All it would take is a morally principled, non-lobbied regulator to step in and r…

> regulate that down to something reasonable like 5% or 3% How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not something up for a vote -- that's up to the market. Let's say you have an iOS app. If you sell it for $5 on the App Store, you keep $3.5. And you sell 100,000. App Store nets you $350k. And let's say you sold the app direct to users and did everything yourself: $5 sales price, you keep $5 however, you al…

> How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not something up for a vote -- that's up to the market.

If you ask Apple themselves to split the payment processing from the hosting and 'marketing', they claim it's 3% and 27%.

So if you could use their payment processing by itself, that would put you at $485k before server costs, not $419k. So you can have very nice servers and over a third more revenue.

You'll have to decide whether being in the main app store is important enough to pay a big percentage. And advertising and updates and customer support are costs either way, so please don't imply you only pay them if you avoid the app store.

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

#313

Post by lapcat »

boshalfoshal wrote: post #310
lapcat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple could layoff 4% in a week Highly unlikely: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/02/apple-layoffs-tim-cook/

Have you ever worked at a high profile company that laid off people? I have. Everything is good and the narrative is "We aren't like other companies" until it actually happens. Its suboptimal to explicitly telegraph layoffs from an employee morale perspective. As leadership, its better to ask for forgiveness after the layoff than to ask for permission to lay off. They may actually get through this without laying off,…

> They may actually get through this without laying off, but its certainly not guaranteed just because the CEO says "no layoffs."

It's not just because of what the CEO said. The CEO's words are justified by the company's actions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34742642

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

#315

Post by jarjoura »

I can only speak to my experience in the engineering org at Meta and past experience at Apple.

One key difference between Apple and Meta is that each individual (on the ground) team at Apple is responsible for its own hiring. Whereas at Meta, they have a general company-wide engineering pool that is mainly driven by recruiters to fill.

A manager at Apple will get a batch of resumes and start hiring with a recruiter and the team members will then interview each candidate and decide to move forward or not with a candidate.

A manager at Meta, on the other hand, is constantly trying to sell their team to potential engineers looking to either switch from another team internally, or come from the general pool (bootcamp).

Make no mistake, both companies get headcount budgets driven by org-wide budgets set by the very top and HR uses that budget with very complicated formulas for determining how fast they need to hire to maintain or grow headcount to stay ahead of people leaving. Also, engineering managers absolutely have endless work to assign to new hires. So given the headcount, they will definitely make use of it.

All that to say, I do think Meta's internal team structure made it far easier to over-hire and Apple's intentionally inefficient structure prevented doing the same.

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

#316

Post by hbn »

JohnFen wrote: post #264
BurningFrog wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is why I turn down promotions. A promotion (especially to a management position) means another step toward the sort of work I don't enjoy and don't want to do.

I haven't necessarily turned down promotions, but I've been at my job for over 2.5 years and have no desire to make the jump from "developer" to "senior developer" like most do, because while I'm sure you get a nice pay bump, I know firsthand it just means you're in way more meetings (of which I already think I'm in too many of) and writing less code.

I don't even know what the extra pay would be, but it's probably not enough to be worth making my job less enjoyable.

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

#317

Post by scarface74 »

com2kid wrote: post #311
scarface74 wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Apple is doomed any day now”. That’s been the narrative for over 40 years. So which customers aren’t satisfied? The people on HN that want to run Linux on the Apple Watch?

> “Apple is doomed any day now”. That’s been the narrative for over 40 years. And they almost went out of business at least twice, once they survived because MS bailed them out. Apple pre-iPod was a source of amusing commercials. Pre iPhone they were the catalyst for change in the music industry, but they were still a consumer goods company with one product that had pretty wide, but still overall limited appeal. Appl…

Just Mac revenue by itself would be the envy of most companies.

But you can easily look at Apple’s revenue breakdown between Mac, iPads, services, wearables, etc and see that it is well diversified.

And Microsoft never “bailed them out”. Before the MS deal was signed, Apple had already gotten a line of credit for a couple of billion. The $250 million that Microsoft invested in Apple was nothing.

Apple turned around and used $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac license. It didn’t become profitable for another two years. The little money that Microsoft invested didn’t make a difference.

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

#319

Post by blackflame7000 »

williamcotton wrote: post #124
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…

It was all totally insane. The actual narrative of the layoffs is this: High performing public tech companies went totally insane and doubled their head counts. Everyone else was a cargo cult with an open checkbook so they insanity-squared their head counts. No one could possibly manage such a gigantic influx of knowledge workers so resources were obviously being poorly allocated industry-wide. This first had an impa…

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