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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

#341

Post by ben7799 »

ynx wrote: post #305
naravara wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I people tend to have a bit of rose tinted glasses on about Apple's software quality of yore. There have always been big stability issues with new features and apps. And they've simply never been good at the UX for anything that involves a network connection or has to sync across multiple systems (besides Safari). The big difference is that more and more computing requires syncing and networking, which is their tradi…

Been on macOS since 10.3. In general, the .1 or .2 patches were solid, and if one release seemed like a stinker the next one tick-tocked its way into stability/quality pretty reliably, and staying on N-1 version while N was out was a pretty good choice if you wanted to keep your setup as-is without falling TOO far behind. Also, Safari was really bad, early on. It was rendered unusable for me when a runaway bookmark s…

You're thinking of recent Apple. You have to consider the first half of Apple's lifetime too.

Especially in the second half of the 1990s Apple was in very very tough shape due to poor software and uncompetitive hardware. Their fans wouldn't admit it but the company definitely knew what they were up against.

There's pretty much been no point 2000-present where Apple quality has been worse than it was Pre-2000, and their prices have never been more competitive either.

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

#342

Post by JohnFen »

giantg2 wrote: post #287
gnicholas wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you do if this came up again? Would you still demur, but perhaps give a different reason (family needs right now, etc.)?

Possibly the family needs thing (which is true for me now, but wasn't then). I'm not sure it would have even worked though. Once they bring up the prospect of a promotion, they've already used a bunch of political capital to open that spot for you and it's an insult to say no. I get is different for other companies or even just other departments, but that's how it was for that one. The other thing is, my company meas…

I don't know if it helps, but what I've done when turning down promotions is to be sure they know that I'm pleased and honored by the offer and value it. And that the reason I'm turning it down is because I feel I can provide the greatest value to the company in the position I'm currently in.

All of which is true, and phrases things so they know you're not turning your nose up at anything and that you have the company's best interests in your mind.

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

#343

Post by ClumsyPilot »

apetresc wrote: post #220
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can't hire competently, why do yoy think they can fire competently?

I think it's easier to identify a low performer after a year of work than it is to identify a high performer after an hour of whiteboarding.

Low-performers are not relevant to this discussion.

The accusation is that the companies hired more people than they knew what to do with / could apply productively in their business.

If such a basic task is beyond the capability of decisionmakers, who is to say that they are capable of collecting the feedback from rank-and-file employees required to assess who needs firing?

Mangers have many concerns apart from Performance, suppose we have Steve and Bob, and Bob is 50% more productive than Steve, but Steve is in the middle of delivering a critical project, millions of dollars are on the line. Meanwhile Bob is in between projects, and today they decided they must fire some staff, who do you think will get fired?

Also, is performance one metric? Suppose Steve writes worse code, but the business folks love his presentations, he is really good at explaining the issues facing the team. They can put Steve in front of a corporate client and win business. They never see much of Bob, even thought he is doing most of the 'real' work, so who is more valuable?

Unless you are dealing with someone totally incompetent, these questions are usually 'which skillset do we need most' and they are not so simple.

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

#344

Post by Patrol8394 »

sanderjd wrote: post #326
Patrol8394 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about AI/ML, Cloud, Workspace ? (+ of course ads and search). Why didn't they launch something like ChatGPT? Even if it was half baked, they should have made more noise and marketing PR on what's cooking ... instead they let OpenAI and Microsoft take the stage. Cloud? They basically invented the cloud! They were running in the cloud when the rest of the world was still copying files to production .. and yet they…

> What about AI/ML, Cloud, Workspace ? (+ of course ads and search). "AI/ML" isn't a product, it's a tool, and one that is used effectively in a number of successful Google products (including the big moneymakers). Cloud and Workspace are the non-ads bright spots, which is why they keep receiving plenty of investment, but they are both still very far from dominant in their markets, behind both Amazon and Microsoft. T…

>they can only launch things that are capable of serving billions of requests per day

They did not have to launch something like ChatGPT at full scale. I understand very well the cost associated with it. But, they should have been the one setting the stage and the narrative. Building expectation releasing cool demo, experimental features backed into Docs. Things that could show where "potentially" Google could have taken the technology in time ..

But, it seems like, that while they were working on the "perfect working money printing AI product", they completely left the stage to OpenAI and friends.

I think, that was definitely a strategic error.

Perhaps Google will come ahead, who knows. I hope this was a wakeup call for them.

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

#345

Post by VirusNewbie »

ben7799 wrote: post #335
jarjoura wrote: post #315

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 a…

I had the impression Google and Amazon use the same model as Meta. But in working in the field since the 1990s I have never encountered or worked at any company that used their model. I think their model is likely superior in terms of hiring the most people in the shortest time. With the shortcoming that it might make it easy to overhire, and it might not fill the job with the best person as often. Lots of small to m…

Google is very similar. You go through a pipeline to send you to the hiring committee, then once you are cleared and leveled, you can now interview with managers who can read your scores etc.

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

#346

Post by cguess »

lapcat wrote: post #76
cguess wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you absolutely need more engineers to maintain the software and you need to buy more servers and hire more sysadmins etc. Apple makes software, you know. ;-) They also have many internet services, such as iCloud, App Store, Apple Music, TV+, etc.

None of which scaled significantly due to the pandemic. Everyone at companies that use Macs had Macs already, so if they're not using the one at work anymore there's not a net increase of Mac users.

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

#347

Post by selectodude »

hailwren wrote: post #337
gsinclair wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For my use case (education) iPad Pro is a godsend. I don’t see anything wrong with it.

What feature of the pro makes it worth $150 ($650 if you have the larger screen) more than the comparable iPad?

120Hz + Apple Pencil.

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

#348

Post by WWLink »

ben7799 wrote: post #335
jarjoura wrote: post #315

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 a…

I had the impression Google and Amazon use the same model as Meta. But in working in the field since the 1990s I have never encountered or worked at any company that used their model. I think their model is likely superior in terms of hiring the most people in the shortest time. With the shortcoming that it might make it easy to overhire, and it might not fill the job with the best person as often. Lots of small to m…

The funny thing is my personal experience was the opposite. I have a lot of experience in embedded software. The recruiters I interacted with at Google knew about my specialization and targeted positions that were embedded-related (like, at waymo or their other projects). However, the actual phone screen interview was with a web programmer that had very little C++ background and seemed pretty uncomfortable with me using that to solve their quiz. I ended up being weirded out by that and not moving forward. I figured I'd have to go back and practice a lot of stuff I hadn't touched in a while to actually impress their interview panel.

Meta was different. I interviewed with someone from the reality labs team and it was super specific. Our discussion and the software quizzing they did was right up my alley. Like, they specifically had a reason to want to hire me, and given what they described, I had a reason to be very interested in the project they were hiring for. It was a big shock, because the last time I spoke to someone hiring for FB they seemed to have no idea what they were doing lol. I still didn't move forward! But I was really tempted to.

I had a similar experience when I talked to someone at Apple. Unfortunately that time they wanted someone even more specialized than I was (they wanted someone to work on things to manage multiple JTAG devices - that was already innately familiar with doing that sorta thing at a hardware level). Still, 10/10, I'd apply to Apple again. I'd also apply to Meta again... although I think they basically killed the entire reality labs thing. I was so impressed by Meta. Still am.

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

#349

Post by jcheng »

ayewo wrote: post #104
ryandrake wrote: post #43

Apple is known for going with tiny teams rather than the gigantic, bloated trees of VPs and Directors that other companies have. Their CFO even spoke[1] publicly about it, a rarity. Sometimes you just need a team of two people reporting to the CFO to do something. You don't need 2 SVPs, with 10 VPs, with 80 Directors, each with trees of management/ICs to do the same thing. 1: https://twitter.com/workmj/status/1595324…

That's a neat find. Thanks for linking to it. I think I found the full interview on YouTube [1] Managers: From Italy to Top Global Businesses. Luca Maestri, CFO of Apple 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHWwq5--nEw

Nice find--the Twitter video wasn't loading for me, but your link did. The relevant part is at 52:30.

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

#350

Post by xyzelement »

I think this is more to do with scope rather than caution, although of course those are related.

Apple has a fairly finite set of offerings and they probably didn't feel the need (or maybe didn't have an opportunity to) rapidly grow their scope during the pandemic.

In contrast, Google and Amazon have broader scope and obviously much more of their scope had intersection with pandemic-driven opportunities.

To list some obvious examples - as people shifted to work from home, Google had the opportunity to establish gSuite as the place where such work happens. Amazon obviously had to opportunity of people having no interest to go into a store. Those are just two out of many many areas where both companies had more "surface" to engage than Apple did.

Did they over hire? Well, they had an opportunity and they went for it. If the size of the opportunity was misjudged, they could always shed some of the new size, as they are now doing.

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