Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 405 posts

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#321

Post by fnord77 »

fullsend wrote: post #211
simplyluke wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cook has made several decisions in the past handful of years that seem to show an ability to resist the group think that exists among the large tech companies leadership.

No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. All this guy does is wake up at 4, work till 10, and sleep. Cuts his own pay voluntarily. Didn’t double his headcount while revenues fell like so many. Tim Cook is such a beast. Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook.

so, basically a competent CEO

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#322

Post by a2tech »

ethbr0 wrote: post #278
a2tech wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that the pandemic has rammed home with my wife and I is just how poor the out of home dining experience is in general. The food is lackluster, the ambiance is awful, being surrounded by other people eating is terrible (my wife is a quiet talker and being fat always makes eating in public a shameful experience), so we'd MUCH rather eat at home. The quality of the ingredients are far higher, the food is tasti…

I've found that eating out varies a lot city by city (estimate: 50%+?). Some cities have excellent base-level food; others are terrible. As someone who lived in Atlanta during the restaurant revolution, it went from "I could do better than this at home" to most places being able to put together an interesting plate I couldn't/wouldn't do at home. And oddly, pre-pandemic prices didn't change that much when it happened…

I may be spoiled, but its extremely rare we eat someplace where I find the ingredients, flavor, and options to match what we have at home. We don't travel a crazy amount (compared to people with traveling jobs or a real wanderlust), but we get around a fair amount and I see the variability you describe--but only up to a point. There's obviously places where the restaurants are truly awful, and there's places where the food is ok. But no place where on average the restaurants are excellent.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#323

Post by latexr »

_yb2s wrote: post #277
latexr wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. It’s unfortunate (and it says a lot about our current situation) that that behaviour is worthy of note. > Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook. I don’t understand the obsession with shareholders. It’s all about money money money, good products and respect for the customer be dammed. Cook was a fant…

As a longtime apple customer, the quality and innovation in my M1 pro is absolutely in line with their old values.

Yes, I agree that hardware-wise they’re on top of their game¹. I was specifically thinking of software and services, like the trend of trying to upsell you to their services when using their apps or releasing half-baked apps which go against their own Human Interface Guidelines and are never fixed.

¹ Let’s see if that continues with Evans Hankey leaving.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#324

Post by latexr »

eddieroger wrote: post #315
latexr wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No scandals, no twitter addiction, no sexual assault cases. No bullshit. It’s unfortunate (and it says a lot about our current situation) that that behaviour is worthy of note. > Jobs left one last blessing for Apple shareholders in his decision to elevate Cook. I don’t understand the obsession with shareholders. It’s all about money money money, good products and respect for the customer be dammed. Cook was a fant…

Apple is a public company, and public companies are accountable to shareholders, not customers. Shareholders want it to be worth their while, so yes it's about the money. It is possible to do what's best for both, and Apple still does that plenty, but the customer of today isn't the customer of the Apple you're describing. I wish they focused more on the Mac line, and the M1 and M2 are returns to that, but Apple's ma…

> Apple is a public company, and public companies are accountable to shareholders, not customers.

Tim Cook himself, a decade ago, might have had something to say about that¹.

> It is possible to do what's best for both, and Apple still does that plenty

My objection is the trend more than the current state. A decade ago it would have been unthinkable to me that Apple would ever have ads in any OS. Today, I’m dreading the moment they go “full Windows” and start shoving third-party ads in Spotlight, then Safari, then the Dock².

¹ https://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tim-cook-soundly-rej...

² Yes, I am exaggerating to make a point. At least I hope it’s an exaggeration.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#325

Post by college_physics »

danaris wrote: post #312
college_physics wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the one commercial entity that could completely disrupt surveillance capitalism and reboot the digital space to an era reminiscent of the Microsoft monopoly - but now with their huge attached and interoperable mobile user base. What they simply need to do is make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy and support a number of new/updated protocols for decentralized online interactions (messaging, blo…

> make self-hosting (using Mac devices) trivially easy They did this for years: every Mac starting with the first release of Mac OS X had a built-in Apache webserver, and activating it was just the click of a button in the Sharing preference pane. Problem is, the segment of people who a) are willing and able to create web content, and b) only want the very basics as provided by Apple (including whatever versions of P…

I did not know about built-in Apache (cool). Last I have seen this was in a NAS server. I was never into the Apple ecosystem but I recall hearing e.g. about appletalk [0]

What you describe are both real hindrances and somehow not fundamental. E.g. people migrated en mass to centralized social media also for simple personalized websites (which in retrospect might not have been in their best interests).

My sense is that as time goes on it will take an active act of suppression for self-hosting not to become potentially much more widespread and ofcourse if a major and credible player can remove friction points for non-technical people this will only open the floodgates.

As for ISP's, yes, they are a big part of the problem.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleTalk

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#326

Post by JKCalhoun »

deltarholamda wrote: post #300
microtherion wrote: post #58

I don't recall whether this was ever stated explicitly, but I always had the impression that this is one of the elements of Apple's strategy that is still driven by the tribal memory of the late 1990s turmoil. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were there at the time, and especially the former (who also had witnessed a 1980s bust) was determined to never be in this position again. So as a consequence: * Apple is hoarding c…

Apple is a real company. Amazon, Twitter, even Microsoft to some extent are not. Apple makes things. The software side works with it, but it's a hardware company. They aren't entirely dependent on conjuring up value out of thin air, they have supply chains and manufacturing and whatnot. Even Amazon, which deals with physical objects, doesn't really make anything.

I had a moment of enstartlement (note to auto-correct: I made up the word, okay?) the other day. I get a lot of vintage/retro computing videos in my YouTube feed — I realized how odd it was that Apple was one of the few (only?) 8-bit computer companies still around. And around in an impossible-to-ignore kind of way.

But only just barely missed going under back in the late 1990's.

What a strange timeline.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#327

Post by herculity275 »

deltarholamda wrote: post #300
microtherion wrote: post #58

I don't recall whether this was ever stated explicitly, but I always had the impression that this is one of the elements of Apple's strategy that is still driven by the tribal memory of the late 1990s turmoil. Both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were there at the time, and especially the former (who also had witnessed a 1980s bust) was determined to never be in this position again. So as a consequence: * Apple is hoarding c…

Apple is a real company. Amazon, Twitter, even Microsoft to some extent are not. Apple makes things. The software side works with it, but it's a hardware company. They aren't entirely dependent on conjuring up value out of thin air, they have supply chains and manufacturing and whatnot. Even Amazon, which deals with physical objects, doesn't really make anything.

> Even Amazon, which deals with physical objects, doesn't really make anything.

Echo, Kindle, Blink and Fire TV product lines would beg to disagree.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#328

Post by unsui »

scarface74 wrote: post #282
kennywinker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone who got laid off wouldn't have had at a job at all if they weren't hired Maybe I've been lucky, but every time I've been looking for a job I've had AT LEAST two options. People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time. Investing a year learning the ropes at a company, finding ways to fit into the structures, etc. only…

> People move cities, sell houses, buy houses, give up apartments, plan their finances, and plan their career around their job all the time Then those people are naive. I never plan my life around an employer. I plan my life around my employability . I wouldn’t move somewhere that there weren’t other jobs in the area. Well now I wouldn’t work at any company that wasn’t fully remote

Looks like there are thousands (perhaps millions) of people who are just naive then, who just were thinking strategically, serves them right, etc....

I'm not disagreeing with you, but your tone lacks empathy. Fuck them, I got mine, those idiots deserve what they got for not being smart enough.

These are real people who lost real jobs, not just some cells in an excel sheet.

Re: Apple: The only big tech giant going against the job cuts tide

#330

Post by scarface74 »

ghaff wrote: post #318
scarface74 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And thats why I have a 25 year of paranoia about being overly specialize. Yes I’m self aware enough to understand the irony of the only reason I fell into my role at $BigTech at 48 years old is because I did become overly specialized in enterprise dev + cloud.

It's hard not to be at least somewhat specialized as a very senior person. If you're an embedded systems programmer, maybe you can hack on some Javascript but no one is probably going to pay you very senior comp to do junior programmer work. It is certainly true you don't want to be too specialized in general. You didn't want to be the Y2K guru in 2001 or the world's expert in performance optimization for some specif…

Is that really true though? How many of the 2.7 million developers in the US are just your generic enterprise CRUD developer writing apps using Java, C#, etc? They are basically interchangeable and for most of my career, I could throw a resume up in the air and get multiple offers for yet another generic enterprise CRUD job.

On the other side, how many jobs are (were?) available to the generic software engineer who could do the DS&A monkey dance (junior/mid) and “design Twitter” and talk about “scope” and “impact@ in STAR format (senior).

Post reply on HN