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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

#361

Post by potatolicious »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #160
williamcotton wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If someone is insane, is their next move sane? Are they a good investment?

This remains my chief concern - part of this admittedly is anger that those responsible for the sackings have generally not been sacked, but the rest of it is whether or not anyone in charge truly knows what they did wrong in order to avoid the same situation again.

When one authorizes a 40,000-person increase in headcount, what did they think they were paying for? What projects were these people allocated to, and why are these projects now expendable where they weren't before?

My suspicion is that a lot of the hiring for the past two years were for work and projects that simply wouldn't pass even a cursory smell-test. I also strongly suspect that there really should be some replacements in leadership positions - not because of some sense of retribution for the layoffs but because I honestly don't think many people have internalized what went wrong in a way that would make them more reliable in the future.

Many of these layoffs seem like slash-and-burn tactics in response to criticism and investor panic rather than a real, sober assessment of the excesses of the past few years and why they happened.

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

#362

Post by mlyle »

dumpsterdiver wrote: post #146
bell-cot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>...more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality... Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short term. (FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)

Speaking of software quality, anyone notice in Apple Music how the categories all start with Apple? Apple Dance music, Apple Country, Apple Pop... like are they trying to make it intentionally difficult for me to use my eyes to find music? I know that I'm using Apple Music... why does every category need to remind me of that while simultaneously impeding my ability to locate things alphabetically? Of course, when I u…

> anyone notice in Apple Music how the categories all start with Apple?

No-- where are you seeing this?

Almost nothing in the Apple Music app on iOS or MacOS starts with "Apple Music" for me. Only really the "Apple Music" radio stations, which is necessary to distinguish them from the generic playlists and third-party radio stations.

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

#363

Post by r00fus »

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…

> I still can't believe major corporations thought the shift to ecommerce from the pandemic "looked to be permanent".

My theory is that it had less to do with e-commerce overall than more to do with all the big spenders in VC and crypto that essentially vanished once QE and ZIRP regime changed completely (over a very short period).

Not unlike the dotcom boom where large companies at the time like Sun/Cisco took huge losses because they were selling shovels for the gold miners (startups) who suddenly all went out of business. It's no surprise that so many of the Super Bowl ads were crypto - there was an immense amount of such cash swishing around.

Apple didn't dip into that market at all (naturally they are B2C) so they neither hired for that gold rush, nor fired as the gold rush faded.

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

#364

Post by potatolicious »

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…

> "Also, engineering managers absolutely have endless work to assign to new hires. So given the headcount, they will definitely make use of it."

This seems like the crux of the problem. Of course engineering managers always want more headcount - I am one and I would be very happy to get more headcount. My backlog is ten miles long and keeps growing.

But I also understand that if I head enough engineers to actually take care of all the things I want, I will have likely overhired, and am chasing increasingly marginal returns on investment. Some things should not make it off the backlog, because honestly the ROI likely isn't worth it.

"Optimal" staffing at the team level is almost certainly not optimal for either the company or the product. A team that doesn't have to constantly drop things because of lack of resources is likely building a lot of stuff that is poorly-justified.

In a healthy company the desire to do everything is tempered by financial reality and sound judgment - it sounds like both got tossed out the airlock at many companies.

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

#365

Post by jarjoura »

bell-cot wrote: post #351
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…

Reaction: Sounds like Apple's method encourages managers to select and hire one person, who is a very good fit for his team's actual current need. Vs. Meta's encourages managers to cast a net, haul in a load of fish, and hope that one of 'em is a passable fit for his team's current need. But many keep a few extra fish regardless - since he'll have more needs in the future, and fishing is a crap shoot.

Or the reverse take, at Meta, ICs find the projects on teams that excite them and they are the ones empowered to decide what is a good fit for themselves.

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

#366

Post by jarjoura »

potatolicious wrote: post #364
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…

> "Also, engineering managers absolutely have endless work to assign to new hires. So given the headcount, they will definitely make use of it." This seems like the crux of the problem. Of course engineering managers always want more headcount - I am one and I would be very happy to get more headcount. My backlog is ten miles long and keeps growing. But I also understand that if I head enough engineers to actually ta…

LOL, this is also very true.

I do question how you manage your backlog though, if there are things on it that should never be implemented, maybe you should clean it out? :-p

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

#367

Post by sanderjd »

Patrol8394 wrote: post #344
sanderjd wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> They did not have to launch something like ChatGPT at full scale.

I think this is really a misunderstanding of the constraints Google has to operate under. They have released plenty of things that "show where "potentially" Google could have taken the technology in time". Not least among them, the original transformer paper that this is all based on... But also, there are features in Docs and elsewhere that are backed by this kind of AI. Have you seen the "complete the sentence" thing in Gmail? How do you think that works?

What they didn't release is a generically useful product that everyone could use. Because if they had, everybody would have used it! Which, as you stipulate, would have been untenable.

But that doesn't mean it wasn't a strategic mistake! But it also wasn't a strategic success... The insightful and maddening thing about "the innovator's dilemma" is that incumbents can make the right decisions and still be disrupted. An incumbent just doesn't have the same options as a new entrant. This is an excellent demonstration of the effect!

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

#368

Post by ss48 »

etempleton wrote: post #53
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…

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.

However, if you hire twice as many people, potentially twice as many people will be competent the following year.

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

#369

Post by jonny_eh »

jarjoura wrote: post #365
bell-cot wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reaction: Sounds like Apple's method encourages managers to select and hire one person, who is a very good fit for his team's actual current need. Vs. Meta's encourages managers to cast a net, haul in a load of fish, and hope that one of 'em is a passable fit for his team's current need. But many keep a few extra fish regardless - since he'll have more needs in the future, and fishing is a crap shoot.

Or the reverse take, at Meta, ICs find the projects on teams that excite them and they are the ones empowered to decide what is a good fit for themselves.

That's likely still true at Apple, but you gotta start somewhere.

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

#370

Post by evancox100 »

WWLink wrote: post #348
ben7799 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

Have to question your life choices if you are the "manage multiple JTAG devices in hardware" expert. (In HW, we are all that person.)
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