Comment by rmah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmah | Hacker News Reader

A little research reveals that the title of the article is both preposterous and simply wrong.

The figure of $46k is extracted from the site Simply Hired. If you go to the source of this supposed stat (http://www.simplyhired.com/a/salary/search/q-apple), you will find that it is simply a search for jobs with "apple" in the title or description.

If you go to the URL of search results that are used to determine the $46k salary (http://www.simplyhired.com/a/jobs/list/q-apple) you find that of the first 50 listed jobs, only 4 are actually at Apple.

Of the Apple jobs, 3 are at the retail Apple stores.

Of the remaining jobs, while many are tech support or development on Apple platforms, most are completely unrelated to Apple. They are jobs at Apple Bank or in places like Apple Valley, CA, or at Apple Blossom Mall, etc.

My god, and to think that some these people have the nerve to call themselves journalists? If this is what passes for news these days, I weep for the future.

Apple does not disclose compensation expense. The closest it comes to that is its "selling, general and administrative" expense figure. This is about $128,000 per employee but, to be clear, it includes more than just compensation and so is only a ceiling.

This article is wrong-headed in other ways too. The author attributes Apple's higher return on capital to the fact that it makes things. That has nothing to do with it. GM makes things and where did that get GM? Google doesn't make things but it has a very nice return on capital.

You're completely right- and I really don't think we can overstate how embarrassing of an oversight this is for the New Yorker. I know journalists are not the biggest math fans out there but some basic understanding of statistics, data analysis and general rigor applied to vetting your web sources is a requirement for an article like this.

Actually the New Yorker article has this sentence which is ignored by tuaw:

Another Web site, Salary List, quotes a substantially higher figure—$107,719—but that doesn’t appear to include people working at Apple’s more than three hundred retail stores.

And this disclaimer at the top:

One word of warning, though. What follows should be considered a process of me thinking out loud, and pointing out some things that strike me, rather than reaching any definitive conclusions.

And, oh yeah, it doesn't have a misleading link-bait headline either. There's actually nothing at all embarrassing about the New Yorker article. Tuaw just pulled a quote out of context and turned it into an inane blog post.

Well the blog post is much worse, but the $46,000 number is worthless if it's just the average of jobs with "apple" in the description, It really shouldn't be included for any reason in the New Yorker post.

I suspect that the average salary for "journalists" is below $46k. That's either a cause or a symptom of what you're complaining about.

Nah. If they were paid more, they'd work even less.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com