Some Apple engineers rewarded up to $180k in stock bonuses as incentive to stay
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
Is that really a significant amount enough to ward off being poached? 120k over 4 years is 30k a year if linear. I would think at the pay scales being discussed they would get 30k a year just to move companies.
In reality, most engineers aren't bouncing around from company to company every year trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their compensation. The strategy works well for a few iterations in early careers, but eventually it starts becoming counter-productive.
If you have 10 jobs in 10 years on your resume, every hiring manager who sees it will instantly recognize that you're a job hopper who isn't likely to stay longer than a year. It also becomes difficult to really accomplish anything big if you're always leaving a company before you can really hit your stride.
Most people I know who end up at FAANG level companies are interested in sticking around for at least 3-4 years, if not longer. This provides the chance to accomplish bigger things, build an actual reputation within the company, and move up the in-company career ladder. Jumping to other companies for a $10-50K immediate bonus could be shooting yourself in the foot relative to sticking around long enough to get a promotion and retention awards.
This is a good point. Most people singing the praises of job hopping are early (<10 years) into their careers. That's when you get the big jumps in comp when you hop. My first job hop netted me +50%. The next one, about +20%. The next one, maybe 5%? I don't know, it wasn't remarkable. Now that I'm 20 years into my career, changing jobs doesn't really increase comp at all (last change was probably negative when you considered the difference in equity). You hit the comp plateau, after which, changing jobs really doesn't get you anywhere unless you can get a higher "level" (senior eng -> staff eng or manager, staff eng -> principle eng, principle eng -> executive) which is not always easy.
The youngsters among us will eventually understand, after you've reached that plateau and your next job is going to be +1% at best, all the work it takes to reskill, grind leetcode, interview prep, interview, negotiate, move your family, change your mailing address, etc. kind of stops being worth it.
That might be the biggest luxury of being in this field at least for the time being. You don't need to constantly looking for a different job that pays a little more to not live hand to mouth, nor do you need to climb the corporate ladder or move to a specific city/country to be able to have a good quality middle class life.
We consider it unacceptable if all the projects a candidate wants to talk about "began before I was hired, and shipped after I left." And that's what you get if you are an aggressive job-hopper your entire career, not just at the beginning.
I am never against someone wanting to negotiate the compensation they deserve for the skills they have developed. And certainly, for many skills, job hopping is the strategy for maximizing your pay for the skills you are able to learn and refine in 1-2 years per job.
But if you don't develop the skill of taking a major multi-year project from inception to completion, there is a skill you don't have that we will not pay for by hiring you at the top two levels of our org.
I'm not sure what company you're at but there is certainly not a multi-year project in any I've worked at. There are long term _product_ roadmaps but in order to stay agile you never commit to something as big as a multi-year project. There are only individual features that get committed to. Even in core infra (heavily technical) where needs and solutions are known committed work goes out a year tops.
Absolutely you want people who delivered things from start to finish but I've never heard of those things taking multiple years. If it takes 2-3 years for your product to go to market it's a failure, regardless of whether it's an external or internal product.
Out of curiosity, what product does your company make? What kind of moat do they have if anything you do can be replicated in under a year by a competitor?
If a roadmap goes out 3-5 years and a candidate only executes on one or two of those years, the candidate hasn't gained experience with which parts of a roadmap stay committed and which ones change in response to new information/priorities.
Most of this does not apply to a hot startup where the founders are still coding every day, but those aren't the only senior engineering opportunities.
My meta-experience is that the kinds of things I'm talking about tend to be most highly prized by companies that have been around longer than a startup, and now have problems to solve technically and organizationally that can most effectively be solved by people who have stayed in one company longer than one-two years.
Such companies aren't usually as exciting as pre-IPO startups, so absolutely no side-eye from me if anyone reading this is thinking "You can take that job and shove it, I'm busy inventing the future on a two-pizza team in a six-pizza startup."
1. Experience with the consequences of their choices. Ok, you were able to get a job at company X, get up to speed, and lead a major cross-team or cross-group initiative within two years. What happened after that? Did it create the desired outcomes? Why? Why not? Were there unanticipated consequences? What part did you play in dealing with those?
2. Experience with change. Managers--even entire management orgs--change. Were you around long enough to live through one such change? Or did you jump ship without acquiring any experience or scars from the change? Strategies change, e.g. Pivoting from B2C to B2B, or weaning a company off a dependence on sales-led growth. Do you have experience with not just the technological consequences, but the organizational consequences? Do you have the skill of creating an oasis of calm within the chaos?
Consider someone who works as a team lead at a startup for two years, it goes IPO, they cash out. Do they stay, learn about working in a bigger company and become the kind of person I'm describing above?
Yes, if that interests them. But that isn't the only road. They could also go join another startup. Lather, rinse, repeat. With luck and skill, they could keep honing their skills as a leader of teams in a fast-paced early-stage environment, without ever becoming the kind of person a 500-person engineering group is trying to hire as a Principal Engineer.
Nothing wrong with that, it's the engineering equivalent of a serial entrepreneur. Some founders want to run their company for their entire career, like Ken Olsen, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Others are happy to sell out and start all over again.
Do what makes you happy. I'm just explaining what one company is looking for at a senior level.
Jumping around every 1-2 years is fine if you're junior or mid. After that you're suspect. We had a guy who left after 1.5 years. It was sudden and disruptive, and the guy burned bridges. We were not surprised since his past jobs were like that (short stints, and anger by the end of the last one). However, now, everyone we interview who's senior, we look at a different light with regards to job hopping.
Lesson learned with regards to that. Beware of senior engineers who job hop.
I think this is a bit too much of a generalization. I would caveat this with "understand what you're hiring for".
In some cases, you need a specialist to come in and laser-focus on a problem, and then maybe someone who won't be with you for long, but will tackle those problems, is just fine - and even what you really want: no seat-warming, just get it done and get out.
But if you're hiring someone to lead a long-lived team working on big projects, then your point stands.
I go through a lot of resumes, but hardcore job hopper resumes are still very rare. Numerically, they'd have to be overrepresented in the applicant pool due to changing jobs 2-5X more frequently than everyone else.
It's not a big deal if someone has a couple short jobs on their resume or even a series of short-term engagements. But what may not be obvious until you've done a lot of hiring is that it's really hard to tell the difference between someone who changes jobs every 12 months for a pay increase compared to someone who changes jobs every 12 months because they get PIPed and managed out of every company they work for. Some people are really good at interviewing, but will show up at your company and proceed to ride your performance management track until they're pushed out, at which case they hop into the next company and move on.
So at minimum, job hoppers get much more intensive interviews and reference checks. But more realistically I just give priority to candidates who have track records of accomplishing bigger things over longer periods of time at companies.
On top of that, most of our most productive engineers stayed over 4 years.
Unless you’re a senior or lead, it’s unlikely that you have had the opportunity to gain enough deep exposure to many technologies and problems in a very short tenure at a company.
Also I don't think seniors and leads with short stints are to be trusted (from recent experience with such people).
Staying after that in a lot of these cases mean a lack of interesting projects, and also end up with stagnation. My experience may be a bit affected by freelancing though :)
A few short engagements are no big deal, but serial job hoppers are a warning flag for deeper investigation.
I won't overlook a resume for having a job hopper signature, but we will be going very deep into their accomplishments at these companies. It's often hard to ramp up at a company and deliver something significant from start to finish and production follow-up in 12 months.
Most of the job hoppers I interview end up citing projects that they contributed to, but can't really pin down much significant that was really their own contribution. It's not impossible, but it's far more common to find significant contributions in 2-4 year engineers.
People who haven't worked on any significant projects start - to - finish, and have a demonstrable trial of being a drifter aren't fit for senior positions by very definition.
Personally I tend to think drifters and coasters are basically the same things.
No serious shop or hiring manager I know would touch these people with a 10 foot pole.
>>For me a questionable resume is someone who spent the past 20 years at Accenture or something.
Somebody who spent 20 years at a firm, but are involved in new projects every few years make the perfect hires. The top performing talent in Google, Amazon, Boeing or any where for that matter are these kind of people.
HMs in small companies, maybe, in big companies , they dont care, they are paid to bring talent in, they don't get penalized if an employee quits after a year.
> This provides the chance to accomplish bigger things, build ....
I have seen your other comments along the same line, is mostly wrong, at least here in the US, is always business , you have an obligation to yourself(or your family, etc...) not to your employer, most smart people hiring understand that you switch jobs seeking a higher TC, in the same way businesses change course/pivot seeking higher profits. The "stay forever and maybe one day you will get promoted", is a thing of the past. You make more money switching jobs than waiting for a promotion, lots of companies don't have enough "senior positions" or all the next level positions are covered, so you would have to wait until your manager (or next level pos) retires or leave. Also, managers see people who are afraid to leave, or "loyal" to the company as people then can squeeze more work out of.
> It also becomes difficult to really accomplish anything big if you're always leaving a company before you can really hit your stride.
"Anything big" like what?
Hiring managers care because it's a big hit to your deliverables every time someone leaves and you have hire someone else, bring them up to speed, and try to get them back up to the same level of knowledge as the person who left.
If you have a team of 6 and everyone leaves every 12 months, that means you're hiring and re-training a new person every other month. And every other month, 17% of your team's accumulated knowledge/experience walks out the door. And every year, you're basically starting over with a new team.
It sucks, and that's why hiring managers give preference to people who aren't serial job hoppers.
It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
> It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
Which companies are doing this?
The way companies keep employees around is with good RSU vesting schedules, and end of the year bonuses, etc... I understand that a team with people leaving all the time, is bad for business , that's why companies (that care) have incentives in place to avoid that. But judging a person for wanting a better pay/treatment/wlb is ridiculous, I can see your point from the business owner perspective.
You mean like Amazon with it's weird vesting schedule? Those companies also struggle to attract talent, especially combined with obscure PIPs which can push employees out before a single RSU has vested. Those companies are not going to do well in this hiring market.
It should be easy to fire bad employees, and on the flip side, it should be easy to fire bad employers too.
In also know that there is a point (basically staff/principal) where we are very reluctant to make outside hires who haven’t been at that level at another big tech company for a while. We’ll almost never up level someone at hire time. You have to have demonstrated impact over time and that is hard to do without 2.5+ years at the company (although I’m getting the sense that once you break that threshold, moving around more frequently can help again.)
> The "stay forever and maybe one day you will get promoted", is a thing of the past. You make more money switching jobs than waiting for a promotion
These statements are FAR from universally true. My TC has more than doubled in the last 5 years without a job hop. In the same time period, many of my peers have hopped to facebook et al and increased their TC comparably. There is no one true way.
There is no one true way, yes, but one gives the employee more control over their destiny.
Recruiters might be paid to bring people in, but HMs are the ones whose teams these hires typically work for, so being able to do productive things with them is more important than just bringing people in. The cost of retraining, losing institutional knowledge etc, and just the time it takes to bring in a new person are all costs that take away from the actual work of building the product.
You're confusing recruiters for line managers. HM == Hiring Manager == the person who's trying to build a team to accomplish a project, and at large companies most likely a multi-year roadmap.
They absolutely care about people staying a long time - it is expensive to train people on the internals of each company. At a FAANG++ company, you get your first code checked in in your first week, but it takes a YEAR to be truly productive where you are fully autonomous, and have paid off the initial ramp-up period.
> I have seen your other comments along the same line, is mostly wrong, at least here in the US, is always business
According to you. Not everyone's focus is 100% financial-based. Do I want to maximize my earning potential? Of course. But work is also 1/3 of my life. Another 1/3 is sleep. They money is for the last 3rd. So is my entire focus on 1/3 of my life to make the other waking 3rd to be as lucrative as possible? I think that's one way to approach it, but I think that's extremely short-sighted and unfulfilling.
I want my work to be meaningful, challenging, interesting, and impactful. At this point in my career I can control all this by finding workplaces, coworkers, and projects that match my skillset and my impact, and I can realize this. This means committing to multi-year plans to achieve something significant. (In the olden days we would have called this a "legacy", and I suppose that's still appropriate to some degree, though I don't expect to get a plaque on a bridge for it).
I think a lot of people are in the same boat as me. It's also part of the hacker and startup ethos - to make an actual dent in the universe.
Your attitude is very cynical, and while I agree with you that you don't owe anything to the capitalist system that is cynical about using you, that doesn't mean seeking money is the only way.
> lots of companies don't have enough "senior positions" or all the next level positions are covered
Absolutely not true. All the FAANG++ companies do promotions based on accomplishments and achievements, not a quota of budget or availability of folks at the next level.
> Also, managers see people who are afraid to leave, or "loyal" to the company as people then can squeeze more work out of.
Not the case. These managers exist, but they're not the majority. Most people who go into management genuinely care about people, and are interested in developing them. They'd like to reward loyalty. Unfortunately the aforementioned capitalist system does not permit this, but on an individual level managers are human beings with usually more empathy than IC's (out of necessity).
> "Anything big" like what?
A major software project that takes a team of people several years to accomplish.
I work at one of the FAANGs, and have found this to be 100% untrue. I was fully productive within a week, because I was already an SME in what the team was doing. Likewise, everyone hired on the same team have also been immediately productive. Perhaps it's years of consulting experience (where immediate productivity is expected in hours, regardless of environment), but that is not an uncommon path.
You absolutely do not owe companies loyalty. The same will not be displayed to you when "tough times" hit those companies. Trying to divert from this truism with "startup ethos" or similar such woo is not useful to the majority of people.
I disputed OP's point that Hiring Managers don't care about loyalty, and care if you leave after a year.
Not in my experience. Most engineers spend 1-2 years, then leave.
> move up the in-company career ladder.
That's a hard ladder to climb from the inside. Politics lead to entrenchment.
> accomplish anything big
A great deal of work is plumbing and KTLO. What do the folks working on these things get? They're not great promo or resume fodder for internal mobility.
Which, unsurprisingly, also happens to (usually) be the vesting period for their stocks/options they agreed to receive when starting there.
And we're not talking a measly $30k bump, but more like $100k. It's far more advantageous to move on than to work toward an internal promotion.
As someone in charge of hiring at my current company, having brought on 17 devs over the past year, the ones we really worry about have a bunch of 6-9 month engagements. But every 1.5 years or so, with some lesser here or there... no problem at all. More likely than not they're great at what they do.
So after a couple years as the vesting dates hit these start to stack and they end up becoming quite significant.
>50% of engineers at Google are L4+. For the last few years, at L4 you should have been getting annual ~$100k grants over 4 years if your work in The Bay.
My understanding is that FB paid even more, and that Amazon was maybe 20% behind at the same level.
It's not like pre-covid engineers got nothing and now you get a $120k Bonus suddenly.
But total compensation is likely higher than you mentioned.
You have an initial grant that vests over 4 years that currently is absurdly high - usually more than your base (after appreciation).
Then you have 4 of the grants that stack each year. Plus your 15-25% cash bonus.
Plus you usually get a couple small ($1-$5k) bonuses throughout the year for the projects you're working on.
FAANG salaries are no joke. Especially Google and FB.
These are for average performers. Above average performers get up to ~100% more bonus and rsu
At each promotion, these numbers increase by around 15-20%. (Same for L4->L5 promotion, but L4 is not a senior level at Google)
* These are ballpark Bay Area numbers for L5 to L8.
$180k in AAPL 4 years ago is more like $540k now. If you don’t sell the stock, even after tax you’re potentially looking at $300k over a 4 year period. Plus, if you continue to get decent bonuses each year, this grows even more. Over a typical period over the past 10 years, Apple engineers would easily expect “salary” to be considerably less than half their actual income, especially when you consider the size of a typical sign-on RSU bonus and the amount it will grow.
Now of course, the longer Apple keeps growing like this, the less and less likely it is to continue its trajectory, so I don’t know if new engineers will see the same gains, but over the past several years it would have been a pretty sweet deal.
If you're proactive, people are generally happy and not really a huge flight risk so the bonus just keeps them from even entertaining external offers even though they're hearing rumors of people leaving for X% more.
If you're reactive, well they're probably already gone and you need to give them a huge counter offer to stay, many folks believe in the "never accept a counter" rule so again, you lost your employee.
This is especially true for anyone looking to jump ship mostly for the money: If someone wants to jump ship for an extra 40k-50k, then giving them 30k makes the difference pretty negligible, all else being equal.
I remember seeing a slide a while back (2017ish) where 70% of Apple's revenue was from iPhones, 5% from iPads and 2% from Macs. No way in hell do they consider that a big growth market.
EV has huge potential, but has a lot of competition, and Apple would be late to the party and without any serious advantages, technological, ecosystem, or otherwise. On the contrary, they'd have to build delivery and repair networks from scratch ( assuming they delegate all manufacturing). Even for their endless financial reserves, it seems very improbable they'd get anywhere serious within 10 years in the EV market.
Laptops - that's a tough market with lots of competition and long retention ( as in people rarely upgrade, and tend to stick to manufacturers), many of it Apple simply cannot and could not overcome ( Windows will probably remain the de facto enterprise standard for some more time). They finally have a serious technological advantage beyond more abstract, subjective or niche ones ( better UX or light or long batter life) advantages.
2021-12-28 $179.29 4.19x
2017-12-28 $ 42.77 2.14x
2013-12-28 $ 20.00 2.65x
2009-12-28 $ 7.56 2.87x
2005-12-28 $ 2.63 6.57x
2001-12-28 $ 0.40 3.33x
1997-12-28 $ 0.12
The last couple of years have been absolutely bonkers. 4x-ing from here would be 17x their valuation in 2017. Controlling for inflation, the probability of that happening given their current valuation seems ridiculously low.
Is 15k extra per year an effective boost to happiness?
Is 15k enough to keep working for Big Brother, in a job with very limited freedom, professionally and socially
Is 15k enough to keep working in a company that keeps users addicted to unhealthy behaviors?
Maybe this is just 1% problems. So let me be specific and you judge. Promotion within Apple is getting nearly impossible as a career path, because company-wide "standards" on how to promote someone (above a certain level) invite division-wide scrutiny and justification to peers (of the people doing the promoting). Not to say that it was a huge career path in the past (you had to be lucky), but at least you got paid competitively. Now, can't pay someone market rate because that would be going out of band. While at the same time, people who come in as "headline" hires from external are given not nearly such scrutiny and instead get $Ms and hiring bonuses and directorships. AIML, I'm looking at you. Strict standards for the masses, bonuses for the leadership.
And Apple is also not good at training/setting up/teaching people how to advance while working inside the company. So you are practically incentivized to leave and come back for your career advancement (once you realize it and want to stop banging your head against the wall). But not in any way that was deliberate, which loses the company a good deal. Maybe doing that better could have saved the company the billions they're having to pay now to keep people.
I remember a Steve Jobs quote where he said, "we don't hire smart people to tell them what to do, we hire them so they tell us what to do." It doesn't feel that way much at all now, because seems like Apple just wants labor.
And the annual review system is a joke. It serves just to gather feedback from peers and file it away in the drawer, since the salary bumps and bonuses are already all determined top-down from leadership. So what's the point of giving feedback or striving out of your way (unless you have some project that's got major visibility on the line)?
I thought that Apple was a welcome exception from the college-kids-software-companies, with some more maturity and rigor to it. Turns out every company has issues. Eventually you come to accept what the company is in your small pocket of it, and take it or leave it.
This seems like a common, growing problem in BigTech: It's often easier to interview and get L+1 at another company than it is to get promoted from L to L+1. Hell, it's probably easier to quit and immediately re-interview for L+1 at your own company than to go through the arduous promotion grind. When you go for promotion, you generally have to have some chain of evidence, peer reviews, performance history, etc. to show you should be at L+1, whereas when you interview at that L+1 role, you merely need to talk your way through a few interviewers and bedazzle them sufficiently. I mean, the bar is already high for the interviews, don't get me wrong, but believe it or not, it appears to be even higher for promotion.
An Amazon Sr. SDE (L6) is expected to have strong leadership skills, which means interpersonal tech lead abilities - including mentorship of others, communication with stakeholders, etc.
This person may not have had the abilities or interest in having this so they went to Google which seems to focus exclusively on leetcode-esque abilities. (My data is ~5 years stale, but I interviewed with Google a few years back and didn't get a SINGLE "behavioural" interview question, or anything about my prior experience. It was 100% "solve this problem on a whiteboard").
Obviously going to a competitor comes with its costs, and hence people do not do it just for the $x discount. Just like with employment.
If there were no switching costs, then you would not see these types of "misaligned" incentives.
My experience personally and from what I have heard from others, this is basically true at every tech workplace today
+1. I used to think there were some generalizations that could be made based on company size, etc, but now I have realized that it is pretty similar everywhere (except possibly a < 50 employee startup).
The is the natural consequence of commoditization. If you are rank-and-file engineer #8430, you're a commodity. You've molded your skillset into a specific shape that fits into a particular hole, and as a result you get options. You get security. Because there are lots of engineer-shaped holes at lots of companies. Unfortunately, there are lots of engineer-shaped people. You can be easily replaced by someone with a similar skillset. So why pay you more and more, when if you quit, it's no big deal? Supply and demand at work.
These "headline" hires are different. They have rarer skillsets that are harder to come by. They're harder to hire, harder to replace, and often require poaching. Demand for them is high, because supply is low. Of course they're going to get paid more, and of course those deals are going to involve more flexibility and negotiation. For the same reason you see lots of negotiation during the purchases of cars/houses/etc, but not buying paperclips/cereal/other commodities at the store.
This is just markets at work. I think the mistake is assuming that just because you exist in the same company as someone else, your role in the market is (or should be) identical.
And when they then get in the company, turns out they have no better idea / skills to change what we do than anyone internally. But they just got paid 3x to join and find that out.
But hey, maybe that's the game. And maybe the dumber companies are getting hoodwinked. Join the game I guess and make out like a bandit while the getting is good then.
Maybe I'm old and bitter but... Isn't any corporation like this? Those who hold the power will use it for their own good, or at the very least, to avoid personal problems and responsibilities. Quick example: you fight to promote someone and it turns out the person shouldn't have been promoted? You screwed up big time, you traded a good employee who was performing well in his spot for a bad employee and now have one person to fire and two open roles to fill. You hire someone from outside? Well if that person fails you can't be fully blamed because of course the HR and your boss were involved so if everyone was wrong then no one can't be blamed.
— Peter Gibbons, Office Space
It makes me excited for the future of software engineering to see moves like this. Clearly Apple, and many other companies, are starting to understand just how critical devs are to a modern business. And they are finding that to get good devs, you have to treat devs well too, in order to compete with companies like Google & Meta. My bet: salaries, especially for experienced engineers, continue to skyrocket.
That being said, I have colleagues in other orgs/teams that love their job, work 30 hours a week on average, have strong managers, interesting work, and shockingly higher pay.
So, there are good teams and there are bad teams. Unfortunately, you only hear that because there are often far more bad teams than good.
I've been impressed that Apple has thus far avoided one of those "Amazon is the worst company to work for" NYT articles. The lows are so unbelievably low at Apple if you end up on a bad team.
I tend to think 2015 was a turning point. And everything after is Tim Cook era. Also depends on org as well, for example vast majority of bad comments could be traced back to Apple IS&T. And you dont even need insider story to tell, simply judge them by IS&T's output on iCloud and any services.
I’ve been at one of the FAANGs for about 7 years. I’ve been on some amazing teams but also my share of office bs and difficult people.
From reading HN’s characterization of my work environment, I’m depressed, completely stressed out, and everyone I work with is a horrible human being.
I mean, if I wasn’t depressed before, I’m more likely to be depressed after reading some of these posts.
As much as folks on even this site rally against FB, the constant stream of negativity or opinions - on why we should all hate X or why Y is evil - is easily found even here on HN.
> It makes me excited for the future of software engineering to see moves like this. Clearly Apple, and many other companies, are starting to understand just how critical devs are to a modern business.
As a counterpoint, some of the highest paid non-FAANG jobs I had had some of the worst treatment of engineers. The high salaries were used to compensate for the terrible treatment and make it harder for employees to leave. In one case, many of us left and gladly took lower compensation at other companies just to get out. And of course, the jobs were immediately backfilled with new people eager to cash in on the high salaries. Money is an easy way to fill seats, but treating people well is the only way to keep them there.
From my perspective, Apple has always treated their engineers quite well. Guy Kawasaki once said that "Working for Apple is like being paid to go to Disneyland."
It may no longer be the case, but I have always assumed that engineers at Apple have always felt valued.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
I thought we didn't post personal attacks on HN.
That was uncalled-for.
I was extremely careful not to write in a confrontational manner. It was merely a vague statement, of my own personal PoV, based on a great deal of personal experience (I've been writing Apple software since 1986). Much of that time was spent, working for very respected corporations that had a close working relationship with Apple engineering. I spent a great deal of time, working directly with Apple engineers and managers. I have also had many, many training sessions at Apple (back when they did that). I've spent a lot of time, in the Apple ecosystem.
It doesn't escape my notice that lots of other folks that haven't worked for Apple have been more than happy to post their opinions, here.
Apple seems to be a bit of a lightning rod. I can tell you that anyone that has developed for them, as long as I have, has become quite used to torrents of abuse. I can't even imagine what Apple employees had to go through (actually, I can, because they told me).
I have to add that I have never had any interaction with either of you two folks, yet your very first interaction with me, was an attack.
That may fly on Facebook or Twitter, but it may be ... less than ideal ... in a professional environment (which I definitely consider HN). Note that I make it absolutely clear who I am, how to get in touch with me, and how to find out more about me. It encourages me to behave well. I deleted my last anonymous social media account, years ago.
This is a community. I consider it to be a professional community, and I value the considered input of professionals. I learn something every day from HN, and have great respect for many of its participants.
It is not a good idea for me to start relationships off in a pugilistic manner. I am likely to reduce the number of opportunities for me to grow; both personally, and professionally.
The nice thing about being run by PMs is that products and feature ship.
I joke bitterly with my friends at Google who can't seem to consistently deliver anything outside of their existing cash-cows.
I don’t think I have never come across an actual product manager at apple. Design tends to make on most of that responsibility
hiring so many project managers.
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=pm&sort=relevance...
That explains the state of Xcode and WWDC-driven documentation.
Meanwhile, Meta gives >$1M in discretionary equity to top performers to prevent them from leaving. I don't think Apple picked a big enough number here.
Most of the engineers receiving these bonuses would never get discretionary equity at Meta. Discretionary equity is given to < 1% of engineering every year. Of course, Meta also has very generous regular RSU and bonus schemes.
Much better wording than what the article says, which is "likely meant to keep companies like Facebook parent company Meta from poaching employees".
Poaching, as far as I know, is illegal trafficking of animals. Why are media companies insisting we see the human workforce as animals, and that we should view companies offering better pay/work as "stealing" employees when in reality, it's just people switching jobs, something that is normal?
LTIs are a pretty standard retention practice in general, especially for key employees who are already at the top of their pay bands, but the churn in the industry over the last 18 months has probably driven up the actual value of them across the board, and potentially even shortened the vesting period.
Not in the context of Streaming. Spotify's lead ( I want to say dominance but that wouldn't be true ) is partly because Apple Music, Youtube Music and Amazon Music isn't exactly great. Just look at how many free trials Apple Music is giving out everywhere trying to push for more adoption.
I dont think Spotify is perfect ( far from it ), but they have fought hard to win their place. So it is anything but boring.
I imagine some people had similar thoughts when considering Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer.
> If you’re not in the AR/car divisions then what is the point.
Some people are more interested in a stable paycheck and will take a bullshit job to enable it.
If I was Apple… it was the wrong time to build fancy headquarters. You got a few years, and now the area around it is falling apart and your employees have fallen in love with remote work.
The answer, I think, is that Progressives in the American cities wear their homelessness and drug problems like a badge of honor. The messaging appears to be: look at how tolerant we are, and if you want to blame someone you can blame the rich. They should do better to learn from our European friends how to spend tax dollars to help the needy.
Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...
Human, if you're wondering still.
EDIT: the comments in response are non-sequiturs. The map does not display mostly human poop. It is mostly dog poop. I know I know, you see people poop all the time. But that’s not what the map is.
I walk my kid to and from daycare in that area and see street pooping if not every week, three times a month. There's a reason why people move away from the city when they have kids. We are not far off from doing the same after almost seven otherwise very enjoyable years here.
I've "only" seen two discarded needles on the street the entire time I've been here though, one was outside of a major grocery store just before Thanksgiving.
The rest of the peninsula is pretty vanilla and mundane though. As are the parts of the city not an hour's walking distance from market street. It was very interesting visiting manhattan though, I'm not sure where everyone there goes, but their SOMA-style areas seemed overall cleaner than ours, which leads me to believe it's partly a city management issue.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gT5NULvRSk
Lol. As a current Cupertino resident and non-Apple employee, this is the nicest place I’ve ever lived. Massive perfect roads, extremely low crime or homelessness, modern buildings, and easy access to freeways. It’s not at all like downtown SF
* actual quote from current city council member
This city would be a lot different if we granted the right to vote to all of our resident non-citizens, which I think we absolutely should do. They live here and pay taxes. They should have a voice.
> easy access to freeways
Come live here, it's easy to go elsewhere
Enjoy suburbia; someone has to.
I've never lived in the Bay Area/SF so I can't comment on the problems there, but I have lived in London for the past few years.
I volunteer extensively with the homeless, and I haven't seen a fraction of what people describe in San Francisco, or anywhere near the level of antisocial behaviour or crime. Every week I'm serving food on the streets for at least a few hours; I've never once been threatened with anything other than words (and even then maybe twice with words?), never seen needles lying around (co-volunteers have, not common though), and never seen human faeces on the street.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen or that people who write about them are being untruthful. However, I do wonder if it is the extreme events or experiences that get written about and aggregated into news.
Please stay the course and let them have their “reality”.
I have been taking the Caltrain for work in the past decade, sure it isn’t the most ideal or perfect railway system in the world debatably but it sure is the workhorse of a bustling population that doesn’t get as much praise for doing it’s job.
I would, but I guess I could be in the minority there.
Additionally, it’s really hard to step away from solving large scaling issues, and go back to trying to finding your first customers/building an MVP.
I’ve been at startups and large companies. I like the money and challenges at large companies, and I don’t have crazy hours.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-28/apple-pay...
I doubt the $30k a year with some difficult vesting cliff is going to keep those guys working at the dumpster fire that has become Apple.
We may hear more stories in the next few years. Either the woke took over, or the woke left.
1) work were you perform difficult maintenance tasks, think debugging userland code from complete system dumps
2) challenging infrastructure
3) monopolization of power by established employees
Reality is that Apple willing to have 10x the typical staff for marginal gains. Being part of that can be difficult and boring.
Does anyone have a recommended resource that details what practically happens to my options when a company IPOs?
I know there’s a lot of variables but I imagine there’s some common patterns and things to be aware of.
The entire thing is Greek to me and might become very important soon.
Hopefully at a decent brokerage like e-trade or fidelity or schwab or even whatever Merril Lynch is called these days, and not ComputerShare, which is terrible.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-engine...
That was Facebook-Google though. Apple likes to do no-poaches... https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...
What? How? Why? Those devices have completely different uses...
Or more realistically, know someone who is already at one of those companies and can vouch for you and get your resume looked at by a recruiter. After that it's mostly a matter of how well you can handle a high pressure tech interview loop.
the interviews are challenging, but it's no secret what you'll be evaluated on.