Apple avoids job cuts because it didn’t overhire like Google and Amazon
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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 the loop on just how big the hiring was over the pandemic. Not that layoffs are good for employees and workers like me, but these companies must still have retained tons of the hires as RIFs in tech seem to be about 7-20%.
Apple was smart to move slower. They are probably one of the best run companies in the world.
Some of us never become competent.
That has always been a concern to me about being laid off in one of these massive layoffs efforts. If it is pretty much understood that in these moves the companies are removing dead weight, does that stigma get attached to you as you search for a new job.
So while it looks odd by comparison, cloud providers were in a bit of a different environment than Apple.
apple is an enormously stable company in ways that (to be very honest) even most other tech blue-chips are not. even microsoft or google have the sword of damocles hanging over them - given a sufficiently long and severe position of mismanagement it is possible that even google or MS could be unseated or even go under. arguably that is the trajectory MS was on in the 00s, and google could be similarly unseated by AI.
intel would be a great real-world example of that. Even 10 years ago the thought of big blue losing control was unthinkable, un-thinkable. And here we are, they're circling the drain right now and need to make very deep cuts and refocus on the essentials or they're going to be in bankruptcy in 5-10 years, during a down market in general and a specific market that they glutted during the pandemic (a lot of customers have enough PCs/laptops/servers for quite a while). And in contrast Apple is still making money hand-over-fist despite the market conditions - now that's stability.
I'm not going to say that google or MS doubling their size on a short-term timescale sounds like a good idea but it's a ride-or-die industry, you're pretty much either getting bigger or getting smaller, and mere homeostasis is a rare luxury.
Working east coast in more traditional tech companies this has never really been a thing. It's always been conservative, staying profitable, etc.. It is the older way.
Apple, MS, etc.. were built this way too of course.
So satan is involved? That might explain how Jobs came back after getting boot #1.
Additionally they deal a lot with hardware design. Being in the office is going to be easier for certain things, particularly when you are as secretive as Apple.
This seems to be general sentiment here lately. Do you have any evidence to support this or is purely conjecture?
New hires take anywhere from 3 months to 8 months or more depending on the position to ramp up
During ramp up period, there’s a productivity toll taken on the team via teaching the new hire
Thus during this time, productivity is hampered
——
For culture, I think it’s a bit more subjective. But if you have a team of 5 who then gets 1 new hire to teach over 6 months, generally it allows them to “mesh” better in the culture.
Both in terms of team mates learning about the new hire, and the new hire having room to fit in within the culture, and bring their own value to the team (assuming an already existing good culture.
Now say you have 3 new hires on a team of 5. If we further presume productivity is also hampered more as more people are onboarded at once, that creates additional stress on the team to teach them.
Further, it could be harder to have the new hires feel part of the team if less time is spent getting to know each one. But assume this isn’t the case:
Business will most likely expect at least the same productivity from the team. Now they’re stressed from teaching, higher expectations on their output (onboarding a team member is tiring work), and the business is going to soon expect productivity to increase further after headcount is upped by over 50% in this example.
Now take that, and add on new teams created to interact with, additional communication layers, and it’s pretty straightforward to assume growing too fast can be negative
As the saying goes "revenue solves everything".
I would argue that perhaps Apple's business side of things is arguably well-run. I personally disagree; I think that since Tim Cook has taken over, Apple's business focus is more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality.
But I would also strongly argue that their software side of things has been trending downward (especially in terms of quality) since Tim Cook took over.
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.)
Apple continues to make extremely long term highly strategic investments. You don't get to develop a highly original, industry leading SOC architecture without long term investment in technology. Bankrolling new process node development and thereby locking in capacity in strategic contracts doesn't happen by accident or on a whim. Development and implementation of the Apple watch happened entirely in the post-Jobs era.
So I just don't see it, they continue to commit to heavy long term investment in capital intensive technology projects and innovative new products. Not everything works out. The touch bar and butterfly keyboards were notable misses. But then that's always been true. I look at the phones, desktops, laptops, watch, Airpods, iPads, etc. They're the most Apple-y products Apple has ever produced, and not a single one of them is a me-to product slapped together to ride a trend.
My m1 mbp is the best laptop I've ever owned, and I've owned a lot. I don't really use any mac software though - just a terminal, emacs, and a web browser. Macos just stays out of the way and causes no problems. I routinely get 1 or 2 months of uptime - only ever needing to reboot to apply system updates. Maybe if I used more mac software I would see this supposed decline.
And yes, I was still buying legit Macs and software, and a lot of stock when it was at $11. It was a blast, I tell you.
The iPad pro line is a travesty. IPadOS is horrible, Apple need to take it out back and shoot it. The hardware fits a great niche but Apple have ruined it with their gimmicky software.
IPhones have been getting bigger, heavier, and last less time with each generation. I recently upgraded from the 11 to the 14 pro, and the hardware feels strictly worse. It’s snappier and has a digital island, but it’s significantly heavier and is the first iPhone I’ve ever really been worried about dying during the day (even after turning off the stupid always on display).
AirPods have probably been their biggest win in recent years. The original were amazing, Pros, and Pro 2 were significant upgrades and they’re a big reason (along w/ apple ecosystem integration) I won’t jump ship for android. Maxs are horrible, heavy, and I just don’t understand why people like them at all (bose + sony both make better headphones for cheaper here).
Yes, however it's clearly successful.
> Are you saying Cook’s 10+ years that took the company is at the expense of the next 90 years?
Apple is slowly pulling away consumer ownership of their devices and is turning into an advertisement company. I honestly believe that is at the expense of the next 90 years. And this is rather more the point that I tried to make: short term profits at the expense of long-term customer satisfaction.
The Macs are better than ever.
What else should he be doing?
They off-source all of their factory efforts to other companies. The other companies are doing the hiring and firing.
Probably the best run company is Qualcomm. I have never heard them do layoffs. And they are based in San Diego.
edit: Just googled it and found https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1l5vLinG
edit2: also, https://www.thelayoff.com/apple
And this is evidence they're not so well run? On the contrary...
I would disagree with this. Although their risk is spread much better than it was in the early 00s, a huge amount of their recurring revenue right now teeters on the brink of destruction in the form of their 30% app store cut and the walled-garden nature of their app store. All it would take is a morally principled, non-lobbied regulator to step in and regulate that down to something reasonable like 5% or 3% and require allowing third party app stores (both actions would be equivalent economically because their current fee only works because of their monopoly), and I don't see someting like this not happening in the next decade.
It will be a huge and deserved adjustment when this does happen, and stock speculation will only amplify the blow in the form of lost stock value. There are many, many long-time holders of apple stock who might see the threat of such an event as a time to finally sell. Then we'll see how much value is really there.
Additionally, they have sunk billions of dollars in a brand new campus at a time when WFH is here to stay. That investment will also likely turn out to be worthless in the coming decades as the value of CRE races to $0.
We've seen pushback on the 30% but mostly for a select group of major companies who want to offer alternative payments. The majority of apps aren't going to be asking customers for their credit cards separately vs a single "subscribe" button, nor do they all have CCs already in their existing DBs. Even worst case if 25% of the revenue gets lost due to secondary subscription payment support (assuming they don't somehow still take a cut), that 75% is still a monster that could support Apple for a long time.
Not to mention the rest of their businesses.
At this point they should self-regulate, like any misbehaving child who realizes they are in the wrong should before they get punished. It's not a risk and it's not going to hurt their stock if it's self-imposed. People always praise anything that comes from within with Apple so it would actually be a pretty savvy play, given what's on the horizon.
Also, they will still be one of the, if not most, profitable businesses in the world even if they lose all the App Store revenue, so it does not seem reasonable to expect more.
How is 5% "reasonable?" Who determines that? That's not something up for a vote -- that's up to the market.
Let's say you have an iOS app.
If you sell it for $5 on the App Store, you keep $3.5. And you sell 100,000.
App Store nets you $350k.
And let's say you sold the app direct to users and did everything yourself:
$5 sales price, you keep $5 however, you also have to collect and remit sales tax for jurisdictions in which you sell. Your street price is $5 + tax, and you keep the $5 but you incur some expense for sales tax compliance.
You have to use a payment processor. That's 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction. So if you sold 100k apps at $5, that's $455,500 in revenue after credit card fees are paid.
However, there's also chargebacks. Chargeback ratio averages roughly 0.6% across all industries (it's much higher for digital goods and CNP transactions -- so let's call it 1.5%) So from 100k sales, you really sell 98,5000, so your revenue is $448,667 (after cc fees.) However, you have 1500 in chargebacks that cost $20 each (per stripe.). So that's $30k in chargeback fees. So now your revenue is $418,667. Apple rarely loses chargebacks and refunds are extremely rare. So that sales loss is negligible.
You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads and pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth. As well as shipping updates to all of your customers. As well as ensuring updates are compatible for any iOS version your customers might be using. There's going to be some level of customer support required. That's a non-zero cost.
Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise. You'll need to market. And -- convince people that you aren't going to infect their device with malware.
Let's just assume that you sell just as many outside the App Store as you would doing it yourself. (That won't happen, but let's assume your marketing is so good that it's the case.)
The difference is $419-$350k. (That's assuming zero expense for hosting, marketing, customer support, etc.) So you're "losing" $69k per year. After tax however -- $280k from the App Store, $335k doing it yourself. So $55k additional. Yet you have hosting, customer support, marketing -- etc. $55k per year as a salary for doing those tasks is tiny and that doesn't include the cost of the hosting and bandwidth.
Try $0. Look at the App Store charts. The 200 top grossing apps are ironically all "Free": https://appfigures.com/top-apps/ios-app-store/united-states/...
This is the real problem, the crApp Store race to the bottom. Apple's cut was never really the problem. The cut is obscene, but only because the prices are already obscenely low. I'd be happy to give Apple 50% if I could sell my software for higher prices.
> And you sell 100,000.
Good luck with that.
> You also have to set up a server to serve the downloads and pay hosting, storage, and bandwidth.
Cheap.
> As well as shipping updates to all of your customers. As well as ensuring updates are compatible for any iOS version your customers might be using. There's going to be some level of customer support required.
You have to do these things anyway.
> Finally, how are people going to discover your app? You aren't on any app stores, so you have to advertise. You'll need to market. And -- convince people that you aren't going to infect their device with malware.
You have to do all of this stuff regardless of whether you're in the App Store. As an App Store developer myself, I can tell you that Apple absolutely does not do these things for you.
Notice how many Mac developers, given the choice, choose to distribute themselves rather than via the Mac App Store. They don't see the App Store as a win like you do.
If you ask Apple themselves to split the payment processing from the hosting and 'marketing', they claim it's 3% and 27%.
So if you could use their payment processing by itself, that would put you at $485k before server costs, not $419k. So you can have very nice servers and over a third more revenue.
You'll have to decide whether being in the main app store is important enough to pay a big percentage. And advertising and updates and customer support are costs either way, so please don't imply you only pay them if you avoid the app store.
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 impact on low performing public companies, followed by the higher performing public companies, and then the cargo cults.
The places that didn't go insane were not only unaffected but stand to benefit immensely.
Are they a good investment?
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.
A lot of the world's ills today seem to be boiling down to sociopathic trust fund billionaires treating literally everything in life as a game to be won.
Amazon saw a massive spike in their ecommerce business due to lockdowns so they had to hire to ensure they had the labour to deal with all the extra orders and deliveries. And even with this extra hiring I remember my deliveries being delayed often in 2020.
Saleforce is a weird software company because my understanding is a lot of their staff are there to help clients with integrations, manage accounts and to upsell. Again, assuming Salesforce saw a spike in demand during the pandemic they probably needed more employees because of the nature of their business.
My guess is that Apple also had to ramp up manufacturing significantly during the pandemic to meet demand, but obviously they don't employee people directly to do their manufacturing which probably gave them more flexibility when it came to meeting pandemic demand without increasing head count.
For the most part I don't understand why people act like tech companies were hiring recklessly during the pandemic. Are people forgetting how much demand was pulled forward by stimulus and lockdowns? These companies were forced to hire or lose market share. That's really the only two options they had.
Personally I'd be blaming politicians and the Fed for creating an impossible economic environment to operate in. If you were a company in 2020 your demand was either skyrocketing from lockdowns or at zero because you were forced to close your business. There was no in-between. Tech employees as initial beneficiaries of lockdowns are only now seeing the impact of job losses, but these were happening on mass elsewhere in the economy while lockdowns were in place.
It's pretty hard to be in charge of a public company and say no to the shareholders who want you to take advantage of the sudden bubble in demand.
Companies would have been punished for not growing, and now they are being punished if they don't shrink.
Who created that perverse system of incentives? The Fed, by making a number of mistakes in the past decade that kept the economy overboosted, by boosting it even more during 2020, and then by taking drastic action to kill the monster they created.
Similarly to those who blame companies for over hiring to meet pandemic demand, I've seen some people suggest the average home buyer was being reckless for buying a home during the pandemic, because "they brought the bubble!"
I guess it's strange to me how the Fed can pump every asset class to the moon, force companies to over hire to meet demand, and cause a huge inflationary problem for consumers – all while promising not to raise interest rates – then rug pull everyone but get no blame for any of it.
Instead I find I'm invited to blame the average business or home owner for being "reckless" for hiring to meet demand for buying a home for their family, while praising the Fed for "doing what's necessary"? Give me a break.
There were no consumer inflation issues for the past decade. It took a once in a life time pandemic supply shock to cause those issues. You're being unfair.
It's easy to blame the fed for all your problems. The fact is inflation was stable and the economy was just fine prior to the COVID19 pandemic. I don't think any amount of rate raises prior to 2020 would have had any appreciable impact on what we're facing now. Most of these layoffs are happening in the tech sector. Others are healthy. This isn't an economy wide problem yet. It's hard to not blame the individual companies for poor management.
> Instead I find I'm invited to blame the average business or home owner for being "reckless" for hiring to meet demand for buying a home for their family, while praising the Fed for "doing what's necessary"? Give me a break.
The fact is if you want what you want and want it now, and everyone else does, you have to pay. It's easy to say "oh they should've raised rates in 2017 or 2014" in 2022. It was much harder to say back then.
it's funny that you brought this up unprompted because this is the obvious counterargument - the fed really really should have been doing moderate tightening of the interest rate in 2017-2018-2019 and everybody knows it, even you. Everyone said it too, I completely do not get your "it was much harder to say it back then", this was specifically something that everyone said was a bad idea except for one individual (let's call him Individual Number One) who wanted to goose the economy to get numbers up for his re-election the following year, and instead leaned on the fed to cut interest rates instead, throwing gas onto an already-roaring fire. And then when the pandemic hit the fed had absolutely no room to maneuver.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/30/federal-r...
this was all extremely predictable, for literally everyone except Individual #1, who didn't really care.
Not really... Inflation began spiking in late 2020 / early 2021. It was completely foreseeable given how strong economic demand was and how quickly CPI was raising that inflation would be high in 2021. When CPI shot past 2% the Fed basically told businesses and investors not to worry about rates and that they were going to allow inflation to run hot and stimulate demand.
What you're saying suggests you don't understand what happen. Inflation surprised no one in 2021 the Fed was actively encouraging it for months while it was well beyond 2%. The Fed was basically telling people that if they had cash in the bank that they would continue to erode its value through inflation.
This is why businesses were scrambling to spend and there was high demand for hard assets like real estate. Its simple asset allocation. If you believe your cash is going to have negative real yields for the foreseeable future then you need to get out of cash and buy stuff which can benefit from the economic demand ASAP.
> The fact is inflation was stable and the economy was just fine prior to the COVID19 pandemic. I don't think any amount of rate raises prior to 2020 would have had any appreciable impact on what we're facing now.
I'm actually of the opinion that monetary policy was appropriate prior to 2020. I'm not someone who believes interest rates have been too low since the GFC although I'm aware this is a common talking point of people critical of the Fed.
The way I see it the Fed has a duty to keep inflation at their 2% target. The supportive monetary policy prior to 2020 was in pursuit of this goal and therefore appropriate imo so long as we care about that 2%. I disagree with what they did in 2021 and beyond precisely because they didn't do their job and disregarded their 2% inflation target in pursuit of keeping demand high.
> Most of these layoffs are happening in the tech sector. Others are healthy. This isn't an economy wide problem yet. It's hard to not blame the individual companies for poor management.
It's a tech problem for a reason though. Tech is naturally more interest rate sensitive than other sectors due to the funding and growth dynamics, but other rate sensitive sectors like real estate are also suffering. But the largest reason tech over invested in 2021 was because demand that was being pumped into the economy was largely being pushed into tech because of lockdowns.
I'm also of the opinion this will spread into the broader economy later this year and the full cost of the Feds mistake has not yet been felt.
> The fact is if you want what you want and want it now, and everyone else does, you have to pay.
I guess I don't really understand what you're saying. I mean do you think it was just all a coincidence or something? Why do you think people and business all suddenly wanted to buy things at the same time? Can you think of any reason why that might of happened?
Maybe people's cash was being erode by negative real yields? Maybe the government was stimulating demand via QE and fiscal stimulus? Maybe the Fed was buying hundreds of billions of dollars of assets while inflation was running above 2%? Maybe the central bank was explicitly telling people that they would continue to erode their purchasing power and couldn't give a damn about their inflation target?
Honestly it's hard for me to even understand how someone can even blame stock investors, crypto investors, real estate investors, tech companies, bond investors, consumers, etc all for being too greedy without even questioning why they were all so suddenly so greedy at exactly the same time.
> It's easy to say "oh they should've raised rates in 2017 or 2014" in 2022. It was much harder to say back then.
As I mentioned, this is opposite to the position I hold. Rates prior to 2020 were mostly appropriate imo and if anything I believe monetary policy should have been more accommodative.
It did later mean the cult-like indoctrination of the leadership principles made sense. When you’re growing at that rate (even not considering the attrition that happens along side it) you can easily end up in a place where _most_ of the employees have been with the company for 12mo or less. If you’ve any hope of maintaining a consistent culture over time you need to get in embedded into people quick. Because the new hires are looking at people who’ve only been there 9 months as though they’re the OGs of the company.
Apple's culture is not all that amendable to high growth of headcount[0]. Its not in their DNA. Steve Jobs in his return back to Apple setup a cultural legacy around hiring smart, hiring smart, and being intentional. That its better to invest in hiring the best you can and people who fit. When I was there, it was another huge boom time for most of the industry, and Apple still wasn't hiring fast like Meta (then Facebook) or Google was. Some departments in Apple do scale quickly, but typically there is a targeted plan behind that scaling.
In essence, they don't like to take shots on scaling the people aspect of the business, because they value culture fit extremely high and intentionally put it ahead of many other metrics internally.
That was and I believe still is the case
[0]: one can argue no company can take rapid headcount rises, but setting that aside, clearly a lot of companies thought it could work
Demand looked like it was growing massively with no end in sight, valuations were insane, and money was easy to get.
A lot of companies didn't stop to think that maybe it was all just a bubble. So they hired to avoid missing out.
Basic things like running a sustainable business with a sane balance sheet were not scrutinized by investors. Now they are, and in the layoff emails to employees we see CEOs talking about how that is important, as if they suddenly realized it for the first time.
To be fair, some of those companies probably did make a lot more money than they would have if they hadn't taken advantage of the situation -- and they probably would have been punished by their shareholders if they didn't.
Apparently you can't.
That's the cool part - you can't.
We forget that many of these companies have been doubling every few years already. Google and meta were startups in the 2000s, apple and Microsoft are 20+y older.
Basically, most of these tech companies have been hiring at a constant rate for years, and also experiencing constant attrition. Once the economy soured, and then hiring freezes started, attrition rates had crashed, and the employee count wasn't as affected by freeze as desired. The layoffs have been roughly a reset towards the headcount before the freeze for many companies.
While the whole article is paywalled, I'll quote an excerpt from ben Thompson:
> The popular narrative right now about these layoffs is that tech companies dramatically over-hired during the pandemic, but while that seems to have happened with Amazon — and for arguably very good reasons given the way that e-commerce shot up during lockdowns in particular — the reality is that the rest of the tech companies largely increased at the same rate they always had. Sure, the number of employees they added was large, but that was a function of keeping the same hiring rate off of an ever increasing base.
> In short, no one was giving up a job at one of the big five tech companies this year as fear spread about a broad-based slowdown in hiring... These companies, though, adjusted more slowly to the slower rate of attrition, which means they accidentally increased their headcount... the relatively limited size of the layoffs to date actually reflects that: these companies are not returning to their pre-pandemic levels of employees, but rather to where they would be had they kept up roughly the same rates of hiring this year that they have over the last ten
[0] https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
But surely someone must have questioned the industry mass over hiring with the Covid bubble and VC cheap money fuelling it for decades to result in these mass layoffs?
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 compared to low inflation and low interest rates. Then both of those things changed, so the ROI on a dev compared to investing in other things became much worse- so there's less money for developers.
Meanwhile, Apple has a mostly-stable massive chunk of the consumer device market and has always had a profit margin that is startlingly high. Not much has changed as far as they're concerned.
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 effect of senior staff at these companies having been completely detached from the pandemic experience of the majority of the population. Lots of people still had to go to work F2F, lots of people spent it cooped up in 30m2 apartments with flatmates they hate.
What you have to look at is e-commerce adoption as a % of retail. This % is increasing every year since the end of the 90s. It was about 10% pre-pandemic.
Of course they knew that the huge jump from COVID wouldn't be permanent. What they bet however is that once things re-open, SOME of that conversion to e-commerce would be permanent and that trend of % of retail on ecom would keep increasing at a faster pace than if COVID had not happened. Which wasn't the worse bet to take, you'd think that if people get used to a certain way of shopping and we invest in all this ecom infrastructure, some people would prefer the convenience of it in the long term.
Tobi explained it well in his announcement for layoffs last year at Shopify (which came much earlier than other tech companies, likely because their revenue is much more strongly related to ecom revenue) https://news.shopify.com/changes-to-shopifys-team
It's a reasonable strategy, the risk being their cost structure gets unbalanced and they might have to lay off people. Contrary to what people here seem to think, laying off people isn't the end of the world, and many of these companies are very comfortable doing it once their growth calculus changes. It was a calculated risk and if we are being honest, it paid off very well for most of the companies which are currently doing layoffs. In many cases the alternative would be to forfeit growth just to potentially save jobs down the line - but what would that look like for companies like Amazon? I don't know if people remember but when the pandemic hit Amazon was scrambling to meet the demands of customers and prime shipping times shot up from 1 day delivery to sometimes more than a week. Those situations would give competitors like WalMart an opening to capitalize on taking market share.
At the end of the day, no one had a crystal ball, and while companies probably shouldn't have assumed whatever growth rates of the quarter were permanent, to ignore the growth and not hire in that environment carried it's own risks. And besides, are the current growth rates permanent with all the macro-economic factors at play? Of course not, most likely the economy will pick up at some point, but companies don't know when exactly that will be, so the prudent thing is to prioritize their workforce on high priority revenue generating products and balance their cost structure around the current economic realities.
What matters is not getting fired.
It's hard to get fired if your actions are in line with the consensus.
I assume by `F2F` you mean "face-to-face"?
I think that's a matter of perspective. In my echo chamber, people live with flatmates that they get along with just fine and are happy that they don't have to go to an office to do work that could be done at home.
> More people than not spent 2 years complaining they couldn't leave the house
So... perhaps they do indeed want to "leave the house". But I think they still don't want to go to the office when they can work from home.
I think e-commerce is indeed shifted-up relative to the start of the pandemic. I think things that e-commerce can't do well are still where people want to leave the house. As you said, pubs/window shopping (not quite shopping itself)/holidays.
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.
Apple was largely unaffected by this because they are first in line for new fabrication processes, did not cancel their existing chip orders, and uses mostly modern fabs anyway, not bargain basement 40nm+ stuff.
The M1 and other 5nm and smaller chips largely kept pace with demand. It’s never been difficult to find a Mac throughout the pandemic.
See https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-imac-and-ipad-producti....
Apple had a big bump in pandemic-related revenue too, inspired by mass WFH hardware purchases. And now Apple revenue has gone down as well: https://sixcolors.com/post/2023/02/apple-results-and-charts-...
These dotcoms hired more people because that's what dotcoms do when they can.
Apple makes software, you know. ;-)
They also have many internet services, such as iCloud, App Store, Apple Music, TV+, etc.
I don't believe that any CEO/CFO with half a brain actually thought this. Sure, things wouldn't return to pre-pandemic levels necessarily, but the COVID-induced state was not going to permanently change human behavior.
> ROI on devs was good compared to low inflation and low interest rates. Then both of those things changed
this is more the reason; the "mea culpa, how could we have known" excuses is just to cover a regression to the mean they knew was eventually going to happen.
Both strategies make sense—make big, risky investments, or grind out more profits in existing, highly lucrative markets.
What are those risky bets I wonder?
Meanwhile Apple rolled out a completely custom CPU and transitioned all its hardware to it.
Amazon literally did the same with Graviton (to be fair they acquired a company doing this and used their work as the basis, but still). Google literally developed TPUs in the same timeframe, while also trying a few other things (Stadia, rip, comes to mind).
Was the ROI good though? Did any of these companies seem to deliver new products or features faster? Do their financials suggest that these devs somehow improved operational efficiency (e.g. improved gross margins)?
Or was it just that they hired because they could afford to?
The bloomberg article has a visual showing revenue-per-employee going up from 1.17M/employee (2017-2019) to 2.51M/employee (2020-2022), so ... some of the underlying economics changed somehow?
The pandemic probably contributed to that, but also during that period they went from their worst line of Macs in recent years to their best.
https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...
CEOs that didn't meet those needs would be fired for ceding market share instead. This demand explosion did not manifest in hardware companies such as 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 and the team members will then interview each candidate and decide to move forward or not with a candidate.
A manager at Meta, on the other hand, is constantly trying to sell their team to potential engineers looking to either switch from another team internally, or come from the general pool (bootcamp).
Make no mistake, both companies get headcount budgets driven by org-wide budgets set by the very top and HR uses that budget with very complicated formulas for determining how fast they need to hire to maintain or grow headcount to stay ahead of people leaving. Also, engineering managers absolutely have endless work to assign to new hires. So given the headcount, they will definitely make use of it.
All that to say, I do think Meta's internal team structure made it far easier to over-hire and Apple's intentionally inefficient structure prevented doing the same.
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.
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
Sometimes I come back to a very detailed bug report I wrote about something I found in another team's system. It has been fun to see it grow to almost 4 years old now. Although I am not happy it gets pushed back every release, I would certainly be less happy if it was just closed as "this will never be worth it".
Lots of small to massive very successful companies don't need to use their model of hiring a pool of people and then only later figuring out which role they will fill. If you're only hiring someone when you have identified a specific role and identified the correct person for that role it might take longer to hire someone, but you won't overhire as easily and you're probably more likely to have a higher hit rate in terms of getting the right person.
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.
But we all specialize in something and I don't really think I've gone down a path where any of those big companies would really ever be a good place for me now. I think whatever path you go down in terms of specialization would certainly influence your interactions with their recruiting.
I have been working/interviewing since the late 90s.. when I interviewed with various companies is over a 25 year period at this point, so they were not the same companies they are today. I interviewed at Apple in the late 90s when they were a mess, and I thought they were a mess. I didn't own a Mac, they were too expensive for me as a student, so I'm sure that didn't help. I turned down a job at MS out of college because they put a delay in the process and I'd gone elsewhere by the time they contacted me. MS would have been a better place for me to go to start. Google & Amazon I interviewed at > 10 years ago when public/industry opinion of them was much higher. By the time FB/Meta really got going I declined.. I have not had a strong opinion of them. However, of all my friends who have worked at the FAANG companies the ones who work at Meta seem the happiest, with the ones who worked Amazon having had the most unhappy experience and Google seemingly in the middle.
I'm not sure I'll ever get over my anti-MS bias. I respect them a lot for some things, but I had a couple of real shitty experiences with their university recruiting team about 10 years ago, and I don't like the way they make everything to be managed by others. That they sell consumer software feels like a bit of an anomaly sometimes.
Assuming there isn't a sharp dropoff of the ROI on the work juuuuust past the point where the current team can tackle it, that means that the work in the backlog is valuable and worth paying for. By chopping people they are saying actually, this work doesn't need to be done. Whether that work needs to be done or is valuable has not magically changed. That means the company was wrong all along about whether the work in the backlog was worth doing, and had all along had too many people on the team -- despite painfully fighting for headcount to get that work done, and despite careful calculus about which teams to spend budget on, all those managers were basically categorically wrong all along. How can we reconcile all that?
On the other hand, Google is all over the places, they are very distracted and confident that they will always be the indisputable kind in ads and search so they didn’t invest much in generating other long term major revenue streams.
Their incentives for promotions is all wrong and has led to tons of products being launched just for the sake of some manager aspirations and empowered, bored engineers who wanted to work on yet another green field project.
They missed the boat on the cloud, and unless they turn the ship very quickly they are gonna leave a big chunk of search and ads to Microsoft.
I’d argue they should also review their hiring strategy that have intoxicated the whole industry and clearly hasn’t led to better results.
I think this is a very muddled analysis. You seem to be saying that the lack of focus is caused by the perception of a permanent easy revenue stream. But I think the causation is actually the reverse of that. The lack of focus is more like a breadth first search for additional sustainable revenue streams undertaken because they know the golden goose can't lay eggs forever.
And similarly backwards: it is Apple who has the luxury of focus because high-end consumer computing hardware is a stable revenue stream with very little risk of drying up over a very long time horizon.
I think the difference is urgency. They probably do know that the golden eggs will stop coming at some point, but they don't believe it'll happen for a long while. Perhaps as a consequence of this, they very rarely commit to projects in a life-or-death way. At this point it's a HN trope to state this, but I do believe the reputational damage done by this lack of commitment to any of its fledgling projects is doing massive harm to Google's ability to find new revenue streams.
I think what people are saying is something like "Google needs to focus on a small number of new successful large revenue sources". Which, yes, of course! But they don't know what those are, and none of the backseat drivers do either.
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 left that to AWS and Azure ...
Don't get me wrong, I loved Google, I had much respect for them, and that's why I am so disappointed!
They doubled down on monetizing on user data, search and ads, and completely neglected other areas they could have dominated hands down.
"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. They are good businesses but not at all a full solution if the ads business declines substantially.
> Why didn't they launch something like ChatGPT?
Because billions of people would have used it immediately, and it's way too expensive for that. I suspect nobody yet has a way to serve these chats without the marginal revenue being negative. Google can't launch search features with rate limits, they can only launch things that are capable of serving billions of requests per day.
I'm not sure what argument you think I'm making that the Cloud thing is a counterargument to... My point is very much not "Google has always done everything right and made no mistakes". They absolutely missed the Cloud opportunity, and that's probably the only thing they've tried that could have been big enough if they'd entered the market early enough. (Maybe also if they had started making their own iphone-competitive hardware much earlier.)
But they thought going the social route, competing with Facebook, was going to be the answer, and the failure of that strategy was a major setback.
It could still be the case that this new era of AI is their saving grace. They still have a very real chance to be the first ones to figure out how to turn it into an economically sustainable product in some form. For all the hype, I sincerely doubt anyone has accomplished that yet. Definitely not OpenAI, and I'm guessing this Bing integration is a loss leader.
I was at a series B startup that did 15% layoffs during the first pandemic wave. The result: we moved faster, code quality went up, morale increased over time. Some layoffs are driven by necessity, and some are opportunistic ways for companies to retool and mass-fire low performers.
This applies at higher levels of abstractions too. When google did their layoffs, multiple entire unprofitable teams and business units were eliminated. It doesn't matter if "they could pay for it". They had an opportune excuse to remove some ugly looking lines from the balance sheet all at once and they took it.
It's impractical for them to try to differentiate high and low individual performers at that scale. No matter how talented you are, you were contributing to a loss-making part of the company.
Apple seems to have been better at not having useless teams and divisions. Tim Cook is a disciplined guy, so I'm not surprised.
Given that the evaluation of who to cut is made by outside groups, in a short period of time, without appeal, it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying. Without changing that mismanagement, the result won't be a better environment. The message to employees is rough also: "don't trust our performance evaluations".
> This is assuming that layoffs affect the correct group of people
Layoffs often don't target the right group of people when it comes to perf. There's error in human judgement abound. But it's 100% accurate when it comes to which business units are bringing in revenue, or costing a lot.
> why couldn't those people be informed earlier and been given a choice to find a different position or to improve their performance
Human attention is a scarce resource. Executives will tolerate inefficiency during up markets because it's more valuable to try to capture growth vs become efficient. When there's no growth to be had, then they turn their attention towards cutting costs.
> it seems more likely that layoffs in these cases are less about cutting low performers and more about getting rid of people the company is mismanaging, or people that the company is overpaying
The larger a company gets, the more these are effectively the same thing. Money in, value out. Too much money, too little value, you're just changing two sides of a ratio.
I’m half expecting you start quoting atlas shrugged here.
You’ve mistaken my statement about executive incentives for one about their competence.
Maybe the investments weren't successful or didn't pan out, but that is not to say they didn't invest.
The problem is the culture. Google is an exceptionally poorly managed company as a rule I claim this is by design from the beginning: as an engineering meritocracy, the technically best ideas won (over time) and employees voted with their feet. That doesn't scale. I'd argue that it began to fail pretty dramatically around the time Diane Greene took over Cloud and Prabhakar moved over (you could probably also argue that those org changes were lagging indicators, and the real start to the "problems" began when Ruth was hired) to run Ads/Search. As the board became increasingly business focused, the lack of solid management or even strategic leadership became more problematic.
What's rule #1 of B2B? Being responsive to your customers' needs and acting predictably. The lack of top-to-bottom management combined with the legacy meritocratic culture have not lent themselves to the same sort of command-and-control hierarchy you see at places like Apple & Microsoft, both of which have been almost entirely market driven for decades.
If you look at this[1] org chart cartoon from about ten years ago, you see what things looked like then. You had the Cult of Jobs at Apple, where a singular leader compartmentalized the entire company. You see the Sales & Marketing driven Microsoft, where Ballmer created stupid internal coopetition, and you see the insane messes at FB & Google. I suggest these are no longer accurate representations. As all of these big tech businesses have matured, everyone is converging on Amazon's & Oracle's command & control model, which is the traditional strategy for managing large organizations. It has been easier for some to get there (MSFT, for example, just had to remove the "guns" from their org chart), but at places like Google & Facebook there are fundamental changes that are required for the corporations to run efficiently that are also orthogonal to the founders' principles of how things should work, and (in my opinion) what you've been seeing in the past few quarters are "light" attempts at dealing with that. For Google it was the "cut off your nose to spite your face" 12k layoff. For FB it was a more existential staff cut but also the more recent notice to middle management that many of them are expected to become ICs again, to remove redundant layers.
I don't think it's in Google's current culture to "turn the ship quickly". Frankly, under the circumstances, I think the only way to legitimately force this would be to divorce Ads from the rest of the business (or even just make it its own Bet). Anything else will likely fail, slowly, and feel like death by a thousand cuts for the rank & file and like pushing a string uphill to the leadership.
[1] https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon...
I think I found the full interview on YouTube [1] Managers: From Italy to Top Global Businesses. Luca Maestri, CFO of Apple
Apple relies a lot on contractors. Those 2 IR folks likely have 2-3 comms firms on retainer. Those 7 treasury folks likely have an entire team staffed at a major bank.
Some companies decide to source labor in house, others don’t.
distribution/warehouse problem and over hiring problem are two separate problems.
i will explain overhiring problem.
from 2018 to 2021 many amazon executives and director leave company. this continued in 2022.
these “tech” leadership very hands on..strong technical acumen. they have vision..manage people..understand business..understand the tech and how to scale.
these people not perfect. under them it very hard burnout factory of place to work. good chance if you work here you need therapy.
these people all start leaving.
they replace by “professional” managers. professional manager has one goal: grow headcount and build empire so they get promoted.
entire teams exist with no valuable output. team of 8 people supporting a service built 10 years ago maybe doing patching like replace outdated java log4j library and redeploy. no feature work. entire team can be fired and service ownership could be given easily to some team doing feature work in another space.
this problem happening all over amazon. innovation at amazon is on how to increase revenue. what they do is hire mba grad, put pressure on them to deliver. Mba grad does obvious shitty thing… let show more ads. if you see amazon.com and search it is now flea market but before you buy any cheap trash first you see walls and walls of “sponsored” recommendation or what is actually fucking ad.
it a massive grift.
amazon need Bezos to return like bob iger do at Disney. jassy only focus on aws
Apple could layoff 4% in a week and these same analysts will try to explain why there was no other way
Highly unlikely: https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/02/apple-layoffs-tim-cook/
Its suboptimal to explicitly telegraph layoffs from an employee morale perspective. As leadership, its better to ask for forgiveness after the layoff than to ask for permission to lay off.
They may actually get through this without laying off, but its certainly not guaranteed just because the CEO says "no layoffs."
It's not just because of what the CEO said. The CEO's words are justified by the company's actions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34742642
More seriously, I realize this is just clickbait, but I wonder how you could determine objectively which approach (hiring slow and needing to catch up, hiring medium, hiring fast and needing to fire) is “better for business”. Seems very hard to control variables.
If we follow one path all the way to the end: If you can bring on a large number of people, then you can potentially evaluate them as "up-and-coming" high-quality talent. Those talents can be soaked in your business and technology stack, and become internal experts. Over that talent's life within the company, you may also underpay them relative to bringing in the same equivalent 10+ year veteran and training them on your internal assets.
On another path: You can also develop a broader population of mid-grade, quality talent which can strength workforce resilience.
During the mass layoff, procedures are different, and you may not have to follow quite the same fire-process as with an individual, and without some of the individual recourse processes regarding discrimination.
FWIW, Microsoft used to (still does?) had a certain percentage of layoffs every year. In a good environment, it's weeding; in a bad environment, it culls good talent.
Anyway, I see a difference between hiring and laying off vs. not hiring in the first place with regard to disruption in worker's lives.
I’ll take some of that kind of disruption, please.
Just wait for Elon to buy them
Yes, I consider it good management and judgement. Apple is a company, not some charity. Amazon, etc didn't hire out of the goodness of their hearts they felt they could capitalize on something that didn't materialize.
Well, maybe don't be mad at anyone. Aside from a small number of true a-holes, the vast majority of people are all stumbling along doing the best they can and trying to make the best decisions they can. Yep, sometimes we humans don't make the best decisions. Sometimes we do dumb things. But at the end of the day, I personally believe most of us are trying to do the right thing. If that wasn't true, our society would rapidly descend into chaos.
As for me, I'm trying not to be mad at anyone. You do you I guess.
It's so exhausting too.
One wonders why Apple gets high praise for "hiring cautiously".
But I think if you go back and look at who is criticizing Nintendo, they're not the same people criticizing Google and Amazon. They're opposing sides. It's move-fast-and-break-things versus do-it-right-the-first-time. Both have their merits.
But when you move fast and overhire, you upend people's lives when you have to let them go.
When you move slow, you provide fewer opportunities for people, but noone upends their lives over it.
For my comfort, I choose employers who prioritize keeping the team intact, even if that does mean fewer opportunities during boom times.
Its well understood that layoffs destroy the morale of your employees, and that they drive out a huge percentage of employees, and specifically the ones who have the best alternative options.
But I imagine that measuring the impact of brain drain from a layoff after a subsequent overhire compared to potential growth losses from not overhiring during the boom is one of those things that is extremely hard to measure.
Good on Apple and Nintendo for having strong enough and competent enough leadership to make that call, instead of the typical metric based CYA.
You've got it. The number of companies I've worked with who talk about being "data-driven" and who do not use any data for a majority of their decision making is ridiculous.
This is true, and goes double (at least) for anything that is at odds with maximizing superficial short-term profits, or with absolute control by management over employees' existences.
There are many studies at this point showing how much more productive and profitable companies can be when they treat their employees well and pay them at or above market rate, but the neofeudal mindset and the idea that this quarter's profit growth are the only metric are so deeply ingrained into so many people's heads that it's very, very hard to make any inroads.
Have you not read this forum for the past week? It's been riddled with techies ragging on tech CEO's for "blaming the economy" and not blaming themselves for over-hiring.
Okay, so the job wasn't the last of your career, you didn't get to commit the rest of your life to the company. But come on, it's not the 1950s anymore. People change jobs all the time, it's normal. If a company overhires for a few years then eventually corrects itself, that's the company screwing itself over but I think workers offended by this are getting emotionally over-invested. You got paid for your time and you got more out of the relationship than the company which never actually needed your labor in the first place. That's a win for you and a loss for the company, but not all good things can last forever.
Mass hiring distorts the entire job market. It draws people out of safer, more stable jobs. It draws people into the industry from other industries. It draws students into the industry, and into industry-related academic areas. If the gains were only short-term, that's not necessarily a good tradeoff for employees.
Some fairly straightforward examples of why dumping tens of thousands of people into financial precarity isn't a positive or neutral action:
* Rent is still due at the end of the month. Hopefully you don't have too long left on your lease if you find a job in another city.
* Many companies seem to be doing it simply because they can, rather than out of any kind of financial necessity.
* Recent hires likely haven't recouped their relocation costs.
* Finding a new job is more complicated when the market has been flooded with literally hundreds of thousands of people in the same situation.
* People lose part of their social circle, especially bad for people who gave up their existing one when relocating.
* Many applicants, especially graduates, have had accepted job offers withdrawn, putting them in a financially precarious position where they've turned down other offers and now need to scramble to find a way to pay their rent.
The fact is that most people only ever have a few months at most to find a new source of income. Losing your job in an environment where finding a new one is more challenging than normal is going to be hugely stressful for most. To be honest, I find it really odd that you're totally unaware why someone losing their job might affect them negatively.
The HN mob in general is pretty level headed, but its like someone kicked over the beehive.
I think the "I take full responsibility ..." that seems to be a regular fixture of layoff announcement suggests otherwise.
Meanwhile, PlayStation 6, Pixel 9, and iPhone 16 are foregone conclusions.
So as a metric it's very context-dependant.
If priority #1 is shareholder value, then doing all 3 of those makes sense.
If priority #1 is something other than money, then maximizing profit can lead to a negative impact on the true mission.
So I do agree it's context-dependant, but perhaps a slightly different context than you had in mind?
For example paying people less might impact your ability to improve your money stream. Similarly having fewer people may lead to some missed opportunities.
In India the size of organization that you manage signals the status of your position, and since a lot of engineers are from India - no wonder this practice becomes norm in the US
If you let manager choose whom to manage: 10 brilliant scientists in a research group, or 100 engineers building a product - almost every Indian manager will choose the latter
From what I recall Nintendo’s hiring was never the issue but the pay
Google? Facebook? Microsoft? All very profitable, all doing layoffs.
You don't have to guess. These are publicly owned corporations. Their published balanced sheets include debt.
This is the important word. Although Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft overall are profitable there are parts of it that a) was (and still not profitable) and b) was in demand in the last three years but are now softened enough that it turns "okay, unprofitable but manageble" into "this has become a money pit". Since that they are cutting off anyway, why not throw laggards and undesirables into the mix? I estimate that around half is genuine cost-savings and another half is euphemistic firing, which I'll be honest muddies the explanation up a bit.
For Google, their focus was on the cloud and productivity products. Even discounting the already-planned Stadia layoffs, it is well-known that Google has targeted 2023 as its Google Cloud break-even point. If they can't profit on user acquisition then they need to cut up costs. This is why they're now aggressive on closing up GCP products so that the core GCP product can be operated with less expense. Additionally, their Workspace and ChromeOS team were also gutted because the Chromebook boom induced by the pandemic is now over (will expand over at Microsoft's explanation).
Microsoft's cuts are also focused on productivity suites. The boom times for PCs is over so they need to cut costs there, and it shows hard. Both the Windows and 365 subteams were gutted further since that companies have now time to actually count up how many licenses they need, plus since Windows 11 is "free" the only revenue is from OEMs and business. OEMs now buys fewer licenses because the boom times is over. Businesses are not thrilled at Windows 11 and are secretly waiting for a Windows 12 or a 10 ESU. Azure is now slightly profitable but as you might have guess "slight" is unacceptable to shareholders so some were also let go too.
Meta no longer grows in its traditional business in social media and fails to crack the secret to an enjoyable metaverse, with most people passing it off as a fad and even metaverse believers flocking to competitors that were already there and have better products. It's plain obvious why they need to reduce headcount.
"Almost 20 years in, Facebook is still growing. The social network now has 2 billion daily active users, Meta reported alongside its fourth-quarter earnings. The report marks the first time Facebook, which added 16 million users last quarter, has reached 2 billion daily users." https://www.engadget.com/facebook-2-billion-meta-q4-2022-ear...
Source: a low level manager at Apple.
You or a friend?
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...
It's different this time around though, because economy. The tech layoffs started at the least profitable companies with the weakest balance sheets first (Google, Microsoft), and besides the whole economy is doing massive layoffs because of the recession and high interest rates: https://www.nar.realtor/blogs/economists-outlook/instant-rea...
"U.S. reports blowout job growth; unemployment lowest since 1969" https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-job-growth-accelerates-j...
Although last week the US announced an unexpectedly strong jobs report, roughly 80% higher jobs growth than expected. (180,000 projected, 300,000 actual iirc).
Microsoft was profitable all along (I think).
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.
With the pandemic there was an excuse to pretend again that the sky was the limit. That attitude seems now being corrected - reverting to a cash-cow model. Some companies can do cash-cows better than others ;-)
P.s. another factor where Apple tries to differentiate itself is the privacy front. What it believes in practice is a different matter, but to the degree that there are visible legislative headwinds this would make any tech company that directly or indirectly draws revenue contingent on current rules might be more cautious going forward.
And yes, of course, I know there are other terminal apps for macOS. I just want the built-in one to get fixed.
And don't get me started about Tektronix and ReGIS graphics...
They did it because everyone else is doing it.
IMO that makes Apple even more commendable. If my understanding is correct, that would imply they have more of a spine than these other morally ambiguous companies. Not saying Apple isn’t morally ambiguous, but in comparison it seems like a fair conclusion.
Although the article is paywalled so I don't know, maybe the author has a quote from Apple with some statement minimally confirming this.
137k in 2019 -> 164k in 2022
like ~6% a year growth compounded
Maybe they learned their lesson.
For example, if Apple grew headcount by 20%, but laid off zero percent — percentage wise, they’re still significantly behind contributions made to labor market of a comparable company that double in size and then laid off 20% of its workforce; meaning not only did the comparable company increase the percentage of people being paid during the period, but also at the end of the period had increased the overall percentage of new employees.
There are now so many wellness coordination inclusion coordinator coordinators that explain the bloat. And there's an army of accountant data analysts who micromanage purchases of managers making $700k for work-necessary items costing $200.
PS: I work there.
So there is no official statement from Apple saying that they are not planning a layoff round in the coming months, just the opinion of 2 analysts? Apple isn't avoiding anything.
Every CEO says its a last resort, they tried everything, etc. Cooks statement isn't any different
Otherwise they are pretty similar sized "Big Tech" companies.
Apple: 164,000 employees
Google: 150,000 employees
Amazon: ~800,000 corporate employees (this one was harder to find but the tech/software team is probably similar to above)
People forget these days but the entire point of the stock market is to give companies a money-printing machine. More accurately, it's an on-demand way of obtaining investment by sucking up value from the people who hold your shares.
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/leading-apple-with/9781...
But some people still have this belief that 9 women can make a baby in a month.
“Brooks' law is an observation about software project management according to which adding manpower to a software project that is behind schedule delays it even longer.”
I also think they’re doing research, not development most of the time. Such projects can’t be time-estimated, so they can’t be late (managers or outsiders still might call them late, though), and often can’t be parallelized well (“9 women cannot make a baby in one month”), so starting out with a larger team may not have helped, either.
Did they announce an AR headset, not bring it to market and someone else's got wildly popular or...?