8 ms·

Apple expanding outside of SV as it struggles to recruit and retain talent

40 points by retskrad 5y ago

wolverine876 5y ago
Note that it's been going on for years and it's not related to the trendy anti-urban, anti-SV, anti-CA meme. I'd be interested in interviews with executives about what is attractive about SV and what, if anything, has changed (without the current trendy stuff). Living costs and talent have been expensive for a long time.
- novok 5y ago
  Cupertino is boring american suburb too, and as far as american suburbs goes, a bit shoddy and crappy. Not that urban.
  - linguae 5y ago
    Disclaimer: I'm live in the Santa Cruz area and visit Cupertino at least once a week. Cupertino might not be the most active place in terms of things to do, especially regarding nightlife (which the most exciting thing is probably getting donuts at the 24/7 donut place on De Anza south of Apple's old headquarters). However, Cupertino has an amazing selection of Asian restaurants that you can't find in most American suburbs. We're talking authentic Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese restaurants. One of my favorite Japanese restaurants in the Bay Area is Ajito on Bollinger Road near De Anza Blvd, which is a Japanese izakaya that specializes in chicken-based dishes. I go there regularly, and during the pandemic I bought take-out hot bento boxes, which are delicious! Another one of my favorite restaurants in Cupertino is a Taiwanese restaurant on Wolfe across the street from Apple's new headquarters called Southland Flavor Café. It has some of the best shrimp fried rice I've ever tasted this side of the Pacific! I wish most American suburbs had the collection of Asian restaurants that Cupertino has. But outside of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, most American suburbs don't have that extensive of a collection.
    - novok 5y ago
      There is a difference between some nice immigrant restaurant availability in sad looking strip malls because the immigrant population there can support it, and a well designed 'nice' neighborhood with well maintained roads, interesting architecture, nice houses, overall liveliness and cultural interestingness. More flavors on the menu only goes so far. Seriously, you put mountain view or cupertino in an average town in north america and people would think your in a lower-middle working class neighborhood that that has budget problems that is emptying out, with a large abandoned mall that just sat there empty for years until very recently and broken pot holed roads everywhere. It's bizzare. Even nearby Stockton, being famous for going bankrupt, has better road conditions than Cupertino on average. And cupertino has a company that is in the top 3 in global market cap headquartered there.
      - conk 5y ago
        Not too long ago Cupertino and Mountain View were lower-middle working class neighborhoods.
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        > More flavors on the menu only goes so far. It's gone pretty far in Cupertino.
      - GhettoChild 5y ago
        As someone who grew up in The Bay I never really comprehended the blandness of the Valley until I started traveling. Other than the weather there is nothing about SV that is all that special or unique. Its as if you dropped of Tulsa Oklahoma on coastal California.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Hasn't that long been true? Yet Cupertino has been part of the IT capital of the world. The question is, what is attractive about SV and what has changed?
    - novok 5y ago
      Nothing has really changed, more like the pressures of building negatives of living in the SFBA were building up and up, and black swan COVID broke the game of remote chicken where %33 of their staff were distributed all over america and they are realizing they don't want to go back. Apple is trying to return to the status quo, but now the game has changed, and they are dragging their feet about it. As to what is good about the SFBA, well it has great weather and still has a large concentration of smart people to hire.
      - GhettoChild 5y ago
        I have always been of the mindset that if companies were willing to pay SV salaries in cheap parts of the country they would be able to recruit smart people to move there. Money is an amazing motivator.
deregulateMed 5y ago
They think it's location based? I just can't work for a company that bends to the Chinese Dictatorship and suppresses Democratic ideas.
- 4wsn 5y ago
  I'm legitimately baffled by this sentiment, not just when it's targeted at Apple (see Blizzard). I feel like I missed a memo everyone got but me where we decided to only do business with people we agree with. I'm getting on in my 30s and I can sense my ideas fossilizing somewhat, so I do try my best to counter that by being open to new ideas. But this one is hard to process. What are we supposed to do with countries we disagree with? Boycott them, trade with them but ignore their domestic laws if we find them distasteful, organize coups to overthrow their governments and install ones we agree with? What's the actual plan once we're done posturing?
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    I guess you didn't get the memo: - the CCP has been in a Cold War with the US since the Korean War - the CCP is in a genocide campaign against multiple religions - the CCP finances their health care syste with involuntary organ donations - the CCP's main military target for their nuclear and hypersonic missiles is the US. It's not a "disagreement." They're monsters.
  - supercanuck 5y ago
    >What are we supposed to do with countries we disagree with? Criticize them and slowly change public sentiment of the brand until they make better choices. This is the free market and democratic way.
  - over_bridge 5y ago
    Why would you do business with people you disagree with? I wouldn't knowingly serve wife beaters or pedos in my ice cream shop. Why would I trade with genocidal human rights abusers as a corporation? Cause they have cash? Come on, have some standards. Don't be an empty suit and actually believe in something.
ampdepolymerase 5y ago
It is a well known fact that Apple's pay is bad. They are like game studios, they sell a dream and the perception of changing the world to engineers who should be old enough to know better.
- frankbreetz 5y ago
  Bad compared to what? Apple is one of the highest paying companies out there. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Apple/salaries/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Apple/salaries/
  - innagadadavida 5y ago
    Most employees in Apple cannot afford to live anywhere close by - they commute from far away to afford a decent place. Given Apple makes close to $2M in revenues per employee, this is just sad.
    - GhettoChild 5y ago
      Thats the case for every company in The Bay. Only the most senior of employees make enough to live in a home near work.
fxtentacle 5y ago
I can only speak for myself but Tim Cook's Apple seems more like you're joining as a tiny cog in a huge manufacturing machine and not as someone who actually gets to make decisions to improve the product. Otherwise, I wouldn't know why Apple's developers added so many "features" that developers hate.
- taywrobel 5y ago
  I worked at Apple for 3 and a half years, leaving a few years ago. I think the thing to remember about Cook is that he’s a process and money guy, previously being the COO. I don’t think anyone at Apple would call him a “visionary” like they said about Jobs; that’s just not his style. However the repercussions of this were pretty clearly felt, at least by me and my organization. We were tasked with a monumental infrastructure undertaking while continuing to support production use cases, and we were running as a skeleton crew for a lot of it, because getting headcount to hire more was such a heavily scrutinized process. So I ended up on a team of 3 people maintaining 3 separate server components. It was honestly sort of brutal. And I know Jobs was also famous for working people hard, but he had the charisma to make it have purpose. We were under Tim, and then under Eddy, who are… not the most charismatic fish in the sea. It really just felt like we were being pushed needlessly hard when hiring one or two more people would have made a massive difference and improved the overall development cadence and quality.
  - ksec 5y ago
    >Cook is that he’s a process and money guy “People start to get confused that the process is the content...And that’s what makes great products. It’s not the process, it’s the content.” —Steve Jobs [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
  - novok 5y ago
    Apple was always weirdly cheap internally. Cheap on pay, cheap on team size and cheap on giving their engineers machines, unless you were working on special blessed projects. I think it was trauma from the time they almost died in the late 90s before jobs came back and saved the company, and they could afford to keep it because it kept on working.
geofft 5y ago
Apple is specifically in Cupertino, which is the suburbia part of Silicon Valley. The term "Silicon Valley" has been shifting in the last decade+ to encompass the cities of San Francisco and Oakland and basically to be equivalent to "San Francisco Bay Area," but Apple remains actually in Silicon Valley. So that means you have the drawbacks of high cost of living but none of the attractions of being in an urban city. Getting between Cupertino and San Francisco is awful - your options are a lengthy Caltrain or a miserable drive, and neither living in SF and commuting to Cupertino nor living in Cupertino and heading to SF in the evenings (and heading back home late at night) are particularly enjoyable. So you don't really get the cultural benefits of being near a big city. I learned recently that Apple does have a NYC engineering office (I live in NYC, and I used to live and commute in SFBA), which made me actually think about applying to work there for the first time ever. The cost of living in NYC is a bit higher, but at least I get to actually enjoy the city, which makes it much more worthwhile for that cost of living than working in the Valley proper.
- moneywoes 5y ago
  How have you liked NYCs weather compared to the Bay Area?
  - geofft 5y ago
    It is a little disappointing that it's not bike-to-work weather year-round (it gets both too hot and too cold). But I do enjoy winter and snow, so overall I appreciate the changing seasons, and none of the extremes are really too extreme. (It also helps that the subways generally keep running through the entire winter; I suspect I would dislike Cupertino density with NYC climate.)
- GhettoChild 5y ago
  Everything I have seen has indicated that cost of living in NYC is actually lower than in the SFBA but then again many people would not even consider in living in some of the boroughs
pcurve 5y ago
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is more or less back to working at office. I love flexibility of working from home, but I also wonder if this will soon hit an inflection point towards gradual decline.
musicale 5y ago
Tech companies struggle to retain employees because of overwork and poor incentives (financial and otherwise) for staying with the company. There's a reason why Steve Jobs wanted an anti-poaching agreement with Google; when people find out they could make more money working at another company, they're likely to consider leaving or trying to negotiate a pay raise. Another problem is that a portion of Apple's compensation package (like those of some research labs, game companies, etc.) is paid in intangibles (prestige, coolness, blessings of St. Jobs, etc.) rather than dollars.
- griffoa 5y ago
  Exactly. I have worked there and I would advice anyone who considers it, to just let it go. It is a horrible place to work.
dmode 5y ago
Feels like a very speculative article. I work at a FAANG and regularly recruit. We receive 400+ resumes for any open PM positions based in SV
- novok 5y ago
  And how many of those resumes are not absolute trash after the first foo bar filter?
watersb 5y ago
Buy me a house in a great place for my kids within 30 minutes commute time, and I will consider the other things in your job offer. If you add a huge arcology within walking distance to your mother ship, so that we can all live in the beautiful glass dream, I might consider that rather than a house. But then again, if you won't hire a reasonable number of people to do the work anyway, I probably won't trust you to run the homeowner's association
native_samples 5y ago
I wonder to what extent this is also driven by the shape of their headquarters. Ive has left them saddled with a very cool looking but completely unexpandable donut shape. It means every time they want to add more people than the donut can support those people have to become very visibly 'second class citizens', housed in boxy generic offices. The picking and choosing would be quite bad for their cohesiveness, one might imagine. Apparently GCHQ in the UK had the same problem. They moved into a new donut shaped office but they somehow managed to not count one of their teams when doing the capacity planning and ended up with an office that was too small for the organization. And what's the one office shape you cannot expand in any way? A circle.
- quantumwannabe 5y ago
  You could always do multiple rings, like the Pentagon has. I believe GCHQ did say that their building's design was inspired by the Pentagon's, so it'd make sense.
- Boltgolt 5y ago
  As an intelligence agency the GCHQ should have added a boxy extention to the circle, turning it into a massive magnifying glass
- novok 5y ago
  I always felt like the donut was a missed opportunity, they could of made it triple the height. Typical SFBA suburban zoning restrictions probably limited them to the bog standard 4 story max, even though that 'high rise' was surrounded by parkland.
naveen99 5y ago
I wonder why apple didn’t move to Seattle to escape taxes for their employees like microsoft and Amazon. if your employees have to pay more income tax, it’s kind of like a tax on the employer indirectly too.

40 points by retskrad 5y ago

Note that it's been going on for years and it's not related to the trendy anti-urban, anti-SV, anti-CA meme. I'd be interested in interviews with executives about what is attractive about SV and what, if anything, has changed (without the current trendy stuff). Living costs and talent have been expensive for a long time.

novok 5y ago
Cupertino is boring american suburb too, and as far as american suburbs goes, a bit shoddy and crappy. Not that urban.
- linguae 5y ago
  Disclaimer: I'm live in the Santa Cruz area and visit Cupertino at least once a week. Cupertino might not be the most active place in terms of things to do, especially regarding nightlife (which the most exciting thing is probably getting donuts at the 24/7 donut place on De Anza south of Apple's old headquarters). However, Cupertino has an amazing selection of Asian restaurants that you can't find in most American suburbs. We're talking authentic Taiwanese, Chinese, and Japanese restaurants. One of my favorite Japanese restaurants in the Bay Area is Ajito on Bollinger Road near De Anza Blvd, which is a Japanese izakaya that specializes in chicken-based dishes. I go there regularly, and during the pandemic I bought take-out hot bento boxes, which are delicious! Another one of my favorite restaurants in Cupertino is a Taiwanese restaurant on Wolfe across the street from Apple's new headquarters called Southland Flavor Café. It has some of the best shrimp fried rice I've ever tasted this side of the Pacific! I wish most American suburbs had the collection of Asian restaurants that Cupertino has. But outside of the Bay Area and Los Angeles, most American suburbs don't have that extensive of a collection.
  - novok 5y ago
    There is a difference between some nice immigrant restaurant availability in sad looking strip malls because the immigrant population there can support it, and a well designed 'nice' neighborhood with well maintained roads, interesting architecture, nice houses, overall liveliness and cultural interestingness. More flavors on the menu only goes so far. Seriously, you put mountain view or cupertino in an average town in north america and people would think your in a lower-middle working class neighborhood that that has budget problems that is emptying out, with a large abandoned mall that just sat there empty for years until very recently and broken pot holed roads everywhere. It's bizzare. Even nearby Stockton, being famous for going bankrupt, has better road conditions than Cupertino on average. And cupertino has a company that is in the top 3 in global market cap headquartered there.
    - conk 5y ago
      Not too long ago Cupertino and Mountain View were lower-middle working class neighborhoods.
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      > More flavors on the menu only goes so far. It's gone pretty far in Cupertino.
    - GhettoChild 5y ago
      As someone who grew up in The Bay I never really comprehended the blandness of the Valley until I started traveling. Other than the weather there is nothing about SV that is all that special or unique. Its as if you dropped of Tulsa Oklahoma on coastal California.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Hasn't that long been true? Yet Cupertino has been part of the IT capital of the world. The question is, what is attractive about SV and what has changed?
  - novok 5y ago
    Nothing has really changed, more like the pressures of building negatives of living in the SFBA were building up and up, and black swan COVID broke the game of remote chicken where %33 of their staff were distributed all over america and they are realizing they don't want to go back. Apple is trying to return to the status quo, but now the game has changed, and they are dragging their feet about it. As to what is good about the SFBA, well it has great weather and still has a large concentration of smart people to hire.
    - GhettoChild 5y ago
      I have always been of the mindset that if companies were willing to pay SV salaries in cheap parts of the country they would be able to recruit smart people to move there. Money is an amazing motivator.

deregulateMed 5y ago

They think it's location based? I just can't work for a company that bends to the Chinese Dictatorship and suppresses Democratic ideas.

4wsn 5y ago
I'm legitimately baffled by this sentiment, not just when it's targeted at Apple (see Blizzard). I feel like I missed a memo everyone got but me where we decided to only do business with people we agree with. I'm getting on in my 30s and I can sense my ideas fossilizing somewhat, so I do try my best to counter that by being open to new ideas. But this one is hard to process. What are we supposed to do with countries we disagree with? Boycott them, trade with them but ignore their domestic laws if we find them distasteful, organize coups to overthrow their governments and install ones we agree with? What's the actual plan once we're done posturing?
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  I guess you didn't get the memo: - the CCP has been in a Cold War with the US since the Korean War - the CCP is in a genocide campaign against multiple religions - the CCP finances their health care syste with involuntary organ donations - the CCP's main military target for their nuclear and hypersonic missiles is the US. It's not a "disagreement." They're monsters.
- supercanuck 5y ago
  >What are we supposed to do with countries we disagree with? Criticize them and slowly change public sentiment of the brand until they make better choices. This is the free market and democratic way.
- over_bridge 5y ago
  Why would you do business with people you disagree with? I wouldn't knowingly serve wife beaters or pedos in my ice cream shop. Why would I trade with genocidal human rights abusers as a corporation? Cause they have cash? Come on, have some standards. Don't be an empty suit and actually believe in something.

ampdepolymerase 5y ago

It is a well known fact that Apple's pay is bad. They are like game studios, they sell a dream and the perception of changing the world to engineers who should be old enough to know better.

frankbreetz 5y ago
Bad compared to what? Apple is one of the highest paying companies out there. https://www.levels.fyi/company/Apple/salaries/ https://www.levels.fyi/company/Apple/salaries/
- innagadadavida 5y ago
  Most employees in Apple cannot afford to live anywhere close by - they commute from far away to afford a decent place. Given Apple makes close to $2M in revenues per employee, this is just sad.
  - GhettoChild 5y ago
    Thats the case for every company in The Bay. Only the most senior of employees make enough to live in a home near work.

fxtentacle 5y ago

I can only speak for myself but Tim Cook's Apple seems more like you're joining as a tiny cog in a huge manufacturing machine and not as someone who actually gets to make decisions to improve the product. Otherwise, I wouldn't know why Apple's developers added so many "features" that developers hate.

taywrobel 5y ago
I worked at Apple for 3 and a half years, leaving a few years ago. I think the thing to remember about Cook is that he’s a process and money guy, previously being the COO. I don’t think anyone at Apple would call him a “visionary” like they said about Jobs; that’s just not his style. However the repercussions of this were pretty clearly felt, at least by me and my organization. We were tasked with a monumental infrastructure undertaking while continuing to support production use cases, and we were running as a skeleton crew for a lot of it, because getting headcount to hire more was such a heavily scrutinized process. So I ended up on a team of 3 people maintaining 3 separate server components. It was honestly sort of brutal. And I know Jobs was also famous for working people hard, but he had the charisma to make it have purpose. We were under Tim, and then under Eddy, who are… not the most charismatic fish in the sea. It really just felt like we were being pushed needlessly hard when hiring one or two more people would have made a massive difference and improved the overall development cadence and quality.
- ksec 5y ago
  >Cook is that he’s a process and money guy “People start to get confused that the process is the content...And that’s what makes great products. It’s not the process, it’s the content.” —Steve Jobs [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
- novok 5y ago
  Apple was always weirdly cheap internally. Cheap on pay, cheap on team size and cheap on giving their engineers machines, unless you were working on special blessed projects. I think it was trauma from the time they almost died in the late 90s before jobs came back and saved the company, and they could afford to keep it because it kept on working.

geofft 5y ago

Apple is specifically in Cupertino, which is the suburbia part of Silicon Valley. The term "Silicon Valley" has been shifting in the last decade+ to encompass the cities of San Francisco and Oakland and basically to be equivalent to "San Francisco Bay Area," but Apple remains actually in Silicon Valley. So that means you have the drawbacks of high cost of living but none of the attractions of being in an urban city. Getting between Cupertino and San Francisco is awful - your options are a lengthy Caltrain or a miserable drive, and neither living in SF and commuting to Cupertino nor living in Cupertino and heading to SF in the evenings (and heading back home late at night) are particularly enjoyable. So you don't really get the cultural benefits of being near a big city. I learned recently that Apple does have a NYC engineering office (I live in NYC, and I used to live and commute in SFBA), which made me actually think about applying to work there for the first time ever. The cost of living in NYC is a bit higher, but at least I get to actually enjoy the city, which makes it much more worthwhile for that cost of living than working in the Valley proper.

moneywoes 5y ago
How have you liked NYCs weather compared to the Bay Area?
- geofft 5y ago
  It is a little disappointing that it's not bike-to-work weather year-round (it gets both too hot and too cold). But I do enjoy winter and snow, so overall I appreciate the changing seasons, and none of the extremes are really too extreme. (It also helps that the subways generally keep running through the entire winter; I suspect I would dislike Cupertino density with NYC climate.)
GhettoChild 5y ago
Everything I have seen has indicated that cost of living in NYC is actually lower than in the SFBA but then again many people would not even consider in living in some of the boroughs

pcurve 5y ago

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is more or less back to working at office. I love flexibility of working from home, but I also wonder if this will soon hit an inflection point towards gradual decline.

musicale 5y ago

Tech companies struggle to retain employees because of overwork and poor incentives (financial and otherwise) for staying with the company. There's a reason why Steve Jobs wanted an anti-poaching agreement with Google; when people find out they could make more money working at another company, they're likely to consider leaving or trying to negotiate a pay raise. Another problem is that a portion of Apple's compensation package (like those of some research labs, game companies, etc.) is paid in intangibles (prestige, coolness, blessings of St. Jobs, etc.) rather than dollars.

griffoa 5y ago
Exactly. I have worked there and I would advice anyone who considers it, to just let it go. It is a horrible place to work.

dmode 5y ago

Feels like a very speculative article. I work at a FAANG and regularly recruit. We receive 400+ resumes for any open PM positions based in SV

novok 5y ago
And how many of those resumes are not absolute trash after the first foo bar filter?

watersb 5y ago

Buy me a house in a great place for my kids within 30 minutes commute time, and I will consider the other things in your job offer. If you add a huge arcology within walking distance to your mother ship, so that we can all live in the beautiful glass dream, I might consider that rather than a house. But then again, if you won't hire a reasonable number of people to do the work anyway, I probably won't trust you to run the homeowner's association

native_samples 5y ago

I wonder to what extent this is also driven by the shape of their headquarters. Ive has left them saddled with a very cool looking but completely unexpandable donut shape. It means every time they want to add more people than the donut can support those people have to become very visibly 'second class citizens', housed in boxy generic offices. The picking and choosing would be quite bad for their cohesiveness, one might imagine. Apparently GCHQ in the UK had the same problem. They moved into a new donut shaped office but they somehow managed to not count one of their teams when doing the capacity planning and ended up with an office that was too small for the organization. And what's the one office shape you cannot expand in any way? A circle.

quantumwannabe 5y ago
You could always do multiple rings, like the Pentagon has. I believe GCHQ did say that their building's design was inspired by the Pentagon's, so it'd make sense.
Boltgolt 5y ago
As an intelligence agency the GCHQ should have added a boxy extention to the circle, turning it into a massive magnifying glass
novok 5y ago
I always felt like the donut was a missed opportunity, they could of made it triple the height. Typical SFBA suburban zoning restrictions probably limited them to the bog standard 4 story max, even though that 'high rise' was surrounded by parkland.

naveen99 5y ago

I wonder why apple didn’t move to Seattle to escape taxes for their employees like microsoft and Amazon. if your employees have to pay more income tax, it’s kind of like a tax on the employer indirectly too.