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> Apple, meanwhile, was more cautious. Its headcount increased just 20% from 2020 to 2022 At Apples size this is still pretty huge. At least, I thought it was

• throwaway1777 4y ago
  Correct on all counts. The hiring was insane and even with the cuts the number of employees is still higher than 2020
• etempleton 4y ago
  Growing too fast is damaging to both culture and productivity. You have a bunch of people starting that are still learning. Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job. Apple was smart to move slower. They are probably one of the best run companies in the world.
  • deelowe 4y ago
    My experience is in cloud and I can give some insight on what we were thinking at this time. In cloud, infrastructure is key and our theory was that we needed to beat the other companies in terms of scale and capability. So we were aggressively trying to scale to get ahead of the competition. The environment was highly competitive all the way down to even the PCBA manufacturers. As an example, at one company, to get their "A teams" you need to be their top customer in terms of volume. So while it looks odd by comparison, cloud providers were in a bit of a different environment than Apple.
  • mbesto 4y ago
    > Growing too fast is damaging to both culture and productivity. This seems to be general sentiment here lately. Do you have any evidence to support this or is purely conjecture?
    • spacephysics 4y ago
      Not that I have a rigorous source, but I feel we can generally agree the following: 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
      • mbesto 4y ago
        Okay cool. But, none of this addresses the opportunity cost. What happens if you don't hire fast and you miss revenue opportunities. As the saying goes "revenue solves everything".
        • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
          Cash flow solves everything, or profit solves everything are perhaps better phrases, since apparently people forgot that the purpose of a company is to make profit, not just revenue.
  • inetknght 4y ago
    > [Apple is] probably one of the best run companies in the world. 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.
    • bell-cot 4y ago
      >...more on short-term gains instead of long-term quality... Considering that Tim has been CEO for 11 1/2 years now, and things are still going incredibly well for Apple...it seems pretty hard to argue that he is too focused on the short term. (FWIW, I mostly agree about their software quality.)
      • dumpsterdiver 4y ago
        Speaking of software quality, anyone notice in Apple Music how the categories all start with Apple? Apple Dance music, Apple Country, Apple Pop... like are they trying to make it intentionally difficult for me to use my eyes to find music? I know that I'm using Apple Music... why does every category need to remind me of that while simultaneously impeding my ability to locate things alphabetically? Of course, when I use Siri I can just say "play Dance music" and it works. Hmm.
        • eitally 4y ago
          It could be worse. If you were on Android, about half of Google's 1P apps start with "Google", and about half don't, even ones that probably should (like Google Home).
        • brnt 4y ago
          Soon in supermarkets near you: the Apple Apple. Beautiful, healthy, tasty; no buttons!
          • 4y ago
  • sam0x17 4y ago
    > They are probably one of the best run companies in the world. 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.
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Playing the game according to the current rules seems preferable than playing the game according to rules that may or may not come into existence. 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.
      • sam0x17 4y ago
        Companies of this size need to play the long game, but quarterly OKRs and a beuracratic structure ensure they only ever play the short game. The 30% is great this quarter and next quarter, and every quarter until the quarter where it goes away completely. Keeping it this high is extremely risky behavior, literally taunting for regulation.
        • lotsofpulp 4y ago
          If you look at Apple’s results and products and think they are playing for next quarter, I do not know what to tell you. The App Store model has served them well for years. If it stops serving them well next quarter, so what?
  • nashashmi 4y ago
    > one of the best run companies 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 https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1l5vLinG edit2: also, https://www.thelayoff.com/apple https://www.thelayoff.com/apple
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • simonh 4y ago
      >The other companies are doing the hiring and firing. And this is evidence they're not so well run? On the contrary...
  • rcarr 4y ago
    "I think Apple is one of the strong companies and will stay a strong company, I think it's ungodly well-managed." - Charlie Munger
    • red-iron-pine 4y ago
      > I think it's ungodly well-managed. So satan is involved? That might explain how Jobs came back after getting boot #1.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    "Depending on the job and the person it can take a full year to be fully competent in a job." Some of us never become competent.
    • danudey 4y ago
      Ideally it takes a full year for them to realize that you're not competent, at which point you hit your 1 year cliff and can snag 25% of your options or RSUs before you get PIP'ed out.
      • glomgril 4y ago
        If you're at Amazon you'll walk away with 5% after one year, and only 20% after two years.
        • Gh0stRAT 4y ago
          True, but misleading. Amazon gives big cash bonuses to new hires in years 1 and 2 in order to compensate for the back-weighted vesting schedule.
          • stephencanon 4y ago
            As big as 20% of their RSU grant + the bonus they would get at another company would be? If not, not misleading at all.
            • andonisus 4y ago
              Comp is meant to stay stable at the agreed upon target for the first two years. There is a cash bonus for years 1 and 2 used to offset the vesting schedule. The final 2 years are really dependent on stock performance. For example, I basically will need AMZN stock to get increase by 25% from todays value by Jan 2025 to be making what I did for the first two years.
            • Gh0stRAT 4y ago
  • a4isms 4y ago
    I use "Eternal September" for the cultural effect on businesses that suddenly gorge themselves on new hires that have no exposure to the existing culture or context. The negative effects are loosely parallel to what happens when a social medium breaks out of being a subculture and goes mainstream.
  • paulmd 4y ago
    there is a cultural mindset especially among startups that it's better to be alive and having to make layoffs than to move conservatively, have a faster mover overtake you and push you out of the market, and be dead. "The graveyards are full of businesses that moved appropriately for the market conditions", to warp a saying. 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.
    • ben7799 4y ago
      This is kind of a west coast SV/social/adtech type of startup mentality. 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.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        Well, of course, how many of the east coast minicomputer companies are still around? That said, I agree in general, there's probably a general difference in approach between east coast and west coast. (And the mix of companies--and government--is generally different and reflects that.)
  • kefirlife 4y ago
    Apple does a lot right. However, I find their insistence on keeping their teams in an office to be strange. My experience with Apple internally was an overly positive and optimistic culture, to the point where they had a hard time identifying, or discussing, what did not work well.
    • cjohnson318 4y ago
      Aside from all the talk about the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, etc. I found Apple to be very conservative and buttoned up, which I found very reassuring. I've never worked anywhere else in the FAANG-sphere, but it seemed like the polar opposite of "Googley".
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      I predict that Apples in office culture is going to be key to their success.
    • etempleton 4y ago
      Apple built one of the most expensive office complexes in the world. They are going to want people in the office. 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.
  • ss48 4y ago
    However, if you hire twice as many people, potentially twice as many people will be competent the following year.
  • chris222 4y ago
    This comes directly from Steve Jobs legacy. He talked a lot about the value of small teams and how they self regulate but can breakup if they grow too quickly. https://youtu.be/wTgQ2PBiz-g https://youtu.be/wTgQ2PBiz-g
• trilobyte 4y ago
  When Google announced 12,000 layoffs, for anyone reading past the headline this came on the back of hiring 41,000 people over the last two years. 41,000 is about 1/2 the total employees of Salesforce as of October 2022.
• rvz 4y ago
  Yes. Apple's size is still large but isn't ten times as large as Amazon, nor has it grown as much in a short space of time. 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?
• steve1977 4y ago
  > How can you effectively double orgs of this size over a 2 year period? Apparently you can't.
  • fragmede 4y ago
    Given the number of orgs that have done this quite successfully in the BC (before Covid) era, it seems like you can.
    • disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      I dunno about that. I was at Facebook for five years, it doubled in headcount basically every year. The culture when I joined was very, very different to the culture when I left. And even after the layoffs they're still double the size they were when I left.
    • steve1977 4y ago
      Which ones for example?
• blockwriter 4y ago
  Was there any federal program that encouraged hiring at these large corporations as part of the COVID bills?
  • slt2021 4y ago
    companies borrowed billions (startups via equity raise, publics via debt offering at almost zero % rates) and quickly increased headcount in the name of chasing growth
• baxtr 4y ago
  Do you have a link to data supporting the doubling? I would love to see the numbers!
  • wand3r 4y ago
    It was in TFA. Unfortunately I can't get past the paywall again. There was a graph that had employee growth. I left out a couple companies but Meta and Google were mid 90's% and SF was something like 104% from 2020-2022. The source in the article was "Bloomberg" presumably they are from public filings.
  • Wojtkie 4y ago
    The numbers are in the article...
    • baxtr 4y ago
      Ok, thanks. I admit am lazy and mostly read just comments :/
• williamcotton 4y ago
  It was all totally insane. The actual narrative of the layoffs is this: High performing public tech companies went totally insane and doubled their head counts. Everyone else was a cargo cult with an open checkbook so they insanity-squared their head counts. No one could possibly manage such a gigantic influx of knowledge workers so resources were obviously being poorly allocated industry-wide. This first had an 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.
  • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    If someone is insane, is their next move sane? Are they a good investment?
    • potatolicious 4y ago
      This remains my chief concern - part of this admittedly is anger that those responsible for the sackings have generally not been sacked, but the rest of it is whether or not anyone in charge truly knows what they did wrong in order to avoid the same situation again. When one authorizes a 40,000-person increase in headcount, what did they think they were paying for? What projects were these people allocated to, and why are these projects now expendable where they weren't before? My suspicion is that a lot of the hiring for the past two years were for work and projects that simply wouldn't pass even a cursory smell-test. I also strongly suspect that there really should be some replacements in leadership positions - not because of some sense of retribution for the layoffs but because I honestly don't think many people have internalized what went wrong in a way that would make them more reliable in the future. Many of these layoffs seem like slash-and-burn tactics in response to criticism and investor panic rather than a real, sober assessment of the excesses of the past few years and why they happened.
      • KerrAvon 4y ago
        Your last sentence is actually why I might -- might -- be a bit more forgiving here -- in some cases (most?) the layoffs are being driven by pressure from activist investors. I have firsthand knowledge that at least one of the major companies that did a layoff recently had no internal desire or financial need to do it, but is being heavily pressured to lay off staff as a cost-cutting measure, even though the business is perfectly viable without it. 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.
• pbreit 4y ago
  Working and then getting severance seems better than not working...
• yodsanklai 4y ago
  I wonder what it tells about employees selection and their level. Was it harder to get into Google/Meta 5-10 years ago than within the hiring boom?
• no_wizard 4y ago
  I know that everyone is looking at this as "by the numbers" and there is truth to be had there, I offer a different take though. 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
• kypro 4y ago
  I can't speak to Meta, but Saleforce and Amazon probably needed to hire during the pandemic to keep on with demand. 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.
  • twblalock 4y ago
    I definitely blame the Fed. 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.
    • kypro 4y ago
      Where this logic irritates me the most is in the housing market. 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.
• twblalock 4y ago
  It was a symptom of the bubble economy, particularly in e-commerce and online services, that materialized during the pandemic and was egged on by a series of mistakes made by the Fed. 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.
• vineyardmike 4y ago
  So, like everything, that’s not the whole truth. Apple was much more restrained, but that’s because it’s always been restrained. I commented this before here, but not all tech companies substantially changed behavior wrt hiring… 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 https://stratechery.com/2023/tech-layoffs-big-techs-hiring-r...
• strangattractor 4y ago
  If your attitude is adjust your workforce at will then who cares. If I can hire twice as many people and get X done twice as fast then do it. At some point it is likely X is done and I don't need the people. Dump them on the streets. Unethical maybe but not irrational.
• glenngillen 4y ago
  I joined Amazon in 2017, and even back then it was doubling every 1-2 years. Which still seemed absolutely nuts to me. 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.
• Moissanite 4y ago
  > How can you effectively double orgs of this size over a 2 year period? That's the cool part - you can't.