I guess more details would be needed to opine about it but it is hard to believe that a multiple trillion dollar company with 150000 employees can't do anything to keep 600 people no matter what they were doing :(
Apple isn't a jobs scheme or a charity, and its primary purpose is not to keep engineers employed - I'm sure the organisation could have kept those 600 people if it wanted to!
Apple is not a charity but is one of the most impactful organizations in the planet and probably should think a little bit ahead of this. Im sure they have enough smart people to find some way of working this around other than making the stakeholders happy.
Employment is a game of matching; the employer wants to match a skill set to a particular job.
It’s entirely likely people on these products don’t easily match internally.
The job market for people capable of working on Apple high end R&D is also likely much better at matching then Apples internal HR, simply because the market has so many more openings.
Especially at Apple. Although I've never worked for Apple, I did spend a year at a company that built internal software for Apple, my experience was that their teams are tightly coupled and very, very long-lived (hence they had external software shops building internal tooling for them).
If they are automotive engineers, mechanics, and other auto-specific roles, there is little chance that they would be a match for other jobs that Apple needs. They were given a nice severance deal and will be able to find new job pretty quickly.
the last time I was laid off, it was a relief. The project was clearly failing and the work had become drudgery. When we all got laid off and given severance money, we all went to a bar and celebrated. Then we all went and got other jobs.
Remember, the unemployment rate is under 4% right now.
fully agree. Totally ridiculous that a company who makes that much profit is allowed to delete the primary income source of these employees just because they decided to stop their car project.
I would love regulations to make it impossible to eliminate jobs unless the company is bankrupt. Considering how much is of your life is dependent on having an employer, it shouldn't be this easy for a company to toy with that. More so when a company has so much profits.
They could totally offer other positions within the company. If needed support people learning new technologies or languages. Or use these people's expertise to start new projects. but firing it totally unnecessary.
We've gone through a round of layoffs, and I've been thinking about the same thing.
It's not that it's too easy—it's that it's too impactful.
The real answer is social safety nets. If you want to protect people, address the root problem that your life is dependent on having an employer. Proper unemployment or UBI plus universal healthcare makes losing a job annoying ("ugh now I have to find another one") vs. terrifying.
Jack up the corporate tax rate (on revenue) to pay for it—which should be a wash after reducing the load of severance, healthcare benefits, etc. that companies are paying today.
Better worker protections like the UK/Europe are mechanisms too—notice periods, guaranteed severance, etc.—but have their own chilling effects.
This has the added benefit of reducing the barriers of entry for individuals: people are more likely to leave bad jobs or pursue their own opportunities, which in turn should drive subsequent job creation.
I'm a big fan of social safety nets, but would you agree it needs to stop somewhere? I assume the people laid off here were very well compensated for their work and likely had ample opportunity to build their own reserves. A safety net should be set up in a way that it enables you to have a comfortable, but basic lifestyle. Or should society pay for the CEO's mansion's maintenance should he get fired?
yes social safety nets would be the usual way the impact/consequences are taken care of. At the same time america could also lean into the idea of the employer providing everything, in that case it would make sense for the employer to also take care of the consequences.
what was the saying again? the beatings will continue until morale improves?
Is the threat of financial ruin or the threat of starving worth the advantage that you yourself are getting?
Inside the current "free market" do you really have the agency, choice or leverage to choose a different economic relationship with your employer if you would want one?
> Is the threat of financial ruin or the threat of starving worth the advantage that you yourself are getting?
False dichotomy. There are a myriad of options between the status quo and transitioning to a Southern European-style employment model.
> Inside the current "free market" do you really have the agency, choice or leverage to choose a different economic relationship with your employer if you would want one?
The solution isn't in making the current economy sclerotic, but in better distributing its gains. Destroying the gains just makes everyone poorer. And when that happens, empirically, inequality goes up, not down.
Classic instance of the sunken cost fallacy fallacy (not a typo).
They prefer to cut their losses and forget about how much they spent recruiting those people.
Keeping them might seem wasteful on the short term, but such skilled workers could likely be made profitable in a big R&D powerhouse.
But the real cost is damaging their reputation among future candidates and current employees, and lowering their perceived value as an employer.
For the most skilled and efficient engineers, choosing to work for big tech is always a tradeoff, a company like Apple is usually very appealing for the most risk-averse.
> Classic instance of the sunken cost fallacy fallacy (not a typo). They prefer to cut their losses and forget about how much they spent recruiting those people.
The Sunken cost fallacy would be to retain those people because of the costs irrevocably incurred (sunk) recruiting them, employing them to date, etc. Apple are (apparently following a theoretical economics position) considering the prospective costs going forward of keeping them, when they no longer have an obvious future revenue stream, and would still generate additional redeployment/retraining costs
Recruiting employees is a sunk cost. There is a concept that it is a fallacy to maintain the cost because so much has already been spent- in other words, "throwing good money after bad".
In this particular case, GP posits that fallacy is itself a fallacy, insomuch as there is no greater opportunity the company could pursue which required laying those employees off. The reputational harm done, among other things, is a hidden cost not reflected in the numbers of their salaries, and surely they could have participated in other R&D efforts, or something along those lines.
