First they require in-person #returnToOffice, then they relocate business units from one location to another, and force those who can’t uproot their lives to leave.
The Apple location in #SanDiego isn’t going away. But they intentionally forced 121 people to choose between moving to #Austin, or lose their jobs. Make no mistake, this is a layoff.
Never mind the fact that #Texas is hostile to anyone with a uterus, or is not cishet—why the hell anyone would move to that state? If anything, Apple should be shutting down their Austin office, and paying for people to relocate to a state that better ensures their safety.
“Apple to Shutter 121-Person San Diego AI Team in Reorganization”
Oh and for folks wondering why #Apple is insisting that people work in #Austin#Texas: I can’t speak for their actual motivation, of course, but this much is true:
In 2018, Apple received $25M in grants from the Texas Enterprise Fund, as well as a $16M property tax abatement from Williamson County for building their new campus, contingent on Apple bringing in 4,000 new workers to Williamson County over 12 years.
I’m sure those financial considerations come into play.
@drahardja Apple recorded a $93B ($93,000 million) profit last year on $383B ($383,000 million) revenue, and you think they were swayed by a one-time 2018 $16 million tax abatement?
@drahardja as far as I understand, most of this "back to office" was already about securing tax benefits and other financial incentives and less about the actual employees
@drahardja This is not a new trick. Companies have always used reorgs and moving jobs as a way to motivate attrition without calling it layoffs. People quit instead of moving. Sometimes you reach out to a star and offer them an incentive to stay.
Lockdown and WFH upset broke that dynamic. RTO is a way to bring the power back to the employer.
@drahardja I wonder how anyone squares a forced move to fucking Texas with the values Apple leadership claims to espouse. What’s next, your job has moved to Afghanistan?
@drahardja something you should factor in the decision: Central Texas experienced its hottest summer on record in 2023. Austin saw a total of 80 days with 100-degree heat, 40 days with temperatures of 105 degrees or higher, and received less than 1.5 inches of rain from June through August. The National Weather Service issued an Excessive Heat Warning for 38 days.
It’s only going to get worse. Also Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and Alex Jones live here. Also tacos are like $8 each now.
@drahardja what are they planning to do with all that office space? 🤔
looking at the job listings for San Diego vs Austin, for hardware team listings 285 vs 255, software team listings 179 vs 115. for machine learning and AI in software teams it is 2 vs 7...
my hunch is they want to move related teams closer together and maybe expand hardware lab space in San Diego and possibly make it more of a hardware focused campus. still poor execution trying to move people halfway across the country.
@drahardja please don't get me wrong. I agree it's a big ask to move from CA to TX, but the reasoning you provide doesn't make sense.
As a layoff, 0.08% of the workforce is not very consequential. And if Apple are keeping the SD office, what's the point of hiding a layoff behind an office relocation?
@lupus_blackfur Honestly, I still have a soft spot for Apple. No other company out there insists on the level of hardware quality and customer protection that they do. But, we can’t forget that they are a BigCorp™ now, and susceptible to every mind virus that invariable infects all BigCorps. I feel that they are regressing to the mean, slowly but surely adopting the usual set of behaviors of large corporations that are hostile to communities, workers, and customers.
@lupus_blackfur That’s fair. Let’s just say that I’m convinced that they’re still the least bad for consumer privacy from what I’ve seen so far.
That will undoubtedly get eroded as they double down on Services revenue for growth, where tracking and metrics will mean more and more to the bottom line. They’ve already started going down that road with e.g. News and Stocks, where content owners get reports on ad performance, etc.
I’m actually curious what #Apple will do to people who just sit around and don’t quit after their job has been relocated elsewhere. Will Apple fire them? What would the cause be?
My guess is that Apple will lay them off with zero severance: I think Apple would claim that the grace period during which they can look for another position is their severance. It would be interesting if anyone who has direct experience with this arrangement could clarify.
@mentallyalex I don’t think so; in my experience Apple doesn’t do that. They just make it really difficult for you to leave the job you already have, then keep your raises to a minimum.
@roadskater@mentallyalex Yes, they’ve had payroll offices there since forever, with very little, if any, tech. This latest deal was made in 2018 and is likely part of the reason why more tech groups are relocating there.
@drahardja “My guess is that Apple will lay them off with zero severance “
According to the Bloomberg article: “Those who choose to leave Apple will see their roles eliminated and get four weeks of severance — plus an additional week for every year worked. They’ll also get six months of health insurance.”
@drahardja it’s not exactly the same situation, but years ago Univision laid off most of the group I was a part of. A few folks who lived in NYC and Miami where they had big corporate offices were able to apply to other jobs but the rest was distributed around the country and didn’t have that option.
But they informed us in early Nov, with Jan 31st as our termination date. As engineers, they needed us to keep our web properties up until another group had time to migrate things to their own system. But our boss said other than emergencies, we were free to do whatever we wanted.
So I got almost three months of being on the payroll with effectively no job, plus the full severance because I didn’t leave before my termination date. I had found a job mid-December, but said I couldn’t start until the end of January.
My guess is the folks who don’t move to Austin will have a similar experience, in Feb they’ll be given a termination agreement with April 26th on it.
@ryanboswell I think that makes sense. And if they were smart about it, they would ride out the whole grace period and make sure to collect severance to maximize their income.
@drahardja yeah, I’d say the folks at Apple probably will still be expected to do their jobs until April though, since the team itself isn’t being disbanded. So it’s not quite as cushy as mine ended up being but still gives you more time to get an alternative lined up.
And at least with it being high profile, other companies may step in and try to recruit folks from that team. As much as I dislike much of the AI hype and B.S. these days, their skill sets are probably fairly in demand because of it.
@ryanboswell So to be clear: the folks being laid off appear to be responsible for tagging training sets for AI, not doing actual R&D. Specifically, they appear to be tagging training sets in non-English languages.
These folks are in high demand, sure, but companies like OpenAI tend to outsource these kinds of work to contractors.
@drahardja Fair enough, I guess it is rare for companies to bring those roles in house, Apple likely only did because of the privacy issues of non-employees listening to those recordings (and protecting their privacy-focused brand).
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