> "Most engineers received stock worth $80,000 to $120,000, with the bonuses provided as restricted stock units that are set to vest over the course of four years provided the employees stay with Apple and do not take jobs at other companies."
Is that really a significant amount enough to ward off being poached? 120k over 4 years is 30k a year if linear. I would think at the pay scales being discussed they would get 30k a year just to move companies.
Not sure if this is how it works, but if they're awarded now and Apple maintains its current growth it could be worth 4x (AAPL is up ~400% compared to 4 years ago).
They don't need to convince you that there's a chance for 4x growth, they need to convince those specific individuals that there's a chance. And those engineers are immersed in a culture that could affect their perception of Apple's potential.
VR/AR is miniscule with relatively high potential. We'll have to wait and see what they come up with, it could be great, it could be niche, no way no to know.
EV has huge potential, but has a lot of competition, and Apple would be late to the party and without any serious advantages, technological, ecosystem, or otherwise. On the contrary, they'd have to build delivery and repair networks from scratch ( assuming they delegate all manufacturing). Even for their endless financial reserves, it seems very improbable they'd get anywhere serious within 10 years in the EV market.
Laptops - that's a tough market with lots of competition and long retention ( as in people rarely upgrade, and tend to stick to manufacturers), many of it Apple simply cannot and could not overcome ( Windows will probably remain the de facto enterprise standard for some more time). They finally have a serious technological advantage beyond more abstract, subjective or niche ones ( better UX or light or long batter life) advantages.
Also apple forays into new niches are generally hit or miss, though they do at least keep at it until it works like Apple Watch and Apple TV (which was near useless for the first 3-4 years).
I remember seeing a slide a while back (2017ish) where 70% of Apple's revenue was from iPhones, 5% from iPads and 2% from Macs. No way in hell do they consider that a big growth market.
Laptops didn’t shrink to such a tiny part of Apple’s revenue because of poor performance, Apple is at its core a consumer electronics company, and the paradigm for what devices consumers mainly use shifted with the times.
I agree this can't go on for too much longer, if only because governments will eventually stop Apple if they control too much of the economy. But is there room for another 4x? Maybe?
What you aren't taking into account is that the larger you are, the more difficult it is to grow. You can even see this in Apple's growth since 2005 slowly declining.
The last couple of years have been absolutely bonkers. 4x-ing from here would be 17x their valuation in 2017. Controlling for inflation, the probability of that happening given their current valuation seems ridiculously low.
Well, the engineer could also take a job at another company, and just used the increased compensation to buy more Apple stock. Unless they significantly believe that they working in Apple will be a significant factor in Apple stock price increasing 4x, in which case, they should probably ask for more stock.
Except that RSUs that will mature 4 years from now will be granted today, so you have 4 years of potential appreciation even if you don’t have the money to buy those securities today. It’s quite difficult to replicate the same strategy without taking significantly more risk (i.e. margin), and it’s a big driver in why tech comps have been huge on average, because by the time shares vest they have already ballooned.
The GP was highlighting that 30k per year is very little to keep senior talent. I was adding some perspective to how little it really is after considering taxes at the highest bracket.
>50% of engineers at Google are L4+. For the last few years, at L4 you should have been getting annual ~$100k grants over 4 years if your work in The Bay.
My understanding is that FB paid even more, and that Amazon was maybe 20% behind at the same level.
It's not like pre-covid engineers got nothing and now you get a $120k Bonus suddenly.
I work for an public enterprise software company and it's a constant drip of RSUs as performance bonuses, retention, company milestones, anniversary dates, "well we can't give you raise right now but how about some RSUs?", etc.
So after a couple years as the vesting dates hit these start to stack and they end up becoming quite significant.
A bonus is a bonus. Presumably this is on top of whatever they had before, so an extra $20K to $45K per year is icing on the cake.
In reality, most engineers aren't bouncing around from company to company every year trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their compensation. The strategy works well for a few iterations in early careers, but eventually it starts becoming counter-productive.
If you have 10 jobs in 10 years on your resume, every hiring manager who sees it will instantly recognize that you're a job hopper who isn't likely to stay longer than a year. It also becomes difficult to really accomplish anything big if you're always leaving a company before you can really hit your stride.
Most people I know who end up at FAANG level companies are interested in sticking around for at least 3-4 years, if not longer. This provides the chance to accomplish bigger things, build an actual reputation within the company, and move up the in-company career ladder. Jumping to other companies for a $10-50K immediate bonus could be shooting yourself in the foot relative to sticking around long enough to get a promotion and retention awards.
> In reality, most engineers aren't bouncing around from company to company every year trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their compensation.
Not in my experience. Most engineers spend 1-2 years, then leave.
> move up the in-company career ladder.
That's a hard ladder to climb from the inside. Politics lead to entrenchment.
> accomplish anything big
A great deal of work is plumbing and KTLO. What do the folks working on these things get? They're not great promo or resume fodder for internal mobility.
My perception is that everyone knows job hopping is normal and companies will be happy to have you for that 1-2 years if you’re good. It’s not a black mark on your resume. For me a questionable resume is someone who spent the past 20 years at Accenture or something. Signals possibility of being too entrenched in those habits to make a contribution in a new environment.
As an engineering manager, this is definitely not true for me. If you have a long history of short tenures, you aren't worth the time to bring up to speed (which is generally 4-6 months). Having a short stint or two isn't a big deal though, people work for companies that have financial problems, or they get a bad manager, or whatever.
I agree. If an applicant doesn’t seem to be invested into any previous company enough to stay more than a year they’re going to be sorted out very early on.
On top of that, most of our most productive engineers stayed over 4 years.
Unless you’re a senior or lead, it’s unlikely that you have had the opportunity to gain enough deep exposure to many technologies and problems in a very short tenure at a company.
Seniors and leads aren't going to get a lot of depth in a short period time, either. Seniors and leads do a lot of non-deep work that, depending on their responsibilities, may involve "lead" activities that take away from deep-diving uninterrupted.
Also I don't think seniors and leads with short stints are to be trusted (from recent experience with such people).
This really depends on the projects / companies people are involved with as well. Especially on the front-end, it is very common to take a project from start to post-launch support in a year, especially in a "non-tech" company.
Staying after that in a lot of these cases mean a lack of interesting projects, and also end up with stagnation. My experience may be a bit affected by freelancing though :)
Also a hiring manager and I agree: The job-hopping mentality is greatly exaggerated online.
I go through a lot of resumes, but hardcore job hopper resumes are still very rare. Numerically, they'd have to be overrepresented in the applicant pool due to changing jobs 2-5X more frequently than everyone else.
It's not a big deal if someone has a couple short jobs on their resume or even a series of short-term engagements. But what may not be obvious until you've done a lot of hiring is that it's really hard to tell the difference between someone who changes jobs every 12 months for a pay increase compared to someone who changes jobs every 12 months because they get PIPed and managed out of every company they work for. Some people are really good at interviewing, but will show up at your company and proceed to ride your performance management track until they're pushed out, at which case they hop into the next company and move on.
So at minimum, job hoppers get much more intensive interviews and reference checks. But more realistically I just give priority to candidates who have track records of accomplishing bigger things over longer periods of time at companies.
If you a serial job hopper (stayed less than 2 years at more than 60% of your portfolio employers), that is a red flag for me as a hiring manager. Yes if you are stuck at Accenture for 20 years doing the same shit, that is also bad but you can't just hop jobs every year or so and call it normal. Teams want candidates to stick around especially if they are any good and if I don't see that on your Resume at least for some companies in your past, I would pass specially for senior roles.
It depends on how big the things you're building are. If you have an influence in direction-setting, policy, procedures, norms, even company culture, if you're involved in large projects that take time, then 1-2 years might not be enough. Certainly not 1 year. If you're in a large organization, it takes many months to just build the relationships enough to accomplish bigger things.
Jumping around every 1-2 years is fine if you're junior or mid. After that you're suspect. We had a guy who left after 1.5 years. It was sudden and disruptive, and the guy burned bridges. We were not surprised since his past jobs were like that (short stints, and anger by the end of the last one). However, now, everyone we interview who's senior, we look at a different light with regards to job hopping.
Lesson learned with regards to that. Beware of senior engineers who job hop.
I think this is a bit too much of a generalization. I would caveat this with "understand what you're hiring for".
In some cases, you need a specialist to come in and laser-focus on a problem, and then maybe someone who won't be with you for long, but will tackle those problems, is just fine - and even what you really want: no seat-warming, just get it done and get out.
But if you're hiring someone to lead a long-lived team working on big projects, then your point stands.
I interview 50% or more of the senior engineers we (A YC-backed company that is post-IPO and still growing rapidly) hire. I assure you that our interview process for engineers at this level is weighted towards significant involvement in projects.
We consider it unacceptable if all the projects a candidate wants to talk about "began before I was hired, and shipped after I left." And that's what you get if you are an aggressive job-hopper your entire career, not just at the beginning.
I am never against someone wanting to negotiate the compensation they deserve for the skills they have developed. And certainly, for many skills, job hopping is the strategy for maximizing your pay for the skills you are able to learn and refine in 1-2 years per job.
But if you don't develop the skill of taking a major multi-year project from inception to completion, there is a skill you don't have that we will not pay for by hiring you at the top two levels of our org.
p.s. There's more than just shepherding long projects, that's just the easiest thing to explain. But to add some colour, other things a senior engineer is expected to demonstrate are:
1. Experience with the consequences of their choices. Ok, you were able to get a job at company X, get up to speed, and lead a major cross-team or cross-group initiative within two years. What happened after that? Did it create the desired outcomes? Why? Why not? Were there unanticipated consequences? What part did you play in dealing with those?
2. Experience with change. Managers--even entire management orgs--change. Were you around long enough to live through one such change? Or did you jump ship without acquiring any experience or scars from the change? Strategies change, e.g. Pivoting from B2C to B2B, or weaning a company off a dependence on sales-led growth. Do you have experience with not just the technological consequences, but the organizational consequences? Do you have the skill of creating an oasis of calm within the chaos?
p.p.s. I want to be very clear that there's nothing magic in my mind about being a "senior" engineer. You don't have to be a senior engineer to make more money in this industry: You can be a serial intermediate!
Consider someone who works as a team lead at a startup for two years, it goes IPO, they cash out. Do they stay, learn about working in a bigger company and become the kind of person I'm describing above?
Yes, if that interests them. But that isn't the only road. They could also go join another startup. Lather, rinse, repeat. With luck and skill, they could keep honing their skills as a leader of teams in a fast-paced early-stage environment, without ever becoming the kind of person a 500-person engineering group is trying to hire as a Principal Engineer.
Nothing wrong with that, it's the engineering equivalent of a serial entrepreneur. Some founders want to run their company for their entire career, like Ken Olsen, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Others are happy to sell out and start all over again.
Do what makes you happy. I'm just explaining what one company is looking for at a senior level.
I'm not sure what company you're at but there is certainly not a multi-year project in any I've worked at. There are long term _product_ roadmaps but in order to stay agile you never commit to something as big as a multi-year project. There are only individual features that get committed to. Even in core infra (heavily technical) where needs and solutions are known committed work goes out a year tops.
Absolutely you want people who delivered things from start to finish but I've never heard of those things taking multiple years. If it takes 2-3 years for your product to go to market it's a failure, regardless of whether it's an external or internal product.
This probably depends a lot on your industry. In my industry, every product I've worked on took multiple years to ship. It wouldn't be unreasonable to want to find sr engineers who had been through the whole cycle from early planning to post launch support.
Out of curiosity, what product does your company make? What kind of moat do they have if anything you do can be replicated in under a year by a competitor?
are you not involved in the product roadmap and how that gets translated into the individual, smaller projects that get you there? then you may not be as senior as you think ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If a product takes 2-4 iterations to reach maturity, and a candidate is only involved in one of those iterations, they haven't participated in the complete multi-year product cycle from skateboard to scooter to bicycle to motorcycle to car, to borrow a popular metaphor.
If a roadmap goes out 3-5 years and a candidate only executes on one or two of those years, the candidate hasn't gained experience with which parts of a roadmap stay committed and which ones change in response to new information/priorities.
Most of this does not apply to a hot startup where the founders are still coding every day, but those aren't the only senior engineering opportunities.
My meta-experience is that the kinds of things I'm talking about tend to be most highly prized by companies that have been around longer than a startup, and now have problems to solve technically and organizationally that can most effectively be solved by people who have stayed in one company longer than one-two years.
Such companies aren't usually as exciting as pre-IPO startups, so absolutely no side-eye from me if anyone reading this is thinking "You can take that job and shove it, I'm busy inventing the future on a two-pizza team in a six-pizza startup."
> My perception is that everyone knows job hopping is normal and companies will be happy to have you for that 1-2 years if you’re good. It’s not a black mark on your resume.
A few short engagements are no big deal, but serial job hoppers are a warning flag for deeper investigation.
I won't overlook a resume for having a job hopper signature, but we will be going very deep into their accomplishments at these companies. It's often hard to ramp up at a company and deliver something significant from start to finish and production follow-up in 12 months.
Most of the job hoppers I interview end up citing projects that they contributed to, but can't really pin down much significant that was really their own contribution. It's not impossible, but it's far more common to find significant contributions in 2-4 year engineers.
>>My perception is that everyone knows job hopping is normal and companies will be happy to have you for that 1-2 years if you’re good.
People who haven't worked on any significant projects start - to - finish, and have a demonstrable trial of being a drifter aren't fit for senior positions by very definition.
Personally I tend to think drifters and coasters are basically the same things.
No serious shop or hiring manager I know would touch these people with a 10 foot pole.
>>For me a questionable resume is someone who spent the past 20 years at Accenture or something.
Somebody who spent 20 years at a firm, but are involved in new projects every few years make the perfect hires. The top performing talent in Google, Amazon, Boeing or any where for that matter are these kind of people.
Maybe not most, but I'd gather those in the FAANG/unicorn game do - the upside is far too great to not do it. Not 1 year... but more like 1.5-2 years is probably most likely.
And we're not talking a measly $30k bump, but more like $100k. It's far more advantageous to move on than to work toward an internal promotion.
As someone in charge of hiring at my current company, having brought on 17 devs over the past year, the ones we really worry about have a bunch of 6-9 month engagements. But every 1.5 years or so, with some lesser here or there... no problem at all. More likely than not they're great at what they do.
> If you have 10 jobs in 10 years on your resume, every hiring manager who sees it will instantly recognize that you're a job hopper who isn't likely to stay longer than a year.
HMs in small companies, maybe, in big companies , they dont care, they are paid to bring talent in, they don't get penalized if an employee quits after a year.
> This provides the chance to accomplish bigger things, build ....
I have seen your other comments along the same line, is mostly wrong, at least here in the US, is always business , you have an obligation to yourself(or your family, etc...) not to your employer, most smart people hiring understand that you switch jobs seeking a higher TC, in the same way businesses change course/pivot seeking higher profits. The "stay forever and maybe one day you will get promoted", is a thing of the past. You make more money switching jobs than waiting for a promotion, lots of companies don't have enough "senior positions" or all the next level positions are covered, so you would have to wait until your manager (or next level pos) retires or leave. Also, managers see people who are afraid to leave, or "loyal" to the company as people then can squeeze more work out of.
> It also becomes difficult to really accomplish anything big if you're always leaving a company before you can really hit your stride.
I’m currently involved in hiring at a rather large tech company and I assure you that the hiring manager would be highly displeased if someone left after just a year. In fact, that is true of every hiring manager I’ve ever worked with, because hiring managers hire direct to thier teams and turnover is a PITA. Recruiters may not care, but managers and teammates do. That’s not to say we’d resent someone taking a better offer, but managers and ICs alike prefer lower turnover.
In also know that there is a point (basically staff/principal) where we are very reluctant to make outside hires who haven’t been at that level at another big tech company for a while. We’ll almost never up level someone at hire time. You have to have demonstrated impact over time and that is hard to do without 2.5+ years at the company (although I’m getting the sense that once you break that threshold, moving around more frequently can help again.)
It happened three times this year that I interviewed for companies having only worked a place for one year, and they didn't even mention this factor. Why? In each case because I'd be filling some urgent hole on a team somewhere. I suppose it's kind of like how "cheating on your partner is bad, but your secret lover won't mind"... as long as there's an immediate gain to your coming employer, they'll focus on other things like how good of a personal fit you'd be, and if you know those things that are in the 6-month plan. Some hiring managers are thinking short-term is my experience. And that is, honestly, just as much of a red flag as an interviewee.
> most smart people hiring understand that you switch jobs seeking a higher TC, in the same way businesses change course/pivot seeking higher profits
> The "stay forever and maybe one day you will get promoted", is a thing of the past. You make more money switching jobs than waiting for a promotion
These statements are FAR from universally true. My TC has more than doubled in the last 5 years without a job hop. In the same time period, many of my peers have hopped to facebook et al and increased their TC comparably. There is no one true way.
My TC went up 5x in the last 5 years. I accomplished this by job hoping twice, more than doubling with every move. That could not happen if I stuck around the old job, even after multiple promotions. My only regret is I should have job-hopped earlier, I missed out on 5-digits of income.
There is no one true way, yes, but one gives the employee more control over their destiny.
> HMs in small companies, maybe, in big companies , they dont care, they are paid to bring talent in, they don't get penalized if an employee quits after a year.
Hiring managers care because it's a big hit to your deliverables every time someone leaves and you have hire someone else, bring them up to speed, and try to get them back up to the same level of knowledge as the person who left.
If you have a team of 6 and everyone leaves every 12 months, that means you're hiring and re-training a new person every other month. And every other month, 17% of your team's accumulated knowledge/experience walks out the door. And every year, you're basically starting over with a new team.
It sucks, and that's why hiring managers give preference to people who aren't serial job hoppers.
It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
People leaving companies every 1-2 years, doesn't mean, that on any given team, everybody will leave every year, so your example is a bit over the top.
> It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
Which companies are doing this?
The way companies keep employees around is with good RSU vesting schedules, and end of the year bonuses, etc... I understand that a team with people leaving all the time, is bad for business , that's why companies (that care) have incentives in place to avoid that. But judging a person for wanting a better pay/treatment/wlb is ridiculous, I can see your point from the business owner perspective.
> It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
You mean like Amazon with it's weird vesting schedule? Those companies also struggle to attract talent, especially combined with obscure PIPs which can push employees out before a single RSU has vested. Those companies are not going to do well in this hiring market.
It should be easy to fire bad employees, and on the flip side, it should be easy to fire bad employers too.
If you have a team of 6 and everyone leaves every 12 months, it doesn't matter what candidate you bring on, job hopper or not, your organization is the one at fault.
> HMs in small companies, maybe, in big companies , they dont care, they are paid to bring talent in, they don't get penalized if an employee quits after a year.
Recruiters might be paid to bring people in, but HMs are the ones whose teams these hires typically work for, so being able to do productive things with them is more important than just bringing people in. The cost of retraining, losing institutional knowledge etc, and just the time it takes to bring in a new person are all costs that take away from the actual work of building the product.
> HMs in small companies, maybe, in big companies , they don't care, they are paid to bring talent in,
You're confusing recruiters for line managers. HM == Hiring Manager == the person who's trying to build a team to accomplish a project, and at large companies most likely a multi-year roadmap.
They absolutely care about people staying a long time - it is expensive to train people on the internals of each company. At a FAANG++ company, you get your first code checked in in your first week, but it takes a YEAR to be truly productive where you are fully autonomous, and have paid off the initial ramp-up period.
> I have seen your other comments along the same line, is mostly wrong, at least here in the US, is always business
According to you. Not everyone's focus is 100% financial-based. Do I want to maximize my earning potential? Of course. But work is also 1/3 of my life. Another 1/3 is sleep. They money is for the last 3rd. So is my entire focus on 1/3 of my life to make the other waking 3rd to be as lucrative as possible? I think that's one way to approach it, but I think that's extremely short-sighted and unfulfilling.
I want my work to be meaningful, challenging, interesting, and impactful. At this point in my career I can control all this by finding workplaces, coworkers, and projects that match my skillset and my impact, and I can realize this. This means committing to multi-year plans to achieve something significant. (In the olden days we would have called this a "legacy", and I suppose that's still appropriate to some degree, though I don't expect to get a plaque on a bridge for it).
I think a lot of people are in the same boat as me. It's also part of the hacker and startup ethos - to make an actual dent in the universe.
Your attitude is very cynical, and while I agree with you that you don't owe anything to the capitalist system that is cynical about using you, that doesn't mean seeking money is the only way.
> lots of companies don't have enough "senior positions" or all the next level positions are covered
Absolutely not true. All the FAANG++ companies do promotions based on accomplishments and achievements, not a quota of budget or availability of folks at the next level.
> Also, managers see people who are afraid to leave, or "loyal" to the company as people then can squeeze more work out of.
Not the case. These managers exist, but they're not the majority. Most people who go into management genuinely care about people, and are interested in developing them. They'd like to reward loyalty. Unfortunately the aforementioned capitalist system does not permit this, but on an individual level managers are human beings with usually more empathy than IC's (out of necessity).
> "Anything big" like what?
A major software project that takes a team of people several years to accomplish.
> At a FAANG++ company, you get your first code checked in in your first week, but it takes a YEAR to be truly productive where you are fully autonomous, and have paid off the initial ramp-up period.
I work at one of the FAANGs, and have found this to be 100% untrue. I was fully productive within a week, because I was already an SME in what the team was doing. Likewise, everyone hired on the same team have also been immediately productive. Perhaps it's years of consulting experience (where immediate productivity is expected in hours, regardless of environment), but that is not an uncommon path.
You absolutely do not owe companies loyalty. The same will not be displayed to you when "tough times" hit those companies. Trying to divert from this truism with "startup ethos" or similar such woo is not useful to the majority of people.
> In reality, most engineers aren't bouncing around from company to company every year trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their compensation. The strategy works well for a few iterations in early careers, but eventually it starts becoming counter-productive.
This is a good point. Most people singing the praises of job hopping are early (<10 years) into their careers. That's when you get the big jumps in comp when you hop. My first job hop netted me +50%. The next one, about +20%. The next one, maybe 5%? I don't know, it wasn't remarkable. Now that I'm 20 years into my career, changing jobs doesn't really increase comp at all (last change was probably negative when you considered the difference in equity). You hit the comp plateau, after which, changing jobs really doesn't get you anywhere unless you can get a higher "level" (senior eng -> staff eng or manager, staff eng -> principle eng, principle eng -> executive) which is not always easy.
The youngsters among us will eventually understand, after you've reached that plateau and your next job is going to be +1% at best, all the work it takes to reskill, grind leetcode, interview prep, interview, negotiate, move your family, change your mailing address, etc. kind of stops being worth it.
At least for me, even before hitting comp plateau, money lost quite a bit of value, because I already own most of what I want to own, can set aside plenty for longer term goals or emergencies as well as having multiple pensions plans. So other aspects of work/live took over in terms of priorities what I'm looking for.
That might be the biggest luxury of being in this field at least for the time being. You don't need to constantly looking for a different job that pays a little more to not live hand to mouth, nor do you need to climb the corporate ladder or move to a specific city/country to be able to have a good quality middle class life.
Keep in mind that it’s $30k the first year. If you get the same bonus the next year, it’s now $60k ($30k from the first grant + $30k from the second). At 4 years you’re now making $120k per year above your salary. On top of that, Apple stock has been doing pretty well for something like 15-20 years now. If you don’t immediately sell, that first $30k you got is now worth significantly more, though there are no guarantees that will continue into the future. But it certainly can work out very nicely. If you start over at a new company, you lose that extra $120k per year for the next 4 years until you’re vested at the new company.
This is apparently a new and unprecedented bonus from Apple, over and above "normal" stock compensation. I'd be surprised if they repeat this every year.
A lot of them get this stock option every year, meaning after 4 years, you can easily have 480k vesting over time... (120k already vested after 4 years, 360k more to come in the next 4) etc...
Sure, it's not going to discourage someone that is very actively looking elsewhere already. But for people on the fence? And the people that would follow them if they made the jump? That's who this is aimed at. And who knows? For the folks already looking to get out, if the first one or two opportunities to come their way don't work out, maybe they'll decide to stay too.
This is especially true for anyone looking to jump ship mostly for the money: If someone wants to jump ship for an extra 40k-50k, then giving them 30k makes the difference pretty negligible, all else being equal.
If you're proactive, people are generally happy and not really a huge flight risk so the bonus just keeps them from even entertaining external offers even though they're hearing rumors of people leaving for X% more.
If you're reactive, well they're probably already gone and you need to give them a huge counter offer to stay, many folks believe in the "never accept a counter" rule so again, you lost your employee.
Keep in mind that the stock isn’t converted to cash when they grant it. It stays as stock from the beginning, so if the company goes up in value, it’s effectively worth more and more each year so long as you don’t sell it.
$180k in AAPL 4 years ago is more like $540k now. If you don’t sell the stock, even after tax you’re potentially looking at $300k over a 4 year period. Plus, if you continue to get decent bonuses each year, this grows even more. Over a typical period over the past 10 years, Apple engineers would easily expect “salary” to be considerably less than half their actual income, especially when you consider the size of a typical sign-on RSU bonus and the amount it will grow.
Now of course, the longer Apple keeps growing like this, the less and less likely it is to continue its trajectory, so I don’t know if new engineers will see the same gains, but over the past several years it would have been a pretty sweet deal.
This is nothing new. I've heard that some well-known tech companies are offering fairly large additional stock-based long-term incentives (up to 2-3x salary in some cases) to key senior engineering talent to keep teams together for the next few years.
LTIs are a pretty standard retention practice in general, especially for key employees who are already at the top of their pay bands, but the churn in the industry over the last 18 months has probably driven up the actual value of them across the board, and potentially even shortened the vesting period.
LOL - dumpster fire of money! and prestige and long-term sales channels. Apple for engineers you mean.. most people here care, but management does not care, and brags about that. I absolutely recall Apple's cynical "revenue per employee" numbers being pushed around, like a house cat who craps in the middle of a path, to show everyone who is really in charge.
Things change. Their products used to be so good they were considered as a standard for quality and usability. Few of the iconic companies of the past retain their status. Apple has sunk a long way; but, like IBM and Microsoft, though, there's a still a lot of air to fall through before they hit ground.
My opinion / guess from 20 years of watching Apple, is something to do with their values, principles and politics, along with PR or at least their projected image vs the actual image they have differs greatly.
We may hear more stories in the next few years. Either the woke took over, or the woke left.
Well, I’d love to work for Apple, but I have no interest into moving from Minnesota suburbs to the Bay Area with all of its sanitation and ludicrous cost of living problems.
If I was Apple… it was the wrong time to build fancy headquarters. You got a few years, and now the area around it is falling apart and your employees have fallen in love with remote work.
Just FYI, while cost of living is a problem pretty much everywhere in the Bay Area, the infamous sanitation issues are isolated to an incredibly tiny portion of the Bay Area.
There is actually very little evidence for this. It is likely that it is mostly dog poop.
EDIT: the comments in response are non-sequiturs. The map does not display mostly human poop. It is mostly dog poop. I know I know, you see people poop all the time. But that’s not what the map is.
Market south to Bryant, and 10th st north to the waterfront (i.e. SOMA) is a pretty prolific area, I frequently see the city deploying porta-potties to keep it under control due to the campsites that pop up. Also yeah Tenderloin, Lower Nob Hill, Design District, civic center, pretty much that whole "fertile" crescent. It's no surprise that the city gave twitter huge incentives to put their headquarters in between civic center and central soma.
I walk my kid to and from daycare in that area and see street pooping if not every week, three times a month. There's a reason why people move away from the city when they have kids. We are not far off from doing the same after almost seven otherwise very enjoyable years here.
I've "only" seen two discarded needles on the street the entire time I've been here though, one was outside of a major grocery store just before Thanksgiving.
The rest of the peninsula is pretty vanilla and mundane though. As are the parts of the city not an hour's walking distance from market street. It was very interesting visiting manhattan though, I'm not sure where everyone there goes, but their SOMA-style areas seemed overall cleaner than ours, which leads me to believe it's partly a city management issue.
Regardless of what the map is about, the statement "poop on the streets is very common in San Francisco" is both about human and dog poop. The frequency with which people encounter human poop on the sidewalk in SF is very, very abnormal, even if dog poop is more frequent. One of my best friends owns a house on a street which is not a bad part of town by any means (both sides of the street are lined with immaculately-kept victorians that zillow thinks are worth $3+ million) and he has to clean human poop off of his own sidewalk about once a month.
Honestly it's a game to identify which. Accidentally left my garage in an 8 unit apartment building open once. Had to clean up the poop 15 minutes later.
Even in San Francisco it’s mostly in a small geographic area, although it does happen to overlap closely with high foot traffic shopping and tourist areas.
Most of _San Francisco_ doesn't have that problem. One of the really weird parts about SF is that the worst part of town is right next to the tourist area, and all the tech companies congregated in the area that had really cheap office space because no established companies would touch the area.
The homelessness and drug use I hear about in SF really boggles my mind. If california were a nation, it's GDP would be higher than the entire nation of india. Why in god's name can a place as rich as SF and the bay area not address their problems? Seriously? This isn't hard. Look at Portugal. Are you really telling me this couldn't be done on a smaller scale in California? Do they simply not care?
Cynically, the answer that a lot of wealthy people have to the problem of inequality is to cut the lower tier loose - loose from bail, prisons and restrictions. Cut them loose from prosecution. SF and NYC, two cities with Progressive badging, have much bigger problems than cities with smaller budgets but wiser (and national) housing, healthcare and child care systems. Has anyone asked themselves why it's legal in California to pitch a tent on a sidewalk or shoot heroin on the sidewalk (in NYC, too, now), but stuff like this is barely seen in cities like Paris, London and Lisbon? And why we ceased prosecuting property crimes, with predictable results?
The answer, I think, is that Progressives in the American cities wear their homelessness and drug problems like a badge of honor. The messaging appears to be: look at how tolerant we are, and if you want to blame someone you can blame the rich. They should do better to learn from our European friends how to spend tax dollars to help the needy.
Lol. As a current Cupertino resident and non-Apple employee, this is the nicest place I’ve ever lived. Massive perfect roads, extremely low crime or homelessness, modern buildings, and easy access to freeways. It’s not at all like downtown SF
Coming from Menlo Park even, Cupertino feels a bit too dull and suburban, but it is astonishingly well maintained in comparison to anywhere else in the bay area. No doubt that the city is doing a great job.
I've lived here for 12 years and I can tell you that you are totally right -- it's very dull and suburban and also well maintained. It's practically a company town. The Mayor couldn't even name the second biggest employer in town after Apple. I think it's actually Amazon.
Of course, the people who live in Cupertino all hate Apple because they’re retirees and hate the traffic, think male tech employees will molest their children and hire prostitutes[1], cell phones will give them cancer, tech employees are too poor due to not yet being millionaires, etc.
Oh yes I'm aware of our racist, ageist, and elitist city council, but it's mostly a reflection of the population. Only 12% of Apple employees actually live here. Although it's changing as the old people die and the only people who can afford their houses are current tech workers, but sadly, most of those current tech workers either don't vote or can't vote (lots of immigrants).
This city would be a lot different if we granted the right to vote to all of our resident non-citizens, which I think we absolutely should do. They live here and pay taxes. They should have a voice.
I'm glad you enjoyed it ;) I was just amusing myself; I moved to a semi-rural small town and bought a house that was twice the size for less money and can work remotely with gigabit internet. There's an Amazon cargo airport less than 2 hours away, so surprisingly my deliveries are even faster than they were when I lived in the city.
I mean, I could pump up the restaurants and apartment buildings more if you like; I am unsure how modern well maintained infrastructure and mobility are not important factors in niceness though.
The Bay Area is 6900 square miles of land and cost of living is as high as any other metro on average per square mile. London, Tokyo, New York and pretty much every other major metropolis has problems akin to the Bay Area but we never quite as frequently refer to London or Tokyo “falling apart” the way we like to attract all our collective attention to bash the Bay Area here.
Well speaking just for London when I lived there for 12 years before leaving commutes were as easy as jumping on the tube for 30-40 minutes, pretty reliable from a reasonably priced distance. The Bay Area sounds like actual hell in comparison.
“Sounds like actual hell in comparison” What gives that assumption?
I have been taking the Caltrain for work in the past decade, sure it isn’t the most ideal or perfect railway system in the world debatably but it sure is the workhorse of a bustling population that doesn’t get as much praise for doing it’s job.
With all of its wealth and demand, the Bay Area should look like London or Tokyo or New York. Instead it looks like Tracy. It’s not falling apart, but neither is it growing up. It’s stagnant.
> London, Tokyo, New York and pretty much every other major metropolis has problems akin to the Bay Area
I've never lived in the Bay Area/SF so I can't comment on the problems there, but I have lived in London for the past few years.
I volunteer extensively with the homeless, and I haven't seen a fraction of what people describe in San Francisco, or anywhere near the level of antisocial behaviour or crime. Every week I'm serving food on the streets for at least a few hours; I've never once been threatened with anything other than words (and even then maybe twice with words?), never seen needles lying around (co-volunteers have, not common though), and never seen human faeces on the street.
I've lived in the Bay Area for 15 years. Except for the "poop on street" part, I've never witnessed any of those other things in SF or anywhere else either. I've never ever been threatened by anything (words or physically) in real life (this is true everywhere I've lived: Hong Kong, Florida, Connecticut, Texas, SF/Bay Area) In the Bay Area I've largely stayed in the less crowded suburbs such as Mountain View, Palo Alto, etc. where things are kept absurdly clean and orderly (the parks are hosed down at least once a week). Last week while going to work in Burlingame I did see there was human feces in the parking lot but the city sanitation worker was already cleaning it up. I do go to SF sometimes to see friends, to go at a restaurant (in pre-COVID times), etc. There is a small part of SF that gives me uncomfortable feelings but the rest of the city has never given me any issues and I've run through parts of the city in the middle of the night (during the Golden Gate Relay).
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen or that people who write about them are being untruthful. However, I do wonder if it is the extreme events or experiences that get written about and aggregated into news.
Having lived all my life in several packed downtown metro areas all over from Delhi, Mumbai, NYC to San Francisco, being safety aware and conscious of your surroundings is pure common sense and not just a specific city problem. Yes, the political class and municipality can absolutely do better to quell the concerns for the wealth and demand the metro area attracts as someone pointed out earlier, although that’s a tangential discussion IMO
Apple is clearly an incredibly successful company but to take an example why would an energetic young developer ever choose to work on Apple Music over Spotify? I say this as an Apple Music subscriber but one is a company that is existentially all in and the other that sees a revenue stream. This is evident in the quality of the respective products. If you’re not in the AR/car divisions then what is the point.
I get your idea, but Spotify isn't exactly an innovative company either. They made a product that was successful and they simply maintain it while also exploring other revenue streams (podcasts, Car Thing).
Music streaming is a terrible business to be existentially all in to because the record labels own all the actual music and have all the power over you. But you can’t do anything about it either. So there’s not much reason to invest in it.
That’s almost precisely my point. If I wanted to atrophy on a subpar product I’d choose Apple Music too. But I admit I say this not knowing the general compensation of either product.
> why would an energetic young developer ever choose to work on Apple Music over Spotify? I say this as an Apple Music subscriber but one is a company that is existentially all in and the other that sees a revenue stream
I imagine some people had similar thoughts when considering Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer.
> If you’re not in the AR/car divisions then what is the point.
Some people are more interested in a stable paycheck and will take a bullshit job to enable it.
Being number one can be downright boring. Spotify is incentivized to not rock the boat and keep the profits coming. It's very, very difficult to affect big and powerful change in that environment.
Not in the context of Streaming. Spotify's lead ( I want to say dominance but that wouldn't be true ) is partly because Apple Music, Youtube Music and Amazon Music isn't exactly great. Just look at how many free trials Apple Music is giving out everywhere trying to push for more adoption.
I dont think Spotify is perfect ( far from it ), but they have fought hard to win their place. So it is anything but boring.
Depends on what you think of the business. If Spotify goes down you're looking for a new job and all your stock blows up. If Apple closes music, you'll have a reasonable chance of getting an internal transfer, and the stock will still be there. Risk/reward assessment as usual.
Because the installed based is ridiculously huge, and you want discounts on Apple stuff? Also, it's a good way to get your foot in the door and maybe switch to something more unique to Apple later on.
Pretty much everyone I know who worked in Software at Apple had a bad experience. The common refrain was that engineers are treated like crap at apple, and it's the designers who get all the glory.
It makes me excited for the future of software engineering to see moves like this. Clearly Apple, and many other companies, are starting to understand just how critical devs are to a modern business. And they are finding that to get good devs, you have to treat devs well too, in order to compete with companies like Google & Meta. My bet: salaries, especially for experienced engineers, continue to skyrocket.
I worked in software & hardware engineering at Apple, we don't know one another, and nothing you cite as the common refrain was true anywhere around our world.
We were treated excellently, and I loved it. (Quit for a science job far away, total non sequitur, not because of Apple)
This is a recurring theme of posts that authoritatively attempt to describe the “hopeless” working conditions of highly compensated employees at big tech company <X>.
I’ve been at one of the FAANGs for about 7 years. I’ve been on some amazing teams but also my share of office bs and difficult people.
From reading HN’s characterization of my work environment, I’m depressed, completely stressed out, and everyone I work with is a horrible human being.
I mean, if I wasn’t depressed before, I’m more likely to be depressed after reading some of these posts.
As much as folks on even this site rally against FB, the constant stream of negativity or opinions - on why we should all hate X or why Y is evil - is easily found even here on HN.
I think there is a major difference between Steve-Jobs era and Tim Cook era. Lots of people's past experience may have been Steve Jobs or slightly past Steve Jobs era from 11 - 14, where most of the things stayed the same.
I tend to think 2015 was a turning point. And everything after is Tim Cook era. Also depends on org as well, for example vast majority of bad comments could be traced back to Apple IS&T. And you dont even need insider story to tell, simply judge them by IS&T's output on iCloud and any services.
I was there for both eras, and what you wrote seems plausible. It did seem pointless bureaucracy attempts were more prevalent after 2015 or so, from what i observed, and such were explicitly spoken of as forbidden before 2011, for example.
Parent commenter might mean EPMs (engineering program managers). They are basically project managers and keep software releases on time. They do tend to hold a lot of power at apple.
I don’t think I have never come across an actual product manager at apple. Design tends to make on most of that responsibility
Well, it’s not easy to understand the full list of responsibilities for the PM ppl, but from my point of view at apple the most important and valuable asset is access to VP+ folks. PMs and designers have the most of it.
From my point of view there is a hierarchy of swe’s at apple.
On the top are iOS devs - the one who are the closest to the users and execs. Next are macos, hardware, backend. After all of that you have IST eng (i hope that i remember the name of the org correctly) and not really people from Apple’s point of view: contractors.
I never worked at Apple, but I've been an Apple developer, since they were a pretty scruffy outfit, and everyone was waiting for them to go belly-up.
From my perspective, Apple has always treated their engineers quite well. Guy Kawasaki once said that "Working for Apple is like being paid to go to Disneyland."
It may no longer be the case, but I have always assumed that engineers at Apple have always felt valued.
I clearly, and unambiguously spelled out my qualification (30+ years of working with very happy Apple engineers), and also clearly stated that I have never worked there, myself.
I was extremely careful not to write in a confrontational manner. It was merely a vague statement, of my own personal PoV, based on a great deal of personal experience (I've been writing Apple software since 1986). Much of that time was spent, working for very respected corporations that had a close working relationship with Apple engineering. I spent a great deal of time, working directly with Apple engineers and managers. I have also had many, many training sessions at Apple (back when they did that). I've spent a lot of time, in the Apple ecosystem.
It doesn't escape my notice that lots of other folks that haven't worked for Apple have been more than happy to post their opinions, here.
Apple seems to be a bit of a lightning rod. I can tell you that anyone that has developed for them, as long as I have, has become quite used to torrents of abuse. I can't even imagine what Apple employees had to go through (actually, I can, because they told me).
I have to add that I have never had any interaction with either of you two folks, yet your very first interaction with me, was an attack.
That may fly on Facebook or Twitter, but it may be ... less than ideal ... in a professional environment (which I definitely consider HN). Note that I make it absolutely clear who I am, how to get in touch with me, and how to find out more about me. It encourages me to behave well. I deleted my last anonymous social media account, years ago.
This is a community. I consider it to be a professional community, and I value the considered input of professionals. I learn something every day from HN, and have great respect for many of its participants.
It is not a good idea for me to start relationships off in a pugilistic manner. I am likely to reduce the number of opportunities for me to grow; both personally, and professionally.
The standard way to describe Apple is that there are good and bad teams. My experience there (SWE org) was 70+ hour workweeks, backstabbing, more politics than anywhere else I've ever worked by a factor of ten, useless leadership (director had no charisma or leadership skills, but seemed to have the Jobs personality...), fear of senior management (director, VPs) by managers, and every other negative anecdote about a toxic workplace you can come up with.
That being said, I have colleagues in other orgs/teams that love their job, work 30 hours a week on average, have strong managers, interesting work, and shockingly higher pay.
So, there are good teams and there are bad teams. Unfortunately, you only hear that because there are often far more bad teams than good.
I've been impressed that Apple has thus far avoided one of those "Amazon is the worst company to work for" NYT articles. The lows are so unbelievably low at Apple if you end up on a bad team.
I have also experienced some uniquely Apple lows in my time. The mini-Jobs personality problem is spot-on, there are some middle managers there who are unprofessionally rude, mean, even dictatorial. The stress is ratcheted up by ironclad deadlines that entire orgs live and die by. And for a long time a lot of internal systems were absurdly out of date even though they belonged to such a cutting-edge company.
FWIW, the Apple software devs I know really enjoy their jobs. They all agree that it's not easy work, but I don't know anyone there who claims mistreatment. Small sample size, of course.
> It makes me excited for the future of software engineering to see moves like this. Clearly Apple, and many other companies, are starting to understand just how critical devs are to a modern business.
As a counterpoint, some of the highest paid non-FAANG jobs I had had some of the worst treatment of engineers. The high salaries were used to compensate for the terrible treatment and make it harder for employees to leave. In one case, many of us left and gladly took lower compensation at other companies just to get out. And of course, the jobs were immediately backfilled with new people eager to cash in on the high salaries. Money is an easy way to fill seats, but treating people well is the only way to keep them there.
As a former engineer in SWE, I don’t think there was mistreatment, but I definitely felt like designers were treated (slightly)better. At the minimum they seemed to have better snacks back in Infinite Loop!
Interesting, Apple pays $180k over 4 years to prevent good engineers from going to Meta.
Meanwhile, Meta gives >$1M in discretionary equity to top performers to prevent them from leaving. I don't think Apple picked a big enough number here.
I don't have an insider perspective on this, but from where I'm sitting, it sure looks like the giant bag of money is sufficient and Meta/Facebook hasn't had to worry about any of those things for a long time.
The giant bag of money is the tax. If they weren't having problems with retention and hiring because of the ethical dilemma, they wouldn't have to offer such a large retention bonus.
I think context matters a lot with these recent articles about eng salaries. Hiring any mid-level and up engineer is tough right now, and Amazon recently bumped their salary bands by quite a bit. I think other companies are now catching up.
> Apple pays $180k over 4 years to prevent good engineers from going to Meta
Much better wording than what the article says, which is "likely meant to keep companies like Facebook parent company Meta from poaching employees".
Poaching, as far as I know, is illegal trafficking of animals. Why are media companies insisting we see the human workforce as animals, and that we should view companies offering better pay/work as "stealing" employees when in reality, it's just people switching jobs, something that is normal?
This is a mean spirited comment that doesn't belong on HN. Not going to argue but I don't feel that comments like these add anything of value to the discussion.
I disagree. Meta is a big tech company which is up there with Rio Tinto in "purely evil how the heck do they still exist" land. Tech people should be able to discuss how terrible they are. And one of the only possible ways to influence them from the outside is to shame those selling their morals for money.
That doesn't seem too hyperbolic to me, though to be fair to Rio Tinto they don't just poison rivers and blow up cultural heritage, they actually produce needed materials in the process. I'd say working for adtech is closer to a job with a defense contractor making landmines, maybe not quite so gruesome, sure, but so negative that the positives are awfully hard to see...
I think an interesting thing here is that even if we all can agree that Meta is bad in the extreme, it's still fairly easy to hook engineers who want to solve non-evil problems on a massive, massive scale. They can tell themselves they're not working on a specific feature or service that participates in the evil, they're just using their talents to ... make an absolutely massive chat system, or incredible optimizations to network topology, or SSL termination at a mind-boggling scale. These aren't directly evil projects, and there are very, very few places where you get the opportunity to work on them at facebook scale.
I think this is how people justify it to themselves. It's probably how I'd justify it to myself if I went there. I personally don't ever plan to work there and the bigger and more evil they get, the weaker that justification becomes, but hey, it's a real thing.
> Meta gives >$1M in discretionary equity to top performers to prevent them from leaving
Most of the engineers receiving these bonuses would never get discretionary equity at Meta. Discretionary equity is given to < 1% of engineering every year. Of course, Meta also has very generous regular RSU and bonus schemes.
In 1979 an inflation-led recession rocked the US economy, abated for about 3 quarters, then returned for another 4 quarters starting in 1981. I expect the same to happen in the months ahead, and in that context Apple's offer is attractive. For anyone who hasn't lived through a deep recession, or an inflation-led recession (stagflation)... it really sucked.
I don't know what you think inflation-led means, but that's exactly my point. But for inflation, no Fed rate intervention, no liquidity scarcity, no recession... inflation started/led to it. You are one pedantic person. You must be a lot of fun at parties.
Back in 2008 or so I remember rumors of Google giving million dollar stock awards to keep engineers from leaving, particularly female or other under-represented classes. These Apple award numbers sound downright stingy for a trillion dollar tech company.
On one hand it seems like it would have happened already, but I still have to wonder if the FAANG arms race will have consequences in 5-10 years when all these overpaid engineers call in rich and decide to go work on something more interesting and with less bureaucracy in the way.
How do you imagine it playing out? It's unlikely to happen at huge scale since most people won't happily take a huge paycut regardless of how well-off they are. And there's enough people who want to work at those companies to replace the ones that leave.
It depends on individual priorities. Some folks just enjoy stacking cash. If you can do that, and maintain the status of being a top engineer at a well-known company, why rock the boat?
Additionally, it’s really hard to step away from solving large scaling issues, and go back to trying to finding your first customers/building an MVP.
I’ve been at startups and large companies. I like the money and challenges at large companies, and I don’t have crazy hours.
I'm sure there's variables, but your company will most likely setup something with a brokerage and then you'll have to create an account there and have an employer equity account which will track your options. When you exercise them, the shares will go into your regular brokerage account and you can trade them like anything else (potentially subject to trading windows and other temporal conditions). Once you've got shares, you can transfer them out to a different brokerage if you like paperwork.
Hopefully at a decent brokerage like e-trade or fidelity or schwab or even whatever Merril Lynch is called these days, and not ComputerShare, which is terrible.
Thanks. I was under the impression that until my options became stocks, my interface would be some person in the finance department. If my options appear in some managed brokerage account of mine, that makes this a lot more transparent.
Eventually, it should be in a managed account. But it may take a while post IPO to set it up. It depends how much experience the finance department has, but the brokerages know how to do it.
Apple is the biggest brand in the world and consumers love the company more than any other brand. Meta/Facebook is a peanut when it comes to the consumer hardware space. AR/VR will probably replace the smartphone in 10 years but I don’t think Apple has anything to worry about. Apple will cannibalize the iPhone themselves.
I'd argue that since most of the younger generation uses their phones for social media, AR/VR has real potential in replacing traditional social networks in the next decade. The only thing I can think of that wouldn't fit well in AR/VR is reading articles.
Amazon upped their L5 and L6 pay bands by 100k on the upper end. These companies are having trouble retaining and attracting talent, word has also spread on the internet about poor treatment of employees. 30k a year is nothing when someone else will give you a 150k raise.
I've heard (2nd hand) Microsoft also handed out SSAs ("Special Stock Awards") last month, but it's unclear how they chose the recipients (all across the level range and performance score range, though it appeared more targeted at ~3-4 year hires who are probably approaching their cliff and considering jumping).
Go to one of a dozen or so privileged colleges that FAANGs almost exclusively hire from.
Or more realistically, know someone who is already at one of those companies and can vouch for you and get your resume looked at by a recruiter. After that it's mostly a matter of how well you can handle a high pressure tech interview loop.
Google abandoned the "hire from only the best colleges" mantra years ago. It will hire anyone who makes it through the interview, regardless of college.
Have you tried just emailing recruiters directly on LinkedIn? My resume isn’t flashy (no-name college and no-name work experience) and certainly it wasn’t a few years ago. Yet, a few years ago I managed to get interviews setup with every single FAANG company, and accepted to interview at three of them. I entered through the front door with no connections, by simply searching recruiters on LinkedIn and “spamming” a couple directly (spam = one single message).
it's really not like that. I got interviews from both FAANGs I applied to last time. I went to a no name school, worked at a no name company, and had no referrals.
the interviews are challenging, but it's no secret what you'll be evaluated on.
Yeah, I just hit 4YOE. Been working mostly with early stage companies and learning a lot, but it's time to buy a house and lever up - hence time to enter the leetcode gulag for a while and earnestly see if I can pass a FAANG interview screen.
Apple is reaching a size where the un-coordination of its leadership and processes as it has grown (while yet rigorously enforcing other negative aspects of corporate culture) are producing a place that is harder and harder to enjoy working for. It worked for a while when the company was small enough and lines of command were short enough for leadership to control effectively, but it has grown while the people processes have not been consciously updated to fit.
Maybe this is just 1% problems. So let me be specific and you judge. Promotion within Apple is getting nearly impossible as a career path, because company-wide "standards" on how to promote someone (above a certain level) invite division-wide scrutiny and justification to peers (of the people doing the promoting). Not to say that it was a huge career path in the past (you had to be lucky), but at least you got paid competitively. Now, can't pay someone market rate because that would be going out of band. While at the same time, people who come in as "headline" hires from external are given not nearly such scrutiny and instead get $Ms and hiring bonuses and directorships. AIML, I'm looking at you. Strict standards for the masses, bonuses for the leadership.
And Apple is also not good at training/setting up/teaching people how to advance while working inside the company. So you are practically incentivized to leave and come back for your career advancement (once you realize it and want to stop banging your head against the wall). But not in any way that was deliberate, which loses the company a good deal. Maybe doing that better could have saved the company the billions they're having to pay now to keep people.
I remember a Steve Jobs quote where he said, "we don't hire smart people to tell them what to do, we hire them so they tell us what to do." It doesn't feel that way much at all now, because seems like Apple just wants labor.
And the annual review system is a joke. It serves just to gather feedback from peers and file it away in the drawer, since the salary bumps and bonuses are already all determined top-down from leadership. So what's the point of giving feedback or striving out of your way (unless you have some project that's got major visibility on the line)?
I thought that Apple was a welcome exception from the college-kids-software-companies, with some more maturity and rigor to it. Turns out every company has issues. Eventually you come to accept what the company is in your small pocket of it, and take it or leave it.
That is true. But it seems like the gap between IC levels and managers is growing much larger than before, while the skills (at least those displayed) by managers is hardly as noticeable.
If the GP poster had said that that Apple had previously solved the "external hires treated better than internal candidates" it would be perhaps the most impressive thing I'd ever heard about Apple culture.
> Now, can't pay someone market rate because that would be going out of band. While at the same time, people who come in as "headline" hires from external are given not nearly such scrutiny and instead get $Ms and hiring bonuses and directorships.
This seems like a common, growing problem in BigTech: It's often easier to interview and get L+1 at another company than it is to get promoted from L to L+1. Hell, it's probably easier to quit and immediately re-interview for L+1 at your own company than to go through the arduous promotion grind. When you go for promotion, you generally have to have some chain of evidence, peer reviews, performance history, etc. to show you should be at L+1, whereas when you interview at that L+1 role, you merely need to talk your way through a few interviewers and bedazzle them sufficiently. I mean, the bar is already high for the interviews, don't get me wrong, but believe it or not, it appears to be even higher for promotion.
So true. I don't understand the logic of why companies do this. It's not limited to big tech, I'd say it's true anywhere the company grows beyond 40 or so employees.
I think it comes down to how incentives are structured. In my experience, if someone who is promoted from L to L+1 fails to succeed at that new level, that person's manager is dinged for pushing a promotion that the person wasn't ready for. Conversely, an external hire who comes in at L+1 and fails to succeed is chalked up to the difficulties of hiring, with no negative consequences for the hiring panelists. As a result promotions are much more conservative than hiring. Which definitely sucks.
I can't get any sort of loyalty discount from big telcos or cable companies either, but they'll gladly give me 3 months free service to switch to them. You been a customer with us for 8 years and want the $10/discounted rate we've plastered billboards with? Get lost. Or... go switch to a competitor, then we'll court you back with freebies.
This have been so far my experience. The L5 on my team, was L5(L4 at Google scale) at Amazon, couldn't get the promo, then interviewed with us , and got L5 with TC at the top of the bracket. I know is just one data point, but I have heard of similar stories.
That could also be based on a difference of expectations in skills for a job family at Google vs. Amazon.
An Amazon Sr. SDE (L6) is expected to have strong leadership skills, which means interpersonal tech lead abilities - including mentorship of others, communication with stakeholders, etc.
This person may not have had the abilities or interest in having this so they went to Google which seems to focus exclusively on leetcode-esque abilities. (My data is ~5 years stale, but I interviewed with Google a few years back and didn't get a SINGLE "behavioural" interview question, or anything about my prior experience. It was 100% "solve this problem on a whiteboard").
Maybe, but I will take his TC at Google over a L6 TC at Amazon any day, talking from the experience of being at Amazon, and seeing people with string LP evaluations and EE performance getting only a 3% comp boost, so yeah.
> Turns out every company has issues. Eventually you come to accept what the company is in your small pocket of it, and take it or leave it.
+1. I used to think there were some generalizations that could be made based on company size, etc, but now I have realized that it is pretty similar everywhere (except possibly a < 50 employee startup).
> It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's another thing, I have eight different bosses right now.
> Strict standards for the masses, bonuses for the leadership.
Maybe I'm old and bitter but... Isn't any corporation like this? Those who hold the power will use it for their own good, or at the very least, to avoid personal problems and responsibilities.
Quick example: you fight to promote someone and it turns out the person shouldn't have been promoted? You screwed up big time, you traded a good employee who was performing well in his spot for a bad employee and now have one person to fire and two open roles to fill. You hire someone from outside? Well if that person fails you can't be fully blamed because of course the HR and your boss were involved so if everyone was wrong then no one can't be blamed.
> While at the same time, people who come in as "headline" hires from external are given not nearly such scrutiny and instead get $Ms and hiring bonuses and directorships… Strict standards for the masses, bonuses for the leadership.
The is the natural consequence of commoditization. If you are rank-and-file engineer #8430, you're a commodity. You've molded your skillset into a specific shape that fits into a particular hole, and as a result you get options. You get security. Because there are lots of engineer-shaped holes at lots of companies. Unfortunately, there are lots of engineer-shaped people. You can be easily replaced by someone with a similar skillset. So why pay you more and more, when if you quit, it's no big deal? Supply and demand at work.
These "headline" hires are different. They have rarer skillsets that are harder to come by. They're harder to hire, harder to replace, and often require poaching. Demand for them is high, because supply is low. Of course they're going to get paid more, and of course those deals are going to involve more flexibility and negotiation. For the same reason you see lots of negotiation during the purchases of cars/houses/etc, but not buying paperclips/cereal/other commodities at the store.
This is just markets at work. I think the mistake is assuming that just because you exist in the same company as someone else, your role in the market is (or should be) identical.
Some of what you say is true. But lately, it feels like one of the skills of management hires is simply being able to talk like you know how to do the job.
And when they then get in the company, turns out they have no better idea / skills to change what we do than anyone internally. But they just got paid 3x to join and find that out.
But hey, maybe that's the game. And maybe the dumber companies are getting hoodwinked. Join the game I guess and make out like a bandit while the getting is good then.
I see stories regularly of engineers who know very little, yet get hired and paid huge sums to fuck around for years and coast while staying under the radar. It happens at every level. It's turtles all the way down.
I know some people working there who are remote. (For example one lives in New York but works for a team that is located in Cupertino.) From what they’ve told me it all depends on what you can talk your manager (or a hiring manager) into. If you’re good enough and they want you badly enough, you can get what you want.
In the near term, no. Long term, with appreciation, yes. The bonus is paid as equity, not cash. If the share price doubles, that bonus is $360K, not $180K. The hope is that you’ll be incentivized to stick around for the appreciation.
I wonder if this will continue though. As some of the other comments point out, Apple stock has increased by 400% over the past 5 years, it's difficult to imagine that it will keep "popping" like this over the next 5 years.
My expirence from other large companies is these bonuses will be given to wrong engineers. But that is the nature of the beast. Nobody yet figured out the fix.
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[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadIs that really a significant amount enough to ward off being poached? 120k over 4 years is 30k a year if linear. I would think at the pay scales being discussed they would get 30k a year just to move companies.
EV has huge potential, but has a lot of competition, and Apple would be late to the party and without any serious advantages, technological, ecosystem, or otherwise. On the contrary, they'd have to build delivery and repair networks from scratch ( assuming they delegate all manufacturing). Even for their endless financial reserves, it seems very improbable they'd get anywhere serious within 10 years in the EV market.
Laptops - that's a tough market with lots of competition and long retention ( as in people rarely upgrade, and tend to stick to manufacturers), many of it Apple simply cannot and could not overcome ( Windows will probably remain the de facto enterprise standard for some more time). They finally have a serious technological advantage beyond more abstract, subjective or niche ones ( better UX or light or long batter life) advantages.
I remember seeing a slide a while back (2017ish) where 70% of Apple's revenue was from iPhones, 5% from iPads and 2% from Macs. No way in hell do they consider that a big growth market.
The last couple of years have been absolutely bonkers. 4x-ing from here would be 17x their valuation in 2017. Controlling for inflation, the probability of that happening given their current valuation seems ridiculously low.
Is 15k extra per year an effective boost to happiness?
Is 15k enough to keep working for Big Brother, in a job with very limited freedom, professionally and socially
Is 15k enough to keep working in a company that keeps users addicted to unhealthy behaviors?
>50% of engineers at Google are L4+. For the last few years, at L4 you should have been getting annual ~$100k grants over 4 years if your work in The Bay.
My understanding is that FB paid even more, and that Amazon was maybe 20% behind at the same level.
It's not like pre-covid engineers got nothing and now you get a $120k Bonus suddenly.
But total compensation is likely higher than you mentioned.
You have an initial grant that vests over 4 years that currently is absurdly high - usually more than your base (after appreciation).
Then you have 4 of the grants that stack each year. Plus your 15-25% cash bonus.
Plus you usually get a couple small ($1-$5k) bonuses throughout the year for the projects you're working on.
FAANG salaries are no joke. Especially Google and FB.
These are for average performers. Above average performers get up to ~100% more bonus and rsu
At each promotion, these numbers increase by around 15-20%. (Same for L4->L5 promotion, but L4 is not a senior level at Google)
* These are ballpark Bay Area numbers for L5 to L8.
So after a couple years as the vesting dates hit these start to stack and they end up becoming quite significant.
In reality, most engineers aren't bouncing around from company to company every year trying to squeeze every last dollar out of their compensation. The strategy works well for a few iterations in early careers, but eventually it starts becoming counter-productive.
If you have 10 jobs in 10 years on your resume, every hiring manager who sees it will instantly recognize that you're a job hopper who isn't likely to stay longer than a year. It also becomes difficult to really accomplish anything big if you're always leaving a company before you can really hit your stride.
Most people I know who end up at FAANG level companies are interested in sticking around for at least 3-4 years, if not longer. This provides the chance to accomplish bigger things, build an actual reputation within the company, and move up the in-company career ladder. Jumping to other companies for a $10-50K immediate bonus could be shooting yourself in the foot relative to sticking around long enough to get a promotion and retention awards.
Not in my experience. Most engineers spend 1-2 years, then leave.
> move up the in-company career ladder.
That's a hard ladder to climb from the inside. Politics lead to entrenchment.
> accomplish anything big
A great deal of work is plumbing and KTLO. What do the folks working on these things get? They're not great promo or resume fodder for internal mobility.
On top of that, most of our most productive engineers stayed over 4 years.
Unless you’re a senior or lead, it’s unlikely that you have had the opportunity to gain enough deep exposure to many technologies and problems in a very short tenure at a company.
Also I don't think seniors and leads with short stints are to be trusted (from recent experience with such people).
Staying after that in a lot of these cases mean a lack of interesting projects, and also end up with stagnation. My experience may be a bit affected by freelancing though :)
I go through a lot of resumes, but hardcore job hopper resumes are still very rare. Numerically, they'd have to be overrepresented in the applicant pool due to changing jobs 2-5X more frequently than everyone else.
It's not a big deal if someone has a couple short jobs on their resume or even a series of short-term engagements. But what may not be obvious until you've done a lot of hiring is that it's really hard to tell the difference between someone who changes jobs every 12 months for a pay increase compared to someone who changes jobs every 12 months because they get PIPed and managed out of every company they work for. Some people are really good at interviewing, but will show up at your company and proceed to ride your performance management track until they're pushed out, at which case they hop into the next company and move on.
So at minimum, job hoppers get much more intensive interviews and reference checks. But more realistically I just give priority to candidates who have track records of accomplishing bigger things over longer periods of time at companies.
Jumping around every 1-2 years is fine if you're junior or mid. After that you're suspect. We had a guy who left after 1.5 years. It was sudden and disruptive, and the guy burned bridges. We were not surprised since his past jobs were like that (short stints, and anger by the end of the last one). However, now, everyone we interview who's senior, we look at a different light with regards to job hopping.
Lesson learned with regards to that. Beware of senior engineers who job hop.
I think this is a bit too much of a generalization. I would caveat this with "understand what you're hiring for".
In some cases, you need a specialist to come in and laser-focus on a problem, and then maybe someone who won't be with you for long, but will tackle those problems, is just fine - and even what you really want: no seat-warming, just get it done and get out.
But if you're hiring someone to lead a long-lived team working on big projects, then your point stands.
We consider it unacceptable if all the projects a candidate wants to talk about "began before I was hired, and shipped after I left." And that's what you get if you are an aggressive job-hopper your entire career, not just at the beginning.
I am never against someone wanting to negotiate the compensation they deserve for the skills they have developed. And certainly, for many skills, job hopping is the strategy for maximizing your pay for the skills you are able to learn and refine in 1-2 years per job.
But if you don't develop the skill of taking a major multi-year project from inception to completion, there is a skill you don't have that we will not pay for by hiring you at the top two levels of our org.
1. Experience with the consequences of their choices. Ok, you were able to get a job at company X, get up to speed, and lead a major cross-team or cross-group initiative within two years. What happened after that? Did it create the desired outcomes? Why? Why not? Were there unanticipated consequences? What part did you play in dealing with those?
2. Experience with change. Managers--even entire management orgs--change. Were you around long enough to live through one such change? Or did you jump ship without acquiring any experience or scars from the change? Strategies change, e.g. Pivoting from B2C to B2B, or weaning a company off a dependence on sales-led growth. Do you have experience with not just the technological consequences, but the organizational consequences? Do you have the skill of creating an oasis of calm within the chaos?
Consider someone who works as a team lead at a startup for two years, it goes IPO, they cash out. Do they stay, learn about working in a bigger company and become the kind of person I'm describing above?
Yes, if that interests them. But that isn't the only road. They could also go join another startup. Lather, rinse, repeat. With luck and skill, they could keep honing their skills as a leader of teams in a fast-paced early-stage environment, without ever becoming the kind of person a 500-person engineering group is trying to hire as a Principal Engineer.
Nothing wrong with that, it's the engineering equivalent of a serial entrepreneur. Some founders want to run their company for their entire career, like Ken Olsen, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Others are happy to sell out and start all over again.
Do what makes you happy. I'm just explaining what one company is looking for at a senior level.
I'm not sure what company you're at but there is certainly not a multi-year project in any I've worked at. There are long term _product_ roadmaps but in order to stay agile you never commit to something as big as a multi-year project. There are only individual features that get committed to. Even in core infra (heavily technical) where needs and solutions are known committed work goes out a year tops.
Absolutely you want people who delivered things from start to finish but I've never heard of those things taking multiple years. If it takes 2-3 years for your product to go to market it's a failure, regardless of whether it's an external or internal product.
Out of curiosity, what product does your company make? What kind of moat do they have if anything you do can be replicated in under a year by a competitor?
If a roadmap goes out 3-5 years and a candidate only executes on one or two of those years, the candidate hasn't gained experience with which parts of a roadmap stay committed and which ones change in response to new information/priorities.
Most of this does not apply to a hot startup where the founders are still coding every day, but those aren't the only senior engineering opportunities.
My meta-experience is that the kinds of things I'm talking about tend to be most highly prized by companies that have been around longer than a startup, and now have problems to solve technically and organizationally that can most effectively be solved by people who have stayed in one company longer than one-two years.
Such companies aren't usually as exciting as pre-IPO startups, so absolutely no side-eye from me if anyone reading this is thinking "You can take that job and shove it, I'm busy inventing the future on a two-pizza team in a six-pizza startup."
A few short engagements are no big deal, but serial job hoppers are a warning flag for deeper investigation.
I won't overlook a resume for having a job hopper signature, but we will be going very deep into their accomplishments at these companies. It's often hard to ramp up at a company and deliver something significant from start to finish and production follow-up in 12 months.
Most of the job hoppers I interview end up citing projects that they contributed to, but can't really pin down much significant that was really their own contribution. It's not impossible, but it's far more common to find significant contributions in 2-4 year engineers.
People who haven't worked on any significant projects start - to - finish, and have a demonstrable trial of being a drifter aren't fit for senior positions by very definition.
Personally I tend to think drifters and coasters are basically the same things.
No serious shop or hiring manager I know would touch these people with a 10 foot pole.
>>For me a questionable resume is someone who spent the past 20 years at Accenture or something.
Somebody who spent 20 years at a firm, but are involved in new projects every few years make the perfect hires. The top performing talent in Google, Amazon, Boeing or any where for that matter are these kind of people.
And we're not talking a measly $30k bump, but more like $100k. It's far more advantageous to move on than to work toward an internal promotion.
As someone in charge of hiring at my current company, having brought on 17 devs over the past year, the ones we really worry about have a bunch of 6-9 month engagements. But every 1.5 years or so, with some lesser here or there... no problem at all. More likely than not they're great at what they do.
HMs in small companies, maybe, in big companies , they dont care, they are paid to bring talent in, they don't get penalized if an employee quits after a year.
> This provides the chance to accomplish bigger things, build ....
I have seen your other comments along the same line, is mostly wrong, at least here in the US, is always business , you have an obligation to yourself(or your family, etc...) not to your employer, most smart people hiring understand that you switch jobs seeking a higher TC, in the same way businesses change course/pivot seeking higher profits. The "stay forever and maybe one day you will get promoted", is a thing of the past. You make more money switching jobs than waiting for a promotion, lots of companies don't have enough "senior positions" or all the next level positions are covered, so you would have to wait until your manager (or next level pos) retires or leave. Also, managers see people who are afraid to leave, or "loyal" to the company as people then can squeeze more work out of.
> It also becomes difficult to really accomplish anything big if you're always leaving a company before you can really hit your stride.
"Anything big" like what?
In also know that there is a point (basically staff/principal) where we are very reluctant to make outside hires who haven’t been at that level at another big tech company for a while. We’ll almost never up level someone at hire time. You have to have demonstrated impact over time and that is hard to do without 2.5+ years at the company (although I’m getting the sense that once you break that threshold, moving around more frequently can help again.)
> The "stay forever and maybe one day you will get promoted", is a thing of the past. You make more money switching jobs than waiting for a promotion
These statements are FAR from universally true. My TC has more than doubled in the last 5 years without a job hop. In the same time period, many of my peers have hopped to facebook et al and increased their TC comparably. There is no one true way.
There is no one true way, yes, but one gives the employee more control over their destiny.
Hiring managers care because it's a big hit to your deliverables every time someone leaves and you have hire someone else, bring them up to speed, and try to get them back up to the same level of knowledge as the person who left.
If you have a team of 6 and everyone leaves every 12 months, that means you're hiring and re-training a new person every other month. And every other month, 17% of your team's accumulated knowledge/experience walks out the door. And every year, you're basically starting over with a new team.
It sucks, and that's why hiring managers give preference to people who aren't serial job hoppers.
It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
> It's actually becoming fairly common for companies to give back-weighted compensation or hiring bonuses that must be paid back if the employee leaves before two years, especially for job hoppers.
Which companies are doing this?
The way companies keep employees around is with good RSU vesting schedules, and end of the year bonuses, etc... I understand that a team with people leaving all the time, is bad for business , that's why companies (that care) have incentives in place to avoid that. But judging a person for wanting a better pay/treatment/wlb is ridiculous, I can see your point from the business owner perspective.
You mean like Amazon with it's weird vesting schedule? Those companies also struggle to attract talent, especially combined with obscure PIPs which can push employees out before a single RSU has vested. Those companies are not going to do well in this hiring market.
It should be easy to fire bad employees, and on the flip side, it should be easy to fire bad employers too.
Recruiters might be paid to bring people in, but HMs are the ones whose teams these hires typically work for, so being able to do productive things with them is more important than just bringing people in. The cost of retraining, losing institutional knowledge etc, and just the time it takes to bring in a new person are all costs that take away from the actual work of building the product.
You're confusing recruiters for line managers. HM == Hiring Manager == the person who's trying to build a team to accomplish a project, and at large companies most likely a multi-year roadmap.
They absolutely care about people staying a long time - it is expensive to train people on the internals of each company. At a FAANG++ company, you get your first code checked in in your first week, but it takes a YEAR to be truly productive where you are fully autonomous, and have paid off the initial ramp-up period.
> I have seen your other comments along the same line, is mostly wrong, at least here in the US, is always business
According to you. Not everyone's focus is 100% financial-based. Do I want to maximize my earning potential? Of course. But work is also 1/3 of my life. Another 1/3 is sleep. They money is for the last 3rd. So is my entire focus on 1/3 of my life to make the other waking 3rd to be as lucrative as possible? I think that's one way to approach it, but I think that's extremely short-sighted and unfulfilling.
I want my work to be meaningful, challenging, interesting, and impactful. At this point in my career I can control all this by finding workplaces, coworkers, and projects that match my skillset and my impact, and I can realize this. This means committing to multi-year plans to achieve something significant. (In the olden days we would have called this a "legacy", and I suppose that's still appropriate to some degree, though I don't expect to get a plaque on a bridge for it).
I think a lot of people are in the same boat as me. It's also part of the hacker and startup ethos - to make an actual dent in the universe.
Your attitude is very cynical, and while I agree with you that you don't owe anything to the capitalist system that is cynical about using you, that doesn't mean seeking money is the only way.
> lots of companies don't have enough "senior positions" or all the next level positions are covered
Absolutely not true. All the FAANG++ companies do promotions based on accomplishments and achievements, not a quota of budget or availability of folks at the next level.
> Also, managers see people who are afraid to leave, or "loyal" to the company as people then can squeeze more work out of.
Not the case. These managers exist, but they're not the majority. Most people who go into management genuinely care about people, and are interested in developing them. They'd like to reward loyalty. Unfortunately the aforementioned capitalist system does not permit this, but on an individual level managers are human beings with usually more empathy than IC's (out of necessity).
> "Anything big" like what?
A major software project that takes a team of people several years to accomplish.
I work at one of the FAANGs, and have found this to be 100% untrue. I was fully productive within a week, because I was already an SME in what the team was doing. Likewise, everyone hired on the same team have also been immediately productive. Perhaps it's years of consulting experience (where immediate productivity is expected in hours, regardless of environment), but that is not an uncommon path.
You absolutely do not owe companies loyalty. The same will not be displayed to you when "tough times" hit those companies. Trying to divert from this truism with "startup ethos" or similar such woo is not useful to the majority of people.
I disputed OP's point that Hiring Managers don't care about loyalty, and care if you leave after a year.
Which, unsurprisingly, also happens to (usually) be the vesting period for their stocks/options they agreed to receive when starting there.
This is a good point. Most people singing the praises of job hopping are early (<10 years) into their careers. That's when you get the big jumps in comp when you hop. My first job hop netted me +50%. The next one, about +20%. The next one, maybe 5%? I don't know, it wasn't remarkable. Now that I'm 20 years into my career, changing jobs doesn't really increase comp at all (last change was probably negative when you considered the difference in equity). You hit the comp plateau, after which, changing jobs really doesn't get you anywhere unless you can get a higher "level" (senior eng -> staff eng or manager, staff eng -> principle eng, principle eng -> executive) which is not always easy.
The youngsters among us will eventually understand, after you've reached that plateau and your next job is going to be +1% at best, all the work it takes to reskill, grind leetcode, interview prep, interview, negotiate, move your family, change your mailing address, etc. kind of stops being worth it.
That might be the biggest luxury of being in this field at least for the time being. You don't need to constantly looking for a different job that pays a little more to not live hand to mouth, nor do you need to climb the corporate ladder or move to a specific city/country to be able to have a good quality middle class life.
This is especially true for anyone looking to jump ship mostly for the money: If someone wants to jump ship for an extra 40k-50k, then giving them 30k makes the difference pretty negligible, all else being equal.
If you're proactive, people are generally happy and not really a huge flight risk so the bonus just keeps them from even entertaining external offers even though they're hearing rumors of people leaving for X% more.
If you're reactive, well they're probably already gone and you need to give them a huge counter offer to stay, many folks believe in the "never accept a counter" rule so again, you lost your employee.
$180k in AAPL 4 years ago is more like $540k now. If you don’t sell the stock, even after tax you’re potentially looking at $300k over a 4 year period. Plus, if you continue to get decent bonuses each year, this grows even more. Over a typical period over the past 10 years, Apple engineers would easily expect “salary” to be considerably less than half their actual income, especially when you consider the size of a typical sign-on RSU bonus and the amount it will grow.
Now of course, the longer Apple keeps growing like this, the less and less likely it is to continue its trajectory, so I don’t know if new engineers will see the same gains, but over the past several years it would have been a pretty sweet deal.
LTIs are a pretty standard retention practice in general, especially for key employees who are already at the top of their pay bands, but the churn in the industry over the last 18 months has probably driven up the actual value of them across the board, and potentially even shortened the vesting period.
I doubt the $30k a year with some difficult vesting cliff is going to keep those guys working at the dumpster fire that has become Apple.
We may hear more stories in the next few years. Either the woke took over, or the woke left.
1) work were you perform difficult maintenance tasks, think debugging userland code from complete system dumps
2) challenging infrastructure
3) monopolization of power by established employees
Reality is that Apple willing to have 10x the typical staff for marginal gains. Being part of that can be difficult and boring.
If I was Apple… it was the wrong time to build fancy headquarters. You got a few years, and now the area around it is falling apart and your employees have fallen in love with remote work.
Map: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=b6fab72091...
EDIT: the comments in response are non-sequiturs. The map does not display mostly human poop. It is mostly dog poop. I know I know, you see people poop all the time. But that’s not what the map is.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gT5NULvRSk
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtyW4FRn78
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPuMceGWtOQ
I walk my kid to and from daycare in that area and see street pooping if not every week, three times a month. There's a reason why people move away from the city when they have kids. We are not far off from doing the same after almost seven otherwise very enjoyable years here.
I've "only" seen two discarded needles on the street the entire time I've been here though, one was outside of a major grocery store just before Thanksgiving.
The rest of the peninsula is pretty vanilla and mundane though. As are the parts of the city not an hour's walking distance from market street. It was very interesting visiting manhattan though, I'm not sure where everyone there goes, but their SOMA-style areas seemed overall cleaner than ours, which leads me to believe it's partly a city management issue.
Human, if you're wondering still.
The answer, I think, is that Progressives in the American cities wear their homelessness and drug problems like a badge of honor. The messaging appears to be: look at how tolerant we are, and if you want to blame someone you can blame the rich. They should do better to learn from our European friends how to spend tax dollars to help the needy.
Lol. As a current Cupertino resident and non-Apple employee, this is the nicest place I’ve ever lived. Massive perfect roads, extremely low crime or homelessness, modern buildings, and easy access to freeways. It’s not at all like downtown SF
* actual quote from current city council member
This city would be a lot different if we granted the right to vote to all of our resident non-citizens, which I think we absolutely should do. They live here and pay taxes. They should have a voice.
> easy access to freeways
Come live here, it's easy to go elsewhere
Enjoy suburbia; someone has to.
I have been taking the Caltrain for work in the past decade, sure it isn’t the most ideal or perfect railway system in the world debatably but it sure is the workhorse of a bustling population that doesn’t get as much praise for doing it’s job.
I've never lived in the Bay Area/SF so I can't comment on the problems there, but I have lived in London for the past few years.
I volunteer extensively with the homeless, and I haven't seen a fraction of what people describe in San Francisco, or anywhere near the level of antisocial behaviour or crime. Every week I'm serving food on the streets for at least a few hours; I've never once been threatened with anything other than words (and even then maybe twice with words?), never seen needles lying around (co-volunteers have, not common though), and never seen human faeces on the street.
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen or that people who write about them are being untruthful. However, I do wonder if it is the extreme events or experiences that get written about and aggregated into news.
Please stay the course and let them have their “reality”.
I imagine some people had similar thoughts when considering Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer.
> If you’re not in the AR/car divisions then what is the point.
Some people are more interested in a stable paycheck and will take a bullshit job to enable it.
Not in the context of Streaming. Spotify's lead ( I want to say dominance but that wouldn't be true ) is partly because Apple Music, Youtube Music and Amazon Music isn't exactly great. Just look at how many free trials Apple Music is giving out everywhere trying to push for more adoption.
I dont think Spotify is perfect ( far from it ), but they have fought hard to win their place. So it is anything but boring.
It makes me excited for the future of software engineering to see moves like this. Clearly Apple, and many other companies, are starting to understand just how critical devs are to a modern business. And they are finding that to get good devs, you have to treat devs well too, in order to compete with companies like Google & Meta. My bet: salaries, especially for experienced engineers, continue to skyrocket.
I’ve been at one of the FAANGs for about 7 years. I’ve been on some amazing teams but also my share of office bs and difficult people.
From reading HN’s characterization of my work environment, I’m depressed, completely stressed out, and everyone I work with is a horrible human being.
I mean, if I wasn’t depressed before, I’m more likely to be depressed after reading some of these posts.
As much as folks on even this site rally against FB, the constant stream of negativity or opinions - on why we should all hate X or why Y is evil - is easily found even here on HN.
I tend to think 2015 was a turning point. And everything after is Tim Cook era. Also depends on org as well, for example vast majority of bad comments could be traced back to Apple IS&T. And you dont even need insider story to tell, simply judge them by IS&T's output on iCloud and any services.
I don’t think I have never come across an actual product manager at apple. Design tends to make on most of that responsibility
hiring so many project managers.
https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/search?search=pm&sort=relevance...
The nice thing about being run by PMs is that products and feature ship.
I joke bitterly with my friends at Google who can't seem to consistently deliver anything outside of their existing cash-cows.
That explains the state of Xcode and WWDC-driven documentation.
From my perspective, Apple has always treated their engineers quite well. Guy Kawasaki once said that "Working for Apple is like being paid to go to Disneyland."
It may no longer be the case, but I have always assumed that engineers at Apple have always felt valued.
I thought we didn't post personal attacks on HN.
That was uncalled-for.
I was extremely careful not to write in a confrontational manner. It was merely a vague statement, of my own personal PoV, based on a great deal of personal experience (I've been writing Apple software since 1986). Much of that time was spent, working for very respected corporations that had a close working relationship with Apple engineering. I spent a great deal of time, working directly with Apple engineers and managers. I have also had many, many training sessions at Apple (back when they did that). I've spent a lot of time, in the Apple ecosystem.
It doesn't escape my notice that lots of other folks that haven't worked for Apple have been more than happy to post their opinions, here.
Apple seems to be a bit of a lightning rod. I can tell you that anyone that has developed for them, as long as I have, has become quite used to torrents of abuse. I can't even imagine what Apple employees had to go through (actually, I can, because they told me).
I have to add that I have never had any interaction with either of you two folks, yet your very first interaction with me, was an attack.
That may fly on Facebook or Twitter, but it may be ... less than ideal ... in a professional environment (which I definitely consider HN). Note that I make it absolutely clear who I am, how to get in touch with me, and how to find out more about me. It encourages me to behave well. I deleted my last anonymous social media account, years ago.
This is a community. I consider it to be a professional community, and I value the considered input of professionals. I learn something every day from HN, and have great respect for many of its participants.
It is not a good idea for me to start relationships off in a pugilistic manner. I am likely to reduce the number of opportunities for me to grow; both personally, and professionally.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine."
That being said, I have colleagues in other orgs/teams that love their job, work 30 hours a week on average, have strong managers, interesting work, and shockingly higher pay.
So, there are good teams and there are bad teams. Unfortunately, you only hear that because there are often far more bad teams than good.
I've been impressed that Apple has thus far avoided one of those "Amazon is the worst company to work for" NYT articles. The lows are so unbelievably low at Apple if you end up on a bad team.
> It makes me excited for the future of software engineering to see moves like this. Clearly Apple, and many other companies, are starting to understand just how critical devs are to a modern business.
As a counterpoint, some of the highest paid non-FAANG jobs I had had some of the worst treatment of engineers. The high salaries were used to compensate for the terrible treatment and make it harder for employees to leave. In one case, many of us left and gladly took lower compensation at other companies just to get out. And of course, the jobs were immediately backfilled with new people eager to cash in on the high salaries. Money is an easy way to fill seats, but treating people well is the only way to keep them there.
Meanwhile, Meta gives >$1M in discretionary equity to top performers to prevent them from leaving. I don't think Apple picked a big enough number here.
Much better wording than what the article says, which is "likely meant to keep companies like Facebook parent company Meta from poaching employees".
Poaching, as far as I know, is illegal trafficking of animals. Why are media companies insisting we see the human workforce as animals, and that we should view companies offering better pay/work as "stealing" employees when in reality, it's just people switching jobs, something that is normal?
People on this forum NEED to look at what they contribute to the world, i imagine some of them wont want to.
Also, could you please stop posting flamewar/flamebait comments generally? We're hoping for a different sort of forum.
I think this is how people justify it to themselves. It's probably how I'd justify it to myself if I went there. I personally don't ever plan to work there and the bigger and more evil they get, the weaker that justification becomes, but hey, it's a real thing.
Most of the engineers receiving these bonuses would never get discretionary equity at Meta. Discretionary equity is given to < 1% of engineering every year. Of course, Meta also has very generous regular RSU and bonus schemes.
I would, but I guess I could be in the minority there.
Additionally, it’s really hard to step away from solving large scaling issues, and go back to trying to finding your first customers/building an MVP.
I’ve been at startups and large companies. I like the money and challenges at large companies, and I don’t have crazy hours.
Does anyone have a recommended resource that details what practically happens to my options when a company IPOs?
I know there’s a lot of variables but I imagine there’s some common patterns and things to be aware of.
The entire thing is Greek to me and might become very important soon.
Hopefully at a decent brokerage like e-trade or fidelity or schwab or even whatever Merril Lynch is called these days, and not ComputerShare, which is terrible.
What? How? Why? Those devices have completely different uses...
Or more realistically, know someone who is already at one of those companies and can vouch for you and get your resume looked at by a recruiter. After that it's mostly a matter of how well you can handle a high pressure tech interview loop.
the interviews are challenging, but it's no secret what you'll be evaluated on.
Maybe this is just 1% problems. So let me be specific and you judge. Promotion within Apple is getting nearly impossible as a career path, because company-wide "standards" on how to promote someone (above a certain level) invite division-wide scrutiny and justification to peers (of the people doing the promoting). Not to say that it was a huge career path in the past (you had to be lucky), but at least you got paid competitively. Now, can't pay someone market rate because that would be going out of band. While at the same time, people who come in as "headline" hires from external are given not nearly such scrutiny and instead get $Ms and hiring bonuses and directorships. AIML, I'm looking at you. Strict standards for the masses, bonuses for the leadership.
And Apple is also not good at training/setting up/teaching people how to advance while working inside the company. So you are practically incentivized to leave and come back for your career advancement (once you realize it and want to stop banging your head against the wall). But not in any way that was deliberate, which loses the company a good deal. Maybe doing that better could have saved the company the billions they're having to pay now to keep people.
I remember a Steve Jobs quote where he said, "we don't hire smart people to tell them what to do, we hire them so they tell us what to do." It doesn't feel that way much at all now, because seems like Apple just wants labor.
And the annual review system is a joke. It serves just to gather feedback from peers and file it away in the drawer, since the salary bumps and bonuses are already all determined top-down from leadership. So what's the point of giving feedback or striving out of your way (unless you have some project that's got major visibility on the line)?
I thought that Apple was a welcome exception from the college-kids-software-companies, with some more maturity and rigor to it. Turns out every company has issues. Eventually you come to accept what the company is in your small pocket of it, and take it or leave it.
My experience personally and from what I have heard from others, this is basically true at every tech workplace today
This seems like a common, growing problem in BigTech: It's often easier to interview and get L+1 at another company than it is to get promoted from L to L+1. Hell, it's probably easier to quit and immediately re-interview for L+1 at your own company than to go through the arduous promotion grind. When you go for promotion, you generally have to have some chain of evidence, peer reviews, performance history, etc. to show you should be at L+1, whereas when you interview at that L+1 role, you merely need to talk your way through a few interviewers and bedazzle them sufficiently. I mean, the bar is already high for the interviews, don't get me wrong, but believe it or not, it appears to be even higher for promotion.
Obviously going to a competitor comes with its costs, and hence people do not do it just for the $x discount. Just like with employment.
If there were no switching costs, then you would not see these types of "misaligned" incentives.
An Amazon Sr. SDE (L6) is expected to have strong leadership skills, which means interpersonal tech lead abilities - including mentorship of others, communication with stakeholders, etc.
This person may not have had the abilities or interest in having this so they went to Google which seems to focus exclusively on leetcode-esque abilities. (My data is ~5 years stale, but I interviewed with Google a few years back and didn't get a SINGLE "behavioural" interview question, or anything about my prior experience. It was 100% "solve this problem on a whiteboard").
+1. I used to think there were some generalizations that could be made based on company size, etc, but now I have realized that it is pretty similar everywhere (except possibly a < 50 employee startup).
— Peter Gibbons, Office Space
Maybe I'm old and bitter but... Isn't any corporation like this? Those who hold the power will use it for their own good, or at the very least, to avoid personal problems and responsibilities. Quick example: you fight to promote someone and it turns out the person shouldn't have been promoted? You screwed up big time, you traded a good employee who was performing well in his spot for a bad employee and now have one person to fire and two open roles to fill. You hire someone from outside? Well if that person fails you can't be fully blamed because of course the HR and your boss were involved so if everyone was wrong then no one can't be blamed.
The is the natural consequence of commoditization. If you are rank-and-file engineer #8430, you're a commodity. You've molded your skillset into a specific shape that fits into a particular hole, and as a result you get options. You get security. Because there are lots of engineer-shaped holes at lots of companies. Unfortunately, there are lots of engineer-shaped people. You can be easily replaced by someone with a similar skillset. So why pay you more and more, when if you quit, it's no big deal? Supply and demand at work.
These "headline" hires are different. They have rarer skillsets that are harder to come by. They're harder to hire, harder to replace, and often require poaching. Demand for them is high, because supply is low. Of course they're going to get paid more, and of course those deals are going to involve more flexibility and negotiation. For the same reason you see lots of negotiation during the purchases of cars/houses/etc, but not buying paperclips/cereal/other commodities at the store.
This is just markets at work. I think the mistake is assuming that just because you exist in the same company as someone else, your role in the market is (or should be) identical.
And when they then get in the company, turns out they have no better idea / skills to change what we do than anyone internally. But they just got paid 3x to join and find that out.
But hey, maybe that's the game. And maybe the dumber companies are getting hoodwinked. Join the game I guess and make out like a bandit while the getting is good then.
https://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-engine...
That was Facebook-Google though. Apple likes to do no-poaches... https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...