Apple is the worst tech firm for losing staff, claims flawed report

AppleInsider

New employment research says the technology industry is the poorest for retaining staff and Apple struggles the most -- but the analysis is close to nonsense.

Staff retention is genuinely an issue, and Apple has had sufficient problems with it that former head of retail Angela Ahrendts saw fit once to boast of having greatly raised the figures. Now research from resume.io calls out Apple for being the US company with the shortest average retention of staff at 1.7 years.

As the research does note, Apple has been paying out up to $200,000 in stock bonuses to select engineers to get and keep them in the company. But the research is also clear about its methodology, and that's where the problem is.

"Resume.io analyzed the LinkedIn pages of the top 100 companies by market cap in the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia," said the researchers. "We ranked each business based on its average tenure to find the companies that are best at retaining their staff."

As a source for general statistics, LinkedIn is problematic because all of its data comes from individuals and it is up to them whether they post at all. It's also up to them whether they are accurate.

Plus it's up to the individual whether they go on LinkedIn, and people who are not looking for work arguably have no reason to join the platform. People who've been at Apple for life and intend to stay will not be diligently updating a LinkedIn profile, if they even have one.

So there is, for instance, a LinkedIn account for Craig Federighi but it says he's a "hairstylist at Jajah" in Mumbai. There's at least one Tim Cook, but it isn't the one at Apple. There is no Phil Schiller.

The figures for Apple do include the hundreds of thousands of retail workers and don't include the likes of Tim Cook

Consequently, the people at Apple whose tenures stretch into the decades and so would help skew the average higher, are not included in this LinkedIn-based research at all.

More significantly, the research includes people who are working in retail. That industry famously turns over staff as people move between jobs, or they take up such positions part time.

Apple has an enormous retail workforce and so does the joint second-place worst company, Amazon, which purportedly retains staff for an average of 1.8 years.

But sharing that joint second place spot is Meta, which opened its first physical retail space in 2022.

Read on AppleInsider

Draco

The study may be flawed but I can tell you first hand that it's directionally correct. Apple is a sausage grinder for engineers; many people quit or are fired before they even make it two years. And unlike other companies, if your manager doesn't like you, they will do nothing to help you find another position in the company under a different manager--you're just gone. 

40domi

IMO you don't need a survey to know that Apple has had a brain drain, the problem is that they've lost a lot of their top engineers and replaced the with less than average ones, which hardly surprising with the state of Universities in the West, Apple needs to recruit from the Asian countries!
It's clear with the lack of innovation and poor upgrades over the last 2 years 😏

danox

40domi said:

IMO you don't need a survey to know that Apple has had a brain drain, the problem is that they've lost a lot of their top engineers and replaced the with less than average ones, which hardly surprising with the state of Universities in the West, Apple needs to recruit from the Asian countries!
It's clear with the lack of innovation and poor upgrades over the last 2 years 😏

Then those Asian software engineers should be good for writing an OS from the ground up, and staying home? Samsung’s looking…..  

StrangeDays

40domi said:

IMO you don't need a survey to know that Apple has had a brain drain, the problem is that they've lost a lot of their top engineers and replaced the with less than average ones, which hardly surprising with the state of Universities in the West, Apple needs to recruit from the Asian countries!
It's clear with the lack of innovation and poor upgrades over the last 2 years 😏

That sounds like absolute nonsense to me, not the least because Apple hardware has made impressive updates the past two years. Nobody can compete with the M-series, for example. As for iPhone, it matured many years ago and naturally the improvements are incremental and best examined over a period of time, not year to year. 

I don't know what you consider "innovation" to be, but it certainly isn't PC laptops or android knockoffs. 

charlesn

Listen: I get it. Trying to fill a website each day with compelling "news" about a famously secretive company is hard. Really hard. But that's still NO EXCUSE for an 11-paragraph article based on analysis that your sub-head states is "close to nonsense." Why would you publish an analysis of "nonsense analysis?" Review some accessory instead. Or maybe start a new ongoing series of articles that compare an "official" Apple accessory with a knock-off sold at a fraction of the price--what are the differences? I don't know, but there have got to be better ways of filling the ether than with "nonsense." 

coolfactor

StrangeDays said:

40domi said:

IMO you don't need a survey to know that Apple has had a brain drain, the problem is that they've lost a lot of their top engineers and replaced the with less than average ones, which hardly surprising with the state of Universities in the West, Apple needs to recruit from the Asian countries!
It's clear with the lack of innovation and poor upgrades over the last 2 years ߘ怜t;/div>

That sounds like absolute nonsense to me, not the least because Apple hardware has made impressive updates the past two years. Nobody can compete with the M-series, for example. As for iPhone, it matured many years ago and naturally the improvements are incremental and best examined over a period of time, not year to year. 

I don't know what you consider "innovation" to be, but it certainly isn't PC laptops or android knockoffs. 

Unlike software, it's important to remember that hardware development is a multi-year strategy. What we get in 2023 was likely being worked on in 2020 or 2021, or earlier. So losing workers in 2 year intervals must be a major setback to that.

hodar

coolfactor said:

StrangeDays said:

40domi said:

IMO you don't need a survey to know that Apple has had a brain drain, the problem is that they've lost a lot of their top engineers and replaced the with less than average ones, which hardly surprising with the state of Universities in the West, Apple needs to recruit from the Asian countries!
It's clear with the lack of innovation and poor upgrades over the last 2 years ߘ怜t;/div>

That sounds like absolute nonsense to me, not the least because Apple hardware has made impressive updates the past two years. Nobody can compete with the M-series, for example. As for iPhone, it matured many years ago and naturally the improvements are incremental and best examined over a period of time, not year to year. 

I don't know what you consider "innovation" to be, but it certainly isn't PC laptops or android knockoffs. 

Unlike software, it's important to remember that hardware development is a multi-year strategy. What we get in 2023 was likely being worked on in 2020 or 2021, or earlier. So losing workers in 2 year intervals must be a major setback to that.

I agree.  Seems they may have a very high turnover in the lower ranks; but if you survive 3-4 years- you move to the more lucrative and stable levels. 

From there it’s a longevity perspective to the staff critical point, where you are at a senior and leadership level. 

It’s culling the entry level to find loyalty and talent in the long game.  Risky business strategy 

eriamjh

The more bad news you hear, they more that exists of you assume the number of people who do not have problems do not complain.  

The argument “we don’t hear the good news” is because no one praises what is expected to be the norm.   We only hear the complaints.  Ever see a store with a compliment department?  No.  Because it’s unnecessary.  

It’s a version of “I didn’t have any problems so your problems must not be real” syndrome.  

Defenders of Apple dismiss bad news.  Don’t argue it’s “flawed” without having opposing data.  The study is based on the data provided.   A studies are.  

Now, the conclusions based on those results can be summarized in wildly different ways because of bias.   I’ve seen articles about studies that conclude the opposite of each other for the same data. 

Bring on the M3 30” iMac, please.  Studies show everyone wants one.  

silverwarloc

charlesn said:

Listen: I get it. Trying to fill a website each day with compelling "news" about a famously secretive company is hard. Really hard. But that's still NO EXCUSE for an 11-paragraph article based on analysis that your sub-head states is "close to nonsense." Why would you publish an analysis of "nonsense analysis?" Review some accessory instead. Or maybe start a new ongoing series of articles that compare an "official" Apple accessory with a knock-off sold at a fraction of the price--what are the differences? I don't know, but there have got to be better ways of filling the ether than with "nonsense." 

It's not non-sense at all.  Reading the article at face value one can think that to be true.  The author is just providing context on how the stats came about.  This is useful to the reader especially to me since I'm not a techie.  Transparency in methodology of any stats should be a no brainer.  However, resume.io's methodology would have solved this issue have they been made clear about how the stats were obtained.  Note: I believe the author of this article meant to say that the methodology is NOT clear from resume.io.

williamlondon

charlesn said:

Listen: I get it. Trying to fill a website each day with compelling "news" about a famously secretive company is hard. Really hard. But that's still NO EXCUSE for an 11-paragraph article based on analysis that your sub-head states is "close to nonsense." Why would you publish an analysis of "nonsense analysis?" Review some accessory instead. Or maybe start a new ongoing series of articles that compare an "official" Apple accessory with a knock-off sold at a fraction of the price--what are the differences? I don't know, but there have got to be better ways of filling the ether than with "nonsense." 

Sadly, the editorial awhile ago took a very negative turn.

FileMakerFeller

AppleInsider said:

Apple is the worst tech firm for losing staff, claims flawed report

Wow. It's like the managers at Apple don't even know about Find My.

"Where's that intern? I swear he was here just a second ago..."