Apple's Silicon Valley hiring issues prompts office expansion elsewhere
Apple's need to hire the best and brightest people to its workforce has been a challenge, with the high cost of living in the San Francisco Bay Area apparently pushing the iPhone maker to embrace decentralization.
Hiring in Silicon Valley is notoriously difficult due to the high cost of living in the area. It appears that the expensive living costs for the region are making it extremely hard for Apple's hiring teams, according to Bloomberg's "Power On" newsletter on Sunday.
With executives knowing that hiring and keeping talent is essential to the company's future, Apple is reportedly looking at other ways to expand its workforce with diversity in mind. Engineers have complained of the living costs in the area, but diversity is a bigger problem for recruiters.
So far, the number of employees Apple has employed from underrepresented communities has grown by 64% in the last five years. However, it acknowledges there's more work to be done, but geography is a problem for hiring.
Since Apple can no longer hope more employees will move towards the Apple Park HQ, Apple instead has to go to areas where its potential workforce actually lives, or to areas where it is cheaper to live.
The realization of a decentralized workforce only really came about for Apple's top brass recently, though some members had apparently been pushing for it for years. Johny Srouji, in charge of Apple's custom silicon, was reportedly a strong proponent of the shift, with his group opening offices in many locations, including expansion into Europe, Asia, and within the United States.
Eddy Cue also pushed for decentralization, including offices in Los Angeles and Nashville. COO Jeff Williams has also championed the cost-benefit of more offices, while retail and HR lead Deirdre O'Brien has talked about diversity benefits.
While the company has already created many offices around the world, it is pushing to increase its footprint globally, with quite a few new campuses in development. It has paid out for new office space in Cork, Ireland, as well as an expansion of its New York City offices, and has put 1 billion euro towards a silicon design center in Germany.
It also started the construction of a new billion-dollar campus in Austin, Texas in 2019. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Apple is planning further expansion including a $1 billion engineering hub, in part assisted by $845 million in tax breaks over 39 years.
Remote working continues to be a benefit that many Apple employees still want to use, with one June survey revealing nearly 90% of respondents strongly agreeing with the statement "location-flexible working options are a very important issue to me." Over 58% of Apple employees said they were concerned about colleagues leaving due to a lack of flexible work arrangements, while over 36% said they were concerned that they would have to leave themselves.
In June, Apple announced a plan for employees to return to offices for three days a week starting in September. It prompted some Apple staff to write to Apple's leadership asking for more options.
Keep up with everything Apple in the weekly AppleInsider Podcast -- and get a fast news update from AppleInsider Daily. Just say, "Hey, Siri," to your HomePod mini and ask for these podcasts, and our latest HomeKit Insider episode too.If you want an ad-free main AppleInsider Podcast experience, you can support the AppleInsider podcast by subscribing for $5 per month through Apple's Podcasts app, or via Patreon if you prefer any other podcast player.
Hiring in Silicon Valley is notoriously difficult due to the high cost of living in the area. It appears that the expensive living costs for the region are making it extremely hard for Apple's hiring teams, according to Bloomberg's "Power On" newsletter on Sunday.
With executives knowing that hiring and keeping talent is essential to the company's future, Apple is reportedly looking at other ways to expand its workforce with diversity in mind. Engineers have complained of the living costs in the area, but diversity is a bigger problem for recruiters.
So far, the number of employees Apple has employed from underrepresented communities has grown by 64% in the last five years. However, it acknowledges there's more work to be done, but geography is a problem for hiring.
Since Apple can no longer hope more employees will move towards the Apple Park HQ, Apple instead has to go to areas where its potential workforce actually lives, or to areas where it is cheaper to live.
The realization of a decentralized workforce only really came about for Apple's top brass recently, though some members had apparently been pushing for it for years. Johny Srouji, in charge of Apple's custom silicon, was reportedly a strong proponent of the shift, with his group opening offices in many locations, including expansion into Europe, Asia, and within the United States.
Eddy Cue also pushed for decentralization, including offices in Los Angeles and Nashville. COO Jeff Williams has also championed the cost-benefit of more offices, while retail and HR lead Deirdre O'Brien has talked about diversity benefits.
While the company has already created many offices around the world, it is pushing to increase its footprint globally, with quite a few new campuses in development. It has paid out for new office space in Cork, Ireland, as well as an expansion of its New York City offices, and has put 1 billion euro towards a silicon design center in Germany.
It also started the construction of a new billion-dollar campus in Austin, Texas in 2019. In Raleigh, North Carolina, Apple is planning further expansion including a $1 billion engineering hub, in part assisted by $845 million in tax breaks over 39 years.
Remote working continues to be a benefit that many Apple employees still want to use, with one June survey revealing nearly 90% of respondents strongly agreeing with the statement "location-flexible working options are a very important issue to me." Over 58% of Apple employees said they were concerned about colleagues leaving due to a lack of flexible work arrangements, while over 36% said they were concerned that they would have to leave themselves.
In June, Apple announced a plan for employees to return to offices for three days a week starting in September. It prompted some Apple staff to write to Apple's leadership asking for more options.
Keep up with everything Apple in the weekly AppleInsider Podcast -- and get a fast news update from AppleInsider Daily. Just say, "Hey, Siri," to your HomePod mini and ask for these podcasts, and our latest HomeKit Insider episode too.If you want an ad-free main AppleInsider Podcast experience, you can support the AppleInsider podcast by subscribing for $5 per month through Apple's Podcasts app, or via Patreon if you prefer any other podcast player.
Comments
A computer scientist friend of mine spent years being head hunted and deployed all over the world. It sounds nice to have a company contract you and provide a mansion for you and your family in Miami for a couple of years, schooling for kids etc included etc but there comes a point when you just want to be 'home'.
COVID has forced companies to adapt even more to the notion of decentralisation but for many multinationals it was already a 'perk' of hard to fill positions to work in places that were not 'too far' from home and where quality of life is relatively high. Moving might be necessary to a degree but not to unrealistic destinations with administrative, cultural or language barriers to manage.
Cork is close enough to most of western Europe for workers to relocate although there are complaints about the cost of living there too. Most Europeans would have no issues relocating within the EU. Of course, for obvious reasons. Most companies (Apple included) have R&D centres dotted around the world and if Apple has decided to expand its footprint, it's a step in the right direction. Especially as competing companies offering similar positions are offering positions that aren't too far from applicants' places of current residence.
That and modification of the stupid open floor plan design of their wealth-brag main building...
Also proves wrong all those rabid fanboys who say "Employees who don't like working in the office? Ha! Fire them! Apple will easily replace them!" look pretty ignorant, since Apple is now struggling to get enough hires. It's very much a worker's economy right now, and apparently Cook is a combination of apathetic toward his employees, too far removed from reality to realise the shift in the economy, and sluggish to make the same changes that every other tech company is doing; to make Apple a more attractive place to work. It's not the employees' fault that the spaceship apparently isn't a very good place to work.
However, expanding in Cork is such a great move right now. With the UK out of the EU, Ireland is an attractive prospect for talented tech graduates from across Europe.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/11/06/08/apple_planning_massive_12000_capacity_spaceship_campus_in_cupertino
The spaceship campus also has limited capacity, they couldn't fit another 10,000 employees in it.
Apple is building a campus in Texas and if 'everyone moves to Texas' they'll quickly have the same housing problems:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/apple-expands-in-austin/
"Apple in Austin
"Apple is on track to contribute $350 billion to the US economy between 2018 and 2023, and during that time will hire an additional 20,000 employees in cities across the country."
This was announced before the pandemic.
The Bloomberg article is just another hit piece from Mark Gurman. He talks about employee salaries being an issue. Even if they had 30,000 employees making $200k, that's $6b for a company that makes $275b in revenue and has nearly $200b in cash.
- Apple is embracing hybrid work and offering fair working policies for extremely well paid jobs
- a lot of Apple's employees can't feasibly work remotely, especially in hardware. Facebook/Google/Microsoft are mostly software.
- Apple is expanding globally and has been before the pandemic
Good thing California doesn't have things like rolling blackouts.
Was Steve's thought process too high minded for the "What's in it for me?" thinking that pervades (or still persists?) our current society? Maybe. The pandemic has certainly driven more people into isolation, shifted focus inward, and has greatly reduced their sphere of exposure to immediate coworkers to simply being a matrix of partially engaged talking heads on a flat screen. Of course senior executives would prefer that employees refer to their coworkers as "teammates" that are all engaged in holding up their part of the collective teamwork being carried out on a shared field of play they call the company's "campus." It's no longer a "facility," a "factory," or an "office building," it's a campus just like their college days where frisbees are being thrown across the quad by carefree students. At least that's what the messaging and the purposefully and strategically created work environments are meant to convey.
The reality for Apple and its employees, aka teams, is that being in the SF Bay area has a lot of opportunities and a lot of tradeoffs. Tradeoffs include stratospheric housing prices and horrible commutes. These tradeoffs are not unique to Apple and are not unique to the SF Bay area. Anyone leaving Cupertino and moving to Austin, Boston, RTP (North Carolina), Atlanta, LA, DC, and several other "high tech" job centers are going to face similar tradeoffs, perhaps not at the same level, but of sufficient magnitude to keep the grind in the daily grind fully intact. Apple can't "fix" the SF Bay area problems, and in fact, will inevitably drag some of the contagions from that area to their new locations. Housing prices, congestion, and commute times will absolutely go up in their new locations.
I'm not going to pick sides on this argument because I think that the pandemic simply highlighted issues that have existed for many decades in many locations around the world. It's always been a big ongoing social experiment and we've not yet discovered the perfect solution to keeping everyone happy and productive and landed on a work-life balance that actually works for them. I think that despite all of the great lengths that high minded planners have gone to in trying to come up with to create the perfect hamster cage for their workers, nothing will satisfy everyone in all cases.
One possible approach, the one that I chose, was for me to decide what kind of work-life balance I wanted and pick a job and location that I thought would provide an opportunity for it to happen. After a few tries, and with consideration for a working partner that has similar needs as well, I think I've finally settled on something that worked out. Trying to come up with a reasonable solution that satisfies the needs of one, two, or a small family of people is difficult enough, but manageable. For a company like Apple, trying to come up with a one-size-fits-all solution that satisfies hundreds of thousands of employees and their families is impossible. Yeah, Apple could enforce an edict or fall back to a take-it-or-leave-it attitude and deal with the consequences. That's an easy way out and is a card that many companies have played in the past and will play now. A more empathic approach would be to engage with employees to see if there are compromise or hybrid solutions. It sounds like Apple is following the latter model, but it will never be enough for everyone.
Apple can't fix all your problems. There are some things you have to fix for yourself.
I personally don't believe in large scale HQs anymore. Once an industry becomes dominant in an area, the local governments becomes antagonistic towards them. Google had to pay a $200m "community funds" bribe + extra concessions to San Jośe to get their new campus approved. Companies are better off decentralizing instead of building out large scale HQs in a single area.
Incidentally, people forget that before the tech industry being dominated by first software and then data companies on the west coast and San Fran/Silicon Valley, the tech industry was dominated by hardware - electronics and semiconductor companies - and the center for that was Texas. Dell, DEC, EDS, AT&T and - of course - Texas Instruments! It is crazy that everyone thinks that the Texas economy is all fossil fuels and low wage jobs. It is the tech sector that keeps the Texas economy afloat during the energy boom and bust cycles.
No the Texas higher education system isn't the equal of California's, but who is really? So while Texas lacks a Cal Tech (or MIT and possibly a Northwestern) they nonetheless have the following great engineering schools in that state: Rice, Houston, Texas A&M, Texas, SMU, Baylor. Several good ones include Texas Tech, Trinity, North Texas, Abilene Christian and some branch campuses of A&M and Texas. A bunch more are at least average. No one else - besides, again, California - can match that quantity. As Apple is in fact primarily a hardware company as opposed to software/data companies like its competitors Microsoft and Google, they should absolutely have a massive presence in the Lone Star State. Not just to take advantage of all those engineering grads, but to raid experienced talent from the many other tech companies in that state.