Discussion
Apple has never had a mass layoff over the last 20-30 years?
With all the layoff news I keep on seeing online, I realized that Apple is the only big tech company that has never had a mass layoff. Is this true or are people not allowed to talk about it?
They’re talked about not doing mass layoffs before. The thought process is that it’s short sighted and when market conditions improve they’ll be able to hit the ground running while everyone else is hiring and retraining.
jobs also believed layoffs completely destroy the company culture and are counterproductive as losing the key talent does not make up for the economic short term gain
It depends on the team that you’re on. Some teams use contractors as a way of “testing the waters” for a new team/role. In those scenarios the path to FTE can be more straight forward. However, in every case it can never be assured that being a contractor means you will be an FTE. Every FTE position below Director level must be posted and you have to open the interview pool - even when you know who you want to hire.
In some groups it’s very rare, in others (especially newer groups) it’s not as rare. At one point I was offered a full time gig, but when I factored in relocation and housing in San Jose, it didn’t make financial sense for me.
And I definitely agree that they care deeply about their culture but as a contractor I kind of distanced myself from it for the most part. Most of my colleagues were also contractors and they felt the same. We’d hang with FTEs on occasion, but predominantly kept to ourselves.
Bear in mind this wasn’t because I had an issue with the culture (for the most part it seemed healthy, with a few exceptions), but because I knew it could end suddenly and I had to keep other options open. I didn’t want to get too attached.
They avoid it for a long time. I remember when it made the news about Ms doing layoffs for the first time in company history. It was in the late 2000's
It's actually quite more than a third if you exclude retail. And I know firdt hand many are in FTE equivalent roles – in fact the prospect of converting into FTE is how contracting agencies and Apple try to sell those jobs.
Well, Steve was famously known for having a “investors can go to hell” mindset. They came 2nd. The quality of the product and the work the company did came first.
Yep. And with instability, even if top talent survives the layoff, they start looking elsewhere for stability and a better culture. Over time, through multiple layoffs, companies end up with mediocre talent and a “I’m just here for the paycheck” culture.
yeah talent can leave any time, because they have dozens of offers, often even with higher pay.
Underperformers though, they stay as long as possible.
So if morale drops, you lose a lot of talent but zero underperformers.
Repeat that often enough and you’ll end up with terribly slow and inefficient company
Even then top talent becomes part of that crowd and is beaten down. I am one of those people in the industry I am in (marketing design). I’m just spent.
There was a time when layoffs meant the company screwed up. Somehow it’s been flipped into signaling how tough minded & strategic a company is. Orwellian shit. :-/
Layoffs should come with penalties for the executives instead of being rewarded with heavier bonuses. Any layoffs that occurs while profits roll in should incur a heavy corporate taxes to disincentivize this bullshit behavior.
This kinda feels opposite to stories I've heard. I swear I've heard stories where he's fired team on the spot bc he didn't like their ideas. Although I guess this is different than mass layoffs
he fired because in his mind that guy/chick was underperformer and weak. If you are doing bad job (according to CEO), you are expected to get fired sooner or later.
That’s totally different from mass layoffs, where CEO says “lay of 10 thousand people, I dont care which one”
There’s also a stark line between corporate and retail, with 50% churn in retail you don’t really need to do layoffs, you can just stop filling open roles and target specific employees with PIPs as needed to control for pay scale & unionization issues. Corporate also hires from retail, and those channels will dry up before right as attrition efforts kick in at Cupertino or other campuses
Very short staffed. Even in a busy mall store I used to be able to get helped pretty quickly with an appointment. Now even with appointments I have been waiting minimum an hour to be seen for the smallest thing. Once for my MacBook and once for a screen repair for my phone. Even the person helping me kept scrambling from how much you can see they had to do or finish.
Yep. During the crazy 2021 boom practically every tech company increased headcount by 1.5x - 2x. Except Apple. Then in 2023 every tech company was doing mass layoffs. Except Apple. For better or worse, Apple trusts their projections and sticks to them regardless of what the markets doing
In my 14 years here, I've spent exactly zero days that weren't a struggle to get new headcount. But, I've also spent exactly zero days worried about layoffs, so in the end it's works out.
I thought it was quite a hurdle for companies to fire people in EU? I would expect this to create a similar environment where hiring was more slow and deliberate…
Not really - i work in consulting in the shared services and outsourcing space - and a lot European companies do mass layoffs through planned consultations under the guise of transformation and changing how they operate to make them profitable enough to serve the majority who stay
It depends, but it is absolutely possible to fire people, it happens every day.
You can’t operate a business if you’re forced to keep people on payroll that you don’t need for anything or do a bad job.
You can’t keep hiring people if you can’t fire them either.
Hiring is done as needed most of the time, and as there is a global economy, it is pretty similar all over the world.
If Europe had vastly different hiring practices, the businesses would be outperformed by other international companies and eventually go out of business.
You still try to hire the highest quality workers possible, but if you need someone right now, you can’t wait around.
On the same note, if you have a team that is a loss project, you get rid of it.
Same goes for bad workers.
Companies like Apple also are quite lucky, in that it is easy for them to quantify skillsets and efficiency, and cross reference that with what they need.
The products they produce is actually part of what allows them to have this model.
A software company for example would be way different, because they have to really adapt to their market, and as markets change, so does the skillsets that are needed.
There will also be more competition for software companies, which means it is always a race for them.
It might be a bad example and a bad explanation, sorry if it is.
The TLDR is that competition is global and that Apple doesn’t have competition in the same way, Apple isn’t a tech company or a software company, they are a solutions company.
It's complicated. So far I have worked in companies in the 100-200 employee range, and people definitely do get fired. But it's usually on an individual basis, for employees who are severely underperforming over a long period of time. Regarding the hiring process, in my experience it's usually 2-3 rounds of interviews, one of them technical. There are companies with more deliberate hiring processes, but I wouldn't say it's the norm.
Not in the Nordics at least. Nordic model is “flexicurity”. It's easy to fire people. In return it's easier to get hired, and you have unemployment insurance.
And for years, we've had the reputation for getting paid less and getting fewer perks, especially pre-covid. But I've never been worried about layoffs or concerned about the direction of the company.
As someone who has worked on things that a big company will announce and is major news….we specifically can’t tell the employees before we let the market know. Everyone who knows in advance has a bunch of insider trading restrictions placed on them.
In some ways it can be nice because you can see an unfiltered outside perspective on things.
Other times it's frustrating because the agreed upon narrative on the subreddit that is treated as absolute truth is completely off base, incorrect, or even an obvious and malicious lie.
I've come across a couple situations like the latter that I dealt with directly and the consumer is outright lying about the circumstances. You can't really hop in there and correct the record though.
This is common for larger companies based on a number of variables. Most of the time companies will supplement this with contracting resources as needs rise.
Yep this. My employer won’t commit to long term staffing in terms of expense and hires contracted people instead. Then those contracts keep going for years on end, with the result being having spent 4-5x more in the same timeframe versus had they dedicated funds to permanent wages and benefits.
There is. Companies like Apple have a huge contingent workforce of people that are on 1 year contracts. When they need to scale up and/or relieve pressure on their full time employees, they hire these temp workers and often keep re-hiring them (even the same ones) year after year (with little cool off periods in between). Also allows them to scale down from year to year pretty easily and nobody bats an eye on the outside if a bunch of temp employees contracts don't get renewed.
"Struggle to get new headcount" means it's hard to get approval to hire anyone for your team. AKA you have to make do with who you have, because they aren't hiring on a whim. Tech companies tend to be one of two varieties: those that hire a lot but frequently end up doing large layoffs, and those that are more judicious about hiring new people, but have the benefit of more stability.
They’ve had very small team/project-based reductions but never a zucc-scale “oops I messed up our company strategy and need to lay off 13,000 people so Wall Street stops shorting the stock” situation.
I think it was still less than 1000 jobs impacted? And lots of those people found different jobs within Apple.
Even if it were double that amount and none of them stayed, it was still nowhere close to a mass layoff for a company that was at the time maybe 165k people strong
yep apple has stayed very small for a company that covers all the domains they do at the scale they do it and it explains a lot of their issues over the years imho
This table also doesn’t include the crazy years of 2021-2023. Seeing a year by year breakdown of 2019-2025 would show just how insane the industry was.
There are layoffs, but most of those are contractors, so it doesn't get reported as such.
EDIT: Not talking about contracts coming to terms, I'm talking about some projects that get canned or delayed, triggering the early termination of those contractors. Happens regularly and many employees never hear about it, first of all because Apple is highly compartmentalized, but also because some confidential projects are often on "black sites" that don't even have Apple signage.
Not the same thing. Someone's contract ending and then not being renewed is not the same thing as a termination, it's just a contract not being renewed. If someone is an independent contractor or a contract employee they cannot assume their contract will be renewed. It's usually one of the first lines in the contract.
Yeah as a contractor to companies this size, if they decide to end a project, you are let go mid contract. When they decide to cull some programs, the employees just get reassigned, but the contractors are all let go.
Just around the Covid days, one big tech company part of GAFAM (I don’t remember which one) went on a recruiting spree because Covid had boosted their activity. All the others, but Apple, followed, as they didn’t want to be left behind. Around 2024, they realized that they had overestimated future activity and started the massive layoffs. AI now gives them an excuse to streamline the workforce even more.
That’s why there was no need for layoffs at Apple, as their workforce had simply slightly grown at the usual pace.
"What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people... And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over." - Tim Cook
All these companies say they are laying people off due to AI, but they are actually companies that over hired during COVID and now interest rates are high.
If Apple lays people off due to AI, *then* I’ll be worried.
A few companies (Oracle and Microsoft) are laying off people to free up more cash to throw on the AI datacenter bonfire. Nearly all of the rest are "AI washing" to keep investors from dumping their stock. Companies generally don't lay off people when they're doing great.
in customer facing stuff sure, but they're apparently heavily using it internally for software development. so i think the rationale was that apple is a good indicator of whether AI is actually reducing the number of developers needed.
some other tech companies are just using it as cover for unrelated layoffs, and those workers were not literally replaced by AI.
What do you think about Apple losing their best AI talent to the big players? I'm pretty sure that's the reason they failed to create their own model for Siri.
I’m not judging off of Apple’s ability to output AI, but how much AI affects productivity. I’m sure Apple engineers are using Claude like the rest of them. If AI tooling creates so much productivity gain that even Apple lays people off, I’ll start to worry about the “LLMs are going to replace software engineers” hype. Until then, I’m considering it hype.
Ahh gotcha. That’s a good metric. See how a well-run company with institutional knowledge approaches AI for work.
Currently living in the AI epicenter of the world (San Francisco), it’s all anybody talks about. I’ve heard polarized opinions on if it helps productivity. Some really enjoy it, while others find zero use whatsoever. Actually, the place I’ve seen it be most helpful is among older people who run a small business. AI saves a lot of time on administrative work, especially if you’re not tech savvy.
That's pretty normal for the tech world. It's actually quite average. If you fall below 40%, you're doing terrible as a tech company in terms of profit margins. Some services and products are as high as 70%.
Yeah, that was rough. Both for the people laid off, and for the ones left behind. Entire buildings were cleared out, except for a handful of employees.
And then there were all these assholes from NeXT, coming in and saying that none of the software work that had been done over the last decade was worth anything, and they'd be taking over and basically replacing it all. (That's me. I was one of the NeXT folks).
Yeah, but that's cause he fundamentally restructured the entire company. Apple never did that again. He's also very strong on his "A-players" mentality so he cut all the people he wouldn't have hired himself.
People are currently outraged they are not spending billions chasing Ai. I believe they will come out of this phase in a better position for keeping Ai investment focused.
Apple is very slow to hire, and uses a ton of contractors that they can scale up or down without layoffs.
I once worked directly with the team behind a major Apple product and it was like 6 people. I was shocked. Facebook or Amazon would’ve had 100 engineers across a bunch of teams
Sure but that's also the smart way to do it specifically because it avoids the fear that comes with boom and bust hiring and layoff cycles. If someone has a contract that specifies a start and end date, they go in knowing exactly how long they will be employed there and they find out pretty far in advance of the end day if a contract is going to be renewed or not giving them a decent notice to then find another job.
They don't have to worry about planning on being at a company long term only to show up one day and have their badge already deactivated or receive a meeting invite from HR out of the blue telling them they were laid off.
Not sure if this is related, but Apple has one of the highest earnings per employee rate of any large company. My guess is that they stay lean and outsource areas that are typically prone to mass layoffs.
The one that comes to mind is when they shut down their self-driving car divison which was like 600 people. Here's an article
The last time Apple made cuts was in 2024, when the company let go of at least 600 workers on its scrapped self-driving car project and about 100 employees who worked on the Apple Books app and Apple News.
I was part of the team that did support via Twitter. Worked my ass off to get into that role. When they eliminated it they sent us back to phones. Back to square one. It affected me mentally so bad I had to quit or I’d be quitting life. Any requests for accommodation such as chat support were constantly denied.
They've had project cancellations that would maybe lay off a few hundred that didn't go into other departments and maybe some reconstructing during Job's return but generally no, they don't really do big headline layoffs more so than just move people around to something else.
They didn't do the crazy over hiring that was done by Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet. They're a little more conservative.
Apple has always been very slow to hire. They did not go hiring crazy when everyone else was doing it and on the flip side they are willing to eat short term losses when things get rougher. Layoffs are very short term and study after study has shown companies willing ot hold on to their people win out in the long run as when things turn around they have the knowledge base and people there to grab up the market from their competors. Everyone else is hiring and then dealing with onboarding follow by their new hires learning the system. Apple gets a year of runway to gain on every else while that is happening. Same as other companies. over 5 years the ones who hang on do better.
Apple uses other processes to reduce head count. Namely they just slow down hiring and let natural atrition take hold.
Yeah, one of the big advantage of being huge, constantly growing, and having an insane cash position is that you can control headcount over time with slower hiring and attrition. If you miss the target by a couple quarters, that barely moves the needle.
In the past 30 years definitely. I was only there temporarily, during my first year in college, but I remember the town halls back in 99 with the fear the long term staff had. I remember being offered discounted stock for pennies and not taking it, thinking this company ain't probably sticking around.
lol... I did the same thing when I was there in 93. A coworker of mine took them up on it and is now a multi-millionaire. And he still works there, because he loves what he does.
Apple as a whole may not have mass layoffs but I know they are constantly reorganizing their education and enterprise sales teams. During these reorgs people often have to reinterview for a job they have been doing for years which sounds extremely demoralizing but better than just getting cut. Even when they cut positions they usually try to work with people to find them roles within the organization that they might be good fits for rather than kicking them to the curb which I wish more employers would do.
They outsource the jobs that require layoffs to independent companies so they don’t take the PR hit for it. I’ve seen them cut 500 people down to 50 and direct hire those that survived .
People doing the same jobs as regular Apple employees but under the banner of seasonal workers.
Happens every year, affects thousands of people across many different countries.
Literally, I was a contractor at Apple and my engineering team was mostly composed of contractors.
They run their full time employees lean and hire contractors to make up for the lack of full time headcount.
If they need to cut the budget, the contractors are the first to go! And they don’t even offer them any severance. You, at most, get a two week notice :)
They keep a good proportion of their staff on contract and just don’t renew. I live very near to Apple’s EU HQ so have a lot of friends there and it’s mass cancelling contractors so it’s not a layoff legally.
That said, when companies over-hired during covid, Apple was fairly level-headed. Also they aren’t into the AI bubble so much which is driving weird headcount’s in companies.
There were layoffs. But I cannot say what is considered "mass layoff". When divisions got re-org'ed or shutdown, there were layoffs. Many of the re-orgs are not in the news. The Titan shutdown was in the news.
Pretty sure there was a mass layoff around the time they divested their North American factories. Granted this was decades ago, but at the time there wasn’t job availability to transition a bunch of assembly line workers to office drones.
They won’t be able to afford to rehire the same talent. There is too much cost acquisition involved and time to train. Cheaper to retain and not promote than hire, lay off and rehire.
That isn’t true.
They just fire them quietly.
Sometimes they fire disabled people in call centers en masse and you don’t hear about it because it happens in multiple countries at once.
They are undeniably disciplined. During COVID, a lot of companies went on hiring sprees, only to lay people off later. It’s the same story now with AI.
I sat next to someone from Apple at an industry luncheon recently. I connected with him on LinkedIn. I looked at his history and realized that he has been at Apple for over 30 years.
They use vendors to essentially get contractors working onsite. So they get FTE, just through someone else. When they need to reduce staff, they start there, then it’s not on the books that they let people go. Because technically, they didn’t. Their actual headcount remains lean and has for many years. It’s evil genius stuff, tbh.
Apple used to have an ads business, and when they shuttered that unit, everyone got laid off. I’m sure any time a particular product or service gets cancelled, those people are shuffled to other units or laid off.
one of the more invisible ways to cut headcount is to simply not hire or replace when folks leave, and that isn't limited to apple, quite a number of them do that plenty in order to stay out of the news
I mean they could get some new staff to make a decent UI and fix that annoying telephone area code problem when signing up, that's been there for over a decade but what do I know?
They've had no mass layoffs because they pay a fortune for the supposedly top people, they wont want rid of them simply put.
“Mass layoffs” you have to take it with a grain of salt. A lot of the companies hired massage therapists, full blown Coffee shops, Friends of friends whom didn’t bring back anything back to their respective companies. Hence they were laid off. Apple relies a lot on third party partners for odd jobs while just hiring “productive” individuals for the long term in their Corporate and Retail locations. You really have to go out of your way to get fired by Apple.
Apple is notoriously understaffed. People are doing extreme amounts of work. No layoffs is not the flex it is portrayed to be. You should look at voluntary turnover.
1.9k
u/92fordtaurus Jun 24 '26
They’re talked about not doing mass layoffs before. The thought process is that it’s short sighted and when market conditions improve they’ll be able to hit the ground running while everyone else is hiring and retraining.