The Impact of Low Salaries At Apple

orenh writes "Recent data indicate that Apple engineers have significantly lower salaries than their Silicon Valley peers: $89,000 at Apple, versus $105,000 at Yahoo and $112,000 at Google. Paying lower salaries had a major impact on Apple's bottom line when it was struggling in the market up until 2004. But now that Apple is highly profitable, these lower salaries are no longer a factor in Apple's success. Will Apple have to raise salaries to match the market rate, or face defections?"

Comments

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[Toll_Free]

Nah, they won't.

I live in the area, and let me tell you, people would rather KNOW they are going to have a paycheck, at least in theory because of seniority if nothing else, than NOT because they jumped ship to get a 20K a year raise.

Not when you paid nearly a million dollars for your 3 bedroom house.

There ARE people within a few miles of my house paying 25 thousand dollars a month in RENT.... My neighborhood is in the 2 to 3K a month range, and if I KNEW I could pay my bills with the economy going to the toilet, there is NO good reason for me to jump ship for a raise.

Three years ago, they ALL would have jumped ship. It's a different type of world now, since foreclosures, etc. are looming everywhere. Local trash mags have foreclosure sales listed, as do newspapers.

Apple should pony up some of those profits, but a smart board and CFO would realize, they might need a bit of cheese to get them through the thin period we can all see coming.

--Toll_Free

Re:I know you're sarcastic, but...

[oberondarksoul]

Even skipping past the other implications, I never heard the Great Man giving credit to anyone else but himself.

Watch the WWDC and MacWorld keynote addresses. Jobs always makes a point of thanking the Apple engineers, asking them to stand up and be applauded, and so on.

Steve Jobs style

[sjbe]

If you ever actually watched the end of keynote you'd see that often Lord Jobs asks the engineers to stand for a round of applause. Jobs is also well known for being aggressive, demanding and egotistical. He frequently has been not-very-nice to those who work for him. He's a talented manager but has rarely been described as kind or gentle. He gets results which is why people tolerate his style. I suspect he does care about the people who work for him but he appears to be hard to work for at times.

Re:Steve Jobs style

[Dahamma]

If you want to see how much of an asshole Jobs can really be to employees, just see what he would do to his best friend.... (nicked from wikipedia):

He returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari Founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line. At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them US$600 (instead of the actual US$5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus US$300

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[statemachine]

When the other companies in the Valley are hiring again, and Apple continues to have lower salaries, yes they will need to raise them.

$89K/year won't get you a house even with today's market. Maybe an OK condo, assuming a bank will give you a loan. But if you don't mind driving 100+ miles each way, then you could get a decent structure, though the neighborhood might be in the middle of nowhere. Rents are going back up, but if you don't mind living in small apartments to be able to have some play money, then sure, $89K is enough.

For those who just see the numbers and have no idea about cost of living, $700 for an apartment is awesome in the midwest, but $1400-1600 in the Valley will at least keep you out of the bad neighborhoods. After gas, food, and utilities, you'd be lucky to have anything left over to go out and socialize. In the midwest, you'd live like royalty.

Re:Will Apple have to raise salaries?

[Peaquod]

presidential rederick can't resist the urge... it's rhetoric

You, sir, do not know what you are talking about

[tlambert]

You, sir, do not know what you are talking about.

Mac OS X is the *first* UNIX(tm) *not* derived from AT&T sources.

I was one of the people who made Mac OS X into UNIX(tm), and we started from not even being able to compile the test suite.

My first one line header file change to xnu to test the water (not defining size_t in ) broke 156 projects, including Open Source that was written by people who assumed promiscuous #include files, in violation of the standard.

A relatively small team of us fixed well over 40,000 total test case failures in a period of about 2.5 years, many of those in command line tools, most of that code being pushed back out to the various Open Source projects. Like, oh, "gcc", "bash", "vim", "tar", "bc", "pax", and hundreds of others, which are now UNIX conformant because of us.

In the middle of things we were working 80 hour weeks, sometimes more.

At the end... *almost no one noticed the changes*, because we worked our *asses* off to make sure there was so close to zero *both binary and source* compatibility issues that it would *not* be noticed. One member of the team put it this way: "It's like raising everyone 12 feet into the air, and replacing the Earth underneath them, then lowering them back down to the ground".

All told, we changed more lines of code in the kernel, libraries, compiler, and UNIX(tm) standardized utilities, than all of the non-conformance related changes in Tiger and Leopard combined. I counted.

And then we published the sources for everything needed to build your own Darwin system that could pass the UNIX(tm) conformance test, including our kernel.

So let me repeat: you, sir, do not know what you are talking about.

-- Terry