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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?"
That's why you don't hear me complaining about salaries.
Speaking of marketshare then, here is where Apple is currently leading:
iTunes Store #1 music retailer, relies on QuickTime
iPod #1 MP3 player, relies on iTunes and QuickTime
The iPhone is quickly rising, so it may, in a few years, become the #1 smartphone, with heavy reliance on Safari Mobile, OS X Mobile, and of course, iTunes and QuickTime.
So to put your post in perspective: If you want to be in consumer electronics, web services, online stores, consumer applications, or media players, you want to work at Apple.
I mean, you have heard of the iPod, iTunes, and iPhone, right? Nearly everyone who uses an iPod uses QuickTime, and there over 170m sold, plus 6m iPhones, that suggests nearly 1/6 of the US population is using iTunes and therefore QuickTime
GPL Deconstructed
Defend that the engineers continue to work at Apple despite lower than average salaries? Nobody's making them stay, and with Apple on their resume they could get work other places quite easily. This isn't like Wal-Mart dragging down the wages of an entire town.
If anything, Yahoo should question why they're paying their engineers so much.
Southwest Airlines has always paid less for just about every single position than the industry standard, from the CEO to the pilots to the attendants. Yet every time SA is hiring for a new position, they'll have dozens or hundreds of people from the other airlines interview for it. Why? Because working at most airlines is a crappy, thankless job, and at Southwest it's fun.
;-)
Not sure how well that applies here though, as Google has a reputation for being pretty fun while Apple has a reputation of having people scream at you when your project is late or experiencing difficulties. I guess some people are gluttons for pain
The only people working 70+ hours/week at Google are the folks nearing a deadline, putting out a fire, or dealing with some other emergency. Some other folks do get close to that, however. The fresh out of college, in-a-new-town sort of folks have no life and so they work all week. Google gives them dinner (though I suspect dinner service will be stopping soon; shortly before I left, they were sending out surveys to see how they could "serve you better"), there are showers, and if you're young and energetic you can hook up with another geek. You get a few years before you burn out, so these guys are fine; they'll learn.
The other ones working insane hours are the people that want a pay raise. You have to get promoted to get a raise at Google. And since promotions are essentially popularity contests, you need to Be Seen (and be seen as a go-getter). Since I'm getting up in years, and I have a family life I enjoy, I never bothered to nominate myself for a promotion. It meant a few years without a raise, but the stock did well so it was a wash in my mind. The bonuses were fairly generous anyway.
The final group working long hours are those who are doing a 20% project. These are few and far between, the 20% project being primarily a myth to entice people into applying for a job. (I did a lot of interviewing, and about half the interviewees would ask about 20% projects, what mine was, etc. I could never quite bring myself to lie to them and say that there was ever the slightest chance they'd get to choose and work on a 20% project). There's been a real severe crackdown on 20% time. There's just less need for a "throw everything at a wall, see what sticks" mentality. They have a core set of products, so what you'll see from here on out is acquisitions as a way to get into offering new products/services, and add-ons to existing products (new features in Google maps, etc). There's actually a little room for 20% time in the latter areas, but the barrier to entry is non-trivial. Long gone are the days when you could host some new whizz-bang idea on your workstation or a borrowed machine in a coloc. If you want to integrate with existing services, you have to speak borg, borgmon, etc.
Anyway, there are a lot of people who put in a normal working week at Google an dare perfectly happy. They won't get promoted as often (or ever), and they won't get involved with the internal Google hip-crowd, but they can have happy, productive careers there. It's actually a pretty non-stressful place to work, once the golden handcuffs come off. I don't know that I'd work there again, but it's a fun place to be, with a lot of energy about the place.
As far as Apple, the stuff I was hearing is that there's a lot of fear for one's job, everyone needs to swear allegiance to the Cult of Steve, etc. I gather it's not a very fun place to work, and I gather that long work weeks are all but mandatory. That could just be sour grapes from overworked engineers, though.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
True, but those salaries don't meet their material needs.
Median cost of a home in Cupertino: $649,000.
Median mortgage payment: $2,145
The rule is, you take your annual salary ($89,000), you take 28% of that, and divide by twelve, and that is your upper bound for mortgage payment ($2,076).
Want to work for Apple? Odds are you'll be renting.
Steve Jobs trots out a half-dozen people, remarks how this person worked on this and that person lead this great team who did that, and generally gives credit to lots of other people, including people who aren't even directly part of Apple. He's done this at EVERY keynote speech pretty much since he's been giving them.
Honestly Steve Jobs hasn't been one to toot his own horn. Sure there isn't a lack of OTHER people doing it but you'd be hard-pressed to find many places where he says that he was the only one who did X, Y, and Z for Apple.
If you want to see some good history about all the old Macintosh crew, go take a look at Folklore.org. There's a lot there about Steve Jobs for sure, but also a lot about all the other people who worked on the first Macintoshes. Steve Jobs is hardly the only one who is recognized for his work at Apple.
Sapere aude!
It's reading things like this that help put my little worldview in perspective. I'm out in the sticks of Eastern Washington (the state), earning ~52k writing software, paying 645 for a two-bed, and maybe a mile from the Columbia River and the mess of parks cluttering the shore.
Having worked at Apple, I can tell you that the conditions where I worked weren't great. In fact, the company that poached me and offered me more money has far better conditions - including personal growth time, further education opportunities (which they pay for), and a real focus on staff health.
At Apple, you're expected to be available from 6.00 am to 9.00 pm or later some times. There is no idea whatsoever of a work-life balance. You get great discounts on hardware, but corporate clients of Apple get an Apple staff discount too - my current employer fits in that category.
I wouldn't go back in a fit - they'd have to offer me a lot more money if they wanted that.
Where has anyone given the impression that Apple engineers are lazy and incompetent? I think maybe you're projecting from your own sense of not being recognized or something here. If anyone at Apple thought they didn't have great engineers, they wouldn't bother to push them to make great products. Nobody I know at Apple (even in traditionally clueless divisions like marketing) thinks the engineers and programmers are anything but the lifeblood and foundation of the company.
But yes, much of what Apple was originally and is again now, is due to Jobs' marketing savvy and seemingly magical ability to know when a device is ready (as opposed to needing another 3 months of work) and how people can be doing something in the future without worrying so much about the limitations the rest of us are aware of. There are lots of people who are great long-term visionaries, and lots of folks who are great engineers capable of building most anything you can imagine, but there are very few short-term visionaries capable of really knowing what needs to be built 12-24 months from now.
If you've never worked with a fantastically inspirational and inspired boss, it's hard to understand. Sure, over the long term it can be tiring, and after the twentieth time you go back to the drawing board because his inspiration just doesn't match up with the laws of physics, you want to set his house on fire. But when every talented engineer in the room says something is impossible, and the boss insists you do it anyway, and 6 months later you're all amazed because you managed to make it work -- that's a great feeling.
Most programmers, designers, and engineers I know complain that projects get rushed out the door before they're done, that they never get a chance to really use iterative design techniques to create a better widget, because once it is "good enough", they have to put it in a box and move on to the next project. Being able to work at a company where "good enough" is NOT good enough, is what many people dream about -- knowing that you can create the whole project, then throw it out and do it RIGHT, is a blessing. Yeah, if you just want a job with direct deposit where you don't have to do much other than punch the clock, it isn't the best company to work for. But if you want to create products people will use every day -- and LOVE USING -- while keeping enough time for family and a normal life, it's a pretty great company.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I agree, but I think you overestimate this effect. In Apple, with Ive and Jobs generally being the public faces, it's rare for the guys in the trenches to get noticed. Not everybody's ego is pleased with a pat on the back. They need public accolades, more money, or a mix of both.
Also, as sexy as Apple's products are, they don't have a very large lineup. There's no dearth of sexy products in the rest of the tech. world, and people do often move -- we'd probably be surprised at the number of people who have worked for at least 2 companies out of Apple, Google, and MS.
The numbers in TFA (Glassdoor) are based on a sample set that's way too small to be a statistically "representative sample". So we don't even know if Apple engineers really are paid less than the average silicon valley employee.
The one effect the article seems to miss: Apple's stock has been on fire for some time now. So if Apple employees are getting stock awards and have a decent employee stock purchase plan, the raw salary numbers aren't telling us the whole story.
I recently finished a one year contract at Google. Since leaving, I have said on numerous occasions that google's downfall will be their arrogance. You nailed it perfectly. The mono-culture you mention isn't just in their technical leanings. It's also very much evident in the political leaning of the workforce. Politics is dominated by the extreme left. You aren't supposed to hire based on politics (it's the law), but people are rejected because they "don't fit with the google culture." Google is also failing miserably in hiring military vets. That's a big no-no. I expect them to get in serious trouble for that.
-- Will program for bandwidth
No, I meant twenty to twenty five thousand dollars a month.
This is the Bay Area. We have more millionaires than SoCal. Of course, their wealth is all subject to the ups and downs of their stock options, but...
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/apa/723370120.html twenty three thousand a month.
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/apa/723180186.html 10,000 a month for a 3 bedroom
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa?minAsk=10000 Lets just make it easy... Theres all of them above 10k. Granted, some of them are for sale prices in the ghettos, but.... Gives you an idea of WHY people out here make what they do.
And one of the reasons I left the rat race of IT after a LONG time.
--Toll_Free
I agree about the pay; I was in a job being paid around $20 per hour - the job was pretty easy (non-IT related btw), but the boss was an asshole. Now sure, for the first few months I could do the old thing of "lay back, and think of the queen", but that only works for so longer. The extra pay, no matter how great it may be, will never offset in the long run a crappy work environment. The work environment is where one spends at least 1/3 of their life, all the money in the world isn't going to make the work environment better.
I went from that job to another job (again, non-IT related), I earned less money BUT at the same time, I had alot more perks. I was head of a department in an section of the retail sector which provides stable long term employment. My co-workers were down to earth genuine people rather than egotistical pricks like I've seen in the IT world. Sales representatives giving the ability to get things at wholesale prices (for my own person consumption etc).
Believe me, before I went back to University, I had a pretty sweet time in that job.