I’m sure women will be stoked to have Apple relocate them to a state that could kill them.
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It’s just another stealth layoff. They’ve calculated that x% would rather quit than move, and that probably roughly corresponds with the amount of people they want to cut. On top of that, Texas probably provides tax incentives and has a cheaper labour pool and fewer labour protections.
Speaking of labour protections, is this even legal? Or is it a case of illegal, but good luck with the courts? I would think that at least California would have protections against something like this.
For example, let’s just consider housing: imagine you bought a house when interest rates were 3% - now they can just force you to sell it and buy a new one with a 9% rate (or force you to rent)?
But I guess they can just call it a layoff instead so they can get away with it or something
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I’m sure that the Title IX people will be very excited to hear about the disparate impact of this decision.
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This is the most willfully ignorant thing I’ve read in a long time.
Bullshit. In California you have rights. In Texas they have the explicit right to deny you a lifesaving abortion. The degree of human rights you have used to be generally the same state by state until roe was killed
Nah it’s not just a state. A lot of Ob/Gyn physicians no longer feel comfortable practicing in states with extremely prohibitive abortion laws because it genuinely limits what kind of healthcare they can practice. This limits access to care, which can result in poor outcomes.
Have you been paying attention to the news coming out of texas? I’m guessing not.
4 Upvotes, 50 Downvotes
You’re spare parts bud.
Google is dropping the Assistant team, and Amazon is dropping the Alexa team. This sounds a lot like Apple is trying to avoid an explicit layoff and forcing employees to quit instead.
Constructive dismissal lawsuit?
Edit: see this comment https://sopuli.xyz/comment/6157509
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. This could have the makings of constructive dismissal. Relocate to a place with vastly different legal protections or be fired? Hmm. Since it also would possibly disproportionately affect female employees, I wonder if some discrimination could also come in to play?
Not a lawyer, just spitballing ideas.
If they are offering a relocation package, and it sounds like they are, then this likely doesn’t fall under constructive discharge. Also in CA a constructive discharge lawsuit often only makes you entitled to the same benefits as if you were fired (i.e. severance and unemployment). These guys aren’t being fired for cause so they still qualify for unemployment and the severance deal Apples offering is probably already worth more than many would get in a lawsuit. A lawsuits not gonna force Apple to move the office back.
I don’t know why everyone always jumps straight to “constructive discharge” and “this must be illegal”. Guys, we live in a legal hellscape, Apple may be being shitty but they aren’t doing anything illegal.
Huh. So they’re all dropping their voice assistant teams. Is this because it turns out people only ever use them as voice activated kitchen timers because it turns out talking to computers sucks, or is some worse generative AI shit coming?
What seems to be going down is that tech firms are laying off AI teams that aren’t based on large LLMs like ChatGPT. My read: they’re thinking it’s time to lay off those workers in anticipation of replacing that functionality (in siri, cortana, echo/alexa) with a large LLM stack
Even if it is constructively a dismissal, you can almost never sue someone for firing you in California.
Let’s not let Apple sugar coat. An appropriate title:
“Apple has layoffs and shadily tries to hide it”
Apple spokesperson confirmed that the team, which listens to recordings of Siri interactions to make sure it responded appropriately, will “have the opportunity to continue their role with Apple in Austin.”
“have the opportunity”
So a job you could do anywhere, wants you to do it somewhere else?
Siri has a quality control team? What do they do all day?
Emailing the funniest ones to each other?
They’ve heard some pretty good ones from me on bad days I bet lol
Yeah I’m not in favor of constructive dismissal, but maybe these layoffs are justified….
But if this is how it is WITH quality control… 😬
I can all but guarantee you team was understaffed, overworked, constantly asked up the chain for time and resources to automate things, and was consistently ignored.
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They make sure siri responds correctly. I’m surprised their jobs aren’t being replaced with ML, although I’m sure Apple is working on it.
Tesla did the same thing, and failed miserably when the majority of its workforce threatened to quit. Or at least thats what I read. Hopefully Apple fails too.
Although it’s a manual QA team. Of the folks in engineering with leverage, manual QA teams have the least. It’s the department that is one of the easiest to backfill.
Tesla has a QA team?!
That’s the point, this is just constructive dismissal.
Fired
Because what Siri needs is less quality.
For those that do relocate, Bloomberg writes they’ll be given $7,000 stipends, while Apple will offer the others four weeks of severance plus another week’s worth per year that they worked, as well as six months of health insurance.
It’s a scumbag move to try and frame this as anything other than a layoff, but this seems fairly decent of Apple. Admittedly, I’m not sure how this compares to other severance packages though - can someone give context on how this measures up?
Idk man, whenever I see severance pay it’s usually for at least one full year.
In what non-US country is this the case?
You can get severance pay in the US, it’s just written into the contract individually, so it is rather rare outside of the C-Suite
Im sure they have some grand plan for the investors how many jobs they can replace with AI bullshit to increase those sweet-sweet numbers.
So move to a place that will strip your human rights away if you’re a woman or be laid off.
Nice.
Not to mention if you’re trans. The thought of moving to Texas is terrifying.
all my homies hate
applebillionaires.This is the best summary I could come up with:
The article reports that the staff was surprised by the relocation, which Apple had indicated would involve a move to another campus in San Diego by the end of January, rather than going to Texas.
Apple has mostly avoided layoffs as other companies have made heavy cuts over the last two years.
The San Diego team reportedly listens to Siri recordings in multiple languages, including Hebrew, English, Spanish, and Arabic.
Apple has generally been perceived as being behind the AI curve, at least when it comes to its digital assistant, despite using people to quality check Siri recordings, as Google and Meta also do.
That perception didn’t change with the introduction of LLMs, but Apple has been pouring vast resources into catching up, and it’s reportedly been courting news outlets to buy training data.
It recently released its so-called frameworks and libraries supporting AI development on code repositories and is working on optimizing LLMs for use on its iPhones.
The original article contains 348 words, the summary contains 159 words. Saved 54%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is Apple lookin’ like a Lemon.
Sandiego is just way too expensive.
And Texas is way too fascist.
Plus it’s Austin, none of the cheap house benefits (unless you’re coming from California money), all of the high property tax downsides (and almost of the social benefits of said taxes).
That is not a concern for capitalism.
