On Wednesday, Microsoft announced it would lay off 10,000 people. Alphabet this morning, plus he’s miserable at 12,000. To date, 18,000 jobs have been eliminated at Amazon and 11,000 jobs at Meta. Also, at the beginning of the month he can bring in Salesforce, which cut 7,000 jobs.
You’ll notice one company is clearly missing from this wretched list. It’s Apple. At least until now, I’ve been on the sidelines when it comes to layoffs.
It’s worth noting that the company has no history of major layoffs, with the last major layoff dating back to 1997, when Steve Jobs returned to management and laid off 4,100 employees. That was a time when Apple was in dire straits, before Jobs spearheaded a major restructuring and launched the steady advance to the company it is today.
As the graph below shows, one of the biggest reasons we hear about these layoffs is the issue of hiring.
| company |
number of employees at the time of dismissal |
Employee Growth 2020-2021 | dismissed employee |
| Amazon | 1.5 million | 800,000 | 18,000 |
| alphabet | 187,000 | 52,000 | 12,000 |
| meta | 87,000 | 27,000 | 11,000 |
| microsoft | 221,000 | 58,000 | 10,000 |
| apple | 164,000 | 17,000 | – |
sauce: macro trendClick on Employee Growth to access the source data.
These companies have grown like gangbusters during the pandemic for a variety of reasons, depending on the company, but each has significantly increased their workforce numbers from 2020 to 2022. As the economy slowed through 2022, these companies saw these massive layoffs as a result.
While other organizations have added employees in large numbers, Apple is hiring at a much more modest rate than the big tech companies, adding 17,000 employees between 2020 and 2022. I have only added. Perhaps the fact that it didn’t hire as many employees as other companies may explain the fact that it hasn’t done any major layoffs yet.
Layoff news from Apple so far has been fairly modest. In August he reported that Forbes had quietly fired 100 of his contract engineer recruiters. At a company with over 160,000 employees, it feels like a trivial matter, but at least it could have been a sign the company was slowing hiring.
That’s exactly what happened when the company announced a hiring freeze in November. While Apple had indicated its intention to continue hiring for certain roles, it was a general freeze as a response to the overall economic uncertainty to which all these companies are reacting.
The changing economic climate and overall uncertainty heading into the new year were also big factors in the job cuts, but Apple has so far avoided using layoffs as a tool.
That said, Apple plans to report earnings on February 1st, which will likely give us a clearer picture of the company’s overall financial performance. No one can predict what will happen here, and given the overall pattern of layoffs we’ve seen at other companies lately, it’s not unreasonable to expect something similar, but perhaps their hiring prudence will help prevent a similar fate and consequences for Apple.Relieve employees from this trauma.
