Seems like something that WFH would solve without having to upend so many employee lives.
A decade ago, a lot of folks would probably seriously consider this. Austin is a rad town and cost of living is cheaper than San Diego. Now moving to Texas could put you at significant risk if you’re a woman.
Apple, a company that likes to value diversity and inclusion, is apparently fine with putting its female employees in harm’s way for a tax break.
Of all the shit Apple has done, this is particularly disturbing.
Edit: Took a few more minutes to look into this, and it appears that Apple covers travel and medical expenses for women that have to travel out of state for care. Although, forcing someone into that position to keep their job is pretty douchey.
Austin isn’t even that much cheaper and property tax in TX is heinous compared to CA.
Not cheaper at all, actually. They only discuss income tax when folks claim that.
Austin is cheaper than San Diego, even excluding taxes:
Also, the topic was taxes, not cost of living. But it is understandable that when folks can’t justify their bias they simply shift the goal posts.
Pay is higher in CA so that isn’t the smug data point you thought it was.
The topic was cost of living. Then someone mentioned it AND taxes. Then this person replied to the cost of living part.
Seems weird to read this conversation and see the claim bias and goalpost moving. They very clearly are not shifting anything.
Also you’re making a pretty wild assumption that by stating facts with evidence that they’re “biased”. Don’t be that guy/girl. I hate it when conservatives do that too.
Nope it is Taxes for the Company. The Company cares not one whit for the CoL of their Employees except when it affects the quality.
I see that you’re shifting goalposts, neat.
Average monthly salary in the cities is listed at the bottom of that link I gave. The two cities differ in monthly salary by $14 dollars on average, per the available data. Those same submissions show that the cost of living is ~20% higher in San Diego than Austin.
Not relevant as the topic is IT at Apple and not folks at McDonalds as well as being about Taxes for the Company. The Company cares not one whit for the CoL of their Employees except when it affects the quality.
It’s relevant since the topic was cost of living. If you’re going to try to talk to people, try to keep up with the conversation.
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all the tech companies should move to another smaller city in a blue state all at once. turn Salem OR or something into the next big tech hub
Welcome to Raleigh!
Or build a blue city on the triple-border of South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming. Property is crazy cheap there. It’s the perfect place for a big “blue utopia” city.
Because of those states’ small population, just a small number of Democratic votes there could yield three states’ electoral votes and six senators.
Republicans would lose forever if Democrats didn’t gerrymander themselves into the coasts.
IIRC some red states have already floated the idea of not letting people vote for several years after moving there specifically to ensure that Republicans never lose control.
Bend OR has a decent sized Sony studio apparently.
Bend gets snowed out frequently and suffers from a lack of diversity. It could use some more folks for sure but idk if people would want to live there in the winter
austin is crazy expensive now. it was already starting to get that way when i lived there ~ 25 years ago.
and i’d pick the san diego climate any day over anywhere in texas.
You think it’s expensive now, but wait till everyone with all that California tech money rolls in and starts buying everything sight-unseen. And in cash.
The average tax burden in Texas is actually higher than California. People see “no income tax!” and lose all ability to reason
Wouldn’t be the first time conservative voters misunderstand taxes
Even covering expenses still puts women’s lives at risk.
Sure if you get pregnant and early on decide you want one, they can help out, AFTER you divulge very private information.
But what about all the myriad of other scenarios where people need medical abortions in life threatening situations. You don’t always have the time to get yourself to another state, and then you die, or lose the ability to get pregnant again.
Sure its nice they offer it, but fuck them for putting women in that situation anyway. They don’t get a pass for covering costs when they can.
With a 2% chance of an ectopic pregnancy, it’s a little like Russian Roulette if you’re of childbearing age, isn’t it?
value diversity and inclusion
Bullshit.
They don’t give a shit.
It’s something of importance to their target demographic, so they play into it.
Edit: Took a few more minutes to look into this, and it appears that Apple covers travel and medical expenses for women that have to travel out of state for care. Although, forcing someone into that position to keep their job is pretty douchey.
And when the Texas government arrests them to keep them from traveling for an abortion, Apple will break them out of jail?
Not saying this corporate policy makes up for Apple trying to re-lo people to the Texas. Just providing more detail.
Bail money counts as expenses, I’d say.
Sorry, values diversity and inclusion?
Yeah, if you include the slave labour that was literally chained inside their factories in China?
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Are they expecting for people to just pack their shit up, and go? We have to stop letting these companies pretend that all the workers are just meat puppets
Honestly, probably not. They probably want them to quit. This is a cost cutting measure that they don’t want to admit to publicly.
Yep. Sounds like that to me. Even Apple can’t afford San Diego which is why OP’s WFH idea isn’t an option
They want to force them to quit. Then they can move the office to Austin and rely on cheap illegal labour.
Probably not illegal per se but definitely cheaper and easier to fuck over: Texas labor protections are functionally nonexistent
This is what a stealth layoff looks like folks.
This is becoming a larger and larger ask as the states drift further apart in terms of rights.
Don’t move, don’t quit. Make them fire you.
make them fire you? Start a fucking union and make management’s life hell.
No one from California wants to move to Texas.
Its slowing down recently but in 2021 and 2022 it was a very popular topic and many people did move from CA to TX.
And guess what happened in 23? A LOT of those people came RIGHT back to California lol
Perfect example: https://www.businessinsider.com/couple-moved-california-texas-back-santa-cruz-rosenberg-2023-11?op=1
Looking at census data: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/california-exodus-census-analysis-18509264.php
California was one of 11 states whose inmigration rate was lower than the national migration average of 19.9%. The data says that many of the people (44,279) who moved to California last year came from Texas. The second-highest number of people (31,225) who moved from a different state to California came from New York.
Well, lots of people move to Texas from all kinds of states. You could make an article about each one if you tried. Also, people are moving to California from Texas—and everywhere else. You could write an article about each of those places if you tried.
My point is, people who bleed blue don’t move to Texas unless they have to. And, with recent politics, Texas is a much harder pill to swallow for anyone left of center.
I’m sure the lefties in California would love to get rid of the righties. Maybe they could make a 1:1 trade, lefties for righties.
The Central Valley disagrees.
Sorry, coastal California ;)
You know, where the people live
San Diego is one of the biggest major cities with a Republican Majority and it’s in Cali. Now considering these are tech workers they may care, but I’ve worked with my fair share of tech libertarians. Especially here in Cali.
They probably wouldn’t like Austin though.
That’s not really true. Most of California is very conservative, just not very populated. There’s probably a good number of people who at least would say they want to live in Texas, although they’d probably hate it once they realize what the state of California does for them.
Most of the…land? This is the verbal form of “map more red libs get owned”
pretty much exactly. we need to get a bunch of liberal people to move into those areas and push the rednecks and klansmen out
Perhaps the first comment was worded poorly. It’s less populated in comparison to some of the most populace cities in the world. There’s a lot of Republicans in California who would probably say they want to live in Texas. There are just a massive number of people in California.
You said most of California is conservative. Which is just flat out wrong. If u had just left that incorrect statement out then the rest of that comment would have been OK.
Most of California, by land mass, is. Most, by population, is not. Those are both true.
People tend to think of California as an exclusively blue state, and I think that’s ignoring the dangers the right can cause who live there. They are there, and they want to assert themselves. I think it’s dangerous to ignore that.
Ffs tech workers need to unionize and fast.
Apple supports anti-abortion misogyny, the murder of immigrants crossing the border, and a deterioration of employee rights for profit. This is the safest conclusion.
And how much do you wanna bet that Apple has received cashbacks or other benefits for moving that office to Texas? It’s a huge benefit to Texas. We’ve seen this when Amazon was trying to choose where to build their next HQ.
If they’re using this as a method to get employees to quit, then it’s gonna suck for the few that do move
Well duh, now they’ll have to live in Texas.
Its only temporary, those employees will be eliminated later under more lax labor laws.
“Asks”? So they can just say “no thank you” and keep their jobs?
No?
Then asks is not the right word.
Apple likes the labor laws in Texas that allows them to screw their employees over when they feel like it
The company reportedly told employees they can apply for other jobs within the company, though some doubt they’re qualified for other Apple roles in the city, and most don’t plan to move.
Sounds like it’s QA people. Which sucks extra hard cause that’s a much harder field to get another job in. If they were software engineers, the world would be their oysters. I bet a lot of people will make the move and it’s quite shitty and cynical from apple to move a team that doesn’t have a lot of options.
If they tried to move an engineering team to texas, they know they’d get told to get fucked
If they were software engineers, the world would be their oysters.
Not with all the layoffs lately.
https://layoffs.fyiGo check out the net jobs over last year. Reality is all that happened is the folks let go work elsewhere for better companies.
Very anecdotal, but I’m rather skeptical of that. Where I work, we haven’t hired in more than a year despite some decent growth. Seems to be quite similar for most of my circles, very little movement and hiring gojng on. I used to get harassed by recruiters 5-10x a week on LinkedIn alone despite being employed and listed as unavailable. Now it’s more like a cold message or two a month. Maybe it’s regional or something…?
Net 700 IT job gains in 2023 as all the positions cut did was move chairs between buildings.
You should probably go look at what the historical numbers are for that.
Far more than 700 people entered the IT workforce last year
And yet there was a NET (please look the definition up) job increase.
And if you’d actually go look at data from before 2023, you’ll see that’s the lowest it’s been in over a decade by well over 100k jobs.
But yeah everything’s dandy if you just ignore reality
That number alone isn’t particularly telling. What were those IT jobs? Did we lose a bunch of programmers and software architects and gained T1 support roles? Permanent vs contractual? What percentage had a pay cut/raise? How many people entered the workforce (graduated, new hires) vs how many left (retired or career change) this year?
I’m just shocked to learn that Siri has (had) a quality control team.
And so begins (continues?) the enshittification of Apple. Siri is dumb as a bag of rocks. These people should all get raises.
Siri is dumb as a bag of rocks, but give them raises? They’re lucky they haven’t been fired.
Apple’s being enshittified a thousand ways, but Siri has always been shit.
I’ve heard that the original Siri, before Apple bought it, was good?
You make a fair point
What a ridiculous comment, in your opinion Siri is bad so the Siri team should get a raise? That aside, Siri has only gotten better in time, yeah she ain’t Jarvis but come on now
Furthermore, having your employees move to a different location isn’t enshittification, this move doesn’t affect their products at all which is what enshittification is all about, making product changes for the worse. Yeah this move sucks for employees because fuck Texas but that’s not the same thing.
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking
I didn’t want to get into the increasing bugginess of their software in this thread. I’ve been an Apple user for 17 years, and it’s become infuriating. AppleCare support is also FAR worse than it used to be.
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