Apple is moving an AI team from San Diego to Austin. Most refuse to relocate(fortune.com)
fortune.com
Apple is moving an AI team from San Diego to Austin. Most refuse to relocate
https://fortune.com/2024/01/14/apple-moving-ai-team-from-san-diego-to-austin-but-most-unwilling-to-relocate/
7 comments
Good on them!
Tech was historically an industry in which the majority of your assets left every day at 17 and didn't return until 8 the next day.
Tech was historically an industry in which the majority of your assets left every day at 17 and didn't return until 8 the next day.
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Not related to the issue at hand, but I wonder if Apple (and others moving employees from CA to TX) maintain the same salaries, since there's no income tax here. (Combined with the lower cost of living, it would make for a substantial realized income increase)
Apple moved me from Cupertino to Austin (granted, ages ago). There was a region-specific salary adjustment then, and to my knowledge that adjustment still happens. I believe most large companies impose regional cost-of-living adjustments.
Calling it an AI team gives the wrong impression imo, these aren't researchers or engineers.
>The group, which also has offices in China, India, Ireland and Spain, is responsible for improving Siri by listening to queries to the voice service and determining if it heard and handled questions accurately. The announcement to close the San Diego group was made by Christine DeFilippo, a top deputy to Apple AI chief John Giannandrea, the people said.
This sounds like a low level position that wouldn't be worth moving for.
>The group, which also has offices in China, India, Ireland and Spain, is responsible for improving Siri by listening to queries to the voice service and determining if it heard and handled questions accurately. The announcement to close the San Diego group was made by Christine DeFilippo, a top deputy to Apple AI chief John Giannandrea, the people said.
This sounds like a low level position that wouldn't be worth moving for.
So "AI" exists solely because of researchers and engineers, and nobody else ? All those contract employees OpenAI hired in Kenya to vet tens of thousands of hours of often horrific and traumatizing content? Surely they were, in some of course very lowly, unworthy of mention way still working....for "AI" ?
- ATX climate is brutal compared to San Diego's idyllic mild nature. It's 19 F right now and last summer, it was 105-110 F every day for several months. Blizzards and ice storm. Power outages.
- More homeless people than SD but not quite LA levels.
- Property taxes. Some areas have an effective 2%/year rate.
- Women lack humane and proper reproductive medicine legal protections.
- ATX is the worst of mix of big and small. Tons of skyscrapers went up that pushed out Austin fixtures and squashed local gathering places. It's approaching San Jose downtown but with worse roads.
- Lots of traffic. I-35 is a parking lot 16 hrs/day.
- Massive influx of cool-chasing, mid-West, unhip, boring yuppies who buy wildly inappropriate dogs for apartments, don't train them, leave shit everywhere, and then drag them around by the neck because they're totally clueless about training.
- It's nothing like the DFW metroplex which is a proper, complete urban area.
- Seasonal waves of Airbnb partiers but not this year because of the weather.
- Sure there's some music acts but you're probably going to have to drive to HTX or DFW.
- Texas is known for industrial pollution and lax regulations.
- Urban traffic design hostile to pedestrians and non-automotive users with random, unexpected chunks of concrete everywhere.
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Also, Apple had a reputation for not getting sucked into emotional market fads or hockey-stick bubble over-hiring with massive layoffs later. It's doubly curious why then they would risk the fragile cohesion of niche, high-demand talent by trying to uproot their lives, that of N families including wives, husbands, and children, to shift somewhere else entirely when technical telepresence means exist and are usable. It just seems like pointless, expensive, loss-oriented churn when anywhere with good internet and marginally close time-zone overlap does the trick. (Queue "The Beatles - The Inner Light".) Perhaps this board shakeup is just a passive signal that really it's time for TC to go and the new board to find a bolder Apple leader who's going to lead with new categories without cannibalizing the central business to maximize short-term profits.