Well…. It has to do with what you said because you said "No one should get raises or bonuses if anyone was laid off. It’s a failure"
Clearly, it’s a business and it’s about pivoting to ensure the business thrives to meet its requirement to make money for its shareholders (being a business). And if a company makes money by streamlining, including efficiencies such as reducing staff, then that business is in a better position financially. If they are in a better position, then those responsible for this increase in profits deserve remuneration. That is how it works (as if you didn’t know).
How is increasing efficiencies a failure? Do you actually think that Apple has failed because they became more efficient? Of course you don’t. Like many before, it’s all fake rage.
That's right. But let's be clear what's happening in this particular case: a very small number of employees are being given time to find another position within the company that would make them more productive. Those who can't, or choose to use this as an opportunity to voluntarily leave, will be laid off. Nobody's getting a raise because of something this minor. Nobody's getting a bonus. This is baseline level stuff for a company the size of Apple. They have more than a thousand positions open in Cupertino alone, so they're planning to add over 10x as many people as they're shuffling here.
When people say "why is Apple spending so much time on News services rather than fixing iCloud", this is what addressing that looks like: the News team gets smaller and the iCloud team gets bigger. Very often it's the same people moving from one to the other, some times not.
That is absolutely
not the same as saying "less people means higher profits". Apple is still very much in a growth mindset, and growing means needing more resourcing. Apple still believes they need more people to achieve higher profits, thus the 10+:1 ratio of openings to reductions.
And yes, it's about trying to make money for its shareholders, but not only for them. Continuing to employ people you can't afford to isn't doing anyone any favors. In the short term, those few people will continue making a paycheck, but in the long term everyone will be out of a job. That's a failure to the shareholders, but it's also a failure to every other employee who suffers from management's inability to make a decision.
What I think people are suggesting here when they say "no one should get raises, this is a failure" is that if management makes poor decisions about the direction of the company, that can lead to staff reductions. For the people who, against all evidence, view everything through the "Apple is doomed, Cook is ruining the company" lens, they see that message in every story. Everything we see here though is that that isn't the case-- this wasn't a failure of management and nobody's likely to get a raise for it. And that's not what happens in those situations anyway-- compensation isn't tied to staff reductions, it's tied to performance numbers and if management screwed up the business the reductions are because they can't make those numbers so won't get the compensation boost. Coming in to clean up someone else's management mess is a different matter, but again, this isn't that.
