Apple asks its San Diego Siri quality control team to relocate to Texas

Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 257 points – Apple asks its San Diego Siri quality control team to relocate to Texas
theverge.com

I’m sure women will be stoked to have Apple relocate them to a state that could kill them.

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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?

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.

Not constructive dismissal, because the goal isn't to place the burden on the employee. On whatever date, they will all be terminated without cause (layoff) if they choose not to relocate. There is no goal of forcing them to quit. Presumably, Apple has filed (or will file in due time) things like the WARN Act notification.

This is a PR move to hide the layoffs from the general public, but not from the law.

Ah that's helpful context, thank you!

Lawsuit of 100 people is laughable.

Tech will never unionize, and because of that, are just shilling for billionaires so they can one day make it big. LMAO

The reason why American tech workers haven't unionized is because when times are good, they think they don't need a union, and when times are bad, it's far too late.

Source: reading too many of hopeless comments like this on hacker news

You only need 40 people to start a class-action lawsuit

Nothing those employees can do, they're even being offered money and time off to move lol.

Legally, 0 actionable items for a suit.

This is a clear example of constructive dismissal

Constructive dismissal isn’t illegal, it merely allows the employees to receive benefits and make claims as though they had been dismissed. California is an at-will employment state, so unless these employees have contracts stating otherwise (including the employee handbook, unless it has verbiage stating it is not legally binding), their dismissal is legal.

Apple is giving each employee who chooses to resign a $12.5k severance package. Assuming Apple doesn’t plan on fighting any unemployment claims made by these employees, what else you think they would be able to get after a successful lawsuit?

I agree, but I don't think that's even close to a reasonable reason to sue.

I don't like that, but I'm just making the argument that the 1% doesn't give 2 shits either way.

I don't understand what kind of magic bullet people think a constructive discharge lawsuit is or what kind of powerful uno reverse card it would be. Winning a constructive discharge lawsuit is basically being legally fired instead of quiting...they'd probably get less from that lawsuit (not even counting the time and legal fees) than if they just accepted Apples package. What is a constructive discharge lawsuit supposed to do here?

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

Siri has a quality control team? What do they do all day?

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.

Someone has to make sure Siri understands what I’m saying in a situation where I might as well use my fingers to get the same stuff done, but doesn’t understand a single word when I’m driving.

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.

1 more...

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.

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

Almost 2x the amount going to the people who fuck off is obscene lmao.

You can move for 7k or quit for ~12.5k

Fuck you Apple, enjoy your suicide nets and spyware/POS OS

all my homies hate apple billionaires.

People just folded like soggy tortillas when the state and federal governments implemented the laws that allowed women to be killed. They folded by allowing these megacorporations to accrue dragon's hoard levels of wealth and by allowing lobbying to continue to exist. My sympathies are all but non-existent. People are allowing this type of stuff to happen to themselves because they think it won't happen to them.

You're just as guilty friend, you're a people too. Or do you reserve your disdain for others?

I go out and take a stand against the police when protests happen in my area. I also don't whine about the government on social media, pretending that it will make any difference whatsoever.

But you do whine about people on social media, pretending that it will make any difference whatsoever.

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).

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.

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