I’m sure women will be stoked to have Apple relocate them to a state that could kill them.
Leave a state with abortion protections and move to a hellhole where you can be thrown in jail if you have an abortion, or left to die if you have a complicated pregnancy. This is basically a potential death sentence (or jail sentence) for any women on the team.
That’s according to Bloomberg, which reported that an 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.”
Why do you need to uproot people and force them to relocate to a dangerous backwoods shithole just to listen to recordings on their computers anyways? This is a work from home job.
I’m sure that the Title IX people will be very excited to hear about the disparate impact of this decision.
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This is the most willfully ignorant thing I’ve read in a long time.
Bullshit. In California you have rights. In Texas they have the explicit right to deny you a lifesaving abortion. The degree of human rights you have used to be generally the same state by state until roe was killed
It’s still an insult that it was only upheld by precedence and wasn’t enshrined into a federal law. This isn’t something that states should have the choice of deciding, as it massively affects the quality of healthcare across the country.
Of course, but also the last democratic supermajority barely lasted long enough to get a pared down ACA which was an immediate priority at the time. The implied right to privacy was seen as fairly stable until the republicans began stealing Supreme Court seats.
Have you been paying attention to the news coming out of texas? I’m guessing not.
Nah it’s not just a state. A lot of Ob/Gyn physicians no longer feel comfortable practicing in states with extremely prohibitive abortion laws because it genuinely limits what kind of healthcare they can practice. This limits access to care, which can result in poor outcomes.
4 Upvotes, 50 Downvotes
You’re spare parts bud.
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
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!
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?
Emailing the funniest ones to each other?
They’ve heard some pretty good ones from me on bad days I bet lol
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… 😬
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.
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?
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.
Tesla has a QA team?!
That’s the point, this is just constructive dismissal.
Fired
Because what Siri needs is less quality.
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
Im sure they have some grand plan for the investors how many jobs they can replace with AI bullshit to increase those sweet-sweet numbers.
So move to a place that will strip your human rights away if you’re a woman or be laid off.
Nice.
Not to mention if you’re trans. The thought of moving to Texas is terrifying.
all my homies hate
applebillionaires.This is Apple lookin’ like a Lemon.
Sandiego is just way too expensive.
And Texas is way too fascist.
That is not a concern for capitalism.
