I refer, of course, to the hatchet job the NYT did on Apple.
On page 5, we learn of a poor engineer, Mr. Saragoza, whose job disappeared when the Elk Grove plant essentially moved to Asia. But why? Apparently the costs were too high, not because of wages, but because of lead times and inventory. To solve that, the plant would have to increase work hours (with commensurate pay, obviously, given american law — something the NYT chooses to overlook).
Mr. Saragoza explains his position with regards to this survival measure: “We were told we would have to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays,” Mr. Saragoza said. “I had a family. I wanted to see my kids play soccer.”
As per the NYT piece:
A few years after Mr. Saragoza started his job, his bosses explained how the California plant stacked up against overseas factories: the cost, excluding the materials, of building a $1,500 computer in Elk Grove was $22 a machine. In Singapore, it was $6. In Taiwan, $4.85. Wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities. Rather it was costs like inventory and how long it took workers to finish a task.
For some unexplainable reason (as far as the NYT is concerned, it was possibly the evil evil evil pursuit of profit), the factory ended up as a call center.
The NYT then tells us of the fate of Mr. Saragoza:
Mr. Saragoza was too expensive for an unskilled position. He was also insufficiently credentialed for upper management.
I’m not so sure that the “credentialed” part was the important issue; I’d venture that the “would rather watch kids play soccer” attitude was more dispositive. After all, management — for all the disparagement it gets — requires a gung-ho attitude and dedication to the business objectives. Possibly some other engineer was willing to do it.
As a counterpoint to this poor family-loving engineer, the NYT tells us of the evil top executives who paid themselves large amounts of stock options (which — a point that seems to have escaped the NYT — are only valuable if they stay with the company for a while and generate enough shareholder value to raise the price of the stock, i.e. if they do their jobs).
After reading in Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs what these executives went through, and comparing them with the statement of Mr. Saragoza above, I can only say: Duh! These executives should receive trauma pay for what went on inside Apple.
Apple in 1995 was recovering from having just been teetering on the brink of extinction. Apple now is a high-tech powerhouse. Monomaniacal management has many faults, but it certainly worked well there.
It’s not Apple that’s the issue. It’s the general attitude that jobs are an entitlement and don’t depend on the willingness to do things one might find disagreeable or inconvenient.
I’ve met people who worked in large multinational consultancies and had Mr. Saragoza’s attitude; call them Type S. There’s nothing wrong with that attitude: life is much more than work and a trade-off must be made. Their trade-off was in favor of family, a generally laudable choice.
Type S associates typically don’t make partner.
I’ve also met people who have made partner in those multinational consultancies. Among those is X, who had a family vacation planned for D day and on D minus one day got a phone call from a client requesting X’s services immediately. Were X of type S, the consultancy would probably have lost this multi-million dollar yearly billings client. X sent the family away on vacation and went to meet the client.
That’s why X is a partner in a multinational consulting firm.
There’s nothing inherently better or more moral about X or the S types. But there’s a clear difference in terms of firm economics: if there aren’t enough Xs, there will be no jobs for the S types — clients will simply choose a different firm, one that has more Xs.
The NYT, of course, ignores this minor problem; it’s only the fundamental cause of western decline, but who cares about that when they have their journalism degrees to feel a warm glow in the NYT offices.
Until there’s no one to pay for it, that is.
