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Apple

Apple To Add 3600 Jobs At New $304 Million Campus In Austin 113

Posted by timothy from the city-motto-is-less-humid-than-houston dept.
An anonymous reader links to a short note at Tech Newest, according to which "Apple Inc. plans to create a $304 million campus in Austin, Texas, which will add 3,600 jobs over the next decade, more than doubling its labourforce in the city. The Cupertino, California, customer device [maker] already employs thousands in Austin, whose tasks include handling customer issues and support."
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Apple To Add 3600 Jobs At New $304 Million Campus In Austin More

Apple To Add 3600 Jobs At New $304 Million Campus In Austin

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  • There's gonna be a rumble! (Score:3, Funny)

    by PessimysticRaven ( 1864010 ) on Saturday March 10, 2012 @03:04PM (#39313467)

    Awesome. I for one can't wait to hear about the turf war between Dell's Round Rock campus and this new Apple Dumpling gang.

    • Re:There's gonna be a rumble! (Score:5, Funny)

      by poly_pusher ( 1004145 ) on Saturday March 10, 2012 @03:13PM (#39313539)
      When you're a dell, you're a dell all the way. From your first hard drive fail to your last RMA!

      *Snaps fingers and hunches over*

    • customer device huge? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Qwertie ( 797303 ) on Saturday March 10, 2012 @03:32PM (#39313697) Homepage
      WTF is a customer device huge?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by ehintz ( 10572 )

      That's been going on for years. I worked at Apple Austin from '96 to '98; back then there was a LaserWriter on the 2nd floor of the Anderson campus that was ironically named "Dell Resume Writer". Srsly.

      It was kind of a crappy thing for the phone monkeys tho. They'd get stuck in a rut, 9mos as a contractor at Apple, 9mos at Dell. Never get a full time gig with benes, just end up being a temp worker forever.

      • This is a case why temporary work should not exist, and that contractors largely shouldnt either. They represent a lack of trust for the workers, and this is a good case for such regulation to exist.

        Make the costs for temporary work (of any type, including oncall) on par with FTE work. More levels of indirection or short contracts? Congratulations, you have to provide more benefits than an FTE worker would have received. Then have a part of it that states that raising the requirements is an illegal circ

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • be able to go on the floor and see how long he would last. i'd give that fucker two weeks, then i would throw him on the 'low skill' pile and tell him to get a job more suited to his capabilities, like being a janitor. at least there are no queue stats when you are scrubbing a shit stain out of a toilet.

          • Phone support has always been a revolving door. Trust me, I know. Been there done that and got the t-shirt. That's because customer support is one of those low skill aggravating occupations that leads to one of the highest burn-out rates. It's so bad that it's a naturally re-occurring phenomenon that most like will never go away. So tell me, why would companies like Dell even bother taking them on as a full employee with benes?

            This would come from valuing their employees enough to thwart contract-based employment sourced burnout.

            If anything, it means that business must be made willing to retrain people into more permanent work, even if it means getting rid of their contingent labor trump card.

            As mobile as that occupation is, you be lucky to even apply for the position state-side. Be thankful they're outsourcing this cheap, mobile, low skill, unstable work locally and not overseas.

            Where they treat people badly enough to require onsite psychiatric care and enjoy BPO-specific exemptions that end up screwing with their workers?
            I'll be thankful when offshore outsourcing dies a painful, grisly, obscene death that nobody on

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            As mobile as that occupation is, you be lucky to even apply for the position state-side. Be thankful they're outsourcing this cheap, mobile, low skill, unstable work locally and not overseas.

            Actually, it's Apple - they have an image and customer service reputation to maintain. And part of that is, unfortunately, having people that can speak clearly and understand what you're saying.

            So the main reason for having this call center here in the US is because customers have repeatedly told Apple that they don't w

        • Get rid of all the ways business can fuck with a worker, and things get better.

          By implementing government regulations that in the end will just fuck the employee over even more. Sorry, no thanks. Freedom is less regulations, not more.

          • Then why does "increased freedom" result in companies screwing over workers more as it has?

    • Kind of like when Dell was stealing people from Radio Shack.

  • In Related News, Apple Buys UT Austin Dorms (Score:4, Funny)

    by theodp ( 442580 ) on Saturday March 10, 2012 @03:06PM (#39313495)

    Hey, workers need a place to live [utexas.edu], right?

  • this one sounded just like my last tech support call...

  • device huge?

  • In Austin there are plenty of ex-Dell support center staff who'd (presumably) need very little training.

  • 3600 Jobs... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Saturday March 10, 2012 @03:22PM (#39313613)
    But human cloning is illegal in the USA.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Surt ( 22457 )

      Only if you get caught. It's a lot like Marijuana. Everyone is doing it, and there's token enforcement targeted only at oppressing the poor.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      But as you can tell from any call to Comcast, baboon cloning is perfectly legal.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        yea, I gave up with those clowns, the office is only a few blocks away and the service is much better ... or if it is not, atleast they can see my face when I get the "sorry, but how retarded are you?" look

        I played a game once, I called comcast, then got in the car to go to the office, I was able to stand in line with 6 other people, 1 clerk, pay my bill and get a new cable box, drive back home and sit back down infront of my computer before I got off hold ...

  • California has seen a lot of people leaving over the last two years. If things keep up there will be a mass exodus. If major tech companies start expanding elsewhere ... owww. California will be hurting.

    • Re:And the exodus from California to Texas begins (Score:5, Informative)

      by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Saturday March 10, 2012 @03:28PM (#39313661) Journal

      Apple are also building a 16,000-employee campus in Cupertino, that's adding to the existing 6,000-employee campus they already have - they also have long-term leases on another 10,000-employee or so offices, but I'm guessing those will be let to expire once the new campus comes online in 3 years or so.

      Simon

  • ...that while the [new] facility will be "top of the line", most of the jobs associated with that facility will be minimum wage jobs.

    You might wonder how:

    The top jobs will definitely require skill and some serious experience. But the folks who will be doing these jobs will need to eat, have their laundry done, work in a clean environment etc. Fact: These folks will not make more than minimum wage.

    The other jobs will be mostly done by machine (read computers). These will range from air quality control, moni

  • Info about the Apple Austin campus (Score:5, Informative)

    by Necroman ( 61604 ) on Saturday March 10, 2012 @03:25PM (#39313643)

    Apple is based in North Austin (see satellite map [g.co] of the campus). It's currently 4 buildings and they have room to add more building right in that area. They currently employ around 3500 people in their Austin corporate office (at least from the press releases I saw). If you poke around Apple's jobs website [apple.com] you'll find around 64 open positions in the Austin office, mainly around support and sales. Their only engineering type roles have to do working with their suppliers in Austin (Samsung, Intel, AMD, FreeScale, and IBM all have offices down here).

    I'm little sad they have no real engineering/development in Austin, but they seem to like keeping all of their people working on the same product in the same offices. Spreading an engineering force globally can cause communication issues, so they seem to avoid it.

    • Re:Info about the Apple Austin campus (Score:5, Informative)

      by Pulzar ( 81031 ) on Saturday March 10, 2012 @04:07PM (#39313905)

      I'm little sad they have no real engineering/development in Austin, but they seem to like keeping all of their people working on the same product in the same offices. Spreading an engineering force globally can cause communication issues, so they seem to avoid it.

      You don't seem to be searching right... The team working on ARM-based ASICs going into iPads and iPhones is in Austin. Here's an example posting [apple.com].

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ehintz ( 10572 )

      Austin was, in the beginning, a support outpost. There were a few phone monkeys who actually moved there from the Bay Area in the early '90s when Apple decided to close down shop in CA (Freemont, IIRC, but I may be wrong there, it's before my time at the fruit company). I've been gone from the place for well over a decade now, but even so I admit I'm a bit surprised to find there's any engineering there at all. Wasn't jack back when I worked there, everything was in Cupertino and Austin was all about phone

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      It pretty much treated Texas a developing country, full of cheap labor, desperate government willing to pay companies to build, and no labor standards. Texas does have two advantage. First, unlike much of the south, we do not have Nazi style laws in which people can be stopped without probable cause and detained for lack of papers. Texas also has a pretty good higher educational system, so there are a lot of english majors in desperate need of work to pay of huge students loansIn state can easily rake up
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I don't think there is a city in the USA that is more fitting to liking Apple. Liberal and progressive yet at the same time having looking and appearing cool as priorities.

    In a city that is in part defined by adherence to trends, Apple having a huge base there is fitting. Very fitting.

  • We're not over the first one yet!

    (ok, that was tasteless, but hey, I got Karma to burn)

  • Laugh (Score:2)

    by koan ( 80826 )

    all your customer device huge are belong to us

  • Maybe Apple can dip into that huge cash supply to fix the traffic in Austin.

  • Looks like Apple is working hard to counter all of the bad publicity from their Chinese slave labor factories.
    For the world's most valuable company, this is peanuts.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PNutts ( 199112 )

      You mean the factories that also produce for Acer, Amazon, Apple Inc., Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Motorola Mobility, Nintendo, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Toshiba, and Vizio? I do agree Apple is working hard but also has the time to ask for a third-party audit of working conditions, conduct 40 Foxconn audits since 2006 and 500 supply chain audits in the past five years.

      The exerpt below is from an Apple audit of Foxconn back in 2006 when Apple used 15% of Foxconn's capacity. The bi

      • apple deserves everything they are getting, because they tried to market themselves as 'different' all these years, appealing to the hipster intellectual urban middle-upper creative class. its their own goddamned fault, since this is the same class that tends to get jobs at human rights foundations, media organizations, and push for labor rights.

        the 'audits' are a fucking joke. unions are still illegal in china, and there are still no environmental laws or worker safety laws. (laws, being, the law itself, a

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mspohr ( 589790 )

        Yes, you do sound like a shill.
        The "audits" are a joke.
        Yes, all of the corporations which use Chinese slave labor should take a hard look at the factories. (Ever been to WalMart?)
        Perhaps if corporations really were people, they wouldn't be so quick to ship US manufacturing jobs overseas to slave labor countries.

        I hate daylight savings time, too.

  • The only reason apple is expanding is austin & TX had the highest bid, 21 mil state, 8.6 mil city. See http://www.statesman.com/business/apple-plans-3-600-new-jobs-for-austin-2228637.html [statesman.com] for details. Note the high number is always the headline, 3600, but the actual number may be as low as 650. Personally, I think it should be completely forbidden for any govt entity to waive taxes/give incentives to sway a company to locate. It just turns it into a bidding war, and the people who lose the most are the

    • Not only did it get rid of a large cash-register company(NCR), Georgia did all it could to sneak everything out before people noticed that a 125 year old company was gone.

      Safe to say Georgia is looked down upon by many for uprooting that company. Not so much blood feud, but any business association or government entity in Georgia is as welcome in Ohio as Art Modell is in Cleveland(for doing similar to the Cleveland Browns).

      If you got rid of that by federal law or Constitutional amendment, you would single

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Osgeld ( 1900440 )

        we have huge amounts of free land, and very low cost's. boo fucking hoo NCR moved, maybe you should stop blaming other states and take a look at whats wrong with yours

  • The summary is a good candidate to be sent to that site

  • Boom & Bust (Score:2, Insightful)

    by peas_n_carrots ( 1025360 )
    This looks alot like a typical over-hiring scenario. 5-10 yrs down the road (or less?) Apple will probably have equally large layoffs. I know it sounds improbably right now, but their meteoric rise is unsustainable. Business boom cycles don't last forever.

    • I certainly agree that their current rate of growth isn't sustainable (an article a few weeks back pointed out that if they do sustain it, they'll pass the GDP of France and Spain in a few years), but to suggest that a bust is imminent in the near future seems foolish, though a plateauing seems likely.

      Depending on which analyst you choose to believe and how you categorize devices, they have somewhere between 55% and 75% market share in the tablet market, which is quickly shaping up to displace a large porti

      • I certainly agree that their growth will first fall off and be flatter. And yes, predicting the bust isn't easy (or more of us would be rich). Generally from what I've observed, the faster a business grows, the faster it can fall if things don't go as planned. Netflix is a recent poster child. Apple's a different company of course, but their insane market share can only go down from here due to competition making inroads. Android is no small potatoes in this game.

        The most telling thing in the near term is

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