Comment by gyomu

> Apple recorded almost 100 billion in profit in 2023. They can afford to hire every single UX and UI designer on the face of the planet with that money

Lots of senior people have left in the last 10 years, and Covid/RTO dialed up the exodus to 11. Many of the best Apple designers - the ones who had been there for over a decade or two, with lots of deep, hard to acquire skills/knowledge - are gone, and they made so much money from stocks that there’s nothing Apple could offer to bring them back, seeing as the reason they left is that they missed the scrappy high impact environment of the 2000s/early 2010s and got tired of the trillion dollar company vibes.

It’s a tough problem to prevent, and it’s only going to get worse.

A tangential but related problem is that old school designers came from a very different background than modern day UX designers - since UX wasn’t formalized as a field back then, it was industrial design/print design/architecture/software nerds who found themselves having an interest in designing UIs who got the jobs. Today’s junior UX designers all have the same portfolio of hamburger menu apps and nonsensical personas and are lost the moment they have to design something more complex than an informational website in Figma. There might be 1000x more UX designers today than there was 20 years ago, but finding amazing ones in all the noise is harder than it ever was (the same way you can find tons of junior devs who can copy paste React code from chatGPT, but good luck finding devs that can write clean high performance code).

The company is still streets ahead the competition in many areas tho so I’m not too worried about the stock price for the next 5-10 years. Beyond that, who knows.

The image of SJ in a leather jacket flipping off IBM often comes to my mind. Apple is as old, has as many employees, and is much richer, than IBM was at the time this picture was taken. Time for founders to go take pictures of themselves flipping the bird in front of AP.