And those 80 people will not have a problem finding a remote job. Seems like everything will work out in the end. Remote workers will find remote jobs.
If you don't stand up for what you want, why is that anyone's fault but yours? I get not wanting to be the squeaky wheel... but in the end, it's your loss.
And you can voice your opinion and work for what you want without being a "sqeaky wheel" - which I take to have a negative connotation as a "complainy pants".
Sometimes you have to "bring out the big guns" and send a letter to the CEO... sometimes you just have to say "I want to continue to work remotely as has been proven to make me more productive." and be ready to find another job if the company doesn't meet your needs any more. Work is a two way street and Apple employees can probably find work elsewhere easily enough.
That's on a personal level though... this happens to be on a "union" level ("employee group"? not sure if that's a union per-se but it's more than just a single person). I think a union (or whatever this is) has the obligation to make these sorts of moves - so there is a difference there.
I skimmed the article before and just reread it - 80 people wrote the letter and 2800 joined a slack channel for it - so this does go beyond individuals into a more "our voices will be heard" direction.
Still need to stand up to be heard and you can do so without being a squeaky wheel :)
Did I say that making a stand or bringing out the big guns is bad? No. I said that this specific instance (writing a letter to Tim Cook), him saying "No", and remote advocates having to find work elsewhere means that everything does not in fact work out for everyone. Especially for those of us who are not interested in leaving the company.
I didn't say a letter would make everything work out for everyone... I said you have to speak up to have the opportunity - and speaking up can be done without being a "sqeaky wheel" (AKA: complainy pants).
Personally, I don't think they'll find a way to make EVERYONE happy. Someone isn't going to get the option they want (100% wfh? work at a remote location because they don't like the main office? etc). There's no way they can.
BUT
The group speaking up CAN put more pressure to have options that will make more people happy. If hundreds of employees say "Look at the numbers and look at news stories talking about 40%+ of employees willing to leave a job without WFH and etc"...
If I say "I'm not open to 100% in the office" and Tim says no?
If 80 say it... if 2800 say it...
Tim can ignore 1 person. Can he ignore 80? 200? 2000?
If you aren't interested in leaving but you want better options then you have two things at odds with each other. You may be interested in staying but if staying means you work in a office you hate or have a commute you hate or whatever... then that's on YOU to decide what's more important - a job at apple or a job with WFH.
At the end of the conversation... the letter tells Tim (or whatever CEO gets a similar letter with more than a couple signatures) that he risks losing a sizable number of employees. That letter isn't from one person... it's from a large group of people.
It's up to Tim to decide if the risk of losing talent is worth sticking to the currently given options.
It's up to you and me if it's worth the lack of option you want to stay at the current job.
Like i said... I'd probably look for work if asked to be in the office 5 days a week due to my commute. I don't blame them for asking and given some thought I don't think a letter from a "union" or "employee group" in this circumstance is bad.
We'll have to agree to disagree then. The overall sentiment in big tech is still very much "If you leave your cushy FAAMG job there are hundreds of people eager to replace you, and the employer is well aware of this when announcing returning to work."
Although I would love to know if you're also doing work in union/labor organization either at your employer or otherwise.
I am not and generally don't have any interest in being part of a union but this would be one instance where having the "collective" would actually be beneficial. A lot of employees want something and "management" needs to hear more than you or me say something.
From what I see of the market, its an employees market - "there are hundreds of people waiting to replace you" doesn't mean those people are good, experience or worth what they would replace. It's EXPESNIVE to replace an employee and the prospect of doing it for 80? 100? 500? employees is something that Tim (and his management) can't ignore.
I would tell my manager if it was just me - I wouldn't send a letter to Tim ("The CEO")... but this is a weird time and there are PLENTY of stories on HN or... well everywhere... about how many employees have a taste of WFH and are considering job hunting if the options aren't acceptable after COVID.
I do agree everyone is replaceable though... but the cost would be extensive if it comes down to it and THAT many people leave.
> I would tell my manager if it was just me - I wouldn't send a letter to Tim ("The CEO")... but this is a weird time and there are PLENTY of stories on HN or... well everywhere... about how many employees have a taste of WFH and are considering job hunting if the options aren't acceptable after COVID.
Haha, so we were in agreement the whole time. The whole idea of a tech collective goes against this being an employee's market. But perhaps we are starting to see a more concrete shift in the tech world from a white collar "you have your ticket to anywhere you want" environment to a blue collar "you better have a union/collective or you'll probably get screwed out of perks like remote work" environment.
Right so the implication is that if Apple arbitrarily refuses to continue accommodating them they’re agreeing to terminate employment. This is how most employment disputes of this nature go:
- Emplployer: we won’t/will cease to accommodate you in this meaningful way
- Employees: we’re not being accommodated and have a reasonable expectation to be; if you don’t meet those expectations we effectively can’t work for you
Most are probably contractors and H1B's who have the fear of job loss hovering over their heads. Apple is Tim Cooks life and legacy, he has nothing else but that company and like all crazy fucking people in those positions probably believes it should hold the same importance to every last employee. I can understand if your twenty something full of piss and vinegar and think your going to change the world, but you have to be nuts or desperate (H1B's/Contractors excused) to give your life to a job once you have a family.
Yes I don’t understand how ‘going into the office’ means ‘giving your life to the company’. Frankly I find it easier to separate work and home when there is an office.
I’m not. I loathe the open office at Apple Park, I dislike the commute, and I have a nice air-conditioned, insulated shed at the bottom of the garden which is great as a home office.
There is nothing I need in Apple Park to do my job, and all I get from my director is how pleased he is with how I’m working (“we couldn’t have done this without you”). Tomorrow, what I’ve been working on for the last 6 months or so will be in the keynote, and it’s awesome :) This is the 4th time I’ve had something in the keynote in my career, and this time it’s kind of disappointing (but totally understandable) that I won’t get to stand up with my team and take a “bow”. There’s one more, multi-year project that’s going to blow people away that I wrote the OS for, but that’s not ready yet.
I’m not returning to the office in September, I’m going to leave the company instead, after over a decade of service. I suspect I’m the kind of senior engineer employee Apple would prefer to keep, but the thought of not going back to AP is too enticing to pass up.
Yep, that and the sudden WFH made me realise just how boiled a frog I was.
Every little step, small in itself, that I'd compromised over the years had led me to a place I don't want to be. I work to live, not the other way around, and slowly but surely I'd been coerced into living to work. Sometimes the best way to fix something is a complete break. I think this is one of those times.
I don't think the comment you responded to was trying to communicate sympathy for him, but contrasting the sense of identification with his company that higher-ups tend to have, versus the rank and file. And emphasizing the normality of the latter.
If FAANG goes remote, rest assured that many highly capable engineers in cheaper cities like mine are willing to work for them at a discount as we would still come out way ahead compared to local rates.
I'd imagine this is a big consideration for a lot of the people advocating a return to the office in those companies. Once fully remote work is an option (or even mostly-remote work, a 3 hour commute might be acceptable once a fortnight and if that's by plane, half the country is within range) they'll be open to far greater competition from equally talented engineers in much more reasonably priced areas.
A "scab" is a worker hired to knowingly break a union strike, so unless there's a well-accepted Apple Software Engineers' Union it's not applicable here.
And of course it's not appreciated by the union, since their ability to collectively withhold labour from the company is their only real source of power. The ethics of the situation depend entirely on what's actually going on, though - there are plenty of well justified strikes, but there are also strikes where the union is overstepping its bounds. Union and corporate power remain relatively well balanced or one side gets screwed and ultimately everybody loses.
I think we're gonna see a lot of companies move towards predominately in office work at least a few days a week, while having some specific teams working remotely full time to satisfy the people who want to do that.
I think in general, a lot of people are going to prefer a 3/2 hybrid of wfh for software positions.
Im personally pretty excited to go back to the office, as Ive found myself hating wfh quite a bit.
We had hybrid and hot desking before COVID and it was a bit of a pain to deal with.
- the hot desks never had the correct dock stations for people's laptops, or "good" chairs had been stolen and left with the sketchy one with the broken wheel.
- The people you actually need to talk with will naturally come into the office on a completely different schedule, so they'll only have one overlap day with you.
- Everybody else will need to talk with them too, so it'll be impossible to get face time when you're in the office and everybody will be pissed off at each other because of all the meetings.
- All business will get done on zoom those other two days.
Yea Im personally not a fan of hybrid work if you have a team oriented job, but I think a lot of people will insist on it for at least a while. I think some places might make it work, but overall people will trend back towards wanting to go into the office.
The consensus opinion on HN of people wanting to stay remote is not generally the most popular from what Ive found talking to "normal" people.
Schedule? Why are you coming to work on a schedule that isn't "when I have meetings with people I need to see"? It's this arbitrary crap that makes good work practices go bad.
I work for a small office and one idea thrown around was get rid of the office entirely. Cheaper to just rent a conference room as needed for team meetings.
I think we'll definitely see a small rise in rented office space like that as well as retreat type areas for companies to rent a place for a week or two to crunch or work out things that need special attention
I think hybrid is a false compromise which will be worse than wfh or fully in office but it will serve its purpose to management as a step towards fully back in the office.
The prevailing wisdom, previous to Covid, was that you had to be colocated in an open floor plan, sitting next to each other, and overhearing conversations, in order to facilitate collaboration. Now many companies that spearheaded this (not including Apple, apparently) are saying you don't even have to be in the same building -- or even in the same city! What a turn around! Was the open floor plan thing erroneous?
I think something that's not readily apparent with the success so far of remote work during COVID, is that organizations are operating on the organizational 'shared context' that was created before remote work started.
It's why I think outsourcing often doesn't work out. Outsourced workers lack an understanding of this shared context which makes for a high level of friction and impairs their ability to deliver the work as imagined by the organization.
Right now, IME we're still in the sweet spot of being able to work from this shared context, which I think means the benefits of working from the same physical space are not appreciated.
It'll be interesting to see how things play out if remote work becomes the norm. I do think remote work can be successful, if the effort is put in to make sure that collaboration etc. still occurs. However, if companies stay remote and try to run on the fumes of the previously held shared context from pre-COVID then I think it will mean disaster for them.
Agree regarding shared context. The question though is, how close do you have to be to your coworkers, to create that shared context? Do you have to be in the same room and overhearing conversations? Is it enough to be in the same building? Or is it enough to video conference several times a week?
In my experience, video conferencing several times a week is enough to build shared context. Open floor plan not needed.
I think it varies on the organization and individuals. For me, "shared context" is a general feeling that people can ask questions and ask for help and can expect to get a productive response in a reasonably timely manner. Organizations have absolutely managed to establish that online using tools like video conferencing (as you mention).
For me though, I find relying heavily on asynchronous communications insufficient, and synchronous remote communications deeply frustrating (i.e., natural turn-taking cues aren't present in video calls). I end up feeling disconnected from the people I work remotely with, even though they didn't do anything wrong. I can only establish "shared context" with people who have spent enough time with me in the same space with ample frictionless face-to-face conversations.
One crucial bit of shared context that gets mostly missed…lunch. Not having lunch together has been, IME, the single biggest indicator of a dysfunctional team.
The neat thing about lunch is that the conversations are entirely non-directed without feeling like the time is being wasted in a meeting. Conversations can cover a specific project, when a high degree of coordination is necessary, generalized venting, when there are shared frustrations or just be about non-work topics that help a team bond and get to know each other as people rather than workers. It’s like a meeting that doesn’t feel like a meeting that can be strategic or therapeutic as needed. There’s really no way to replicate the beneficial effects of eating lunch together when workers are remote.
As a manager, this has also been one of my go-to tricks for successful cross-team projects lasting any significant amount of time. I tell one of my team members to setup a lunch with at least one member of the other team on a weekly basis and use the incentive of authorizing the company to pay for it. For ~$20/person/week, the cross-team communications issues basically disappear. It’s ridiculously cost effective and almost magical in how well it works.
Hard disagree. There's something about eating with someone that taps into our lizard brains' survival instincts...eating together == allies. Online games may work for people who like online games, but anyone who doesn't like them is going to feel resentment at being made to waste time doing something they don't enjoy. Lunch is something that everyone is already doing, so no one will consider the time wasted, especially if they're getting free food out of it.
Mixed onsite/remote doesn't work because the remote folks become second class citizens. Missing out on conversations that happen in person prevents them from working as effectively. Fully remote takes more explicit focus on making sure necessary communication happens. It's harder to make work than in person. But I don't think it's impossible.
Also, in my opinion, remote work works better when team members have met in person. It's easier to pick up on certain ways that they communicate, which help understanding in online communications.
Mixed can work if either some higher up employees are remote or some meaningful percentage of employees are remote (even if a minority).
It's about the communication paradigm. If people consider communication to be only local, then it falls apart when people are in multiple locations (including multi site offices). However if people default to remote compatible communication, it scales really well to people working from home and multi site offices.
I think that largely depends on the location of leadership.
If all leadership is in one location, yes, it'll get one sided. If leadership are spread out, I think it works out fine.
I've spent the last decade working with large multi site companies in the "lesser" location, and was able to move up from a junior to senior/supervisor roles at each company. Obviously my anecdote doesn't scale out uniformly, but I've seen it work out fine for many employees as long as leadership was adequately spread out.
Hybrid can be great or completely useless depending on the person and their locality.
If you're hybrid, you can't really live further away in cheaper areas, but you now have to set up office space at home for the WFH days. So it's potentially worse than fully WFH or fully on site.
You still need to maintain having a vehicle or commute.
Of course there are advantages, like spending more time with family and reduced sum commute. But it doesn't allow for people to have a meaningful change in lifestyle that they're seeking.
> If you're hybrid, you can't really live further away in cheaper areas
While I haven't done this (yet?), I've had coworkers who have, and they've successfully lived farther away in cheaper areas. :) What I've seen happen is one of two things:
(1) They live far enough away that the commute is hellacious (say, Sacramento to San Francisco, which can run 2+ hours by car each way and 3+ each way via transit), but they're willing to put up with it one or two days a week.
(2) They live far enough away that daily commutes are simply infeasible and just come in for a few days to a week every 4–8 weeks, staying in a hotel. This may or may not be paid for by the company, depending on what they've negotiated.
(N.B.: I'm aware that there are people who have done daily commutes via plane from, say, LA to SF, but that sort of thing seems to be pretty rare below the executive level.)
So I think those would work if the hybrid day layout was more flexible.
In this case, Apple is two days of WFH (Wednesday/Friday I believe) so your second suggestion wouldn't work (honestly some folk I've spoken to have even considered car camping). If it were contiguous blocks perhaps.
"Doesn't work" would be a significant loss of efficiency compared to colocation. I'm not going to try to define "significant" rigorously. Something like, "if you adjust everyone's salary to compensate for it, nobody wants to work there any more." Whereas fully remote would be a small enough hit (if any) that people would choose it for the other benefits.
There's a few people who have experience in successful mixed environments. I'm curious how, so I hope to hear more from them.
We have shared office pods in cities where we reach critical mass, currently Boston and Miami.
The experiment right now is between companies that stick to office requirements and those that decentralize. I hired a high-level Amazon engineer because they did not want to commute back into the office. We pay good money for top talent. The best time for startups to poach high-end talent is now!
> I think something that's not readily apparent with the success so far of remote work during COVID, is that organizations are operating on the organizational 'shared context' that was created before remote work started.
Strong agree here. My company has hired a bunch of new people over the course of the pandemic and the same level of acculturation into the internal culture and way of doing things is just not there for them. A fair number of our team has actually been 100% remote all along before the pandemic, but I think having a core contingent of (particularly operation and project management) people sharing space over the workday did a lot to spread that shared context around and loop the fully remote members of the team in. Over the COVID period I’ve noticed newer team members just having a lot more trouble adjusting and settling in because all that in acknowledged cultural and context dissemination wasn’t happening.
I can’t think of the last time I actually spoke to anyone on our UI/UX team because I literally have zero reason to set up a meeting with them and if there isn’t a work reason to interact it doesn’t happen anymore. For me that’s less of a deal but, for example, imagine being in the shoes of a junior business development person. For them their career progression and skill development depends on picking up a lot of the lingo and philosophy around how development works by osmosis. The absence of that is pretty fatal for cross team collaboration.
Lots of big companies are heavily silo’d in this way where everyone just does their specific job description thing, and I’ve worked in many such companies. I really didn’t like it. Those environments have always felt less dynamic and creative to me. Obviously that’s just one man’s opinion and experience, but I really don’t think I’d be as happy in a fully remote team.
> I can’t think of the last time I actually spoke to anyone on our UI/UX team because I literally have zero reason to set up a meeting with them and if there isn’t a work reason to interact it doesn’t happen anymore
This is what I really dislike about remote work. I was looking forwards to mingling with non-programmers, but when you're new to the company and working remotely that's basically impossible.
Outsourcing usually doesn't work out because of poor management, such as the first principle and primary driver of a project being to cut costs. And the reason for that is often because budgets are insufficient.
They try to find cut-rate programmers by going overseas, then try to save more money by finding the less expensive outsourcing agency. Then, instead of engaging with the problem, they hire a third party middleman who takes a big cut and has no stake in the actual outcome. This is a horrible incentive structure and usually results in poor communication.
The fact that they are from another country is irrelevant. The language skills could be very relevant, but again it is usually so poorly managed that none of the people that should be communicating directly with developers even try or are given an opportunity.
It always was. “Collaboration” was a weak excuse given by managers who want a panopticon and companies that need to densely pack floor space to save money.
That's not universally true. I've been in buildings where the employees had their own private offices and shared spaces. A majority of people used the shared space.
Any idea what nudged them toward spending their time in shared spaces? It’s been a while, but I remember working in buildings where most employees had offices (or, at least, cubicles) and they mostly used those instead of shared spaces.
The open office has a chilling effect on collaboration. People go to meeting rooms to collaborate, and that's the biggest sign that the open office isn't working out.
If we're forced to wfh everyone is going to say they're doing great and stock holders shouldn't worry. We're doing better than ever! Just like every quarter.
It'll be interesting to see where we actually land in a year.
> The prevailing wisdom previous to Covid, was that you had to be colocated in an open floor plan, sitting next to each other, and overhearing conversations, in order to facilitate collaboration.
That may have been the prevailing trend, but programmers were pretty clear in pointing out how destructive for performance and focus this open office trend was. There is an avalanche of data pointing to how harmful the openoffice layout is for everything from declining morale to decreasing productivity hits to faster spread of disease and increasing worker stress levels. This clear and unambiguous data was widely disseminated in the popular press. The only reason firms ignored all the data and did this was to save on real estate costs and to mimic other firms. To anyone who bothered to spend 10 seconds googling the topic, all the research was obvious, except no one bothered to do that very basic due diligence and see if there was any data whatsoever to support the openoffice thesis.
The open floor plan thing was to make commercial real estate costs cheaper. Having individual offices requires 2x to 3x space. Then you have significant additional fit out costs - for example you now have to air condition say 1000 small spaces instead a couple of large ones. You have to pay for partitioning, separate cable runs, your door costs. Might sound silly but if a 100m office fit out can easily double or triple. So overall 2/3x fit out cost + 2/3x annual rent. All of a sudden why wouldn't you promote open plan working?
And these are all good points. If companies stop treating employees as ignorant chumps and explain them costs, I think it would go long way in increased mutual understanding. But then employers feel scared that if an employee comes back and say how about I set up a home office? Win-Win right? So now employers comes with cost saving plan but smothers with bullshit of "next generation collaborative workspace" or whatever.
> While the writing group was relatively small, it reportedly began in a "remote work advocates" Slack channel with about 2,800 members. If so, it might reflect the concerns of a significant number of Apple's non-retail employees.
I’m at a different tech company where employees penned a letter to leadership on another matter, which was picked up by news outlets.
And that group wasn’t influential at all - they just happened to be the loudest people. If anything, the news media made the issue appear to be orders of magnitude more significant than it really was. Quite frankly, most people didn’t care.
IMO there’s really no “news” here. This is clickbait. There are differences in opinions on what office vs remote work looks like in a post COVID world, and that applies to pretty much every company including my own.
The slack channel has 2800 people? How is that relevant?
They have to realize that Apple is going to want to use that HQ sooner or later. Can see you quickly becoming a second class of employee if you tried to do full remote at Apple.
I'll be curious to see how these companies with these super expensive to build and maintain campuses are going to react. If nothing else, it seems like the sunk cost of having a multi-acre campus will force some companies to stick with the colocated in an office model.
The “space ship” campus is not nice to work in. I was working at Apple when it was built - nobody wanted to move there (other than execs) because it was open-office plan whereas most full time employees in other campuses in Cupertino all had individual offices.
Also, if you significantly above average contributor you pretty much can dictate when and where you work even before the pandemic (with some common sense limits). A famous example - intel based mac were initially developed by someone working remotely.
> nobody wanted to move there (other than execs) because it was open-office plan whereas most full time employees in other campuses in Cupertino all had individual offices.
Yuck. I have a cube at my office and even though it has an open "door" space, it has high walls and just that little bit of privacy is so nice.
> Also, if you significantly above average contributor you pretty much can dictate when and where you work even before the pandemic (with some common sense limits).
Yup. I’ve been mostly remote most of my career for this reason. I’ve only once had to justify it beyond my contribution once (got a doctor’s note stating that the noise in an office would make me less productive, which is true). It was no surprise that I didn’t want to keep working there for other reasons not so long after.
For what it’s worth (to you and anyone else reading) I was able to obtain that note because I have an ADHD diagnosis and my doctor understood (upon explanation) that I have pretty severe cognitive difficulties under sensory stress-particularly auditory overstimulation.
This wasn’t meant as a comment saying I got a doctor’s note casually (not that I think you’re suggesting that interpretation, I’m just realizing it’s important to clarify). I got it because I was sincerely concerned about the cognitive impact going into the office as demanded would have on me and my work.
If you have a similar response to sensory stimulation, I highly recommend looking into it! I’m coming from the perspective of it being common with ADHD and ASD, which aren’t the only bases for it; if you mean headaches literally, do yourself a favor and talk to your doc about why sound or any other sensory issue might be affecting you that way.
Turns out, I do too, so I appreciate the follow up. For me what really did it (in my most recent attempt at holding a job) was the sound of my colleagues eating at their desk.
Yup that’s a common one! For me it’s usually certain vocal ranges, and others’ subconscious habits like tapping their feet.
If I had to guess, that sounds an awful lot like hyperacusis. Which is more common in ADHD, along with auditory processing disorder and potentially even tinnitus.
I think this idea of a default shitty working experience for everyone, and then only if you manage to overcome that and contribute more you get a quiet space, is ridiculous.
Apple Park is nice for the amenities but the open plan does indeed suck. Still open plan at Apple Park is still a step up from my previous open plan office in Sunnyvale. Same shitty open plan but worse amenities.
The Apple Donut has a very slightly larger outer diameter than the Pentagon. It's the mother of all sunk costs.
It would be cool if they just packed the whole thing with servers, kept a few conference rooms and the theatre, and called it a day; but something tells me they won't.
:) It's more that employees became familiar to each other through frequent small encounters, which wouldn't have happened had each group their own common facilities. The important conversations weren't expected to happen with one party frantically holding it in.
When I'm trying to take care of basic bodily functions, I don't need some exec using it as an opportunity to manipulate me into workplace / social interaction.
Sigh... I laughed hard at your comment, but it reminds me of just the sheer amount of idiotic shit management comes up with... It's like they're living in a totally different universe from the ICs.
Well, for me more interesting to know is that did he work with JIRA laborers and had daily stand-ups where people stood like chump and offer roughly same status updates for last three years.
Honestly one of the biggest perks of WFH full-time is being 10 metres from my own private bathroom where I can take my 11am dump with the door open and in relative luxury.
FWIW, almost everyone at Pixar has their own office, with doors, walls and everything. Some people share an office with one other person. There are communal spaces, and some cubes, but nothing even remotely like the massive open office plan at most tech companies.
As others have mentioned, I also wonder how much of this annoyance to return has to do with the failed open-office concept.
People more-or-less occasionally like having their own place during work where they can some action (e.g. closing their door) to focus 100% without interruption.
Cost-cutting open-office plans that let management see their flock typing away destroyed this option, and covid has reminded people how valuable and productive this option is/was (for those at home with this option).
We are now in new territory, as we are experiencing the end of the first pandemic during the information age. What we decide now will resonate for many years.
Something to think about: for most millennia of human experience, where one worked and where one lived amongst the family and community were one and the same. It’s only a blip in post-industrial history have we had this situation of leaving the family (et al.) behind to pull levers and receive $coins.
If the internet lets us go back… that would be huge
You say that like the company's purpose is to be as bad to employees as possible. I get where the idea comes from, but that's not true everywhere and companies did remote work before it was forced on them. It doesn't have to be "bend to some of labor's demands", but rather "choose most effective hiring and working strategy".
This is a failure of the job to be done though. The JTBD for the execs at these companies forcing in person work isn’t to be efficient. It’s to make themselves feel good. They feel better when they see asses in seats. It’s really that simple.
If efficiency had literally anything to do with it we would have all been remote since 2005.
I think that's a little simplistic. Lots of people are just as productive, or more productive, at home as they are in an office. But I've also had a lot of other people tell me they struggle to work remotely. It really depends on the individual, where they are in their career, and what type of project they're working on.
I think there is a significant amount of companies (and a substantial portion of the government) in the US that operates on a philosophy like "How much can we extract from people before there is any push back?" It is a nation entirely built on micro transactions.. I am sitting in an airport right now. Baggage carts are free to use. The last time I flew in the US it was a $5 fee. Why? Because it's just enough to extract value from us but not enough for anyone to complain in a significant way.
I don't think that companies are deliberately trying to be awful to workers. They are just using the standard American model.. "How much can we get away with?"
The country is in desperate need of widespread unionization efforts.
I don’t think all companies are as adversarial towards their employees as this makes it sound.
Great companies recognize they benefit when they are proactively trying to do what’s best for the employee as well as the company.
Companies that I’ve seen do it well have an executive level employee advocacy position. Typically in a human resource department, but less concerned about the policy and regulatory requirements and is specifically tasked to be a champion/voice for employees.
Good pay is nice, but it's not the only variable to the equation.
I worked received great pay in the US, but made the decision to return to Australia. I have some regrets, but the lifestyle I get from not being in the Bay Area pretty much offsets any pay difference.
What I miss most is the scope and pace of the work and the incredibly intelligent people I got to work with. Thankfully I'm beginning to see the genesis of this in my local market.
The company's purpose is to make as much money as possible. That means that their interest is to make their employees work as much as possible while paying them as little as possible.
If they try to make you do better/more work a nicer or a ruder way is an implementation detail. The goal is always to extract as much work as possible from you at the lowest price.
Sometimes the goals of the company converge with the goal of employees. Most of the time they exist in a state of frozen conflict. It sucks, but that's just how the employer/employee relationship must work out in general.
Most people that I know get very lonely working from home.
I saw it in my developer group, where all single people would try to go to office during covid, because it's so lonely at home.
Colleagues with small kids are unable to get any work done when there is no babysitter.
I personally have no problem working from home, but I see that's a real exception. And even I don't mind going to the office once every week, just to get the social interactions and be away from home once in a while.
So I think you are right that people who don't want to go to work at all is a real exception.
My experience has been similar to yours, with the addition that married people without children never wanted to go to the office. It was basically the best of both worlds; you aren't lonely, plus your spouse (usually) understands that they shouldn't bother you while you're working, while kids don't.
I remember a production outage of some database, I can’t remember the db details, but it was when my then three year old hit the limit on her ability to enjoy Sound of Music alone. The last half hour or so of the call was done with a toddler sitting on my shoulders.
I have experience with them in two places, one good and one bad.
The bad experience had no separation between the engineers, kitchen or sales people. Sales tend to be extra noisy- high energy, always on the phone, etc. Kitchens are also loud for the obvious reason.
In my good experience, we had physical separation from anything not engineering. People moved and talked around you, but it wasn't obnoxious and frequently informative to overhear.
Of course, I wouldn't give up working from home for anything, so it has become a moot point.
Even at the 'good' example you state when engineering was separate from other departments, I would still find that there could be 4-6 different conversations being held within a few feet of me at various times in the day (every day) at a recent job I had. And usually there was at least 1 or 2 conversations within earshot for most of the day.
I had no choice but to where headphones in order to drown out the conversations to focus. A year and a half ago I developed a constant Tinnitus in my left ear, and I suspect that job contributed to it.
So that's fun, and something I get to deal with for the rest of my life. Thanks open office.
I’m very much inclined to agree with your wondering. I feel that there is a certain personality type that despises the open office, and that most others are fine with them.
Anecdotally, a group at the company I work (pre-Covid) had the opportunity to contribute to designing their own new working space, as part of an empty floor was being retrofitted for them. The standard at our company was either individual cubicles or quads, but these folks chose open plan of (as far as I know) their own free will.
For anybody wondering, this is two teams of about 12 or so developers each, mostly relatively young.
It's a little awkward to criticize it in person. It's not like they will change the office on opinions of a few staff. It's a take it or leave the company kind of thing.
The HW org "open office" concept is just this. 5 linear feet of bench space; no dividers or any other sort of line-of-sight blocking.
The SW org packs people into tiny rooms with slightly more space (maybe 6'), but there is literally nowhere to go to get away from having someone breathing down your neck.
This is a great concept, but higher ups are on the manager schedule, meetings all day long. They live in conference rooms. If they are at their desk, most people will think twice before interrupting them.
Individual contributors however live at their desks and no one hesitates to interrupt them.
So having your execs in the open seems egalitarian, but it is an empty gesture.
Why is the presence of noise cancelling headsets considered a symptom of something being wrong?
Most often, I like to have a mix of time spent interacting with coworkers and time spent working “by myself”. I like to be accessible to coworkers and have coworkers accessible to me if I need their assistance, but I don’t necessarily want their full attention all the time, right?
I kinda expect the office to be a bustling place. Not loud and shouting all the time, but just a lot of activity of people discussing things.
Part of me suspects that at least some of the WFH productivity boost companies see is attributed to home offices being quieter. My home "office" is on the attic landing, with no door, and I have a 3 year old running around the house. It's been quieter and easier to stay focused here compared to my company's open plan office. I went back to the office for the first time in over a year a few weeks ago and I was flabbergasted at how low my productivity was despite working hard the whole day.
> It’s only a blip in post-industrial history have we had this situation of leaving the family (et al.) behind to pull levers and receive $coins.
A bit of history: actually that was the industrial revolution and until the the 1970s the open plan office was the norm even for white collar workers (the cubicle was invented in the late 60s as “liberation” from the open plan). I remember being shocked when I first saw the open plan return, back in 2000, and since the productivity of offices (for programmers) and cubes was so well documented I was sure it was simply some weird experiment.
In the end though it will be trade off between the value of the ad hoc interactions vs the cost of real estate.
The kind of close-minded people who consider their colleagues (ahem, “workers”) to be merely fungible resources will make their decision solely on the price of real estate.
Note I started my first “mostly remote, work over the net” company in 1989. It’s not a new idea either.
Two main reasons that I'm aware of: (1) employer distrust of their employees being hard at work when not in full view of said employer and (2) the cubicle area put an automatic lower limit to the amount of floor space a single employee would occupy.
I thought open-offices were mostly a dud: they were trendy a few years ago, then most companies switched back when they realized the open offices actually decreased productivity.
I think, unfortunately, the big tech companies might disagree with your take on this issue. They continue to invest millions in new and "re-designed" buildings based on open-office plans.
Sadly it seems like the trend has only picked up. I haven't seen a new office buildout in the past 5 years that had individual offices except for sometimes for the managers.
To be honest even though I hate open office with a passion and cannot concentrate single person office is not ideal at least for me. A large part of my time at google we had a shared team office for 4-10 people and that was never an issue and has all of the collaboration. Another time my desk was in a noisy open landscape next to the main reception and a busy cafeteria where the kitchen staff would often chat loudly and play video on their phone using the speaker.
Not an Apple employee but for me it would be the commute not the office that’s the pain point
Driving or even bussing down or up or across the bay to get to Apple is a huge stressor. Doing it every single day both ways easily kills 2 hours of my life.
If I stay home and work instead I am better rested, more relaxed, and consequently more productive
This is interesting on so many levels. Not saying I don’t feel for a terrible commute.
But has anyone ever been on Blind?
A lot of these people are kind of awful, rich, a-holes. Now coming in the office is too much to ask?
The best part is what can Apple really do here…
I think a reasonable compromise is cut their salaries by around 20% if you optionally work remote and donate it to education in less fortunate communities in these cities.
Be interesting to see how many people show up to the office.
I would take that in a heartbeat. Also fifty percent cut for par work during child rearing years (which I was able to negotiate for myself but was a thought fight). And yes I am blind. I suspect it is a bit of posturing mixed in with a bit of not hiding ones true but shameful beliefs.
I never understood why someone would live over an hour away from where they work. There's been numerous studies showing the number one cause of unhappiness/dissatisfaction at work is commute time, especially when it reaches over 40 minutes one way.
If you live in San Jose, getting to Apple would only be 15-20 minutes.
I once had a coworker who lived an hour and 40 minutes away, literally wasting almost 3.5 hours of their day.
Except they get less time with their family. And seeing the average size of a suburban home, is that amount of space needed to love your family or is that an ideal we feel we must have?
My own story is pretty basic. I don’t work for Apple, but the housing near my org is very expensive. Schools aren’t very good. To find the first public schools and safe neighborhood combo, that was 45 minute commute. That was years ago and jobs changed but family is still in same house.
> I never understood why someone would live over an hour away from where they work.
Lack of housing / housing affordable at your price point (even if it's high). I don't know the peninsula, but I doubt that 15 minute drive is a 15 minute commute, due to rush hour.
Living down in SV is boring as hell for all the time you're not at work, and it's hard to get paid as much up in SF if you don't want the instability of startup life.
Wow, so you mean change home just like that to live near office. I am not at Apple or even in bay area etc and at a distance of just 9 mile on a straight stretch of road. But from home/office it takes 45-60 min during peak hours. One possible thing I should do is to permanently rent a room in Drury Inn near office, especially since they have great corporate discount for us.
My impression is people who live far here are either:
(1) Ones with family who want rent/buy cheap and they'd live in east bay or somewhere much further south (e.g. Gilroy, South San Jose). Its understandable being its expensive here.
(2) Young (and/or single) 20/30 something people who either dislike living in suburban environment, or just find it "uncool", or just need better social life. They are actually spending more time in commute + spending more money in rent.
I live in San Jose, pretty close to work, but am considering going into category 2 (will use the company shuttles). But if things were perfect, I'm fine with a nice spacious suburban house and save those 3 hours.
Apple is in Cupertino, one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S. Numerous of the competing cities are in the immediate vicinity.
"Cheap" housing is at best across the Bay. Commutes from Santa Cruz (itself small and not cheap), the East Bay, or Central Valley are not uncommon. Traffic is insane.
Mean housing price is > $1,000,000. Median gross rent $3,335/mo. Population density is 5,418/mi^2 (compare SF at ~17,000, NYC at ~27k, and Guttenberg, NJ at ~57k/mi^2).
California has had an utterly dysfunctional housing / work / transport policy for the past 50 years. Cupertino makes the state as a whole look sane.
- It's good for the kids: suburban schools perform better.
- It's a sacrifice: a family man is supposed to prioritize his own comfort last.
- It's accessible: we don't look at bankers or tech workers and say how great it is that they're doing so much for the families. That's just classism and privilege at work. Maybe, if we're feeling charitable, natural-born talent. But we, too, could deliver a better life to our families by driving longer hours. We just don't have the stomach for it. So we respect those who do.
Of course no one cares what it's doing to the environment. That really ought to factor in the moral calculus. But right now super-commuting is just about the most virtuous thing an American middle-class adult can do.
This all depends on whether or not the 2 hours you're losing everyday with your hypothetical kids is sufficiently nullified by the (marginal)savings. Your kid's grade school academic performance is more important than effectively a full extra work week worth of availability for the family? Doesn't sound so virtuous.
But father/husband travelling that much have negative consequences for both wife and kids. If they live where worker travells over 2 hours a day and he does it, she cant work. And they dont spend time together either.
Uh, random dudes smelling like drugs yelling at me on the street? Some of them looking like they have mental issues? And then some yelling direct racial slurs at me? Homeless tents everywhere? Reports of assaults every few days?
I’ve worked a year in downtown Palo Alto, five years in San Francisco, three years in Mountain View, a year in Walnut Creek (their branch office in San Francisco didn’t pan out), and four years in Palo Alto down by Los Altos. Each of these was at least twenty miles away from the next. Even for renters willing to move continually, it’s pretty easy to get stuck with a bad commute until your lease is up.
Personally I love my commute time. I split my journey into two parts: bike and subway train. In the train I relax and I do what I want, usually I learn something new. On the bike I enjoy the surroundings; often I try new routes and explore new places. In this way commuting becomes pure pleasure, and especially the way back home lets me relax and basically forget about work stress.
I lived in San Jose and worked in Cupertino. 15-20 minute drive only on a weekend, or middle of the day. The morning/evening commute time average was 45 mins.
Same. If I didn’t have a crazy Californian commute if love to go into the office. The new space ship campus looks amazing. I’m sure I could make it work. A lax approach that allowed for teams to decide how best to work be it fully remote or fully in the office or somewhere in between seems like a better solution than a one-size fits all one. But TC is the boss and if he doesn’t relent then people will have to adapt or leave I guess.
1) Fix public transport so gridlock is lessened
2) Fix housing regulations to increase supply
3) Fix open concept offices so that people have diversity of work environments are the office and allow people to work from home some days
I was sitting in gridlock in LA traffic when I calculated how many hours a year I'd been doing that. I did the math in my head and figured I must be wrong. So I did it with a calculator when I got home. I was not wrong.
It was pretty close to a solid year in every 10 years because I spent as much or more time in traffic on the weekends.
Hunters and foragers didn't sit at a desk or in a car all day when they went out either. They also got to head back whenever they hunted/gathered enough food, instead of stick around until they put their 8 hours in.
"A study back in the 1960s found the Bushmen have figured out a way to work only about 15 hours each week acquiring food and then another 15 to 20 hours on domestic chores. The rest of the time they could relax and focus on family, friends and hobbies."
That to me seems like the main reason to hate Apple Park [1] and to prefer individual walled offices like Infinite Loop used to have:
>"Greg “Joz” Joswiak (VP of product marketing, 1986–present): They built this campus fast, and it was obviously a bright shiny object. Everybody wanted to move in. It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office." [2]
I've been working remote for over a decade and if/when I go to the office I basically get nothing done. It's great for morale and building relationships but for all individual contribution work it's awful.
Who is going to support them? People working from home (maybe not from tech org like Apple) from a non-tech organization forget that computers don't fix themselves. Their work is now totally dependent on their ISP too. An org's IT department employees can't be pulled in 100 different directions to go fix a mouse or "the Internet" every day.
Anecdata: I experienced as frequent internet outages at various offices as I did working from home. With a fallback to mobile internet, it was never a problem for people in my experience. It's actually less disruptive when one random person has issues than when the whole office goes down.
Mouse issues? Get out and buy a new one, submit the receipt to claim back money. This is likely much cheaper than the IT person's time. As a bonus you choose a mouse rather than getting corporate-issue-mouse-01.
I get that there are other issues that can come up, but in practice, I've just not seen it from the employee point of view. Maybe the IT dept has some better stats to publish.
> Anecdata: I experienced as frequent internet outages at various offices as I did working from home.
That’s not the point. If everyone is in an office, an outage will simply affect everyone at once. If everyone is working from home, and you’re sufficiently distributed, then it’s possible that the company winds up with at least one employee out on bad internet every day.
Depending on the sort of work they do, one or the other might be preferable.
A lot of the reporting titles make this sound like the employees want across the board remote work.
The letter specifically states that they want teams to be able to define their own remote/local needs versus being beholden to a company wide policy.
They also ask that the company track how many people reject job offers or leave due to the remote work policy so that the teams can make informed decisions.
This seems really fair. Some teams will need to be fully on site, others don't. Right now they're beholden to the new policy, whereas if these changes are accepted, they could do what's best for the team.
There's no surprise that some large/small subset of employees want to be full-remote. If you're someone who hates the commute, has relocated, or just plain don't want to be around people - going back to the office feels like all downside from your perspective.
If you're responsible for the larger organization, your pros and cons are different. The IC may not care about subtle deleterious effects of remote work on culture and collaboration but top management has to care about that very much.
Personal story: I started a new job during COVID and haven't met any of my colleagues. This started off fine because I was building out a team and connecting with stakeholders, so there was a lot of shared context being built up together and it went fine. Now, I've been asked to take on a few more teams and holly shit it's hard. I struggle to visualize who is on what team because I never see them "together" in physical space. It's also hard to become aware of people I am not working with but should be. For example, it took me a while to realize that there's a "support" team doing front-line defense for one of the teams. In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.
The point is that the employees have much simpler consideration: do I like/want to go to the office or not. If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern.
I'll add one more thing - the physical space makes it much clearer what you should be paying attention to. If there's a group of programmers standing behind someone's chair looking stressed, there's probably an outage I can be helpful with.
If I see an engineering manager and a product manager have what sounds like a rancorous conversation, that's something I am going to check in on later.
If I see someone always coming over to my team, I'm going to ask who they are because I probably need to know them.
All of this simply doesn't happen so easily in full-remote, and it has huge cumulative networking, team-building, etc effect over time. That said, I am not looking to come in to the office every day either, but I'd love to have at least occasional (weekly/monthly/whatever) in person connection to people and teams I work with.
As an IC, the people who dislike talking to their coworkers are ignoring the effect that Zoom has on team cohesion. Personally, a single in-person meeting is more effective for getting to know my coworkers and bonding with them than any number of Zoom lunches and socials and happy hours. And even ICs have to talk to other people to exchange ideas, get buy-in, and solve cross-functional problems. It's _so_ much easier to do that when those people are also your friends rather than strangers. They don't need to be friends you go out with after work everyday for drinks, just friends you know well enough to have a conversation with that isn't awkward. This dynamic was very apparent to me having worked at a company that did have cohesion and one that didn't.
I used to think ICs should just be able to code away in a cube but lack of communication has much larger costs than being slightly less productive because someone interrupted you. Now more than ever building the _right_ thing is more important than building the _best_ thing. Maybe some people here feel they should just be able to code away because their EMs have handled the buy-in part and they just get work assigned to them but I think lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.
Can you provide more details about how this works? I'm stuck with Zoom meetings that I feel are long and ineffective, but I'm not sure how to sell my manager on eliminating them.
Until managers realise they can actually manage in writing, and the fact it gives back plenty of time to actually engage directly with the few individuals who need more 1/1 interactions to address issues they are having. I think managers benefit even more from less meetings since they have even more meetings in the first place.
Simply don't join the meetings. For this not to fire back, it's also simple: inform the organiser in advance that you won't join, that s/he should let you know if your presense is absolutely necessary for input, and to email the outcome if relevant to your work.
After a while, you can stop informing them as they've gotten used to your absence and realised you aren't needed. Whoever remains in these meetings tend to feel even better selling each others thin air without practical participants making negative comments during those discussions.
It worked for me. Of course beware there could be retaliation on principle. If that's the case you better update your CV and start seeking another remote position anyway.
My view is that raises and promotions don't tie to whether someone is heared or not. If one criteria matters, it's negociating skills. After that probably comes competence.
Not joining meetings should provide you with as much time saved to focus on actual work. Growing competence, and lead to higher/better throuput.
I've seen a number of people playing the "let's be heard/noisy" card. It often works for a while but not in the long term.
Time spent at "work" can be spent with a short sighted objective, or a long one.
Even if I made a mistake of interpretation and attending meetings can result in better outcomes, I would still favor mental health and maximising time spent to improving my competence, over fears to loose my job or not getting a promotion raises from the current employer.
In my experience, it's not necessarily the person who does the most work that gets promoted, but the person who gets the most recognition.
Sitting at home never seeing, hearing, speaking, or interacting with people save for brief slack messages just doesn't seem like the best way to get recognition.
So much this. Until a company adopts a no-BS policy towards meetings, I do not see the point. 80% of my time in company meetings is just wasted. I have talked to my colleagues about this - they feel the same. At least with remote work, I can politely tune out of useless meeting filler by muting audio/video.
Contrast that with grad school, where every minute of my meetings with my advisors was time well spent.
> lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.
All fine, though in practice I have found that building the "_right_" thing equates to building the vision of the loudest/senior most person in the room irrespective of merit. Until that culture changes, I am more than happy to be a Jira ticket consumer.
I also detest the zoom social and avoid whenever possible. My team did have one remote activity which was pretty cool though - a virtual escape room. Everyone was remote but the escape room employees were in the physical space. So we used a mix of online collaboration and verbal discussion to direct the actions of the escape room rep within their physical space, which was all viewable through high quality webcams. I was skeptical when I first heard about it but it turned out to be a really great team activity.
That sounds like a very common problem which is that many companies somehow don’t share visual representation of their organisation effectively. I routinely ask that during interviews and it’s generally a scramble to get me nothing.
These are certainly valid concerns you raise, broadly speaking. However, as mentioned in numerous other comments, there is a compelling case to be made that remote work is more productive for a lot of people. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if it also affected retention. Far from the suggestion that some people simply can’t be bothered to commute as you rather dismissively suggest.
In any case, the fact that this may make things marginally more challenging for management in the near term as we collectively adjust to this reality is, frankly, a pretty lame justification for opposing remote work categorically.
You are assigning to me a much more extreme view than I hold. I neither dismiss the desire to do remote work (I express some of it for myself) nor oppose it "categorically".
I am simply saying that the "pros" are obvious to everyone but the cons are more subtle and may not be relevant for everyone. I also think someone's ability to self assess their own productivity is suspect:one may feel productive because they coded undistributed all day - when I'm reality the most productive thing they could have done that day is perceived that two juniors were arguing over a silly point and set them straight - something they'd have done in the physical but not virtual office.
Good points. The part that I have a different experience with is that you’d have spotted someone running over in the office to realize there’s communication between certain team members. To me that sounds either lucky or anxiety inducing. Should I as manager be keeping one eye on the group and one eye on my screen? I think these information gaps are much easier to catch by clearly communicating the process rather than keeping an eye on your surroundings.
ICs do have it simpler. Leadership comes with complexity and accountability. Sometimes yes, it is hard. I'm trying to avoid reading too much into your anecdotes, but it sounds like you are saying remote work is less desirable because it makes your life harder. I suppose that is a fair point, but I'd wonder what your goal is as a manager - to make your life easier, or to make the team perform better?
> ...you have a different and much more complicated concern.
That concern seems to disappear when I attend meetings seemingly all on phone and webex and that goes for at least half a day. Company never flies me to meet folks in other offices in different cities face to face.
How would you deal with employees that were in a different office? What about offshore contractors? I find it hard to believe that managers need to see people together in a physical space to be effective.
> In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it.
Why would anyone stand up and run over to tell someone about things in person when they could send a message and notify everyone at once? Like, this just seems like you want to work "in the 90s", not work "in an office", because unless your office has like five people total in it, this doesn't seem like a realistic way people would communicate.
> But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.
Zoom replaces in-person meetings you also might not have been in, and frankly are even less likely to have been in because you can't easily be in two meetings at once, record the meeting to attend later, or attend the meeting while in transit or doing other work (all things that are reasonable as you are there as a manager to track what is happening, not do the work: you might even be in two meetings at once! sounds crazy, but people do that in person all the time, by running back and forth between two conference rooms, only now that is trivial).
As for chat: wasn't that your fault? If you need to watch the support team interacting with the engineering efforts, make sure their chat is configured so you can see it... if the workers are colluding to create secret back channels using personal Slack accounts that management isn't aware of in order to get their work done, something much more serious has failed at your company that you should be addressing before demanding everyone congregate in an office building.
I literally did all of the things I am known for without having met any of the people I did them with, as we met online and coordinated online and achieved great things having to talk in person... or on video, or even on the phone, because it was more than sufficient to talk via IRC and e-mail.
This is a really important point that's not getting voiced much here. Numerically there are more ICs in a company/forum/world, so the managerial voices don't get heard in places where the numerical advantage matters.
The only person in leadership position I could ask in real life told me IC productivity might be higher than before but team & org productivity has plummeted drastically. Wondering if this is true across the industry?
That’s not what my (Apple) leadership told us. Individual and team productivity rose this year, to the extent that they started giving us a day off once per month or so. They were concerned that people were over-working, that the situation everyone was in was too stressful, and we needed “reconnect days” periodically.
That's interesting because the person I spoke to also said that they've reduced the daily number of work hours. Not because productivity was high but because stress was high due to the pandemic & perhaps working conditions at homes.
> now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.
It sounds like all you need is a social graph of interactions from your chat software. That could lead to micromanagement deviance, but if the graph is open to all employees, I believe it would be fair and help everyone.
Working from home all the time and avoiding an office is probably amazing if you are single or married without kids.
Let me just say, you are all a bit naive... heh. If you have kids (and they are at home 24x7 because they are too young for vaccines) - WORKING AT HOME SUCKS BEYOND BELIEF. I would give literally anything to go back to an office and get some work done in peace and quiet. We all know housing is tight in the Bay and if you have a "normal" 4 person family in a "normal" 3 bedroom 2 bath house, that's fine unless somehow both adults have to work from home and bigger places are financially out of reach. It's beyond amazing to me that this point hasn't been raised AT ALL in this debate. I think you are all naive tech-bros :)
Working from home contributes to the well being of employees. While a lot may not notice it, that 1 hour (at least) daily you save (from commute / preparing) can be used for activities that can contribute to one's personal health (mental & physical). Remote work works.
Remote work is not a mental health panacea. Working from home (further) blurs the psychological distinction between being and not being “at work”. This can be surprisingly difficult for many people to notice, let alone deal with in a healthy way. How many of us have found ourselves struggling to carve out the time to shower in a given day? I’ve commiserated about that struggle with multiple coworkers over the past year. This is just scratching the surface of the surface of the difficulties of remote work.
Does anyone know what remote work processes Apple has used to ship such good hardware in 2021? I feel like these employees might have a point - Apple has shipped earth shattering hardware improvements on the Macintosh in a mostly remote work environment.
... like the ethernet port on the ... power brick?
They shipped one major hardware improvement, and that has been an architectural change that took years.
However, the problem with removing perks that employees like is you're going to lose your best people, because those can just quit and have another job next week. You'll be left with those that can't afford to quit because they won't find another job easily, which in IT means not so competent.
I remember the rumor mill when Marissa Mayer canceled work from home at Yahoo saying they're losing all their good people. Considering what's left of Yahoo it looks like the rumors were right.
I raised this in another thread, but how much collaboration does the typical software engineer need? It obviously varies by company (Pivotal being the extreme), but in every company I have been in, there have been days where I have needed no substantial interaction with anyone else beyond maybe 5-10 Slack messages.
Now, as a software engineer with a product manager, information mostly flows one way as well, except for pings back to indicate when work is complete. On teams where software engineers are more than implementers, I can see this mattering, but a lot of us are implementers, and the advantages of quiet time to work outweigh in person time spent for the minimal decision making we do.
I could wipe out virtually every meeting I have beyond daily standup and very little would change.
I suspect that corporate real estate will go the way of legacy costs like pensions.
I'm excited for companies who can use this to their advantage, and can deliver with higher productivity and better margins than the entrenched players.
For everyone commenting on the commute being terrible: shuttles are nice but what the US and California more specifically needs is a proper mass transit system a la the EU (works really well here in Berlin) complete with trains and light rail that bypasses the congestion.
I have lived in Santa Clara and every day done a 1.5 to 2 hour commute one way to go to my office in SF. I know people who drive 1 - 2 hours to Apple or pay insane high rents. Then combine that with limited space on desk and insane distractions of getting pulled over by someone who was stuck on a very small configuration which he/she could have figured out at his/her own by spending 15 mins (rather than borrowing me for 5 mins and disrupting my thought process worth hours). I believe what COVID made me realize was the fact how much bullshit I was keeping up with (including social pressure stuff) to just be “good team player”. You can think of me as introvert but I am very talkative and social person.I believe 3 hours worth of commute and the ceremony stand-ups are not required when you have technology at disposal. Google, Microsoft, and Apple should be leading the charge on this technology centric culture rather than being backwards, stuck in time. If I am asked today to return back to office I would rather resign and be freelance developer than being stuck in the company policy prison again.
Most of the people in management would be extroverts so they are the ones clamouring for back to office and their work also by nature is mostly collaborative mostly talking to ppl etc.
For us ICs, even though we also collaborate, once you have a design etc or after task allocation, its mostly individual work and you get disrupted if you have any distractions. But its hard for management to understand this, since they view everything thru their lens.
I don't understand why higher-higher ups are now pushing to return to office... by limiting actual employees in the office, it gives the flexibility to outsourcing, making them save money in the short-term. It's almost like an own-goal
I'm a proponent for returning to the office. Working from home has never appealed to me from a number of perspectives (mixing work and life just seems tiring, lack of resources, serendipity, space, distractions, lack of evaluation metrics, etc).
I think working at the office creates a sense of community and a focus on team over the individual. Which I think is the opposite of working at home; notwithstanding all the tools we have gained in the last few years that try to bridge that. As well, self-management is not the strongest skill set among young engineers, many need management, coaching, evaluation based not only on work quality but also interpersonal and team commitments.
Working at home also risks your work being considered non-core or worthy of outsourcing or automation. The risk that you won't align well with company goals and vision is real and slowly (if not almost immediately) being considered less important to the team and the company itself.
I do think there is a place for working at home where efforts to operationalize exist but most firms don't have the capability or insight to do this. I think Apple has an entrenched culture of working together in the office. And while this may have worked over the last few months (year?) I'm sure they don't see this as a long term strategy. Nor do we have an insight at the structural issues that working at home may have cost the firm over this time. (not to mention the cost of build that UFO)
My vote is go back to the office. Or resign yourself to consultant, and make the risk you are taking clearly part of your strategy to monetize your work. I think this approach to use their union (?) to push operational methods is incorrect and they are certainly pissing off people do this.
Many, including myself, have an opposite view on nearly every point.
I have more energy at home. Interacting with family during lunch break is better than interacting with co-workers. Of course, this does mean I spend less time with co-workers, but they still get the majority of my waking hours, so hopefully that's enough.
I have more resources at home, I have more space at home, I have fewer distractions at home. I am more professional and focused more on the team at home, rather than focused on office politics. Collaboration tools are great, and if there were another developer like me, and we worked 30 feet apart, we would collaborate remotely with the tools rather than walking 30 feet.
I also want to know what evaluation metrics require being in an office? Any good ones? I guess working remote the only way to evaluate is to look at the work done and the quality of that work. Sounds pretty good.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 268 ms ] threadExcept for those of us who want to work remotely but don't want to be the squeaky wheel.
And you can voice your opinion and work for what you want without being a "sqeaky wheel" - which I take to have a negative connotation as a "complainy pants".
Sometimes you have to "bring out the big guns" and send a letter to the CEO... sometimes you just have to say "I want to continue to work remotely as has been proven to make me more productive." and be ready to find another job if the company doesn't meet your needs any more. Work is a two way street and Apple employees can probably find work elsewhere easily enough.
That's on a personal level though... this happens to be on a "union" level ("employee group"? not sure if that's a union per-se but it's more than just a single person). I think a union (or whatever this is) has the obligation to make these sorts of moves - so there is a difference there.
I skimmed the article before and just reread it - 80 people wrote the letter and 2800 joined a slack channel for it - so this does go beyond individuals into a more "our voices will be heard" direction.
Still need to stand up to be heard and you can do so without being a squeaky wheel :)
Personally, I don't think they'll find a way to make EVERYONE happy. Someone isn't going to get the option they want (100% wfh? work at a remote location because they don't like the main office? etc). There's no way they can.
BUT
The group speaking up CAN put more pressure to have options that will make more people happy. If hundreds of employees say "Look at the numbers and look at news stories talking about 40%+ of employees willing to leave a job without WFH and etc"...
If I say "I'm not open to 100% in the office" and Tim says no?
If 80 say it... if 2800 say it...
Tim can ignore 1 person. Can he ignore 80? 200? 2000?
If you aren't interested in leaving but you want better options then you have two things at odds with each other. You may be interested in staying but if staying means you work in a office you hate or have a commute you hate or whatever... then that's on YOU to decide what's more important - a job at apple or a job with WFH.
At the end of the conversation... the letter tells Tim (or whatever CEO gets a similar letter with more than a couple signatures) that he risks losing a sizable number of employees. That letter isn't from one person... it's from a large group of people.
It's up to Tim to decide if the risk of losing talent is worth sticking to the currently given options.
It's up to you and me if it's worth the lack of option you want to stay at the current job.
Like i said... I'd probably look for work if asked to be in the office 5 days a week due to my commute. I don't blame them for asking and given some thought I don't think a letter from a "union" or "employee group" in this circumstance is bad.
Although I would love to know if you're also doing work in union/labor organization either at your employer or otherwise.
From what I see of the market, its an employees market - "there are hundreds of people waiting to replace you" doesn't mean those people are good, experience or worth what they would replace. It's EXPESNIVE to replace an employee and the prospect of doing it for 80? 100? 500? employees is something that Tim (and his management) can't ignore.
I would tell my manager if it was just me - I wouldn't send a letter to Tim ("The CEO")... but this is a weird time and there are PLENTY of stories on HN or... well everywhere... about how many employees have a taste of WFH and are considering job hunting if the options aren't acceptable after COVID.
I do agree everyone is replaceable though... but the cost would be extensive if it comes down to it and THAT many people leave.
Haha, so we were in agreement the whole time. The whole idea of a tech collective goes against this being an employee's market. But perhaps we are starting to see a more concrete shift in the tech world from a white collar "you have your ticket to anywhere you want" environment to a blue collar "you better have a union/collective or you'll probably get screwed out of perks like remote work" environment.
- Emplployer: we won’t/will cease to accommodate you in this meaningful way
- Employees: we’re not being accommodated and have a reasonable expectation to be; if you don’t meet those expectations we effectively can’t work for you
- Employer: bye!
There is nothing I need in Apple Park to do my job, and all I get from my director is how pleased he is with how I’m working (“we couldn’t have done this without you”). Tomorrow, what I’ve been working on for the last 6 months or so will be in the keynote, and it’s awesome :) This is the 4th time I’ve had something in the keynote in my career, and this time it’s kind of disappointing (but totally understandable) that I won’t get to stand up with my team and take a “bow”. There’s one more, multi-year project that’s going to blow people away that I wrote the OS for, but that’s not ready yet.
I’m not returning to the office in September, I’m going to leave the company instead, after over a decade of service. I suspect I’m the kind of senior engineer employee Apple would prefer to keep, but the thought of not going back to AP is too enticing to pass up.
What changed? The number of remote opportunities?
Every little step, small in itself, that I'd compromised over the years had led me to a place I don't want to be. I work to live, not the other way around, and slowly but surely I'd been coerced into living to work. Sometimes the best way to fix something is a complete break. I think this is one of those times.
Yeah, he just has a 2T company, poor soul.
What makes you think H1B folks don't want to go to offices?
I don't think the comment you responded to was trying to communicate sympathy for him, but contrasting the sense of identification with his company that higher-ups tend to have, versus the rank and file. And emphasizing the normality of the latter.
Also, Cook doesn't own the company or even close.
And of course it's not appreciated by the union, since their ability to collectively withhold labour from the company is their only real source of power. The ethics of the situation depend entirely on what's actually going on, though - there are plenty of well justified strikes, but there are also strikes where the union is overstepping its bounds. Union and corporate power remain relatively well balanced or one side gets screwed and ultimately everybody loses.
I think in general, a lot of people are going to prefer a 3/2 hybrid of wfh for software positions.
Im personally pretty excited to go back to the office, as Ive found myself hating wfh quite a bit.
- the hot desks never had the correct dock stations for people's laptops, or "good" chairs had been stolen and left with the sketchy one with the broken wheel.
- The people you actually need to talk with will naturally come into the office on a completely different schedule, so they'll only have one overlap day with you.
- Everybody else will need to talk with them too, so it'll be impossible to get face time when you're in the office and everybody will be pissed off at each other because of all the meetings.
- All business will get done on zoom those other two days.
The consensus opinion on HN of people wanting to stay remote is not generally the most popular from what Ive found talking to "normal" people.
WeWork revival?
Seriously.
It's why I think outsourcing often doesn't work out. Outsourced workers lack an understanding of this shared context which makes for a high level of friction and impairs their ability to deliver the work as imagined by the organization.
Right now, IME we're still in the sweet spot of being able to work from this shared context, which I think means the benefits of working from the same physical space are not appreciated.
It'll be interesting to see how things play out if remote work becomes the norm. I do think remote work can be successful, if the effort is put in to make sure that collaboration etc. still occurs. However, if companies stay remote and try to run on the fumes of the previously held shared context from pre-COVID then I think it will mean disaster for them.
In my experience, video conferencing several times a week is enough to build shared context. Open floor plan not needed.
For me though, I find relying heavily on asynchronous communications insufficient, and synchronous remote communications deeply frustrating (i.e., natural turn-taking cues aren't present in video calls). I end up feeling disconnected from the people I work remotely with, even though they didn't do anything wrong. I can only establish "shared context" with people who have spent enough time with me in the same space with ample frictionless face-to-face conversations.
The neat thing about lunch is that the conversations are entirely non-directed without feeling like the time is being wasted in a meeting. Conversations can cover a specific project, when a high degree of coordination is necessary, generalized venting, when there are shared frustrations or just be about non-work topics that help a team bond and get to know each other as people rather than workers. It’s like a meeting that doesn’t feel like a meeting that can be strategic or therapeutic as needed. There’s really no way to replicate the beneficial effects of eating lunch together when workers are remote.
As a manager, this has also been one of my go-to tricks for successful cross-team projects lasting any significant amount of time. I tell one of my team members to setup a lunch with at least one member of the other team on a weekly basis and use the incentive of authorizing the company to pay for it. For ~$20/person/week, the cross-team communications issues basically disappear. It’s ridiculously cost effective and almost magical in how well it works.
Also, in my opinion, remote work works better when team members have met in person. It's easier to pick up on certain ways that they communicate, which help understanding in online communications.
It's about the communication paradigm. If people consider communication to be only local, then it falls apart when people are in multiple locations (including multi site offices). However if people default to remote compatible communication, it scales really well to people working from home and multi site offices.
If all leadership is in one location, yes, it'll get one sided. If leadership are spread out, I think it works out fine.
I've spent the last decade working with large multi site companies in the "lesser" location, and was able to move up from a junior to senior/supervisor roles at each company. Obviously my anecdote doesn't scale out uniformly, but I've seen it work out fine for many employees as long as leadership was adequately spread out.
You lose the geographic flexibility, but apart from that, it seems like it could potentially offer the best of both worlds?
If you're hybrid, you can't really live further away in cheaper areas, but you now have to set up office space at home for the WFH days. So it's potentially worse than fully WFH or fully on site.
You still need to maintain having a vehicle or commute.
Of course there are advantages, like spending more time with family and reduced sum commute. But it doesn't allow for people to have a meaningful change in lifestyle that they're seeking.
While I haven't done this (yet?), I've had coworkers who have, and they've successfully lived farther away in cheaper areas. :) What I've seen happen is one of two things:
(1) They live far enough away that the commute is hellacious (say, Sacramento to San Francisco, which can run 2+ hours by car each way and 3+ each way via transit), but they're willing to put up with it one or two days a week.
(2) They live far enough away that daily commutes are simply infeasible and just come in for a few days to a week every 4–8 weeks, staying in a hotel. This may or may not be paid for by the company, depending on what they've negotiated.
(N.B.: I'm aware that there are people who have done daily commutes via plane from, say, LA to SF, but that sort of thing seems to be pretty rare below the executive level.)
In this case, Apple is two days of WFH (Wednesday/Friday I believe) so your second suggestion wouldn't work (honestly some folk I've spoken to have even considered car camping). If it were contiguous blocks perhaps.
Having been on both sides of the equation at two different tech companies, this hasn’t been my experience.
Can this happen? Sure. It is possible that remote work limits career growth. But employees should still be able to choose that.
There's a few people who have experience in successful mixed environments. I'm curious how, so I hope to hear more from them.
We have shared office pods in cities where we reach critical mass, currently Boston and Miami.
The experiment right now is between companies that stick to office requirements and those that decentralize. I hired a high-level Amazon engineer because they did not want to commute back into the office. We pay good money for top talent. The best time for startups to poach high-end talent is now!
Strong agree here. My company has hired a bunch of new people over the course of the pandemic and the same level of acculturation into the internal culture and way of doing things is just not there for them. A fair number of our team has actually been 100% remote all along before the pandemic, but I think having a core contingent of (particularly operation and project management) people sharing space over the workday did a lot to spread that shared context around and loop the fully remote members of the team in. Over the COVID period I’ve noticed newer team members just having a lot more trouble adjusting and settling in because all that in acknowledged cultural and context dissemination wasn’t happening.
I can’t think of the last time I actually spoke to anyone on our UI/UX team because I literally have zero reason to set up a meeting with them and if there isn’t a work reason to interact it doesn’t happen anymore. For me that’s less of a deal but, for example, imagine being in the shoes of a junior business development person. For them their career progression and skill development depends on picking up a lot of the lingo and philosophy around how development works by osmosis. The absence of that is pretty fatal for cross team collaboration.
Lots of big companies are heavily silo’d in this way where everyone just does their specific job description thing, and I’ve worked in many such companies. I really didn’t like it. Those environments have always felt less dynamic and creative to me. Obviously that’s just one man’s opinion and experience, but I really don’t think I’d be as happy in a fully remote team.
This is what I really dislike about remote work. I was looking forwards to mingling with non-programmers, but when you're new to the company and working remotely that's basically impossible.
They try to find cut-rate programmers by going overseas, then try to save more money by finding the less expensive outsourcing agency. Then, instead of engaging with the problem, they hire a third party middleman who takes a big cut and has no stake in the actual outcome. This is a horrible incentive structure and usually results in poor communication.
The fact that they are from another country is irrelevant. The language skills could be very relevant, but again it is usually so poorly managed that none of the people that should be communicating directly with developers even try or are given an opportunity.
It'll be interesting to see where we actually land in a year.
That may have been the prevailing trend, but programmers were pretty clear in pointing out how destructive for performance and focus this open office trend was. There is an avalanche of data pointing to how harmful the openoffice layout is for everything from declining morale to decreasing productivity hits to faster spread of disease and increasing worker stress levels. This clear and unambiguous data was widely disseminated in the popular press. The only reason firms ignored all the data and did this was to save on real estate costs and to mimic other firms. To anyone who bothered to spend 10 seconds googling the topic, all the research was obvious, except no one bothered to do that very basic due diligence and see if there was any data whatsoever to support the openoffice thesis.
https://www.workfront.com/blog/what-science-says-about-open-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2019/06/30/open-plan-w...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-work...
I’m at a different tech company where employees penned a letter to leadership on another matter, which was picked up by news outlets.
And that group wasn’t influential at all - they just happened to be the loudest people. If anything, the news media made the issue appear to be orders of magnitude more significant than it really was. Quite frankly, most people didn’t care.
IMO there’s really no “news” here. This is clickbait. There are differences in opinions on what office vs remote work looks like in a post COVID world, and that applies to pretty much every company including my own.
The slack channel has 2800 people? How is that relevant?
Also, if you significantly above average contributor you pretty much can dictate when and where you work even before the pandemic (with some common sense limits). A famous example - intel based mac were initially developed by someone working remotely.
Yuck. I have a cube at my office and even though it has an open "door" space, it has high walls and just that little bit of privacy is so nice.
Yup. I’ve been mostly remote most of my career for this reason. I’ve only once had to justify it beyond my contribution once (got a doctor’s note stating that the noise in an office would make me less productive, which is true). It was no surprise that I didn’t want to keep working there for other reasons not so long after.
This wasn’t meant as a comment saying I got a doctor’s note casually (not that I think you’re suggesting that interpretation, I’m just realizing it’s important to clarify). I got it because I was sincerely concerned about the cognitive impact going into the office as demanded would have on me and my work.
If you have a similar response to sensory stimulation, I highly recommend looking into it! I’m coming from the perspective of it being common with ADHD and ASD, which aren’t the only bases for it; if you mean headaches literally, do yourself a favor and talk to your doc about why sound or any other sensory issue might be affecting you that way.
If I had to guess, that sounds an awful lot like hyperacusis. Which is more common in ADHD, along with auditory processing disorder and potentially even tinnitus.
It would be cool if they just packed the whole thing with servers, kept a few conference rooms and the theatre, and called it a day; but something tells me they won't.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/technology/google-back-to...
All of this looks like a dystopian nightmare. Glad I never worked in big tech.
https://hbr.org/2013/07/think-carefully-about-where-yo
There's a lesson in this for all of us, and I'm pretty sure it involves a return to offices with open floor plans.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
People more-or-less occasionally like having their own place during work where they can some action (e.g. closing their door) to focus 100% without interruption.
Cost-cutting open-office plans that let management see their flock typing away destroyed this option, and covid has reminded people how valuable and productive this option is/was (for those at home with this option).
We are now in new territory, as we are experiencing the end of the first pandemic during the information age. What we decide now will resonate for many years.
Something to think about: for most millennia of human experience, where one worked and where one lived amongst the family and community were one and the same. It’s only a blip in post-industrial history have we had this situation of leaving the family (et al.) behind to pull levers and receive $coins.
If the internet lets us go back… that would be huge
As the labor market is, companies have to bend to some of labor's demands in order to attract and retain talent.
This isn't the worst state of affairs.
Where? I don’t see that in what they wrote.
A different way to read that is: people would do as told and not ask to work remotely because they could get replaced.
But that applies only if the company does not care about the employees and wants cogs instead.
Remote work is a big change.
Ergo, absent an exteral driver of change, companies will continue doing what they've always done.
If efficiency had literally anything to do with it we would have all been remote since 2005.
I don't think that companies are deliberately trying to be awful to workers. They are just using the standard American model.. "How much can we get away with?"
The country is in desperate need of widespread unionization efforts.
Companies that I’ve seen do it well have an executive level employee advocacy position. Typically in a human resource department, but less concerned about the policy and regulatory requirements and is specifically tasked to be a champion/voice for employees.
No thanks. I don’t like working with clock punchers nor do I want to get paid as poorly as programmers in Europe/Canada.
Until unions in the US stop prioritizing seniority over competence for pay, they need to stay the hell away from this industry.
I worked received great pay in the US, but made the decision to return to Australia. I have some regrets, but the lifestyle I get from not being in the Bay Area pretty much offsets any pay difference.
What I miss most is the scope and pace of the work and the incredibly intelligent people I got to work with. Thankfully I'm beginning to see the genesis of this in my local market.
If they try to make you do better/more work a nicer or a ruder way is an implementation detail. The goal is always to extract as much work as possible from you at the lowest price.
Sometimes the goals of the company converge with the goal of employees. Most of the time they exist in a state of frozen conflict. It sucks, but that's just how the employer/employee relationship must work out in general.
Companies are willing to do anything to attract skilled workers short of raising wages.
Assuming people don’t mean some dystopian 30 rows
I saw it in my developer group, where all single people would try to go to office during covid, because it's so lonely at home.
Colleagues with small kids are unable to get any work done when there is no babysitter.
I personally have no problem working from home, but I see that's a real exception. And even I don't mind going to the office once every week, just to get the social interactions and be away from home once in a while.
So I think you are right that people who don't want to go to work at all is a real exception.
Yeah, but if they’re small enough to need a babysitter you can’t leave them home alone and go to the office either.
Speak for yourself. Give credit where credit is due to the heroic efforts of employed parents who got work done and took care of the kids.
When you have a 1-3 year old, getting work done while babysitting is just not possible. Anyone who has done that knows.
And I don't judge my colleagues who are in the same situation: they tell this themselves.
The bad experience had no separation between the engineers, kitchen or sales people. Sales tend to be extra noisy- high energy, always on the phone, etc. Kitchens are also loud for the obvious reason.
In my good experience, we had physical separation from anything not engineering. People moved and talked around you, but it wasn't obnoxious and frequently informative to overhear.
Of course, I wouldn't give up working from home for anything, so it has become a moot point.
I had no choice but to where headphones in order to drown out the conversations to focus. A year and a half ago I developed a constant Tinnitus in my left ear, and I suspect that job contributed to it.
So that's fun, and something I get to deal with for the rest of my life. Thanks open office.
Anecdotally, a group at the company I work (pre-Covid) had the opportunity to contribute to designing their own new working space, as part of an empty floor was being retrofitted for them. The standard at our company was either individual cubicles or quads, but these folks chose open plan of (as far as I know) their own free will.
For anybody wondering, this is two teams of about 12 or so developers each, mostly relatively young.
The SW org packs people into tiny rooms with slightly more space (maybe 6'), but there is literally nowhere to go to get away from having someone breathing down your neck.
Individual contributors however live at their desks and no one hesitates to interrupt them.
So having your execs in the open seems egalitarian, but it is an empty gesture.
On the other hand, I've lost count on the number of Bose/Sony noise cancelling headsets I came across in the office.
Most often, I like to have a mix of time spent interacting with coworkers and time spent working “by myself”. I like to be accessible to coworkers and have coworkers accessible to me if I need their assistance, but I don’t necessarily want their full attention all the time, right?
I kinda expect the office to be a bustling place. Not loud and shouting all the time, but just a lot of activity of people discussing things.
A bit of history: actually that was the industrial revolution and until the the 1970s the open plan office was the norm even for white collar workers (the cubicle was invented in the late 60s as “liberation” from the open plan). I remember being shocked when I first saw the open plan return, back in 2000, and since the productivity of offices (for programmers) and cubes was so well documented I was sure it was simply some weird experiment.
In the end though it will be trade off between the value of the ad hoc interactions vs the cost of real estate.
The kind of close-minded people who consider their colleagues (ahem, “workers”) to be merely fungible resources will make their decision solely on the price of real estate.
Note I started my first “mostly remote, work over the net” company in 1989. It’s not a new idea either.
nowadays i just don't want to go back to the office.
Driving or even bussing down or up or across the bay to get to Apple is a huge stressor. Doing it every single day both ways easily kills 2 hours of my life.
If I stay home and work instead I am better rested, more relaxed, and consequently more productive
But has anyone ever been on Blind?
A lot of these people are kind of awful, rich, a-holes. Now coming in the office is too much to ask?
The best part is what can Apple really do here…
I think a reasonable compromise is cut their salaries by around 20% if you optionally work remote and donate it to education in less fortunate communities in these cities.
Be interesting to see how many people show up to the office.
In all seriousness, I am just concerned for greater income equality from increased remote work.
If you live in San Jose, getting to Apple would only be 15-20 minutes.
I once had a coworker who lived an hour and 40 minutes away, literally wasting almost 3.5 hours of their day.
My own story is pretty basic. I don’t work for Apple, but the housing near my org is very expensive. Schools aren’t very good. To find the first public schools and safe neighborhood combo, that was 45 minute commute. That was years ago and jobs changed but family is still in same house.
1. Buying a house
2. Renting a better place
Lack of housing / housing affordable at your price point (even if it's high). I don't know the peninsula, but I doubt that 15 minute drive is a 15 minute commute, due to rush hour.
I lived in Sunnyvale for a while. Hour of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic just to get to/from Mountain View on a shuttle.
(1) Ones with family who want rent/buy cheap and they'd live in east bay or somewhere much further south (e.g. Gilroy, South San Jose). Its understandable being its expensive here.
(2) Young (and/or single) 20/30 something people who either dislike living in suburban environment, or just find it "uncool", or just need better social life. They are actually spending more time in commute + spending more money in rent.
I live in San Jose, pretty close to work, but am considering going into category 2 (will use the company shuttles). But if things were perfect, I'm fine with a nice spacious suburban house and save those 3 hours.
"Cheap" housing is at best across the Bay. Commutes from Santa Cruz (itself small and not cheap), the East Bay, or Central Valley are not uncommon. Traffic is insane.
Mean housing price is > $1,000,000. Median gross rent $3,335/mo. Population density is 5,418/mi^2 (compare SF at ~17,000, NYC at ~27k, and Guttenberg, NJ at ~57k/mi^2).
California has had an utterly dysfunctional housing / work / transport policy for the past 50 years. Cupertino makes the state as a whole look sane.
http://www.city-data.com/city/Cupertino-California.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
property prices.
- It's good for the kids: suburban schools perform better.
- It's a sacrifice: a family man is supposed to prioritize his own comfort last.
- It's accessible: we don't look at bankers or tech workers and say how great it is that they're doing so much for the families. That's just classism and privilege at work. Maybe, if we're feeling charitable, natural-born talent. But we, too, could deliver a better life to our families by driving longer hours. We just don't have the stomach for it. So we respect those who do.
Of course no one cares what it's doing to the environment. That really ought to factor in the moral calculus. But right now super-commuting is just about the most virtuous thing an American middle-class adult can do.
A family woman isnt?
A lot of people are married to someone who works in another part of the bay area.
A lot of people buy houses and change jobs later.
And then there are safety issues. I don't feel safe in San Jose.
I've been hating commuting with passion for my 15+ years of work, and WFH then back to the office made it worse.
I once visited an apartment complex almost facing my workplace. Going from my bedroom to my office would be around 5 minutes.
Money was the only issue, otherwise I'd have made the move.
It was pretty close to a solid year in every 10 years because I spent as much or more time in traffic on the weekends.
Hunters and foragers went out. Working from home seems like a blip compared to that.
"A study back in the 1960s found the Bushmen have figured out a way to work only about 15 hours each week acquiring food and then another 15 to 20 hours on domestic chores. The rest of the time they could relax and focus on family, friends and hobbies."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...
That to me seems like the main reason to hate Apple Park [1] and to prefer individual walled offices like Infinite Loop used to have:
>"Greg “Joz” Joswiak (VP of product marketing, 1986–present): They built this campus fast, and it was obviously a bright shiny object. Everybody wanted to move in. It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office." [2]
[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employee...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history...
Mouse issues? Get out and buy a new one, submit the receipt to claim back money. This is likely much cheaper than the IT person's time. As a bonus you choose a mouse rather than getting corporate-issue-mouse-01.
I get that there are other issues that can come up, but in practice, I've just not seen it from the employee point of view. Maybe the IT dept has some better stats to publish.
That’s not the point. If everyone is in an office, an outage will simply affect everyone at once. If everyone is working from home, and you’re sufficiently distributed, then it’s possible that the company winds up with at least one employee out on bad internet every day.
Depending on the sort of work they do, one or the other might be preferable.
The letter specifically states that they want teams to be able to define their own remote/local needs versus being beholden to a company wide policy.
They also ask that the company track how many people reject job offers or leave due to the remote work policy so that the teams can make informed decisions.
This seems really fair. Some teams will need to be fully on site, others don't. Right now they're beholden to the new policy, whereas if these changes are accepted, they could do what's best for the team.
If you're responsible for the larger organization, your pros and cons are different. The IC may not care about subtle deleterious effects of remote work on culture and collaboration but top management has to care about that very much.
Personal story: I started a new job during COVID and haven't met any of my colleagues. This started off fine because I was building out a team and connecting with stakeholders, so there was a lot of shared context being built up together and it went fine. Now, I've been asked to take on a few more teams and holly shit it's hard. I struggle to visualize who is on what team because I never see them "together" in physical space. It's also hard to become aware of people I am not working with but should be. For example, it took me a while to realize that there's a "support" team doing front-line defense for one of the teams. In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.
The point is that the employees have much simpler consideration: do I like/want to go to the office or not. If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern.
If I see an engineering manager and a product manager have what sounds like a rancorous conversation, that's something I am going to check in on later.
If I see someone always coming over to my team, I'm going to ask who they are because I probably need to know them.
All of this simply doesn't happen so easily in full-remote, and it has huge cumulative networking, team-building, etc effect over time. That said, I am not looking to come in to the office every day either, but I'd love to have at least occasional (weekly/monthly/whatever) in person connection to people and teams I work with.
I used to think ICs should just be able to code away in a cube but lack of communication has much larger costs than being slightly less productive because someone interrupted you. Now more than ever building the _right_ thing is more important than building the _best_ thing. Maybe some people here feel they should just be able to code away because their EMs have handled the buy-in part and they just get work assigned to them but I think lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.
I’m both a remote maximalist, and a Zoom hater.
I reconciled this by eliminating meetings. Turns out, 99% of all software can be built, managed, scaled, and sold asynchronously.
I’d think managers would see the elimination of meetings as a direct threat to their job. So I don’t have any good suggestions.
You could just try skipping them? See if you get in trouble? Push it all the way to getting a pip. That’s what I’d do lol.
After a while, you can stop informing them as they've gotten used to your absence and realised you aren't needed. Whoever remains in these meetings tend to feel even better selling each others thin air without practical participants making negative comments during those discussions.
It worked for me. Of course beware there could be retaliation on principle. If that's the case you better update your CV and start seeking another remote position anyway.
Not joining meetings should provide you with as much time saved to focus on actual work. Growing competence, and lead to higher/better throuput.
I've seen a number of people playing the "let's be heard/noisy" card. It often works for a while but not in the long term.
Time spent at "work" can be spent with a short sighted objective, or a long one.
Even if I made a mistake of interpretation and attending meetings can result in better outcomes, I would still favor mental health and maximising time spent to improving my competence, over fears to loose my job or not getting a promotion raises from the current employer.
Sitting at home never seeing, hearing, speaking, or interacting with people save for brief slack messages just doesn't seem like the best way to get recognition.
Contrast that with grad school, where every minute of my meetings with my advisors was time well spent.
Can't agree more with you.
All fine, though in practice I have found that building the "_right_" thing equates to building the vision of the loudest/senior most person in the room irrespective of merit. Until that culture changes, I am more than happy to be a Jira ticket consumer.
WTF??? My god, I cannot imagine sitting through something like that. Is it really a thing?
https://getmibo.com/
That sounds like a very common problem which is that many companies somehow don’t share visual representation of their organisation effectively. I routinely ask that during interviews and it’s generally a scramble to get me nothing.
In any case, the fact that this may make things marginally more challenging for management in the near term as we collectively adjust to this reality is, frankly, a pretty lame justification for opposing remote work categorically.
I am simply saying that the "pros" are obvious to everyone but the cons are more subtle and may not be relevant for everyone. I also think someone's ability to self assess their own productivity is suspect:one may feel productive because they coded undistributed all day - when I'm reality the most productive thing they could have done that day is perceived that two juniors were arguing over a silly point and set them straight - something they'd have done in the physical but not virtual office.
Ah, this probably illustrates a lot of the disconnect. Most tech workers have relatively short futures at their companies.
That concern seems to disappear when I attend meetings seemingly all on phone and webex and that goes for at least half a day. Company never flies me to meet folks in other offices in different cities face to face.
Why would anyone stand up and run over to tell someone about things in person when they could send a message and notify everyone at once? Like, this just seems like you want to work "in the 90s", not work "in an office", because unless your office has like five people total in it, this doesn't seem like a realistic way people would communicate.
> But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.
Zoom replaces in-person meetings you also might not have been in, and frankly are even less likely to have been in because you can't easily be in two meetings at once, record the meeting to attend later, or attend the meeting while in transit or doing other work (all things that are reasonable as you are there as a manager to track what is happening, not do the work: you might even be in two meetings at once! sounds crazy, but people do that in person all the time, by running back and forth between two conference rooms, only now that is trivial).
As for chat: wasn't that your fault? If you need to watch the support team interacting with the engineering efforts, make sure their chat is configured so you can see it... if the workers are colluding to create secret back channels using personal Slack accounts that management isn't aware of in order to get their work done, something much more serious has failed at your company that you should be addressing before demanding everyone congregate in an office building.
I literally did all of the things I am known for without having met any of the people I did them with, as we met online and coordinated online and achieved great things having to talk in person... or on video, or even on the phone, because it was more than sufficient to talk via IRC and e-mail.
Here's something to consider:
The only person in leadership position I could ask in real life told me IC productivity might be higher than before but team & org productivity has plummeted drastically. Wondering if this is true across the industry?
It sounds like all you need is a social graph of interactions from your chat software. That could lead to micromanagement deviance, but if the graph is open to all employees, I believe it would be fair and help everyone.
Let me just say, you are all a bit naive... heh. If you have kids (and they are at home 24x7 because they are too young for vaccines) - WORKING AT HOME SUCKS BEYOND BELIEF. I would give literally anything to go back to an office and get some work done in peace and quiet. We all know housing is tight in the Bay and if you have a "normal" 4 person family in a "normal" 3 bedroom 2 bath house, that's fine unless somehow both adults have to work from home and bigger places are financially out of reach. It's beyond amazing to me that this point hasn't been raised AT ALL in this debate. I think you are all naive tech-bros :)
They shipped one major hardware improvement, and that has been an architectural change that took years.
However, the problem with removing perks that employees like is you're going to lose your best people, because those can just quit and have another job next week. You'll be left with those that can't afford to quit because they won't find another job easily, which in IT means not so competent.
I remember the rumor mill when Marissa Mayer canceled work from home at Yahoo saying they're losing all their good people. Considering what's left of Yahoo it looks like the rumors were right.
Now, as a software engineer with a product manager, information mostly flows one way as well, except for pings back to indicate when work is complete. On teams where software engineers are more than implementers, I can see this mattering, but a lot of us are implementers, and the advantages of quiet time to work outweigh in person time spent for the minimal decision making we do.
I could wipe out virtually every meeting I have beyond daily standup and very little would change.
It's good to share ideas but that happens anyway if the team members are comfortable with eachother.
I'm excited for companies who can use this to their advantage, and can deliver with higher productivity and better margins than the entrenched players.
For us ICs, even though we also collaborate, once you have a design etc or after task allocation, its mostly individual work and you get disrupted if you have any distractions. But its hard for management to understand this, since they view everything thru their lens.
I think working at the office creates a sense of community and a focus on team over the individual. Which I think is the opposite of working at home; notwithstanding all the tools we have gained in the last few years that try to bridge that. As well, self-management is not the strongest skill set among young engineers, many need management, coaching, evaluation based not only on work quality but also interpersonal and team commitments.
Working at home also risks your work being considered non-core or worthy of outsourcing or automation. The risk that you won't align well with company goals and vision is real and slowly (if not almost immediately) being considered less important to the team and the company itself.
I do think there is a place for working at home where efforts to operationalize exist but most firms don't have the capability or insight to do this. I think Apple has an entrenched culture of working together in the office. And while this may have worked over the last few months (year?) I'm sure they don't see this as a long term strategy. Nor do we have an insight at the structural issues that working at home may have cost the firm over this time. (not to mention the cost of build that UFO)
My vote is go back to the office. Or resign yourself to consultant, and make the risk you are taking clearly part of your strategy to monetize your work. I think this approach to use their union (?) to push operational methods is incorrect and they are certainly pissing off people do this.
What office specific metrics are there, at least in tech?
I think in the office its your exposure and image which matters more which add in to your evaluation, mostly benefiting extroverts.
I have more energy at home. Interacting with family during lunch break is better than interacting with co-workers. Of course, this does mean I spend less time with co-workers, but they still get the majority of my waking hours, so hopefully that's enough.
I have more resources at home, I have more space at home, I have fewer distractions at home. I am more professional and focused more on the team at home, rather than focused on office politics. Collaboration tools are great, and if there were another developer like me, and we worked 30 feet apart, we would collaborate remotely with the tools rather than walking 30 feet.
I also want to know what evaluation metrics require being in an office? Any good ones? I guess working remote the only way to evaluate is to look at the work done and the quality of that work. Sounds pretty good.