Perhaps the most compelling argument was that Apple was being hypocritical in the way it markets its own products. "We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely?" the letter states.
> We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it?
I'd have to agree. If you're building products and market them for "remote working", then you better have figured out remote working yourself in your own environment, otherwise I won't trust that you've actually gotten it right.
Of course, there is also a difference between different job functions. If you're in the hardware team, I can see how it's hard to actually collaborate remotely on a bunch of stuff. But for the pencil pushers in corporate? Definitely should have figured out how to make that work.
> Turkey creating great drones does not require them to believe war is good.
I don’t think that’s the correct analogy. It’s more like Turkey creating great drones while also believing that drones are not an effective way to wage war.
Your Turkey allegory isn't fitting due to "si vis pacem para bellum". Turkey can say war isn't good, and one of the best ways to dissuade potential enemies is by being good at war. Nothing similar is at play with Apple.
Tools can be ideal without the situation they call for being ideal. Apple isn't pushing for remote work, it just has a good solve for it. Its not hypocritical at all.
There’s a big difference between what’s needed to design and build something and what’s needed to use something. I hope Tim Cook fires all these whiners.
They aren’t being fired for having different opinions.
They are being fired for
(a) essentially explicitly stating they are not gonna do a good job working in the way the company thinks its employees should be working
(b) trying to get the company to change through “open letters” through the press.
Both (a) and (b) are reasons for firing on their own. It has nothing to do with differing opinions.
It’s like me telling my team that since the Product Owner did not prioritize the feature I think is critical for us to work on first, I will not really do a good job with working on the features the PO did prioritize.
The company would be foolish to fire me because I said our PO sucks and makes terrible decisions. The company would not be foolish to fire me because I said that because I disagree with the PO I’m gonna do a half hearted job. Especially if the way I communicated this to the company is through a half page advert in the NYTimes.
>>They aren’t being fired for having different opinions.<<
Just to be clear, no one mentioned anything about anyone being fired in the article that I could see. There is a return to the office mandate for two days a week, so I guess if you just don't show up for work two days a week, yeah, you'll be fired but that's a different thing.
In an anonymous poll given (article linked below) there were quite a few employees who stated they were going to look for remote jobs and quit.
Thank you for the references, this is a very interesting perspective that I personally never considered before.
But still, I wondering if this should mean that WFH needs to be enforced at any company. Not every company can implement full WFH without disrupting operations, especially when working with hardware or when needing concurrent comunication between co-workers.
The article about black workers, mentions discrimination based (mainly) on their appareance. Sure this cannot happen if they work behind a screen. But the same would happen if we all were blind? Shall we wear opaque glasses to end discrimination based on racial features too?
We can also flip the argument. I see this as telling black people (or other groups), stay at home, and in this people will not discriminate you. Is this really what we want? We should make the world better by improving it, not downgrading it.
Is it really hard to imagine that it's easier to get to the office as an able bodied 22 year old than as a 45 year old wheelchair user? Or a 31 year old single parent?
No, but any physically impaired person will have a disadvantage in any physical environment. You cannot always lower the baseline to allow all persons to do the same in the same conditions.
By this reasoning, we should also close all physical stores, since wheelchair users have more difficulties to buy bread in person. If for the majority it is easier to go in person to buy bread, I think a better compromise is to adapt the shop to as many people as possible, while accepting that access will be still more difficult for some.
Is it really hard to imagine that it’s easier to afford a comfortable vehicle to commute in, not to mention housing with a shorter commute, as a 45 year old senior manager than as a 22 year old just starting out with significant college debt?
And those salaries get lower as they advance in their careers? Or do they go up?
If the more senior people get paid even more, how does this contribute to making the workforce skew younger?
Have you considered that there are jobs besides software engineering at Apple? And those jobs might also have 22 year olds working at them? Is the entry level marketing assistant getting six figures and stock options too?
Well, senior people earn more and have an easier life. This is not necessarily bad. Young people don't need to have an easy life, just a fair one, with equal opportunities to those ones that came before them and the ones that are among them.
The logic behind this is that work from home allowed greater participation from not-these groups. Folks whose physical or mental health was improved in a work from home environment (I know someone with chronic migraines, for whom the typical 'Glass and steel open office' workspace is basically hell on a random draw of days). Additionally, for those whose health conditions are such that COVID-19 is still a concern in the "Manage Your Own Risk"-era, losing work from home means losing one of the major ways to manage that risk.
Work from home also allowed for more schedule flexibility - it's hard to run an errand, pick the kids up from school, etc. when that's a 15 minute trip, rather than having to commute back home. This burden often falls disproportionately on women, and workers with families (who are likely slightly older than those who don't).
Removing the constraint of "You have to have the capital to move to SV to work here" allows hiring from a broader and more diverse pool of groups with less generational wealth, which means likely a more diverse body of job candidates.
Whether you agree with this or not, there is a logic behind it. Heck, I think they actually missed a couple axes of workers Apple is going to miss out on.
Weren’t a lot of these people already working from the office before COVID? Do you know if Apple’s workforce change significantly in composition to include more of the grouops you refer to during the WFH period?
> Please think for a second about how a WFH policy might impact some groups more than others.
I'm curious why you think anyone needs to "think" about this. Some of us are perfectly happy with WFH and don't feel guilty for it, and there's really nothing to contemplate further and no moral crisis to spark.
Not at most companies; the legal implications of working from other countries mean that, unless you want to misrepresent yourself and create a fake "home" address, digital nomad lifestyles are explicitly forbidden.
Tons of remote companies are US only, or even "one timezone in the US" only. Apple going remote doesn't mean the existing teams US teams would become international.
I don't think you can "remotely" work for Apple without a work visa. If your paycheck comes from Apple US, and you don't have the right to work in America, that's a pretty clear violation of immigration law.
It seems like every complaint or request is being rewritten to appear based in social justice.
I feel confident we'll begin to see HOAs justifying their grass-length rules because "longer lawns disproportionately affect historically oppressed, disabled, and neurodivergent persons"
This is not a great trend, if you care about equality in society, because shit is getting so watered down it's about meaningless.
Adding Apple to the list of companies I'd never work for. White men are just supposed to shut up and take the increasingly open discrimination? This isn't equality. And it won't actually lead to equity either, but we all will end up with less if this continues - except for the more equal animals among us.
Edit: just imagine if the text said "younger, blacker, more female-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Or "younger, more Jewish, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Stop whining and vote with your feet. If you're talented enough to work for Apple, there are plenty of other wonderful companies out there that will happily let you work remotely.
Not every company needs to have the exact same policies on everything.
The GP's metaphor of a marriage is not applicable in this case, since a marriage is a friendship/partnership, and the corporate structure is essentially a kingdom. Options are limited if the king and his advisors aren't listening, or they listened and rejected the approach for whatever their reasons are. An open letter to the king probably won't change anything, but worth a try before emigrating.
I go to work because I like exchanging labor for money. The marriage analogy is kind of crazy.
I’ve had eight jobs in my 25 years as an adult. It never took me more than two months to find a job I was happy with. It took me 15 years and one failed marriage to find a a spouse I was happy with.
When I have a disagreement with my wife, we compromise as equal partners. I’m not in any way an equal partner to the CEO of a 2 trillion+ dollar company.
Leaving my marriage necessitated lawyers, going to court, and giving up half of everything we accumulated together. Leaving a job required a form resignation letter with meaningless platitudes and a two week notice.
So you really think the CEO of Apple didn’t know that people would prefer to work from home and have the option to work from some place that cost less?
If this is a deal breaker, yes. But this kind of approach is a last resort. Why shouldn't someone try to influence company policy before taking such a drastic step?
Because if the CEO of a trillion dollar company wants people in the office, it's very likely that you will convince them otherwise. Tim Cook has tremendous influence over his company, these employees do not. Maybe if they had a union there would be some bargaining power but as it stands they can't do anything outside of leaving.
Happy to be proven wrong here, but labor doesn't have much power in the US; especially when it's labor against a trillion dollar company.
I can guarantee you that “Nothing can ever be better, so why try?” will definitely not work to change policies. But it would make one a stereotypical Democratic senator.
But is writing a (somewhat pathetic) open letter really trying? Perhaps organizing a strike would convey more meaning, although I don't see that happening at all.
>Happy to be proven wrong here, but labor doesn't have much power in the US
I hope you're proven wrong too. I like to think this pandemic has accelerated progress on the worker's rights front. I want to believe workers as a collective have realized they're bigger than the companies they work for. This fight against Apple should be really interesting either way.
What’s drastic about leaving a job? The average tenure of a software engineer at any major tech company is 3 years. I never thought it was a “drastic” step to change jobs when one wasn’t what I like - 8 jobs and counting including six since 2008.
How drastic it is depends on the personality and living arrangements of the people involved. I know it's a common stereotype that developers hop jobs frequently, but there are also plenty of developers who do not. I know many such people at my current employer. I happen to be very content working there despite knowing I could make more if I went somewhere else and then jumped ship again and again.
The people who want to work from home and are being forced to work in the office, by definition aren’t “content”.
As far as the living arrangements, if the impetus for you leaving is to find remote work, how will changing to another job change your living situation?
>"The people who want to work from home and are being forced to work in the office, by definition aren’t “content”."
I feel like being "content" involves a lot of other factors and trying to determine if someone is content means looking at other aspects of the job holistically. I've always detested yearly evaluations and the 'song and dance' one must do to write "corpo-speak" about their achievements and goals. Yet, that consistent displeasure has never outweighed the work life balance I've enjoyed so far. My concern is that in your framework I would be considered by definition, not content.
>"if the impetus for you leaving is to find remote work, how will changing to another job change your living situation?"
I don't see jobs as fungible. While you might be able to WFH the new company will have different benefits such as potentially worse health insurance, compensation that isn't as good, or fewer paid days off. You might end up working remotely for a company in another timezone and that might mean you cannot drop your child off at school anymore. That kind of thing.
If you work for any company that offers health insurance, there is a pretty high bar set by the ACA for employers that make the difference in health insurance benefits different at most a few thousand dollars. You can usually negotiate the difference by asking for more money.
Even if that’s not the case, being able to work remotely means you can choose to work in a lower cost of living area - ie basically any place away from Apple’s headquarters will be cheaper.
It would also be a very regressive company - one that I have never worked at in 25 years - that would frown on you saying “I’m not available during $x hours when I need to drop my kid off to school. That’s the benefit of working remotely. You have a meeting at 9:00 and can’t get home in time? Pull out your cellular equipped tablet and join the meeting
I once left home at 9:00 AM during a workday to see my parents 4 hours away. But it took a whole day after stopping along the way to attend meetings from my cellular iPad.
I logged in when I got to my parents and finished my workday.
I have meetings scheduled with someone on the opposite coast at 7:00 ET? I log out at 5, walk to the next room to my home gym, exercise and log back in at 7 to have the meeting.
Very odd, seeing how you literally posted very fungibale things right after that. You know that you can just negotiate those things and only jump ship once you've found something that satisfies you.
If you wanted to make your point, you should've talked about actual barely-fungible things when switching jobs, i.e. if you're going to do the work you've been promised, your managers and company culture, etc etc etc
I usually think along your lines, and recently I read an article that made me think different https://the.ink/p/as-goes-amazon-so-goes-the-nation?s=r - not always different, and I don't know when to apply one thinking or the other yet. But I see its value.
Honestly, at least Apple laid out their intentions. People can leave or stay, but the policy is clear.
At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
As a manager, these types of comments and sentiments are so incredibly frustrating for me.
This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.
Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff.
But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
And the funny thing is, I absolutely understand the suspicion! It's just that, as a person in a leadership position, it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.
Hence why I admire what Apple has done, here. They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy, and now they're letting the staff make their decision about how they want to react to that policy. Whether you agree with the policy or not, that's far better than ambiguity or constant flip-flopping.
First, if Apple declared, right now, that full remote was an option, what you say is still true. i.e., in two years, management could decide to take away that benefit.
So I don't see how that kind of reasoning is useful when making an employment decision today. Getting up in arms about a purported future two years from now is just not rational, and is ultimately a byproduct of fear.
More broadly, this has always been true. Employers have always been in an position where they could change the terms of employment, and employees have always been in the position of being able to make a choice as to whether they would be willing to accept those changes. The WFH situation isn't special in that regard.
Second, this could go either way. Future leadership could equally decide Apple will go full remote. But the assumption is always that future change will take away the benefit rather than expanding it. That the slippery slope will always be to the worker's detriment. That's just another form of management distrust.
Edit: And oddly, given the current demand for positions in technology companies, that distrust is especially unfounded. Employees have never been more empowered. The sheer demand for labour means that any company instituting a policy that's broadly unpopular will lose staff. Absent a profound change in the labour market, in that context it would be insane for Apple to communicate a hybrid work policy, now, only to renege on it.
I don't really disagree with any of that although I do think some policies are stickier than others. It's probably easier to adjust the terms of hybrid work than it is to tell remote workers who can't commute to an office that they have to move if they want to stay with the company.
But, yes, in general I wouldn't make decisions based on what could happen in 2-3 years unless I really saw the writing on the wall and wanted to proactively spare myself the pain.
>But the assumption is always that future change will take away the benefit rather than expanding it. That the slippery slope will always be to the worker's detriment.
This seems like a reasonable assumption unless the labor seller is in very high demand relative to supply.
You could pre-commit to it. For example, you could sign a contract that if the company mandates a full return to work in the next 10 years, they will also increase everyone's base salary by 50%. That would be prohibitively expensive, so the company will never do it.
I totally agree with you. If the manager can't grant such a thing then he has no power over it, the employees have no reason to trust the upper hierarchy either, even if they trust their direct manager.
> It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.
Absolutely true. Employees do not trust management for good reasons, because they have experience with management not being open and honest with them (speaking generally here, of course there are exceptions).
Management's goals are often counter to those of the employees. Whereas workers want good pay, flexibility, work/life balance, and so on. Management wants control, pay people less, have them work more, and so on. Many managers pretend they care about what the workers want, only to force on to them what they want. People pick up on that bait and switch after a few times. Again, speaking generally here, this isn't universal, but it is common.
What they are describing is literally the objective objectives of a company's management. It's not some fluffy 'cultural values' thing that changes based on what the company's philosophy is. I've held exec positions at startups and ... well, I don't need to have held those positions to tell you this. (These authority contests are so frustratingly silly. We're not 5 year olds.)
> Management's goals are often counter to those of the employees. Whereas workers want good pay, flexibility, work/life balance, and so on. Management wants control, pay people less, have them work more, and so on. Many managers pretend they care about what the workers want, only to force on to them what they want. People pick up on that bait and switch after a few times. Again, speaking generally here, this isn't universal, but it is common.
Yes, there are companies that behave this way. And there are many companies that don't. As you say, it's not universal.
The question is: What kind of company is Apple?
I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.
You have to assume this type of bait and switch when companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google have spent so much money on their flagship campuses, that will have to be torn down and rebuilt as they were custom designed by architects in neomodernist styles as proxy corporate peens =/
>I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.
It is the kind of company that colludes with other employers to illegally gain advantage when negotiating with employees about pay and quality of life at work.
If you want to believe people at Apple have changed, go for it. But in my opinion, it always behooves sellers of labor that buyers of labor are always playing an adversarial game. And vice versa of course.
> Yes, there are companies that behave this way. And there are many companies that don't.
Can you name some companies that don’t? Very few companies with more than a few employees are more concerned about the bottom line of their employees than the corporation. This is by design due to management training in business schools, motivation by managers to control and yield power over others to signal their prowess, and basic greed by business stakeholders to maximize their returns to name just a few reasons.
When the recession hits, yanking hybrid away and demanding full time is an easy way to both A) easily cut staff that cant show up to the office easily (so preselected layoffs) and B) have massive leverage to force the issue sense they cant just go quit to make 20k more now in response
Yea came here to say the same thing -- you can just imagine the executive level conversations.. "the company is really struggling, and here are these bozo's sitting at home enjoying their life while I am stressed out in this board room... we need to be all rowing the boat in the same direction, and the only way I can see us doing that is by seeing everybody else stressed out along with me at the office..." so yea.. unless the management is also work from home, you can pretty much guess that a recession will cause a whole bunch of "well, when we said work from home forever, we meant like, ya know while the company was running fine.."
If you want people to 100% believe it, add it to the employment contracts, with significant payments if the company reneges. However I think you will find that the executives won't go for it.
Yep. Money where your mouth is. Corporate management has a history of only responding to direct incentives, so if they want me to believe anything they say, then they have to give themselves a direct incentive to follow through with it.
> It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.
Usually the result of past "Say one thing, do another" sort of experiences. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
In the past decade or so, for instance, a lot of the rush to "open office" (which is Hell on Earth for the sort of deep work a lot of tech types are typically paid to do) has been surrounded with all sorts of talk about the benefits of people and ideas colliding and such... mostly coming from people who have an office with a door that closes.
There's a place and time for those ideas, and it's the various "watercooler" places a typical office has - break room, lounge area, etc. "I am not working on something, let's BS on some ideas!" But there's a time and place for "not having random conversations," and it would be where people try to get work done. It's exceedingly hard to focus on deep work when there are lots of conversations around, and having gone from one extreme to another (open office with probably 100 people in line of sight to my own dedicated shed office), even if you know how bad it is, you don't realize how bad it really is. I listen to a lot less music now, and a lot of what I listen to is quieter and instrumental. In the open office plan, I'd acquired an appreciation for some pretty aggressive metal - because it was better than random conversations. And if I'm in the middle of something, I don't get constantly jacked out of the groove by other people being bored or hungry or such. There are many days out in my shed when I couldn't tell you what time it is without explicitly looking, and on more than one occasion it's been my wife pinging me, "Hey, you coming up to the house for dinner?" I'd been buried in something technical for the last few hours and had no idea it was dinnertime.
But despite all this, a lot of tech companies still try to spin "butts in tiny seats with people all around them" as somehow better.
Anyway, if nobody believes what management is saying, there's probably a very good reason for it.
> a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff.
Then it sounds like they probably do want to a full return to in-office work, but don't think they can get away with it. If the argument from your leadership doesn't begin with "according to these very clear numbers, our profitability as a business has suffered due to remote work," then it's reasonable to consider what the real reason might be: Wanting to exert control, or the sunk cost fallacy of leasing commercial real estate, or a justification for managers to have someone to manage. Who knows? These things are often not well explained. But anything except an existential business risk is a bad reason as far as I am concerned, when the "resources" so clearly want it to go otherwise.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I wasn't attempting to give you a complete and thorough explanation of our work-from-home policy or the reasoning behind it, but rather just one (very important) factor that's part of the overall calculus. I believe that was clear from the context.
If you are experiencing cynical reading between the lines from your reports, you might want to ask yourself why. Why don't they trust you? Or maybe they think you're sincere but they don't trust senior management? I suspect that they have good reason for that, and you might take a closer look as to why.
You're not telling me anything I haven't already thought about. Remember, this thread started with me saying:
> At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
The issue in my org is that, starting from the executive level down, everyone is saying "we are not forcing people back to the office", but no official policy has been written and published that lays that down in writing.
Then mouzogu came along implying that, even with a written policy, they still wouldn't believe it, thus the tangent about being frustrated.
But in my own org, today, absolutely staff have good reason to feel uncertain, if only because fear is filling the communication vacuum.
As for karaterobot's comment, they extrapolated a brief remark into a conspiracy theory. Rest assured, when communicating with my staff, there's a lot more nuance that's being conveyed.
If we're stereotyping, I think you're overestimating human rationality and the power of emotional thinking, which is also a pretty common trait among engineers.
I’m not stereotyping though; I said if engineers are cynical their is probably a reason. I didn’t say all engineers are cynical or all mangers give them a reason to be.
It sounds like you have a disconnect with your ICs if you don’t understand why they don’t trust you.
> "according to these very clear numbers, our profitability as a business has suffered due to remote work"
Seems like this has absolutely been the case. FAANG and the like aren't gonna to willingly lose 10-20% of their staff unless in office work was more productive. The business will make their decisions based on what will make them the most money at the end of the day. They aren't politicians seeking power, just profit. If remote is more profitable, we will see remote companies dominate the scene in the next few years, but as of now, all management has to go off of is reports showing productivity went down during WFH.
At my last employer, there was a very clear 10% jump in productivity when we went home, and we were still ordered back. There were tax implications to having an office unoccupied that played into that, but I'd bet the bigger reason was that a lot of managers had nothing to justify their salary by while the introverts they used to manage got along better than before.
Profitable for the company != profitable for a given manager.
> This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.
What do you think the lack of trust comes from? We have a large body of evidence that management does things in exactly this way. You can argue that this evidence isn't germane, but you can't argue that it doesn't exist.
The technology industry in general is one with some of the most empowered workers in the economy. The incredible imbalance in labour supply-and-demand means that salaries and benefits are sky high, work conditions tend to be quite favourable, and employees have a ton of options in selecting employers that have positive work environments.
And yet there are some who seem to think that tech workers are continuously under attack from heartless corporations looking to maximize profits at all costs, even at the expense of workers.
Absolutely, if you're working in, I dunno, service or manufacturing industries where labour supply is high and anti-union efforts have resulted in a rollback of labour rights, there is every reason to be concerned.
But in tech? I genuinely have no idea where this perception comes from or how it can be justified given the current structure of the labour market.
It’s because we know exactly how precarious the situation is. If the demand for labor dropped significantly, do you think companies would maintain the status quo working conditions? Or would we see many more instances of worker exploitation?
> It’s because we know exactly how precarious the situation is.
The labour market for tech has been on fire for nearly 20 years now. There was barely a blip during the 2008 crash that evaporated huge chunks of the economy. During COVID demand for labour went up despite massive disruptions in the economy. I swear I've been reading articles about labour supply shortages in tech for as long as I've been in the industry.
I honestly have no idea where this fear comes from.
Please, I'm very curious to know: in what way is the situation for engineering labour "precarious"?
It's not clear how high the barrier to entry to software is; if the barrier is low, we can expect wages to drop, long-term. People are (reportedly) getting six figure jobs from a six week bootcamp, which could be troubling to people getting paid only somewhat higher for 20 years of experience. And since remote work is clearly here to stay, why would companies hire for US salaries when they could hire somewhere else in the world for less?
There's also concern about whether the stack I have experience with will be around in five years (particularly bad in the Web arena), concern about will I be able to get a job after I'm forty, concern about will I be able to get a job if I have to whiteboard leetcode exercises, etc.
Plus, if you have a mortgage in a high cost of living area (likely if you are in tech) with a family of four, say, your burn rate is pretty high, which is fear-inducing. How long can you afford to pay a $1 million mortgage with no job? Even if you think you will probably be okay, there is a non-negligible (with unknown probability) that you might not find a job and, say, lose your house. There is a potentially huge tail-risk in switch jobs. So even if the market is good in general, there is a risk that if it is not good for you there might be a disaster. On top of this, you read about plenty of layoffs when the economy turns poor, so you know the company is not likely to care about your personal situation. Whether or not the situation is actually precarious, the risk makes you feel like it is.
(In my case, freelancing has been helpful for the fears, because you look for work so much more frequently, and your perspective on your work options, and even what you are selling changes.)
If the main reason tech workers have good working conditions is an under-supply of talent, that suggests that management is fundamentally not trustable. If that is the case, then when things go the other way we can expect to not have good working conditions.
I've found things made more sense once I realized that the political structure of modern corporations is essentially a kingdom. I think the cynicism of management comes from a combination of factors. First is that the individual contributors have no political voice, so decisions are made for them and they just have to live with the results. Second is that without the individual contributors there is no product, so the ICs fulfill management's goals, but nobody (on a structural level; individual managers may vary) is even asking the ICs what they want. Third, management routinely makes decisions that make the ICs life less pleasant [1], and frequently the ICs know of / are using / know they have the capability to build a system that they want. Fourth, management naturally attracts the people who want power; leaders enable those under them, but rulers tell their underlings what to do. Between the nature of the job and the failings of people, management tends to attract rulers, not leaders. Fifth, tech people tend be individualistic / mavericks, and those kind of people dislike being ruled, especially when the rules are lousy.
This could probably be summarized as ICs want autonomy, mastery, and competency (see Dan Pink). Many tech people got into tech on their own, so have a high sense of autonomy; the corporate structure tends to squelch autonomy. To make it worse, management does not appear to value the ICs, even though the king wouldn't eat if the farmers didn't farm. But ICs have no power within the system, so the best they can do is go quit.
Cynicism is the refuge of the powerless.
[1] The most egregious example I've seen was one very large company had needed a QA system. The IT department liked a particular software package, and apparently nobody else liked it. Probably because it was completely unfit for bug tracking. So, naturally, the company got the package IT wanted. Using it was completely miserable.
> we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.
Unless you are in the c-suite and are also the board, you can't make those promises. Your job is to say these things and gain employee trust, only to have a different set of orders come from on high.
In which case I quit along with the rest of my staff and find another job.
If my management expects me to renege on a commitment that they've told me I can make, then I can't trust management any more than my staff can, and I will no longer be willing to work for that company.
Honestly, it's like folks around here don't grok that a) employees are actually empowered, and b) management knows that.
I hear this from line managers at every company I have worked for, at FAANGs and non-FAANGs. It is romantically naive. Unless you are working for a small tight knit org run by leader with solid moral character, management will always renege.
Its the kind of thing that needs to be codified in the handbook and come from the top. I know middle managers that make these kind of decisions right now at their companies and feel the same way, but the calculus that gets missed is that until its codified in the manual, the HR processes, and is said from the executive c-suite level, it will always appear suspicious, because the course would be easy to reverse on everyone if we take it as a pinkie promise or handshake agreement.
Same reason I don't like "well let teams decide". It doesn't force the business processes to update themselves to the divergent realities, it pushes all of the burden onto teams and individuals instead, which is not good in aggregate for these sorts of things.
Unfortunately for your argument, their policy speaks to their attitude, which is "fuck what you think". Anyone with a basic understanding of human power dynamics correctly interprets this policy as "in a year all you peasants will be back with your arses in your seats where we can see you". The statement is the evidence.
>But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
The fact that you have a problem with this proves our point. You are not approaching this from the perspective of "how can I empower my team to do their best work and make us all a ton of money". Your frustration is "I know better and these idiots won't do what they are told".
And the fact that you claim to be unable to understand these basic ideas means that either (a) you do understand and are lying or (b) are incompetent, and in either case, your team has come to the correct conclusion.
I look forward to hiring a ton of Apple devs while also being disappointed that macOS will continue to get worse.
I would say that it's not just a lack of trust in your specific organization's management intentions. It's also related to how much we've all seen management throughout the Western world react with horror to the idea that the people they're supposed to be telling what to do might not be physically within their view for weeks or months at a time...or ever!
There's unquestionably a very strong strain of "management" in our culture that consists almost solely of a) distrusting the employees, b) therefore trying to physically monitor them at all times, and c) justifying their own existence by calling for many hours of (in-person) meetings every week. Personally, the institution I work for has claimed—in defiance of all logic and obvious reality—that certain jobs here can only be done in the office, all the time, and thus anyone in these jobs (which is basically everything below Director-level) seeking to work remote even part of the time will be denied.
Your company many not even have any of these people. I don't know. But so many of us have heard the stories from so many others who do have management like this that we would be stupid not to be wary of any manager—on up to the C-suite/owner/board—who seems unenthusiastic about remote work.
> it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.
Six months from now you get a new CEO and they want asses in seats immediately. What do you say then?
How much less are you believed about remote work than other situations where the recipient of the news has to trust you, and whose quality of life will suffer if you’re wrong or dishonest?
I mean it seems all the reasons are laid out in your response.
Just reordering them:
> I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office
> the executive team has been ambiguous
> it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise
You can claim all you want but if the CEO and all the chief officers are not the one making it all clear and not just taking about it at a standup but in black and white on paper. Then it means nothing and what you claim means nothing too to your employees. Like someone said next step after that is to put it in the contract.
Also it’s up to you and the other managers and officers, and not the people bellow you, to create a trusting environment and trust with your team. It’s frustrating you to hear comments like that but it should be instead a red flag for you about the health of your team. Because it’s even more stressful and frustrating to be in the very seat of an employee where there is no trust at their work and the leaders are vague about critical part of their work life and don’t care and (not pointing finger at you but just saying) are just frustrated when they voice their concerns instead of listening and acting as leaders.
In general, glad to see people advocating for what they see as the most effective environment in which to work. Some of these points are a bit strained, though, especially the "serendipity" [1] point which they choose to lead with - one could just as easily argue that being siloed with a smaller group of people working on similar problems is good for serendipity - that's certainly the way that universities, labs, startups, etc. seem to work well.
The time theft of traffic, costs of fuel and wear and tear on your car, the cost of lunch if you don't pack a lunch. It all adds up when having to go back to the office. I hate that we had to return to the office because it was like getting a big pay cut. Even the 3 day a week thing, it's like what's the point? We can work from home obviously, what more does going in 3 times a week accomplish other than punish you, showing you how much it sucks to go to the office. All it really feels like is punishment forcing you to be under some managers thumb.
We're all workers, and we should be supporting one another. Everyone has different concerns, but if you have a boss you have more in common with others who have bosses.
Worker solidarity raises us all up. Support workers in improving their workplaces rather than blowing them off for making slightly more.
Better to say, "I don't fully understand your concerns, but I support you" than be a crab in a bucket pulling all the other crabs down.
Someday you'll have concerns about your job and you'll wish tech workers stood by you on the picket lines.
I don't pretend to understand all the grievances of nurses, concrete pourers, or railyard workers, but when they say "this is a problem for us" I'm there in support.
WFH is not just an issue for those who are working in Apple. I work in a country where-in the combined commute time going back and forth to the office is 3 to 4 hours a day.
It doesn't make sense to go back to the office for five days a week when we've been working productively during the pandemic already for two years.
> The time theft of traffic, costs of fuel and wear and tear on your car, the cost of lunch if you don't pack a lunch.
I'm all for remote work but calling it "time theft" feels a bit weird.
You knew these things were a requirement when you signed your contract, right? If you didn't want these things then why didn't you either made a point of them in contract negotiations or simply went to a company that allowed remote work from the start?
True, but in this example, the pandemic provided an effective increase in pay to the employee while catering less for the needs of the employer. From an employer's perspective, the fair thing would be to either have the employee end their temporary privileges when the pandemic is over (i.e. return to the office), or "meet in the middle" and propose a salary cut to the employee.
I'm not saying this is how employers should react, but I found the arguments presented here just really one-sided and wanted to show where such a line of arguments lead.
I think reality is a bit more complex; the employer can turn this into an upside as well by saving expenses for office space, and possibly benefitting from the increased productivity of people who are more productive at home. And I think it's reasonable that employees ask their employers to look into these upsides.
It's a deliberate turn of the typical management canard that workers constantly commit "time theft" by not being on-task for the entirety of an eight-hour day.
Coming over from Paris where I took a bus to work for 30-40 minutes on some days, I thought it would be more of the same, but a bit longer. Turns out that both highways through silicon valley are bumpier in places than Paris cobblestone, and that if you combine the variance in bus times, the walk from my place to bus stop, and the walk from bus stop to the office, it doubled my overall commute time. I didn't know how tired I would be at the end of each day when I signed the contract, was incredibly happy with the end of the commute when the pandemic started, and am glad to be back in Europe now.
It’s time theft if you put in 40 hours of work a week while at home but then you’re told to do 8 hours a week of commuting and by the way you still have to do 40 hours of work.
I think “time theft” sums it up nicely. You had something and then it was taken away.
Something I don’t see on HN is how the ideal wfh works for people who can’t afford a study. What if you live with your parents and share with a sibling?
This might not be the case for established six figure programmers in the states. But there are lots of people with less money who might value having a separate space to work.
Might even be the silent majority outside of highly paid developers.
Correct, they can and should provide funds so that employees can rent out coworking spaces that are located near where they live, as opposed to commuting far to the physical office.
I like this idea. If I already have a home office, so I get paid this extra fund too? Or does my coworker only get it because he doesn’t have a home office?
Maybe everyone gets paid it because teams might want to use the WeWork for local in-person collaboration rather than meeting at HQ, if it's logistically easier. Some team members might have home offices but others do not.
I'll just throw out there when I started developing all I had was one crappy laptop and headphones and the way I ended up working was by going to the Starbucks down the street getting a hot chocolate and a scone and going to town for hours at a time. Of course that wouldn't work as well for meetings but it was simpler times back then.
Although now I've got an idea to make coffee shops produce more revenue I'm realizing if the CEO of Starbucks is reading this give me a call.
I realize this won't fly with many companies, but at a previous role I treated commute time (~1.5 hours/day) as work time. Not 8.5 hours work with commute on top of that.
> CEO Tim Cook called in-person collaboration benefits "irreplaceable" and in an email, the executive team talked about the importance of "the serendipity that comes from bumping into colleagues" during in-person work.
Another extroverted MBA who doesn't understand why many engineers need big, unbroken chunks of silence & concentration to do great work.
Maybe allow teams, but I don't think allowing individuals to choose isn't good.
Having a team that's half remote/half in-person is worse of both worlds. What typically ends up happening IME is that the in-person half typically gets way way way more visibility than those working remote. It's especially worse if the company isn't remote first at all. It's especially terrible if the team is remotely distributed as well. I left my last company because my org had a time preference for their offices in Hyderabad, which isn't bad but they kept forcing mandatory meetings at 7 or 8 am. All the US workers hated it. The idea of core hours didn't exists, you basically had to adapt to Hyderabad time or you suffered.
I have no issue with remote teams or in-person teams, but having both in the same team is the worse.
The Apple policy under discussion is a top-down edict from the executives that no future remote roles are allowed, period. This is more draconian than the pre-pandemic “exceptions allowed with VP approval” policy. Your experience isn’t germane to this situation.
> Your experience isn’t germane to this situation.
I've been seeing more and more of this rude dismissal of other comments. They're discussing the general topic at hand by offering their experience. Your snarky reply degrades the conversation significantly more than them broadening the conversation.
Have you worked in this environment? I have and I agree with the previous comment. You get the low friction interaction of being there in person but then all the people who aren't there get left out. Or you have to do everything on video anyway so there's no point in some people being in person. My bet is in person companies win in the end.
Even if it's true that in-person developers are more productive, you also have to account for the preference of developers. If developers prefer to work remotely, then the average in-person developer is probably likely to be worse than the average remote developer (since skilled developers will have an easier time to find the more attractive remote positions).
And as we all know, the difference between a skilled developer and a bad one is quite massive.
My team is 1/2 in person and 1/2 remote and it works fine. We don't have the "way way more visibility" problem. I think this is at least partly because my director is remote, and at least one link in the chain of VPs above him is remote as well.
Cook has an engineering degree and Apple did some pretty good engineering before COVID including the A series of microprocessors, Air Pods, Apple Watch, and most of the M1 development.
I understand that people like work from home, but implying engineering can’t be done in an office building is overselling the issue by quite a bit.
There's a bit of a disconnect here in that many on this forum are software engineers, probably mostly working on systems that need no hands-on interaction (or on apps that can be tested easily locally).
The products you listed are hardware products (with integrated software) which are much more difficult to work on remotely, especially in a company that prioritizes secrecy as much as Apple does.
Apple software engineers who work with prototypes did this for two whole product development cycles. Access to prototypes _can_ still be managed remotely, it turns out.
It's possible to do (I'm doing it), but it's definitely more complicated than in-person, especially when operating across a team.
From a hardware engineering perspective, access to equipment is also important; I have a decent lab setup at home, but I've still needed to go into the office regularly to access some testing tools.
It is my understanding that the team behind the hardware and chip developments refused to work at Apple Park and demanded that a more suitable work area was built for them.
I think engineers tend to under-estimate how much of their work is communicating with other engineers.
Yes, you need that focus time. But running into someone on another team can be very valuable - you might learn that they're solving the same problem, you might learn that they're consuming the same API you're trying to figure out, you might learn that they're planning on working with your team in a few weeks, etc.
Sure, but if your company’s productivity depends on these accidental interactions, you’re in serious trouble if you’re as large as Apple is. Apple Park is so large you can roam the halls all day and not run into the people you’re working with on other teams. Many of the teams will be on other campuses anyway.
I would argue the benefits of having more of your state in Slack more than make up for “surprise productive watercooler meeting” thing that managers are so hot on. I think I’ve had that interaction maybe twice in 25+ years, and one of those times was just pointless gossip in the end.
The watercooler comment resonates: i keep hearing it as justification to be back in-person and even in cases where i feel i've ha da productive watercooler conversation, it has very rarely resulted in anything crucial or important emerge from it.
Businesses have problems that need solving (using technology): it is unlikely that the problem is identified at a watercooler (or other metaphorical equivalents) or the solution is identified in a one hour in-person meeting. One might 'feel' that the outcome from the quickly made decision in the 1-hr meeting was useful, but thats questionable too.
> Yes, you need that focus time. But running into someone on another team can be very valuable - you might learn that they're solving the same problem, you might learn that they're consuming the same API you're trying to figure out, you might learn that they're planning on working with your team in a few weeks, etc.
Out of all the companies out there, I'd imagine Apple benefits from this the least. With all the badge-locked doors, literal curtains hiding projects from one another, and internal NDAs preventing one engineer from even disclosing what they are working on with another engineer, cross-pollination of ideas is going to be almost impossible. "Serendipitous conversations" is not something that comes to mind when one thinks about Apple's internal engineering culture.
> I think engineers tend to under-estimate how much of their work is communicating with other engineers.
That's a good point. I would go so far as to say that the majority of what engineers do is communicate with their future selves and other engineers, in that writing software is to use a communication medium. What code you write today will need to be read and understood later. What the code does on the computer is only a part of software.
Lots of companies' executive officers are relaying identical messages, even down to the same choice of words. "Serendipity." "Collaboration." "Magical hallway conversations." I've never seen all of Corporate America, including fierce competitors, so closely aligned on a very particular narrative, as I've seen them aligned on returning to physical offices. It's as if they all received the exact same memo with the same talking points and are all desperately following it. Never seen anything like it before.
This isn't some artificial set of talking points, it's what business leaders genuinely believe and have believed for decades. (This isn't the first time that remote work has become a big public debate, although it was called "teleworking" last time.) That doesn't prove they're right, but it's not some kind of astroturfed conspiracy.
Doubly so because "accidental" product launches because two engineers bumped heads in the cafeteria and came up with an idea is not how things work at Apple. That's Google culture.
At Apple employees in a hallway will not be allowed to talk about each other's projects at all. All the product directives are strictly top down. As an individual engineer you have zero say in the product and very little in broader engineering decisions.
So, I get that. However, that doesn't make those engineers better at communicating, being communicated to, or understanding where they work. They're at risk for being underrepresented due to the siloed and likely insular nature of their work.
Most of my success has been because I'd spoken, independently and unofficially, to people in unrelated divisions who hadn't met who _really needed to talk_. I don't expect others to take this on because they're almost definitely busier than me. And I don't necessarily like taking to people, but I'm really good at this one stupidly simple thing, and I'd rather be the one getting dragged into the meetings instead of everyone else so they can focus.
It's why corporate org charts are so bullshit to me; the real work happens when people can form their best structures, which typically takes knowing who you're working with or being known by someone who can protect that for you. For some, that's churning out work while being with their families way the fuck away from everyone else. For others, it's being wherever they can get some perspective and inspiration digging in and deciding something about the trajectory of the org they're at, usually involving people. If it works, it's valid.
As a software engineer I find I'm much more productive in the office. Probably because a lot of my work does involve talking to other people (other engineers, PMs etc) and really understanding what the problem space is. Sure I need focus time too, but I can get that in the office too.
Hi senior engineer here, I enjoy being with my co-workers and you can definitely make people understand you need your time in an office setting. This sounds like a communication issue that a lot of devs have but that's squarely our failing not other people in our orgs.
I'm more on the introversion end of the spectrum, and as someone who's been both an engineer and a manager I'm a big believer in big unbroken chunks of silence and concentration for focused engineering ("makers vs managers schedule", etc).
And... I would say a majority of the major project setbacks / failures I've seen over my career have not been due to engineering failures, but have been due to either:
1) Misalignment or lack of agility about priorities / goals and inter-team dependencies. Situations where people and teams put their heads down and do a lot of engineering... that ends up not being the right engineering.
2) Interpersonal conflicts that simmer, escalate, and aren't defused early enough and harm collaboration.
In theory, both of these could be addressed well in fully remote environments, with careful product, product, and people management.
In practice, I have personally seen it be much easier to head these problems off in environments where people are having regular informal face-to-face and non-transactional interactions. The lunch / coffee break / hallway-chat-after-the-meeting sort of discussions. Even being in separate buildings across a large tech campus has been a barrier to this.
Again, I would be personally happy to WFH, but I do feel I've multiple times seen significant project and company-level benefits from shared workspace interaction, so there are tradeoffs.
We blew five billion dollars on Apple Park. its a monument and a testament to the ineffable power and glory of our babel made manifest. You will attend this church of man in blessed reverence or you will find the cold streets at your feet.
This is exactly the case. Its been my observation that companies with substantial (owned) brick and mortar facilities tend to be the ones promoting return to work programs now. Apple definitely falls into this group, perhaps more than any other company.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/this-is-the-first-look-at-...
"Nvidia is preparing a new, massive building in Santa Clara, CA and this is it. Called Voyager, it will be larger than the building Nvidia just finished constructing by 250,000 square feet."
I'm fully remote and love it, but let's not pretend that Apple engineers are at risk of homelessness if they decide they don't want to work at apple anymore
Exactly. Some companies will be fully remote and some won’t. It’s easy to switch tech jobs in the Bay Area and you can pick one that suits you. Apple was always in person.
Actually, I'd caution you there. There's roughly 25k Apple employees in the Bay area and Apple is a top payer in terms of salary. I've been shopping for homes in the Bay since I arrived and South Bay is easily 1M+ for a very tiny home. Oakland is about 600k+ and usually both markets require cash on top to get a home. That puts average mortgages (and rent) in the 3-5k range. If the average salary is limited by the number of companies that can pay more than 3-5k per paycheck (you want rent or mortgage to be 1/3 of your paycheck for risk purposes) then yes, Apple employees, depending on when they get their place to live, could already be over leveraged and at risk.
Are people who are convinced by this logic aware that the vast majority of Apple employees don’t work in Apple Park and instead in extremely unremarkable office buildings throughout suburban Bay Area?
If you accept that there is some marginal benefit in getting employees together physically, (and as someone with a remote position, I certainly do) then I think the logic of "we already spent the money, get in here" has a degree of truth to it.
I think if you frame that as an roi, the marginal benefit as a worker would really have to outweigh the cost. If I was being scouted by a company, which I'm not, the offer would have to be extremely compelling, because it's just not in me to commute and be on time for shit.
> Still, Apple will continue to be based in Silicon Valley, where it has about 25,000 employees, including 12,000 employees in its loop-shaped headquarters.
Would it surprise you to hear that, despite taking the mantle as the new HQ (because it’s the most impressive building) it’s just an incremental office build and people still work at one infinite loop?
Even more than that. Most of the Silicon Valley employees of Apple do not work in either the Spaceship or any of the Infinite Loop locations. There are dozens of buildings around Cupertino and Sunnyvale (many quite large) that house Apple employees. If you just drive down Deanza Blvd you will see Apple sign after Apple sign pointing out those builds (and that is just one street).
Yes, it does actually surprise me that a company would spend $5 billion for and tout the design as the second coming of office Jesus as an "incremental office build".
I indeed did not realize that Apple Park wasn't the primary office building in that area, especially because of some of the articles that came out at the time. It's why I asked the honest question I did.
And do they ignore the fact that many of apple’s most important employees work in physically secured labs where physical device access is a major part of their job?
Like sure GitHub can be remote top to bottom, but an insane amount of Apples workflow is prototype driven and those prototypes cannot physically leave their secure facilities. Hard to argue (from a retention standpoint) that those people need to come in full time but the Apple Music people can do whatever they want.
You mean easy to argue? The lab workers would get no remote days per week due to their jobs. The workers who can be fully remote are being forced back.
What do you mean here, by "many", exactly? Kind of odd to argue that everyone should go to the physical office because "many" must, when, let's be honest, "many" here is probably less than 1%.
I'm sure at a certain stage it is prototype, in secured buildings. But I have a friend who works at Apple full time remote (for a dozen years now) who routinely gets unreleased hardware at home to work on the software changes for. They is very intentional about only revealing stuff after it is public, which I think is still technically a breach of his NDA (revealing that they'd been working on it).
Keep in mind Apple just returned 27 billion to shareholders [1] because presumably there was no better use for it. I doubt the cost of a 5 billion office park is causing them to loose sleep.
People want to have their cake and eat it too. Silicon Valley companies pay very well because cost of living is very high in the area and they _need_ to pay well to attract talent in that area. If remote work becomes the norm, pay will start to even out across the country. If you live in a place that didn't pay well before, you'll be better off, but if you live in a high cost of work area, you'll probably be worse off. It's just an inevitable truth of how the market functions.... maybe your company says they'll keep salaries the same no matter where you work, but let's see how that plays out in ten years from now.
To that end, 2 days a week in office seems like a great compromise. Personally, I wouldn't want a long commute to work, so I'd pay a lot to be near my office if I'm going in 5 days a week, but for 2 days a week, I'd have much less problem with say a 1 to 1.5 hour-each-way commute, which drastically opens up options for where I can live. And by requiring people to live in the area, these companies will still need to pay competitive salaries for that area, so this seems like a pretty good compromise.
Its a cycle. It’s undeniable that Bay Area salaries are higher than elsewhere. They pay what they need to pay to get good engineers _in that location_. I’d venture to guess that Apple employees in other countries (or even other parts of the US) make less.
If they find that it's hard to attract talent, they'll also pay well for remote. But if they don't, angrily worded letters are not going to be the thing that makes the difference. People are going to have to start voting with their feet before Apple will see the supposed error of their compensation formula.
Many companies are. Traditional, old school companies like Google and Apple are slow to move here, but many tech companies are moving to a "we pay you your value, not your cost of living".
I've only seen one (Airbnb) but perhaps there are others I've missed. I don't think we will be able to know how it is going to play out for a couple of years. They may validly intend to do what they say today, but market forces may ultimately force them to change their approach. I'm happy to wait and see personally.
Lower barriers to communication and the building of shared conceptual models of the domain will make a team much more effective.
An engineering team in the same timezone whose members have a similar general context for how they approach work will be able to do all of that more easily.
In my mind, that explains much of the difference.
Of course, there are fully-remote teams and companies that work hard to overcome some of those obstacles, but it seems to be non-trivial to do so successfully.
They are already starting adjust salaries for cost of living in the zip codes where remote workers live. They still pay more because the field is competitive, but companies (including Facebook and Google) aren’t paying Palo Alto salaries to remote workers in low cost of living areas.
no. another 100 years of the people having no effect on anything, their behaviors swayed by the macroeconomic predilections of a few people educated in this niche for fun and profit. Fun series arc.
Silicon Valley companies pay very well because _other_ Silicon Valley companies pay very well. Fast food companies don't pay anywhere near as well even though the cost of living is the same for those employees.
The demand for good engineers far outstrips the supply, so companies are forced to compete with each other, which is why you get lots of other perks other than salary (free gym, free lunch, free dry cleaning, etc). Any big tech co that decide to pay the same regardless of location will have a huge advantage recruiting and maintaining remote employees. If a remote employee's only option is to jump to another FAANG company for a 15% salary decrease, what motivation will there be to leave?
Unfortunately the folks that get to make these decisions are so removed from the reality of their company's every day tasks that all they can think is "if I don't see butts in the seats I bought, then obviously no work is getting done".
I worked for a small company in 2020 that wanted to get people back in the office by June of that year to “foster better communication” while Covid was still going strong.
That next week, a recruiter from BigTech sent me a message about applying for a software engineering position. I asked them would it be permanently remote. They said “no”. I was about to end the conversation. But then we kept talking and they suggested I talk to another department that was always designed to be remote. I got a job there.
There are way too many opportunities for software engineers to be begging a company to WFH.
The problem is, for many people and jobs that heuristic is accurate. I’ve heard of countless examples of people spending their time gaming at home instead of working.
Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.
It's so interesting to me that we still struggle to get out of the 'hours worked' mindset when considering how valuable someone is to a company. I would argue it's completely irrelevant if someone is gaming, even if it's almost all their time. The question to answer is, what value are they actually bringing to the organization? Would you rather have someone that's useless but working hard 10 hours a day over someone who's brilliant but only works 2 hours a day? I certainly wouldn't.
I think competent organizations will actually do the counter and embrace trusting their employees. IME, it is basically already impossible not to -- there's just way too much work and complexity for someone to accurately know exactly what all of their reports are doing.
This sounds a lot like flame-baiting. Are you expecting a constructive dialogue by leading with an accusatory generalization about a wide corpus of political ideology? Or do you wish to engage in a good faith dialogue about what "conservatives" actually want?
Hopefully they're putting effort into unionizing behind the scenes, because otherwise there's 0 chance Apple is going to say "sure everyone can choose to not show up to our brand new $5bn HQ"
Ignorant European here, I fail to see any connections..
> They said that Apple's reasons for implementing the policy don't stand up, and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce
The logic behind this is that work from home allowed greater participation from not-these groups. Folks whose physical or mental health was improved in a work from home environment (I know someone with chronic migraines, for whom the typical 'Glass and steel open office' workspace is basically hell on a random draw of days).
Work from home also allowed for more schedule flexibility - it's hard to run an errand, pick the kids up from school, etc. when that's a 15 minute trip, rather than having to commute back home. This burden often falls disproportionately on women, and workers with families (who are likely slightly older than those who don't).
Removing the constraint of "You have to have the capital to move to SV to work here" allows hiring from a broader and more diverse pool of groups with less generational wealth, which means likely a more diverse body of job candidates.
Whether you agree with this or not, there is a logic behind it. Heck, I think they actually missed a couple axes of workers Apple is going to miss out on.
How it makes for more white employees I fail to comprehend. Even if there was reason, remote work only hides the problem but does not solve it.
You could argue letting people work from home creates only more separation of cultures.. If you want bigger cultural diversity just treat everyone equally?
Apple knows what form of work is best for Apple. If it turns out they are wrong, they'll eventually suffer in the market as the result of making the wrong choice.
That said, being remote or hybrid first seems like it would be a huge competitive advantage for a least some teams in Apple...like the Facetime team.
I tried using their "new" like zoom Facetime meeting with a URL feature for a work-related meeting. The lack of basic functionality like a text chat to share links and other notes in shows that Apple either doesn't actually use Facetime for their own remote meetings or they have no idea how most people use these types of tools to collaborate.
I feel like this is true for many apple tools with robust competition. Apple’s offering always only seems to scratch the surface of what’s necessary to be competitive, plus their unique apple-y take. Which, tbf, I often find refreshing, if only it had all the other features I need too.
Instead I’m often felt feeling like someone at apple said “we can do this better” but gets distracted shortly after deploying the MVP.
If Apple suffers in the market as a result, their executives will be gently kicked out with substantial severance packages, and workers will be laid off en masse. That's an anti-worker result.
Best solution is to insist on a salary sufficient to purchase a home in the Bay Area while spending no more than 33% of your income on housing. If they want to pay that much, maybe that's not a bad deal. Otherwise it's a bad deal.
> and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce.
Does anyone take tossing around words like this seriously anymore?
I am pro working remotely, but this is just ridiculous.
Yes. I don't see how at a minimum "more able-bodied" should be controversial. Someone who requires a wheelchair has a much easier experience when WFH. "Younger" is a likely extension of that given how age affects mobility.
People in wheelchairs leave their homes all the time. Apple has buses and offices that I'm sure are wheelchair accessible. Apple probably offers pretty good insurance to get a motorized wheelchair if needed. If someone really can't make it to the office physically, I'm sure the policies are somewhat more nuanced.
I understand it may be more difficult for certain people, but I guess to me it's a non sequitur. Doing different things is varying levels of difficult for different people. Is the conclusion that nobody should ask you to do anything inconvenient?
> I understand it may be more difficult for certain people
If you can understand that, then you should understand that certain people will make rational decisions to minimize their difficulty. Remote work positions are more available now, and such people will likely naturally gravitate towards them. Consequently, non-remote positions will be disproportionally more able-bodied, which is exactly the point of the Apple employee statement.
Yeah maybe. I'd be curious to know how big of a factor it actually is. Would an extraverted person using a wheelchair prefer to work from home, or go in? I'd be hesitant to assume something like that is necessarily the biggest factor for somebody.
It could certainly trend that way though. I don't see that as super problematic.
Yeah sure. What I'm getting at is that it's not necessarily unjust to ask someone in a wheelchair to go somewhere in person for their job, and I'm not convinced most people in a wheelchair would see it that way.
The conclusion is that we should remove barriers whenever possible. Climbing a mountain is more difficult for people in a wheelchair, but that's just the way it is, we can't make the mountain equally accessible for everyone. Climbing the stairs of a skyscraper is more difficult for people in a wheelchair, but it doesn't have to be that way, we can install an elevator.
Extend that to everything. We shouldn't ask people to do something inconvenient when we could make it convenient.
I guess in my mind accessible buildings, accessible transportation to and from work, insurance that makes it easy to get high quality treatment and medical devices are akin to "installing the elevator" in your analogy. Part of the job is getting to the top of the skyscraper and those things make it easier.
> Part of the job is getting to the top of the skyscraper
I guess that's the core disagreement here. The people who wrote this letter do not think getting to the top of the skyscraper is an important part of the job worth sacrificing even a small amount of accessibility, and the executives do.
Chewing is so inconvenient. Feeding tubes for everyone!
That’s a joke… we need the flexibility to cater to those who require it. We don’t need to make the baseline match the minimum. I think ADA and other items do well in this regard. So, just let a person WFH if attendance is overly inconvenient. It’s not the standard expectation. If working in the office is a baseline then It doesn’t mean they get to move to another country then claim the commute is now inconvenient. I think this wasn’t really much of an issue before Covid. Why is it now?
> I think this wasn’t really much of an issue before Covid. Why is it now?
It was. The ADA was the result of an enormous amount of struggle and activism, and that movement continues to the present. Reach out to a local disability rights organization (I guarantee there's one near you) and ask if they had any concerns about office work before Covid. I'd also recommend the documentary Crip Camp if you're not familiar with this part of American history.
Edit: Here's an article from the start of the pandemic with lots of quotes relevant to your question. Sorry for the archive link, the site seems to be down right now.
> Watching these accommodations become available in a wide-spread way so quickly has been really painful. It hurts not only because I could have benefited from accommodations like this throughout my education, but because there are so many others who could have benefited, or were forced to drop out of school, or quit their jobs because their school or employer told them they were impossible to accommodate. These accommodations have always been possible but acknowledging that requires acknowledging the ableism behind their denial.
It's a quick read and it's very good, I recommend reading it. Most of the issues discussed could be most easily addressed by allowing full remote work. Also, many of the people quoted have "invisible disabilities" - you may have coworkers like them without realizing it. This isn't just about ramps and elevators and other common accommodations.
As someone who has needed ADA accommodations for a serious medical condition, they haven't worked for me. I've had upper management/HR lay me off twice even though my manager and manager's manager tried to keep me.
If everyone has more flexibility, I don't need to risk my job asking for reasonable accommodations.
It also helps stomp on stupidity like requiring 14 people in a remote office in the middle of Nowhere, Midwest to wear black tennis shoes. (I own no tennis shoes and can't wear them.) There was literally no reason for it except to have a dress code.
I’ll admit I’m not too familiar and sorry to hear the reality is more grim than I’d hope. My point is more about this WFH and anti RTO stance being a bit like a wrecking ball when a hammer would do. Things like dress codes are exactly the minor policy reforms that could be done before revolting to a fully remote wfh movement. That said, I hope now everyone is now more flexible in general and that translates to people that actually needed it and weren’t getting it (like yourself).
Why do you draw the line at a mountain? We have the technology for outdoor lifts.
In the end it's a trade off, and while we should have minimum standards of accessibility, after that point its a trade off between productivity, efficiency, and accessibility. If having the entire team in office 2x a week makes the average worker XX% more productive, should we sacrifice that for the one teammate who has a harder time to getting to the office? What about the coworker who choose to live further away? Should my team push meetings around because I am not a morning person? What about the dead worker who can understand coworkers better when in person, should we require everyone to go in every day for them?
I think we agree. The cost of installing a lift up a large mountain is incredibly high, and the benefit is relatively low, since the experience will still be so different from hiking up the mountain. I think most people would agree that tradeoff is not worth it.
The people who wrote this letter are arguing that the cost of full remote work is low or even negative, and the benefits are quite high, so the tradeoff is worth it. That's what this discussion is about, how should we balance the tradeoffs.
And yes, I don't know if they were meant to be sarcastic, but all of your questions are worth considering. If you have a deaf coworker that struggles with remote work, you should absolutely consider making changes up to and including in-person work. I can't tell you what tradeoff would be appropriate for your particular team and situation, but of course you should think about it and not just default to the status quo.
I also think many people with disabilities would argue that we as a society have not yet reached "minimum standards of accessibility".
> Also isn't it pretty racist /sexist to suggest that just because [you're] black or a woman, you won't be able to commute?
I don't agree with the framing of this... The question is whether or not WFO would impact these folks more negatively than their peers, not that they wouldn't be able to do it at all.
That one does seem the most questionable. Looking at an ethnicity map of Cupertino, it seems like in-office requirements would favor white and asian employees, as they tend to live closest to the Apple office. The other items in that list seem pretty uncontroversial to me though.
White and Asian bias in tech has almost everything to do with candidate pool - very little to do with bias and preference for in-person work.
People who are willing to work in tech and are in the US are overwhelmingly white and Asian. I mean - 70%+ of my current job is Asian. White is a minority. Black, Hispanic, mixed race, and much else is all less than 10% combined. Mostly due to candidate pool…
Why is it ridiculous? It seems very, very obvious to me.
Younger = less likely to have a family so commutes are not as big of an issue + the many responsibilities of having a kid that are easier to manage wfh
Whiter = this is the one that I have the least contextual evidence for off the top of my head, but feel safe assuming it's at least partially true given the other factors
Male-Dominated = the kid issues raised above certainly affect women more than men
Neuro-normative = designing your own wfh space + not requiring travel to an office seems pretty clearly better for neuro-divergent people, especially when the office still exists for those that need to utilize it
Able-bodied = much easier to wfh when you're in a wheelchair, don't have to commute with eyesight impairments, etc
For what? That younger people are more likely to not have kids than people further in their career? That women’s careers tend to be affected more by having kids than men? This are “the sky is blue” type facts. They don’t really need citation.
Listing privileges like that is a progressive millennial/zoomer thing that gets people's hackles up, but in its defense:
I'm physically disabled. I use a wheelchair, which makes commuting hard, and a reclining desk which is too big to fit in an open office. I can't type much, so I sometimes rely on dictation and eye tracking. I definitely can't do that in an open office. I have a bunch of doctor's appointments, weekly PT etc. and sometimes I'm too fatigued to work, so I have to crash, so I end up with weird schedules.
despite this, I've invented several critical algorithms for extremely hard problems that helped our company scale, along with singlehandedly writing tons of formally-verified distributed systems infrastructure. I'm valuable enough to keep around despite being damaged goods. hence I have permanent WFH. still miss the office sometimes though.
Remote work is an existential threat to large knowledge-work-based corporations or at least to their management hierarchies. Having spent $$ on fancy buildings that are now empty is just one aspect of this. Problem for them is: the genie is out of the bottle now. We've spent 2y proving that things are humming along just fine without everyone on a campus, commuting for 2h every day.
It's going to be fascinating to watch this play out over the next few years. Google will have 3.1 million sqft of space in Manhattan when it's done building out its most recent acquisition [0].
This may be an opportunity for companies who need technical teams, but aren't able to compensate at FAANG levels, to compete.
I have to think real estate investments, employment laws, and other factors beyond what company leadership states openly must be involved. The employee objections here are written out clearly, but the policies from big companies that require more than 50% of time in the office seem like such a tragic compromise that I can't believe they've been fully explained.
The longer companies waffle on these policies the more likely it is they will hamper recruitment and face attrition to companies with more consistent policies.
In-office is much less effective when your team is distributed across multiple sites/time zones anyway which seems to be the new normal.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] thread> We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it?
I'd have to agree. If you're building products and market them for "remote working", then you better have figured out remote working yourself in your own environment, otherwise I won't trust that you've actually gotten it right.
Of course, there is also a difference between different job functions. If you're in the hardware team, I can see how it's hard to actually collaborate remotely on a bunch of stuff. But for the pencil pushers in corporate? Definitely should have figured out how to make that work.
Turkey marketing its drones as great for war does not mean Turkey is being hypocritical for saying that war isn’t good.
So lets say Apple doesn't believe "remote working" is good in general. Why would they be building tools for something they don't think is good?
other than profits for shareholders?
And again, Turkey creating great drones does not require them to believe war is good.
This is a pretty straightforward logical fallacy.
I don’t think that’s the correct analogy. It’s more like Turkey creating great drones while also believing that drones are not an effective way to wage war.
Apple nowhere said their products aren't good for remote work...?
They are being fired for (a) essentially explicitly stating they are not gonna do a good job working in the way the company thinks its employees should be working (b) trying to get the company to change through “open letters” through the press.
Both (a) and (b) are reasons for firing on their own. It has nothing to do with differing opinions.
It’s like me telling my team that since the Product Owner did not prioritize the feature I think is critical for us to work on first, I will not really do a good job with working on the features the PO did prioritize.
The company would be foolish to fire me because I said our PO sucks and makes terrible decisions. The company would not be foolish to fire me because I said that because I disagree with the PO I’m gonna do a half hearted job. Especially if the way I communicated this to the company is through a half page advert in the NYTimes.
Just to be clear, no one mentioned anything about anyone being fired in the article that I could see. There is a return to the office mandate for two days a week, so I guess if you just don't show up for work two days a week, yeah, you'll be fired but that's a different thing.
In an anonymous poll given (article linked below) there were quite a few employees who stated they were going to look for remote jobs and quit.
https://fortune.com/2022/05/02/apple-workers-unhappy-return-...
https://youtu.be/GC5Gmkn92Bg
I mean, they're just asking you to come to the building 3 days a week.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/10/health/remote-work-disabiliti...
But still, I wondering if this should mean that WFH needs to be enforced at any company. Not every company can implement full WFH without disrupting operations, especially when working with hardware or when needing concurrent comunication between co-workers.
The article about black workers, mentions discrimination based (mainly) on their appareance. Sure this cannot happen if they work behind a screen. But the same would happen if we all were blind? Shall we wear opaque glasses to end discrimination based on racial features too?
We can also flip the argument. I see this as telling black people (or other groups), stay at home, and in this people will not discriminate you. Is this really what we want? We should make the world better by improving it, not downgrading it.
By this reasoning, we should also close all physical stores, since wheelchair users have more difficulties to buy bread in person. If for the majority it is easier to go in person to buy bread, I think a better compromise is to adapt the shop to as many people as possible, while accepting that access will be still more difficult for some.
22 years are buying houses and cars when they land at Apple.
If the more senior people get paid even more, how does this contribute to making the workforce skew younger?
Have you considered that there are jobs besides software engineering at Apple? And those jobs might also have 22 year olds working at them? Is the entry level marketing assistant getting six figures and stock options too?
Works both ways.
Presumably we are talking about Engineers at Apple so low pay doesn't seem relevant?
Work from home also allowed for more schedule flexibility - it's hard to run an errand, pick the kids up from school, etc. when that's a 15 minute trip, rather than having to commute back home. This burden often falls disproportionately on women, and workers with families (who are likely slightly older than those who don't).
Removing the constraint of "You have to have the capital to move to SV to work here" allows hiring from a broader and more diverse pool of groups with less generational wealth, which means likely a more diverse body of job candidates.
Whether you agree with this or not, there is a logic behind it. Heck, I think they actually missed a couple axes of workers Apple is going to miss out on.
I'm curious why you think anyone needs to "think" about this. Some of us are perfectly happy with WFH and don't feel guilty for it, and there's really nothing to contemplate further and no moral crisis to spark.
Which is only possible for people who live in the same hemisphere as the building and have citizenship or visa.
Remote work is international work.
Not at most companies; the legal implications of working from other countries mean that, unless you want to misrepresent yourself and create a fake "home" address, digital nomad lifestyles are explicitly forbidden.
If the company wants me as an employee because they can impose tougher restrictions on me that way, sorry, it's a seller's market for developers.
> will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
because it's not about coming to office 3 days a week, it's about not hiring international remote workers in the first place.
I feel confident we'll begin to see HOAs justifying their grass-length rules because "longer lawns disproportionately affect historically oppressed, disabled, and neurodivergent persons"
This is not a great trend, if you care about equality in society, because shit is getting so watered down it's about meaningless.
Edit: just imagine if the text said "younger, blacker, more female-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Or "younger, more Jewish, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Not every company needs to have the exact same policies on everything.
Is what you’re saying here.
They’re trying to make company changes to improve their relationship with someone they like to work for, without using the nuclear option.
I’ve had eight jobs in my 25 years as an adult. It never took me more than two months to find a job I was happy with. It took me 15 years and one failed marriage to find a a spouse I was happy with.
When I have a disagreement with my wife, we compromise as equal partners. I’m not in any way an equal partner to the CEO of a 2 trillion+ dollar company.
Leaving my marriage necessitated lawyers, going to court, and giving up half of everything we accumulated together. Leaving a job required a form resignation letter with meaningless platitudes and a two week notice.
Sometimes leadership wants to do the right thing, but they can’t hear the workers through the managers
If this is a deal breaker, yes. But this kind of approach is a last resort. Why shouldn't someone try to influence company policy before taking such a drastic step?
Happy to be proven wrong here, but labor doesn't have much power in the US; especially when it's labor against a trillion dollar company.
Voting with your feet is trying. Also keep your snarky (and highly boring) political stance to Reddit, whenever possible (always).
I hope you're proven wrong too. I like to think this pandemic has accelerated progress on the worker's rights front. I want to believe workers as a collective have realized they're bigger than the companies they work for. This fight against Apple should be really interesting either way.
https://developerpitstop.com/how-long-do-software-engineers-...
The people who want to work from home and are being forced to work in the office, by definition aren’t “content”.
As far as the living arrangements, if the impetus for you leaving is to find remote work, how will changing to another job change your living situation?
I feel like being "content" involves a lot of other factors and trying to determine if someone is content means looking at other aspects of the job holistically. I've always detested yearly evaluations and the 'song and dance' one must do to write "corpo-speak" about their achievements and goals. Yet, that consistent displeasure has never outweighed the work life balance I've enjoyed so far. My concern is that in your framework I would be considered by definition, not content.
>"if the impetus for you leaving is to find remote work, how will changing to another job change your living situation?"
I don't see jobs as fungible. While you might be able to WFH the new company will have different benefits such as potentially worse health insurance, compensation that isn't as good, or fewer paid days off. You might end up working remotely for a company in another timezone and that might mean you cannot drop your child off at school anymore. That kind of thing.
Even if that’s not the case, being able to work remotely means you can choose to work in a lower cost of living area - ie basically any place away from Apple’s headquarters will be cheaper.
It would also be a very regressive company - one that I have never worked at in 25 years - that would frown on you saying “I’m not available during $x hours when I need to drop my kid off to school. That’s the benefit of working remotely. You have a meeting at 9:00 and can’t get home in time? Pull out your cellular equipped tablet and join the meeting
I once left home at 9:00 AM during a workday to see my parents 4 hours away. But it took a whole day after stopping along the way to attend meetings from my cellular iPad.
I logged in when I got to my parents and finished my workday.
I have meetings scheduled with someone on the opposite coast at 7:00 ET? I log out at 5, walk to the next room to my home gym, exercise and log back in at 7 to have the meeting.
We are very much a calendar culture in my org.
Very odd, seeing how you literally posted very fungibale things right after that. You know that you can just negotiate those things and only jump ship once you've found something that satisfies you.
If you wanted to make your point, you should've talked about actual barely-fungible things when switching jobs, i.e. if you're going to do the work you've been promised, your managers and company culture, etc etc etc
At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.
Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff.
But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
And the funny thing is, I absolutely understand the suspicion! It's just that, as a person in a leadership position, it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.
Hence why I admire what Apple has done, here. They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy, and now they're letting the staff make their decision about how they want to react to that policy. Whether you agree with the policy or not, that's far better than ambiguity or constant flip-flopping.
Leadership changes. People change their minds. Something can absolutely be a genuine intent today but that could change in a few years.
So I don't see how that kind of reasoning is useful when making an employment decision today. Getting up in arms about a purported future two years from now is just not rational, and is ultimately a byproduct of fear.
More broadly, this has always been true. Employers have always been in an position where they could change the terms of employment, and employees have always been in the position of being able to make a choice as to whether they would be willing to accept those changes. The WFH situation isn't special in that regard.
Second, this could go either way. Future leadership could equally decide Apple will go full remote. But the assumption is always that future change will take away the benefit rather than expanding it. That the slippery slope will always be to the worker's detriment. That's just another form of management distrust.
Edit: And oddly, given the current demand for positions in technology companies, that distrust is especially unfounded. Employees have never been more empowered. The sheer demand for labour means that any company instituting a policy that's broadly unpopular will lose staff. Absent a profound change in the labour market, in that context it would be insane for Apple to communicate a hybrid work policy, now, only to renege on it.
But, yes, in general I wouldn't make decisions based on what could happen in 2-3 years unless I really saw the writing on the wall and wanted to proactively spare myself the pain.
This seems like a reasonable assumption unless the labor seller is in very high demand relative to supply.
Which is precisely the situation we're in right now.
If that were true, we'd all have private offices, or at least the option, instead of open plan office space.
Flexibility is not forcing people to come some arbitrary number of days because reasons.
Absolutely true. Employees do not trust management for good reasons, because they have experience with management not being open and honest with them (speaking generally here, of course there are exceptions).
Management's goals are often counter to those of the employees. Whereas workers want good pay, flexibility, work/life balance, and so on. Management wants control, pay people less, have them work more, and so on. Many managers pretend they care about what the workers want, only to force on to them what they want. People pick up on that bait and switch after a few times. Again, speaking generally here, this isn't universal, but it is common.
Yes, there are companies that behave this way. And there are many companies that don't. As you say, it's not universal.
The question is: What kind of company is Apple?
I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.
>I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.
It is the kind of company that colludes with other employers to illegally gain advantage when negotiating with employees about pay and quality of life at work.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
If you want to believe people at Apple have changed, go for it. But in my opinion, it always behooves sellers of labor that buyers of labor are always playing an adversarial game. And vice versa of course.
Can you name some companies that don’t? Very few companies with more than a few employees are more concerned about the bottom line of their employees than the corporation. This is by design due to management training in business schools, motivation by managers to control and yield power over others to signal their prowess, and basic greed by business stakeholders to maximize their returns to name just a few reasons.
I used to work with them a lot in a past role, and the remote guys seemed to get disappeared much more quickly than the folks who had a home base.
When your boss is in Brazil or whatever and gets a savings target, he sorts a spreadsheet by salary and utilization and poof!
Usually the result of past "Say one thing, do another" sort of experiences. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
In the past decade or so, for instance, a lot of the rush to "open office" (which is Hell on Earth for the sort of deep work a lot of tech types are typically paid to do) has been surrounded with all sorts of talk about the benefits of people and ideas colliding and such... mostly coming from people who have an office with a door that closes.
There's a place and time for those ideas, and it's the various "watercooler" places a typical office has - break room, lounge area, etc. "I am not working on something, let's BS on some ideas!" But there's a time and place for "not having random conversations," and it would be where people try to get work done. It's exceedingly hard to focus on deep work when there are lots of conversations around, and having gone from one extreme to another (open office with probably 100 people in line of sight to my own dedicated shed office), even if you know how bad it is, you don't realize how bad it really is. I listen to a lot less music now, and a lot of what I listen to is quieter and instrumental. In the open office plan, I'd acquired an appreciation for some pretty aggressive metal - because it was better than random conversations. And if I'm in the middle of something, I don't get constantly jacked out of the groove by other people being bored or hungry or such. There are many days out in my shed when I couldn't tell you what time it is without explicitly looking, and on more than one occasion it's been my wife pinging me, "Hey, you coming up to the house for dinner?" I'd been buried in something technical for the last few hours and had no idea it was dinnertime.
But despite all this, a lot of tech companies still try to spin "butts in tiny seats with people all around them" as somehow better.
Anyway, if nobody believes what management is saying, there's probably a very good reason for it.
Which in turn makes the executive team suspicious which makes them hint at even just one day a month which makes people suspicious which ...
I dont have any solutions - but I agree with you.
> They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy
That is all you can do while hoping that both sides (and yes in this case there are good people and bad people on both sides) chill the fuck out.
Then it sounds like they probably do want to a full return to in-office work, but don't think they can get away with it. If the argument from your leadership doesn't begin with "according to these very clear numbers, our profitability as a business has suffered due to remote work," then it's reasonable to consider what the real reason might be: Wanting to exert control, or the sunk cost fallacy of leasing commercial real estate, or a justification for managers to have someone to manage. Who knows? These things are often not well explained. But anything except an existential business risk is a bad reason as far as I am concerned, when the "resources" so clearly want it to go otherwise.
I said "not the least of which because". I didn't say that was the only reason.
This is precisely the kind of cynical reading-between-the-lines that I'm talking about.
But, it was the only reason you gave.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I wasn't attempting to give you a complete and thorough explanation of our work-from-home policy or the reasoning behind it, but rather just one (very important) factor that's part of the overall calculus. I believe that was clear from the context.
> At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
The issue in my org is that, starting from the executive level down, everyone is saying "we are not forcing people back to the office", but no official policy has been written and published that lays that down in writing.
Then mouzogu came along implying that, even with a written policy, they still wouldn't believe it, thus the tangent about being frustrated.
But in my own org, today, absolutely staff have good reason to feel uncertain, if only because fear is filling the communication vacuum.
As for karaterobot's comment, they extrapolated a brief remark into a conspiracy theory. Rest assured, when communicating with my staff, there's a lot more nuance that's being conveyed.
It sounds like you have a disconnect with your ICs if you don’t understand why they don’t trust you.
Seems like this has absolutely been the case. FAANG and the like aren't gonna to willingly lose 10-20% of their staff unless in office work was more productive. The business will make their decisions based on what will make them the most money at the end of the day. They aren't politicians seeking power, just profit. If remote is more profitable, we will see remote companies dominate the scene in the next few years, but as of now, all management has to go off of is reports showing productivity went down during WFH.
Profitable for the company != profitable for a given manager.
What do you think the lack of trust comes from? We have a large body of evidence that management does things in exactly this way. You can argue that this evidence isn't germane, but you can't argue that it doesn't exist.
The technology industry in general is one with some of the most empowered workers in the economy. The incredible imbalance in labour supply-and-demand means that salaries and benefits are sky high, work conditions tend to be quite favourable, and employees have a ton of options in selecting employers that have positive work environments.
And yet there are some who seem to think that tech workers are continuously under attack from heartless corporations looking to maximize profits at all costs, even at the expense of workers.
Absolutely, if you're working in, I dunno, service or manufacturing industries where labour supply is high and anti-union efforts have resulted in a rollback of labour rights, there is every reason to be concerned.
But in tech? I genuinely have no idea where this perception comes from or how it can be justified given the current structure of the labour market.
The labour market for tech has been on fire for nearly 20 years now. There was barely a blip during the 2008 crash that evaporated huge chunks of the economy. During COVID demand for labour went up despite massive disruptions in the economy. I swear I've been reading articles about labour supply shortages in tech for as long as I've been in the industry.
I honestly have no idea where this fear comes from.
Please, I'm very curious to know: in what way is the situation for engineering labour "precarious"?
There's also concern about whether the stack I have experience with will be around in five years (particularly bad in the Web arena), concern about will I be able to get a job after I'm forty, concern about will I be able to get a job if I have to whiteboard leetcode exercises, etc.
Plus, if you have a mortgage in a high cost of living area (likely if you are in tech) with a family of four, say, your burn rate is pretty high, which is fear-inducing. How long can you afford to pay a $1 million mortgage with no job? Even if you think you will probably be okay, there is a non-negligible (with unknown probability) that you might not find a job and, say, lose your house. There is a potentially huge tail-risk in switch jobs. So even if the market is good in general, there is a risk that if it is not good for you there might be a disaster. On top of this, you read about plenty of layoffs when the economy turns poor, so you know the company is not likely to care about your personal situation. Whether or not the situation is actually precarious, the risk makes you feel like it is.
(In my case, freelancing has been helpful for the fears, because you look for work so much more frequently, and your perspective on your work options, and even what you are selling changes.)
I've found things made more sense once I realized that the political structure of modern corporations is essentially a kingdom. I think the cynicism of management comes from a combination of factors. First is that the individual contributors have no political voice, so decisions are made for them and they just have to live with the results. Second is that without the individual contributors there is no product, so the ICs fulfill management's goals, but nobody (on a structural level; individual managers may vary) is even asking the ICs what they want. Third, management routinely makes decisions that make the ICs life less pleasant [1], and frequently the ICs know of / are using / know they have the capability to build a system that they want. Fourth, management naturally attracts the people who want power; leaders enable those under them, but rulers tell their underlings what to do. Between the nature of the job and the failings of people, management tends to attract rulers, not leaders. Fifth, tech people tend be individualistic / mavericks, and those kind of people dislike being ruled, especially when the rules are lousy.
This could probably be summarized as ICs want autonomy, mastery, and competency (see Dan Pink). Many tech people got into tech on their own, so have a high sense of autonomy; the corporate structure tends to squelch autonomy. To make it worse, management does not appear to value the ICs, even though the king wouldn't eat if the farmers didn't farm. But ICs have no power within the system, so the best they can do is go quit.
Cynicism is the refuge of the powerless.
[1] The most egregious example I've seen was one very large company had needed a QA system. The IT department liked a particular software package, and apparently nobody else liked it. Probably because it was completely unfit for bug tracking. So, naturally, the company got the package IT wanted. Using it was completely miserable.
Unless you are in the c-suite and are also the board, you can't make those promises. Your job is to say these things and gain employee trust, only to have a different set of orders come from on high.
If my management expects me to renege on a commitment that they've told me I can make, then I can't trust management any more than my staff can, and I will no longer be willing to work for that company.
Honestly, it's like folks around here don't grok that a) employees are actually empowered, and b) management knows that.
Fool me 7 times ...
Same reason I don't like "well let teams decide". It doesn't force the business processes to update themselves to the divergent realities, it pushes all of the burden onto teams and individuals instead, which is not good in aggregate for these sorts of things.
Unfortunately for your argument, their policy speaks to their attitude, which is "fuck what you think". Anyone with a basic understanding of human power dynamics correctly interprets this policy as "in a year all you peasants will be back with your arses in your seats where we can see you". The statement is the evidence.
>But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
The fact that you have a problem with this proves our point. You are not approaching this from the perspective of "how can I empower my team to do their best work and make us all a ton of money". Your frustration is "I know better and these idiots won't do what they are told".
And the fact that you claim to be unable to understand these basic ideas means that either (a) you do understand and are lying or (b) are incompetent, and in either case, your team has come to the correct conclusion.
I look forward to hiring a ton of Apple devs while also being disappointed that macOS will continue to get worse.
There's unquestionably a very strong strain of "management" in our culture that consists almost solely of a) distrusting the employees, b) therefore trying to physically monitor them at all times, and c) justifying their own existence by calling for many hours of (in-person) meetings every week. Personally, the institution I work for has claimed—in defiance of all logic and obvious reality—that certain jobs here can only be done in the office, all the time, and thus anyone in these jobs (which is basically everything below Director-level) seeking to work remote even part of the time will be denied.
Your company many not even have any of these people. I don't know. But so many of us have heard the stories from so many others who do have management like this that we would be stupid not to be wary of any manager—on up to the C-suite/owner/board—who seems unenthusiastic about remote work.
Six months from now you get a new CEO and they want asses in seats immediately. What do you say then?
Just reordering them:
> I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office
> the executive team has been ambiguous
> it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise
You can claim all you want but if the CEO and all the chief officers are not the one making it all clear and not just taking about it at a standup but in black and white on paper. Then it means nothing and what you claim means nothing too to your employees. Like someone said next step after that is to put it in the contract.
Also it’s up to you and the other managers and officers, and not the people bellow you, to create a trusting environment and trust with your team. It’s frustrating you to hear comments like that but it should be instead a red flag for you about the health of your team. Because it’s even more stressful and frustrating to be in the very seat of an employee where there is no trust at their work and the leaders are vague about critical part of their work life and don’t care and (not pointing finger at you but just saying) are just frustrated when they voice their concerns instead of listening and acting as leaders.
Nobody is going to pay Bay Area salaries so you can live in the woods of Idaho or whatever.
[1]: https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-w...
Worker solidarity raises us all up. Support workers in improving their workplaces rather than blowing them off for making slightly more.
Someday you'll have concerns about your job and you'll wish tech workers stood by you on the picket lines.
I don't pretend to understand all the grievances of nurses, concrete pourers, or railyard workers, but when they say "this is a problem for us" I'm there in support.
(Sarcasm)
It doesn't make sense to go back to the office for five days a week when we've been working productively during the pandemic already for two years.
I'm all for remote work but calling it "time theft" feels a bit weird.
You knew these things were a requirement when you signed your contract, right? If you didn't want these things then why didn't you either made a point of them in contract negotiations or simply went to a company that allowed remote work from the start?
This is not entirely fair. Pre-pandemic, remote work was much more difficult to find.
I'm not saying this is how employers should react, but I found the arguments presented here just really one-sided and wanted to show where such a line of arguments lead.
I think reality is a bit more complex; the employer can turn this into an upside as well by saving expenses for office space, and possibly benefitting from the increased productivity of people who are more productive at home. And I think it's reasonable that employees ask their employers to look into these upsides.
Something I don’t see on HN is how the ideal wfh works for people who can’t afford a study. What if you live with your parents and share with a sibling?
This might not be the case for established six figure programmers in the states. But there are lots of people with less money who might value having a separate space to work.
Might even be the silent majority outside of highly paid developers.
Although now I've got an idea to make coffee shops produce more revenue I'm realizing if the CEO of Starbucks is reading this give me a call.
Another extroverted MBA who doesn't understand why many engineers need big, unbroken chunks of silence & concentration to do great work.
I say this as someone who works from home and is a huge WFH advocate.
We need to stop assuming every role in an org revolves around “I stare at my screen for 9 hours do not interrupt me.”
Having a team that's half remote/half in-person is worse of both worlds. What typically ends up happening IME is that the in-person half typically gets way way way more visibility than those working remote. It's especially worse if the company isn't remote first at all. It's especially terrible if the team is remotely distributed as well. I left my last company because my org had a time preference for their offices in Hyderabad, which isn't bad but they kept forcing mandatory meetings at 7 or 8 am. All the US workers hated it. The idea of core hours didn't exists, you basically had to adapt to Hyderabad time or you suffered.
I have no issue with remote teams or in-person teams, but having both in the same team is the worse.
That's a management problem, not a policy problem. Sorry.
I've been seeing more and more of this rude dismissal of other comments. They're discussing the general topic at hand by offering their experience. Your snarky reply degrades the conversation significantly more than them broadening the conversation.
Less of this, please.
I'm not so sure that's a blanket statement. If teams are properly managed it works out.
And as we all know, the difference between a skilled developer and a bad one is quite massive.
I'm with the engineer on this.
Not sure I would call him an extrovert either.
I understand that people like work from home, but implying engineering can’t be done in an office building is overselling the issue by quite a bit.
The products you listed are hardware products (with integrated software) which are much more difficult to work on remotely, especially in a company that prioritizes secrecy as much as Apple does.
From a hardware engineering perspective, access to equipment is also important; I have a decent lab setup at home, but I've still needed to go into the office regularly to access some testing tools.
<Looks at his desk in his home office. It's full of prototype boards he's doing software for.>
Difficult?
> especially in a company that prioritizes secrecy as much as Apple does.
But that's Apple's problem, not the employees' problem.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/09/apple-park-employees-op...
I think even office areas are not equatable and greatly depends on the team.
Yes, you need that focus time. But running into someone on another team can be very valuable - you might learn that they're solving the same problem, you might learn that they're consuming the same API you're trying to figure out, you might learn that they're planning on working with your team in a few weeks, etc.
I would argue the benefits of having more of your state in Slack more than make up for “surprise productive watercooler meeting” thing that managers are so hot on. I think I’ve had that interaction maybe twice in 25+ years, and one of those times was just pointless gossip in the end.
Out of all the companies out there, I'd imagine Apple benefits from this the least. With all the badge-locked doors, literal curtains hiding projects from one another, and internal NDAs preventing one engineer from even disclosing what they are working on with another engineer, cross-pollination of ideas is going to be almost impossible. "Serendipitous conversations" is not something that comes to mind when one thinks about Apple's internal engineering culture.
That's a good point. I would go so far as to say that the majority of what engineers do is communicate with their future selves and other engineers, in that writing software is to use a communication medium. What code you write today will need to be read and understood later. What the code does on the computer is only a part of software.
But enough about the Wall Street Journal
At Apple employees in a hallway will not be allowed to talk about each other's projects at all. All the product directives are strictly top down. As an individual engineer you have zero say in the product and very little in broader engineering decisions.
Most of my success has been because I'd spoken, independently and unofficially, to people in unrelated divisions who hadn't met who _really needed to talk_. I don't expect others to take this on because they're almost definitely busier than me. And I don't necessarily like taking to people, but I'm really good at this one stupidly simple thing, and I'd rather be the one getting dragged into the meetings instead of everyone else so they can focus.
It's why corporate org charts are so bullshit to me; the real work happens when people can form their best structures, which typically takes knowing who you're working with or being known by someone who can protect that for you. For some, that's churning out work while being with their families way the fuck away from everyone else. For others, it's being wherever they can get some perspective and inspiration digging in and deciding something about the trajectory of the org they're at, usually involving people. If it works, it's valid.
And... I would say a majority of the major project setbacks / failures I've seen over my career have not been due to engineering failures, but have been due to either:
1) Misalignment or lack of agility about priorities / goals and inter-team dependencies. Situations where people and teams put their heads down and do a lot of engineering... that ends up not being the right engineering.
2) Interpersonal conflicts that simmer, escalate, and aren't defused early enough and harm collaboration.
In theory, both of these could be addressed well in fully remote environments, with careful product, product, and people management.
In practice, I have personally seen it be much easier to head these problems off in environments where people are having regular informal face-to-face and non-transactional interactions. The lunch / coffee break / hallway-chat-after-the-meeting sort of discussions. Even being in separate buildings across a large tech campus has been a barrier to this.
Again, I would be personally happy to WFH, but I do feel I've multiple times seen significant project and company-level benefits from shared workspace interaction, so there are tradeoffs.
We blew five billion dollars on Apple Park. its a monument and a testament to the ineffable power and glory of our babel made manifest. You will attend this church of man in blessed reverence or you will find the cold streets at your feet.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9764995/Facebook-de... "In addition to the housing and retail spaces, Facebook also plans to have 1.25 million square feet of new office, meeting and conference room space for the social media company."
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/this-is-the-first-look-at-... "Nvidia is preparing a new, massive building in Santa Clara, CA and this is it. Called Voyager, it will be larger than the building Nvidia just finished constructing by 250,000 square feet."
I could go on...
Is it though? Citation needed.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-will-sp...
I indeed did not realize that Apple Park wasn't the primary office building in that area, especially because of some of the articles that came out at the time. It's why I asked the honest question I did.
Like sure GitHub can be remote top to bottom, but an insane amount of Apples workflow is prototype driven and those prototypes cannot physically leave their secure facilities. Hard to argue (from a retention standpoint) that those people need to come in full time but the Apple Music people can do whatever they want.
What do you mean here, by "many", exactly? Kind of odd to argue that everyone should go to the physical office because "many" must, when, let's be honest, "many" here is probably less than 1%.
Are you challenging Ives to make a car that is a rounded rectangle with black mirror finish?
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apple-reports-second-...
[1] https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2021/12/apple-poisoned-me-...
[2] https://disasterarea.home.blog/2019/07/12/apple-headquarters...
To that end, 2 days a week in office seems like a great compromise. Personally, I wouldn't want a long commute to work, so I'd pay a lot to be near my office if I'm going in 5 days a week, but for 2 days a week, I'd have much less problem with say a 1 to 1.5 hour-each-way commute, which drastically opens up options for where I can live. And by requiring people to live in the area, these companies will still need to pay competitive salaries for that area, so this seems like a pretty good compromise.
You've got the order backwards.
Do they pay their teams in Canada, India, China, etc. as much as SV? No.
An engineering team in the same timezone whose members have a similar general context for how they approach work will be able to do all of that more easily.
In my mind, that explains much of the difference.
Of course, there are fully-remote teams and companies that work hard to overcome some of those obstacles, but it seems to be non-trivial to do so successfully.
The demand for good engineers far outstrips the supply, so companies are forced to compete with each other, which is why you get lots of other perks other than salary (free gym, free lunch, free dry cleaning, etc). Any big tech co that decide to pay the same regardless of location will have a huge advantage recruiting and maintaining remote employees. If a remote employee's only option is to jump to another FAANG company for a 15% salary decrease, what motivation will there be to leave?
Isnt this backwards? Isnt the cost of living high because the companies pay so much?
That next week, a recruiter from BigTech sent me a message about applying for a software engineering position. I asked them would it be permanently remote. They said “no”. I was about to end the conversation. But then we kept talking and they suggested I talk to another department that was always designed to be remote. I got a job there.
There are way too many opportunities for software engineers to be begging a company to WFH.
Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.
If a company can't evaluate an employee's performance while they are out of sight, that sounds like a management problem.
I think competent organizations will actually do the counter and embrace trusting their employees. IME, it is basically already impossible not to -- there's just way too much work and complexity for someone to accurately know exactly what all of their reports are doing.
At the end of the day we all ultimately know the truth even if we shy away from it to be nice… just how it goes
> They said that Apple's reasons for implementing the policy don't stand up, and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce
How does this even work?
Work from home also allowed for more schedule flexibility - it's hard to run an errand, pick the kids up from school, etc. when that's a 15 minute trip, rather than having to commute back home. This burden often falls disproportionately on women, and workers with families (who are likely slightly older than those who don't).
Removing the constraint of "You have to have the capital to move to SV to work here" allows hiring from a broader and more diverse pool of groups with less generational wealth, which means likely a more diverse body of job candidates.
Whether you agree with this or not, there is a logic behind it. Heck, I think they actually missed a couple axes of workers Apple is going to miss out on.
You could argue letting people work from home creates only more separation of cultures.. If you want bigger cultural diversity just treat everyone equally?
As a brief thought experiment for you:
- You have one pool of workers who work well in an environment with ambient noise and distractions
- You have a second pool of workers who need quiet spaces to concentrate
You treat them all equally by placing them in an open plan office with an excellent office-wide Spotify playlist.
Do you think you'll end up with both pools being proportionally represented?
That said, being remote or hybrid first seems like it would be a huge competitive advantage for a least some teams in Apple...like the Facetime team.
I tried using their "new" like zoom Facetime meeting with a URL feature for a work-related meeting. The lack of basic functionality like a text chat to share links and other notes in shows that Apple either doesn't actually use Facetime for their own remote meetings or they have no idea how most people use these types of tools to collaborate.
Instead I’m often felt feeling like someone at apple said “we can do this better” but gets distracted shortly after deploying the MVP.
If Apple suffers in the market as a result, their executives will be gently kicked out with substantial severance packages, and workers will be laid off en masse. That's an anti-worker result.
Win-win for executives, lose-lose for workers.
Does anyone take tossing around words like this seriously anymore?
I am pro working remotely, but this is just ridiculous.
In this case it seems like lazy people throwing everything at the wall, including prejudice, to prevent going to work.
I understand it may be more difficult for certain people, but I guess to me it's a non sequitur. Doing different things is varying levels of difficult for different people. Is the conclusion that nobody should ask you to do anything inconvenient?
If you can understand that, then you should understand that certain people will make rational decisions to minimize their difficulty. Remote work positions are more available now, and such people will likely naturally gravitate towards them. Consequently, non-remote positions will be disproportionally more able-bodied, which is exactly the point of the Apple employee statement.
It could certainly trend that way though. I don't see that as super problematic.
Extend that to everything. We shouldn't ask people to do something inconvenient when we could make it convenient.
I guess that's the core disagreement here. The people who wrote this letter do not think getting to the top of the skyscraper is an important part of the job worth sacrificing even a small amount of accessibility, and the executives do.
That’s a joke… we need the flexibility to cater to those who require it. We don’t need to make the baseline match the minimum. I think ADA and other items do well in this regard. So, just let a person WFH if attendance is overly inconvenient. It’s not the standard expectation. If working in the office is a baseline then It doesn’t mean they get to move to another country then claim the commute is now inconvenient. I think this wasn’t really much of an issue before Covid. Why is it now?
It was. The ADA was the result of an enormous amount of struggle and activism, and that movement continues to the present. Reach out to a local disability rights organization (I guarantee there's one near you) and ask if they had any concerns about office work before Covid. I'd also recommend the documentary Crip Camp if you're not familiar with this part of American history.
Edit: Here's an article from the start of the pandemic with lots of quotes relevant to your question. Sorry for the archive link, the site seems to be down right now.
> Watching these accommodations become available in a wide-spread way so quickly has been really painful. It hurts not only because I could have benefited from accommodations like this throughout my education, but because there are so many others who could have benefited, or were forced to drop out of school, or quit their jobs because their school or employer told them they were impossible to accommodate. These accommodations have always been possible but acknowledging that requires acknowledging the ableism behind their denial.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20200329102738/https://www.teenv...
It's a quick read and it's very good, I recommend reading it. Most of the issues discussed could be most easily addressed by allowing full remote work. Also, many of the people quoted have "invisible disabilities" - you may have coworkers like them without realizing it. This isn't just about ramps and elevators and other common accommodations.
If everyone has more flexibility, I don't need to risk my job asking for reasonable accommodations.
It also helps stomp on stupidity like requiring 14 people in a remote office in the middle of Nowhere, Midwest to wear black tennis shoes. (I own no tennis shoes and can't wear them.) There was literally no reason for it except to have a dress code.
In the end it's a trade off, and while we should have minimum standards of accessibility, after that point its a trade off between productivity, efficiency, and accessibility. If having the entire team in office 2x a week makes the average worker XX% more productive, should we sacrifice that for the one teammate who has a harder time to getting to the office? What about the coworker who choose to live further away? Should my team push meetings around because I am not a morning person? What about the dead worker who can understand coworkers better when in person, should we require everyone to go in every day for them?
The people who wrote this letter are arguing that the cost of full remote work is low or even negative, and the benefits are quite high, so the tradeoff is worth it. That's what this discussion is about, how should we balance the tradeoffs.
And yes, I don't know if they were meant to be sarcastic, but all of your questions are worth considering. If you have a deaf coworker that struggles with remote work, you should absolutely consider making changes up to and including in-person work. I can't tell you what tradeoff would be appropriate for your particular team and situation, but of course you should think about it and not just default to the status quo.
I also think many people with disabilities would argue that we as a society have not yet reached "minimum standards of accessibility".
That said, if they have Apple salaries, I'm sure they can work it out.
That said (again), they might need to spend more of that Apple salary than their peers to figure it out.
So, it's a bold and unsubstantiated statement, but might have some truth to it. Idk, wish they would cite sources.
Also isn't it pretty racist /sexist to suggest that just because your black or a woman, you won't be able to commute?
Why not?
> Also isn't it pretty racist /sexist to suggest that just because [you're] black or a woman, you won't be able to commute?
I don't agree with the framing of this... The question is whether or not WFO would impact these folks more negatively than their peers, not that they wouldn't be able to do it at all.
I think that is the argument being made.
People being priced out aren’t working in tech…
People who are willing to work in tech and are in the US are overwhelmingly white and Asian. I mean - 70%+ of my current job is Asian. White is a minority. Black, Hispanic, mixed race, and much else is all less than 10% combined. Mostly due to candidate pool…
Younger = less likely to have a family so commutes are not as big of an issue + the many responsibilities of having a kid that are easier to manage wfh
Whiter = this is the one that I have the least contextual evidence for off the top of my head, but feel safe assuming it's at least partially true given the other factors
Male-Dominated = the kid issues raised above certainly affect women more than men
Neuro-normative = designing your own wfh space + not requiring travel to an office seems pretty clearly better for neuro-divergent people, especially when the office still exists for those that need to utilize it
Able-bodied = much easier to wfh when you're in a wheelchair, don't have to commute with eyesight impairments, etc
I'm physically disabled. I use a wheelchair, which makes commuting hard, and a reclining desk which is too big to fit in an open office. I can't type much, so I sometimes rely on dictation and eye tracking. I definitely can't do that in an open office. I have a bunch of doctor's appointments, weekly PT etc. and sometimes I'm too fatigued to work, so I have to crash, so I end up with weird schedules.
despite this, I've invented several critical algorithms for extremely hard problems that helped our company scale, along with singlehandedly writing tons of formally-verified distributed systems infrastructure. I'm valuable enough to keep around despite being damaged goods. hence I have permanent WFH. still miss the office sometimes though.
Love to see the source of data that supports every single one of these issues.
I remember the Google memo from James Demore was backed by sources unlike this letter.
So why do white people love the office but non whited are comfortable only at home?
Whether it's correct or not is a separate question.
This may be an opportunity for companies who need technical teams, but aren't able to compensate at FAANG levels, to compete.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/nyregion/google-buys-buil...
The longer companies waffle on these policies the more likely it is they will hamper recruitment and face attrition to companies with more consistent policies.
In-office is much less effective when your team is distributed across multiple sites/time zones anyway which seems to be the new normal.