I can tell you from direct experience that he is no big loss for Apple. And he wasn't "Apple's Director of ML" as in the headline makes it sound like the top company lead for this topic. He was a director, among many. A reasonably sized group leader, not say, a JG.
GANs were just low hanging fruit that Schmidhuber already found. By most accounts Ian Goodfellow is kind of an asshole, and there was some drama about him a few times over the years. I don’t know the man, that’s just what I’ve heard.
You know, if it were anyone else I would probably ignore this comment, but you seem to do your homework, to put it mildly. Are you saying he's, uh, misrepresenting himself?
(I like Schmidhuber but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really evaluate his work or claims.)
he's had a decades-long tendency to just say that stuff has been invented before, sometimes by him, sometimes by obscure russians, that one time by Gauss. sometimes he's right, more of the time he's materially wrong, all of the time he's got no social sense.
To be fair, it’s not just him. Whenever I gave a poster at a conference, there was a chance that someone with a Russian sounding name would call the work trivial and say they had already published it in the nineties ;). Of course, on closer inspection that was not the case.
I don’t fully understand the tendency to do so, but it appears to be fairly widespread.
No, especially in fields that have as much citations and papers on average as ML/DL/RL.
If a paper in any other field was cited 44k in ~8 years, it must have made life-changing discoveries. Maybe some of the early papers on COVID-19 will reach that number.
I didn't take it to mean that, exactly. GANs are a very impressive trick. But their social cachet is not, as far as I'm aware, in proportion to people's success at using them for practical applications that generate revenue. So the implication might be, "Don't expect a brain drain in Apple's GAN department to have a significant impact on their business fortunes."
"Director of Machine Learning" is different than "A director of a machine learning project." "Director of Machine Learning" kind of implies that he oversaw a lot of machine learning projects across the company. Being "a director of a machine learning project" means you run a team. Big difference.
Companies typically hire these people to bolster their reputation and draw in new talent. It's the same reason companies keep hiring a guy like Guido van Rossum, even if they don't really care how productive he is.
And it's not just Google. A recent report showed that corporate execs are twice as likely to still be working remotely compared to the rank-and-file, even as their companies mandate returning to the office..
Oh, he said the most profitable business would be to buy people for what they're worth and sell them for what they think they're worth. The joke being people think they're worth a lot more than what they actually are.
Honestly, I think it's a bit much to call that "endorsing slavery" since the intention isn't to say that buying and selling people is good.
That’s a good point (and I think it’s true), but that’s not shown here. If he wanted to work remote, they probably would have let him. Maybe he’d be an ICT7 rather than a Director, but same pay scale. His reason for quitting was he felt a more flexible policy would be best for his team. Maybe he even likes being in the office but wasn’t willing to have to tow the party line for a policy with which he didn’t agree.
At Apple, Director is an executive. It’s sort of equivalent to making partner at a law or consulting firm. Your pay may double or triple as a result, and your annual comp is likely ~$1M+.
I really doubt that most people would give up a job in a satisfying office environment with people they truly enjoy working with on a product/project they are excited to work on everyday simply because of they are told they have to go in and meet those people they really groove with three times a week.
some people have a life outside of the office and found that the commute takes a very large toll on that. they didn't know previously, but now have two years of experience that they'll never forget.
Prior to the pandemic, people I worked with in NYC wore their commute times as badges of honor. “You commute 90 minutes each way? That’s nothing. I commute 2 1/4 hours each way”
Think of that. Some people were spending 4.5 hours commuting every day. And it was ok with them.
Amazon recently recruited me for a job, a job that I already do remotely for a different company, and I turned it down for the same reason. The job at amazon paid way more, but I'm far more productive and happier at home.
I see other jobs at amazon that are remote, but this particular department worked with hardware that they weren't interested in leaving the office. Again, I've worked remotely with similar hardware from the company that pioneered this type of hardware and have done so since 2008. We figured out security, remote testing, local development, software simulations, etc. and haven't had a single leak, hack, etc.
Maybe? I recently interviewed and nobody could tell me what the policy would be in a few months.
“It’s WFH today, but that’ll probably change. And you can always take our bus from your local AWS office to the office where the rest of the team may or may not be because we don’t know what our policy will be.”
I’d expect a company of Amazon’s size and stature to have a better plan than “whatever your VP wants this week.”
Why? The world changes around us, and the best businesses are capable of adapting to suit. It doesn’t make any sense to make promises that one can’t keep. They can’t promise that some teams can WFH forever, because it might not make sense forever. Nor should every team have the same policy, because different teams do different things.
I think it makes more sense to be non-committal than to make promises and then have to renege on them later. The latter makes people much more justifiably upset.
Why? Because people have responsibilities outside of work. People have children and spouses with chronic conditions that require them to be available at a moment’s notice to deal with, for example. And it’s not going to change just because some manager at ConHugeCo wants people back in the office. I cannot take a job without knowing that I’ll be allowed to work a particular way for the foreseeable future, as it just wouldn’t be safe for my family.
And yes, reneging on agreements is bad. Employers need to be forced to understand that humans have rights and their employees are humans. Telling someone their job is remote then changing that 3 months after they start should be illegal. Unfortunately, it’s not, so you’re SOL if you find yourself in that position.
I don’t either, but they could have at least been open about “we’re WFH today but going hybrid as soon as COVID allows.” Instead they waffled and hedged around and wouldn’t commit.
Add in several other factors… 1. the VP and extended team I would have been working with was in Seattle and this position was in VA. 2. There’s an AWS office down the street from my house but they were 100% non-committal about the position being located there (vs the new Arlington HQ2). 3. Would have been a new team with lots of new hires, so I could have just hired them locally (if deemed necessary, though I’ve managed remotely for years now with success so seems silly to me).
From what I hear, policy in general is wildly inconsistent within Amazon. I have heard all sort of stories from people at Amazon ranging from "world's best boss" to "horrific and Dilbertesque".
I am working for Amazon, fully from home. Zero expectation to ever step into the office. Each organization within Amazon is taking a different approach, leading to a lot of variability. Throwing this information out there in case anyone is put off by assuming that Amazon is demanding a return to office.
I can vouch for this as I am the only east coast employee on my west coast team at AWS and I also have no expectation of moving to west coast or returning to office. I have spoken to managers on other teams around Amazon and flexibility is entirely dependent on your director/VP (the manager 1-2 levels above your group manager).
If you’re considering an offer from Amazon I suggest you make it very clear from the start to your hiring manager your expectations on remote work and working hours. Theres some teams at Amazon that are taking a strong return to office stance and others like
mine that allow for fully remote.
guessing goodfellow has specific reasons for this move (like everyone), but feels increasingly like wfh has exposed gaps in our ability to manage or even measure the productivity of knowledge workers
I'm so happy to work for a company who tried to do hybrid and when no one showed up (no way i was going back its a 50 mile one way drive) beginning of April they just said we are now a remote company.
Apple, Google, etc are going to learn quickly and change to all remote soon too I bet. Weighing their prestige vs. the improved quality of life remote brings to most workers can not compete. Especially with company's like Air BnB which pays same very high salaries who says work anywhere in the world.
Overall a raise of 50 to 100k in salary would not get me back into any office and I live alone in a small town in south central PA. The pandemic forced me to find a new social life with new friends that Im equally enjoying as I did with friends I had at work (they are still around some socially but the connection isnt as strong).
I assume Ian wants to get back into research/publishing papers as well, he hasn't published any good papers in a while.
He probably wanted the industry experience/research of machine learning in commercial applications with the scale and support of Apple behind it. When Apple designs things they design it with a fixed narrow purpose. Where as with Google you build general solutions. I think he wanted the experience of both.
This return to office probably just gives him a good out after he accomplished what he wanted to do at Apple.
Let’s say he wants to get back into research. I assume you mean academia? Do you think academics should be forced back to office, I.e. campus? Should universities just be fully remote? Researchers don’t need in-person interaction with each other and neither do students?
These companies touting their solutions for creating a more connected world can't have it both ways. Apple was able to ship the M1 and roll out new iterations of many other offerings since the pandemic hit. They're just fine.
Apple didn't collapse since the pandemic hit, and the flexibility offered by remote work is far more valuable to lots of people than the loss of in-person collaboration opportunities. We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
> We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is to organize your coworkers. You have much more bargaining power about your work conditions as an organized union. The history of unionization stems primarily from workers demanding safe working environments.
Nonsense, the screen actors and writers guilds are formal unions and their members include all of the top Hollywood stars that pull down 7 figure+ paychecks from films.
Besides SAG-AFTRA, lawyers and doctors also have unions and it's essentially the only reason they're highly respected, since they've psyched everyone into thinking they're rare and valuable by making themselves rare.
The NLRA says "Nothing herein shall prohibit any individual employed as a supervisor from becoming or remaining a member of a labor organization, but no employer subject to this Act [subchapter] shall be compelled to deem individuals defined herein as supervisors as employees for the purpose of any law, either national or local, relating to collective bargaining."
...which effectively states that if a supervisor joins a union it's a no-op. The employer is not required to acknowledge their membership. In practice, unions specifically exclude managers for a bunch of obvious reasons related to their ability to bargain effectively on behalf of their members.
Your manager likely joined a union-ish entity open to supervisors. IIUC such entities are not protected by the NLRA and as such have few of the legal powers and protections that make a union a union. They’re basically affinity groups.
This means that manager unions do not gain the traditional protections from the law that other unions do. But - if a manager union and employer come to some agreement despite this fact, it has legal weight and the union can sue if the employer breaks the contract (and vice versa).
Managers, at least at the higher level like being discussed here, arguably do not need as many protections in order to be able to collectively bargain: Apple is likely to be much more concerned (and thus much more willing to negotiate) about 20 "Director of X" employees leaving than 20 engineers.
Or just to do what he did. Ian Goodfellow and probably all his team will have no problem finding another job in the condition they want. Apple don't have any monopole on AI jobs.
Until you want something different from those who wield power in the union. At least I can quit my job and work for a different company. In heavily unionized industries, you can't escape.
Having seen how several family members fared in union jobs (several different unions), I swore I'd never belong to a union or work any job that required me to be part of one.
They all had such an adversarial relationship with work. It's always us against them mentality. They could never see anyone in management as a human. I can't imagine living like that.
As far as I can tell, the unions didn't ever solve any of their biggest gripes, took money out of their paychecks for lots of non-work related political activities, and didn't come through when they really needed to on things like pensions or healthcare.
I have the same feeling having seen family members in unions. My mother is a really hard worker, and plays by the rules, and that means nothing in her union while her colleagues abuse sick policies, push more work into her and so on. All what matters there is tenure, not the quality of employee you are. My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
>All what matters there is tenure, not the quality of employee you are.
From what I understand is this is done because it's the fairest way. Unions, like anything, can be corrupted. It would be funny if the union rep's nephew always got promotions over other people. This is an attempt to prevent that. In other words, it's the least-worst way of doing it.
>My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
Possibly. In my experience, it's usually in the form of a $5 Starbucks gift card every year. It really depends on the position and the company. I've seen a lot of hard ass workers get treated like shit.
is it possible that adversarial relationship might exist even without a union but it would just be hidden?
personally, i think i would prefer a co-ownership (coop) scheme than union, since that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers... idk just a thought
> that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers
This is only true if everyone has exactly the same responsibilities, hours, working conditions and pay. All differences lead to divergences of interest.
well, there will always be a divergence (no two people have the exact same needs or wants) but i would argue being co-owner with others helps as a forcing function to help converge interests (you wouldn't be happy with a co-worker slacking off since they're also wasting your money/time not just 'the companys')
and there are many successful co-ops where people have different responsibilities, hours and pay, i don't think that is a requirement for co-ownership (though the variance is definitely less than traditional top-down orgs thats for sure)
> is it possible that adversarial relationship might exist even without a union but it would just be hidden?
It wouldn't happen in other countries because the US has a uniquely adversarial union structure, where Europe uses codetermination (ICs with board seats) and sectoral bargaining (don't have to convert one company at a time).
Since we’re doing anecdotes, a member of my family is an airline pilot and a member of the pilots union. It has been extremely effective in negotiating better working conditions and higher pay for my family member. Keep in mind that, absent union representation, being a pilot can be absolutely punishing, to the point of being dangerous.
Also, the company is able to maintain very high standards for the quality and skill of the pilots. There are not “useless Joe’s”, as evidenced by the fact that the planes don’t crash.
This family member is a diehard conservative politically but openly espouses the value of the union for representing his interests against the company.
Your biggest power, the option of resigning to work somewhere else, is still with you. You just get backup from the union for when you don't want to exercise that power.
Well, since the original question before we got distracted was about flexibility in how you work, you definitely give that up as part of a union. Your collective agreement will spell out how, when and where you work, how much you get paid and also compel you do to things in support of the union, even if you don't agree with them. Those are all pretty big individual powers.
Since we're on the topic of remote, why do you think the union agreement would not state location of work being 'member's preference' rather than a specific location?
The problem with this question is there are people, like me, for whom the answer is "a lot". I have repeatedly gotten my employer to do things for me that they would not have done on their own. They need me more than I need them, and we both know it.
This is also by the way the main dissenting opinion in the recent Amazon union vote. There were several people who were interviewed by the economist as voting no, who said that they'd never had a bad interaction with HR and had gotten everything that they asked for.
This is not the one-sided issue that pro-union activists act like it is, and that level of ignorance is what is holding them back.
Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer. I'm worth more than the average employee at my company, so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer.
On the other hand, if a union imposes some broad agreement on the company under threat of strikes, I can't convince my company to break that agreement on my own because I'm not more valuable than the entire rest of the company combined.
A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
> but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways.
This really isn’t true. What you’re describing isn’t even a zero sum game it’s negative sum, where hurting the other party is among your goals in itself. The company is interested in using you to make money and for many purposes happy, satisfied employees who are growing in productivity are good. All of those are also things the employees usually want.
Are employee and company interests fully aligned? Absolutely not, but if your employer’s interests are almost completely opposed to yours get out.
The trading with a grocery store is heavily regulated as well. They have requirements for storage and handling, their scales have to be calibrated, and there can be very strict fines for things like screwing around with sale prices.
The behaviour, motivation, and goals of individuals (including your boss and CEO) working for a business very rarely has anything to do with the goals of the business itself. There is a lot of pretend going on, but that is mostly just surface BS. Why do you think CEO’s spend billions buying back shares instead of using that money to invest in new products and other innovations that will make the business more successful long term? Could it perhaps be (gasp! horror!) that they care more about personal enrichment than making the business successful long term?
> Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways
I'm sad that you think this, and would urge you to analyze your situation to see if it's really true. My one piece of advice is that companies seek to minimize cost centers, but invest in profit centers. Get out of the former and in to the latter.
Cost centers: anything that improves your experience as an employee.
It’s smart to move out of it, but the fact that you have to in order to progress is a clear indicator why companies will perpetually undervalue talent - even in competitive markets.
If you can become an enemy of the union simply by being good at your individual-contributor job, maybe that's why unions haven't really taken off in software engineering.
I'd venture a guess that the variance in quality between a set of "professional" electricians and another set of "professional" developers is different by an order of magnitude.
Said another way, I can go down to the union hall and pick an electrician randomly and have a great deal more confidence in that person's ability than I could choosing a random developer off of LinkedIn to write my application.
I think certifications have something to do with this, but it's also the complete lack of understanding of what makes someone a good developer by management... this is entirely the fault of management and I don't blame a developer for trying to "fake it til you make it."
As a person not necessarily opposed to labor unions, I'm curious as to how the previous post was hyperbolic? Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal, so let's not act like union folks are all saints.
>Violence and organized labor go together like milk and cereal
What do you base this on? Movies?
Telling someone to strap on a helmet isn't a threat of violence to a reasonable person. Putting a stuffed rat on a ledge near someone's bed is also not a threat of violence. If it had a noose or something, you'd have a better argument.
Here's actual violence done against picketers and looked the other way by police in Alabama:
But cross a picket-line or hire on as a scab during a strike in a small town and you'd best watch your back... hence the motivation for the "wear a helmet" comment. My hometown was founded on steel and railroads and I knew of more than one person growing up that got jumped for not toeing the line and playing ball with the union.
I see what you are saying. Yes, violence begets violence, certainly. I would also argue that while not defending the morality, the violence against scabs are done by rogue individuals while violence against picketers are coordinated by using companies known for strikebreaking. The company typically yields a much stronger threat of violence than any individual union individual can, and has more sympathy of the "law."
The history of it is quite fascinating. Here's an example.
I'm in Montana these days and just finished a book by Michael Punke about the Butte Mining Disaster. It does a fairly good job of pointing out how basically we're all assholes when you get down to it.
This feels a little contrived. I work for an organisation with trade union representation and yes there is an agreed pay structure in place. This doesn't prevent management identifying particularly critical people and those people being rewarded/incentivised outside the norms of the pay scales (I am one of these people). Sometimes specific cases are discussed in the management/union meetings but not often and even then it's just a matter of management saying "Yeah that guy is the world's greatest widget engineer if he leaves we're screwed so we created a new job to keep him here".
It doesn't really go beyond that unless it's perceived that management are routinely violating the spirit of agreements and/or when the relationship between the union and management has already completely broken down.
The completely different industry structure. The film and theater industries work on time limited projects with a defined beginning, end and deliverable and most teams break up at the end of each project. Under those circumstances all a union can do to protect members is dualise, making lives better for insiders and harder for outsiders by restricting entry.
Long lasting organizations that have multiple overlapping projects with unions end up with compressed wage structures because the union campaigns for the median worker and the structure does not militate against that.
> Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer.
Say, I am not.
> so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer
I cannot, see above. Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
Well, based on the fact that I'm part of the majority i.e. not as valuable as you, it works very well for us (who are not the World's Greatest Widget Engineer).
> Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
No, I do not believe you are entitled to a wealth transfer from people who are better at your job than you are. (Or, to put it another way, you're certainly free to do a little collective bargaining if you'd like, but the World's Greatest Widget Engineer has no reason to join your union.)
I think a lot of devs are led to believe they're the World's Greatest Widget Engineer but what they've really fallen for is the "Hank Hill Special Deal" lol.
Thats ok - they are one in a million anyway. We are talking about people in general, not exceptional diamonds (they clearly can take care of themselves).
Why hasn't he been promoted to management? Most companies don't have a career track for the single most productive IC ever, and he's probably capable of improving other people's work anyway if he managed them.
Because being an effective individual contributor and being an effective manager require different skills? Because the goal of a software company is at least nominally to produce software, and paying people who are good at producing software to produce software is how you produce software?
Even if you did promote your best engineer, that just means that a different employee at your company is now your best engineer and the same dynamics apply. (Until, of course, you promote everyone competent to management, and then your organization is doomed to slowly suffocate itself. Then it's beyond saving, union or no union.)
According to a family friend who worked for the UAW (the huge American auto workers union) the answer to this is yes. I suspect the answer is actually "it depends", but I don't know of any documented examples of unions whose members are allowed to make a separate peace. There are people in the comments who it sounds like have done so, perhaps they can weigh in on the mechanism.
Yes, you would be compelled to support union actions, such as job action in support of collective goals you don't agree with, and get to pay for the right to do so as well. You would not be allowed to negotiate individual concessions for work or skill beyond the norm. Everyone is even more focused on "fair outcomes" (read: the same) than in any non-union environment.
We're not interchangeable cogs in some manufacturing machine; we're extremely skilled experts in the biggest seller's market of our careers. Why anyone would want to unionize right now is beyond me.
It’s a such a coincidence that those are the same talking points the employees were forced to here during the many mandatory meeting. Also interesting that the NLRB found those forced meetings illegal.
They have weekends in China and it’s not because of any labor movement. Working conditions and compensation increase because of supply and demand dynamics, which unions are a part of but not necessary for. For another example of countries that do not tolerate independent labor movements where economic growth led to better working conditions see Vietnam.
Why? A totalitarian/authoritarian government that bans strikes where all worker’s organizations work hand in glove with the government and management describes fascist and communist approaches to unions perfectly. The historical roots of the ruling party are hardly relevant.
I have lived in China for the past 11 years. Middle income countries like China (average income per capita same as Thailand) often have people working more than five days a week. That’s a choice. Taking convenience stores as an example FamilyMart has six day weeks with 16 hour shifts. Lawson’s and 7-11, I think have five day work weeks with nine hour shifts. FamilyMart workers make as much as university graduates starting in decent companies.
There are similar splits in professional level work. There are jobs available where you ~never work six days a week and others where it’s routine. Trust me when I say no one at Nike or Booking in Shanghai is working 996.
My logic does not suggest the lack of unions and organized labor causes six day weeks. Six or seven day working weeks are the natural condition. Economic growth allows for different consumption leisure trade offs. Unions can only very indirectly effect economic growth. They matter much less than the ability to quit your job and find a new one easily. Firms desperate for workers are what make working conditions better, much more than unions.
Every year, Australian employees are entitled to 4 weeks of paid annual leave, two weeks of paid sick leave, 6 months of paid long service leave after 10 years of employment, about 10% of their salary paid into their retirement investments (superannuation).
Unions even up the negotiation power imbalance between employers and workers. Union power has been severely curtailed over the last few decades and as a consequence workers have seen stagnant wages, rising inequality of compensation and the rise of insecure work.
There's plenty of evidence to support the assertion that collective bargaining leads to better outcomes for workers. A rising tide lifts all boats.
> Those laws were a consequence of industrial action by unions.
You didn’t read my message, because this is what I already said. Unions helped push it into law. The unions are all but dead in the US, but weekends are still here because it is a law. What value do the unions provide now?
Your lawyer is your agent. A lawyer representing a group of which you are a part is representing the group, and your interests and the groups can diverge.
What power? You as an individual employee have absolutely no power to change Apple's behavior. Case in point the director of this story quitting because they couldn't convince Apple to change.
As the other comment mentioned the biggest individual power you have is quitting and a union doesn't prevent that.
You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you.
The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
The company doesn't want to give anyone a raise. They are not happy to give anyone a raise. Companies do not willingly increase their costs, full stop.
You could maybe make an argument that companies may increase wages for high performers for retention reasons, because needing to replace valuable employees is a large, if somewhat intangible cost, but that's pretty iffy. Companies are made up of and managed by humans, who are notoriously short-sighted and willing to discount potential risks when there are financial incentives to do so.
50% of the time Joe Useless makes more than you do already, because they joined later and market rate for the position shifted upward. You'll still need to fight tooth and nail, alone, individually, to reach parity, even if you're a top performer. Your manager isn't usually going to say "hmm, we're paying Joe Useless 1.2X, while we're paying Sally Superlative 1.0X--we really should pay Sally 2.0X! Your manager will be overruled by the CFO if they do suggest this anyway. Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
Ultimately, I'd prefer a system where Joe Useless and I fight for equal wage increases collectively, because the balance of power is such that we're more likely to get them than each of us going it alone. Joe Useless is gonna be there anyway unless the company decides they're so useless as to fire them. So long as Joe Useless is there in the same role as I am, I don't care if they get equal pay, especially not if they're helping in the fight for increases in our equal pay.
> Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
In that case, instead of banding together with Joe Useless to strong-arm the company into setting money on fire (from management's perspective), you're better off changing companies as frequently as the market will tolerate.
False dichotomy. You can do both, and an industry-wide effort to exercise our collective power would likely increase the salaries obtained via either route.
The problem is that you are more likely to get a wage increase. Not a wage increase that moves the needle for you individually.
I love seeing the “union fought for years, after many strikes employees ‘win’ and get a 5% wage increase over the next 4 years” news articles, but they never strike me as something that I’d want to apply to me.
Certainly my company is increasing wages for high performers. They may not be happy to do so, but they’ll do it to retain talent they desperately need.
I imagine this would be different if the sector I was in was different, but right now, for software development, it doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s too much variation in skill levels to collectively bargain for anything.
> The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
Then don't organize the union to work like that. A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
> A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
Are you a member of any union? the #1 thing they do is secure a collective bargaining agreement which precisely spells out the pay structure for everyone covered.
You have options choose a pay structure as a union. There is not a single pay structure to which all unions must adhere.
The suggestion is that Joe and Sally must be paid the same even though Joe is "useless". That is not the case. When creating a union, you can choose a different pay structure. The Screen Actors Guild, for instance, has very wide variation in how much members are paid.
The free-rider problem applies to basically any system with cohorts. It's part of the incentive structure, for sure, but it's not the only part. As long as you accept utility in collective systems (ie if you're anything but a pure anarcho-capitalist), you recognize that in some cases (such as public roads) the value outweigh the costs of the free-rider problems. Once you're past that point, it should be all about tradeoffs and execution. Yet, in the US at least, a strict set of specific issues – like organizing employees and health insurance – brings out the free-rider issue every time, conveniently deadlocking the conversation before it even begins.
I have noticed in the US more than anywhere else I've lived, the most important thing to everyone seems to be that no one gets anything unfairly. I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.
It’s a perennial wedge issue in American politics. These wedge issues ultimately benefit the two party system at the expense of the governed, as the underlying issues are never resolved, just papered over for a term or so.
It's a strange attitude, to be sure. In my experience, many Americans have the view of "if it's not perfect, it's not worth doing" when it comes to large-scale social or legal concepts. It's like they don't accept that there's going to be inefficiencies in any large organization.
And, yes, so many rail against something like single-payer healthcare because it would be "unfair" for them to pay for someone else's care, when they already are doing the exact same thing as part of private healthcare! Not to mention it would be cheaper, but paying $5,000 for single payer is seen as evil when people are paying $10,000 for private healthcare! (both figures are simply illustrative and not intended to be factual examples, before anyone rips my head off)
The private healthcare insurance industry is a private coverage holders’ Potemkin village prisoners’ dilemma, holding uninsured potential free riders hostage to prevent a sunk cost fallacy from becoming a self fulfilling prophesy of the insureds’ own design.
> I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.
It's a big generalization to say that, because one side of an ideological divide behaves one way, the other side must, too! I think rather the Democrats (we don't really have a Liberal party) are a party that takes some tentative steps in the direction that it's better for everyone to have something, even if there are some people who don't deserve it; that is, that the malady you diagnose is a Republican, not an American, preoccupation.
Of course you can look back in history and find instances where Democrats have embraced such positions, too, and you can find plenty of odious things even in today's Democratic platform, but I think that today's Democratic party is consciously, if very slowly, trying to distance itself from exactly the mindset that you describe. But maybe I'm blinding myself to this behaviour in an attempt to justify my adherence to the lesser of two evils. Do you have examples?
I'm not saying that everyone must behave the same way, I'm saying that capital L Liberals here are not really that different from capital C Conservatives in any way except degree. Both would rank as lowercase c conservative compared to most of the rest of the West and both have this mindset that I have only really noticed in America.
I specifically am not using Republican and Democrat because the parties are not really important to the point. Libertarians and Greens also have this "imperfection is worse than nothing" mindset.
An example where Liberals needed to relax and not let perfect be the enemy of the good was the 2016 presidential election (and almost 2020 as well). The number of people who said things like, "I know Trump might win if I don't vote for Hillary, but too bad!" was so high that it actually happened.
That's true. The point I was trying to make is that everyone-but-ancaps implicitly support at least one collective system. I just picked that one because it's rare.
> You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you.
What if you're the Joe Useless on your team and you don't know it? A lot of people here seem to think they're the 10X dude but what if they're the 0.1X dude lol. What if you're really the 10X dude but your manager thinks you're the 0.1X dude because they don't like you as a person?
Those systems have good and bad sides to them, but I do think the good outweighs the bad.
I think the 0.1X guys (though I wouldn't use that term) tend to not be here as work is just work for them, not a hobby they are absorbed in at all hours.
Not saying that's healthy but I'm sure being on HN has a strong selection bias on 10X people :)
I've worked with many people with varying degrees of competence and I find that the "go out and satisfy your curiosity" is strictly an above average thing.
The average people tend to rely more on courses and certificates, anything approved by the vendor. And they tend to align with the vendor's gospel. If something is not in the training or documentation it doesn't exist. They are the kind of people that will just open a ticket when something doesn't work and go through the hoops for months :)
The really good ones don't really care about such things and just dive into a problem until they thoroughly understand it using any trip of resources necessary (ideally peer to peer info because official info, from the vendor tends to be politically/marketing biased). I would definitely put HN in the latter category.
But I don't think they are useless. The former are really good in operational roles and the latter more in design and architectural ones.
Those that want to rewrite everything in the cool tech of the day, or want to TDD everything or write Electron applications work maybe not at 0.1x but certainly 0.5x of the ability of a normal programmer.
This is strangely individualist; maybe the company or your team would fall apart without him and he's doing something you don't personally know how to measure.
I now try to convince anyone who cold-calls me to join a trade union.
The employer can’t be all that good if they’re ignoring the do-not-call registry. And I think it slightly increases the chances of bad actors ceasing cold-calling.
I like working from an office and I like informal interactions with colleagues — from chatting over coffee to peeking around and seeing who is free to whiteboard a problem.
Same here. Except I also hate wasting time on commuting, not having the flexibility to take care of a home-related task in the middle of the day, etc. So the experiment to find a balance has begun…
Same here. I currently work at a very prestigious tech company and I’m surprised by how boring it actually is.
There’s hardly anyone around in the office and frankly I couldn’t care less about the free stuff. They pay me enough that I can go out and buy my own snacks.
What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’ll never work somewhere 100% remote or where employees don’t have an expectation of at least 3 days in the office.
Mind you, being able to spend a day a week at home vs full week in the office is quite nice.
Is being in the same physical place the requisite for being 'a team'? Open-source work traditionally has been distributed, and I bet it often results in teams that are closer than the ones from work.
Is a comfortable car with plenty of fuel a requisite for a long road trip? No, you can go by foot, horse, etc. it sure does help though.
Open source work is a infinitesimally small proportion of *work*. No I don’t think it results in teams that are closer at all, I think (and can present no data either) that it’s just as likely to result in bickering and infighting. Guido leaving Python might be a good example.
> currently work at a very prestigious tech company
So do, and I have also worked for scrappy 100% remote startups. The 100% remote startup had better team cohesion and better knowledge transfer with more opportunities to learn.
You might get those things in the office, but pre-pandemic, at least my office environment provided none of those things. Don't conflate a good team dynamic with an office environment. I used to pair program with a guy for four hours a day and I never met him until we both left the company.
> What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’m not sure what your role is but zoom calls really don’t mean anything as an IC. Not unless you’re responding to or handling an outage and debugging on the fly.
What you produce and how well it works is how you’re measured. Documentation and written communication is equally as important.
I totally understand your pov and it’s often the one shared by full remote folks who enjoy it that way: “I produce good work nothing else matters”.
I find that a really sad, if not completely rational, outlook.
See I don’t want to work with someone who outputs great work only. I want to work who can share a joke, help out, bounce ideas of, experiment with new things and fail/succeed.
In other words, I like work to be joyful and productive.
I completely agree. I've always worked remotely. This separation is all I know, and I can't imagine why someone would want something different. As a manager, I don't conduct "team building" exercises. I try to ensure that collaboration is flowing, but I don't care if team members are only talking about work or if they develop some social relationship.
This is in stark contrast to my wife, who had worked in the office before the pandemic and continued with the same philosophy during remote work. She finds my way too cold, and I find hers too wasteful. I would dread working on her pseudo-remote environment.
I have times and tasks for which I'm more productive at home, and times and/or tasks where I'm more productive at work.
Good in-person collaboration, sometimes accidentally overhearing someone else, is invaluable. At the same time, people can get off task and chit chat becomes a hindrance.
Sometimes we all know our role and what has to be done, we just have to get it done. Sometimes we don't know how to solve a problem.
Some employees don't have a good work environment at home. A Ph.D. student with a young special-needs child felt horrible ignoring his daughter while working on his dissertation at home (where his wife was caring for his daughter), bit coming into campus was far better for him, productivity-wise and psychologically.
I think the balance might be a dynamic one, in that what's best can change over time and task and stage of a task and stage of a person's career. And by employee, and by task.
Being a good manager must be immensely difficult, but also being an employee also requires adapting and compromising between all of these trade-offs.
I'm on my second highly-collaborative, fully remote team and I'm always learning a lot and challenged. You're "teacher's pets behind zoom calls" example is very oddly specific and not a thing I've encountered.
I believe this is a problem with OKRs more then with remote work. It is too easy to game the OKR process by choosing easy but showy OKRs, doing the bare minimum and declaring victory.
I've been remote for 10 years and before that worked on a bunch of distributed research teams and it is perfectly possible to have a highly functioning distributed/remote team that really takes ownership. I mean look at open source projects.
Further office culture tends to favor a bunch of young people who all live in the same city and have time to go out for drinks after work etc. I'll take a bunch of crazy odd balls scattered across the globe doing their own thing any day.
That only kind of helps ... and can lead to micromanagement.
I've found a better approach is to focus on key metrics or KPIs and empower people to go after them without a heavy planing cycle. Like if your app is slow and buggy the OKR process tends to favor waterfally quarter long projects like "rewrite X in Y." A better approach is often to get good at monitoring and prioritize cycles spent on maintaining, optimizing, and refactoring existing stuff with a possible incremental rewrite.
Is this a bad thing? I understand that it might be for some people, but others like me think that's great. I don't work to make friends; I do it make money and build something interesting in the process. The fact that remote work allows me to minimise social interactions while still being effective is great.
Our experiences are very different then. We do 1:1 personal zoom calls, we’ll play board games online, we have a drop-in company-wide hang out every other week, and we pair quite a bit and very often through a zoom link in slack asking for help.
I guess it depends on what you want out of work. If you’re the type who wants work to be _only_ work and absolutely nothing more, then I can see how the forced interaction at an office would be beneficial. Otherwise a strong culture around people and collaboration makes the office largely irrelevant. Yes, you do miss out on the random hallway interactions, but there is no perfect solution and I happily trade that for no commuting, hanging with my dog all day, mid-day naps, my own office, throwing in loads of laundry during the day, private bathroom, better coffee, etc etc etc.
These sound like separate problems. Your coworkers being more interested in perf than work will not change just because you force them all to commute for two hours a day.
My experience talking to a lot of people both for and against wfh has been that people with shitty teams hate being remote, because it's hard to do when everyone is putting in zero effort to make remote work "work." The other big group that wants wfh to end are the "my coworkers are my only friends" people. Good for them, i guess, but personally i think that's not a wise way to structure one's life. I understand why companies love it and want to foster it though.
A very small number say things like "I find it difficult to collaborate with anyone over the internet."
Some people prefer remote teams, some people prefer in-person teams.
I don't know anyone who likes hybrid teams though.
Eventually I suspect we'll end up with a mix of remote and in-person employers, and workers who have a strong preference one way or another will just have to filter potential employers accordingly. There might be a way for larger businesses to have certain teams work remotely while others go into the office, but I suspect it would be difficult to manage.
Yep I fell the complete opposite. I suspect that long term people who prefer in-office will gravitate towards companies that are in-office and the opposite will be true for people who prefer WFH. I personally will never ever work for a company that isn’t WFH flexible.
Yeah, the M1 mac is not a strong example. They began _shipping_ in Nov 2020, so I bet the design was finalized or close to it before the March shutdowns in the Bay Area began.
Not to undermine your point, wich which i agree wholeheartedly, but I wanted to address one thing.
I imagine quite a lot of people who worked on M1 hardware probably still had to show up to the office. For some positions it is just required. A friend of mine who worked on hardware at Apple had to go to the office almost every day throughout the pandemic (and no, i dont know what product he worked on, and I am not going to ask given the whole thing with apple being extremely secretive). So clearly, there are certain scenarios for certain positions which might require the person to work in the office.
However, to support your point, that director of ML in the article had been working remote for the past 2 years just fine. So clearly he wasn't in the same position as my friend, and that director's position didn't really have a need for him to be in the office. Which is why imo it was silly to lose him just because of such an unnecessarily arbitrary rule.
There's a ton of lab work, reverse engineering, validation, prototyping, measurement, the list goes on forever. CAD and simulation are just the beginning.
It depends. Some fabless chip design work could be done at home. A dept I worked at did everything in simulation. But another dept did prototyping on FPGAs and would have at struggled -everyone would at least have had to take home a board
I think onsite working can be nice but the problem is that it is really hard to find a company that doesn't try to cram you into an open plan office with at least half a dozen people.
I can't do any real work like that. Before COVID, I was going to the office to talk to people, attend meetings and do chores, whereas I did real work at home. It was unsustainable, as work ended up filling 80+ hours per week.
> it is really hard to find a company that doesn't try to cram you into an open plan office with at least half a dozen people
exactly
I'd be fine to go into the office but don't be under the illusion I'm going to accept materially worse working conditions in order to do it. I guess it isn't the same for everyone, but my home office is a very high bar to beat and it makes a real difference to my productivity and mental well being to be there.
You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.
Also, I've been to a lot of meetings where we were told "there are other things people value in work besides money". Maybe being able to manage your own work environment and save gas and time fits in that slot. A content, well rested workforce would be better IMO than one that's frazzled and is getting less out of their employment than they know is possible.
I'm at the age where I see Time as more valuable than anything, really.
> You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.
Some real estate is a sunk cost, and the execs doubling down on it. Apple and Google both dropped 2 or 3 billion combined on fancy new offices just before the pandemic. You can’t sell those buildings, their too big, and they’re not subdivided well enough to rent out parts of them, so everyone comes back to work
Apple's HQ campus is an interesting one because it's only a small percentage of their employees that actually work there. I imagine if they downsized their silicon valley properties down to infinite loop and the ring building, they'd still be able to easily fill them up with people who like working onsite, conference rooms, meeting spaces, labs, etc.
I am not personally aware but I do remember hearing they had office spaces all over the place because they don't have enough room on the main campuses for all of the employees.
Eng manager here. Honestly not everyone is sold on remote being better much less equivalent in productivity or output compared to being in an office. Remote also requires a lot of rethinking of team dynamics, work allocation and just plain old making sure stuff is done. Make no mistake, WFH may be arguably better and more pleasant from the employee perspective, but it makes projects more difficult for the rest of the company.
Yeah we're not all amazing managers that can make it work and sometimes we do need butts in seats. But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up, some need pair programming, some get lonely, some get emotional and miss their team, some have bad home lives and office setups.
But yeah sure, blaming it all on evil companies and their supposed sunk cost fallacy investments into real estate is the easy answer, so let's do that.
> Eng manager here. Honestly not everyone is sold on remote being better much less equivalent in productivity or output compared to being in an office.
Ad an IC, I would have potentially believed this if the past two years where everyone was working from home wasn’t anything but unbridled success for the tech industry. Companies literally can’t hire us fast enough right now, and yet there are really still some managers out there wondering about productivity and output? How about looking at the big picture?
> But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up
Again, this is purely about controlling others. If your IC is not performant, there are ways of addressing that like adults with performance and goal reviews, improvement plans, mentoring, etc. Requiring them to come in so they have adult supervision makes me chuckle. Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?
And I’m not trying to rail on you personally, maybe I’m more triggered by my own management, but this whole post reads to me like such typical management speak of “we tried nothing and we are all out of ideas”
If by the tech industry you're including startups, then those all firms with money due to future expectations of success, not actual success.
Then you've got firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft with so much financial momentum they could lose half their employees tomorrow and their quarterly results would go massively up.
The cases where WFH matters are all the firms in the middle. Non tech firms, for example. Firms that are mature, but which don't mint money hand over fist.
I've worked from home for years and it works fine for me, but I also have a friend who's a senior tech exec at a non-tech firm. Sometimes he invites me round for BBQs on a workday, where he is "working" but no actual work gets done. Sometimes he naps in the afternoon. My brother is a tech executive at a software firm, his work consists of a few meetings a day and the rest of the time he chills, takes care of his kid or works on side projects.
For the employee? It's great. For the employer? Yes, you can view it purely transactionally, as in "we pay you for results" but in reality contracts aren't worded that way because it's impossible to write down in an understandable and conflict-free manner. So people are always being paid for time spent, and they then don't implement their side of the contract whilst expecting the firm to do theirs. It's tough, I don't know what the answer is, but to not see the employer's side of the story isn't right.
There are a limited number of times you can have coffee in an afternoon. The counterfactual here isn't machine-like productivity but rather, not sleeping when you're being paid to do work.
>>"Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?"
I mean... Yes, sometimes? Coding skill and emotional intelligence don't necessarily have an embedded linear relationship :D. But more seriously, a lot of team members need anything from emotional support to soft skill coaching to nurturing and encouragement etc. But that again to me is orthogonal to the remote vs office. I can be a daycare supervisor to an adult remotely if need be :).
Can you elaborate? I hear this line of thinking a lot, but never explained fully. In particular, what about being in same office helps with unproductive ICs? E. G. you mention tickets - it's not by being in the office that I will notice tickets aging or not being tackled efficiently. Fully recognizing the slacking instinct, I don't see being in office addressing it effectively. You don't stare at any given person's screen 8hrs a day.
(other issues such as social and emotional preferences are also valid but I feel separate and may hash out either way).
I'm with you there, it just happens not to be the same with everyone.
Some folks have very complicated home situations, living with family they don't get along with, living with roommates that are fun, loud, and work for competitors, living with boyfriend/girlfriend that they're having a falling out with, etc.
Some folks have demons of their own that they can't deal with without social pressure. People with alcohol abuse problems for example, since nobody can smell your breath on videoconference, might have trouble not day drinking when they're at home with their stash all day.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, it is a very different experience for kids coming out of college or very fresh in the industry not to have any folks they can easily turn to for advice they'd otherwise have gotten from work colleagues. Work advice, career advice, life in the city kind of advice, you name it - especially if you moved cities or countries for your career, the workplace is a really important factor in helping you get settled.
I'm not saying on balance these would tilt things in favor of working from home or the office, but I'd encourage you to ask around coworkers how they feel in order to get a sense of what other situations might be like.
It's an interesting aspect of the whole situation that many people currently are in living arrangements that they may never have planned if they thought remote working was on the cards. We definitely have to be sensitive to those that have highly adverse circumstances, especially where that translates to being yet another form of discrimination or reinforcement of privilege.
Going forward I can see this being quite transformative for society in general as people seek out living arrangements that favor WFH as it becomes normalised. I feel like housing that offers segregated spaces for work and living etc are going to be highly prioritised.
This was exactly my problem pre-covid. Just couldn't focus at office and end up doing most of the core work from home in the evenings. It was very unsustainable.
Typically the positions for which work is "just required" are lab and hardware positions. These don't tend to have the shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze of humans and desks that I always see in open-plan offices.
Any time I have worked in a lab or on electronic hardware, I have had around 10 times the amount of personal space compared to the tightly packed "collaborative" open-plan offices that consist of programmers sitting at desks with monitors with their headphones on and desperately trying to focus.
I'd be much more enthusiastic about returning to the office if I had a private office with a door, Fog Creek style.
I had an office with a door and window for 12 years at 2 different companies. It was great. I left the door open 90% of the time but it was great to be able to close the door for privacy the other 10%.
I changed to a much better job in 2019 regarding work and salary but everyone including the VP's are in cubicles. It is really annoying when everyone around you is on a different conference call and you have to block them out while trying to have your own conference call.
I only had to deal with that for 6 months before the pandemic sent us all home for 2 years. We are supposed to be in the office 3 times a week for the last 2 months. Some days I go in and immediately get annoyed by all the people talking loudly on their own meetings. I eat lunch and I just go home and work from there.
I look around on the days we are supposed to show up and about 1/3 actually show up. They are trying to entice us back with free lunch once a week but the food isn't even good. The company is doing well but the rest of the industry is doing great too so we have a retention problem. I don't think any of the managers really want to say "You have to be in 3 days a week" because they fear it will cause more people to leave.
I would really love to have an office with a door again but working from home is the next best thing. I like having my meetings with speakers and a speakerphone rather than headphones and a mic at my mouth.
I sometimes think that some Managers, and even primary founders, have such ungratifing gratifying social lives outside of work; They need the social bonding, and drama, that goes on in certain work settings
Kinda like my last girlfriend. I honestly felt if she didn't have an office to go to, and couldn't boss around someone beneath her in the organization around, gossip, and socialize; she couldn't sleep well.
Yea, if she couldn't make someone at work miserable--what's the point of it all?
She didn't even care about the money, it was an ego thing that I will never understand. That Bad Boss attitude who get things done. That, "Dam I'm good!" attitude.
This is not about her gender. I have met more than a few guys with the same flaw. I just didn't go home with them. I've had way to many bosses that loved the office "family".
I don't know how many times I heard we are a family here. Under my breath--I mutter, ya the Manson Family.
I get the social part, but why make everone miserable by dragging them into the office, especially if things get done at home?
I usually liked all by co-workers, and even enjoyed their company outside of work. I was single though.
Covid proved many positions could could be done at home.
If I had the power, I would offer financial benefits to companies that kept employees home.
Working from home, if you can do it, should be celebrated.
And I won't even get started on the rediculious commutes we did for the past 100 plus years. I've know guys who commuted 3-4 hours a day.
If global warming is a problem wouldn't those in power want us at home instead of driving. But dude--we have electric cars? Most of us won't be able to afford one for years, and even then. Most electricity is still not carbon neutral.
Same lunch thing over here. I do enjoy meeting my team for lunch. But it's not any easier for me to get work done in the office and the theoretical face to face collaboration doesn't quite seem to happen. We've offices in a bunch of countries anyways and are pretty distributed in my project.
I'm an engineering manager and some of my fellow managers seem to feel very strongly about wanting people to come to the office despite 2+ years of evidence that we can work remotely. It's tough because everyone is different. Some people might benefit from the ritual of coming into the office, the additional social connections, and to some degree the peer pressure. Some people are very effective working from home. Some people live close by, some people live far away.
We have a lot of space in our offices and lots of meeting rooms so no real noise issues or feeling cramped. If I had my own space with a door and a 5 minute commute then I'd probably go more often but I have neither...
Hard to say where we go from here. I do think having the team in physical proximity has advantages for collaboration. But the other pieces to take advantage of that have to be in place as well. I've done some of my best work while working physically closing with others but I've also had some of the worst distraction heavy environments where I got little done. As long as companies are just optimizing for cost per employee then maybe they should just sell their office buildings...
So recognisable. In our office everyone is on international teams so everyone is side by side on different calls. It's a mess.
It was like this before covid but our company took advantage to reduce the number of floors and make all the office space hotdesks. So now I sit beside colleagues I don't even know and it's even harder to talk about noise.
Yeah, 75% of my team on the current and previous projects are in other parts of the US. We just had a massive reorg to make it more flexible to assign free people to projects around the world.
The CEO and senior VP's have said that we work better when we can see each other in person. At other companies I have really enjoyed brainstorming in a conference room around a white board or solving problems together.
But after this reorg we are going to have even LESS projects together as a local team. My response to my immediate manager was "Sure but then assign people to projects from the same office." It makes no sense to say "come in to work together" and then put us on even MORE remote projects.
A few of the managers also have people working on the project in Israel and India. The managers are constantly on the phone including 7am and 9pm meetings for the foreign offices. I'm glad I don't have to do that but why tell them to come in the office? They are already disrupting their personal lives for the company with those meeting times but it does make sense to make it convenient for the people in India when there are 10 people from India and only one from the US on the call.
I'm glad they are paying us well but the logic of this is idiotic.
When I worked on drivers for a datacenter managed switch, we had hardware (sometimes prototypes) to work with, and would often have to swap hardware out, wire up network cards in some way, attach a traffic generator, etc. It was borderline of if I needed to be there on most days, but we had people in the lab doing rework, so some people definitely needed to be there.
I agree with your comments. As far as I know the work flow software and PDKs used for by the foundries (I know this is true for at least global foundries) has essentially unlimited liability (e.g. for "leaking") , so they often are running on dedicated computers even fenced off from the network. I find it hard to imagine they let hardware engineers take it home.
It may not have been too visible to the outside but Apple never really halted operations as urgently as other companies did. They kind of took a more skeptical approach and kept people coming into the office and taking up the mask and temperature reading protocol among other precautions from what I understand.
I've had WFH people around for more than 20 years at all the places I worked over that time. Mostly they were doing their job, yet there were always limits felt to what they can do and how much they can do.
A director shouldn't be worrying about his hiring grant vesting. I get the impression they're well-paid at that level until they're suddenly out the door.
I'm not sure remote work is for me, but if justice can be done to a position with little, or no, in-office time... then why force employees into the office?
Money can be saved on all the accomodations necessary for office workers, so it would seem like a win-win if remote work arrangements are viable for a position.
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do...
> Btw that quote is describing the potential customers of Apple, not employees
Why does that matter? Does Apple not want the most talented, world-changing people working on their products? If your marketing sounds good for customers but dumb for employees, particularly in knowledge-driven work, then maybe your marketing is just hypocritical?
Do marketers care whether their marketing is intellectually honest? Maybe that matters if the people you're marketing to are very discerning or cynical, but I'm not sure I'd put the typical Apple customer in that bucket. As long as the marketing gets people to consume the product, I don't think it matters if it's stupid or if it's lies.
My guess is that people who work for Apple do it more because of the giant FAANG salary and the social cachet than because of the product marketing.
This sounds great. Maybe Apple thinks it can find someone else can do the same job in office. Also they can't just make exceptions for "talented" people, I guess.
By putting the former head of Pepsi in charge, letting him push out Jobs, and then putting the company in such a dire financial situation that when they rehired Jobs, he had to go to Microsoft for a bailout.
Jobs hired Sculley as CEO, then disagreed with him, attempted to have the board kick him out, instead had the board turn against Jobs himself, was stripped of his roles, and quit.
I'm one of those misfits/troublemakers/etc. I've done my life mostly on my terms, and I've had it really tough. Conformists generally get it much easier. I'm all for more independent thought and fuck-you-ness but never forget that for most people that comes at a high price, so take off the rose-tinted specs.
That was a direct quote from Steve Jobs, except the last bit at the bottom. The whole point of the comment, I think, is how this goes against the old Apple ethos of encouraging non-conformity (to an extent).
I wouldn’t say he has FYM yet. Enough to maybe FIRE but more than cash, he’s in a position where almost any tech or related company would hire him, pay him a ton, and let him work on what he wants to do. Essentially, tenure at a university but paid 10X as much.
I certainly don't have "fuck you money", but these days I think most competent tech workers can easily get jobs elsewhere, so I don't think it's a big, risky move to quit your job.
here's to you, good luck in your journey. make it worth it
"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
I don't know if it's worth it. It's the way I am and I seem to have as much choice over it as ivy chooses growing up a wall.
I've never been hungry by choice and I've always had a roof over my head, and I'm grateful for both of those things, but let's look at something I do know: "..could mean losing ... maybe even your mind"
Yeah, BTDT. A lifetime of mental health problems culminating in a complete ... I dunno, breakdown? ... where I was barely able to function for 2 years and became a risk to others (should have been hospitalised but wasn't), and another 2 years recovering. 4 years of my life wasted. Any projected glamour of mental illness is purely done by those who've never had it. Mental illness is fucking shit and has no redeeming value.
Edit: oh yes, and "Isolation is the gift" - Never is loneliness a gift, ever.
Hmm, the one redeeming value of my anxiety (and the accompanying fear of imminent death) is that it makes it much easier to contemplate things I wouldn’t otherwise contemplate.
I’d still rather do without that, but I guess it’s interesting enough I can call it redeeming?
I suppose it depends. A redeeming feature of death is you never again wake up with a stinking hangover. You can find a positive everywhere I suppose. I don't know.
I am curious at the number of downvotes to this which I take as disagreement, but with what? Have others had years of mental health crashes and found it a great positive in the end, or what? Genuinely would like to know.
Glorious, glorious loneliness...good one. Even introverts know that being alone sucks. Medical studies show a correlation between poorer health and loneliness.
I do not think that Charles Bukowski is a good role model. I love his writing, some of it is very disturbing, and some I only read once - will not repeat the experience.
Yeah. What are we trying that we should expect to lose the most important relationships in our lives? Unsaid but heavily implied is this person would be an atrocious parent, and a very real price is paid for that.
I don't think anyone (or, at least not many people) is arguing against working in the office if you have a specific need to be there. What people have an issue with is requiring a return to the office for no other reason than "group synergy".
Synergy means multiplication instead of addition when things are put together, like male and female oxen. You put them together in an open office and more oxen are sure to be produced.
I left a job over open office plans. I really hate it. And I am one of those tech + social people too. Like having people nearby.
But the distractions are everywhere. It is hard to flow. It is hard to have a phone call with a prospect or customer. Things get moved, borrowed, lost.
But mostly I hate it because everytime I have seen open plan, the people who set it up have big offices with windows looking out at the people they screwed over and seek to ultra micro manage. (And this is exactly what happened at the company I left)
"I saw you doing that, why?"
"How come you wander around several times a day?"
"Your desk is a mess"
And so it goes. Nope. Do not have time for that. Happy to work elsewhere or make less, whatever.
Anyway, they announced, I counter announced, and then was out before the move. They lost a few people, and that company was sold a while back.
Now pretty much everyone doing that work has a new email and works mostly from home! New owners saw no need for a group office scenario and has small teams all over the place. Given the nature of the work, that makes a ton of sense.
Funny how things can work.
Having talked with the old owner after all this went down, the real reasons were to save money and manage people and their relationships. Profound lack of trust.
This guy is doing machine learning though. All he needs is an internet connection.
I understand the idea that hardware WFH is going to be a no-go, but software? We already had the revolutionary moment where the internet is everywhere.
People are smart enough ( I'm sure there is a hiding bar at these companies) to go to the office if they require access to certain equipment which they cannot take home. Why impose a rule that doesn't make sense.
I work for a large semiconductor company and during the pandemic the test engineers in the lab and IT staff were the only ones allowed into the office for the first year. Even the test engineers were allowed to take a lot of lab equipment home with them. The CEO did an all hands where he shared pics of all the lab people testing and evaluating chips at home.
In my case it is hobby fun rapidly turning professional. The way to fund hobby / new work is to get your investment at home to pay for itself. Free tools and gear essentially.
Early on, as I picked up skills and scored deals on equipment, I ended up able to take side gigs and or take on special projects. Sometimes I would do these on a "keep the gear" basis. No money changes hands. Recommended.
Pros:
Picking up new skills
Research on ones interest and terms
Flex time working is possible
Reduced commute
Work when ideation is high tide, so to speak
Cons:
It can be expected to work more
Personal / company boundaries are less clear (IP and overwork)
Can be expensive
Need space
Summary:
Personally, I have always had a lab at home, and I rarely take company gear home. Sometimes I have, but I try to buy my own, or the gear from the company.
I have had to make a few career jumps and the next one has pretty much been made possible by what I had at home and what I could do with it.
Be very careful about IP. The reward for that caution can be a real opportunity for you.
It can be the place where you show young people stuff they would never see otherwise and or, until much later. This happened for me as a teen and it was a huge boost! And it was where home lab started for me. My bedroom was my shop.
Of course, you gotta sort this for your scene too. The CEO letting people take gear home is nice and maybe a non issue for people. Depends on what one is doing and or plans to do.
I know right. I mean to be able to test his his AI algorithms, instead of just walking into the supercomputer room with a briefcase full of punchcards he would either have to make a long distance trip or else FedEx in his punchcards(and expose Apple to the risk of losing them or having them leak).
Sorry, this is 2022 and we have high speed Internet and networked computers. And we don’t have to physically load punchcard into then supercomputer.
>but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward,
Honestly such people are extremely rare. The quote doesn't apply to the vast majority of employees at Apple. There are always going to be other talented people willing to take their spot.
Their revenues and profits are in a historical low. Remote work is a scam. The company must return to the office, otherwise they'll go bankrupt in months.
How is remote work a scam? Engineers don’t need a schmuck like you bothering them in person to do great work. Work from home gives everyone a private office, focus and quiet.
I've found people's views on remote work say more about their personal ethics than universal truth.
People who would (or do) slack off without direct oversight think everyone is that way. They don't understand that the people in these positions are highly motivated, driven people.
I can't think of the last time I've seen an app even remotely cluttered where calls for simplification/decluttering were called for (and the changes made sense)
While the opposite, dumbing down and minimalism for it's own sake is a way more common occurrence (think: not showing MB/s when copying/downloading files, etc)
Good for him and good for all the others that are able to do this (resign and find a new full remote job). For the rest of us it’s going to be a struggle to persuade our companies that WFH is well suited for a percentage of the workforce and they should offer it if they want to keep good/skilled workers. WFH is not for everybody and there are many people that want to return to offices, but the companies that realize that can offer both will come out of this better staffed ;-)
I don't get the fuss about such posts. At the end of the day, it boils down to your personal choices. You love to remote work, find a job with a flexible work policy. You don't, well, here are another companies you would love to work for.
Ultimately, markets (including job market) is all about equilibrium.
Either companies are going to increase the salary to come back [or reduce if you are staying back at home].
The thing which matters the most is picking up the best option for yourself. [and don't _always_ wait for your company to catch up]
It's because he is so high profile and a visionary in his field at Apple. Or was. He is merely an early big fish swimming away so expect more as draconian old-school companies try to drag employees back to their cubes.
I think inventing Generative Adversarial Networks, which enable everything from Alexa to GPT-3 to DALL-E to thousands of other models we use today, is pretty visionary to the field of ML.
I’m sure you have some nitpick but I don’t think it matters
Nothing directly. One could argue that GANs did kick-start the boom in generative model research as the first approach in some time that worked in a big way. Either way, certainly Ian is a huge name in ML.
> At the end of the day, it boils down to your personal choices.
I like working remote fine I guess but all else being equal I'd consider an office for the right job.
All else isn't equal though and the reason we went remote is still in play. A company I left a few years ago went back into the office in january. My old manager who was still working there just died of covid a few weeks ago. Vaccinated, boosted etc.
The risk might be lower now but it's not gone. I never fully recovered from my first round with covid almost two years ago. I'm not looking for another go.
The balance of risk/benefit might favor companies choosing to have workers back. We really might be more productive in there, and hey probably only a handful will die. There's a little more going on than my personal choices though.
I'm trying to hire for a position right now and it has dragged on for months for two reasons:
1) WFH is now limited to 1 day per week, and a 3 month probationary period where new hires don't even get that.
2) Salary. It's still a job seeker's market and my workplace is not keeping pace. It's spec'ed for 3 years of experience but salary is about the median for a new graduate w/o professional experience. I'm happy to train someone but if I rework the job class to allow for new grads then HR will lower the starting salary. So, I'm hoping to find someone who's a new grad but had a part time job or internship or any other non-coursework experience the could be even the least bit argued as adding up to the required experience. (the position is basically a data wrangler / sql jockey / light analysis position, but it directly supports the main revenue-generating operations of the organization so there is real $$$ lost by having this position empty. ::Grrrrr:: end rant.)
> How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.
I may have an answer: Because of our fetish with metrics. It is possible to measure the cost of an engineer or computer programmer. This can be assigned a cost which is arbitrarily precise. Calculating teh benefit is usually not so easy. So the decision makers (rational beings, just mislead by an intellectually bankrupt management philosophy) concentrate on what they can count.
There's also a tendency for humans to over optimise the wrong things.
John Sturman has a business game to illustrate this called the Beer Game[1].
It's supposed to illustrate shocks to a supply chain with limited knowledge of how the rest of the system is behaving.
The players in charge of their part of the system try to reduce costs to get a better score but in doing so often catastrophically open themselves up to shocks in the system.
IMHO the same thing is true for managers and accountants trying to reduce costs in their development teams. If you get it wrong you can get a short term gain and long term problem that kills the company.
Might be as simple as the decision maker assuming they won’t be around for the catastrophe. Or outright malice, for any number of reasons. “Hate of job” is a widespread phenomenon that people don’t even think they have to justify.
It’s simple. If you’re in operations it’s all about increasing operating margin (omx). The simplest way to do that is to cut op expenses until you scrape bottom and op revenue dips. Then you adjust, firefight, and find other op expenses to cut.
Or hire contractors like they do here in Europe.
So you go from spending up to 150kCHF for a lambda software engineering to paying 250kCHF to a consultancy. But the company "invest". Doesn't matter if that contractor will end up working there for 4 years or more, that's call investment in the finance book or Switzerland is a at will country (but with notice period).
Just madness.
Yeah, I could probably get +50% if I went job hopping, but the non salary benefits are very good, work is not stressful-- 40 hours, rarely the expectations of more than that, though it does happen maybe one a month. Very good PTO, 5 minute commute... So it's all an extremely good work life balance, which has always been the most of mportant factor for me if the money is otherwise sufficient to cover things.
I get paid very well for 36 hour weeks (half-day Fridays) in a low stress atmosphere with no expectation of over time. All I'm saying is that there is no harm looking around as there are plenty of jobs like that out there.
Good point... I'm very comfortable where I am and really like the work & mission of my organization, so I haven't looked around much. Maybe I should, maybe my situation isn't as unique as I though it was....
I work 20 hours a week now, fully remote, making (a little bit) more than I used to doing 40. Granted, it's a machine learning gig and I took the pandemic to brush up on these skills, but it's definitely achievable in this market to have a good work/life balance.
I'm very upfront when I schedule the interview, give them a range when we set the time and if they're still interested we proceed. It's education analytics, so there's a little bit of "doing it for the mission" that gets people who are willing to make a little less because the job really has a very direct impact on students' success and lives. My work reduces student debt and increases success rates and identifies those individuals most at risk of having difficulties so others can make proper targeted interventions.
The work environment is laid back, 40 hour weeks & rarely any expectation of going over that so there can be a very good work/life balance. Benefits are pretty good too: very good retirement plan matching contributions, above average health insurance, 37 days PTO each year. So I need to find the right candidate that appreciates those things even if they could easily get 30%+ salary somewhere else. TCP where I work isn't to far off from other opportunities if the candidate considers & values those other benefits.
And again I am very upfront about that, and even explain these factors to them before interviews. I want people who know what they're signing up for, and not waste each other's time. It's a position that will give them lots of hands on experience to easily get the next step up in their career after doing this job for 3 years or so. They can grown from a basic analyst as described above into creating more sophisticated predictive modeling, bringing them up closer to my level. I view my role as managing someone as 1) to keep away from them as much as possible so they can do their work and I can do mine instead of sitting in meetings. And 2) to prepare them for their next job, their next step in their career. Because that's what a good manager does, and because by preparing them that way it means their last year working for me will be at a very high level of productivity, making my life easier as well.
But the candidate really has to be the right sort of person at the right stage in their life, someone looking for these things. And if my organization would ease up & recognize the job market requires at least a 15% increase in base salary I'd probably not have so much difficulty finding such a person.
Maybe you need to re-pitch this role as a contract and hire a remote contractor. I think you would get plenty of interest from experienced analysts if you could hire nationally. I might even be interested with that generous PTO policy, but on-site is like going back to the stone age for me. Whatever metro area you are in that salary must be a show stopper. Many younger people are stuck with incredibly high housing costs without the benefit of being grandfathered into rent control or mortgage payments from 7 years ago.
Unfortunately we don't like to hire contractors much, and when we do it's only for a 6 month period, has to be reviewed and reapproved every months. So I could lose someone just as they're starting to learn the intricacies of our system, because a lot aren't renewed as they're only supposed to be short term. I've got catch 22's all around me.
I’m surprised such a company isn’t going out of business. That’s a very low amount to make per-head for software engineers. Do they make up for it in volume?
Not a software dev or inherently tech-base business. Vast majority of employees are not in a tech related positions.
I'm in Higher Ed analytics, embedded at a high level in an operational division at a university. So, maximizing revenue isn't a primary goal. It's certainly a secondary concern, some amount of "profit" is necessary to plow back into resources for students & researchers and capex, but if we're making a ton of profit it would kind of mean we're charging students more than we need to and putting a higher debt burden on them. Some schools, unfortunately, take that path but not where I work. We are honestly very focused on doing what's best for the student, even at the cost of leaving some easy money on the table.
Minimizing student debt burden is a primary target metric for the university. Of course it's much more complicated than that though, countless variables and interlocking & sometimes competing goals & requirements.
And while Higher Ed isn't perfect and could use some disruption, quality instruction doesn't have much economy of scale. Sure, a very self-motivated person can plow through self-paced college courses without a lot of handholding or overhead costs to get them through, but that's not the majority of students. For most students the ability to get quality help along the way is inversely proportional to class size and directly proportional to support resources. So, high labor costs. Though again, some amount of disruption could probably improve things. As would the realization that not everyone needs to go to a traditional 4-year college, that for many people learning a skilled trade is both a faster path to financial self-sufficiency and better suited to their interests. But that's all a bit off topic so I'll end it there.
From the company's perspective it rarely makes sense to pay an regular employee more than the amount that the company makes per employee.
Yes, there are variations and management can go a bit on the higher side of that number - though also note that that is revenue and doesn't take into account operational costs, taxes, and the like.
In many cases, the company just can't reasonably pay what the "market" suggests the role should get. In these cases, it is a question of trying to point out that the value that the role brings is much more than what they're paying and that the company, upon recognizing that, should offer more.
The other alternative for the company is that they aren't losing money compared to the current set of accounting books. They may be leaving money on the table that they could get from expanding, but that's a risk.
Speaking of risk, there are a lot of risky candidates out there. It is far too easy to hire a person who fails to perform at the expected level or to train the person up for a few months in the tech stack and domain only for them to leave for a different company.
As it is, an unfilled role that has what is perceived as low compensation, to the company, is the less risky than a role filled with someone who is paid more but may not be performing - or even if they are performing aren't bringing the value to the organization compared to the revenue that is needed to justify that role.
This may change soon. Meta and Netflix reportedly have hiring freezes in place now. Other companies are cutting staff. The later half of 2022 may bring significant changes to the job market(along with many other things).
Thanks for posting the heads-up re: Meta and Netflix; in the latter case I’m not surprised (or maybe they could just reduce the obscenely high salaries they overpay so they can feel superior to other members of FAANG, which doesn’t really fool anyone about their engineering prowess (they’re a content company, not an engineering/product/big-cloud company like the others, and everyone knows it). That would also allow them to get rid of this let-a-person-go-after-a-few-months-but-don’t-worry-there’s-warmth-and-respect BS.
Regarding your 2nd statement: “Other companies are cutting staff”; you mean in big tech already? Who?
You should resync with HR on that salary. If it's below market, the company is losing money while it's vacant, and your not able to fill it then you have proof the salary or other benefits are too low. Sort of an efficient market theory: if it was a good offer, someone would take it.
Yeah, I tried that, there's a small amount of wiggle room but not much, because they said "it wouldn't be fair to our current workers in that classification that aren't making as much". A poor answer. Ignores market conditions and says they know they're underpaying other people too, many of whom are probably looking for a new job as a result. I'm embedded in an operational division, but we've lost a very significant % of our core IT folks as well.
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[ 0.36 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] threadhttps://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661
(I like Schmidhuber but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really evaluate his work or claims.)
I don’t fully understand the tendency to do so, but it appears to be fairly widespread.
If a paper in any other field was cited 44k in ~8 years, it must have made life-changing discoveries. Maybe some of the early papers on COVID-19 will reach that number.
https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/301280
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/bnqm0p/d_g...
However HN's rules about tweet submissions are inconsistent and outdated.
https://finance.yahoo.com/m/6017a433-bf69-48cc-9aa0-70034b2e...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-exec-urs-holzle-buyin...
Honestly, I think it's a bit much to call that "endorsing slavery" since the intention isn't to say that buying and selling people is good.
I really doubt that most people would give up a job in a satisfying office environment with people they truly enjoy working with on a product/project they are excited to work on everyday simply because of they are told they have to go in and meet those people they really groove with three times a week.
Think of that. Some people were spending 4.5 hours commuting every day. And it was ok with them.
It is possible they are avoiding something at home so this suits their lifestyles. That would be my guess.
I see other jobs at amazon that are remote, but this particular department worked with hardware that they weren't interested in leaving the office. Again, I've worked remotely with similar hardware from the company that pioneered this type of hardware and have done so since 2008. We figured out security, remote testing, local development, software simulations, etc. and haven't had a single leak, hack, etc.
IMO Enough is best.
You could have potentially moved within the company if that was only decision factor.
“It’s WFH today, but that’ll probably change. And you can always take our bus from your local AWS office to the office where the rest of the team may or may not be because we don’t know what our policy will be.”
I’d expect a company of Amazon’s size and stature to have a better plan than “whatever your VP wants this week.”
Oh, that and I doubled my comp leaving ;)
I think it makes more sense to be non-committal than to make promises and then have to renege on them later. The latter makes people much more justifiably upset.
And yes, reneging on agreements is bad. Employers need to be forced to understand that humans have rights and their employees are humans. Telling someone their job is remote then changing that 3 months after they start should be illegal. Unfortunately, it’s not, so you’re SOL if you find yourself in that position.
Add in several other factors… 1. the VP and extended team I would have been working with was in Seattle and this position was in VA. 2. There’s an AWS office down the street from my house but they were 100% non-committal about the position being located there (vs the new Arlington HQ2). 3. Would have been a new team with lots of new hires, so I could have just hired them locally (if deemed necessary, though I’ve managed remotely for years now with success so seems silly to me).
That is interesting. I like that idea, in theory.
In practise I find the promise I have made to an employer to work/be available certain hours very useful. My time off is off, on is on.
If you’re considering an offer from Amazon I suggest you make it very clear from the start to your hiring manager your expectations on remote work and working hours. Theres some teams at Amazon that are taking a strong return to office stance and others like mine that allow for fully remote.
(per this https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/09/apple-park-employees-op...)
guessing goodfellow has specific reasons for this move (like everyone), but feels increasingly like wfh has exposed gaps in our ability to manage or even measure the productivity of knowledge workers
> And they built his team their own building, off to the side on the campus …
in the article to:
> and built them a trailer or something in the parking lot
in your comment?
Apple, Google, etc are going to learn quickly and change to all remote soon too I bet. Weighing their prestige vs. the improved quality of life remote brings to most workers can not compete. Especially with company's like Air BnB which pays same very high salaries who says work anywhere in the world.
Overall a raise of 50 to 100k in salary would not get me back into any office and I live alone in a small town in south central PA. The pandemic forced me to find a new social life with new friends that Im equally enjoying as I did with friends I had at work (they are still around some socially but the connection isnt as strong).
These companies touting their solutions for creating a more connected world can't have it both ways. Apple was able to ship the M1 and roll out new iterations of many other offerings since the pandemic hit. They're just fine.
Apple didn't collapse since the pandemic hit, and the flexibility offered by remote work is far more valuable to lots of people than the loss of in-person collaboration opportunities. We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is to organize your coworkers. You have much more bargaining power about your work conditions as an organized union. The history of unionization stems primarily from workers demanding safe working environments.
...which effectively states that if a supervisor joins a union it's a no-op. The employer is not required to acknowledge their membership. In practice, unions specifically exclude managers for a bunch of obvious reasons related to their ability to bargain effectively on behalf of their members.
Your manager likely joined a union-ish entity open to supervisors. IIUC such entities are not protected by the NLRA and as such have few of the legal powers and protections that make a union a union. They’re basically affinity groups.
Managers, at least at the higher level like being discussed here, arguably do not need as many protections in order to be able to collectively bargain: Apple is likely to be much more concerned (and thus much more willing to negotiate) about 20 "Director of X" employees leaving than 20 engineers.
They all had such an adversarial relationship with work. It's always us against them mentality. They could never see anyone in management as a human. I can't imagine living like that.
As far as I can tell, the unions didn't ever solve any of their biggest gripes, took money out of their paychecks for lots of non-work related political activities, and didn't come through when they really needed to on things like pensions or healthcare.
From what I understand is this is done because it's the fairest way. Unions, like anything, can be corrupted. It would be funny if the union rep's nephew always got promotions over other people. This is an attempt to prevent that. In other words, it's the least-worst way of doing it.
>My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
Possibly. In my experience, it's usually in the form of a $5 Starbucks gift card every year. It really depends on the position and the company. I've seen a lot of hard ass workers get treated like shit.
personally, i think i would prefer a co-ownership (coop) scheme than union, since that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers... idk just a thought
This is only true if everyone has exactly the same responsibilities, hours, working conditions and pay. All differences lead to divergences of interest.
and there are many successful co-ops where people have different responsibilities, hours and pay, i don't think that is a requirement for co-ownership (though the variance is definitely less than traditional top-down orgs thats for sure)
It wouldn't happen in other countries because the US has a uniquely adversarial union structure, where Europe uses codetermination (ICs with board seats) and sectoral bargaining (don't have to convert one company at a time).
Also, the company is able to maintain very high standards for the quality and skill of the pilots. There are not “useless Joe’s”, as evidenced by the fact that the planes don’t crash.
This family member is a diehard conservative politically but openly espouses the value of the union for representing his interests against the company.
You also give away your power as an individual to those running the union.
This is also by the way the main dissenting opinion in the recent Amazon union vote. There were several people who were interviewed by the economist as voting no, who said that they'd never had a bad interaction with HR and had gotten everything that they asked for.
This is not the one-sided issue that pro-union activists act like it is, and that level of ignorance is what is holding them back.
On the other hand, if a union imposes some broad agreement on the company under threat of strikes, I can't convince my company to break that agreement on my own because I'm not more valuable than the entire rest of the company combined.
A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways. It's _possible_ for you to be worse off in a union, but rare.
This really isn’t true. What you’re describing isn’t even a zero sum game it’s negative sum, where hurting the other party is among your goals in itself. The company is interested in using you to make money and for many purposes happy, satisfied employees who are growing in productivity are good. All of those are also things the employees usually want.
Are employee and company interests fully aligned? Absolutely not, but if your employer’s interests are almost completely opposed to yours get out.
You do know that your employment depends on the success of the business, right?
The relationship with an employee is no more adversarial than your relationship with the local grocery store when you buy a bag of potatoes.
Also, grocery stores are about a million billion gazillion times more transparent about trading with you relative to trading with other shoppers.
I'm sad that you think this, and would urge you to analyze your situation to see if it's really true. My one piece of advice is that companies seek to minimize cost centers, but invest in profit centers. Get out of the former and in to the latter.
It’s smart to move out of it, but the fact that you have to in order to progress is a clear indicator why companies will perpetually undervalue talent - even in competitive markets.
Said another way, I can go down to the union hall and pick an electrician randomly and have a great deal more confidence in that person's ability than I could choosing a random developer off of LinkedIn to write my application.
I think certifications have something to do with this, but it's also the complete lack of understanding of what makes someone a good developer by management... this is entirely the fault of management and I don't blame a developer for trying to "fake it til you make it."
Sadly, it often works.
Somewhat relevant: https://www.9news.com/article/news/investigations/denver-fir...
What do you base this on? Movies?
Telling someone to strap on a helmet isn't a threat of violence to a reasonable person. Putting a stuffed rat on a ledge near someone's bed is also not a threat of violence. If it had a noose or something, you'd have a better argument.
Here's actual violence done against picketers and looked the other way by police in Alabama:
https://www.al.com/news/2021/07/striking-miners-wife-hit-by-...
Here's a few more people running into picketers in Alabama. Apparently these are strikebreakers:
https://www.wbrc.com/2021/06/08/video-shows-trucks-hitting-w...
Here's another:
https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/crime/police-in...
And another:
https://abc7news.com/uc-union-strike-university-of-californi...
There's plenty more.
But cross a picket-line or hire on as a scab during a strike in a small town and you'd best watch your back... hence the motivation for the "wear a helmet" comment. My hometown was founded on steel and railroads and I knew of more than one person growing up that got jumped for not toeing the line and playing ball with the union.
The history of it is quite fascinating. Here's an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
This guy sticks out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haywood
It doesn't really go beyond that unless it's perceived that management are routinely violating the spirit of agreements and/or when the relationship between the union and management has already completely broken down.
What particular aspect of having a union would make that substantially more difficult in tech?
Long lasting organizations that have multiple overlapping projects with unions end up with compressed wage structures because the union campaigns for the median worker and the structure does not militate against that.
Say, I am not.
> so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer
I cannot, see above. Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
Well, based on the fact that I'm part of the majority i.e. not as valuable as you, it works very well for us (who are not the World's Greatest Widget Engineer).
No, I do not believe you are entitled to a wealth transfer from people who are better at your job than you are. (Or, to put it another way, you're certainly free to do a little collective bargaining if you'd like, but the World's Greatest Widget Engineer has no reason to join your union.)
What you mean is «better at negotiating than you are».
Work skill an negotiation skills don’t always coincide (in my experience they almost never do).
Even if you did promote your best engineer, that just means that a different employee at your company is now your best engineer and the same dynamics apply. (Until, of course, you promote everyone competent to management, and then your organization is doomed to slowly suffocate itself. Then it's beyond saving, union or no union.)
We're not interchangeable cogs in some manufacturing machine; we're extremely skilled experts in the biggest seller's market of our careers. Why anyone would want to unionize right now is beyond me.
How did you get so intensely in thrall of the people holding your collar?
On the basis of your logic that's a consequence of the lack of union and organised labour
There are similar splits in professional level work. There are jobs available where you ~never work six days a week and others where it’s routine. Trust me when I say no one at Nike or Booking in Shanghai is working 996.
My logic does not suggest the lack of unions and organized labor causes six day weeks. Six or seven day working weeks are the natural condition. Economic growth allows for different consumption leisure trade offs. Unions can only very indirectly effect economic growth. They matter much less than the ability to quit your job and find a new one easily. Firms desperate for workers are what make working conditions better, much more than unions.
No, this is powered by the law. If it wasn’t the evaporation of unions that we’ve seen over the last 20 years would have taken weekends with them.
A thing unions were supportive of in the past is not evidence of the value of unions now.
It’s like pointing out the importance of American troops in France because world war 2.
Those laws were a consequence of industrial action by unions. Here's a backgrounder on the progress made by unions in Australia.
<https://www.australianunions.org.au/about-unions/union-achie...>
Every year, Australian employees are entitled to 4 weeks of paid annual leave, two weeks of paid sick leave, 6 months of paid long service leave after 10 years of employment, about 10% of their salary paid into their retirement investments (superannuation).
Unions even up the negotiation power imbalance between employers and workers. Union power has been severely curtailed over the last few decades and as a consequence workers have seen stagnant wages, rising inequality of compensation and the rise of insecure work.
There's plenty of evidence to support the assertion that collective bargaining leads to better outcomes for workers. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Links chosen from a cursory web search:
<https://www.ehstoday.com/safety/article/21918297/new-study-s...>
<https://www.epi.org/blog/union-decline-rising-inequality-cha...>
You didn’t read my message, because this is what I already said. Unions helped push it into law. The unions are all but dead in the US, but weekends are still here because it is a law. What value do the unions provide now?
The reason an employee may want to join a union is because this divergence has already happened between the employee and the employer.
One indicator as to whether members are running the union is to see whether the strike fund is well funded.
If it is, that union is very likely to be at a minimum involving the rank and file in it's operations and negotiations.
No strike fund? Be careful. A union without a well funded strike fund basically has very little power.
As the other comment mentioned the biggest individual power you have is quitting and a union doesn't prevent that.
The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
You could maybe make an argument that companies may increase wages for high performers for retention reasons, because needing to replace valuable employees is a large, if somewhat intangible cost, but that's pretty iffy. Companies are made up of and managed by humans, who are notoriously short-sighted and willing to discount potential risks when there are financial incentives to do so.
50% of the time Joe Useless makes more than you do already, because they joined later and market rate for the position shifted upward. You'll still need to fight tooth and nail, alone, individually, to reach parity, even if you're a top performer. Your manager isn't usually going to say "hmm, we're paying Joe Useless 1.2X, while we're paying Sally Superlative 1.0X--we really should pay Sally 2.0X! Your manager will be overruled by the CFO if they do suggest this anyway. Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
Ultimately, I'd prefer a system where Joe Useless and I fight for equal wage increases collectively, because the balance of power is such that we're more likely to get them than each of us going it alone. Joe Useless is gonna be there anyway unless the company decides they're so useless as to fire them. So long as Joe Useless is there in the same role as I am, I don't care if they get equal pay, especially not if they're helping in the fight for increases in our equal pay.
In that case, instead of banding together with Joe Useless to strong-arm the company into setting money on fire (from management's perspective), you're better off changing companies as frequently as the market will tolerate.
I love seeing the “union fought for years, after many strikes employees ‘win’ and get a 5% wage increase over the next 4 years” news articles, but they never strike me as something that I’d want to apply to me.
Certainly my company is increasing wages for high performers. They may not be happy to do so, but they’ll do it to retain talent they desperately need.
I imagine this would be different if the sector I was in was different, but right now, for software development, it doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s too much variation in skill levels to collectively bargain for anything.
Sounds like you haven't worked for many good companies.
Then don't organize the union to work like that. A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
Are you a member of any union? the #1 thing they do is secure a collective bargaining agreement which precisely spells out the pay structure for everyone covered.
The suggestion is that Joe and Sally must be paid the same even though Joe is "useless". That is not the case. When creating a union, you can choose a different pay structure. The Screen Actors Guild, for instance, has very wide variation in how much members are paid.
People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.
And, yes, so many rail against something like single-payer healthcare because it would be "unfair" for them to pay for someone else's care, when they already are doing the exact same thing as part of private healthcare! Not to mention it would be cheaper, but paying $5,000 for single payer is seen as evil when people are paying $10,000 for private healthcare! (both figures are simply illustrative and not intended to be factual examples, before anyone rips my head off)
It's a big generalization to say that, because one side of an ideological divide behaves one way, the other side must, too! I think rather the Democrats (we don't really have a Liberal party) are a party that takes some tentative steps in the direction that it's better for everyone to have something, even if there are some people who don't deserve it; that is, that the malady you diagnose is a Republican, not an American, preoccupation.
Of course you can look back in history and find instances where Democrats have embraced such positions, too, and you can find plenty of odious things even in today's Democratic platform, but I think that today's Democratic party is consciously, if very slowly, trying to distance itself from exactly the mindset that you describe. But maybe I'm blinding myself to this behaviour in an attempt to justify my adherence to the lesser of two evils. Do you have examples?
I specifically am not using Republican and Democrat because the parties are not really important to the point. Libertarians and Greens also have this "imperfection is worse than nothing" mindset.
An example where Liberals needed to relax and not let perfect be the enemy of the good was the 2016 presidential election (and almost 2020 as well). The number of people who said things like, "I know Trump might win if I don't vote for Hillary, but too bad!" was so high that it actually happened.
What if you're the Joe Useless on your team and you don't know it? A lot of people here seem to think they're the 10X dude but what if they're the 0.1X dude lol. What if you're really the 10X dude but your manager thinks you're the 0.1X dude because they don't like you as a person?
Those systems have good and bad sides to them, but I do think the good outweighs the bad.
Not saying that's healthy but I'm sure being on HN has a strong selection bias on 10X people :)
I've worked with many people with varying degrees of competence and I find that the "go out and satisfy your curiosity" is strictly an above average thing.
The average people tend to rely more on courses and certificates, anything approved by the vendor. And they tend to align with the vendor's gospel. If something is not in the training or documentation it doesn't exist. They are the kind of people that will just open a ticket when something doesn't work and go through the hoops for months :)
The really good ones don't really care about such things and just dive into a problem until they thoroughly understand it using any trip of resources necessary (ideally peer to peer info because official info, from the vendor tends to be politically/marketing biased). I would definitely put HN in the latter category.
But I don't think they are useless. The former are really good in operational roles and the latter more in design and architectural ones.
The employer can’t be all that good if they’re ignoring the do-not-call registry. And I think it slightly increases the chances of bad actors ceasing cold-calling.
I absolutely understand that it's the opposite for some people.
I like working from an office and I like informal interactions with colleagues — from chatting over coffee to peeking around and seeing who is free to whiteboard a problem.
There’s hardly anyone around in the office and frankly I couldn’t care less about the free stuff. They pay me enough that I can go out and buy my own snacks.
What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’ll never work somewhere 100% remote or where employees don’t have an expectation of at least 3 days in the office.
Mind you, being able to spend a day a week at home vs full week in the office is quite nice.
Open source work is a infinitesimally small proportion of *work*. No I don’t think it results in teams that are closer at all, I think (and can present no data either) that it’s just as likely to result in bickering and infighting. Guido leaving Python might be a good example.
So do, and I have also worked for scrappy 100% remote startups. The 100% remote startup had better team cohesion and better knowledge transfer with more opportunities to learn.
You might get those things in the office, but pre-pandemic, at least my office environment provided none of those things. Don't conflate a good team dynamic with an office environment. I used to pair program with a guy for four hours a day and I never met him until we both left the company.
I’m not sure what your role is but zoom calls really don’t mean anything as an IC. Not unless you’re responding to or handling an outage and debugging on the fly.
What you produce and how well it works is how you’re measured. Documentation and written communication is equally as important.
I find that a really sad, if not completely rational, outlook.
See I don’t want to work with someone who outputs great work only. I want to work who can share a joke, help out, bounce ideas of, experiment with new things and fail/succeed.
In other words, I like work to be joyful and productive.
This is in stark contrast to my wife, who had worked in the office before the pandemic and continued with the same philosophy during remote work. She finds my way too cold, and I find hers too wasteful. I would dread working on her pseudo-remote environment.
Reading all the responses it seems there's advantages both to being at home or on site and the trick is to find the balance.
Good in-person collaboration, sometimes accidentally overhearing someone else, is invaluable. At the same time, people can get off task and chit chat becomes a hindrance.
Sometimes we all know our role and what has to be done, we just have to get it done. Sometimes we don't know how to solve a problem.
Some employees don't have a good work environment at home. A Ph.D. student with a young special-needs child felt horrible ignoring his daughter while working on his dissertation at home (where his wife was caring for his daughter), bit coming into campus was far better for him, productivity-wise and psychologically.
I think the balance might be a dynamic one, in that what's best can change over time and task and stage of a task and stage of a person's career. And by employee, and by task.
Being a good manager must be immensely difficult, but also being an employee also requires adapting and compromising between all of these trade-offs.
There’s little camaraderie though or sense of shared ownership. interactions are more transactional, deliberate, thought out.
People maximise what’s best for their OKRs only. If this months it’s John on zoom or Jeff and if Mary was replaced with Sue, does it really matter?
There’s a reason team events and off sites etc exist. It helps people see beyond the professional façade to the human behind it.
I've been remote for 10 years and before that worked on a bunch of distributed research teams and it is perfectly possible to have a highly functioning distributed/remote team that really takes ownership. I mean look at open source projects.
Further office culture tends to favor a bunch of young people who all live in the same city and have time to go out for drinks after work etc. I'll take a bunch of crazy odd balls scattered across the globe doing their own thing any day.
This isn't hard to fix; it only requires upper management to recognise the issue. If a goal is easy to reach, it's a bad goal.
I've found a better approach is to focus on key metrics or KPIs and empower people to go after them without a heavy planing cycle. Like if your app is slow and buggy the OKR process tends to favor waterfally quarter long projects like "rewrite X in Y." A better approach is often to get good at monitoring and prioritize cycles spent on maintaining, optimizing, and refactoring existing stuff with a possible incremental rewrite.
I guess it depends on what you want out of work. If you’re the type who wants work to be _only_ work and absolutely nothing more, then I can see how the forced interaction at an office would be beneficial. Otherwise a strong culture around people and collaboration makes the office largely irrelevant. Yes, you do miss out on the random hallway interactions, but there is no perfect solution and I happily trade that for no commuting, hanging with my dog all day, mid-day naps, my own office, throwing in loads of laundry during the day, private bathroom, better coffee, etc etc etc.
My experience talking to a lot of people both for and against wfh has been that people with shitty teams hate being remote, because it's hard to do when everyone is putting in zero effort to make remote work "work." The other big group that wants wfh to end are the "my coworkers are my only friends" people. Good for them, i guess, but personally i think that's not a wise way to structure one's life. I understand why companies love it and want to foster it though.
A very small number say things like "I find it difficult to collaborate with anyone over the internet."
I don't know anyone who likes hybrid teams though.
Eventually I suspect we'll end up with a mix of remote and in-person employers, and workers who have a strong preference one way or another will just have to filter potential employers accordingly. There might be a way for larger businesses to have certain teams work remotely while others go into the office, but I suspect it would be difficult to manage.
When at all possible, they work from home.
It is funny who we know. Not at all a representative sample.
I imagine quite a lot of people who worked on M1 hardware probably still had to show up to the office. For some positions it is just required. A friend of mine who worked on hardware at Apple had to go to the office almost every day throughout the pandemic (and no, i dont know what product he worked on, and I am not going to ask given the whole thing with apple being extremely secretive). So clearly, there are certain scenarios for certain positions which might require the person to work in the office.
However, to support your point, that director of ML in the article had been working remote for the past 2 years just fine. So clearly he wasn't in the same position as my friend, and that director's position didn't really have a need for him to be in the office. Which is why imo it was silly to lose him just because of such an unnecessarily arbitrary rule.
I can't do any real work like that. Before COVID, I was going to the office to talk to people, attend meetings and do chores, whereas I did real work at home. It was unsustainable, as work ended up filling 80+ hours per week.
exactly
I'd be fine to go into the office but don't be under the illusion I'm going to accept materially worse working conditions in order to do it. I guess it isn't the same for everyone, but my home office is a very high bar to beat and it makes a real difference to my productivity and mental well being to be there.
You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.
Also, I've been to a lot of meetings where we were told "there are other things people value in work besides money". Maybe being able to manage your own work environment and save gas and time fits in that slot. A content, well rested workforce would be better IMO than one that's frazzled and is getting less out of their employment than they know is possible.
I'm at the age where I see Time as more valuable than anything, really.
Some real estate is a sunk cost, and the execs doubling down on it. Apple and Google both dropped 2 or 3 billion combined on fancy new offices just before the pandemic. You can’t sell those buildings, their too big, and they’re not subdivided well enough to rent out parts of them, so everyone comes back to work
I am not personally aware but I do remember hearing they had office spaces all over the place because they don't have enough room on the main campuses for all of the employees.
Yeah we're not all amazing managers that can make it work and sometimes we do need butts in seats. But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up, some need pair programming, some get lonely, some get emotional and miss their team, some have bad home lives and office setups.
But yeah sure, blaming it all on evil companies and their supposed sunk cost fallacy investments into real estate is the easy answer, so let's do that.
Ad an IC, I would have potentially believed this if the past two years where everyone was working from home wasn’t anything but unbridled success for the tech industry. Companies literally can’t hire us fast enough right now, and yet there are really still some managers out there wondering about productivity and output? How about looking at the big picture?
> But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up
Again, this is purely about controlling others. If your IC is not performant, there are ways of addressing that like adults with performance and goal reviews, improvement plans, mentoring, etc. Requiring them to come in so they have adult supervision makes me chuckle. Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?
And I’m not trying to rail on you personally, maybe I’m more triggered by my own management, but this whole post reads to me like such typical management speak of “we tried nothing and we are all out of ideas”
This always been the case.
> Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?
Sometimes, yes. Not every adult behaves like a responsible adult.
Then you've got firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft with so much financial momentum they could lose half their employees tomorrow and their quarterly results would go massively up.
The cases where WFH matters are all the firms in the middle. Non tech firms, for example. Firms that are mature, but which don't mint money hand over fist.
I've worked from home for years and it works fine for me, but I also have a friend who's a senior tech exec at a non-tech firm. Sometimes he invites me round for BBQs on a workday, where he is "working" but no actual work gets done. Sometimes he naps in the afternoon. My brother is a tech executive at a software firm, his work consists of a few meetings a day and the rest of the time he chills, takes care of his kid or works on side projects.
For the employee? It's great. For the employer? Yes, you can view it purely transactionally, as in "we pay you for results" but in reality contracts aren't worded that way because it's impossible to write down in an understandable and conflict-free manner. So people are always being paid for time spent, and they then don't implement their side of the contract whilst expecting the firm to do theirs. It's tough, I don't know what the answer is, but to not see the employer's side of the story isn't right.
I mean... Yes, sometimes? Coding skill and emotional intelligence don't necessarily have an embedded linear relationship :D. But more seriously, a lot of team members need anything from emotional support to soft skill coaching to nurturing and encouragement etc. But that again to me is orthogonal to the remote vs office. I can be a daycare supervisor to an adult remotely if need be :).
(other issues such as social and emotional preferences are also valid but I feel separate and may hash out either way).
And let me guess, bringing them back to the office is going to quickly turn them into happy and productive coworkers?
Some folks have very complicated home situations, living with family they don't get along with, living with roommates that are fun, loud, and work for competitors, living with boyfriend/girlfriend that they're having a falling out with, etc.
Some folks have demons of their own that they can't deal with without social pressure. People with alcohol abuse problems for example, since nobody can smell your breath on videoconference, might have trouble not day drinking when they're at home with their stash all day.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, it is a very different experience for kids coming out of college or very fresh in the industry not to have any folks they can easily turn to for advice they'd otherwise have gotten from work colleagues. Work advice, career advice, life in the city kind of advice, you name it - especially if you moved cities or countries for your career, the workplace is a really important factor in helping you get settled.
I'm not saying on balance these would tilt things in favor of working from home or the office, but I'd encourage you to ask around coworkers how they feel in order to get a sense of what other situations might be like.
It's an interesting aspect of the whole situation that many people currently are in living arrangements that they may never have planned if they thought remote working was on the cards. We definitely have to be sensitive to those that have highly adverse circumstances, especially where that translates to being yet another form of discrimination or reinforcement of privilege.
Going forward I can see this being quite transformative for society in general as people seek out living arrangements that favor WFH as it becomes normalised. I feel like housing that offers segregated spaces for work and living etc are going to be highly prioritised.
Typically the positions for which work is "just required" are lab and hardware positions. These don't tend to have the shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze of humans and desks that I always see in open-plan offices.
Any time I have worked in a lab or on electronic hardware, I have had around 10 times the amount of personal space compared to the tightly packed "collaborative" open-plan offices that consist of programmers sitting at desks with monitors with their headphones on and desperately trying to focus.
I'd be much more enthusiastic about returning to the office if I had a private office with a door, Fog Creek style.
I changed to a much better job in 2019 regarding work and salary but everyone including the VP's are in cubicles. It is really annoying when everyone around you is on a different conference call and you have to block them out while trying to have your own conference call.
I only had to deal with that for 6 months before the pandemic sent us all home for 2 years. We are supposed to be in the office 3 times a week for the last 2 months. Some days I go in and immediately get annoyed by all the people talking loudly on their own meetings. I eat lunch and I just go home and work from there.
I look around on the days we are supposed to show up and about 1/3 actually show up. They are trying to entice us back with free lunch once a week but the food isn't even good. The company is doing well but the rest of the industry is doing great too so we have a retention problem. I don't think any of the managers really want to say "You have to be in 3 days a week" because they fear it will cause more people to leave.
I would really love to have an office with a door again but working from home is the next best thing. I like having my meetings with speakers and a speakerphone rather than headphones and a mic at my mouth.
Kinda like my last girlfriend. I honestly felt if she didn't have an office to go to, and couldn't boss around someone beneath her in the organization around, gossip, and socialize; she couldn't sleep well.
Yea, if she couldn't make someone at work miserable--what's the point of it all?
She didn't even care about the money, it was an ego thing that I will never understand. That Bad Boss attitude who get things done. That, "Dam I'm good!" attitude.
This is not about her gender. I have met more than a few guys with the same flaw. I just didn't go home with them. I've had way to many bosses that loved the office "family".
I don't know how many times I heard we are a family here. Under my breath--I mutter, ya the Manson Family.
I get the social part, but why make everone miserable by dragging them into the office, especially if things get done at home?
I usually liked all by co-workers, and even enjoyed their company outside of work. I was single though.
Covid proved many positions could could be done at home.
If I had the power, I would offer financial benefits to companies that kept employees home.
Working from home, if you can do it, should be celebrated.
And I won't even get started on the rediculious commutes we did for the past 100 plus years. I've know guys who commuted 3-4 hours a day.
If global warming is a problem wouldn't those in power want us at home instead of driving. But dude--we have electric cars? Most of us won't be able to afford one for years, and even then. Most electricity is still not carbon neutral.
Depending on my mood, my response to this sort of nonsense is one of either:
"All the more reason to have as few of us as possible in the same place."
"Ah, family-- the people in your life most likely to molest you."
I'm great at parties.
Acting rudely, just because you can, is something people struggle all their lives to achieve.
I just think Darwinian tribalism is the natural status quo of human beings.
Well thought out, altruistic, social structures, are almost the exception.
I'm an engineering manager and some of my fellow managers seem to feel very strongly about wanting people to come to the office despite 2+ years of evidence that we can work remotely. It's tough because everyone is different. Some people might benefit from the ritual of coming into the office, the additional social connections, and to some degree the peer pressure. Some people are very effective working from home. Some people live close by, some people live far away.
We have a lot of space in our offices and lots of meeting rooms so no real noise issues or feeling cramped. If I had my own space with a door and a 5 minute commute then I'd probably go more often but I have neither...
Hard to say where we go from here. I do think having the team in physical proximity has advantages for collaboration. But the other pieces to take advantage of that have to be in place as well. I've done some of my best work while working physically closing with others but I've also had some of the worst distraction heavy environments where I got little done. As long as companies are just optimizing for cost per employee then maybe they should just sell their office buildings...
It was like this before covid but our company took advantage to reduce the number of floors and make all the office space hotdesks. So now I sit beside colleagues I don't even know and it's even harder to talk about noise.
The CEO and senior VP's have said that we work better when we can see each other in person. At other companies I have really enjoyed brainstorming in a conference room around a white board or solving problems together.
But after this reorg we are going to have even LESS projects together as a local team. My response to my immediate manager was "Sure but then assign people to projects from the same office." It makes no sense to say "come in to work together" and then put us on even MORE remote projects.
A few of the managers also have people working on the project in Israel and India. The managers are constantly on the phone including 7am and 9pm meetings for the foreign offices. I'm glad I don't have to do that but why tell them to come in the office? They are already disrupting their personal lives for the company with those meeting times but it does make sense to make it convenient for the people in India when there are 10 people from India and only one from the US on the call.
I'm glad they are paying us well but the logic of this is idiotic.
(Source: I worked on that project at Apple.)
Full vest. Time to go.
I've had WFH people around for more than 20 years at all the places I worked over that time. Mostly they were doing their job, yet there were always limits felt to what they can do and how much they can do.
Money can be saved on all the accomodations necessary for office workers, so it would seem like a win-win if remote work arrangements are viable for a position.
...as long as it's done from the office.
Btw that quote is describing the potential customers of Apple, not employees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sMBhDv4sik
Why does that matter? Does Apple not want the most talented, world-changing people working on their products? If your marketing sounds good for customers but dumb for employees, particularly in knowledge-driven work, then maybe your marketing is just hypocritical?
My guess is that people who work for Apple do it more because of the giant FAANG salary and the social cachet than because of the product marketing.
how so?
Jobs starter Next which was acquired by Apple in 1997, bringing Jobs back home.
Hence gp’s comment about Apple’s long history of doing this…
Why not though?
They already do. It requires SVP approval.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real...
"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
- Charles Bukowski
I've never been hungry by choice and I've always had a roof over my head, and I'm grateful for both of those things, but let's look at something I do know: "..could mean losing ... maybe even your mind"
Yeah, BTDT. A lifetime of mental health problems culminating in a complete ... I dunno, breakdown? ... where I was barely able to function for 2 years and became a risk to others (should have been hospitalised but wasn't), and another 2 years recovering. 4 years of my life wasted. Any projected glamour of mental illness is purely done by those who've never had it. Mental illness is fucking shit and has no redeeming value.
Edit: oh yes, and "Isolation is the gift" - Never is loneliness a gift, ever.
Hmm, the one redeeming value of my anxiety (and the accompanying fear of imminent death) is that it makes it much easier to contemplate things I wouldn’t otherwise contemplate.
I’d still rather do without that, but I guess it’s interesting enough I can call it redeeming?
TIA
- hn_throwaway_99
As Modest Mouse said, "God, who'd want to be / Such an asshole?"
But to live like him? No thank you
For at least parts of Apple engineering, very expensive equipment and prototypes are under lockdown and too expensive to duplicate for WFH.
(at least that's how it was during my several years there.)
An underrated ratio for measuring corporate inequality.
But the distractions are everywhere. It is hard to flow. It is hard to have a phone call with a prospect or customer. Things get moved, borrowed, lost.
But mostly I hate it because everytime I have seen open plan, the people who set it up have big offices with windows looking out at the people they screwed over and seek to ultra micro manage. (And this is exactly what happened at the company I left)
"I saw you doing that, why?"
"How come you wander around several times a day?"
"Your desk is a mess"
And so it goes. Nope. Do not have time for that. Happy to work elsewhere or make less, whatever.
Anyway, they announced, I counter announced, and then was out before the move. They lost a few people, and that company was sold a while back.
Now pretty much everyone doing that work has a new email and works mostly from home! New owners saw no need for a group office scenario and has small teams all over the place. Given the nature of the work, that makes a ton of sense.
Funny how things can work.
Having talked with the old owner after all this went down, the real reasons were to save money and manage people and their relationships. Profound lack of trust.
I understand the idea that hardware WFH is going to be a no-go, but software? We already had the revolutionary moment where the internet is everywhere.
It could be that he wasn’t doing his job well remotely and hence the push to get him in.
“If the director isn’t coming in then why should I?”
> "I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team," Goodfellow said in the email.
In my case it is hobby fun rapidly turning professional. The way to fund hobby / new work is to get your investment at home to pay for itself. Free tools and gear essentially.
Early on, as I picked up skills and scored deals on equipment, I ended up able to take side gigs and or take on special projects. Sometimes I would do these on a "keep the gear" basis. No money changes hands. Recommended.
Pros:
Picking up new skills
Research on ones interest and terms
Flex time working is possible
Reduced commute
Work when ideation is high tide, so to speak
Cons:
It can be expected to work more
Personal / company boundaries are less clear (IP and overwork)
Can be expensive
Need space
Summary:
Personally, I have always had a lab at home, and I rarely take company gear home. Sometimes I have, but I try to buy my own, or the gear from the company.
I have had to make a few career jumps and the next one has pretty much been made possible by what I had at home and what I could do with it.
Be very careful about IP. The reward for that caution can be a real opportunity for you.
It can be the place where you show young people stuff they would never see otherwise and or, until much later. This happened for me as a teen and it was a huge boost! And it was where home lab started for me. My bedroom was my shop.
Of course, you gotta sort this for your scene too. The CEO letting people take gear home is nice and maybe a non issue for people. Depends on what one is doing and or plans to do.
Overall though, I deffo recommend doing it.
I know right. I mean to be able to test his his AI algorithms, instead of just walking into the supercomputer room with a briefcase full of punchcards he would either have to make a long distance trip or else FedEx in his punchcards(and expose Apple to the risk of losing them or having them leak).
Sorry, this is 2022 and we have high speed Internet and networked computers. And we don’t have to physically load punchcard into then supercomputer.
Honestly such people are extremely rare. The quote doesn't apply to the vast majority of employees at Apple. There are always going to be other talented people willing to take their spot.
Not the same company anymore... not even close.
Jarheads are smarter than all of you? Suck it up and get it done.
A quarter century later, Apple is a very different company. As it should be.
He probably had to think differently when he got in charge of a big corporation...
Tim Cook is so wise to save Apple with this move.
People who would (or do) slack off without direct oversight think everyone is that way. They don't understand that the people in these positions are highly motivated, driven people.
These people aren't Homer Simpson.
If you wanted to hear non-BS truth from me. Otherwise, we can all continue to pretend.
Corollary: all you conformists who like rules and structure, you are the useless peasantry.
I’m not an engineer who can work anywhere I want. And I’m confident that working at Apple would have an incredible positive effect on my career.
Still not worth it. I’d rather find a local job outside of tech than get back on the office space hamster wheel.
1. Defending pseudoscience (as long as it’s related to nutrition and exercise)
2. Disgust with “marketing people” and anyone with an MBA
3. Hating “woke” culture
4. Justifying piracy
6. The general decline of macOS with every new release. It’ll be locked down and turned into iOS any day now, just you wait.
While the opposite, dumbing down and minimalism for it's own sake is a way more common occurrence (think: not showing MB/s when copying/downloading files, etc)
1. case sensitivity in Nim
2. 0 vs 1 based indexing
Ultimately, markets (including job market) is all about equilibrium. Either companies are going to increase the salary to come back [or reduce if you are staying back at home].
The thing which matters the most is picking up the best option for yourself. [and don't _always_ wait for your company to catch up]
I’m sure you have some nitpick but I don’t think it matters
If nothing else, cubes help with simple, human space being inadequate.
I like working remote fine I guess but all else being equal I'd consider an office for the right job.
All else isn't equal though and the reason we went remote is still in play. A company I left a few years ago went back into the office in january. My old manager who was still working there just died of covid a few weeks ago. Vaccinated, boosted etc.
The risk might be lower now but it's not gone. I never fully recovered from my first round with covid almost two years ago. I'm not looking for another go.
The balance of risk/benefit might favor companies choosing to have workers back. We really might be more productive in there, and hey probably only a handful will die. There's a little more going on than my personal choices though.
1) WFH is now limited to 1 day per week, and a 3 month probationary period where new hires don't even get that.
2) Salary. It's still a job seeker's market and my workplace is not keeping pace. It's spec'ed for 3 years of experience but salary is about the median for a new graduate w/o professional experience. I'm happy to train someone but if I rework the job class to allow for new grads then HR will lower the starting salary. So, I'm hoping to find someone who's a new grad but had a part time job or internship or any other non-coursework experience the could be even the least bit argued as adding up to the required experience. (the position is basically a data wrangler / sql jockey / light analysis position, but it directly supports the main revenue-generating operations of the organization so there is real $$$ lost by having this position empty. ::Grrrrr:: end rant.)
How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.
> How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.
I may have an answer: Because of our fetish with metrics. It is possible to measure the cost of an engineer or computer programmer. This can be assigned a cost which is arbitrarily precise. Calculating teh benefit is usually not so easy. So the decision makers (rational beings, just mislead by an intellectually bankrupt management philosophy) concentrate on what they can count.
This is McNamara's fallacy
John Sturman has a business game to illustrate this called the Beer Game[1].
It's supposed to illustrate shocks to a supply chain with limited knowledge of how the rest of the system is behaving.
The players in charge of their part of the system try to reduce costs to get a better score but in doing so often catastrophically open themselves up to shocks in the system.
IMHO the same thing is true for managers and accountants trying to reduce costs in their development teams. If you get it wrong you can get a short term gain and long term problem that kills the company.
1. https://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/SDG/beergame.html
She's fighting that battle now to make the chief boss understand that too, but it's a slog.
The work environment is laid back, 40 hour weeks & rarely any expectation of going over that so there can be a very good work/life balance. Benefits are pretty good too: very good retirement plan matching contributions, above average health insurance, 37 days PTO each year. So I need to find the right candidate that appreciates those things even if they could easily get 30%+ salary somewhere else. TCP where I work isn't to far off from other opportunities if the candidate considers & values those other benefits.
And again I am very upfront about that, and even explain these factors to them before interviews. I want people who know what they're signing up for, and not waste each other's time. It's a position that will give them lots of hands on experience to easily get the next step up in their career after doing this job for 3 years or so. They can grown from a basic analyst as described above into creating more sophisticated predictive modeling, bringing them up closer to my level. I view my role as managing someone as 1) to keep away from them as much as possible so they can do their work and I can do mine instead of sitting in meetings. And 2) to prepare them for their next job, their next step in their career. Because that's what a good manager does, and because by preparing them that way it means their last year working for me will be at a very high level of productivity, making my life easier as well.
But the candidate really has to be the right sort of person at the right stage in their life, someone looking for these things. And if my organization would ease up & recognize the job market requires at least a 15% increase in base salary I'd probably not have so much difficulty finding such a person.
There are quite some countries where Jo Average would see 40h working week as monsterous. Or were 40h workweek might even be outlawed.
How does the company's revenue per employee compare to the offered salary?
I'm not familiar with thinking about salaries in these terms though, how is this relevant?
I'm in Higher Ed analytics, embedded at a high level in an operational division at a university. So, maximizing revenue isn't a primary goal. It's certainly a secondary concern, some amount of "profit" is necessary to plow back into resources for students & researchers and capex, but if we're making a ton of profit it would kind of mean we're charging students more than we need to and putting a higher debt burden on them. Some schools, unfortunately, take that path but not where I work. We are honestly very focused on doing what's best for the student, even at the cost of leaving some easy money on the table.
Minimizing student debt burden is a primary target metric for the university. Of course it's much more complicated than that though, countless variables and interlocking & sometimes competing goals & requirements.
And while Higher Ed isn't perfect and could use some disruption, quality instruction doesn't have much economy of scale. Sure, a very self-motivated person can plow through self-paced college courses without a lot of handholding or overhead costs to get them through, but that's not the majority of students. For most students the ability to get quality help along the way is inversely proportional to class size and directly proportional to support resources. So, high labor costs. Though again, some amount of disruption could probably improve things. As would the realization that not everyone needs to go to a traditional 4-year college, that for many people learning a skilled trade is both a faster path to financial self-sufficiency and better suited to their interests. But that's all a bit off topic so I'll end it there.
Yes, there are variations and management can go a bit on the higher side of that number - though also note that that is revenue and doesn't take into account operational costs, taxes, and the like.
In many cases, the company just can't reasonably pay what the "market" suggests the role should get. In these cases, it is a question of trying to point out that the value that the role brings is much more than what they're paying and that the company, upon recognizing that, should offer more.
The other alternative for the company is that they aren't losing money compared to the current set of accounting books. They may be leaving money on the table that they could get from expanding, but that's a risk.
Speaking of risk, there are a lot of risky candidates out there. It is far too easy to hire a person who fails to perform at the expected level or to train the person up for a few months in the tech stack and domain only for them to leave for a different company.
As it is, an unfilled role that has what is perceived as low compensation, to the company, is the less risky than a role filled with someone who is paid more but may not be performing - or even if they are performing aren't bringing the value to the organization compared to the revenue that is needed to justify that role.
Regarding your 2nd statement: “Other companies are cutting staff”; you mean in big tech already? Who?