Mandated tue/thu means they don't perceive capacity/safety issues, because its all-hands. Ignoring health issues for now, the good side is meetings won't be zoom-anyway because of the mass of non-present people thing.
Going to health, if they have HVAC and a good mask protocol for dense spaces, I don't personally see the problem in the building. Getting there, may cause increased exposure.
Apple can afford both the HMO, and the epidemiologists to work out if this change has any impact on health in the company, in the families at large, and in the wider community. I look forward to the research papers!
My company has been fully back in-office since the vaccines came out. The descriptions of WFH I've heard online have sounded like dispatches from a parallel universe. I haven't been on a Zoom call since 2020.
If you work a 230-day year, every ten minutes on your commute is over 38 hours of time. You're spending the equivalent of 17 work weeks in the car, or 37.5% of your 230-day work year.
The commute is really the thing that makes some workplaces intolerable, I think. You can put up with a lot more if you don't have to sit and angrily drive home for an hour afterwards.
All non remote offices are intolerable when you've become accustomed to taking lunch with your spouse and having your kids hug you at your desk when they return from school.
For me, that's looking up from the monitor to watch the kitties romping together (20-20-20 eye rule reminders), taking a short movement break to throw them some toys to chase, and occasionally having one curl up on my lap while I'm thinking.
So many chores get done too with working from home. Laundry, dishes, yard work, errands etc, all on my lunch breaks that would otherwise be spent scrolling the internet over a sad sandwich i cobbled together in 5 minutes at 7am. By the time the end of the day rolls around I'm actually done with work, not just work work but the home work that I'd have to do in the few tired hours that exist at the end of the day after you've finally commuted home and finished cleaning up after dinner. Plus being able to attend to essential business with fickle hours is a godsend. I am no longer forced to do all my banking and DMV business on saturday before 3pm when all these things close. I can do it in the middle of the week like a retiree and not hit any lines. Running errands in the middle of the day means I don't hit any traffic either. It's still a 40 hour work week, its just one that's way more optimized for my convenience, to the point where it would be hard to put a price on the stress relief it brings.
Source? Im friends with a fairly high level commercial real estate agent in manhattan and per his view of things, vast amounts of empty office space in most neighborhoods. covid and zoom may have changed the market forever.
How do they coordinate transit? Does the metro authority run different schedules when Apple is on an in office day? Also doesn’t this cause huge traffic problems?
I'm so glad to be working at a company (a SaaS startup) that transitioned to a permanent "remote first" policy when Covid hit. That transition was validated by a significant productivity increase - they have good data to say it makes business sense not to go back.
Personally, I'll never go back to working in an office, God willing.
My company extolled the amazing productivity results of the connected culture through the pandemic but is pushing for RTO. Worse, during the pandemic they hire people like me as permanent remote. Now we’re getting pressures… denied promotions because we’re not in the office. Probably time to start looking for permanent remote employers.
It seems to me like there's a sunk cost fallacy going on with larger companies (i.e. companies that were larger prior to the pandemic). They've got these beautiful buildings and campuses that represent significant capital and personal investment -- that all have no reason to exist without an RTO policy.
My company is 5x the size it was prior to the pandemic, but only has office space to accommodate ~1/7 of its workforce.
The office functions as a space individuals and teams can reserve for limited times if they want to. So there's no big building tempting leadership to implement RTO.
Most companies just lease office space. You would think that they would be eager to get out of having to lease these sorts of spaces if their employees are willing to foot the bill of maintaining an office themselves through working from home. Emotion is beating logic here I think. It should come as no surprise that the only people pushing for return to office are the managers against the wishes of many employees. They are the ones who felt slighted and made obsolete when the world showed it could do the same computer work at a desk at home versus one in an office that you are probably burning CO2 to get to. What a disaster for the planet. Visibility was like 50 miles early in the pandemic from the mountaintops in LA county with no one driving and generating dust from their tires. No longer.
>> the only people pushing for return to office are the managers against the wishes of many employees. They are the ones who felt slighted and made obsolete
Emotion may be beating logic for many of the people in this thread.
Our company has been super transparent with us from the outset that we're about 30% less productive as a remote-first company compared to everyone being in the office. This was deemed acceptable. We're biotech, we employee an army of medical doctors, and as long as COVID remains a real threat, we'll remain remote-first.
We got rid of maybe a quarter of our office space, but our company has made it clear that it intends to eventually move us back into the office at least once or twice a week for most employees to regain some of that lost productivity and especially to help new hires get up to speed more quickly.
Some high performing, individual contributor, highly self-motivated knowledge workers may be more productive in a fully remote environment, but I think it's very much the exception. For better or for worse, most people just want to do the bare minimum amount of work that they can get away with while still keeping their job, and they can get away with doing far less remotely than they can in real life.
> Some high performing, individual contributor, highly self-motivated knowledge workers may be more productive in a fully remote environment, but I think it's very much the exception.
This probably depends on industry and job function.
For software developers working for a software company, I think it's the rule, not the exception. Our company saw a significant productivity boost as soon as the engineering department went remote, and I've heard the same from other companies as well.
Even better, being remote-first means a software company opens itself up to a much larger, more diverse talent pool. Hiring excellent ICs wherever they may be allows you to compete with the best for the best.
I live in an area with only one large software company in a 25 mile radius - one I used to work for. But I left it for a remote-first startup in Los Angeles. I still live in the same house with my wife and kids; we didn't have to move them and start over, something for which I am deeply grateful. More is expected of me (which I am thrilled to deliver) and I'm paid a lot more too.
Remote is real life. I'm so confused by these claims of poor productivety among employees. Why aren't you talking to your problem employees about them not carrying water then? It seems like its better to figure out how to get engagement from remote work than to do all the inefficiencies of working from the office. For one suddenly you have to build a new office building versus using peoples homes, that costs CO2 in construction and maintenance. Then you have to heat and or cool that building as well as your home, that costs more CO2. Then there is the going to the office from your home, that also costs CO2.
If you are in biotech, all the more reason your company should be focused on limiting its harm to the ecology of the planet as much as it can, and only keep employees whose job can't happen remotely onsite.
That's interesting that you saw a productivity increase; we saw productivity drop by roughly half, and it never came back. We did aerospace software and simulation though so maybe the SaaS startup is different
I don’t care about health like a lot of people do. I go out to restaurants, I meet people, I take public transportation for other things, I’m already putting myself at risk, office isn’t going to change that.
However, this is the third year I’ve been working from home, including starting a new job where I didn’t know anyone. None of it has had any impact on my productivity and the companies I’ve worked for have only seen record profits. I am not commuting for hours every day and wasting my time and money while doing so. Nah. This is about fighting back to the tyranny of upper management who have nothing better to do than make poor decisions that affect other people negatively.
Corporate overlords will only sacrifice the bottom line for one thing: the illusion of control. It's why open-plan offices and Scrum are still things, despite the money left on the table by adopting them.
Scrum is more than "periodic team meetings". It's daily standups, sprints, sprint planning, backlog grooming, retro (cited lengths for these meetings are aspirational; usually they take 1.5x-2x the recommended times). It's sprint goals and sprint commitments, failure to meet which will be recorded and used against you in performance reviews and disciplinary actions. (Don't tell me they're "forecasts" now. They're commitments because people higher than you in the org chart use them for long-term planning.)
The only reason why major companies undergo Agile transformations -- and why these almost always take the form of Scrum -- is because of the promise of fine-grained metrics, analytics, and control of the SDLC by upper management. That's what the agile consultants pitched to the CTO. Everybody involved in a typical Scrum shop is playing a game of Mornington Crescent -- of pretending to deliver quality software in an organic developer-customer relationship when what they're really expected to deliver is stories, estimates, and burndown data to their bosses (or their bosses' bosses).
Anyway, that has not much to do with WFH, aside from the fact that calling workers into the office comes from the same place as imposing Scrum: the bosses need to feel in total control.
I was introduced to Scrum at 2 companies that didn't use Scrum this way, and am currently at a company that uses it exactly as you describe. It was a shock and it's a real pressure cooker.
To be fair, most tech based companies have very long pipelines. Google is making money off software written over the course of two decades. Intel has a 4 year pipeline for chip tape outs. A lot of tech companies were positioned well to increase revenue due to the pandemic.
So just because companies are making more money, doesn't mean productivity hasn't gone down. It could be that it's just lost in the noise at the moment and won't show up in the data for a few years.
I feel like this is a really good point - Most people are likely pretty bad at measuring their productivity, and honestly my expectation is that (if present), the productivity impacts of long term WFH are likely to manifest in ways that aren't entirely obvious.
For example, it seems evident to me that there's going to be a lot less "cross pollination" (for lack of a better metaphor) between people in a WFH environment as opposed to an office. For those with plenty of experience, this will have a fairly minimal impact, but for anyone else I'm concerned about missing out on the little things that are seamlessly transferred in face-to-face interactions over time. That thing that takes you 30 minutes that can be resolved with a 5 minute chat with the guy who knows, etc. Things you won't even really think to ask about that don't get brought up.
Even less direct things as well - eg random new product ideas that come from a chat with a coworker, or improvements, anything like that. Those can all add up to improving products and productivity, and are difficult to measure the effect of.
All of this stuff is in the tail though, and we probably won't see the effects for years (and it'll be muddied by people who do genuinely work well in WFH environments too)
>random new product ideas that come from a chat with a coworker, or improvements
I've had this happen plenty of times over text.
I suspect the "cross pollination" might get balanced out by the ability to interact with anyone at the company, rather than just those on your floor or building.
That's a good point as well - I suppose you could argue the likelihood of entering a conversation like that over text vs in person. In my experience you're generally a bit less likely to end up off track in text as opposed to talking, simply because it's usually slower - you can't bounce ideas back and forth at the same rate (not to say you can't, though)
Unpopular opinion, but you can’t just look at “companies made more profits” and decide that means WFH is more productive.
People starting dying from covid while crypto markets soared, so I guess killing people with covid fuels bitcoin.
Or possible they huge money printing influenced the picture.
EDIT: Not saying we weren’t more productive, just saying that HN tends to be very scientific but is really ignoring correlation != causation which we all would point out for most other things.
I didn’t say work from home is more productive, I meant the record profits while the ENTIRE company was WFH suggests that at the very least, drop in productivity cannot be an excuse to bring EVERYONE in.
Correlation does not imply causation. A company achieving "record profits" does not necessarily have to be because there was no drop in productivity.
It's entirely possible that a company can have a drop in productivity and record profits at the same time.
Anecdotally, my company had record profits during the period of WFH, and I personally think my productivity stayed the same or improved. However, as a company we also shipped significantly less new features/products than we did in years past (and my opinion as to why is because we had significant organizational delays caused by miscommunication about timelines and priorities (stuff that in theory might have been improved if we were not WFH)). If we had not had a drop in the amount we shipped, it's possible our record profits would have been even higher record profits.
Sure, which is why the entire "productivity" discussion is a bit speculative. I note that in the OP article, productivity of any kind is not cited as a reason for the return to office. Neither is profit, for that matter.
Clear "Correlation does not imply causation" case. The fact that people stayed more time at home implied they consumed more of everything online and accelerated digital services adoption making companies related with digital services sell more, plus less expenses (no travel, less expenses in facilities) made higher profits. Remote work correlating with Higher profits is a correlation not a cause afaik.
Many have commented on correlation-vs-causation. We get it, there is lag in the economics and the profits have partly been boosted by COVID. However, there has also been inflation-riding on behalf of these companies, and the same argument can be made in reverse: what evidence have they presented that WFH is causing a drop in productivity? None whatsoever. This move is simply to get employees back on the chairs so that the corporations may exert the same level of control they had in the past. On the other hand, those that are doing just fine and aren't cynical about their work practices are embracing WFH.
They just want people to come back to justify their corporate lease / rent on whatever offices they have. That's really what it's all about. All their productivity claims are bullshit.
I think that and retention. It’s well known that remote jobs make it way easier to jump, plus people are less attached to their coworkers.
That’s still not a good reason, since you are essentially trying to guilt people into staying or making their life more busy so interviewing is harder.
There is also a lot of pressure from local governments to get companies to force people back to work as the businesses built up around large biz centers suffer if everyone works from home (no one eating out for lunch, going to beers after work, getting coffees, getting dry cleaning, etc etc)
Or, if they want more people in the area, they could zone for housing in these downtowns that they previously hollowed out the housing for to build these offices and their parking lots.
I will say I've been work from home for years now and I still do all of those things ;). Just not with my coworkers. And not always in the heart of downtown, but more local to where I am.
The money is still spent, just not in the same places.
I don't suspect any grand conspiracy, but I do think a lot of asset managers have had chats with high net worth individuals and gone over just what the collapse of the commercial real estate market would look like for them personally, especially with the stock market being so shaky as of recent.
I suspect these causal conversations are behind a large number CEOs return to office strategies (in addition to justifying their office investment as you mention) as well as Malcolm Gladwell's sudden revelation that working in an office is super important for everyone who is not him.
The commercial real estate market has no reason to collapse. In these cities with a lot of vacant office space, like NYC today, what do you also have? Enormous demand for apartment housing. Land owners never lose money in these hot markets where apartments are leased the day they are put to market. Your building could burn down and it doesn't matter, the money is in the deed to the dirt and the zip code, and the potential rents that this piece of dirt in this zip code can yield based on the zoning of the property.
It will take a while to determine which jobs lose or gain productivity from WFH. Some regimented jobs like radiologists, or call centres we’re doing a lot of WFH well before the pandemic. Jobs that require focus probably also benefit, but in a lot of cases it’s just regaining lost productivity from the switch to open office plans.
The sort of major product breakthroughs that more creative people had during walks, cross team pollination over coffee breaks, or extended lunch brainstorms are probably fewer though. It’s hard to measure.
Many assumptions in your statement. You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself and record profits come at specific context, specific time and based on a historic inertia and multi-year strategy.
This is not about fighting any tyranny, this is about running companies, and the same way there are costs associated to work in an office for you, there are costs associated with employees working remotely (and not only economic), but you don't see them.
It’s fairly easy for most people to compare their own productivity before and after working from home. Mine is significantly greater. The number of hours I’ve spent working has drastically increased due to losing my 2 hour commute, and the focus I’ve been able to achieve at home is like nothing I’ve ever seen at an office.
Personal productivity isn't the same as organizational productivity. This is one of the key things at the heart of the WFH discussion. It's entirely possible that you personally wrote more lines of code, but the team still fell behind in products shipped. This could be due to many different factors. One easily identifiable one is that while good employees might be more productive WFH, poor performers are even more poor when WFH, and it becomes much more difficult to actively manage/coach/mentor poor performers when they are remote.
There's many more metrics too, like attrition, or poor onboarding experience for new hires, or inability to coordinate across teams (sure you're producing more personal output, but is it the right output?)
Organizations are more than individuals working in isolation. They're coordinated masses of people that have to work together, and what is best for one person's personal productivity may not be best for the organization's overall productivity.
Communication is great for organizations, but I don't understand what you are getting in person that you don't get over zoom talking about whatever you need to talk about. It's not like the entire org is talking to eachother at once in person. At best you talk to like a handful of people a day, probably a good amount of that talk has nothing to do with work. Meanwhile with zoom I've been having so many more directed meetings with key people. Like before, we would sit in this in person meeting and say something like "it would be nice to get Steve's input on this, if he were here in this meeting" and now with zoom we can actually get steve in the meeting. We meet with people from around the world who might have relevant input.
If your issue with wfh is team isolation, just have more meetings and get better at communicating. The issue is not the venue, its the event.
Many assumptions in your statement: people are fully capable with self evaluation of their own productivity and companies aren’t bringing people back because of some cost associated with remote work. Apple, in this case, is making people come back to justify their super expensive and ridiculous new campus.
I can, because I go into office twice a week now. The days I am least productive are the ones I go in, because I lose more than the two hours of door to door commute every day. It is the fact that I lose my most productive hours of the day in waking up, getting ready, fixing a breakfast, getting myself to the office and having to small talk with people before FINALLY I can work.
Then you are accepting that what drags your productivity down is commuting, not actually working from an office. Remote working may be a solution to your problem but comes with associated costs you may be not counting (misunderstandings, wrong team member mental models, alignment calls, longer on boarding times, suboptimal knowledge sharing, less serendipity/synergies in general). Another solution to your commuting problem is find a job that is closer to your place
I agree. However I still support work from home because it’s not up to me as an employee to fight for something that benefits the company at my own expense.
Commuting, finding an apartment closer to work, living in a place that you dislike, buying lunch or making it in advance, and a whole mess of other things are expenses that fall directly on an employee.
On the other hand suboptimal knowledge sharing, misunderstandings, less serendipity, etc. are not only hard to measure but are strictly of benefit to the employer.
If WFM means slightly less productivity per dollar spent in exchange for employee happiness , then so be it. The company can absorb the expense just like it does when it pays for on site cafeterias, overtime, and bonuses or extra vacation to mitigate burnout.
I'm confused how any of those downsides are resolved coming into work? All of those things are just as liable to happen in person. To be honest meetings are a lot more to the point when done remotely. In person the first and last 10 minutes of a meeting are spent just pissing away the time on whatever, the presenters dog did something funny this morning perhaps. If you are having issues with onboarding team members or getting everyone on the same page, just have them meet more often over zoom to discuss projects. Having them come into the office comes with this assumption that people will meet up and help eachother and be productive etc, but in my experience most office chitchat is not relevant to work at all.
Productivity is hard to mature, and the more senior someone is, the more their job involves communication vs production. Communication in person is different, so while companies can be remote, and that can work well, the prices sometimes paid are subtle and hard to see/measure.
> You probably can't evaluate your productivity by yourself
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and say if you can’t evaluate your own productivity, you aren’t trying.
If you are running any kind of scrum, or you are tracking estimates on tickets, you can create a velocity for yourself. You can track that velocity over time - weeks, months, years.
You can track the velocity of your peers, or at least your entire team and compare your velocity to that.
You can look at how many features you implement.
You can look at how many code reviews you do and compare that against how many code reviews your peers are doing.
And finally, you can calibrate your own measurements against your bosses feedback on your performance.
There’s a lot of data to be tracked, and so I really do believe that if you don’t know your own productivity in relation to your past productivity, or to your peers productivity, it’s because you are not collecting the data, not because there’s no data to collect.
Okay, so hardware engineers can work from the office. Having a single set of rules for everyone else that doesn’t need to come in is something I don’t agree with.
Voicing dissatisfying as part of a mass popular outrage is a good way to get rules changed. Leaving a company also achieves that, but is a little more drastic.
I've long-considered that social media outrage, even something tech-specific like blog articles getting passed around on HN, is sadly sometimes the most effective form of customer service on these huge platforms that have mostly automated support:
As far as it being commoditized, I think it might work a little differently in examples like the OP where the outraged people is the workforce itself. It's a more focused audience.
If you don’t like it, there’s the door? That’s a terrible solution to a problem. The my way or the highway approach assumes there is no room for growth or understanding of other positions. This is the root of no-compromise.
Beware, this attitude works while employees have relatively strong bargaining power. As tech layoffs accelerate, this bargaining power dynamic may change. Unless there’s strong unionization efforts on this basis, I suspect WFH is not long for this world in its current, widespread form.
I get your point but I’d hardly say asking people to come to the office for their job 3 days a week is
“tyranny of upper management”. If this is your tyranny then I’d say you have had a pretty lax career.
Good for you I suppose and let’s hope times don’t get tough.
If you are doing something against your will, it is tyranny. If you do things based on reasonable conversation, it is partnership. That said, to be fair, most entities are organized as 'on command' workplaces and management does not really understand and/or like empowered workers. Now, we can quibble over money and such, but most employees already voted, quite vocally, some with their feet.
Does an average person wake up and thinks 'gosh golly, today is a good day to write a better way to track people for ad targeting purposes' or 'today is a splendid day to test that software package'?
I don't. If I don't, it is against my will. It is not rocket science. It is basic logic.
Naturally, you could argue that you are doing it for money and this negates it, but, well, it does not. It just means you are paid to do something against your will.
But wait, I can go somewhere else! That is freedom. You are just changing one tyranny for another and that does not change the fact that it is tyranny.
Thanks for the detail. I think I follow the perspective but let me ask a couple of questions to make sure I got it right. (not intended to bait you here but want to know where the nuance lines are)
Is paying for food/rent also a tyranny? (because who actually wants to pay for that)
Is the need to contribute to society a tyranny?
Is it a tyranny to enforce laws like a speed limit through a school zone?
No problem. To me it is an interesting question in itself in general; as such I do not think you are baiting anyone.
I am mildly concerned that what we are experiencing in our chat can be classified as 'cultural differences'. As such, our assumptions and cultural norms may not be the same.
With that in mind, I probably should define few things.
1. What is tyranny[1]?
- oppressive power
- a government in which absolute power is vested in a single ruler
- a rigorous condition imposed by some outside agency or force
- an oppressive, harsh, or unjust act : a tyrannical act
A lot of people default to the 2nd one, because it is, the one most covered in our history lessons. That said, just because it is the most recognized definition, it is not the only one. I have a pet theory as to why, but that is probably not a place for such musings on my part.
2. Beyond that, I noticed that the questions attempt to conflate societal and governmental rules, which is fair as you want to establish the lines, but I fear it may muddle the point somewhat. It is possible I am channeling Chomsky a little here, but would you be willing to accept a distinction between private power ( corporation ) and societal power ( society and its byproduct government )?
If so, I think we can try to answer those questions.
>> Is paying for food/rent also a tyranny? (because who actually wants to pay for that)
Food and shelter are necessities. For practical purposes, any governing structure quickly recognizes that hungry and homeless population ( especially if it outnumbers fed population and population with an abode ) is a recipe for an end to that governing structure. As such, most bodies do try to keep basic minimum needs met.
That said, it does not appear to meet the definitions above at this time. Although, we are slowly reaching a boiling point of renting/housing being so expensive that it is "oppressive, harsh, or unjust act". Food-wise, it does not appear to be the case yet despite record inflation. Most can still eat, albeit not as much, or as well, as they used to
>> Is the need to contribute to society a tyranny?
Depends. What is the society we are discussing? Is the contribution unfair? If so, tyranny definition could apply.
>> Is it a tyranny to enforce laws like a speed limit through a school zone?
Maybe? Is the law enforced in an unfair manner ( say only women are stopped )? If so, tyranny definition could apply.
In short, I do not really believe in one and zero type answer. If anything, it is a spectrum of sorts and this does not even begin to cover the deeper dive into differences between corporate and non-corporate power structures.
Sorry but where are you getting your definition of tyranny?
“cruel and oppressive government or rule.” It kinda comes with the weight that you have no free will to leave and do something entirely different.
Is it really cruel to make you jump in your air conditioned car and drive to work? While listening to music or a podcast…Then work in an amazing office with fellow gifted engineers and civilized people. Same you did 3 years ago 5 days a week and now 40% less?
I would rather drive the car through a beautiful landscape (that I pick), instead in rush hour trafic that I don't have a choice in..
>Then work in an amazing office..
That I did't choose...
>with fellow gifted engineers and civilized people.
That I didn't pick..
There is a poem in Malayalam with a portion that goes like this "Bhandura kaanjanakkotilanengilum bandhanam bandhanam thanne paaril". It means, "bondage is bondage even if you are in a golden cage".
So the point is that office work is vastly less freedom (thus a kind of oppression), even with all its perks (that is for the few that indeed have those perks).
I think you would agree, when you choose a job you are choosing it based on a few base components. Job duties, pay, culture, location, travel requirements, hours per week etc... If these do not match up with what you want then its your job/right to get a different job at a different place with different components.
But I do reject the concept of 3 days a week not being an absolutely huge impact on your life, depending on your circumstance. It's life altering for a huge number or people. Others It's fine, or preferred.
Why would you commute that long? I’ve never had and would never tolerate a commute longer than 20 minutes. I go into the office every day of the week because the time spent in the car is negligible when you consider it’s just podcast time.
I'd say it's a pretty rare luxury to be able to commute less than 20 mins for your entire career. There are tons of jobs that happen in major cities that don't pay enough to live within 20 minutes. Many don't pay enough to reasonably commute by car.
Plus there are a lot of life circumstances that make people accept different tradeoffs over time (schools/districts, medical care, aging/ailing relatives, space vs price, urban vs natural, car vs transit etc).
>This is about fighting back to the tyranny of upper management who have nothing better to do than make poor decisions that affect other people negatively.
No, this is about Apple spending $5B on a state of the art amazing HQ that no one was doing much complaining about except those folks walking into the windows.
I remember when the plans for the new HQ were first unveiled. There was some disquiet from colleagues about the shift towards open floorplans. Not sure how it ended up being received by those who did relocate to there.
> I recall some disquiet from some colleagues about the shift towards open floorplans.
I can’t blame them for that. I am of the opinion that Frank Lloyd Wright may be the greatest sadist ever to walk the earth for popularizing the concept.
I’m very surprised that the remote-first companies aren’t being more assertive with employee theft from Apple.
There are top employees that have children or otherwise can’t afford not to be remote. I’d be WW2-style dropping leaflets over Apple HQ and purchasing billboards to poach them. When else in history will remote-firsts have such an utter and glaring advantage over Apple again?
Oh they are! Every time apple leadership sends out another one of these ahem... notices, recruiters perk up and start flooding email and LinkedIn inboxes.
they highlight things like "[REMOTE]" and "[WFH FRIENDLY]" heavily
The top employees that aren't moving back have already left or been granted remote as "key talent" through a politically charged process that requires a director going to bat for you in front of a VP. Apple has made it abundantly clear to everyone seeking it that you will not be allowed to go remote, you will not be allowed to work at another office, you will not be granted any sort of flexibility unless legally required. My team seemed to force out a lot of expensive senior talent to easily replace them with new college hires, so, you know, quite convenient for the company.
At this point if you are still at Apple hoping for full remote and haven't been granted it, well, good luck.
In a sense, they do not even have to know. Ratio of applicants to postings for remote vs non-remote positions is very noticeable. Those companies already have their pick.
In my social circle, people who could jump, already have. The companies that are rigid now have either people, who could not for whatever reason move or truly did not want to.
I'm very curious if WFH can survive a recession. My gut tells me no, but who knows. Though I enjoy the flexibility of hybrid, I can't help but feel it's the worse of both worlds. Still gotta live close and commute, but don't have the consistency (colleagues will have different schedules) so you often end up in the office and video chatting anyway.
I think it can. Enough big companies have gone all in on it that backing out will be hard. If some try to squeeze employees into offices, employees will migrate to places more friendly to it. Eg: if a hypothetical company "bookface" is more friendly to WFH than a hypothetical company "pear", they pay similarly, and both have similar jobs for someone, said someone might just sign Bookface's offer and leave Pear if Pear attempts to force WFH.
Five percent unemployment? You've still got some leverage. Nine-and-a-half percent (the peak during the Great Recession), and a lot of folks behind you in line will happily come into the office.
Plenty of WFH jobs at Amazon. Looking at a couple myself. Apple just removed themselves from my list. Actually said this was coming and they were already off my list.
If its a recession why are you spending money on overhead like an office when you have plenty of potential employees happy to work from their home, an office you the employer are basically are getting for free?
Because it's much easier to squeeze in-person employees harder.
I'm being facetious, but I don't think it's entirely a bad thing. I'm not sure if you've even worked in a fast-paced environment where everyone is absolutely buzzing, but it's quite exciting and I'm not convinced there's a remote equivalent.
Alternatively, WFH employees have way fewer benefits (no in-office coffee or food, potentially no internet or equipment support beyond a laptop, no electricity, HVAC, refrigerators, badges, security, commuter benefits, etc) and don't waste 1-3 hours per day commuting to and from the office + parking costs + 1 hour just to get too and from crappy unhealthy lunch spots.
Their hours are much more flexible -- if the desk is right in your house, it's not crazy to hop on the computer quick before bed to finish up a report or send an email or review a PR. So when "crunch time" actually happens, WFH employees can spend more time working than in-office employees, and work less afterward to avoid burnout.
The flexibility has additional benefits for coordination across time zones: I work from home, and I can get up at 6 AM to meet with folks in Australia from my home office. Or I can take off early and come back at 8PM to meet with folks in India. Not an option for in-office work. If you try, you'll be taking the meeting from your couch or some other suboptimal spot, not a home office.
If your company is upwards of 5,000 employees, you probably have multiple offices. This means most of your meetings are in conference rooms with a video call anyway. Effectively no different from WFH meetings, except for crappier volume control, microphone gain, and visibility.
Seems like for giant companies, WFH is a no-brainer for coordination purposes across multiple time zones and physical locations. And for small companies, WFH is a no-brainer because there's a ton of static-cost overhead that comes with physical offices.
Not only that, but I think those companies that are not burdened with enormous costs related to having an office will be more likely to reward / retain / hire employees.
It seems absurd that some WFH-only companies will basically give some "crazy" amount (like $10k) to new-hires to deck-out their home office, but that is probably less than the amortized office-space cost of hiring that person on site each year.
I left the US when Covid struck. No way was I sitting around there during all of this.
I took a 50% pay cut to move back to my home country, while producing the same output (and value)... the company directly benefited from that.
Now, if my company forced me back into an office I'd say no. I'd be on the market only for a remote role, still at a steep discount on US engineers.
Why wouldn't a smart company take that offer?
WFH is not going away, but I suspect the FAANG will move away from it and the startups will capture the opportunity.
I see people all the time complaining about salaries being different based on location and how it’s wrong. I actually don’t mind it. I live in a LCOL area and work for a Bay Area company. I don’t get paid as much as my SF colleagues but I make so much more than anyone around here that it doesn’t matter.
At some level I wonder if people in SF are worried about people like me and the above poster because we’re stealing jobs by being cheap.
Anyways, I’ll always be remote. There is no other option. I’m damn sure not moving to California.
Too many people discuss salary without discussing buying power.
When I did freelance work I loved picking up work from the coasts (NYC, LA, etc). They thought of me as cheap, I thought of them as a gravy train. Both sides benefitted from it.
100k in a rural, LCOL area probably has the buying power of 150-200k in NYC. I don't know the exact numbers, it's the idea that I'm trying to express here.
> Too many people discuss salary without discussing buying power.
In capitalism that is not important. If I have the negotiation capability to get a higher salary why should I accept a lower one just because I live cheaper?
Most people would accept a lower salary to WFH, or to have flexibility in their schedule to ensure they can attend to their child's lives.
The mistake "capitalists" make is thinking money is the only factor, or even the most important one.
But really, that wasn't even the point. The point is your salary isn't what grants you a good life, it's buying power. And having that buying power gives you a stronger negotiating stance anyway.
I honestly don’t know how people thought otherwise. The idea that all this is gonna be permanent just seemed silly to me.
Yes some companies will remain fully remote. Good luck to them. I’ll be curious to see where they land after five years.
Trying to organize a 10,000 person company fully remote seems like a pipe dream. Sure it might work for a few years while there is enough old timers in the mix but after long enough the corporate culture that made the company successful will slowly fracture as all the new hires never get exposed to it.
I dunno man… this all feels like a fad. Any time somebody says “XYZ is here to stay” it almost always means it isn’t gonna stay. Way too hype. Lots of dismissal or outright ignoring all the very real cons. It all just sounds way too good to be true.
It depends if a company’s desire for butts in seats exceeds its money-saving on utilities and rental. That doesn’t apply to Apple, probably because they’re just paying the loans for their new campus, but small companies, or companies that have satellite offices might be saving a bundle by letting their employees wfh. They just have to wade though all the middle-management that loses a lot of its value when there’s no one to lord over.
Yes. One of the funny things about having a lot of money is that it makes a lot more sense to borrow someone else’s money than spend your own. I can’t speak to the specifics, but I’m willing to bet Apple took out some very large loans to build Apple Campus.
Hybrid done right can’t be so flexible that people come in 1-2 days per week and discover no one else did. Has to be e.g “do 2 days a week in the office and one of them should be Tuesday”.
Otherwise as you say people just commute to empty offices.
For the first time in my life, I work in a real office, and I love it. As in, I have my own office, with a door that closes and everything (still missing a name plate on the door). I've decorated it with plants and I chose the furniture myself.
That office is a spare bedroom in my house. I'm never going back to working on an open space. The north-American middle management ideology that birthed that nonsense can die in a fire as far I'm concerned.
Seriously. Sometimes I walk by an office building and see the cubicles inside. I literally tense up inside in involuntary spasm. Life in a cubicle farm is like a slow-burn version of hell.
I will do anything, anything, to avoid ever going to an office again. I will also say that if anyone is so dense as to require office work in 2022, I will never work for them, even if they later change their minds back to WFH.
We must have very different office experiences. I only go in for 6 hours or so with an hour for lunch. My co-workers are nice and the commute is short. I could understand if you like working from coffee shops and such, but working from literal home basically puts you under house arrest.
Goodness me, if I could stay in my house for an entire week I sure would! I've spent a lot of money and effort making this place perfect for me, why should I want to leave?
House arrest? What a bizarre way of looking at it. Today I went and got my car fixed at the mechanic during the same period of time I would have had to vacantly stare at my monitor and pretend to be productive at a typical cubicle job. I have more freedom of movement now than I ever did with the strict 9-5 schedule at an office.
That's the thing. Offices don't have to have a 9-5 schedule. For example - just today I started working at 10am at home. I had a 30 minute remote meeting and then followed up on a couple of things before driving in at 11. I had a 1:1 over lunch with my manager. I did some code review and talked with my co-workers. Then I left at 3:30.
I got free lunch. I got to see my manager face-to-face to have a pretty serious conversation. I got free snacks.
…but you have to live driving distance from work, ruling out almost the entire planet for living in. I will add that it also rules out almost every workplace for you, and almost every employee for your business. Face to face is sometimes better, just not worth the massive tradeoffs.
Depending on where you want to live remote work will make more sense. I'm just saying the loathing that offices get can be quickly fixed by using them less and mostly for what they're good at.
I think my highest-upvoted comment on HN is actually me ranting about how much I hate open offices (specifically me complaining about my coworkers around the World Cup).
I really haven't changed my opinion on this; do I sometimes miss hanging around coworkers in person? Sure, I have some good memories with them, but I very much do not miss open offices. If I had a guarantee of a private office, I'd realistically consider going back to in-person work, but it's basically off the table until then.
I've had multiple record scratch, conversation dies moments discussing my utter dislike of open plan offices to managers.
Some simply do not understand that it doesn't work for a large number of people.
Detest it, I get no work done, my stress goes through the roof and I'm constantly bothered by people chatting/noise, distractions in my sightlines etc.
Basically have to put on noise cancelling headphones and find a seat in the corner, what's even the point then?
I started my remote first business during COVID-19. We will eventually get an office, but a small one with flex space to rent for get-togethers every one or two quarters. Eventually we'll finalized a geographic home.
In the meantime, I pay my employees better, pay for their internet, give better benefits, etc.
(note: open to suggestions on what makes your life better as a remote worker)
A standing desk is a must. It makes me more productive because my body doesn't fall apart from sitting all day, so if I am in the zone I can stay there but just switch to standing and back. Previously, I needed to go on walks.
My body requires this in my late 20’s.
Every workplace should provide reimbursement for a standing desk and floor mat imo.
> open to suggestions on what makes your life better as a remote worker
Provide good networking equipment free-of-charge. Powerline adapters are cheap, will work pretty much everywhere, don't require running wires and while they won't give you the fastest bandwidth, whatever bandwidth they end up achieving will usually remain stable with little packet loss. For people with laptops, give them APs to connect to the powerline adapters and to place in every room they plan to be working in.
Network connectivity is paramount in a remote setting and it will always amaze me how otherwise-smart software engineers put up with terrible connections and have no clue where to even begin attacking the problem (they'll often blame the ISP even though the problem is in their LAN in the majority of cases). An unstable connection is horrible when it comes to calls/screen-sharing/etc as "modern" conferencing software is utterly terrible at handling interruptions (despite something like TeamSpeak from over a decade ago did it better even on computers orders of magnitude slower than now).
Same for audio equipment. I'm lucky enough that AirPods and MacOS work well enough generally so if most of your employees use Mac they are a good option but otherwise Jabra also makes good wireless headsets that connect via USB (and handles the wireless itself with a proprietary protocol, so no Bluetooth shenanigans) so make those available if needed.
On the other hand, I wish my employer would ban AirPods. The microphone quality is largely garbage and frequently cuts out or devolves into robot-voice messiness.
If I ran a company, I would commission every employee with a nice over-ear headset with a boom mic and slight voice feedback in the ear cups. If I ever met with someone with crap audio, they'd have no excuse not to switch to a decent mic/speaker setup.
As you traverse the management tree towards the top, both age and ability to influence office policy go up. And as age goes up, remote management experience/comfort goes down.
Conscious or not, the people with the power are making things most comfortable for them. They’re not necessarily acting in the best interest of the company.
Its emotional thinking to prefer the status quo that you know, not rational thinking imo. Rational logic would suggest not signing any more office leases and letting your employees foot that bill through their own homes, saving the company money with no change in work output.
I don't think it's corelated with age. In fact my experience has always been that it was older, more experienced engineers who had managed to swing things in a direction where they could consult from a home office. I was always jealous of such people when I was younger. A more difficult arrangement for new-grads or junior devs to acquire.
It wasn't until COVID that remote work became more accessible to more people.
Yes - this is a silly echo chamber thought that I only see on this website. In most companies it's not social managers vs antisocial technical folks. And even in software companies it's not the case.
In most companies, the younger half of the employees tend to want to socialize more, tend to live in smaller cramped places, and want learn from experienced people in person.
The older half of employees tend to have bigger houses with personal offices, don't want to be constantly bothered with questions from the younguns, might be married and not care as much about fraternizing with co-workers, and maybe have kids and other personal responsibilities that make the flexibility of remote work all the more appealing.
As one point of data, I've been trending towards remote-or-bust as I've aged. My tolerance for time wasters (like commuting) is low and my desire for flexibility is much higher.
I’m sure some prefer in-office more with age, but it’s definitely not the case for all!
They also own houses worth millions close to the office and don’t give a f-k about other people having to spend the major part of their income on housing and commuting, not to mention the absolute evil of destroying the environment for no good reason.
this is a huge factor. I have found a lot of vp/exec folk are totally blind to the fat that their significant wealth makes commutes go away, and makes it easy to have a decent lifestyle AND be close to the office. This is especially an issue in SFBA where even upper-middle-class-bordering-on-rich still have hour each way commutes due to housing cost.
I had to commute almost 4 hrs every day. Waking up at 5am to be there at 8am. I can play with my son, have quality time with my wife and get up at 7am and finish at 5 and I'm home already. I won't go back, God willing.
Where I live, Boston/Cambridge, there are many people that commute into the city because they pay slightly more than the suburb cities but at the cost of tremendous commute times because they can no longer afford to live in the city.
I made my team fully 100% remote in September 2019. Hah! Then covid hit. The entire team was safely at home since then.
BUT.
I have to say while its a nice perk for the job (typing this from South East Asia), productivity is less than what I would like. People take work for granted a bit more and are a little more "entitled" to everything now.
And I get it. It's really nice to be able to work around your job instead of the reverse.
I think some people (like me) are better in-person managers than remote managers. And that's why the quality of remote work is spotty or so many managers want people back in house.
Let's not also forget that all the things that were cherish and use were mostly built by teams of people working together on some site. Whether it's the buildings, the internet infrastructure, the food you eat, the services your subscribe to, the software you're using right now, the computer or phone you're typing from -- all of it is built and delivered by groups of people that see each other every day in offices.
Please, don't get it twisted that just because you can code, provide customer support or write remotely -- that the other 95% of people can.
Remote work is an untested thing and really, only works for a tiny set of knowledge businesses.
So, while I love that our team works remote -- I would say most people will have to get off their a*ses and get back to the office.
Your company may suck at remote, but Apple doesn't. Two years into the pandemic, we see record AAPL profits, no visible downturn in software quality. And yet Apple's CEO, in thrall to the pet social theories of a bunch of ancient billionaires, is willing to throw it all away.
>I think some people (like me) are better in-person managers than remote managers. And that's why the quality of remote work is spotty or so many managers want people back in house.
Then learn to be a better manager rather than making a whole bunch of people miserable to save yourself the hassle of improving.
People will under-deliver when there is no clear outcome or agenda for their work. Within the office the pressure of contributing to work is provided because others can see what you have on your screen and if its not "work". You contribute because you have to, not because you feel that your outputs are moving the needle in a positive direction.
When you WFH that changes ('aint nobody watching your screen but you) but the underlying problem still remains. The team are not working towards a clear goal that they understand and want to achieve. When you provide that, the team will always contribute effectively because its interesting and importantly allows them to feel like their work means something.
WFH productivity is not the problem. Managers providing worthy work is.
Eh. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but by entitled do you mean less scared of layoff? If so, management does have tools ( or at least should have ) to motivate employees by means other than survival..
I mean it is true. You can tell people are less concerned about their jobs ( anecdotally, my McD messes up my order a lot more often now ), but to me it only proves management had an easy ride the past few decades. Now they actually have to work.
>all of it is built and delivered by groups of people that see each other every day in offices.
Except for those tools that have always been maintained by remote collaborators since it became possible with the internet connecting open source software engineers from around the world. Plus all the businesses that have always been remote.
I agree on all the benefits of WFH that have already been mentioned, but I do miss the daily casual interactions with colleagues, e.g. in front of coffee. I think, long term, teams will be less cohesive and companies will see less idea exchange (the unstructured or serendipitous kind)
I grew up socializing online so I am the opposite. The office was a barrage of spontaneous interruptions, and made me look for a hole in the back of the office to hide in. It’s easier to take a brainstorming walk and ping a colleague with an idea than give them the 50th shoulder tap of the day. It’s understandable that not everyone is used to communicating in this way.
And since your chat program of choice now shows you as inactive/away for that 20min brainstorming walk session, manager sees it as you not working or being productive. Better make that time up!
If you have abusive micromanaging management then your life will be miserable. Period. Blaming one of the five million tools or approaches they could use to achieve that goal is rather short sighted.
if my manager/employer is looking at that shit and complaining about being AFK for 20min I'll be looking for a new place to work. already dealt with that sort of BS in the past -- never again.
At apple you are not allowed to discuss anything with anyone until you've gone to one of three(!!) internal websites to see if they are "disclosed" on the thing you want to discuss with them. "Spontaneous" conversations cannot happen by definition.
I think that depends on the team. When I was there I didn't work on a lot of "classified" stuff, so spontaneous conversations weren't too uncommon, at least in the NY office.
You can have spontaneous discussions with people you know to be disclosed (three websites sucks); you don’t need to re-look them up every time. You can also talk about things that don’t require disclosure.
Just because something has worked one way for ages doesn't mean it can't work another way. It really is a culture thing I think. If you've been working in an office your whole life and you are used to that then I can totally see it being difficult.
If you are a digital native whose social life has taken place largely online it is likely WFH is better.
In some ways the world/technology/culture has changed so much and so frequently over the last 40-50 years that each generation's lived experience growing up is markedly different than the last. In the totality of the human experience this is pretty rare. I think work is only going to become more age segregated over time due to cultural differences.
Two weeks notice is pretty bad. All of this is moot though, in a few months they'll be remote again... if not before or delayed again. It's clear that monkeypox is spreading into the mainstream population and becoming a serious pandemic that might require even stricter measures like fomite spread precautions. There will undoubtedly be a back to school related surge and big companies will snap remote again where employees have significant leverage.
> It's clear that monkeypox is spreading into the mainstream population
My understanding was that 97% of positive cases were in men who have sex with men, but with the huge caveat that only MSM were being widely tested. Have you seen more comprehensive testing data recently?
It's an artifact of undertesting and restricted access to testing. In Nigeria, where the virus is endemic, they clearly have seen and documented its spread via airborne particles to any sex of people for decades now: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01686-z It's silly how quickly people have ignored all the data about it from Africa because it seems to be inconvenient.
The MSM community is the first major non-African cluster just like the Wuhan market was the first major cluster for COVID-19. People saying it's not a threat to the non-MSM community right now were like people who said "oh it won't spread outside China" to COVID-19 in January 2020. The virus doesn't care about your sexual preference. If you have the right cell receptors and come in contact with it, it will attack and infect.
For what it's worth, I replied to you above with numbers showing it's even more MSM than that in CA.
But on testing it feels to me we are making the same mistakes as covid.
I've had this cold/run off gunk for weeks. Longer than what is normal from allergies.
My Dr. told me I need two lesions to get a test.
Which is like saying you need to have been in Wuhan and have severe cold like symptoms.
The pox are pretty unique looking... Especially if you've had recent intimacy.
IDK maybe we sohuld bring back I. Am. Not. An. Epidemiologist (IAMAE) but wouldn't it be better - if our supply is limited - to test people who might have been exposed, so they can quarantine before they get pox and then contact trace.
Probably non-pox spread, but if you have those sores it's pretty noticeable ...
That article does not support what you claim, except stating that the virus is endemic in rats and suspected of being spread through sexual contact. Not really news to anyone who has been following this stuff. It does not mention airborne particles (not that I doubt you: our facility does takes airborne precautions with suspected monkeypox patients)
So back to my original question: have you seen more comprehensive surveillance data for the general population?
As someone who just got their vaccine and in the high risk group: ooof I hope not.
What data points to it being a threat in the 'mainstream' (I don't like that word here) population right now?
here are CA stats [1]; only .8% (mostly identify as cis) female infected.
though it doesn't show demo xtabs over time. so hard to tell if only is growing.
If it spreads through brief contact we'd be screwed..
Let alone if it spreads through droplets and or fomites.
--
Sad we failed yet again. Especially queer community, and like all things health disproportionally bipoc. seems like we had all the tools & knowledge to stop, or drastically slow, this one but failed.
Seeing photos of pox on people's faces is just truly terrifying.
I really really hope this vaccine works or at least prevents sores like that.
Hard to change behavior to avoid all sex / human touch..
Let's not spread FUD. A viral monkeypox (a la Coronavirus) would be way disastrous than the coronavirus itself (people do care more about how they look). There is nothing that suggests that's the case for now. There are also a whole bunch of viruses in Africa (ie: Ebola) that could be worse but they aren't.
Market is cold, so now’s the time to do RTO. All the people considering quitting will have a much harder time putting their money where their mouth is.
I am a bit of a pessimist but RTO feels inevitable to me.
Probably going to get downvoted by people but… There are a lot of people ITT scornful of Apple’s decision here, and saying that they’re only doing it for dumb reasons, I.e., to justify their office or because managers are old and out of touch.
Please don’t take this as a wholehearted endorsement of Apple’s policy here, but I do sort of get it. In my experience, doing collaborative creative work is dramatically more difficult in a remote environment. In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other). I’m sure remote works well for some creative teams… but in my experience, it is much harder (I’ve spoken to peers at other companies who feel the same way). If Apple thinks that collaboration and idea creation are core to innovation, I can see why they want people back in the office.
Not saying I agree with their methods though - personally I would have gone for a softer touch and a more tailored-by-team approach.
I’m doing my best! I’m in a very hybrid environment right now. But even people with a lot of experience find it hard. The O’Reiley book “Discussing Design” (strong recommend, it’s a good book) is about design critique, and it spends some time on how doing critique in hybrid/remote environments is hard. Sometimes things are just… more difficult, and it’s not trivially solvable.
A laptop camera angled on the whiteboard or whatever scrap of paper the person has on hand? Thats what we've used and its fine for showing drawings in zoom meetings. Making people commute to watch someone draw on a whiteboard seems wasteful.
I have tried whiteboard over zoom. It’s a miserable failure. There isn’t a camera, lighting setup and compression algorithm on earth that will get it right. It just looks like a grainy, pixilated poorly lit mess. And you can’t hand the market to the other people.
And worse you have to schedule it in advance in 30 minute intervals. Bye bye spontaneous creativity. Bye bye innovation.
Programming remote is easy. But there is vastly more to delivering a product than writing code.
Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team.
With remote it’s as if the rest of the company doesn’t exist. You’ll never even meet anybody else using just zoom.
I’m sorry but full remote is a huge bust. I get people love their lack of commute and think they are all being ultra productive but honestly they aren’t. There is way more to being a successful organization than simply optimizing for each employees productivity.
Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work.
The last two years were supposed to be temporary. Always remember that.
> Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team.
> [...]
> Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work.
How do you think companies that have team spread across different continents have been working for decades?
Why do you think apps such as slack and msteams were already heavily used and popular in the workplace before covid hit?
In my workplace, I think it proved the opposite. Sure, the sky didn't fall, but the quality of work certainly went down.
The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer. These were things that happened naturally between engineers in a bull pen or from people walking down the hall to ask a senior engineer interesting questions.
I think remote can work for experts, but if you have a lot of juniors, they simply fail to develop.
In my experience it helped companies realize their onboarding sucked in the first place and was relying way too much on oral tradition. They were forced to act on it and implement processes that make them much better than before.
For example it was not uncommon before covid that you'd start in a new company and you either didn't even have a computer ready or were missing lots of accounts to even think about starting and do something. When I switched company a bit less than 1y ago, I received all my equipment one week in advance, got a 3h meeting with HR scheduled on my first day at 9am, a list of mandatory and mostly useful trainings to do that I had to complete in the first month. Those helped me a lot get through the eventual idle time you get when your coworkers cannot dedicate time for you in the first days. I was also assigned an onboarding buddy that I could annoy anytime to help me navigate through anything I didn't know.
Never saw that kind of efficient onboarding before Covid.
> The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer
I actually took advantage of the tools available to me and improved all of those in my current company.
There are onboarding Git repositories with both information about projects, as well as instructions for getting stuff up and running. IDE run configurations and scrips that prompt for input or give details on first run. CI/CD processes for deployments, monitoring tools that are integrated with the communication apps, useful scripts and utilities where needed.
Of course there's always the possibility for colleagues to just ask questions, but now I can also encourage them to look in the direction of general chat channels so someone else could also help them.
Somehow telling someone to wait for a few hours and getting back to them with some very basic automation wasn't chosen in the past often, even if in those particular cases more time was wasted on doing things manually or poking one's finger at the screen and explaining what to do, when that could have been a few lines of Markdown.
As they pointed out in their open letter [0] the last time this was proposed, they don't need in person collaboration every day, or even every week. It's probably only useful about once a month if that.
I wonder how people feel about making other aspects of their lives remote. Attending remote conferences? How about remote vacations? Remote schooling for their kids?
There have been a number of conferences I've missed this year because they returned to in person. Sorry, I'm in it for a few talks, I'm not uprooting my week to fly to Portland and hunt for accommodations. A big slap in the face when they don't even offer recorded sessions online. Like, if the conference is about sharing knowledge with the world, don't you want to let the world access that knowledge?
Do you want them to put out free content that took a lot of money to co-ordinate and produce or do you want them to spend a lot of money setting up a paywall for access that very few people will buy?
All these conferences have corporate sponsors and paid-for sessions by their employees as sales and recruiting tools. The content should be freely accessible, your ticket buys you renting out the conference space and food.
I bet for most of these conferences, those costs are rounding errors in the grand scheme. When Microsoft has Microsoft build, the cost of the space and food is nothing compared to the return they are going to get from companies who turn around a pour money into azure because of what they demonstrated at the conference. Same with other companies.
The cases where this probably isn't true are going to be the conferences like Debconf or BSDConf. Mind you, these conferences have been hosting all their sessions on youtube for years.
This part has been great. Unfortunately "networking" at remote conferences has been terrible. Most of my conferences are predominantly about networking, so overall it's been a net negative.
I agree about that. I think a nice balance would be localized meetups to watch the conference or an after hours event where you can discuss the content of the talks over a pint or hitting a few golf balls or something.
Online conferences have been a complete bust for me. They're on par with IRC or forums, background noise with bursts of activity.
I loved going to conferences because the setting seems to often attract people that exactly are not the always-on-always-busy people, and you can go from tech talk to chitchatting back to tech talk. Also it was always a good excuse to visit another city and maybe add a day of sightseeing, or just break the habits the of every day work.
I miss in-person conferences and I don't see myself participating in a lot of online ones. You have all the problems of bad cameras, bad microphones, bad remote conferencing software. Totally willing to accept these in order to save 30-90 minutes of commuting every day, and you can get yourself suited in your team... but not willing to accept that for twice a year events that used to be awesome and fun.
Guess I have to clarify that I'm 95% happily WFH since March 2020 and I see no problems, given the right team and circumstances. I'm not one of these super extroverted people, but I do love conferences.
I'm not sure what you mean to achieve by this comment. Do you want to imply that working remotely is the same as "remote vacations", and so people are hypocrits for only wanting one of these but not the other?
But if you are serious about your question, please look at the context of each of these: Vacations are often defined by being in a different place. Working, however, is defined through achieving some result - for IT work, there is no necessary, physical "location" attribute.
And if they have different relationships to a physical location, it isn't fair to compare them as if they did.
Neuromatch is a conference and "summer" online school that was created due to the pandemic. It is spectacular, with thousands of lectures and hours of teaching online. It has now become an organization
You are not alone in believing creative work and collaboration are much more difficult in a remote environment.
But yesterday I watched the movie "A dangerous method" about Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Well, at the time, collaboration was via paper mail. And my feeling is that they were more creative than we are.
I'm not suggesting to go paper mail, but I couldn't help but observe this fact.
That’s an interesting hypothesis. I could see how paper mail, by virtue of forcing you to put extreme effort into clarity and thoroughness, could spark some novel thinking. On the other hand, as much as I think I work with great people, I doubt they’re all great in the level of those three!
Unfortunately I think remote work is the worst of both worlds by comparison.
IMO collaborating via paper isn't about the actual medium of communication, it's time and freedom. When every reply takes at least a few days to arrive to you you've got enormous space for experimentation, even if only in your own head. Meanwhile in remote work world we're plugged into video conference meetings multiple times a day. There isn't a lot of mental space.
You are comparing synchronous and asynchronous work, not in-person and remote. There's no reason remote work needs to involve multiple meetings a day, just like there's nothing preventing your boss from requiring multiple meetings a day when working in person.
In fact, remote work is usually more asynchronous than in-person when it's a core part of how a company works. Remote-first companies might have people working in 3 timezones with 8 hours between each of them (I've been in this situation), so meetings are a pain in the ass for everyone and everything that can possibly be done via email or other tools, is.
Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers. Trial-and-error is the least desirable way to work. Async and remote is about thinking and writing down before blurting out. To me the latter is more professional way to work, and for the same reason it's more somber.
Couldn't agree more. I recently started at a full remote company, after working at very in-person-centric companies before. I'm astonished at home much genuine discussion takes place on slack and over email. It's so nice to have a physical, searchable record of where various engineers stand on these issues! And it's nice to be able to take my time and read through an argument, instead of making the argument orally and forgetting half of the points by the time we decide on a direction.
If your company stubbornly insists on synchronous video calls for every decision, of course you'll hate remote work. But if your company embraces the async nature of remote work, I think it's possible to be much more productive.
>Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers
And remote-WFH meetings that aren't 1:1, are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep with their mics muted, until their name gets called and you see them suddenly snap back to reality because they were watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast.
I know I'm guilty of that and if you say you aren't, you're lying, like saying you don't masturbate.
> And remote-WFH meetings are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep, watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast.
This is a company policy problem. Remote or in-person is not going to solve that. If your employees are not being engaged in meetings, stop having them.
I'm heavily in favor of remote-WFH who prefers async communication, but this is a multi faceted problem. What do you do when the employees who actually need to be engaged in the problem use WFH to slack off and not prepare for meetings?
This might touch a nerve, but some tech workers are grown up man-children with little to no discipline (I'm sure everyone here knows some) since they got through life by having adults (parents, guardians, teachers, bosses, coaches, mentors) keep them accountable for their work/progress, and once the move form the office to home happened, they stopped doing much work and treated it as a vacation, since they didn't like their job much anyway and they were just there for the paycheck, and as their boss/colleagues couldn't see them slack off the whole day it felt like they weren't accountable to anyone anymore.
I've already seen several people let go due to this.
Maybe take advantage of the benefits of remote: Have 2 meetings instead of one, with one being a 'pre-meeting' to make sure everyone is prepared, with a few hours between them. Keep them short. Nobody is going to complain that you re holding up the conference room.
>Have 2 meetings instead of one, with one being a 'pre-meeting' to make sure everyone is prepared
So we solve the zoom-meeting fatigue problem by introducing even more meetings and disruptive context switching where the bosses/leads need to take time out of their already busy schedule to act as baby-sitters and check up on their "babies" because some people lack self discipline and can't self organize when someone isn't constantly watching over their shoulder?
Sounds like micromanagement hell, count me out. I don't know any tech company where this is the norm and wouldn't want to be in one, not as a worker, nor as a boss.
Everywhere I worked you were trusted to be accountable for your work and if a higher-up had to keep checking in on you regularly, you were on your way out.
Generally when you're having meetings about meetings, you're crossing the line into a meeting-dominated culture. History and common sense tell us that meetings may be where some decisions are made, but they are not where actual IC work gets done.
Collaborative work done remotely is a skill that can be learned and improved.
And yes, maybe some forms of collaborative work are inherently more difficult to do remotely.
But you are ignoring the massive impacts of commuting, being stuck in crappy office buildings and forced to live in an overwhelmingly expensive and chaotic city have on performance. Having spent 17 years as a remote product manager, my anecdata is that eliminating those factors from my life led to dramatically higher performance, and more importantly, a work/life balance that didn't have me quietly resenting my state of employment for the required in-person depredations.
...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience...
VS
...a 20+ year veteran with 3 kids and a house in the suburbs with a 2.5hrs of commuting per day and a job that consists entirely of conference calls, emails, and presentations.
Not everyone fits in these two groups, but they are illustrative.
The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute.
The second group has usually already baked in their system of organization and discipline and can more easily maintain productivity at home.
Another dimension is how much socialization an employee needs to do their job. Someone in HR might need considerably more face time than a programmer.
> ...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience...
> The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute.
The young single employee will probably not afford to live in a big city and have a short commute.
For most of what Apple does, I'd expect that the ratio of in-person time to remote time needed is pretty low.
I wonder if an approach like that used by some TV series might work? They have a writer's retreat for each season, where all the people that were going to be writing episodes, the showrunners, and I think the directors would get together for several days and pitch episode ideas to the group. They work out what episodes they were going to do, outlines of the general plot, and which writers and directors would do each episode.
For a tech company maybe have a quarterly retreat that lasts a week or two. Hold it at some good vacation destination (changing each time), and for the well off tech companies maybe even pay for the employee's family to come too. Leave some gaps in the meeting schedules so that the employee will have some time to do vacation-like things with their family while at the retreat.
We are talking about a TECHNOLOGY COMPANY that sells the best collaborative software, hardware and philosophy the world has ever seen, and employs thousands of people who all believe in that.
The fact this has not already been used as an example to champion technology to take it to new levels of collaborative effectiveness is an absolutely steaming red flag that Apple has begun "the descent".
> In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other).
Getting a graphics tablet has been a pretty good idea in my experience. You get all the benefits of working digitally like layers and non destructive operations (like moving stuff around), which would be a bit more cumbersome otherwise.
Oh course I'd still argue that it's a bit worse for taking really quick notes, though being able to easily save a file or two and put it in Slack or some Wiki for referencing that exact thing months later is pretty cool, without the intermediate step of having to digitize some pictures and do the same work twice.
I do also enjoy being able to share my screen in standup meetings and very quickly showing a few screenshots and graphs, in addition to aggregating them across years for later performance reviews.
In my experience a particular pain point is the latency that you speak of, as well as people not wanting to invest about 50€ in a reasonable mic and possibly a webcam as well.
It just shows when people don't care or don't know about these things, even interviews with government officials in the news for a while here looked like they're 240p or something.
I got a certain amount of schadenfreude from seeing Apple's opulent "spaceship" campus sit essentially empty during COVID. A building shaped like an asshole is probably a good place for assholes to go to work.
The rest of the world has gone back to hybrid or full time office long time ago.
I have a feeling, most of us here in the states will go back to hybrid eventually.
However, it won't happen for a while.
But once you start seeing unemployment rate tick up past 6-7%, employers will have more leverage. All of a sudden, you will have more employees willing to commute.
If you are in a recession, why are you maintaining an expensive office lease instead of taking the free office your employees are happy to provide for you?
You're missing the part where maybe they want some people to quit right now. IBM would do this with employees that had been working from home for years, that they had even encouraged to work from home. All the sudden, they would say 'hey - we've decided that we should be an in-office department now' - so pack up from Colorado and see you in Poughkeepsie Monday! Don't like it? Well you can always quit...
The article states going from 2 days a week to 3, yet most of the comments here are acting as if it’s going from 0 to 3. I don’t think this will make a substantial difference.
Apple hardware engineering probably does involve a good amount of in-person work.
As far as software goes, Apple's entire culture of secrecy and very top-down approach to decision-making negates the whole "water cooler conversations lead to innovation" meme. Steve Jobs' "serendipitous personal encounters" placement of bathrooms to facilitate conversations was done at Pixar, not at Apple.
Speaking of Pixar, isn't there a whole story of one of their movies getting saved because of somebody working from home and having a backup of the data?
I've might've heard of that. Speaking of Apple and WFH, a single remote employee laid the foundation for the OS X transition to Intel from his very own home office:
For me wfh has been something like the unpleasant social dynamics of a high school cafeteria, as opposed to the focused learning environment of the chemistry classroom. I don’t miss the commute, but I miss the collaboration. Some companies will benefit, probably by lowering compensation, but overall I think productivity drops for teams. Some individuals win, but many lose, such as those with small children, or small apartments with two working adults etc, so I do not accept the workers’ rights argument.
This is correct. Workers rights come from the flexibility and trust that a remote-optional arrangement provides.
I live in a small apartment with two working adults. I’d rather work from our kitchen table than from an open office.
I believe that some people with small children like working from home because they can spend less on childcare and spend more time with their children.
Individuals have a huge spectrum of changing wants and needs. Our working arrangements can and should be flexible.
Ok I’ll bite. I don’t like the rights framing, and I don’t quite know what is meant by trust. I want to replace the word trust with information. Information doesn’t flow along the edges if the org chart, nor does it flow down from manager to employee. It’s moving between individuals horizontally and vertically, and also between groups. For anyone to be effective, they have to know what’s going on, where the project is heading, what’s crucial and what’s expendable. Working in isolation is just not conducive to building an intuition for this team awareness. All the trust in the world isn’t going to cut through the misinformation and confusion that accumulates while people are out of the office, working hard on the wrong thing.
i mean if you live in a super expensive area (bay area) and you get to WFH from your shitty apartment/condo/house that you barely afforded, then i think you aren't getting the full benefits of WFH.
I think you’re saying that to get the most value from remote work, ICs have to move to low cost areas. That’s asking a lot from people who left their home towns (or home countries) to live in a software hub. But it’s a non sequitur anyway, since basically nobody seems to want to go back to the office, regardless of where they live.
My company mandated return to office two days a week.
I quit and landed a better job that’s remote and with location-independent pay.
Working from an office is fine for some. Make it optional.
Lots of companies are still hiring. I encourage you to see what’s out there and ask interviewers if roles can be made remote.
Commuting is an expensive, time-consuming, and wasteful activity. Working from an open office was, for me, a source of near constant low level background stress. It felt unnatural, and I couldn’t work as well. Now, remote, I can deliver more quality work with less burnout. I am also feeling healthier.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadGoing to health, if they have HVAC and a good mask protocol for dense spaces, I don't personally see the problem in the building. Getting there, may cause increased exposure.
Apple can afford both the HMO, and the epidemiologists to work out if this change has any impact on health in the company, in the families at large, and in the wider community. I look forward to the research papers!
That's a lot of time.
Can you get comped for working on the bus? Is it even possible? Commutes like this are really killer.
For me, that's looking up from the monitor to watch the kitties romping together (20-20-20 eye rule reminders), taking a short movement break to throw them some toys to chase, and occasionally having one curl up on my lap while I'm thinking.
Personally, I'll never go back to working in an office, God willing.
My company is 5x the size it was prior to the pandemic, but only has office space to accommodate ~1/7 of its workforce. The office functions as a space individuals and teams can reserve for limited times if they want to. So there's no big building tempting leadership to implement RTO.
It is not.
>> the only people pushing for return to office are the managers against the wishes of many employees. They are the ones who felt slighted and made obsolete
This is the organizational logic working.
Emotion may be beating logic for many of the people in this thread.
Our company has been super transparent with us from the outset that we're about 30% less productive as a remote-first company compared to everyone being in the office. This was deemed acceptable. We're biotech, we employee an army of medical doctors, and as long as COVID remains a real threat, we'll remain remote-first.
We got rid of maybe a quarter of our office space, but our company has made it clear that it intends to eventually move us back into the office at least once or twice a week for most employees to regain some of that lost productivity and especially to help new hires get up to speed more quickly.
Some high performing, individual contributor, highly self-motivated knowledge workers may be more productive in a fully remote environment, but I think it's very much the exception. For better or for worse, most people just want to do the bare minimum amount of work that they can get away with while still keeping their job, and they can get away with doing far less remotely than they can in real life.
This probably depends on industry and job function.
For software developers working for a software company, I think it's the rule, not the exception. Our company saw a significant productivity boost as soon as the engineering department went remote, and I've heard the same from other companies as well.
Even better, being remote-first means a software company opens itself up to a much larger, more diverse talent pool. Hiring excellent ICs wherever they may be allows you to compete with the best for the best.
I live in an area with only one large software company in a 25 mile radius - one I used to work for. But I left it for a remote-first startup in Los Angeles. I still live in the same house with my wife and kids; we didn't have to move them and start over, something for which I am deeply grateful. More is expected of me (which I am thrilled to deliver) and I'm paid a lot more too.
If you are in biotech, all the more reason your company should be focused on limiting its harm to the ecology of the planet as much as it can, and only keep employees whose job can't happen remotely onsite.
However, this is the third year I’ve been working from home, including starting a new job where I didn’t know anyone. None of it has had any impact on my productivity and the companies I’ve worked for have only seen record profits. I am not commuting for hours every day and wasting my time and money while doing so. Nah. This is about fighting back to the tyranny of upper management who have nothing better to do than make poor decisions that affect other people negatively.
This cannot be sufficiently overstated.
The only reason why major companies undergo Agile transformations -- and why these almost always take the form of Scrum -- is because of the promise of fine-grained metrics, analytics, and control of the SDLC by upper management. That's what the agile consultants pitched to the CTO. Everybody involved in a typical Scrum shop is playing a game of Mornington Crescent -- of pretending to deliver quality software in an organic developer-customer relationship when what they're really expected to deliver is stories, estimates, and burndown data to their bosses (or their bosses' bosses).
Anyway, that has not much to do with WFH, aside from the fact that calling workers into the office comes from the same place as imposing Scrum: the bosses need to feel in total control.
So just because companies are making more money, doesn't mean productivity hasn't gone down. It could be that it's just lost in the noise at the moment and won't show up in the data for a few years.
For example, it seems evident to me that there's going to be a lot less "cross pollination" (for lack of a better metaphor) between people in a WFH environment as opposed to an office. For those with plenty of experience, this will have a fairly minimal impact, but for anyone else I'm concerned about missing out on the little things that are seamlessly transferred in face-to-face interactions over time. That thing that takes you 30 minutes that can be resolved with a 5 minute chat with the guy who knows, etc. Things you won't even really think to ask about that don't get brought up.
Even less direct things as well - eg random new product ideas that come from a chat with a coworker, or improvements, anything like that. Those can all add up to improving products and productivity, and are difficult to measure the effect of.
All of this stuff is in the tail though, and we probably won't see the effects for years (and it'll be muddied by people who do genuinely work well in WFH environments too)
I've had this happen plenty of times over text.
I suspect the "cross pollination" might get balanced out by the ability to interact with anyone at the company, rather than just those on your floor or building.
People starting dying from covid while crypto markets soared, so I guess killing people with covid fuels bitcoin.
Or possible they huge money printing influenced the picture.
EDIT: Not saying we weren’t more productive, just saying that HN tends to be very scientific but is really ignoring correlation != causation which we all would point out for most other things.
It's entirely possible that a company can have a drop in productivity and record profits at the same time.
Anecdotally, my company had record profits during the period of WFH, and I personally think my productivity stayed the same or improved. However, as a company we also shipped significantly less new features/products than we did in years past (and my opinion as to why is because we had significant organizational delays caused by miscommunication about timelines and priorities (stuff that in theory might have been improved if we were not WFH)). If we had not had a drop in the amount we shipped, it's possible our record profits would have been even higher record profits.
That’s still not a good reason, since you are essentially trying to guilt people into staying or making their life more busy so interviewing is harder.
I will say I've been work from home for years now and I still do all of those things ;). Just not with my coworkers. And not always in the heart of downtown, but more local to where I am.
The money is still spent, just not in the same places.
I don't suspect any grand conspiracy, but I do think a lot of asset managers have had chats with high net worth individuals and gone over just what the collapse of the commercial real estate market would look like for them personally, especially with the stock market being so shaky as of recent.
I suspect these causal conversations are behind a large number CEOs return to office strategies (in addition to justifying their office investment as you mention) as well as Malcolm Gladwell's sudden revelation that working in an office is super important for everyone who is not him.
The sort of major product breakthroughs that more creative people had during walks, cross team pollination over coffee breaks, or extended lunch brainstorms are probably fewer though. It’s hard to measure.
After RTO, companies start mentioning productivity problems.
Maybe they're related?
I'm a huge fan of working in the office - but it astounds me that anyone can miss that people have different working styles.
This is not about fighting any tyranny, this is about running companies, and the same way there are costs associated to work in an office for you, there are costs associated with employees working remotely (and not only economic), but you don't see them.
There's many more metrics too, like attrition, or poor onboarding experience for new hires, or inability to coordinate across teams (sure you're producing more personal output, but is it the right output?)
Organizations are more than individuals working in isolation. They're coordinated masses of people that have to work together, and what is best for one person's personal productivity may not be best for the organization's overall productivity.
If your issue with wfh is team isolation, just have more meetings and get better at communicating. The issue is not the venue, its the event.
But little of their work drives the company forward.
6 people that are paddling a boat in different directions goes nowhere.
Needs sources. Otherwise it's just speculation.
A solution that may depend on first resolving the housing crises in many tech hub cities.
Commuting, finding an apartment closer to work, living in a place that you dislike, buying lunch or making it in advance, and a whole mess of other things are expenses that fall directly on an employee.
On the other hand suboptimal knowledge sharing, misunderstandings, less serendipity, etc. are not only hard to measure but are strictly of benefit to the employer.
If WFM means slightly less productivity per dollar spent in exchange for employee happiness , then so be it. The company can absorb the expense just like it does when it pays for on site cafeterias, overtime, and bonuses or extra vacation to mitigate burnout.
I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here, and say if you can’t evaluate your own productivity, you aren’t trying.
If you are running any kind of scrum, or you are tracking estimates on tickets, you can create a velocity for yourself. You can track that velocity over time - weeks, months, years.
You can track the velocity of your peers, or at least your entire team and compare your velocity to that.
You can look at how many features you implement.
You can look at how many code reviews you do and compare that against how many code reviews your peers are doing.
And finally, you can calibrate your own measurements against your bosses feedback on your performance.
There’s a lot of data to be tracked, and so I really do believe that if you don’t know your own productivity in relation to your past productivity, or to your peers productivity, it’s because you are not collecting the data, not because there’s no data to collect.
hardware engineering requires shared access to tens of millions of dollars of shared equipment.
disclaimer: ex Apple hardware engineer who used tens of millions of dollars of equipment.
Their company, their rules.
I wonder if that pattern has almost been commodotized, because of social media, to the point where it has less impact than a few years earlier.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689749
Oh, hey, over a decade ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493645#2494528
As far as it being commoditized, I think it might work a little differently in examples like the OP where the outraged people is the workforce itself. It's a more focused audience.
Do you think choosing employment based on conditions of employment has just never occurred to people on this website?
"Their company, their rules." Yeah, no shit. Great observation.
Good for you I suppose and let’s hope times don’t get tough.
Quit the job if it has requirements that don’t meet yours.
Welcome to freedom!
Yes.
Does an average person wake up and thinks 'gosh golly, today is a good day to write a better way to track people for ad targeting purposes' or 'today is a splendid day to test that software package'?
I don't. If I don't, it is against my will. It is not rocket science. It is basic logic.
Naturally, you could argue that you are doing it for money and this negates it, but, well, it does not. It just means you are paid to do something against your will.
But wait, I can go somewhere else! That is freedom. You are just changing one tyranny for another and that does not change the fact that it is tyranny.
Is paying for food/rent also a tyranny? (because who actually wants to pay for that)
Is the need to contribute to society a tyranny?
Is it a tyranny to enforce laws like a speed limit through a school zone?
I am mildly concerned that what we are experiencing in our chat can be classified as 'cultural differences'. As such, our assumptions and cultural norms may not be the same.
With that in mind, I probably should define few things.
1. What is tyranny[1]?
2. Beyond that, I noticed that the questions attempt to conflate societal and governmental rules, which is fair as you want to establish the lines, but I fear it may muddle the point somewhat. It is possible I am channeling Chomsky a little here, but would you be willing to accept a distinction between private power ( corporation ) and societal power ( society and its byproduct government )?If so, I think we can try to answer those questions.
>> Is paying for food/rent also a tyranny? (because who actually wants to pay for that)
>> Is the need to contribute to society a tyranny? >> Is it a tyranny to enforce laws like a speed limit through a school zone? In short, I do not really believe in one and zero type answer. If anything, it is a spectrum of sorts and this does not even begin to cover the deeper dive into differences between corporate and non-corporate power structures.I hope I did not make it too esoteric.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tyranny
Being common place does not negate the fact that it is indeed tyranny.
“cruel and oppressive government or rule.” It kinda comes with the weight that you have no free will to leave and do something entirely different.
Is it really cruel to make you jump in your air conditioned car and drive to work? While listening to music or a podcast…Then work in an amazing office with fellow gifted engineers and civilized people. Same you did 3 years ago 5 days a week and now 40% less?
I would rather drive the car through a beautiful landscape (that I pick), instead in rush hour trafic that I don't have a choice in..
>Then work in an amazing office..
That I did't choose...
>with fellow gifted engineers and civilized people.
That I didn't pick..
There is a poem in Malayalam with a portion that goes like this "Bhandura kaanjanakkotilanengilum bandhanam bandhanam thanne paaril". It means, "bondage is bondage even if you are in a golden cage".
So the point is that office work is vastly less freedom (thus a kind of oppression), even with all its perks (that is for the few that indeed have those perks).
But I do reject the concept of 3 days a week not being an absolutely huge impact on your life, depending on your circumstance. It's life altering for a huge number or people. Others It's fine, or preferred.
Plus there are a lot of life circumstances that make people accept different tradeoffs over time (schools/districts, medical care, aging/ailing relatives, space vs price, urban vs natural, car vs transit etc).
No, this is about Apple spending $5B on a state of the art amazing HQ that no one was doing much complaining about except those folks walking into the windows.
I can’t blame them for that. I am of the opinion that Frank Lloyd Wright may be the greatest sadist ever to walk the earth for popularizing the concept.
There are top employees that have children or otherwise can’t afford not to be remote. I’d be WW2-style dropping leaflets over Apple HQ and purchasing billboards to poach them. When else in history will remote-firsts have such an utter and glaring advantage over Apple again?
they highlight things like "[REMOTE]" and "[WFH FRIENDLY]" heavily
At this point if you are still at Apple hoping for full remote and haven't been granted it, well, good luck.
In my social circle, people who could jump, already have. The companies that are rigid now have either people, who could not for whatever reason move or truly did not want to.
Five percent unemployment? You've still got some leverage. Nine-and-a-half percent (the peak during the Great Recession), and a lot of folks behind you in line will happily come into the office.
Not sure if count tech specifically, the recession might already start?
Only Amazon seems to hire aggressively at this point...
I'm being facetious, but I don't think it's entirely a bad thing. I'm not sure if you've even worked in a fast-paced environment where everyone is absolutely buzzing, but it's quite exciting and I'm not convinced there's a remote equivalent.
Their hours are much more flexible -- if the desk is right in your house, it's not crazy to hop on the computer quick before bed to finish up a report or send an email or review a PR. So when "crunch time" actually happens, WFH employees can spend more time working than in-office employees, and work less afterward to avoid burnout.
The flexibility has additional benefits for coordination across time zones: I work from home, and I can get up at 6 AM to meet with folks in Australia from my home office. Or I can take off early and come back at 8PM to meet with folks in India. Not an option for in-office work. If you try, you'll be taking the meeting from your couch or some other suboptimal spot, not a home office.
If your company is upwards of 5,000 employees, you probably have multiple offices. This means most of your meetings are in conference rooms with a video call anyway. Effectively no different from WFH meetings, except for crappier volume control, microphone gain, and visibility.
Seems like for giant companies, WFH is a no-brainer for coordination purposes across multiple time zones and physical locations. And for small companies, WFH is a no-brainer because there's a ton of static-cost overhead that comes with physical offices.
We're already seeing WFH positions get "retconned" into hybrid positions as tech hiring stumbles a bit.
It seems absurd that some WFH-only companies will basically give some "crazy" amount (like $10k) to new-hires to deck-out their home office, but that is probably less than the amortized office-space cost of hiring that person on site each year.
I took a 50% pay cut to move back to my home country, while producing the same output (and value)... the company directly benefited from that.
Now, if my company forced me back into an office I'd say no. I'd be on the market only for a remote role, still at a steep discount on US engineers. Why wouldn't a smart company take that offer?
WFH is not going away, but I suspect the FAANG will move away from it and the startups will capture the opportunity.
I've took the liberty to correct it for you, so your comment can appear at Hacker News Predictions [1]. I like your prediction, btw.
[1] https://hnpredictions.github.io/
I see people all the time complaining about salaries being different based on location and how it’s wrong. I actually don’t mind it. I live in a LCOL area and work for a Bay Area company. I don’t get paid as much as my SF colleagues but I make so much more than anyone around here that it doesn’t matter.
At some level I wonder if people in SF are worried about people like me and the above poster because we’re stealing jobs by being cheap.
Anyways, I’ll always be remote. There is no other option. I’m damn sure not moving to California.
Too many people discuss salary without discussing buying power.
When I did freelance work I loved picking up work from the coasts (NYC, LA, etc). They thought of me as cheap, I thought of them as a gravy train. Both sides benefitted from it.
100k in a rural, LCOL area probably has the buying power of 150-200k in NYC. I don't know the exact numbers, it's the idea that I'm trying to express here.
In capitalism that is not important. If I have the negotiation capability to get a higher salary why should I accept a lower one just because I live cheaper?
The mistake "capitalists" make is thinking money is the only factor, or even the most important one.
But really, that wasn't even the point. The point is your salary isn't what grants you a good life, it's buying power. And having that buying power gives you a stronger negotiating stance anyway.
Sure, lots of people will say “i don’t care about those things” which is fine.
But my prediction is that for most roles, slowly but surely work will return to the office.
Yes some companies will remain fully remote. Good luck to them. I’ll be curious to see where they land after five years.
Trying to organize a 10,000 person company fully remote seems like a pipe dream. Sure it might work for a few years while there is enough old timers in the mix but after long enough the corporate culture that made the company successful will slowly fracture as all the new hires never get exposed to it.
I dunno man… this all feels like a fad. Any time somebody says “XYZ is here to stay” it almost always means it isn’t gonna stay. Way too hype. Lots of dismissal or outright ignoring all the very real cons. It all just sounds way too good to be true.
What about all the companies that have this happen to them without any remote workers to blame it on?
Otherwise as you say people just commute to empty offices.
That office is a spare bedroom in my house. I'm never going back to working on an open space. The north-American middle management ideology that birthed that nonsense can die in a fire as far I'm concerned.
I will do anything, anything, to avoid ever going to an office again. I will also say that if anyone is so dense as to require office work in 2022, I will never work for them, even if they later change their minds back to WFH.
I got free lunch. I got to see my manager face-to-face to have a pretty serious conversation. I got free snacks.
I really haven't changed my opinion on this; do I sometimes miss hanging around coworkers in person? Sure, I have some good memories with them, but I very much do not miss open offices. If I had a guarantee of a private office, I'd realistically consider going back to in-person work, but it's basically off the table until then.
Some simply do not understand that it doesn't work for a large number of people.
Detest it, I get no work done, my stress goes through the roof and I'm constantly bothered by people chatting/noise, distractions in my sightlines etc.
Basically have to put on noise cancelling headphones and find a seat in the corner, what's even the point then?
Thank christ for WFH.
In the meantime, I pay my employees better, pay for their internet, give better benefits, etc.
(note: open to suggestions on what makes your life better as a remote worker)
My body requires this in my late 20’s.
Every workplace should provide reimbursement for a standing desk and floor mat imo.
Provide good networking equipment free-of-charge. Powerline adapters are cheap, will work pretty much everywhere, don't require running wires and while they won't give you the fastest bandwidth, whatever bandwidth they end up achieving will usually remain stable with little packet loss. For people with laptops, give them APs to connect to the powerline adapters and to place in every room they plan to be working in.
Network connectivity is paramount in a remote setting and it will always amaze me how otherwise-smart software engineers put up with terrible connections and have no clue where to even begin attacking the problem (they'll often blame the ISP even though the problem is in their LAN in the majority of cases). An unstable connection is horrible when it comes to calls/screen-sharing/etc as "modern" conferencing software is utterly terrible at handling interruptions (despite something like TeamSpeak from over a decade ago did it better even on computers orders of magnitude slower than now).
Same for audio equipment. I'm lucky enough that AirPods and MacOS work well enough generally so if most of your employees use Mac they are a good option but otherwise Jabra also makes good wireless headsets that connect via USB (and handles the wireless itself with a proprietary protocol, so no Bluetooth shenanigans) so make those available if needed.
If I ran a company, I would commission every employee with a nice over-ear headset with a boom mic and slight voice feedback in the ear cups. If I ever met with someone with crap audio, they'd have no excuse not to switch to a decent mic/speaker setup.
As you traverse the management tree towards the top, both age and ability to influence office policy go up. And as age goes up, remote management experience/comfort goes down.
Conscious or not, the people with the power are making things most comfortable for them. They’re not necessarily acting in the best interest of the company.
This concept applies to much more than work-from-home.
It wasn't until COVID that remote work became more accessible to more people.
In most companies, the younger half of the employees tend to want to socialize more, tend to live in smaller cramped places, and want learn from experienced people in person.
The older half of employees tend to have bigger houses with personal offices, don't want to be constantly bothered with questions from the younguns, might be married and not care as much about fraternizing with co-workers, and maybe have kids and other personal responsibilities that make the flexibility of remote work all the more appealing.
I’m sure some prefer in-office more with age, but it’s definitely not the case for all!
Sadly this isn't as uncommon as you think, we're basically pricing out whole classes of people from living nearby their jobs.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/realestate/supercommuter-...
Where I live, Boston/Cambridge, there are many people that commute into the city because they pay slightly more than the suburb cities but at the cost of tremendous commute times because they can no longer afford to live in the city.
https://news.airbnb.com/airbnbs-design-to-live-and-work-anyw...
BUT.
I have to say while its a nice perk for the job (typing this from South East Asia), productivity is less than what I would like. People take work for granted a bit more and are a little more "entitled" to everything now.
And I get it. It's really nice to be able to work around your job instead of the reverse.
I think some people (like me) are better in-person managers than remote managers. And that's why the quality of remote work is spotty or so many managers want people back in house.
Let's not also forget that all the things that were cherish and use were mostly built by teams of people working together on some site. Whether it's the buildings, the internet infrastructure, the food you eat, the services your subscribe to, the software you're using right now, the computer or phone you're typing from -- all of it is built and delivered by groups of people that see each other every day in offices.
Please, don't get it twisted that just because you can code, provide customer support or write remotely -- that the other 95% of people can.
Remote work is an untested thing and really, only works for a tiny set of knowledge businesses.
So, while I love that our team works remote -- I would say most people will have to get off their a*ses and get back to the office.
Is this because of remote or just the hot job market? I am a quiet quitter because I know I can just leave, so why do more than the minimum?
Then learn to be a better manager rather than making a whole bunch of people miserable to save yourself the hassle of improving.
When you WFH that changes ('aint nobody watching your screen but you) but the underlying problem still remains. The team are not working towards a clear goal that they understand and want to achieve. When you provide that, the team will always contribute effectively because its interesting and importantly allows them to feel like their work means something.
WFH productivity is not the problem. Managers providing worthy work is.
I mean it is true. You can tell people are less concerned about their jobs ( anecdotally, my McD messes up my order a lot more often now ), but to me it only proves management had an easy ride the past few decades. Now they actually have to work.
Heavens.
Except for those tools that have always been maintained by remote collaborators since it became possible with the internet connecting open source software engineers from around the world. Plus all the businesses that have always been remote.
And since your chat program of choice now shows you as inactive/away for that 20min brainstorming walk session, manager sees it as you not working or being productive. Better make that time up!
If you are a digital native whose social life has taken place largely online it is likely WFH is better.
In some ways the world/technology/culture has changed so much and so frequently over the last 40-50 years that each generation's lived experience growing up is markedly different than the last. In the totality of the human experience this is pretty rare. I think work is only going to become more age segregated over time due to cultural differences.
My understanding was that 97% of positive cases were in men who have sex with men, but with the huge caveat that only MSM were being widely tested. Have you seen more comprehensive testing data recently?
The MSM community is the first major non-African cluster just like the Wuhan market was the first major cluster for COVID-19. People saying it's not a threat to the non-MSM community right now were like people who said "oh it won't spread outside China" to COVID-19 in January 2020. The virus doesn't care about your sexual preference. If you have the right cell receptors and come in contact with it, it will attack and infect.
But on testing it feels to me we are making the same mistakes as covid.
I've had this cold/run off gunk for weeks. Longer than what is normal from allergies.
My Dr. told me I need two lesions to get a test.
Which is like saying you need to have been in Wuhan and have severe cold like symptoms.
The pox are pretty unique looking... Especially if you've had recent intimacy.
IDK maybe we sohuld bring back I. Am. Not. An. Epidemiologist (IAMAE) but wouldn't it be better - if our supply is limited - to test people who might have been exposed, so they can quarantine before they get pox and then contact trace.
Probably non-pox spread, but if you have those sores it's pretty noticeable ...
So back to my original question: have you seen more comprehensive surveillance data for the general population?
What data points to it being a threat in the 'mainstream' (I don't like that word here) population right now?
here are CA stats [1]; only .8% (mostly identify as cis) female infected.
though it doesn't show demo xtabs over time. so hard to tell if only is growing.
If it spreads through brief contact we'd be screwed..
Let alone if it spreads through droplets and or fomites.
--
Sad we failed yet again. Especially queer community, and like all things health disproportionally bipoc. seems like we had all the tools & knowledge to stop, or drastically slow, this one but failed.
Seeing photos of pox on people's faces is just truly terrifying.
I really really hope this vaccine works or at least prevents sores like that.
Hard to change behavior to avoid all sex / human touch..
1: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CID/DCDC/Pages/Monkeypox-Da...
I am a bit of a pessimist but RTO feels inevitable to me.
Take my WFH, take my no-commute. Take me where I have to wear pants.
I don't care, I'm still free, when the recession ends your office is not where I'll be.
Please don’t take this as a wholehearted endorsement of Apple’s policy here, but I do sort of get it. In my experience, doing collaborative creative work is dramatically more difficult in a remote environment. In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other). I’m sure remote works well for some creative teams… but in my experience, it is much harder (I’ve spoken to peers at other companies who feel the same way). If Apple thinks that collaboration and idea creation are core to innovation, I can see why they want people back in the office.
Not saying I agree with their methods though - personally I would have gone for a softer touch and a more tailored-by-team approach.
Work on improving your ability to do collaborative work remotely? It is the future
And worse you have to schedule it in advance in 30 minute intervals. Bye bye spontaneous creativity. Bye bye innovation.
Programming remote is easy. But there is vastly more to delivering a product than writing code.
10000 better than a real white board
The argument that you can be successful only by sharing physical space is disproven every day, and has been for a very, very long time.
With remote it’s as if the rest of the company doesn’t exist. You’ll never even meet anybody else using just zoom.
I’m sorry but full remote is a huge bust. I get people love their lack of commute and think they are all being ultra productive but honestly they aren’t. There is way more to being a successful organization than simply optimizing for each employees productivity.
Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work.
The last two years were supposed to be temporary. Always remember that.
How do you think companies that have team spread across different continents have been working for decades?
Why do you think apps such as slack and msteams were already heavily used and popular in the workplace before covid hit?
The main pain points as I see them are lack of on the job training, on boarding, and knowledge transfer. These were things that happened naturally between engineers in a bull pen or from people walking down the hall to ask a senior engineer interesting questions.
I think remote can work for experts, but if you have a lot of juniors, they simply fail to develop.
Wfh clearly removed some methods of learning.
For example it was not uncommon before covid that you'd start in a new company and you either didn't even have a computer ready or were missing lots of accounts to even think about starting and do something. When I switched company a bit less than 1y ago, I received all my equipment one week in advance, got a 3h meeting with HR scheduled on my first day at 9am, a list of mandatory and mostly useful trainings to do that I had to complete in the first month. Those helped me a lot get through the eventual idle time you get when your coworkers cannot dedicate time for you in the first days. I was also assigned an onboarding buddy that I could annoy anytime to help me navigate through anything I didn't know.
Never saw that kind of efficient onboarding before Covid.
I was thinking more of technical onboarding like project history, context, SOPs, real workflows.
I actually took advantage of the tools available to me and improved all of those in my current company.
There are onboarding Git repositories with both information about projects, as well as instructions for getting stuff up and running. IDE run configurations and scrips that prompt for input or give details on first run. CI/CD processes for deployments, monitoring tools that are integrated with the communication apps, useful scripts and utilities where needed.
Of course there's always the possibility for colleagues to just ask questions, but now I can also encourage them to look in the direction of general chat channels so someone else could also help them.
Somehow telling someone to wait for a few hours and getting back to them with some very basic automation wasn't chosen in the past often, even if in those particular cases more time was wasted on doing things manually or poking one's finger at the screen and explaining what to do, when that could have been a few lines of Markdown.
[0] https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-w...
Do you want them to put out free content that took a lot of money to co-ordinate and produce or do you want them to spend a lot of money setting up a paywall for access that very few people will buy?
The cases where this probably isn't true are going to be the conferences like Debconf or BSDConf. Mind you, these conferences have been hosting all their sessions on youtube for years.
I loved going to conferences because the setting seems to often attract people that exactly are not the always-on-always-busy people, and you can go from tech talk to chitchatting back to tech talk. Also it was always a good excuse to visit another city and maybe add a day of sightseeing, or just break the habits the of every day work.
I miss in-person conferences and I don't see myself participating in a lot of online ones. You have all the problems of bad cameras, bad microphones, bad remote conferencing software. Totally willing to accept these in order to save 30-90 minutes of commuting every day, and you can get yourself suited in your team... but not willing to accept that for twice a year events that used to be awesome and fun.
Guess I have to clarify that I'm 95% happily WFH since March 2020 and I see no problems, given the right team and circumstances. I'm not one of these super extroverted people, but I do love conferences.
But if you are serious about your question, please look at the context of each of these: Vacations are often defined by being in a different place. Working, however, is defined through achieving some result - for IT work, there is no necessary, physical "location" attribute. And if they have different relationships to a physical location, it isn't fair to compare them as if they did.
> https://neuromatch.io/
IMO collaborating via paper isn't about the actual medium of communication, it's time and freedom. When every reply takes at least a few days to arrive to you you've got enormous space for experimentation, even if only in your own head. Meanwhile in remote work world we're plugged into video conference meetings multiple times a day. There isn't a lot of mental space.
The meetings overloads are totally unrelated to the fact employees are working on site or remotely. It happens in both models.
Very easy to say, very difficult for a great many people to do.
In fact, remote work is usually more asynchronous than in-person when it's a core part of how a company works. Remote-first companies might have people working in 3 timezones with 8 hours between each of them (I've been in this situation), so meetings are a pain in the ass for everyone and everything that can possibly be done via email or other tools, is.
If your company stubbornly insists on synchronous video calls for every decision, of course you'll hate remote work. But if your company embraces the async nature of remote work, I think it's possible to be much more productive.
And remote-WFH meetings that aren't 1:1, are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep with their mics muted, until their name gets called and you see them suddenly snap back to reality because they were watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast.
I know I'm guilty of that and if you say you aren't, you're lying, like saying you don't masturbate.
This is a company policy problem. Remote or in-person is not going to solve that. If your employees are not being engaged in meetings, stop having them.
This might touch a nerve, but some tech workers are grown up man-children with little to no discipline (I'm sure everyone here knows some) since they got through life by having adults (parents, guardians, teachers, bosses, coaches, mentors) keep them accountable for their work/progress, and once the move form the office to home happened, they stopped doing much work and treated it as a vacation, since they didn't like their job much anyway and they were just there for the paycheck, and as their boss/colleagues couldn't see them slack off the whole day it felt like they weren't accountable to anyone anymore.
I've already seen several people let go due to this.
Maybe take advantage of the benefits of remote: Have 2 meetings instead of one, with one being a 'pre-meeting' to make sure everyone is prepared, with a few hours between them. Keep them short. Nobody is going to complain that you re holding up the conference room.
So we solve the zoom-meeting fatigue problem by introducing even more meetings and disruptive context switching where the bosses/leads need to take time out of their already busy schedule to act as baby-sitters and check up on their "babies" because some people lack self discipline and can't self organize when someone isn't constantly watching over their shoulder?
Sounds like micromanagement hell, count me out. I don't know any tech company where this is the norm and wouldn't want to be in one, not as a worker, nor as a boss.
Everywhere I worked you were trusted to be accountable for your work and if a higher-up had to keep checking in on you regularly, you were on your way out.
The same thing you do with workers who use working from an office to slack off and not prepare for meetings?
Offices are dominated by politics and rarely arrive at the right answer. The right answer is almost always found in deep quiet contemplation
But you are ignoring the massive impacts of commuting, being stuck in crappy office buildings and forced to live in an overwhelmingly expensive and chaotic city have on performance. Having spent 17 years as a remote product manager, my anecdata is that eliminating those factors from my life led to dramatically higher performance, and more importantly, a work/life balance that didn't have me quietly resenting my state of employment for the required in-person depredations.
...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience...
VS
...a 20+ year veteran with 3 kids and a house in the suburbs with a 2.5hrs of commuting per day and a job that consists entirely of conference calls, emails, and presentations.
Not everyone fits in these two groups, but they are illustrative.
The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute.
The second group has usually already baked in their system of organization and discipline and can more easily maintain productivity at home.
Another dimension is how much socialization an employee needs to do their job. Someone in HR might need considerably more face time than a programmer.
> The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute.
The young single employee will probably not afford to live in a big city and have a short commute.
I wonder if an approach like that used by some TV series might work? They have a writer's retreat for each season, where all the people that were going to be writing episodes, the showrunners, and I think the directors would get together for several days and pitch episode ideas to the group. They work out what episodes they were going to do, outlines of the general plot, and which writers and directors would do each episode.
For a tech company maybe have a quarterly retreat that lasts a week or two. Hold it at some good vacation destination (changing each time), and for the well off tech companies maybe even pay for the employee's family to come too. Leave some gaps in the meeting schedules so that the employee will have some time to do vacation-like things with their family while at the retreat.
The fact this has not already been used as an example to champion technology to take it to new levels of collaborative effectiveness is an absolutely steaming red flag that Apple has begun "the descent".
Getting a graphics tablet has been a pretty good idea in my experience. You get all the benefits of working digitally like layers and non destructive operations (like moving stuff around), which would be a bit more cumbersome otherwise.
Oh course I'd still argue that it's a bit worse for taking really quick notes, though being able to easily save a file or two and put it in Slack or some Wiki for referencing that exact thing months later is pretty cool, without the intermediate step of having to digitize some pictures and do the same work twice.
I do also enjoy being able to share my screen in standup meetings and very quickly showing a few screenshots and graphs, in addition to aggregating them across years for later performance reviews.
In my experience a particular pain point is the latency that you speak of, as well as people not wanting to invest about 50€ in a reasonable mic and possibly a webcam as well.
It just shows when people don't care or don't know about these things, even interviews with government officials in the news for a while here looked like they're 240p or something.
I have a feeling, most of us here in the states will go back to hybrid eventually.
However, it won't happen for a while.
But once you start seeing unemployment rate tick up past 6-7%, employers will have more leverage. All of a sudden, you will have more employees willing to commute.
https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...
So what, if enough people quits, Apple will change course, otherwise, they can enforce it.
I'm never going back to working from an office. It's a gigantic waste of my time, my energy and my money. Distributed teams for life.
As far as software goes, Apple's entire culture of secrecy and very top-down approach to decision-making negates the whole "water cooler conversations lead to innovation" meme. Steve Jobs' "serendipitous personal encounters" placement of bathrooms to facilitate conversations was done at Pixar, not at Apple.
https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secr...
https://screenrant.com/toy-story-2-movie-deleted-accident-re...
I live in a small apartment with two working adults. I’d rather work from our kitchen table than from an open office.
I believe that some people with small children like working from home because they can spend less on childcare and spend more time with their children.
Individuals have a huge spectrum of changing wants and needs. Our working arrangements can and should be flexible.
I quit and landed a better job that’s remote and with location-independent pay.
Working from an office is fine for some. Make it optional.
Lots of companies are still hiring. I encourage you to see what’s out there and ask interviewers if roles can be made remote.
Commuting is an expensive, time-consuming, and wasteful activity. Working from an open office was, for me, a source of near constant low level background stress. It felt unnatural, and I couldn’t work as well. Now, remote, I can deliver more quality work with less burnout. I am also feeling healthier.