Does anyone take tossing around words like this seriously anymore?
I am pro working remotely, but this is just ridiculous.
Younger = less likely to have a family so commutes are not as big of an issue + the many responsibilities of having a kid that are easier to manage wfh
Whiter = this is the one that I have the least contextual evidence for off the top of my head, but feel safe assuming it's at least partially true given the other factors
Male-Dominated = the kid issues raised above certainly affect women more than men
Neuro-normative = designing your own wfh space + not requiring travel to an office seems pretty clearly better for neuro-divergent people, especially when the office still exists for those that need to utilize it
Able-bodied = much easier to wfh when you're in a wheelchair, don't have to commute with eyesight impairments, etc
I understand it may be more difficult for certain people, but I guess to me it's a non sequitur. Doing different things is varying levels of difficult for different people. Is the conclusion that nobody should ask you to do anything inconvenient?
I'm physically disabled. I use a wheelchair, which makes commuting hard, and a reclining desk which is too big to fit in an open office. I can't type much, so I sometimes rely on dictation and eye tracking. I definitely can't do that in an open office. I have a bunch of doctor's appointments, weekly PT etc. and sometimes I'm too fatigued to work, so I have to crash, so I end up with weird schedules.
despite this, I've invented several critical algorithms for extremely hard problems that helped our company scale, along with singlehandedly writing tons of formally-verified distributed systems infrastructure. I'm valuable enough to keep around despite being damaged goods. hence I have permanent WFH. still miss the office sometimes though.
In this case it seems like lazy people throwing everything at the wall, including prejudice, to prevent going to work.
Love to see the source of data that supports every single one of these issues.
I remember the Google memo from James Demore was backed by sources unlike this letter.
So why do white people love the office but non whited are comfortable only at home?
Whether it's correct or not is a separate question.
People who are willing to work in tech and are in the US are overwhelmingly white and Asian. I mean - 70%+ of my current job is Asian. White is a minority. Black, Hispanic, mixed race, and much else is all less than 10% combined. Mostly due to candidate pool…
I think that is the argument being made.
People being priced out aren’t working in tech…
That said, if they have Apple salaries, I'm sure they can work it out.
That said (again), they might need to spend more of that Apple salary than their peers to figure it out.
So, it's a bold and unsubstantiated statement, but might have some truth to it. Idk, wish they would cite sources.
Also isn't it pretty racist /sexist to suggest that just because your black or a woman, you won't be able to commute?
Why not?
> Also isn't it pretty racist /sexist to suggest that just because [you're] black or a woman, you won't be able to commute?
I don't agree with the framing of this... The question is whether or not WFO would impact these folks more negatively than their peers, not that they wouldn't be able to do it at all.
If you can understand that, then you should understand that certain people will make rational decisions to minimize their difficulty. Remote work positions are more available now, and such people will likely naturally gravitate towards them. Consequently, non-remote positions will be disproportionally more able-bodied, which is exactly the point of the Apple employee statement.
It could certainly trend that way though. I don't see that as super problematic.
Extend that to everything. We shouldn't ask people to do something inconvenient when we could make it convenient.
That’s a joke… we need the flexibility to cater to those who require it. We don’t need to make the baseline match the minimum. I think ADA and other items do well in this regard. So, just let a person WFH if attendance is overly inconvenient. It’s not the standard expectation. If working in the office is a baseline then It doesn’t mean they get to move to another country then claim the commute is now inconvenient. I think this wasn’t really much of an issue before Covid. Why is it now?
It was. The ADA was the result of an enormous amount of struggle and activism, and that movement continues to the present. Reach out to a local disability rights organization (I guarantee there's one near you) and ask if they had any concerns about office work before Covid. I'd also recommend the documentary Crip Camp if you're not familiar with this part of American history.
Edit: Here's an article from the start of the pandemic with lots of quotes relevant to your question. Sorry for the archive link, the site seems to be down right now.
> Watching these accommodations become available in a wide-spread way so quickly has been really painful. It hurts not only because I could have benefited from accommodations like this throughout my education, but because there are so many others who could have benefited, or were forced to drop out of school, or quit their jobs because their school or employer told them they were impossible to accommodate. These accommodations have always been possible but acknowledging that requires acknowledging the ableism behind their denial.
- https://web.archive.org/web/20200329102738/https://www.teenv...
It's a quick read and it's very good, I recommend reading it. Most of the issues discussed could be most easily addressed by allowing full remote work. Also, many of the people quoted have "invisible disabilities" - you may have coworkers like them without realizing it. This isn't just about ramps and elevators and other common accommodations.
If everyone has more flexibility, I don't need to risk my job asking for reasonable accommodations.
It also helps stomp on stupidity like requiring 14 people in a remote office in the middle of Nowhere, Midwest to wear black tennis shoes. (I own no tennis shoes and can't wear them.) There was literally no reason for it except to have a dress code.
I guess that's the core disagreement here. The people who wrote this letter do not think getting to the top of the skyscraper is an important part of the job worth sacrificing even a small amount of accessibility, and the executives do.
In the end it's a trade off, and while we should have minimum standards of accessibility, after that point its a trade off between productivity, efficiency, and accessibility. If having the entire team in office 2x a week makes the average worker XX% more productive, should we sacrifice that for the one teammate who has a harder time to getting to the office? What about the coworker who choose to live further away? Should my team push meetings around because I am not a morning person? What about the dead worker who can understand coworkers better when in person, should we require everyone to go in every day for them?
The people who wrote this letter are arguing that the cost of full remote work is low or even negative, and the benefits are quite high, so the tradeoff is worth it. That's what this discussion is about, how should we balance the tradeoffs.
And yes, I don't know if they were meant to be sarcastic, but all of your questions are worth considering. If you have a deaf coworker that struggles with remote work, you should absolutely consider making changes up to and including in-person work. I can't tell you what tradeoff would be appropriate for your particular team and situation, but of course you should think about it and not just default to the status quo.
I also think many people with disabilities would argue that we as a society have not yet reached "minimum standards of accessibility".
This may be an opportunity for companies who need technical teams, but aren't able to compensate at FAANG levels, to compete.
[0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/nyregion/google-buys-buil...
The longer companies waffle on these policies the more likely it is they will hamper recruitment and face attrition to companies with more consistent policies.
In-office is much less effective when your team is distributed across multiple sites/time zones anyway which seems to be the new normal.
Get this, our meetings are on zoom in the office anyways. lol
They are free to leave and enrich other companies.
should the response always be to leave? what about fighting to try to make the place you are currently in better?
Define "better"
Two years later, I onboarded many people on my team, figured out productive ways to collaborate remotely and developed very much real friendships with people I have never been in the same room with.
It takes effort to ensure people have a forum to ask questions, mentor people or just hang out online. But it's not impossible.
Doesn't forcing people to work with home lead to this more? Not everyone has an available, suitable work space at home, and those who don't or who have noisy families etc (generally less white, male, etc etc) are likely to miss opportunities they could have taken in an office.
Making this a social justice issue is a weird, speculative way to deal with this. Why bring gender and race into it, why not just argue the merits (which do seem to be in favour of remote work). Seems a silly letter to me.
That said, being remote or hybrid first seems like it would be a huge competitive advantage for a least some teams in Apple...like the Facetime team.
I tried using their "new" like zoom Facetime meeting with a URL feature for a work-related meeting. The lack of basic functionality like a text chat to share links and other notes in shows that Apple either doesn't actually use Facetime for their own remote meetings or they have no idea how most people use these types of tools to collaborate.
If Apple suffers in the market as a result, their executives will be gently kicked out with substantial severance packages, and workers will be laid off en masse. That's an anti-worker result.
Win-win for executives, lose-lose for workers.
Instead I’m often felt feeling like someone at apple said “we can do this better” but gets distracted shortly after deploying the MVP.
We've reached a technological tipping point when it comes to flexibility. Either embrace it or die.
I've had my head in my hands watching one of our departments efforts trying to hire staff (who are forcing in-office presence), they cannot find the employees and are now offering other benefits to compensate. No dice. Not their fault, it's being forced by directors. From afar, I'm watching the slow death of the company as existing talent withiers and isn't replaced.
Embrace it or die.
I'm almost 40, and most of my work life has been at the office (like most people who have experienced work pre-Covid). I also spent ~5 years WFH when running my small startup, although now I'm back in the corporate. In my opinion, and from asking around, what many people want is "choice". Hybrid seems to be that.
> They said that Apple's reasons for implementing the policy don't stand up, and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce
How does this even work?
Work from home also allowed for more schedule flexibility - it's hard to run an errand, pick the kids up from school, etc. when that's a 15 minute trip, rather than having to commute back home. This burden often falls disproportionately on women, and workers with families (who are likely slightly older than those who don't).
Removing the constraint of "You have to have the capital to move to SV to work here" allows hiring from a broader and more diverse pool of groups with less generational wealth, which means likely a more diverse body of job candidates.
Whether you agree with this or not, there is a logic behind it. Heck, I think they actually missed a couple axes of workers Apple is going to miss out on.
You could argue letting people work from home creates only more separation of cultures.. If you want bigger cultural diversity just treat everyone equally?
is this true?
Majority of ppl do not want to work in an office after working from anywhere past two years. We want our freedom as all have shown to do our jobs successfully remotely no need to go back to an office ever!
Work life is forever changed.
Cities whose economies are hurting and will continue to hurt I say need to turn that commercial real estate into remote worker fully furnished and temporary apartments. Place for remote workers who can...city hop every 3 to 6 to 9 month to 12 months. I'd enjoy city hop remote working as nothing really is tying me down .. those Im dating and or in a relationship can join me or visit me and I can experience living in different cities like Chicago, Honolulu, Seattle, Miami, Austin, etc
I mean, they're just asking you to come to the building 3 days a week.
We blew five billion dollars on Apple Park. its a monument and a testament to the ineffable power and glory of our babel made manifest. You will attend this church of man in blessed reverence or you will find the cold streets at your feet.
I feel confident we'll begin to see HOAs justifying their grass-length rules because "longer lawns disproportionately affect historically oppressed, disabled, and neurodivergent persons"
This is not a great trend, if you care about equality in society, because shit is getting so watered down it's about meaningless.
I'm curious why you think anyone needs to "think" about this. Some of us are perfectly happy with WFH and don't feel guilty for it, and there's really nothing to contemplate further and no moral crisis to spark.
Which is only possible for people who live in the same hemisphere as the building and have citizenship or visa.
Remote work is international work.
Not at most companies; the legal implications of working from other countries mean that, unless you want to misrepresent yourself and create a fake "home" address, digital nomad lifestyles are explicitly forbidden.
Edit: just imagine if the text said "younger, blacker, more female-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Or "younger, more Jewish, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Like sure GitHub can be remote top to bottom, but an insane amount of Apples workflow is prototype driven and those prototypes cannot physically leave their secure facilities. Hard to argue (from a retention standpoint) that those people need to come in full time but the Apple Music people can do whatever they want.
[1] https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2021/12/apple-poisoned-me-...
[2] https://disasterarea.home.blog/2019/07/12/apple-headquarters...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9764995/Facebook-de... "In addition to the housing and retail spaces, Facebook also plans to have 1.25 million square feet of new office, meeting and conference room space for the social media company."
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/this-is-the-first-look-at-... "Nvidia is preparing a new, massive building in Santa Clara, CA and this is it. Called Voyager, it will be larger than the building Nvidia just finished constructing by 250,000 square feet."
I could go on...
[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apple-reports-second-...
If the company wants me as an employee because they can impose tougher restrictions on me that way, sorry, it's a seller's market for developers.
As a brief thought experiment for you:
- You have one pool of workers who work well in an environment with ambient noise and distractions
- You have a second pool of workers who need quiet spaces to concentrate
You treat them all equally by placing them in an open plan office with an excellent office-wide Spotify playlist.
Do you think you'll end up with both pools being proportionally represented?
Are you challenging Ives to make a car that is a rounded rectangle with black mirror finish?
Is it though? Citation needed.
[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-will-sp...
I indeed did not realize that Apple Park wasn't the primary office building in that area, especially because of some of the articles that came out at the time. It's why I asked the honest question I did.
> will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
because it's not about coming to office 3 days a week, it's about not hiring international remote workers in the first place.
What do you mean here, by "many", exactly? Kind of odd to argue that everyone should go to the physical office because "many" must, when, let's be honest, "many" here is probably less than 1%.
Work from home also allowed for more schedule flexibility - it's hard to run an errand, pick the kids up from school, etc. when that's a 15 minute trip, rather than having to commute back home. This burden often falls disproportionately on women, and workers with families (who are likely slightly older than those who don't).
Removing the constraint of "You have to have the capital to move to SV to work here" allows hiring from a broader and more diverse pool of groups with less generational wealth, which means likely a more diverse body of job candidates.
Whether you agree with this or not, there is a logic behind it. Heck, I think they actually missed a couple axes of workers Apple is going to miss out on.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/10/health/remote-work-disabiliti...
But still, I wondering if this should mean that WFH needs to be enforced at any company. Not every company can implement full WFH without disrupting operations, especially when working with hardware or when needing concurrent comunication between co-workers.
The article about black workers, mentions discrimination based (mainly) on their appareance. Sure this cannot happen if they work behind a screen. But the same would happen if we all were blind? Shall we wear opaque glasses to end discrimination based on racial features too?
We can also flip the argument. I see this as telling black people (or other groups), stay at home, and in this people will not discriminate you. Is this really what we want? We should make the world better by improving it, not downgrading it.
By this reasoning, we should also close all physical stores, since wheelchair users have more difficulties to buy bread in person. If for the majority it is easier to go in person to buy bread, I think a better compromise is to adapt the shop to as many people as possible, while accepting that access will be still more difficult for some.
22 years are buying houses and cars when they land at Apple.
Works both ways.
Presumably we are talking about Engineers at Apple so low pay doesn't seem relevant?
If the more senior people get paid even more, how does this contribute to making the workforce skew younger?
Have you considered that there are jobs besides software engineering at Apple? And those jobs might also have 22 year olds working at them? Is the entry level marketing assistant getting six figures and stock options too?
At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions.
Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff.
But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
And the funny thing is, I absolutely understand the suspicion! It's just that, as a person in a leadership position, it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it.
Hence why I admire what Apple has done, here. They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy, and now they're letting the staff make their decision about how they want to react to that policy. Whether you agree with the policy or not, that's far better than ambiguity or constant flip-flopping.
Nobody is going to pay Bay Area salaries so you can live in the woods of Idaho or whatever.
I'm all for remote work but calling it "time theft" feels a bit weird.
You knew these things were a requirement when you signed your contract, right? If you didn't want these things then why didn't you either made a point of them in contract negotiations or simply went to a company that allowed remote work from the start?
This is not entirely fair. Pre-pandemic, remote work was much more difficult to find.
Something I don’t see on HN is how the ideal wfh works for people who can’t afford a study. What if you live with your parents and share with a sibling?
This might not be the case for established six figure programmers in the states. But there are lots of people with less money who might value having a separate space to work.
Might even be the silent majority outside of highly paid developers.
Although now I've got an idea to make coffee shops produce more revenue I'm realizing if the CEO of Starbucks is reading this give me a call.
Worker solidarity raises us all up. Support workers in improving their workplaces rather than blowing them off for making slightly more.
It doesn't make sense to go back to the office for five days a week when we've been working productively during the pandemic already for two years.
(Sarcasm)
To that end, 2 days a week in office seems like a great compromise. Personally, I wouldn't want a long commute to work, so I'd pay a lot to be near my office if I'm going in 5 days a week, but for 2 days a week, I'd have much less problem with say a 1 to 1.5 hour-each-way commute, which drastically opens up options for where I can live. And by requiring people to live in the area, these companies will still need to pay competitive salaries for that area, so this seems like a pretty good compromise.
>"... will change the makeup of our workforce [to] younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied"
Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would change the workforce from what it already is unless it became more diverse during COVID as a result of flexible WFH options.
I also understand their justification for how these might limit candidates except "whiter" and "neuro-normative", which their letter didn't seem to provide direct reasoning for. I suppose "whiter" might be the result of drawing more from the local population, but again they seem to be arguing that a policy that's still more flexible than pre-COVID will make things worse, which I don't follow.
>*"requiring everyone to relocate to the office their team
Again this shouldn't make things any worse than pre-COVID. Given that full WFH was stated as temporary then no one should need to relocate to accommodate a partial in-person requirement. Not unless they unwisely moved away during the lockdown despite things being temporary or are new hires who also failed to take the temporary status into account.
To reiterate, I'm very sympathetic to their overall complaint, but it appears that they might be doing their case a disservice by implying that this will make some things worse than they already are or were before.
I had my own office as intern. When I needed focus time (which is a lot of time as a developer), I could close a door.
Especially with Apple’s open-concept HQ, the delta between WFH and office is larger than it has to be.
The market is speaking. Apple pays well below the rest of FAANG already. Because of their policy, they can only recruit from a narrow, already highly-paid pool of developers. I know an Apple manager that is leaving partly because he can’t recruit anyone to come work for him.
Yeah. I think this is significantly being understated.
There is a VAST difference between "in person" meaning "You have your own office" and "in person" meaning "Open office plan with no dividers at all".
For the first, I wouldn't have much of an issue coming in. For the second, I'd probably take up pitchforks to avoid it.
Now I need to keep track of which days of the week they have to be in the office, because traffic in Cupertino will be 2x-3x worse on the days they are in the office.
Their choice of forcing everyone back on the same day is not only bad for their workers, but it's bad for all of their neighbors and the planet.
That being said, I really do miss the traffic from those first few weeks of the pandemic, when I could get from Cupertino to the airport in 12 minutes at 6pm (a drive that now takes about 25 minutes, and pre-pandemic took 45+).
This was a common source of frustration for employees because they couldn't just work at the office closest to them or work from home. Very few people I knew there worked directly along side their team while I was there. I'm sure this wasn't true for everyone though, however I think it was at least at the time, the majority.
Another extroverted MBA who doesn't understand why many engineers need big, unbroken chunks of silence & concentration to do great work.
I can say as someone who now works full time remote while also geographically isolated, it's not all a bed of roses. I do miss the serendipitous hallway conversations - some of the best directions in my career came from those spontaneous and unplanned in person interactions. I'm toward the end of my career so I now have enough contacts and informal interactions with folks where I can still force those kinds of engagements; if I need to. 10 years ago? No way would I be happy working remotely full time. You just can't get the connections and synergies unless you are in close proximity to other folks; especially those outside of your immediate work unit but still relevant to your work.
A lot of these younger folks pushing for full time remote at the start of their career are putting themselves into a box I don't think they fully appreciate - and won't until it's too late. In a way I'm glad telework didn't become more accepted until later in my career - I absolutely wouldn't be where I am today if I had been full time remote - I wouldn't have had near the opportunities to connect and be noticed.
> We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it?
I'd have to agree. If you're building products and market them for "remote working", then you better have figured out remote working yourself in your own environment, otherwise I won't trust that you've actually gotten it right.
Of course, there is also a difference between different job functions. If you're in the hardware team, I can see how it's hard to actually collaborate remotely on a bunch of stuff. But for the pencil pushers in corporate? Definitely should have figured out how to make that work.
Perhaps Apple cannot acknowledge the foot in their mouth because it would contribute to a systemic collapse of the commercial real estate market... crazy times.
It's hard not to notice that so many of the complaints around return to work from SV area posters centre around commuting woes.
If SV cities were compact, walkable places where people could easily walk, bike and take transit to work returning to work wouldn't cause so much grief.
People are upset at the notion of a return to an hours long commute on the highway. If their commute was a 15 minute bike ride there'd be less opposition.
Apple built the wrong thing in the wrong place, and never became politically involved in trying to make life better for their employees.
Commuting just sucks in general.
I walked to work in Los Angeles (can you believe it?) for 2 years in-between and it was great - i loved that job. It still didn't hold a candle to WFH for me. I think many have realized this same thing in recent years: it becomes very hard to want to go back for a multitude of reasons.
Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.
If a company can't evaluate an employee's performance while they are out of sight, that sounds like a management problem.
I think competent organizations will actually do the counter and embrace trusting their employees. IME, it is basically already impossible not to -- there's just way too much work and complexity for someone to accurately know exactly what all of their reports are doing.
That next week, a recruiter from BigTech sent me a message about applying for a software engineering position. I asked them would it be permanently remote. They said “no”. I was about to end the conversation. But then we kept talking and they suggested I talk to another department that was always designed to be remote. I got a job there.
There are way too many opportunities for software engineers to be begging a company to WFH.
If WFH was so terrible for business there should be ample proof, but so far it has only be shown to be a success.
Correlation != Causation
I personally don't plan to commute to an open office just to use software tools designed for remote work at a desk there instead of my more comfortable, quieter one at home. If I had a private office at work then maybe I'd reconsider.
There is certainly some desire for controlling the workers. But for the most part this is about access to the cash flow commuting workers generate.
The Mayor of New York for instance has made many public declarations about everyone needing to get back to the office, but this is just one public example. Any city has these same pressures, they're simply more acute in NY. Unless you go back to the office you won't spend a ton of money you wouldn't need to otherwise. This is the crux of it.
Not every company needs to have the exact same policies on everything.
Why force either?
But I understand it's far easier for companies to pick one and apply (especially Apple and other large companies who have invested heavily in expensive real estate that would otherwise sit empty).
At least at home I don't need to feel like there's someone standing over my shoulder.
[1]: https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-w...
I'm not saying this is how employers should react, but I found the arguments presented here just really one-sided and wanted to show where such a line of arguments lead.
I think reality is a bit more complex; the employer can turn this into an upside as well by saving expenses for office space, and possibly benefitting from the increased productivity of people who are more productive at home. And I think it's reasonable that employees ask their employers to look into these upsides.
The demand for good engineers far outstrips the supply, so companies are forced to compete with each other, which is why you get lots of other perks other than salary (free gym, free lunch, free dry cleaning, etc). Any big tech co that decide to pay the same regardless of location will have a huge advantage recruiting and maintaining remote employees. If a remote employee's only option is to jump to another FAANG company for a 15% salary decrease, what motivation will there be to leave?
You've got the order backwards.
Do they pay their teams in Canada, India, China, etc. as much as SV? No.
Isnt this backwards? Isnt the cost of living high because the companies pay so much?
And for some people it's the other way around. I have a colleague who has two young children and a small apartment, and it was very tough for him when work from home and school from home was mandatory.
> I also understand their justification for how these might limit candidates except "whiter" and "neuro-normative", which their letter didn't seem to provide direct reasoning for. I suppose "whiter" might be the result of drawing more from the local population, but again they seem to be arguing that a policy that's still more flexible than pre-COVID will make things worse, which I don't follow.
I suspect race, gender, and height biases are a big deal and substantially mitigated by various kinds of remote work, but I don't have much more to add about these things.
About "neuro-normative," I have ADHD. Open plan offices, while they are a blight upon the productivity of every worker, are substantially worse for me than for other people. Apple literally prevents teams from communicating with other teams. The combination of open plan offices, secrecy, and demands to come to the office and listen to salespeople on calls all day but not discuss your work with more than a few other people is truly mind-blowing.
> Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would change the workforce from what it already is…
Don’t disagree with you, but I interpreted their point of comparison to be what would be if there were more WFH flexibility, rather than what is/was.
I am also sympathetic to that line of thinking because while I support diversity efforts, it strikes me that they are often framed around how to make more individuals who are underrepresented in an industry join a company (where they will be still be underrepresented) by relocating to a new community (where they will also be underrepresented), while losing the support of their previously local friends & family. Large companies that care about diversity could instead focus more on opening offices in diverse parts of the country in order create more attractive jobs within those communities, rather than simply bemoaning the challenge of getting underrepresented people to uproot their lives for them. Hopefully increased WFH opportunities will help address this issue.
We're now 20 years later, and they're still referring to it. But when any noninvited ask anything, they all get very very very vague. Whatever happened on the retreat, stays on the retreat. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anything illegal or untoward happened.
It worked. They became a tight social network. Ask anyone anything, and the right person and info magically appears. Even 20 years later, in a very political corporation, the trust built that weekend still persists.
Not saying the retreat was a wholesale bad idea, but it sounds to me like part of the reason it's political could be because there's an in-group and out-group derived from the retreat.
> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions?
Of course it's not an exact equivalent, but it doesn't need to be. Anecdotally speaking, the number of whiteboard meetings I had that I wanted to have were about 1 per year. Remote workers use tools like Notion, Miro, Jetbrains Code With me which have many/more of the advantages of a whiteboard.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
This one is company specific, but I don't need to be in the office to go to lunch with my colleagues. In my last office job, I had lunch with 2-3 colleagues maybe twice a week. In my current all remote job, I meet my colleagues once every other week for lunch, and I _still_ meet my previous job colleagues for lunch once a week or so.
> There is no value in body-language when communicating?
Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value. With remote work, webcams do a reasonable job of picking up the "I'mn really uncomfortable with something you've just said" and "holy crap they've hit it out of the park". Again, in previous office job, a non-trivial amount of communication _in_ meetings happened in private slack groups that were messaging during the meeting - that still happens today. The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard, as most remote teams tend to practice async communciation practices (which are not required but are often combined with remote work)
That's... not all that body language conveys?
Body language helps with basic things like "Oh, Amy is trying to break in and is struggling to make her point", or "Hmm, Doug looks like he's concerned about something, I should ask him his opinion".
Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth. They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest.
You might feel that the tradeoffs are justifiable, but let's not pretend there aren't tradeoffs.
> The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard
And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged.
And that's ignoring the fact that written communication lacks critical nuance (which ends up being poorly filled in with things like emojis) that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.
If that's not a concern for you then have at it. But if you are at the start or mid way through your career, are motivated and still hungry for advancement I'd be VERY careful of spending too much time full time remote.
At the end of the day employers want to see what their employees are doing and employees want to avoid insane commutes / high COL rents / not feel like they are being spied on all the time, in part cause they maybe do 4 hours of work a day anyway. That's what's driving this. The rest is noise.
This is probably the most honest take I've read. Also, it's been proven WFH on a grand scale is effective over the past 2 years, so many arguments against the efficacy of WFH crumbled over Covid. Bottom line is employers who don't want to allow WFH will have a smaller and more expensive pool than they are accustomed to. There are enough WFH opportunities that going to the office is no longer a given. The current debate is employees who want to WFH that are currently employed by companies who don't want employees to WFH. It will iron itself out in a year or two one way or the other.
FWIW, I've gone to the office 100% of the time maybe 1/2 of my 20+ year career, mostly early on. I've managed to negotiate work from home days, both in the 90s, 00s, and 10s. I WFH full time today. I meet the guys for lunch every week. It's nice and it gets me out of the house. We're a small team though.
It isn't. If you are disabled, black, female, or older, an open-plan office is not a comfortable place. It's a halfway house for frat boys, but people for whom being unfairly evaluated and unjustly terminated is the kind of thing that happens at least once in a career do not, in general, do well in it.
I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.
Given the number of companies that offer fully remote or hybrid work, a comparable company that wants their employees in the office five days a week has to provide higher compensation and/or lower standards to meet their staffing needs.
The important question for companies is not whether they want to be in-person/hybrid/remote in abstract, the question is how much they're willing to pay.
Of course not. They're an ersatz replacement for the in-person thing. They do the job about 90% as well. Is that a problem? In the corporate world, most things are ersatz, if you're not an executive. Mediocre supplies, mediocre management, mediocre training, mediocre pay... why should we force people to shlep just to pretend their jobs aren't mediocre? A standard-issue corporate job can be done from anywhere.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused.
Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote.
There is value to me in having lunch with my current colleagues. I also get value out of having lunch with my ex-colleagues who are now just my friends in the same city. We still have lunches together. I am thankful that I used to work in the same city as my colleagues so that this is still possible!
For very extroverted people, the in-person experience might be superior, but I'd be willing to bet they just haven't put effort into connecting in online spaces. Until you've spent thousands of hours doing so, it's hard to knock it legitimately. On the flip side I've seen introverts really open up in these online scenarios in ways they never normally would, and I'm not about to design my entire life around something my team doesn't even want.
To each their own, I suppose, but I find this unhealthy. I would encourage my child to be interactive in person, not to hide behind the computer. I say this as a WFH IT employee who games - the desire to be away from people in person, the desire not to interact with others, the disdain for in-person contact, are all symptoms of a problem in my view.
I don't mean it to say I think less of people who are like this, or that they are worthy of derision. I simply think it is bad for the individual and the community.
And FYI there are plenty of extroverted engineers. Some of us actually enjoy team sports as well as technical problems.
The internet has been my main source of social contact since I was 12 (at which point I just stopped going outside and spent all my time building websites), so I guess I've adapted to this way of living.
The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.
In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.
The rest of it you're right, seeing body language is helpful, getting a chance to hang out socially is helpful. But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home given that I already have a social circle.
If work were my social circle, like it was when I was younger, it would be a whole different story.
Very often back when I worked in an office.
> The online whiteboard works great when one person is adding to it and it's easier to read (you don't have to deal with people's terrible handwriting) and you can save it.
We took pictures of our whiteboards when we needed to save state, it worked great!
> In most cases I've found that only one person is usually writing on the whiteboard, everyone else is just pointing at it and making suggestions. So the one person with an iPad that is sharing it's screen is usually more than sufficient for online white boarding.
I'm glad you are able to make it work for you!
> But not helpful enough to outweigh working from home
I'm with you on this! I'll never go back to an office full time.
All changes in complex systems have tradeoffs. In-person whiteboard sessions can be exhilarating. They also tend to produce imprecise (or no) artifacts that rely heavily on the context of the meeting for interpretation.
I noticed that when our team went remote during COVID and ideation was done by async contributions to design docs, the completeness and reliability of our designs went way up. But again, it's never all positive. If there was a design that was underspecified or not fully understood by the team member leading it, the siloing could lead to analysis paralysis.
I'm not sure where you got that I said that, if you read what I wrote you'll see that I've been fully remote for over a decade. I don't in any way insist that fully remote work needs to be exactly the same as in-office work.
The tooling that has been developed during the pandemic has taken this space forward by leaps and bounds and I expect this to continue.
Instead of focusing on the how, I would focus on the outcomes you are looking for and lets investigate paths forward for those outcomes.
My two cents: There is still body language over video calls, Miro and other whiteboarding solutions work pretty well, not every day needs intense whiteboarding sessions so have onsites when those are required, and good riddance to the lunches with colleagues. If we wanna have lunch let's get on a call and/or have some one-on-one time setup instead of thinking that lunch is somehow a team building exercise.
Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.
This is a totally fair point, but multi-cursor online whiteboards are not the same as standing in front of a whiteboard and brainstorming with a colleague. "Zoom happy hour" or whatever cannot replace spontaneous lunches, after-work drinks, pre-work coffees, etc.
> ... it just requires some thinking and investment, IMO.
I agree and understand, but let's not pretend we're not asking everyone to essentially "beta test" WFH and endure the friction of finding these new techniques. There are tradeoffs here and it's not a seamless transition. Remote work is a skill that needs honing, whereas office work is 'the standard'.
> Not to mention the IMMENSE benefits you get from remote work. Having those tradeoffs and changing the way we work: I am all in.
Working remotely has immense benefits, I agree. I agree so whole-heartedly that I will never work in an office again. That being said, despite all its benefits, there are tradeoffs that don't have equivalents in the WFH world. Anyone that dismisses working from an office entirely is either ignorant or being dishonest, in my opinion.
No. Online whiteboards have benefits that in-person whiteboard sessions do not, obviously.
> There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues?
No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.
> There is no value in body language when communicating?
There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.
> I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience
Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.
> but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls.
Exactly, and I agree with you. It is much safer.
A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.
Is it obvious though? They're garbage for most of the teams I've worked with. They're tolerable to the rest.
> No, obviously there is value in having lunches together with your colleagues, just as there are downsides.
Ok, but I'm asserting some valuable things being lost by going fully remote only, it doesn't do either side of the argument any good to be so ambiguous and non-committal to a point.
> There is value in body language, just as there is probably more value in well-written communication.
Fair point! I don't know that I have ever, anywhere, read any informal text or technical document that could communicate the nuances of body language effectively and entirely though. I'm jealous that you work with such perfect communicators!
> Many people who oppose returning to the office would agree with you. It's a much-improved work experience.
I totally agree, it is much improved, even if we lost a lot of valuable things in the transition.
> A predominantly WFH experience is, in pretty much all your examples, a better experience than working every day from the office. Suggesting it's merely as good as working form the office does it a great disservice.
I did not do any such thing. I'm saying fully remote work is great, but we're losing a lot, so let's not pretend that we aren't. There are facets to in-person work that are completely lost and not translatable to fully remote work.
Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team leans heavily on Miro, for instance.
> Lunch
Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.
> Body language
Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.
I use Mira too, it's great! But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room.
> Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch.
That's cool and I fully support your desire to do whatever you want on your break. For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!
> Not everyone understands or can engage in body language. Many people find it ancient inducing that their appearance and movements are under constant judgement. WFH is equalizing for them.
I understand! However I can understand body language and I find a lot of value in it. It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life. If we worked in the same office you'd be free to have lunch (or whatever you want to do while I go have lunch) by yourself without judgement from me!
Well you sure as hell aren't going to get better at it by throwing up your hands and declaring it just isn't for you. I'm naturally introverted, but when I say that to co-workers they don't believe it - because over the years I have learned to adapt. I'm very extroverted at work - because it's necessary. Yup, I pay a price - it's exhausting and I need time to recharge. But the benefits of adapting to normal work environments instead of demanding the world adapt to me are immeasurable.
There are tons of things I can do now that I couldn't do before. Many of them are unpleasant. But they are necessary and without many of them I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. Good luck with waiting for the world to adapt to you. Let's get back together in 30 years and see how that attitude works for you. I'm sure the universe will have been incredibly unfair to you :p
This whole victim = anything hard/I just don't want to do is getting old. And it devalues people with legitimate issues.
I find that people actually give away more with their body language over whatever conferencing software you may use. When you have all the portraits up on your screen, the little micro things are much easier to spot. I hope I didn't give you even more anxiety! We are just trying to see how people feel in order to manage the situation :)
So no, without a tablet to draw on I find online whiteboards 100% useless so far.
(Btw, this took me on a tangent trying to figure out the proper way to pluralize 'only'.)
There's tradeoffs to everything, the market is going to decide whether remote work is viable or not. Maybe the Apple tier companies can force office work, but startups that are remote are going to be able to snag some great talent who refuse to waste hours of their lives commuting
in my experience the people pushing for return to office are 95% managers who are feeling exposed that they don't really do much and potentially aren't needed. Also people who relied on office politics to survive rather than actually being good at their job
Not every perk is about oppressing your freedom or exploiting your time and labor.
I always went out by myself when I wanted to eat alone, or sat at my desk with headphones in watching Youtube and eating.
You can communicate with people to help them understand you'd like your break to be a solitary one.
We're a social species. Building relationships is something we do. Is it work? Yes. But it's also something we need to do.
Apple choosing the office over WFH in 2022 feels a lot like the US choosing coal over solar in the early 2000s - a manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy that will look short-sighted embarrassingly soon.
If that's not important to you - like you are towards the end of your career and pretty much happy with where you are - then that's a trade off that might not have as big an impact. But it IS a trade off and people need to be honest about it and stop hiding behind ridiculous gobbledygook like the crap that was at the start of that employee letter.
I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ...
That's neat! I hope you don't think your anecdotal evidence discredits my own anecdotal evidence about how useful they are. People use different tools and I'm guessing you're not intending to say folks that have been productively using whiteboards for decades are somehow wrong.
Doing things correctly would help if you were in the office too, but you can paper over the inefficiencies of doing things incorrectly by wasting more time on the backchannel communication face-to-face.
Having lunch with colleagues has nothing to do with 'backchannel communication'. Sometimes it's nice to hear about where we like to go camping, or what cities are nice to visit in their home countries, or ... nothing to do with work or shipping products.
No matter how 'correctly' you think you're doing things, you still haven't convinced me after over a decade of shipping products that online whiteboards are useful, or refuted any of my other points.
It not obvious what carrot or stick motivates people to deliver. But there has to be a way to achieve what the team|org|company wants even with remote workers. As a company - clearly specify and quantify goals, regularly share metrics of progress, provide better tools for working and focus on the long-term.
In person I am socially clueless and add next to nothing to the whiteboard.
Also, unlike Meet/Zoom, in VR you share everyone's screens at the same time (show a virtual monitor/laptop for each persion, have multiple shared whiteboards, have different people virtually standing in front of different whiteboards, etc....
No one even made that claim. From the open letter:
> We definitely see the benefits of in-person collaboration; the kind of creative process that high bandwidth communication of being in the same room, not limited by technology, enables. But for many of us, this is not something we need every week, often not even every month, definitely not every day.
I, personally, get just as much work done working from home. While I do miss the social aspect of the office, it’s just not worth giving up the hours of commute time or dealing with a lot of the in-person bs that work entails.
I realize this is a very privileged position but I’ll keep doing it as long as it’s an option.
There are great tools, which should be available for every worker in home, but that does not happen for some reason?
Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me.
You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.
Sure. single-cis-straight-white-neurotypical-abletypical-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).
Feel free to continue to argue that position.
I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only.
> You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding.
Believe it or not, some people bond over things they have in common that don't have anything to do with racism. You probably have some prejudices or biases leaking through your comment that you might want to explore privately.
> Sure. single-cis-straight-white-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever is the dominant race (looking at salarymen in Japan).
When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel, my sexuality, gender, relationship status or race never come up in the conversation. Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
I sympathize with your point, but object strongly to this analogy on the grounds that being racist is a choice, while benefiting from body language is not a choice. It's also very offensive, but that is a secondary issue.
I say this as someone who works from home and is a huge WFH advocate.
We need to stop assuming every role in an org revolves around “I stare at my screen for 9 hours do not interrupt me.”
I'm with the engineer on this.
Yes, you need that focus time. But running into someone on another team can be very valuable - you might learn that they're solving the same problem, you might learn that they're consuming the same API you're trying to figure out, you might learn that they're planning on working with your team in a few weeks, etc.
I would argue the benefits of having more of your state in Slack more than make up for “surprise productive watercooler meeting” thing that managers are so hot on. I think I’ve had that interaction maybe twice in 25+ years, and one of those times was just pointless gossip in the end.
That's a good point. I would go so far as to say that the majority of what engineers do is communicate with their future selves and other engineers, in that writing software is to use a communication medium. What code you write today will need to be read and understood later. What the code does on the computer is only a part of software.
Out of all the companies out there, I'd imagine Apple benefits from this the least. With all the badge-locked doors, literal curtains hiding projects from one another, and internal NDAs preventing one engineer from even disclosing what they are working on with another engineer, cross-pollination of ideas is going to be almost impossible. "Serendipitous conversations" is not something that comes to mind when one thinks about Apple's internal engineering culture.
I understand that people like work from home, but implying engineering can’t be done in an office building is overselling the issue by quite a bit.
The products you listed are hardware products (with integrated software) which are much more difficult to work on remotely, especially in a company that prioritizes secrecy as much as Apple does.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/09/apple-park-employees-op...
I think even office areas are not equatable and greatly depends on the team.
At Apple employees in a hallway will not be allowed to talk about each other's projects at all. All the product directives are strictly top down. As an individual engineer you have zero say in the product and very little in broader engineering decisions.
And... I would say a majority of the major project setbacks / failures I've seen over my career have not been due to engineering failures, but have been due to either:
1) Misalignment or lack of agility about priorities / goals and inter-team dependencies. Situations where people and teams put their heads down and do a lot of engineering... that ends up not being the right engineering.
2) Interpersonal conflicts that simmer, escalate, and aren't defused early enough and harm collaboration.
In theory, both of these could be addressed well in fully remote environments, with careful product, product, and people management.
In practice, I have personally seen it be much easier to head these problems off in environments where people are having regular informal face-to-face and non-transactional interactions. The lunch / coffee break / hallway-chat-after-the-meeting sort of discussions. Even being in separate buildings across a large tech campus has been a barrier to this.
Again, I would be personally happy to WFH, but I do feel I've multiple times seen significant project and company-level benefits from shared workspace interaction, so there are tradeoffs.
Not sure I would call him an extrovert either.
But enough about the Wall Street Journal
Most of my success has been because I'd spoken, independently and unofficially, to people in unrelated divisions who hadn't met who _really needed to talk_. I don't expect others to take this on because they're almost definitely busier than me. And I don't necessarily like taking to people, but I'm really good at this one stupidly simple thing, and I'd rather be the one getting dragged into the meetings instead of everyone else so they can focus.
It's why corporate org charts are so bullshit to me; the real work happens when people can form their best structures, which typically takes knowing who you're working with or being known by someone who can protect that for you. For some, that's churning out work while being with their families way the fuck away from everyone else. For others, it's being wherever they can get some perspective and inspiration digging in and deciding something about the trajectory of the org they're at, usually involving people. If it works, it's valid.
For example, so many people are going about saying that they should be paid the same whether they work in SF or Topeka. And the assumption is that means people in Topeka will be paid SF salaries. And that may be true for a few years while we are still inside an extremely tight labor market. However, once there is the slightest bit of slack, it's far more likely that employees in SF will be paid Topeka salaries.
A few years further it's even more likely that people in Topeka and SF will be paid Bangalore or Rio or Mexico City salaries.
If there's no benefit from being geographically co-located, then the market should drive everyone to locate themselves in the cheapest geographies possible.
Now, this may not actually be true, even in a looser labor market, and there may be other reasons that would lead to salaries across Topeka and SF remaining at SF levels, but a clear eyed discussion would start from the earlier assumption, that salaries would drop, and then justify why that wouldn't happen.
What I'm seeing instead is that everyone is assuming that salaries will rise, and then operating based entirely on that assumption, without any discussion about why this may or may not be true.
It seems like the software developer market has much more hiring activity than pre-pandemic so I don't think equalizing to the cheapest geography/salary for remote is going to happen. It appears the trend upwards with a labor shortage is more the case that "A rising tide lifts all boats" type of thing where other markets are also trending upwards.
What would be more interesting about remote work is a discussion about the labor shortage. Is it because more people are leaving for more pay and causing a ripple effect in the place they left (like a game of musical chairs)? Are there a lot more VC, therefore startups and just more open positions?
Although this may force people to skip the overrated bubbles.
Some of that is possible remotely, but I don't think it would have been the same as there was a lot of on and off collaboration and chatting over the course of a month sitting side by side. Especially with someone senior who worked on a parallel team where we might not have talked as much if we'd only been meeting through meetings.
And as someone who's managed teams during the pandemic, I'll say that I saw WFH be especially challenging for some earlier-career folks and new hires, who I've seen trying to learn everything "on their own" and feeling a bit adrift. I went out of my way to have more 1:1 check-ins with them, set them up with other senior peers for regular video "coffee chats" and mentorship opportunities, and so on. But it was challenging.
I've also seen Slack be a powerful force for new or junior people asking questions about how to use a tool or the history of some decision (once we built a culture of "it's fine to just ask questions to this channel, no question is dumb"), especially across teams or offices, so async digital collaboration is powerful as well, of course.
So maybe it would be just different. But hard for me to wrap my head around.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Do you not think neuro-normativity is a real thing? Or do you think that neuro-divergent people will be worse off with a truly flexible work-from-home policy?
I don't think they are requesting that the office cease to exist. It sounds like they want a hybrid approach that has no required office time.
> A lot of these younger folks pushing for full time remote at the start of their career are putting themselves into a box I don't think they fully appreciate
This is condescending. It assumes that people who want full-time remote are not aware of the trade offs. I try to think better of people when they make an effort at self-determination. They know their lives better than I do, I imagine.
"They said that Apple's reasons for implementing the policy don't stand up, and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce."
I, for one, have no idea what neuro-normative means.
Anywho, u/EricE isn't agreeing or disagreeing. They're just advising that people can just state their preference plainly, no tortured nonsensical rationalizations necessary.
"If you're explaining, you're losing." -- Lee Atwater
Labor now has greater power. Wield it. Those who would take away your power don't bother to explain themselves. Why should Labor?
Unless, of course, you'd rather be right, over actually winning.
These kids could enter a fully WFH workforce without blinking an eye and continue to develop life long relationships with their new colleagues if they desired. I've done both. But to be honest, the only friends I've maintained from previous in person jobs are the ones who I also connected with via a chat program.
It's about spontaneous and unplanned interactions that provide new paths for you. Yes, you can still have those remotely - but they are no where nearly as frequent, nor anywhere near as impactful. They simply can't be - your fighting millions of years of social evolution if you think otherwise. Heck I doubt most of us remember a fraction of spontaneous in person interactions with others in our day to day life - but let me tell you there are a handful in my past that made all the difference in where I am today. None would have happened if I had been working remotely.
Not one of them.
You simply can't quantize the value of those interactions and I fear for those who are seemingly so willing to casually tossing those away. Yes, commuting sucks. Yes, committing to a schedule sucks. Yes, listening to the same story from Bob for the millionth time while you are trying to focus on something else sucks. But there are other benefits that are irreplaceable too.
Probably the best illustration I can think of in pop culture is the Star Trek:TNG episode where Picard's artificial heart dies and he has that whole near death experience with Q. It's a great analogy for this whole discussion. I'm too am glad I had the bloody nose early on and the much more interesting life overall.
Nearly all of our younger hires have their social networks _entirely online_, and most of our older employees are in a similar situation albeit with a few token IRL friends.
That said, I work in game development and I suspect that causes some selection bias.
I wish it were same, but, even as someone who grew up with more online relationships than meatspace ones, I'd be lying if I said it is. Maybe VR in some 15-minutes-after-tomorrow future can bridge the gap.
I experienced how "not the same" it is with in-person and then remote interactions with other young people in college classes and then with older people in work, and, in both cases, I felt things were lost once we went remote.
I'm in my 30s now, and much of this is unfamiliar to me, but I'm interested in learning more about it. My social network has definitely shrunk significantly these past two years.
This 100%—I worked remotely for my first 5 years after graduating college, and I thought it was great until I went into a real office and found out what I was missing. I vowed to never work a remote job again (of course, the pandemic forced a quick end to that vow, hah.)
People work differently, commuting is a nightmare and gets worse every year, if you want to be in an office I don't think you'll have trouble finding a job to accommodate. A few years before the pandemic I swore I'd never commute again and I intend to live out the rest of my career that way. You will never catch me commuting every day.
s/commute/go to the grocery store ;)
Barring a union contract, seeking shelter via anti-discrimination laws is the best aircover. So you shift from complaining about work conditions to complaining about conditions that do not reasonably accommodate a protected condition.
Being not “neuro-normative” is a great one to use as it feeds into tech stereotypes and is really difficult to disprove.
If there is one positive thing from the pandemic, it did force companies that would have never entertained remote work to at least do it - and many will probably keep at least some remote work as part of their employment package. However I don't see it staying at, of all companies, Apple. Their corporate culture, desire for information control/secrecy - at this point if you are an employee of Apple and surprised they want everyone back in the office - well, that's more your problem than theirs.
But trying to explain this to folks who consider their office careers as pinnacle of their lives with some numbers on account to back this up are relatively high is often futile. Something about strong resistance to admitting mistakes done / direction taken in life that can't be undone.
I don't get why things need to be strictly this or that. Some way in between is almost always best. My needs may be very different from next guy's needs, but as long as we deliver what is expected who cares about the details.
Or to summarize this for those in back seats - WFH gains are not in added work productivity for most (some achieve that, mainly due to crappy offices) but what we gained for our personal lives while still able to perform enough. Its not even only about commuting, for me its 20 mins each way, but overall amount of freedom I gained is massive. Life is damn too short. Don't do decisions that you will almost guaranteed regret later. Chasing career is frequently quoted as #1 regret by dying folks.
None of them - not one - would have happened virtually. There would never had been a reason for me to interact with those people other than I just happened to be in the same physical time/space as them and happened to stop and chat.
It's rather silly when you try to think about it rationally - that so much should ride on random chance; but it's also life. There's millions of years of social evolution favoring in person contact and to pretend otherwise is just silly.
I say let the experiment run. It will soon become apparent.
- open layout offices are awful places to work where many people struggle to focus at all, to the point where their work is negatively impacted
- separating home location from work location opens up opportunities to work places certain people would never have considered before, unless they wanted to leave their friends/family/social groups/etc. behind
- cutting out a commute every day saves folks time, money, stress, and likely cuts down on a lot of wasteful greenhouse gas emissions
I'm relatively early in my career, but I also love WFH compared to in-office work. Why? I hated the commute, I don't like socializing with my coworkers outside of actual work, and I struggle to focus with folks on calls around me and without decent thermostat control. I acknowledge that some people can deal with all of those things, still be productive, and reap the benefits of in-person work. But there are also those of us whose careers have skyrocketed in the past couple of years specifically because we have a working arrangement that works better for us now.
It's hard to say how much this will impact my career trajectory in the long term. But I'm also more concerned about my private social life and hobbies than I am about my career, and remote work works far better for that, too.
TL;DR: Different strokes for different folks. Young people are not doomed by remote work.
I also don't think it has to be 100% either way. The most productive time in my career was when I split time in the office and at home. Office time was for meetings, collaboration, strategizing with others, networking, pushing the corporate bureaucracy along, etc. At home time was focus time to actually get shit done.
It worked amazingly well and I consider myself fortunate to work for several organizations that did allow and respect at least some remote work.
Like most things in life, extremes in any direction are rarely healthy, especially over time.
What I think is most dangerous about moves like this is by pushing so hard to one extreme they risk convincing a company like Apple that the whole concept is more trouble than it's worth. I dunno, maybe there is enough of a labor shortage of smart people where Apple will really shoot themselves in the foot if they maintain a hard line - but I doubt it. We rarely are as essential to the organization as we like to think we are :)
It will be interesting to see how it plays out but I think there are better ways of making your case than resorting to race bating and victimhood right out the gate.
because then suddenly you draw a conclusion that all personal spontaneity which has life-changing implications must happen in person (and that only these kinds of interactions can be serendipitous) and must happen according to <whatever arbitrary rules you think governs (your personal, remember) interactions>.
however your lens fails to resolve the context for what it is: a set of circumstances around how you personally lived (and worked).
Nothing more, nothing less.
many moons ago i happened to accidentally click on a game server for a game i play which has quite a niche, but super competitive online gaming community (fps). i quickly found myself in a server where there were a handful of people spectating a couple of people playing. all very casually. sometimes taking turns.
i then discovered each person in the server was a professional player, who previously and currently for the time competed for money, and were to varying degrees successful. i spent the remainder of my night unexpectedly well, not playing, and just watching. hanging. getting pointers.
ultimately it led to me making some cool friends, but specifically finding a mentor -- one of them took me under their wing and taught me how to really play the game. that interaction alone pushed me to not only stick with the game and to become a better player -- which under this person's guidance was crazy because of the knowledge they possessed -- but it also left me with a life-long friend.
this friendship is one i very much so value, and it was formed totally accidentally, unexpectedly, serendipitously, and completely 100% virtual -- i have yet to meet this person, or any of the others (they are foreign) in person to this day.
that is one of many personal experiences i have had on the internet.
i have absolutely no idea how people arrive at a general conclusion that `office == only_vector_for_serendipity` other than this line of thinking being a direct consequence of drinking Steve Jobs'/Apple kool-aid (ie: designing bathroom layouts to favor random interactions), while also conflating personal experience with universal truth-ness.
that does not mean in-person interactions, random or otherwise, serve no purpose (ever work with someone who has valuable input but often self-censors? body language is hard to hide). i am just baffled as to how one can make such a sweeping statement about a thing being absolutely necessary.
Is what you’re saying here.
They’re trying to make company changes to improve their relationship with someone they like to work for, without using the nuclear option.
I’ve had eight jobs in my 25 years as an adult. It never took me more than two months to find a job I was happy with. It took me 15 years and one failed marriage to find a a spouse I was happy with.
When I have a disagreement with my wife, we compromise as equal partners. I’m not in any way an equal partner to the CEO of a 2 trillion+ dollar company.
Leaving my marriage necessitated lawyers, going to court, and giving up half of everything we accumulated together. Leaving a job required a form resignation letter with meaningless platitudes and a two week notice.
If this is a deal breaker, yes. But this kind of approach is a last resort. Why shouldn't someone try to influence company policy before taking such a drastic step?
Happy to be proven wrong here, but labor doesn't have much power in the US; especially when it's labor against a trillion dollar company.
Someday you'll have concerns about your job and you'll wish tech workers stood by you on the picket lines.
I don't pretend to understand all the grievances of nurses, concrete pourers, or railyard workers, but when they say "this is a problem for us" I'm there in support.
They are being fired for (a) essentially explicitly stating they are not gonna do a good job working in the way the company thinks its employees should be working (b) trying to get the company to change through “open letters” through the press.
Both (a) and (b) are reasons for firing on their own. It has nothing to do with differing opinions.
It’s like me telling my team that since the Product Owner did not prioritize the feature I think is critical for us to work on first, I will not really do a good job with working on the features the PO did prioritize.
The company would be foolish to fire me because I said our PO sucks and makes terrible decisions. The company would not be foolish to fire me because I said that because I disagree with the PO I’m gonna do a half hearted job. Especially if the way I communicated this to the company is through a half page advert in the NYTimes.
Just to be clear, no one mentioned anything about anyone being fired in the article that I could see. There is a return to the office mandate for two days a week, so I guess if you just don't show up for work two days a week, yeah, you'll be fired but that's a different thing.
In an anonymous poll given (article linked below) there were quite a few employees who stated they were going to look for remote jobs and quit.
https://fortune.com/2022/05/02/apple-workers-unhappy-return-...
An engineering team in the same timezone whose members have a similar general context for how they approach work will be able to do all of that more easily.
In my mind, that explains much of the difference.
Of course, there are fully-remote teams and companies that work hard to overcome some of those obstacles, but it seems to be non-trivial to do so successfully.
As an aside, I sort of wonder why the best WoW guilds are fully remote, if in-person collaboration is such an advantage. I spent some time as an IC in one of the best guilds in the world, and being remote didn't seem like such a big deal. Later I spent some time in a leadership position in a much less serious guild (basically as bad as a guild could be and still clear the hardest content in the game) and if you told me I could have everyone in my team spend many hours per week in cars so that we could all hang out together in real life or spend that time learning about how the best players of their classes deal with upcoming encounters, it seems like it would be an easy choice. One might reasonably respond "Well, software is not like world of warcraft! Software is a lot more collaborative!" but in general the level of planning and ad-hoc coordination that goes into boss kills is unrivaled in software outside of companies like Pivotal Labs that spend an entire day on planning each week, communicate liberally throughout the day, and don't seem to end up with substantially more output than other companies as a result. I sort of wonder if this attitude is a cultural accident where much of the discipline of software engineering is made up of people who think that it's bad for people to take time to develop deep expertise in a subject area or people who have allocated so many people to a project that there isn't enough independent-ish work to go around.
It's better! We pair it with a slack call and collaboratively edit it.
> For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!
And that's an outcome that happens with WFH, too. You don't need to go to lunch together to make friends.
> It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life.
That's good for you; but again, WFH doesn't prohibit you from seeing people. If you need body language then have a video call.
If you aren't neurotypical, then read ribbonfarm. Conflict, double meanings, soft and hard power, etc. will be hard to understand without it. Most body language isn't that serious, but conflict is normal and you'll have a much easier time understanding why someone else starts conflict with you. It's long; first two parts are probably enough but it is generally fairly compelling.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
One of my coworkers is a slug with a nice hat; another is an alien.
It's just different now. After covid, even more so.
For example, the 680 lanes operate M-F, 5am-8pm. But northbound traffic in the morning isn't that bad, nor is southbound traffic in the evening. Almost no one would pay to use the express lane at these times, so you wind up with a lane that's almost completely empty and makes traffic denser in the other lanes.
Examples: 880 south between Hegenberger and San Leandro was 4 lanes, widened to 5 lanes in 2015 with the addition of an HOV lane, which was then converted to an Express lane. 880 interchange with 237 used to have the left hand flyover HOV only, which was converted to Express, so now everyone can use it.
And is it possible that this is not a universal thing? Maybe some people can solve problems or have ideas in a different way? Or maybe in the parallel universe you might have maybe less financial/career success but something even better (less stress more happiness) anyway I can tell you that as a developer you can solve problems, you can help the team from remote too. I have almost 20 years of coding experience only on remote but won't bet that 100% an office job would have been better or worse, we never know.
I dont know where you got the idea that I'm pretending there's not trade offs, that's exactly my point.
> Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth.
And those still existed in the office. if I had a nickel for every time someone senior dialled into a call from their car with a kid in the back of it,I could buy a latte. Meanwhile, zoom and meet both have tools to help alleviate those concerns (raising hands, and queues of such).
> They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest.
Again, it's tradeoffs. The tradeoffs are appropriate for work conversations, but maybe not for having a deep relationship question with my partner.
> And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged.
I mean, yes? Written communication is pretty much a hard requirement for most office jobs, and anyone who struggles with it will struggle with email and mant other forms of communication.
> written communication lacks critical nuance
Hard disagree here. Good written communication skills can be as nuanced as verbal communication. Besides, nuance is by definition ambiguity. Communicating in a workplace by refusing to say things is a crutch, and is a recipe for disaster.
I'm autistic. My body language conveys things that are interpreted incorrectly by nearly everyone, particularly in management. This leads to me having to explain repeatedly that no, that's not what I'm experiencing at all, please stop.
When people don't get those cues from me, they understand me better, not worse.
But I find the real loss is hallway conversations and seeing the body language of the people I'm are not talking to.
Going fully-remote requires deliberate changes to the company culture to make implicit things like meeting in the hallway happen remotely. This is not easy and requires more upkeep by everyone than just showing up at the office.
I consider them to be worth a lot more than that!
From a hardware engineering perspective, access to equipment is also important; I have a decent lab setup at home, but I've still needed to go into the office regularly to access some testing tools.
<Looks at his desk in his home office. It's full of prototype boards he's doing software for.>
Difficult?
> especially in a company that prioritizes secrecy as much as Apple does.
But that's Apple's problem, not the employees' problem.
That's going to be a lively place though. You might wanna try searching for smaller communities for more niche things.
That's for discord, anyways. My wife uses Facebook for her things (much to my chagrin).
That sounds good. I do have a Discord, but I've only ever used it to make voice calls with a friend of mine...but I think I'll definitely check out these public servers. I know my old university has some too but they don't show up on Discord search, so I'm guessing they're private.
Thanks again--appreciate the response. Sometimes I feel like a dinosaur by how out-of-the-loop I am: Telegram, Discord, etc.
Sometimes leadership wants to do the right thing, but they can’t hear the workers through the managers
I hope you're proven wrong too. I like to think this pandemic has accelerated progress on the worker's rights front. I want to believe workers as a collective have realized they're bigger than the companies they work for. This fight against Apple should be really interesting either way.
Voting with your feet is trying. Also keep your snarky (and highly boring) political stance to Reddit, whenever possible (always).
You keep listing the benefits as if they are problems.
After work drinks and pre-work drinks are just your work getting to consume more of your life than it pays you to do so, whether hourly work time not counted or salaried hours getting diluted.
I think we're misunderstanding something here. These benefits have nothing to do about progressing the work's agenda. It's about connecting with my colleagues in a way outside of work. Socializing, increasing our networks and bonding. Sometimes work conversations happen, because it's something we have in common, but I'm certainly not 'working' at these outings.
My manager worked entirely remote for our company since it's inception, literally in a separate time zone. I never met him, I don't even know what his face looks like. I still had better interaction, cooperation, and discussion with him than most of my other coworkers, excepting only someone who was already my friend before this job. When we wanted to discuss something, we brought it up in our teams chat, and they could go one for significant time or topics, sharing opinions, plans, work related thoughts and designs, and often personal improvement things including programming ethics and work adjacent learning presentations.
Don't force me to comply to your interaction style just because you don't understand mine.
The only difference is no one is going to tell you to be quiet and get back to work. No one is going to send an email about how there are too many people wasting time around the water cooler!
I just don't see the advantage.
Well, secret in the sense of fully accessible to everyone in management at your company.
Out of curiosity, I hear a lot of negative things about working in game development. How do you like it?
That said, as an older programmer I would not expect to ever earn anywhere near your earning potential for the skills you'll gain, if you were to work outside of gaming. It doesn't matter that you might single-handedly build the infrastructure to host millions in MAU on a shoestring budget; the profit margins are razor thin, if there's any profit at all, and the wages reflect that.
Your customers don't want to pay you, investors don't want to buy in, the media dislikes you by default, and your industry is saturated with competition.
All that said, I have worked outside of gaming and still keep coming back to it. I've taken substantial pay cuts, leaving good jobs of my own volition, to return on several occasions. I do it because I've never experienced so much _freedom_ as I do as a game developer. If there's something I want to try, build or learn then I generally start on that _immediately_. Nowhere else have I felt so able to express myself and better myself.
* Addendum: YMMV. I've worked mostly in small studios, on Indie titles and subcontracting on AAA titles. I imagine things are different at very large studios.
"Why come to the office if none of my team members are there?"
And that's almost certainly gonna be the case here.
At least we eventually had high-resolution cameras in our smartphones so we could photograph them when people insisted on doing planning on whiteboards - more than once I've seen software architects lose days of work because the janitors were overzealous with their dusting.
Wow! That's pretty extraodinary to me. I wonder how we use them differently?
Turkey marketing its drones as great for war does not mean Turkey is being hypocritical for saying that war isn’t good.
So lets say Apple doesn't believe "remote working" is good in general. Why would they be building tools for something they don't think is good?
And again, Turkey creating great drones does not require them to believe war is good.
This is a pretty straightforward logical fallacy.
other than profits for shareholders?
https://developerpitstop.com/how-long-do-software-engineers-...
The people who want to work from home and are being forced to work in the office, by definition aren’t “content”.
As far as the living arrangements, if the impetus for you leaving is to find remote work, how will changing to another job change your living situation?
I feel like being "content" involves a lot of other factors and trying to determine if someone is content means looking at other aspects of the job holistically. I've always detested yearly evaluations and the 'song and dance' one must do to write "corpo-speak" about their achievements and goals. Yet, that consistent displeasure has never outweighed the work life balance I've enjoyed so far. My concern is that in your framework I would be considered by definition, not content.
>"if the impetus for you leaving is to find remote work, how will changing to another job change your living situation?"
I don't see jobs as fungible. While you might be able to WFH the new company will have different benefits such as potentially worse health insurance, compensation that isn't as good, or fewer paid days off. You might end up working remotely for a company in another timezone and that might mean you cannot drop your child off at school anymore. That kind of thing.
Some people like it because they thrive on attention and being disruptive, and open offices are optimized for that behavior.
and that's perhaps only technically true... as soon as you start adding quiet spaces, collaboration spaces, conference rooms, etc. necessary for open office layouts to actually work, the plain 3-4 person office plans (which nobody had for years, i was lucky to have them replaced with open office only during the pandemic) are just plain more efficient. open offices, to the surprise of no one actually working in them, force people to the worst of both worlds: have to commute to work to IM with colleagues anyway to not disrupt the whole office. it's madness.
Private-sector politicians and frat boys love open-plan offices; most of us are neutral at best, and with age most people come to loathe them.
Not sure what a "Private-sector politician" is, nor what your intense hatred of open-plan offices has to do with collocated workplaces in general, but I can assure you that the reasons people split across the remote vs. office spectrum is far more diverse than your generic bucketing of "white male jerks == office love; everyone else hates them".
It's kind of ironic that someone has such polarized, uncompromising views on the topic, supported by the reasoning that "they don't reflect and support a diverse and non-binary workforce"
There are plenty of more substantive reasons to not want to go back beyond "it's not fair".
And why on earth would open plan be specifically bad for black, female or older people? Do you think open plan offices are all like The Wolf of Wall Street?
Humans are almost infinitely adaptable, but if the vast majority of the world doesn't adopt a lifestyle similar to yours I fear you're really going to miss out a big part of what "living" includes. One large component: diversity, both in content and medium.
There's also the real and serious worry about "not going outside". this is terrible for your health and also has a huge corelation with poor diet and lack of exercise. You're so much more than your eyes, hands and brain.
During COVID is the first time I really stopped seeing other people (other than my wife and kids) and I actually enjoyed it. I have my own yard and house, so I do go outside on the occasion still, and make sure to get the mail each day. Some days I sit on my porch in the morning, if it feels nice. I do body weight exercises and yoga and I am having a full gym built in my basement.
That said, I still don't see many other people and I don't feel like my social needs are lacking.
I enjoy my life, it is good.
So do you plan to learn what it means, or do you believe that language should remain exactly as it was at some arbitrary point in the past?
Sadly, this group of authors didn't know the meaning either. Typical.
As a rule, I avoid using terms I can't define. If you know any of the authors, please pass that tip along. Thanks.
> ...or do you believe that language should remain exactly...
Wut?
And thus the majority of friction in todays discourse.
Something I still fall prey to more than I like and try to stay vigilant of so thanks for pointing it out!
Having no psychological/developmental conditionals recognized by the DSM
More seriously...
I'm totally on board with navel gazing. But I don't see how (mis)using such terms helps this letter's authors make the case for having the individual choice to work remotely.
So performative.
But I'll say that I had social anxiety, and that sometimes it can be overcome (certainly not always). But it will never be overcome without stress, often painful stress; and the cruel harsh world is actually a very good training ground to force you to improve. I'm glad my shortcomings weren't coddled; I'm glad they were viewed as something I'd have to either fix or cope with.
There are degrees of anxiety and other mental/emotional problems. Many are not going to be fixed, some require medication, some are just too severe. But it's a gradient, and some can get better with exposure, and removing that exposure can be detrimental (even though that exposure is unpleasant).
> > I'm naturally introverted, but when I say that to co-workers they don't believe it - because over the years I have learned to adapt.
> > There are tons of things I can do now that I couldn't do before. Many of them are unpleasant. But they are necessary and without many of them I wouldn't be anywhere near where I am today. Good luck with waiting for the world to adapt to you.
Some people _simply cannot adapt_. It is not a possibility.
Consider you are the only person in the room who can't speak French. Everyone else can speak French and your native language. Would it be appropriate for them to drop into French whenever you ask a question, talk about it, and then answer in your language? No. Not only would you feel excluded, but you'd also be missing out in vital information required to do your job.
This isn't up for debate. You can argue that installing a wheelchair ramp or not is a choice. Fortunately it is the law. Likewise, accommodating neurodiverse people is the law, at least in the USA and Europe.
If you take the position that "I am neurotypical and it is not my choice, so it is reasonable to expect everyone else to be able to interpret my body language", then in any company in the USA with 15 or more people, your statement would be actionable under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It's not a choice, it's respecting millions of years of social evolution. You are arguing that the way peoples brains are wired should be ignored to accommodate *you*. Good luck with that.
Also not sure where body language rates up there like someone with an actual physical disability or people just being assholes (your language example). Good luck filing some sort of complaint about being "forced" to interpret body language.
This feels a whole hell of a lot like "this is hard and I don't want to learn how to do it so I'll make up some syndrom to excuse it". Bah.
I don't think that's a charitable interpretation and is uncalled for.
Yet you take it for granted that she will go to lunch with you, and that she will engage in neurotypical "pleasantries". I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team.
>Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.
I suppose I do! I'm not coercing anyone to go to lunch with me, so I'm not really sure what your point is here.
> I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team.
Not at all. I'm a results-driven professional and to suggest otherwise is offensive, to be honest.
> I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.
I'm talking about: socializing with my colleagues is one of the many benefits that is lost when we transition to full remote only work. The disabilities, preferences, or whatever other flavor-of-the-moment persecutions you care about is irrelevant to me. I'm going to invite people I enjoy spending time with to lunch and I don't consider the persons gender, sexuality, mental health, or whatever else you are talking about when I invite them to spend their lunch with me. I expect them to be honest and come under their own free will. I can't control anything beyond that.
If you want to spend your lunch with me, great! Let's go chat and learn about each other. If for some reason you find this offensive, or privileged, then I think we would not enjoy lunch together and that's good to learn, too! I wouldn't want to invite you to lunch the next time.
Good luck out there.
If you are in a position to influence a promotion, then an invitation to lunch is not simply an invitation to lunch. I would hope that you would be involved, either as a peer or a manager, since you come across generally as pro diversity.
The thing is, #neurodiverse message boards are full of posts like "My manager has asked me to go to lunch and I am terrified. What do I do?" Their fear is that if they don't go, they will be dismissed as not a team player, but if they do go, they may exhibit behaviors that uneducated NTs find disturbing. Many neurodiverse will just mask up and push through it, and many of us are effective at that. The right thing, of course, is to communicate (I wrote "have a conversation" and deleted it, because Autism) but many NDs don't have access to such support systems to even get the advice. If they are on a #nd channel, then we can help them.
So I'd ask you to consider that, unless you have absolutely no power in your organization, then yes, asking someone to lunch is a non-neutral decision ("coercion" is too strong a word) for an ND person that carries risks and stress.
I'm not asking you to stop having lunch with people. I'm asking you to consider ways to interact with ND people and to get familiar with the challenges ND people face.
But in the era of WFH the cubicles and private offices make even less sense: if I spend most of my day isolated in a cubicle, then why can't I spend that time in my office at home?
I've been working in this industry for 17 years now, and only five of that was in an office. I make an obscene amount of money, so it's not like this has harmed me. The idea that the kids need to suffer through an office so they know what it'll do to their career is about as out of date as the resume advice above.
What works for you may not be what works for everybody, and that's the point.
It could be that remote work would have limited your career advancement.
For me, it's the only reason I can have a career at all.
I think I'd agree with you unless something crazy happened, like a global pandemic that completely shifted the way companies think and made them massively more likely to recruit remote workers.
If that happened then you'd have to be daft to think it wouldn't change anything.
The idea that because you've been working for a decade or two and know how things were before the pandemic, these poor, dumb college kids should just listen to you and let you tell them that everything has always been this way and always will be this way just doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny.
Maybe Apple will loose enough talent over time to where their corp culture will have to adapt. I doubt it. Wouldn't mind if I'm wrong (I think at least having the option for at least some remote work is overall very healthy overall), but I'm not holding my breath.
We have 4 Wii controllers because when the kids were younger they could play with friends and the games didn't take a lot of explaining.
Going further back, you needed an opponent, probably because the systems were doing all they could to keep track of the action and couldn't generate an opponent, too.
A couple of times my son has had a friend bring an Xbox and monitor over to play in the same room at the same time. Given that most Xbox's are connected to big (and fragile) TVs, a "LAN party" would be quite a feat.
I don't really know, I am old enough to have experienced this, and LAN parties in the late 90s were indeed fun, but they took a lot of planning, expenses, and parents driving you there. I've been online since I was 15 and when we finally didn't have to pay by the minute everything was a lot better. No more coordinating for a full weekend, etc. That said, I have zero negative memories of splitscreen, except that the person who owned the game/console was always a lot better due to more practice...
Going back to when I was a high schooler, I was closeted and in boarding school, which admittedly had a significant built-in social life (that was of little interest to me), but I was also able to have a long distance close friendship for years thanks to Google Talk. I dare say some of my most important and formative social moments in my high school years were over Google Talk with my small group of friends. Sure we had antics in the dorm at my boarding school etc., but these were minor and fleeting interactions versus the deep and meaningful relationships I had over Google Talk, and anyone I actually cared about at boarding school also interacted with me that way, a good bit.
Even if that’s not the case, being able to work remotely means you can choose to work in a lower cost of living area - ie basically any place away from Apple’s headquarters will be cheaper.
It would also be a very regressive company - one that I have never worked at in 25 years - that would frown on you saying “I’m not available during $x hours when I need to drop my kid off to school. That’s the benefit of working remotely. You have a meeting at 9:00 and can’t get home in time? Pull out your cellular equipped tablet and join the meeting
I once left home at 9:00 AM during a workday to see my parents 4 hours away. But it took a whole day after stopping along the way to attend meetings from my cellular iPad.
I logged in when I got to my parents and finished my workday.
I have meetings scheduled with someone on the opposite coast at 7:00 ET? I log out at 5, walk to the next room to my home gym, exercise and log back in at 7 to have the meeting.
We are very much a calendar culture in my org.
Very odd, seeing how you literally posted very fungibale things right after that. You know that you can just negotiate those things and only jump ship once you've found something that satisfies you.
If you wanted to make your point, you should've talked about actual barely-fungible things when switching jobs, i.e. if you're going to do the work you've been promised, your managers and company culture, etc etc etc
Having a team that's half remote/half in-person is worse of both worlds. What typically ends up happening IME is that the in-person half typically gets way way way more visibility than those working remote. It's especially worse if the company isn't remote first at all. It's especially terrible if the team is remotely distributed as well. I left my last company because my org had a time preference for their offices in Hyderabad, which isn't bad but they kept forcing mandatory meetings at 7 or 8 am. All the US workers hated it. The idea of core hours didn't exists, you basically had to adapt to Hyderabad time or you suffered.
I have no issue with remote teams or in-person teams, but having both in the same team is the worse.
I've been seeing more and more of this rude dismissal of other comments. They're discussing the general topic at hand by offering their experience. Your snarky reply degrades the conversation significantly more than them broadening the conversation.
Less of this, please.
I'm not so sure that's a blanket statement. If teams are properly managed it works out.
That's a management problem, not a policy problem. Sorry.
...you're in one!
Social anxiety is a genuine mental illness, and a protected disability. This kind of arrogant, ableist crap is exactly why we need to destroy the cultural norm that everybody being in the office all the time is the only way to do work.
It also means that anyone disparaging it like that in the workplace is guilty of discrimination against a disabled person, just as if they had called someone with an amputated leg a "worthless cripple", or mocked a hearing-impaired person for not being able to hear them when they whisper in a meeting.
Or are you just one of those people who thinks that all mental illness is just a lack of sufficient gumption?
I don’t think that’s the correct analogy. It’s more like Turkey creating great drones while also believing that drones are not an effective way to wage war.
Apple nowhere said their products aren't good for remote work...?
And as we all know, the difference between a skilled developer and a bad one is quite massive.
Instead of making it personal, lets make it general. According to you how many people have a problem working in the office for the reasons you listed?
> Stephen Hawking was still quite expressive despite his limitations, although they did come later in life
He's a fantastic example of why you don't need to rely on body language to communicate emotion and feeling.
I have some grace; I'm willing to include those in my consideration that they have deemed unworthy of consideration.
Absolutely true. Employees do not trust management for good reasons, because they have experience with management not being open and honest with them (speaking generally here, of course there are exceptions).
Management's goals are often counter to those of the employees. Whereas workers want good pay, flexibility, work/life balance, and so on. Management wants control, pay people less, have them work more, and so on. Many managers pretend they care about what the workers want, only to force on to them what they want. People pick up on that bait and switch after a few times. Again, speaking generally here, this isn't universal, but it is common.
Yes, there are companies that behave this way. And there are many companies that don't. As you say, it's not universal.
The question is: What kind of company is Apple?
I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.
>I honestly have no idea. But to assume, universally, that all companies will renege on their hybrid work commitments is much too cynical for me.
It is the kind of company that colludes with other employers to illegally gain advantage when negotiating with employees about pay and quality of life at work.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...
If you want to believe people at Apple have changed, go for it. But in my opinion, it always behooves sellers of labor that buyers of labor are always playing an adversarial game. And vice versa of course.
Can you name some companies that don’t? Very few companies with more than a few employees are more concerned about the bottom line of their employees than the corporation. This is by design due to management training in business schools, motivation by managers to control and yield power over others to signal their prowess, and basic greed by business stakeholders to maximize their returns to name just a few reasons.
Usually the result of past "Say one thing, do another" sort of experiences. Once bitten, twice shy, and all that.
In the past decade or so, for instance, a lot of the rush to "open office" (which is Hell on Earth for the sort of deep work a lot of tech types are typically paid to do) has been surrounded with all sorts of talk about the benefits of people and ideas colliding and such... mostly coming from people who have an office with a door that closes.
There's a place and time for those ideas, and it's the various "watercooler" places a typical office has - break room, lounge area, etc. "I am not working on something, let's BS on some ideas!" But there's a time and place for "not having random conversations," and it would be where people try to get work done. It's exceedingly hard to focus on deep work when there are lots of conversations around, and having gone from one extreme to another (open office with probably 100 people in line of sight to my own dedicated shed office), even if you know how bad it is, you don't realize how bad it really is. I listen to a lot less music now, and a lot of what I listen to is quieter and instrumental. In the open office plan, I'd acquired an appreciation for some pretty aggressive metal - because it was better than random conversations. And if I'm in the middle of something, I don't get constantly jacked out of the groove by other people being bored or hungry or such. There are many days out in my shed when I couldn't tell you what time it is without explicitly looking, and on more than one occasion it's been my wife pinging me, "Hey, you coming up to the house for dinner?" I'd been buried in something technical for the last few hours and had no idea it was dinnertime.
But despite all this, a lot of tech companies still try to spin "butts in tiny seats with people all around them" as somehow better.
Anyway, if nobody believes what management is saying, there's probably a very good reason for it.
Then it sounds like they probably do want to a full return to in-office work, but don't think they can get away with it. If the argument from your leadership doesn't begin with "according to these very clear numbers, our profitability as a business has suffered due to remote work," then it's reasonable to consider what the real reason might be: Wanting to exert control, or the sunk cost fallacy of leasing commercial real estate, or a justification for managers to have someone to manage. Who knows? These things are often not well explained. But anything except an existential business risk is a bad reason as far as I am concerned, when the "resources" so clearly want it to go otherwise.
I used to work with them a lot in a past role, and the remote guys seemed to get disappeared much more quickly than the folks who had a home base.
When your boss is in Brazil or whatever and gets a savings target, he sorts a spreadsheet by salary and utilization and poof!
Leadership changes. People change their minds. Something can absolutely be a genuine intent today but that could change in a few years.
So I don't see how that kind of reasoning is useful when making an employment decision today. Getting up in arms about a purported future two years from now is just not rational, and is ultimately a byproduct of fear.
More broadly, this has always been true. Employers have always been in an position where they could change the terms of employment, and employees have always been in the position of being able to make a choice as to whether they would be willing to accept those changes. The WFH situation isn't special in that regard.
Second, this could go either way. Future leadership could equally decide Apple will go full remote. But the assumption is always that future change will take away the benefit rather than expanding it. That the slippery slope will always be to the worker's detriment. That's just another form of management distrust.
Edit: And oddly, given the current demand for positions in technology companies, that distrust is especially unfounded. Employees have never been more empowered. The sheer demand for labour means that any company instituting a policy that's broadly unpopular will lose staff. Absent a profound change in the labour market, in that context it would be insane for Apple to communicate a hybrid work policy, now, only to renege on it.
If that were true, we'd all have private offices, or at least the option, instead of open plan office space.
But, yes, in general I wouldn't make decisions based on what could happen in 2-3 years unless I really saw the writing on the wall and wanted to proactively spare myself the pain.
This seems like a reasonable assumption unless the labor seller is in very high demand relative to supply.
There's unquestionably a very strong strain of "management" in our culture that consists almost solely of a) distrusting the employees, b) therefore trying to physically monitor them at all times, and c) justifying their own existence by calling for many hours of (in-person) meetings every week. Personally, the institution I work for has claimed—in defiance of all logic and obvious reality—that certain jobs here can only be done in the office, all the time, and thus anyone in these jobs (which is basically everything below Director-level) seeking to work remote even part of the time will be denied.
Your company many not even have any of these people. I don't know. But so many of us have heard the stories from so many others who do have management like this that we would be stupid not to be wary of any manager—on up to the C-suite/owner/board—who seems unenthusiastic about remote work.
Unfortunately for your argument, their policy speaks to their attitude, which is "fuck what you think". Anyone with a basic understanding of human power dynamics correctly interprets this policy as "in a year all you peasants will be back with your arses in your seats where we can see you". The statement is the evidence.
>But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response.
The fact that you have a problem with this proves our point. You are not approaching this from the perspective of "how can I empower my team to do their best work and make us all a ton of money". Your frustration is "I know better and these idiots won't do what they are told".
And the fact that you claim to be unable to understand these basic ideas means that either (a) you do understand and are lying or (b) are incompetent, and in either case, your team has come to the correct conclusion.
I look forward to hiring a ton of Apple devs while also being disappointed that macOS will continue to get worse.
What do you think the lack of trust comes from? We have a large body of evidence that management does things in exactly this way. You can argue that this evidence isn't germane, but you can't argue that it doesn't exist.
Which in turn makes the executive team suspicious which makes them hint at even just one day a month which makes people suspicious which ...
I dont have any solutions - but I agree with you.
> They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy
That is all you can do while hoping that both sides (and yes in this case there are good people and bad people on both sides) chill the fuck out.
Flexibility is not forcing people to come some arbitrary number of days because reasons.
Just reordering them:
> I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office
> the executive team has been ambiguous
> it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise
You can claim all you want but if the CEO and all the chief officers are not the one making it all clear and not just taking about it at a standup but in black and white on paper. Then it means nothing and what you claim means nothing too to your employees. Like someone said next step after that is to put it in the contract.
Also it’s up to you and the other managers and officers, and not the people bellow you, to create a trusting environment and trust with your team. It’s frustrating you to hear comments like that but it should be instead a red flag for you about the health of your team. Because it’s even more stressful and frustrating to be in the very seat of an employee where there is no trust at their work and the leaders are vague about critical part of their work life and don’t care and (not pointing finger at you but just saying) are just frustrated when they voice their concerns instead of listening and acting as leaders.
Same reason I don't like "well let teams decide". It doesn't force the business processes to update themselves to the divergent realities, it pushes all of the burden onto teams and individuals instead, which is not good in aggregate for these sorts of things.
Unless you are in the c-suite and are also the board, you can't make those promises. Your job is to say these things and gain employee trust, only to have a different set of orders come from on high.
If my management expects me to renege on a commitment that they've told me I can make, then I can't trust management any more than my staff can, and I will no longer be willing to work for that company.
Honestly, it's like folks around here don't grok that a) employees are actually empowered, and b) management knows that.
Fool me 7 times ...
Six months from now you get a new CEO and they want asses in seats immediately. What do you say then?
Seems like this has absolutely been the case. FAANG and the like aren't gonna to willingly lose 10-20% of their staff unless in office work was more productive. The business will make their decisions based on what will make them the most money at the end of the day. They aren't politicians seeking power, just profit. If remote is more profitable, we will see remote companies dominate the scene in the next few years, but as of now, all management has to go off of is reports showing productivity went down during WFH.
Profitable for the company != profitable for a given manager.
I said "not the least of which because". I didn't say that was the only reason.
This is precisely the kind of cynical reading-between-the-lines that I'm talking about.
But, it was the only reason you gave.
The technology industry in general is one with some of the most empowered workers in the economy. The incredible imbalance in labour supply-and-demand means that salaries and benefits are sky high, work conditions tend to be quite favourable, and employees have a ton of options in selecting employers that have positive work environments.
And yet there are some who seem to think that tech workers are continuously under attack from heartless corporations looking to maximize profits at all costs, even at the expense of workers.
Absolutely, if you're working in, I dunno, service or manufacturing industries where labour supply is high and anti-union efforts have resulted in a rollback of labour rights, there is every reason to be concerned.
But in tech? I genuinely have no idea where this perception comes from or how it can be justified given the current structure of the labour market.
I've found things made more sense once I realized that the political structure of modern corporations is essentially a kingdom. I think the cynicism of management comes from a combination of factors. First is that the individual contributors have no political voice, so decisions are made for them and they just have to live with the results. Second is that without the individual contributors there is no product, so the ICs fulfill management's goals, but nobody (on a structural level; individual managers may vary) is even asking the ICs what they want. Third, management routinely makes decisions that make the ICs life less pleasant [1], and frequently the ICs know of / are using / know they have the capability to build a system that they want. Fourth, management naturally attracts the people who want power; leaders enable those under them, but rulers tell their underlings what to do. Between the nature of the job and the failings of people, management tends to attract rulers, not leaders. Fifth, tech people tend be individualistic / mavericks, and those kind of people dislike being ruled, especially when the rules are lousy.
This could probably be summarized as ICs want autonomy, mastery, and competency (see Dan Pink). Many tech people got into tech on their own, so have a high sense of autonomy; the corporate structure tends to squelch autonomy. To make it worse, management does not appear to value the ICs, even though the king wouldn't eat if the farmers didn't farm. But ICs have no power within the system, so the best they can do is go quit.
Cynicism is the refuge of the powerless.
[1] The most egregious example I've seen was one very large company had needed a QA system. The IT department liked a particular software package, and apparently nobody else liked it. Probably because it was completely unfit for bug tracking. So, naturally, the company got the package IT wanted. Using it was completely miserable.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I wasn't attempting to give you a complete and thorough explanation of our work-from-home policy or the reasoning behind it, but rather just one (very important) factor that's part of the overall calculus. I believe that was clear from the context.
> At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
The issue in my org is that, starting from the executive level down, everyone is saying "we are not forcing people back to the office", but no official policy has been written and published that lays that down in writing.
Then mouzogu came along implying that, even with a written policy, they still wouldn't believe it, thus the tangent about being frustrated.
But in my own org, today, absolutely staff have good reason to feel uncertain, if only because fear is filling the communication vacuum.
As for karaterobot's comment, they extrapolated a brief remark into a conspiracy theory. Rest assured, when communicating with my staff, there's a lot more nuance that's being conveyed.
Which is precisely the situation we're in right now.
The labour market for tech has been on fire for nearly 20 years now. There was barely a blip during the 2008 crash that evaporated huge chunks of the economy. During COVID demand for labour went up despite massive disruptions in the economy. I swear I've been reading articles about labour supply shortages in tech for as long as I've been in the industry.
I honestly have no idea where this fear comes from.
Please, I'm very curious to know: in what way is the situation for engineering labour "precarious"?
There's also concern about whether the stack I have experience with will be around in five years (particularly bad in the Web arena), concern about will I be able to get a job after I'm forty, concern about will I be able to get a job if I have to whiteboard leetcode exercises, etc.
Plus, if you have a mortgage in a high cost of living area (likely if you are in tech) with a family of four, say, your burn rate is pretty high, which is fear-inducing. How long can you afford to pay a $1 million mortgage with no job? Even if you think you will probably be okay, there is a non-negligible (with unknown probability) that you might not find a job and, say, lose your house. There is a potentially huge tail-risk in switch jobs. So even if the market is good in general, there is a risk that if it is not good for you there might be a disaster. On top of this, you read about plenty of layoffs when the economy turns poor, so you know the company is not likely to care about your personal situation. Whether or not the situation is actually precarious, the risk makes you feel like it is.
(In my case, freelancing has been helpful for the fears, because you look for work so much more frequently, and your perspective on your work options, and even what you are selling changes.)
It sounds like you have a disconnect with your ICs if you don’t understand why they don’t trust you.