Good news! I hope other companies (including mine) open up soon. Two people living in a 1-bedroom apt whose living room is an office, dining area, gym, and living room is cramped.
Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
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Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#212I work for another company that is going to do a partial return to office. I will be looking at options for companies that offer full in person office (or 90% in person office) after things settle down. I have worked full remote for a total of 5 years of my career, and I believe working in the office is a competitive advantage. * Overhearing hallway conversations (and joining them) helps spawn invocation. * I often d…
It's funny, all of the things you mention are things I would cite as perks of working remotely at my current org. I guess it depends on how you implement remote work. For example we typically have multiple departments running one or more "open calls" all day that anyone can wander into and hear what's going on. Engineering in particular makes heavy use of this, especially those who like pair programming.
Do people join the open calls just for specific reasons? Or do they join all day? An open call is a half decent alternative during forced WFH but it’s not the same. Random hallway conversations are just that: random. An open call wouldn’t be the same unless everyone was in the call all day.
Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#213"Cook wrapped up the memo by saying that he's looking forward to seeing employee faces. "I know I'm not alone in missing the hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration of our in-person meetings and the sense of community we've all built," he wrote." CEO's all spout the same nonsense. The majority of people work because they need to earn money. They're not working to make a new 'family' or change the wo…
> The majority of people just want to earn some money and do it as easily as possible. That's true, and I don't blame anyone for that. However, I don't think one should expect to enjoy all of the benefits of an extremely high performing company (i.e., RSUs of great value, high pay, prestige, etc.) if they approach work in this way. It sounds very entitled to say "I'm just here for the paycheck" but expect all of the…
I work my job for the paycheck, which includes those RSUs of great value. It’s a fine job, but if I didn’t need the money, I would quit. What kind of commitments should I be making and why?
Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment might make sense in a completely different context, but this is Apple! Everyone there could be making more money for less stress somewhere else, but they’re at Apple since they believe in or appreciate something else about the company, whether that’s the vision, the colleagues, the hard problems, etc. Apple is probably the number one company where your comment is not true.
Less stress probably, but don’t they pay pretty well?
Software pays less than other FAANGs but there also aren’t constant exec sex scandals like other FAANGs. CPUs pay slightly better than other places.
Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or are these people working for companies that provide food or something. It's this. Companies started offering food to keep their employees in the office longer. That people here are saying they prefer eating at work due to the cost shows it worked.
> to keep their employees in the office longer. At the office, maybe, but definitely not working. For dinner, the set times provide natural day boundaries with a strong incentive to wrap up by a certain time. During lunch, it may be saving some time that people wouldn't work by doing away with the need to get to and wait for a restaurant (if the company wouldn't provide any cafeteria at all; every place where I worke…
Hunger is a strong incentive to wrap up. Serving dinner an hour after most people would leave otherwise is an incentive to stay an hour longer. And some people eat dinner and go back to their desks.
Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#216"Cook wrapped up the memo by saying that he's looking forward to seeing employee faces. "I know I'm not alone in missing the hum of activity, the energy, creativity and collaboration of our in-person meetings and the sense of community we've all built," he wrote." CEO's all spout the same nonsense. The majority of people work because they need to earn money. They're not working to make a new 'family' or change the wo…
I’m convinced the majority of members of a previous team were secretly rich and could retire at any point if they so choose. Great team but there was a touch of “we are going to work on what we think is important, what are you going to do, fire me?”
It had a really healthy team culture (largely due to the efforts of a few individuals) and I quite enjoyed going to work for that reason. Hated the commute.
Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#217I maybe in the minority in this comments section but I genuinely enjoy working from office. I enjoy the social aspects. And commute never bothered me, albeit max commute for me was 45 mins (in the bay area). The only downside that I always felt was parking situation. Lot of my friends feel the same about office work. I believe going forward there will be companies (and employees) in 2 camps -- remote first and hybrid…
> I maybe in the minority in this comments section but I genuinely enjoy working from office. In my experience, plenty of people enjoy working from the office. Many of us enjoy a mix of in-office and WFH. The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that. That, and a lot of comments from people who have absurdl…
> The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that.
I resent the implication that I like WFH because I hate my job. I love my job, I'm good at it and I'm a bit of a workaholic by most standards (but wouldn't if I didn't genuinely love it). However, over my career, I found that I'm much more productive when working from home and this is not only for solo work but also for team work.
I believe that remote work works better for a certain type of people, I am good at making friends both in and out of work but I find too many extended social interactions from being in the same place to be draining and that they sap my productivity so I'm pretty much the text book definition of an introvert. That doesn't stop me as a manager from doing one on ones, interacting with my employees and calling or using slack but it does mean that sometimes when I have work where I need to concentrate, it's helpful to be at home. I have noticed in the past though that it takes a certain type of person to work well from home especially for long periods of time.
For context, I work in a remote first company, we were remote before the pandemic and before that I worked as a consultant so I've been remote for the last 10 years.
Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#218Fine, but if any company makes me wear a mask for 8 hours, I am out of there. Work remotely or come to a normal office sure.
We ask our kids to do it when they go to school. It doesn't seem fair if we're unwilling to do the same.
Children should not be in in-person school until either the vaccine is widely available to children as young as 5 or SARS-CoV-2 is completely eradicated worldwide.
Since this will take a long time, the government can kill two birds with one stone by bulldozing every school in the country and building 130-story skyscrapers full of affordable housing on their sites, solving both the school question and the housing problem at the same time.
Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#219Why? Because of the already sunk cost into office space? Any other reasons? I know I can drive 40 min and stare at the same laptop and email/zoom with the same people. What’s in it for me? All I see is unnecessary agony, and a lot of it. I produce more from home. Why does an employer want me to suffer more, even if it will cost them? What’s in it for them?
> Because of the already sunk cost into office space? Yeah, Apple Park did cost ~5 billion dollars, and its still less than five years old so they haven't gotten a great return on investment yet.
Apple Park houses a small fraction of Apple's Bay Area employee workspaces.
Re: Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
> CEO's all spout the same nonsense. The majority of people work because they need to earn money. And Cook knows it. When he writes the above, it's just performative. The actual message is "come, or be fired".
This is going to backfire hard as soon as one disgruntled employee decides that, when faced with the choice of being forced to come into an office they can't stand being in or losing their source of income and ending up homeless, takes the third option of bringing an AR-15 to work, shooting up their workplace, and turning the gun on themselves. Desperate people do desperate things, and mark my words, we will see a ma…
That feels... unrealistic. Apple pays well, and the folks who work there are likely able to find another job like... tomorrow. I doubt there are many financially desperate, mentally unstable people working there.
That said, I suppose it could occur at some other type of job. But pinning that on the CEOs is really unfair. People had a job presumably where they went into an office. The companies decided, or were forced to decide, that people could work from home to ride this thing out. Now that anyone who wants a vaccine is vaccinated in most places, it's not 'evil' to ask people to come back.