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Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

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Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#141

Post by brimble »

jordanpg wrote: post #56
8bitben wrote: post #4

Hard to see it going any other way given the massive real estate investments they have made.

I suspect that at the root of all of these companies with massive office investments insisting that everyone gets back to the office as soon as possible is something to do with taxes. Something like deductions that cannot be taken when those facilities are not used or not used enough in the development of income.

Having X employees in a given city/county/state is often part of agreements for skipping taxes or even attaining grants for new office development, that's true.

Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#142

Post by asd88 »

angryasian wrote: post #106
song wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked in remote companies and companies that had butt in chair requirements, so far all the remote companies have been more innovative and had more cross talk between teams than the companies that required people to be in an office all day, every day. Of course, that's just my experience but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter be…

I'm interested in how you accomplish this. Everything has to be scheduled in a meeting these days, and meeting burn out over zoom is real. Where as in the office it was just walking around and seeing someone in an elevator, the hall, "hey lets catch up" or "you have a minute" or "lets get lunch" these types of interactions just don't happen anymore

In true remote companies everything happens on Slack channels and meetings are minimal. If you want to see what a team is up to, you just have to lurk their Slack channel. Basically almost everything becomes more visible because of Slack.

Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#143

Post by [deleted] »

nostromo wrote: post #16

More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. I'm happy we're returning to normalcy, but it just makes me wonder "why now?" It's like the government and big business just decided overnight to declare "mission accomplished" when nothing substantial has changed. Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "…

[deleted]

Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#144

Post by NoSorryCannot »

nojito wrote: post #109
saturdaysaint wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This line of argument doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny. First of all, it's quite pedantic and naive to assume that governments and medical bodies in the richest and most advanced countries haven't worked through similar issues of causality with innumerable other diseases. More to the point, the peaks in COVID deaths magically align with proportionately large spikes in all cause mortality not seen in prior ye…

Very few states record COVID deaths properly. How do you remove people who die in the hospital for other reasons but have a mandatory COVID swab done and are positive?

The person you responded to mentioned all-cause mortality. Remove the base rate, then you're left with excess deaths. How do you explain excess deaths if they are not covid?

And that's not to say an explanation other than covid is impossible, but it would need to be compelling.

Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#145

Post by ironman1478 »

angryasian wrote: post #106
song wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have worked in remote companies and companies that had butt in chair requirements, so far all the remote companies have been more innovative and had more cross talk between teams than the companies that required people to be in an office all day, every day. Of course, that's just my experience but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter be…

I'm interested in how you accomplish this. Everything has to be scheduled in a meeting these days, and meeting burn out over zoom is real. Where as in the office it was just walking around and seeing someone in an elevator, the hall, "hey lets catch up" or "you have a minute" or "lets get lunch" these types of interactions just don't happen anymore

> Everything has to be scheduled in a meeting these days, and meeting burn out over zoom is real.

At my company, we obviously have to chat over zoom or meet, but it doesn't have to be scheduled. The way we do it is we might be chatting on slack, spitballing ideas, doing stuff in lucidchart or some other charting software, then if it seems good we talk about it over zoom. It doesn't have to be so robotic

Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#147

Post by tharne »

gedy wrote: post #82
throwaway1777 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politics plain and simple. COVID protocols are very unpopular at this point and not every effective. Florida and Texas are having big inflows, california and New York huge outflows. Whatever your viewpoint this is the fact politicians see. And yes taxes and cost of living are a huge driving force not only COVID, but as long as remote work goes on people will keep moving to low cost of living and low tax states.

Elections coming up as well

> Elections coming up as well

This is the big one. Ever since the upset in the Virginia governor's race, the Democrats have been very eager to end COVID restrictions no matter what. The Republicans have never cared about COVID so, at the moment there's a rare bipartisan unity on this issue.

Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#148

Post by tinus_hn »

xienze wrote: post #54
gdulli wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deaths and cases are both dropping sharply, and since deaths lag cases, the deaths should be expected to continue to drop steadily for a few more weeks. Something substantial has definitely changed. That's not the same as knowing there won't be future variants or spikes. But if there's ever a time to get back to normal, now would be it. It's not total victory and may never be, but at some point we either declare that…

> Something substantial has definitely changed. Yeah, it's called midterm elections are coming up and the Democrats are staring down the barrel of getting absolutely crushed if they continue on with mask and vaccine mandate policies.

If you look around the world, many countries are lifting all measures. And they definitely are not affected by US elections. They are affected by hospitalization, ICU and death numbers that are falling as infections are rising.

Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#149

Post by furyofantares »

nostromo wrote: post #16

More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. I'm happy we're returning to normalcy, but it just makes me wonder "why now?" It's like the government and big business just decided overnight to declare "mission accomplished" when nothing substantial has changed. Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "…

A lot has changed in the last year? Loads of people have been vaccinated that weren't a year ago (even if they were eligible then).

Kids became eligible to be vaccinated only a few months ago, which even if it wasn't actually risky to them it was a major concern for many parents.

Right about that time, the omicron wave hit, and ever since late december we've known it was very likely we'd peak and then crash on cases.

So we didn't return to normal last summer because loads of people weren't vaccinated yet, and kids weren't eligible. We didn't return once kids became eligible because omicron was looming. And we didn't return during omicron peak because hospitals were overwhelmed.

Re: Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th

#150

Post by jmull »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #20

Love that all the companies (see also Google, Twitter) are utilizing the WW3-panic to sweep these announcements under the rug. How thoughtful! And props to Apple for adding that Friday PR synergy to the mix! Edit: my best attempt at a good faith argument here is this: it was a move that was supposed to be in sync with Biden's SOFU comments on returning to the office, but other breaking news affected the plan.

Doesn't it seem more likely this is related to changing covid conditions than war in Ukraine?
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