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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

#151

Post by BrianOnHN »

giarc wrote: post #133
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.

You can look at any announcement and say "utilizing mid-term elections to sweep these announcements under the rug... swap out mid-terms with holidays, COVID, hurricanes, natural disasters, oil price swings, etc etc etc. If you go looking for it, you will find it. Doesn't make it true though.

Fast followers? Or do you think the decision was synchronized at the top?

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

#152

Post by gfodor »

codingdave wrote: post #102
gfodor wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not like they just decided - they did, they actually just decided. The change in cloth mask guidance proves it: no new data, we always knew they were ineffective.

> "no new data" There is literally new data every day. Case counts change, hospital usage changes, etc. The change in mask guidance is also not universal - it is dependent on that exact data. The CDC maintains a county-by-county map of the data so you know exactly what the guidance is each day based on the latest data. If you want to keep up with the data, the map is not a bad place to start: https://www.cdc.gov/coro…

There was no new data to support a change in guidance on cloth masks. The argument made is that omicron was the factor which warranted the updated guidance on cloth masks. There is no data to support the idea that cloth masks were suddenly uniquely unsuited as countermeasures.

Edit: The CDC is so infuriating. They still link the term “masks” to this page, that shows a picture of some useless facial decorations on the same page discussing N95 respirators. If we had a sane CDC, all imagery and messaging would be around N95s. They have killed thousands of people with the implicit lie strewn across all their messaging that there some kind of meaningful equivalency to be made between all masks. The unqualified term “mask” should have been struck from the messaging two years ago. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-si...

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

#153

Post by eunoia »

roastytoasty wrote: post #132
dnathi493 wrote: post #5

I left Apple after years of lack of any flexibility on the remote work process. They wouldn't allow transferring to any alternative office for most teams. From what I understood, VPs could protect a small minority of some of their employees if a senior leader made a case to them. Unfortunately, this just seemed to lead to the most politically connected folks going remote and directors friends and favorite hires getti…

Quoted post unavailable.

I don’t think you understand how deep the Apple secrecy/paranoia culture rabbit hole goes.

Another example: Have you ever noticed how comparatively infrequently Apple is even mentioned in FAANG working condition threads?

Source: I am a former Apple employee.

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

#154

Post by lokar »

Lascaille wrote: post #140
lokar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the death rate for people who can't be vaccinated?

Not everyone survives. That's life. You can't expect society to shut down to protect the tiny percentage of people who can't be vaccinated or are immunocompromised. That's never been an expectation of society before so why would it be one now?

It has been. The reason these people survive is because vaccines are required for everyone as a child (in the US). Without that they would catch mumps, measles, polio, etc.

And wearing a mask inside public spaces is not shutting down society.

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

#155

Post by dymk »

LightG wrote: post #76
dmitrygr wrote: post #14

An open season on Apple employees starts now. Recruiters, take notice...

You may be wrong. I'm staunch in favour of remote. I like it, it works. But I recognise the benefits of in-person. I would wager that what most people like me want is a bit of control of their schedule and to be able to work in a hybrid manner. The end. I know as that's what I was going to ask my boss, before he dragged us all back in to the office and stopped remote completely in Nov-21. Most of our team have left a…

Hybrid work solutions are good only for those who _want_ to do them. For everyone else, they're a compromise, also known as "the worst of both worlds".

Telling employees that they _need_ to be in the office on days X, Y, and Z destroys most of the utility of remote working. They even chose Monday, Tuesday Thursday so people couldn't have a four day long block for working or traveling elsewhere.

If Apple cared about flexibility, they'd do this, in order of "how much do they care":

- Employees choose if they want to come into an office at all, figuring out their work dynamics on a per-team basis

- If a number of days per week in-office is required, employees gets to choose those days

- The company chooses the days the employee comes in (which is what Apple chose)

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

#156

Post by pmarreck »

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 "…

but it’s all rural Trumpist counties at this point; ostensibly, the people lying in the bed they made for themselves don’t typically work for Apple

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

#157

Post by mnem »

LightG wrote: post #76
dmitrygr wrote: post #14

An open season on Apple employees starts now. Recruiters, take notice...

You may be wrong. I'm staunch in favour of remote. I like it, it works. But I recognise the benefits of in-person. I would wager that what most people like me want is a bit of control of their schedule and to be able to work in a hybrid manner. The end. I know as that's what I was going to ask my boss, before he dragged us all back in to the office and stopped remote completely in Nov-21. Most of our team have left a…

I think your second paragraph there is the critical point that large companies (including the one I work at) miss or purposefully ignore: let the employee control when (and how many) days they are in. Cohesive teams will self organise something suitable for their productivity, non-cohesive teams won't get any better by frustrating x % of the members. But, fundamentally, large companies simply lack trust in their employees so do not want to allow this.

Also, they have a lot of real estate costs to justify. Nothing like physical tech debt for anchoring your company in the past.

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

#158

Post by sokoloff »

mschuster91 wrote: post #122
gdulli wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More than 2,000 Covid-19 deaths have been reported in the United States each day for the past month" This is 2 weeks old and already out of date. Numbers are in freefall. It's now at 1,357. And cases have dropped sharply and consistently for a few weeks which means the (lagging) drop in deaths will continue for a few weeks.

It's still about four airplanes worth of people crashing daily, to put it into perspective. Not to mention people under immunosuppression or legitimately unable to get vaccinated (e.g. allergies or immunodeficient) - these poor souls are effectively locked into their homes as a permanent jail.

Must we then have vaccinated people join them out of some sense of solidarity?

There are people confined to wheelchairs yet we allow others to walk.

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

#159

Post by jesusofnazarath »

robertoandred wrote: post #119
WithinReason wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. There is a huge difference between "dying with COVID" and "dying from COVID".

So how many people are currently dying because of covid?

No post body was provided.

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

#160

Post by BrianOnHN »

jmull wrote: post #150
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?

There's "no COVID" in my state, so I don't feel qualified to comment on that.
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