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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

#521

Post by lotsofpulp »

gnicholas wrote: post #519
lotsofpulp wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to forego the standard deduction if you want to itemize And take advantage of SALT deductions. Which means you have to owe more federal income tax than $12.5k for single filers and $25.1k for married filers. This link goes into more detail: https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/07/what-is-the-salt-cap-and-w...

Yeah, but that was just the property tax — the SALT cap applies to the total state and local taxes. Tack on the 5% income tax rate, and you'll hit the cap pretty easily. For example, a single person making any amount (with that property tax amount) will hit the cap. Ditto for a couple each making $145k.

And they still have $10k of SALT to deduct. The more you increase the cap, the more it benefits richer people (on a nationwide perspective).

There are a handful of states with extremely high taxes (IL/NJ/CT/CA/NY/MD/etc), but they are solidly Democrat. I do not envision the other Democrat states who would not benefit from SALT cap increases to care about going out on a limb for them.

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

#522

Post by Apocryphon »

saagarjha wrote: post #503
ericd wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s cafe charges for food, and gives its interns very outdated machines. They’re much stingier than Google, or at least they were.

When I was an intern I got a new, latest model (for the time) MacBook Pro. At one point I also got a maxed-out trashcan Mac Pro too that they just had hanging around, which made WebKit builds far more pleasant.

Interns often get extra perks. Regular employees didn’t get the privilege of attending executive speaker series.

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

#523

Post by raffraffraff »

microtherion wrote: post #455
VBprogrammer wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When we went fully remote, suddenly it seems like any compunctions about that vanished; I would have meetings until 9pm 3 nights a week This is why there is a decline button next to the accept button. An outage or something disastrous, sure I'll stay online till midnight to help in anyway I can; a regular status update type meeting, no way.

In principle, I agree, but I should point out that "No meetings outside regular daylight hours" and "My employer shouldn't care where in the world I do my job" are not compatible with each other. In the course of a week, I collaborate literally with people in the UK, California, China, and Saudia Arabia. People are occasionally have to take meetings outside daylight hours. Best we can do is to (a) minimize the number…

Absolutely agree. Also, if you expect people to be switched on at 9pm, be flexible about them not responding first thing the next morning.

I interviewed with a company who is on the west coast. I'm in Ireland. We overlap for a few hours during their morning. Every interview was scheduled during their afternoon. I always asked to move it to an earlier spot. Seems like this conscious awareness of other people isn't automatic.

My view: if you're a global company, you need to instill in your employees a respect for time zones. You need your employees to be aware of where their colleagues are and what their "normal" working hours are. You to be intentional about this and actually say it. At a previous company the CEO actually took a minute during an all-hands to say "Look everyone, we're a global company now and we're hiring like crazy in Europe. Be respectful of timezones. If you need to talk to a colleague in Europe, do it during your morning". That was enough to ensure that most of my meetings happened before 5pm local time, and when they didn't, you'd have at least one person during the meeting say things like "let's cover X first so @raffraffraff can get off the call early" or "guys, we're going off-topic and we've got colleagues from Europe on the call". It normalised consideration.

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

#524

Post by Apocryphon »

paulcole wrote: post #458
olliej wrote: post #240

I'm so glad that Covid cares about the economy. I also hate the obsession with in office work. I know for many people there's a social aspect to being in the office, but honestly I don't consider 4 hours of commuting each day to be worth the socializing aspect of in office work.

I hate the obsession with remote work. I commuted 10 minutes by bike and loved it. Remote work is hell for me. I’ll never pursue work at a remote company ever. I would happily take a pay cut to work in an office again.

You know you can still simulate that commute, right? People who miss the boundaries of the office environment away from home, the social aspects, the prospect for promotions, sure. That all makes sense. But the commute? There’s nothing stopping you from biking those ten minutes before your remote job. During the quarantine you had more time than before to bike, and probably less traffic to boot.

And as an aside- did you have your own office or cubicle, or was it open layout?

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

#525

Post by gnicholas »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #521
gnicholas wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but that was just the property tax — the SALT cap applies to the total state and local taxes. Tack on the 5% income tax rate, and you'll hit the cap pretty easily. For example, a single person making any amount (with that property tax amount) will hit the cap. Ditto for a couple each making $145k.

And they still have $10k of SALT to deduct. The more you increase the cap, the more it benefits richer people (on a nationwide perspective). There are a handful of states with extremely high taxes (IL/NJ/CT/CA/NY/MD/etc), but they are solidly Democrat. I do not envision the other Democrat states who would not benefit from SALT cap increases to care about going out on a limb for them.

I'm no expert, but I would imagine this would be part of a larger package that would have plenty of goodies for other D-leaning states. You don't have to convince folks in Louisiana that SALT cap removal is in their best interest — you just package it up in a bill large enough to get a big enough coalition of supporters.

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

#526

Post by lotsofpulp »

gnicholas wrote: post #525
lotsofpulp wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they still have $10k of SALT to deduct. The more you increase the cap, the more it benefits richer people (on a nationwide perspective). There are a handful of states with extremely high taxes (IL/NJ/CT/CA/NY/MD/etc), but they are solidly Democrat. I do not envision the other Democrat states who would not benefit from SALT cap increases to care about going out on a limb for them.

I'm no expert, but I would imagine this would be part of a larger package that would have plenty of goodies for other D-leaning states. You don't have to convince folks in Louisiana that SALT cap removal is in their best interest — you just package it up in a bill large enough to get a big enough coalition of supporters.

Which is what Dems tried with the Build Back Better bill, but Repubs were able to successfully pit Democrat vs Democrat because increasing the SALT caps is easy to advertise as decreasing taxes for the rich.

This is a great article summarizing what I am trying to say.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/591378-salt-change-likel...

> Critics grumble that raising the cap on SALT deductions runs counter to what they say is the main political rationale for passing the legislation: addressing wealth inequality.

Repubs really put Dems in a bad spot with this one.

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

#527

Post by tialaramex »

dntrkv wrote: post #466
tialaramex wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That influenza virus didn't go anywhere, it's still with us, but people stopped caring after the worst of the pandemic. COVID-19 will now do the same. That's a bad but predictable outcome of short term thinking.

Hasn't influenza been around for like 1000+ years?

Influenza has existed in human populations for a long time, yes. However the 1918 pandemic was a novel H1N1 influenza A probably from birds. It was never eliminated in humans and continues to kill people to this day. We "learned to live with it" because up front capital costs are distasteful to idiots who can't see past the next quarter.

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

#528

Post by jacobmischka »

tombert wrote: post #97
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…

COVID made my situation worse at Apple. I worked in a satellite office (NYC), and while in the office, most folks in California were reluctant to schedule meetings later than ~2pm california time because they didn't want to keep people in the office late. When we went fully remote, suddenly it seems like any compunctions about that vanished; I would have meetings until 9pm 3 nights a week, I guess because the manager…

> Definitely sympathize there; we weren't even allowed to leave Github issues without Legal's approval...

This strongly anti-OSS policy makes me very sad, I occasionally see Apple employees in GitHub issues essentially saying they would fix this problem they're seeing themselves but are forbidden from participating by their employer (Apple). Seems like such a waste. Everyone has their price and priorities, definitely solving interesting problems at work and being paid well for it can outweigh satisfaction from OSS, but just seems so needless for the wealthiest organization in the world.

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

#529

Post by VBprogrammer »

roflulz wrote: post #327
driverdan wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put your work hours in your calendar and auto decline everything outside those hours. Refuse that nonsense.

thats how you get PIPed

Possibly but I've never encountered a company that felt they had control of my time after hours and wouldn't have stayed at one which did.

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

#530

Post by franga2000 »

viraptor wrote: post #496
raydev wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In principle, I agree, but I should point out that "No meetings outside regular daylight hours" and "My employer shouldn't care where in the world I do my job" are not compatible with each other. Not if you're all in North America. I've worked for two large, distributed companies in the last several years, where I reside in Eastern time zone. There's enough overlap between me and teammates in the Pacific time zone…

Yeah, I don't get that one. You need to be in some really extreme timezones to not have any overlap. I worked with both UK and US from Australia (not Apple) and it was possible. Occasionally I'd do a meeting at night and start later the next day, but it was always my choice.

I used to work with people from PST (-8), CET (+1) and KST (+9). The meeting planner [0] shows no "acceptable" overlap, but we made it work by doing meetings very rarely, planning them far in advance and essentially taking turns which timezone gets the late (22-23) or early (6-7) slots. This was despite the fact that there was a clear hierarchy - sometimes the boss got up at 4 or stayed up until 23 so we wouldn't have to.

[0] https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=...

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