Remote work is an existential threat to large knowledge-work-based corporations or at least to their management hierarchies. Having spent $$ on fancy buildings that are now empty is just one aspect of this. Problem for them is: the genie is out of the bottle now. We've spent 2y proving that things are humming along just fine without everyone on a campus, commuting for 2h every day.
Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
161–170 of 632 posts
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#162In other words: 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.
Are people who are convinced by this logic aware that the vast majority of Apple employees don’t work in Apple Park and instead in extremely unremarkable office buildings throughout suburban Bay Area?
What are the percentages? Apple built Apple Park to not house the majority of employees?
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The time theft of traffic, costs of fuel and wear and tear on your car, the cost of lunch if you don't pack a lunch. 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 remot…
> You knew these things were a requirement when you signed your contract, right This is not entirely fair. Pre-pandemic, remote work was much more difficult to find.
Not impossible, so pre-pandemic it was too hard to prevent the egregious time theft you complain about?
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe allow teams, but I don't think allowing individuals to choose isn't good. 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.…
> Having a team that's half remote/half in-person is worse of both worlds I'm not so sure that's a blanket statement. If teams are properly managed it works out.
Have you worked in this environment? I have and I agree with the previous comment. You get the low friction interaction of being there in person but then all the people who aren't there get left out. Or you have to do everything on video anyway so there's no point in some people being in person. My bet is in person companies win in the end.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#165In other words: 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.
So? It's somebody's decision to make and making bad decisions isn't a crime. It's not even clear it's a bad decision for Apple.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#166Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#167When people keep calling literally everything racist it begins to drown out true instances of racism.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#168“It will make Apple younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied” 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.
I would expect more neuro-divergent people to prefer having the option to WFH
Depends on how you define neuro-divergent.
So why do white people love the office but non whited are comfortable only at home?
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#169In other words: 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'm fully remote and love it, but let's not pretend that Apple engineers are at risk of homelessness if they decide they don't want to work at apple anymore
We could make a little joke about Foxconn always being an option, but the joke punchline is sold separately...
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#170> CEO Tim Cook called in-person collaboration benefits "irreplaceable" and in an email, the executive team talked about the importance of "the serendipity that comes from bumping into colleagues" during in-person work. Another extroverted MBA who doesn't understand why many engineers need big, unbroken chunks of silence & concentration to do great work.
I think engineers tend to under-estimate how much of their work is communicating with other engineers. 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 think engineers tend to under-estimate how much of their work is communicating with other engineers.
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.