> It will make Apple younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied, in short
They are free to leave and enrich other companies.
Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
361–370 of 632 posts
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
They converted regular lanes to HOV/express, but not enough people are carpooling.
I don't they did. The Express lanes are either converted from existing HOV lanes (which means they are now open to more, not fewer people) or they were added (680 corridor). Unless you are talking about converted in the far far past from SOV to HOV. Examples: 880 south between Hegenberger and San Leandro was 4 lanes, widened to 5 lanes in 2015 with the addition of an HOV lane, which was then converted to an Express l…
Yeah you may be right about adding the lane, but the bigger issue is that the converted HOV to express, which means that cars with two people still have to pay and cars with one person can now pay and slow down the carpool. So now fewer people can use the carpool while at the same time others can slow down the carpool.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whiteboards Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team leans heavily on Miro, for instance. > Lunch Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing is preventing you from having a conference call or video call over lunch. > Body language Not everyone…
> Digital whiteboards are trivial to share, recover, modify and maintain. They're light-years beyond the limited physical variety. My team land heavily on Miro, for instance. I use Mira too, it's great! But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room. > Lunch time is a break. Not everyone wants to spend their break with their coworkers; but even for those that do, nothing…
> But it's not the same as brainstorming on a whiteboard with your colleagues in the same room.
It's better! We pair it with a slack call and collaboratively edit it.
> For a lot of my breaks when I worked in the office I ended up sharing them with colleagues and made several (hopefully) life-long friends out of the habit!
And that's an outcome that happens with WFH, too. You don't need to go to lunch together to make friends.
> It's easier to empathize and relate to my colleagues when I can understand them better through body language when we're talking about life.
That's good for you; but again, WFH doesn't prohibit you from seeing people. If you need body language then have a video call.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#364Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? There is no value in body-language when communicating? I'm all for fully WFH policies, but I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience. I've been working remote for over a decade and wil…
I'm a remote work advocate. > Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? Of course it's not an exact equivalent, but it doesn't need to be. Anecdotally speaking, the number of whiteboard meetings I had that I wanted to have were about 1 per year. Remote workers use tools like Notion, Miro, Jetbrains Code With me which have many/more of th…
> Honestly in a business setting with "trusted" coworkers, less so. I tend to take what my colleagues say at face value.
That's... not all that body language conveys?
Body language helps with basic things like "Oh, Amy is trying to break in and is struggling to make her point", or "Hmm, Doug looks like he's concerned about something, I should ask him his opinion".
Digital A/V communication tools also bring with them a whole host of other sources of friction, including poor audio and video, latency issues, and so forth. They are, at best a weak by tolerable substitute for face-to-face conversations, and quite frankly, IMO anyone who tries to suggest otherwise is not being honest.
You might feel that the tradeoffs are justifiable, but let's not pretend there aren't tradeoffs.
> The big advantage now is that people who would have been steamrolled in meetings have a chance to get their thoughts heard
And conversely, people who type slower or struggle with written communication for various reasons, are significantly disadvantaged.
And that's ignoring the fact that written communication lacks critical nuance (which ends up being poorly filled in with things like emojis) that can lead to confusion and misunderstandings.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#365Most of those complaining joined Apple when it was fully on-site, and very remote hostile. Even those that joined during the closure were aware of the company's stance on remote work, so what they are asking for is a favour.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
"There is no value in body-language when communicating?" Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me. You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your same-race buddies, because you're missing out on the benefits of social bonding. Sure. single-cis-straight-white-neurotypical-abletypical-male can be super optimized, or the equivalent in what ever…
> Not for me, no. I'm neurodiverse, and that shit is just lost on me. I hear you and understand. Lots of people are neuro-normative though, and that stuff is valuable. Let's not assert that remote-only is the Best® though, because for a lot of folks, there is a loss of fidelity in communication going fully remote only. > You might as well complain that you are missing out on being able to tell racist jokes with your…
>When I go to lunch and talk to my colleague about her favorite places to snorkel
Yet you take it for granted that she will go to lunch with you, and that she will engage in neurotypical "pleasantries". I'll bet that anyone who doesn't want to go to lunch with you, you will take this as a negative at review time. "They just aren't trustworthy" or "He isn't a team player", despite them being the highest performing person on the team.
>Have you tried having conversations with folks without making it about you?
I very rarely make it about me, because my goals are to solve interesting problems that make money by benefitting our customers. In this conversation, the problem is "how to maximize productivity at Apple given a diverse workforce". You are the one that wants to make it "about someone". You are providing an excellent example of neurotypical privilege.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. I don't see how at a minimum "more able-bodied" should be controversial. Someone who requires a wheelchair has a much easier experience when WFH. "Younger" is a likely extension of that given how age affects mobility.
People in wheelchairs leave their homes all the time. Apple has buses and offices that I'm sure are wheelchair accessible. Apple probably offers pretty good insurance to get a motorized wheelchair if needed. If someone really can't make it to the office physically, I'm sure the policies are somewhat more nuanced. I understand it may be more difficult for certain people, but I guess to me it's a non sequitur. Doing di…
The conclusion is that we should remove barriers whenever possible. Climbing a mountain is more difficult for people in a wheelchair, but that's just the way it is, we can't make the mountain equally accessible for everyone. Climbing the stairs of a skyscraper is more difficult for people in a wheelchair, but it doesn't have to be that way, we can install an elevator.
Extend that to everything. We shouldn't ask people to do something inconvenient when we could make it convenient.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it. I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.
Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.
> Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.
I consider them to be worth a lot more than that!
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#369> 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'm more on the introversion end of the spectrum, and as someone who's been both an engineer and a manager I'm a big believer in big unbroken chunks of silence and concentration for focused engineering ("makers vs managers schedule", etc).
And... I would say a majority of the major project setbacks / failures I've seen over my career have not been due to engineering failures, but have been due to either:
1) Misalignment or lack of agility about priorities / goals and inter-team dependencies. Situations where people and teams put their heads down and do a lot of engineering... that ends up not being the right engineering.
2) Interpersonal conflicts that simmer, escalate, and aren't defused early enough and harm collaboration.
In theory, both of these could be addressed well in fully remote environments, with careful product, product, and people management.
In practice, I have personally seen it be much easier to head these problems off in environments where people are having regular informal face-to-face and non-transactional interactions. The lunch / coffee break / hallway-chat-after-the-meeting sort of discussions. Even being in separate buildings across a large tech campus has been a barrier to this.
Again, I would be personally happy to WFH, but I do feel I've multiple times seen significant project and company-level benefits from shared workspace interaction, so there are tradeoffs.
Re: Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter
#370These WFH stories seem to preferentially solicit comments from WFH employees who enjoy the flexibility to comment on HN during the workday.