Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

macrumors.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 734 posts

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#361

Post by hiptobecubic »

klabb3 wrote: post #357
Aeolun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have much more bargaining power, yes. But you’ll also be bargaining as part of a group that includes Joe Useless, who sits in the next cubicle over and ostensibly fulfills the same role as you. The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.

The free-rider problem applies to basically any system with cohorts. It's part of the incentive structure, for sure, but it's not the only part. As long as you accept utility in collective systems (ie if you're anything but a pure anarcho-capitalist), you recognize that in some cases (such as public roads) the value outweigh the costs of the free-rider problems. Once you're past that point, it should be all about tra…

I have noticed in the US more than anywhere else I've lived, the most important thing to everyone seems to be that no one gets anything unfairly. I've noticed more with Conservatives because of the noise they make about things like welfare freeriders, election fraud etc, but i imagine it applies to Liberals as well when talking about other issues.

People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#362

Post by acheron »

holografix wrote: post #298
almost_usual wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better. I’m not sure what your role is but zoom calls really don’t mean anything as an IC. Not unless you’re responding to or handling an outage and debugging on the fly. What you produce and how well it works is how you’re measured. Document…

I totally understand your pov and it’s often the one shared by full remote folks who enjoy it that way: “I produce good work nothing else matters”. I find that a really sad, if not completely rational, outlook. See I don’t want to work with someone who outputs great work only. I want to work who can share a joke, help out, bounce ideas of, experiment with new things and fail/succeed. In other words, I like work to be…

I have family and friends to be joyful with. I want my coworkers to shut up and do their job.

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#363

Post by blululu »

buzzert wrote: post #172
yeahwhatever10 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know about your first point on ML, but I think the second point is the more salient one. If Goodfellow was that productive and that much of a value add they would have found a way to keep him.

I don’t mean to disparage ML generally. I think it has a lot of promise in academia, but its utility in the consumer electronics industry (especially one that’s pivoting towards entertainment services) seems pretty limited.

ML has reached a level of maturity and ubiquity that it is having an effect on almost every area of computing. I have personally seen applications for ML that have moved the needle of consumer electronics applications. A lot of this is old hat stuff at this point but there is also a ton of value. Things like finding the white balance in photos, the next letter on a keyboard or how quickly to charge a phone are all areas that benefit from simple ml.

I would for one would really appreciate it if Apple photos had a decent search function.

Maybe these don’t move the needle as much as Wall Street analysts hope but these marginal improvements add up in a highly competitive space and I can’t see a world where mobile manufacturers turn their backs on ML.

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#364

Post by fooey »

alistairSH wrote: post #94
dimtion wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon WFH policy is still flexible though. For example, in my team the current policy is to work wherever we feel the most productive and happiest. You could have potentially moved within the company if that was only decision factor.

Maybe? I recently interviewed and nobody could tell me what the policy would be in a few months. “It’s WFH today, but that’ll probably change. And you can always take our bus from your local AWS office to the office where the rest of the team may or may not be because we don’t know what our policy will be.” I’d expect a company of Amazon’s size and stature to have a better plan than “whatever your VP wants this week.…

All I hear with the waffling is "we want to force everyone back, but we're not sure we can get away with it"

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#365

Post by otterley »

thewebcount wrote: post #358
otterley wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? The world changes around us, and the best businesses are capable of adapting to suit. It doesn’t make any sense to make promises that one can’t keep. They can’t promise that some teams can WFH forever, because it might not make sense forever. Nor should every team have the same policy, because different teams do different things. I think it makes more sense to be non-committal than to make promises and then have…

Why? Because people have responsibilities outside of work. People have children and spouses with chronic conditions that require them to be available at a moment’s notice to deal with, for example. And it’s not going to change just because some manager at ConHugeCo wants people back in the office. I cannot take a job without knowing that I’ll be allowed to work a particular way for the foreseeable future, as it just…

I meant “why do you expect anyone to be able to foresee the future?”

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#366

Post by hiptobecubic »

kortilla wrote: post #329
kadoban wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways. It's _possible_ for you to be worse off in a union, but rare.

> Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways. You do know that your employment depends on the success of the business, right? The relationship with an employee is no more adversarial than your relationship with the local grocery store when you buy a bag of potatoes.

Yeah, except that switching grocery stores is practically zero cost, so any store that does silly shenanigans gets spanked almost immediately.

Also, grocery stores are about a million billion gazillion times more transparent about trading with you relative to trading with other shoppers.

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#367

Post by YZF »

lizknope wrote: post #284
quadrifoliate wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For some positions it is just required. Typically the positions for which work is "just required" are lab and hardware positions. These don't tend to have the shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze of humans and desks that I always see in open-plan offices. Any time I have worked in a lab or on electronic hardware, I have had around 10 times the amount of personal space compared to the tightly packed "collaborative" open-pla…

I had an office with a door and window for 12 years at 2 different companies. It was great. I left the door open 90% of the time but it was great to be able to close the door for privacy the other 10%. I changed to a much better job in 2019 regarding work and salary but everyone including the VP's are in cubicles. It is really annoying when everyone around you is on a different conference call and you have to block t…

Same lunch thing over here. I do enjoy meeting my team for lunch. But it's not any easier for me to get work done in the office and the theoretical face to face collaboration doesn't quite seem to happen. We've offices in a bunch of countries anyways and are pretty distributed in my project.

I'm an engineering manager and some of my fellow managers seem to feel very strongly about wanting people to come to the office despite 2+ years of evidence that we can work remotely. It's tough because everyone is different. Some people might benefit from the ritual of coming into the office, the additional social connections, and to some degree the peer pressure. Some people are very effective working from home. Some people live close by, some people live far away.

We have a lot of space in our offices and lots of meeting rooms so no real noise issues or feeling cramped. If I had my own space with a door and a 5 minute commute then I'd probably go more often but I have neither...

Hard to say where we go from here. I do think having the team in physical proximity has advantages for collaboration. But the other pieces to take advantage of that have to be in place as well. I've done some of my best work while working physically closing with others but I've also had some of the worst distraction heavy environments where I got little done. As long as companies are just optimizing for cost per employee then maybe they should just sell their office buildings...

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#368

Post by dymk »

ineedasername wrote: post #269
shagie wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's spec'ed for 3 years of experience but salary is about the median for a new graduate w/o professional experience. How does the company's revenue per employee compare to the offered salary?

Back of the envelope, the offered salary is roughly $5000-$10,000 less than the average revenue per employee. I'm not familiar with thinking about salaries in these terms though, how is this relevant?

I’m surprised such a company isn’t going out of business. That’s a very low amount to make per-head for software engineers. Do they make up for it in volume?

Re: Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work

#369

Post by jonathankoren »

nomdenator wrote: post #359
zmmmmm wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is really hard to find a company that doesn't try to cram you into an open plan office with at least half a dozen people exactly I'd be fine to go into the office but don't be under the illusion I'm going to accept materially worse working conditions in order to do it. I guess it isn't the same for everyone, but my home office is a very high bar to beat and it makes a real difference to my productivity and menta…

I wonder what I'm missing in this concept. You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable. Also, I've been to a lot of meetings where we were told "there are other things people value in work besides money". Maybe being able to manage your own work environment and save gas and time fits in that slot. A content, well rested workforce would be better IMO…

> You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.

Some real estate is a sunk cost, and the execs doubling down on it. Apple and Google both dropped 2 or 3 billion combined on fancy new offices just before the pandemic. You can’t sell those buildings, their too big, and they’re not subdivided well enough to rent out parts of them, so everyone comes back to work

Post reply on HN