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

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

#461

Post by incone123 »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #389
lozenge wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your biggest power, the option of resigning to work somewhere else, is still with you. You just get backup from the union for when you don't want to exercise that power.

Well, since the original question before we got distracted was about flexibility in how you work, you definitely give that up as part of a union. Your collective agreement will spell out how, when and where you work, how much you get paid and also compel you do to things in support of the union, even if you don't agree with them. Those are all pretty big individual powers.

Since we're on the topic of remote, why do you think the union agreement would not state location of work being 'member's preference' rather than a specific location?

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

#462

Post by chrishare »

maleldil wrote: post #397
bricemo wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think inventing Generative Adversarial Networks, which enable everything from Alexa to GPT-3 to DALL-E to thousands of other models we use today, is pretty visionary to the field of ML. I’m sure you have some nitpick but I don’t think it matters

What do GANs have to do with GPT-3? Isn't GPT a Transformer-based autoregressive model?

Nothing directly. One could argue that GANs did kick-start the boom in generative model research as the first approach in some time that worked in a big way. Either way, certainly Ian is a huge name in ML.

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

#463

Post by Simon_O_Rourke »

The whole reckoning behind this is not organizational but aesthetic. How does it look if Apple spend a billion bucks on an office, and it's half empty because Bob from Oakland prefers spending his working day at home in a bathrobe and slippers.

The work, more than likely, gets done just the same, but it's all about appearances.

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

#464

Post by cycomanic »

filoleg wrote: post #153
thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #28

Good for him. These companies touting their solutions for creating a more connected world can't have it both ways. Apple was able to ship the M1 and roll out new iterations of many other offerings since the pandemic hit. They're just fine. Apple didn't collapse since the pandemic hit, and the flexibility offered by remote work is far more valuable to lots of people than the loss of in-person collaboration opportuniti…

Not to undermine your point, wich which i agree wholeheartedly, but I wanted to address one thing. I imagine quite a lot of people who worked on M1 hardware probably still had to show up to the office. For some positions it is just required. A friend of mine who worked on hardware at Apple had to go to the office almost every day throughout the pandemic (and no, i dont know what product he worked on, and I am not goi…

I agree with your comments. As far as I know the work flow software and PDKs used for by the foundries (I know this is true for at least global foundries) has essentially unlimited liability (e.g. for "leaking") , so they often are running on dedicated computers even fenced off from the network. I find it hard to imagine they let hardware engineers take it home.

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

#465

Post by Der_Einzige »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #199

That's unfortunate but there's thousands of equally qualified people who will gladly will their spot, and come into the office.

There is literally NO ONE on EARTH qualified to fit Ian Goodfellows shoes. Hahahahaha you cracked me up with this one!

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

#466

Post by gorgoiler »

If you are part of a team that can be productive, remotely, then you are very lucky.

I am not. We are in trouble as a tech business and have a very large piece of tech debt that we need to get over, this year. (We also have an amazing product and smart people invested in our growth. It’s one of those good problems to have, but it’s still a problem.)

We experimented (a long time ago, before I joined) with an “open source model” of siloed teams who made internal releases to each other. This had the unfortunate side effect of hampering our release process and also, far worse, embedding a really unproductive them-vs-us culture that holds back our ability to ship on time.

On a technical level, it’s kind of like the bad old days of when people all had their own branches, and all tried to merge at once in the week of the release. If you’re familiar with this anti-pattern then we are in a similar situation but with individual repositories instead of branches.

Our team has a lot of veterans, many with the title architect, and all of whom are emotionally invested in the status quo being the right approach. There’s a lot of friction between us. Frankly this might not be the right team for me in the long run, but there are so many awesome people here as well that I want to make it work.

We objectively have a problem shipping our product, and because most of the old guard work remotely it is nigh on impossible to effectively build consensus around making any kind of big change. It is very a hard ship sail.

The saving grace? My manager and I go in three days a week. So does our VP Eng and the manager and tech lead of a couple of other important teams. We have whiteboard diagrams, 1:1 walks in the park, and chats in the kitchen. When we meet with the old guard, we sit together in a meeting room while they are on individual calls. I feel like we are getting somewhere, slowly, but an unsettling amount of time has been spent on how to effectively do staff-level persuasive tech-leadership, in the face of a highly talented but highly conservative cadre of senior engineers who keep themselves at arm’s length over Zoom.

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

#467

Post by astrange »

Aeolun wrote: post #132
qbasic_forever wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it. The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is to organize your coworkers. You have much more bargaining power about your work conditions as an organized union. The history of unionization stems primarily from workers demanding safe working environments.

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.

This is strangely individualist; maybe the company or your team would fall apart without him and he's doing something you don't personally know how to measure.

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

#468

Post by astrange »

csande17 wrote: post #400
noisy_boy wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Say, for sake of argument, that I'm the World's Greatest Widget Engineer. Say, I am not. > so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer I cannot, see above. Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself? > A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not…

> Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself? No, I do not believe you are entitled to a wealth transfer from people who are better at your job than you are. (Or, to put it another way, you're certainly free to do a little collective bargaining if you'd like, but the World's Greatest Widget Engineer has no reason to join your union.)

Why hasn't he been promoted to management? Most companies don't have a career track for the single most productive IC ever, and he's probably capable of improving other people's work anyway if he managed them.

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

#469

Post by Salgat »

supernova87a wrote: post #11
skunkworker wrote: post #3

Quite a big loss for Apple. Ian was the primary author of the 2014 GAN paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.2661

I can tell you from direct experience that he is no big loss for Apple. And he wasn't "Apple's Director of ML" as in the headline makes it sound like the top company lead for this topic. He was a director, among many. A reasonably sized group leader, not say, a JG.

Companies typically hire these people to bolster their reputation and draw in new talent. It's the same reason companies keep hiring a guy like Guido van Rossum, even if they don't really care how productive he is.

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

#470

Post by [deleted] »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #265
filoleg wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to undermine your point, wich which i agree wholeheartedly, but I wanted to address one thing. I imagine quite a lot of people who worked on M1 hardware probably still had to show up to the office. For some positions it is just required. A friend of mine who worked on hardware at Apple had to go to the office almost every day throughout the pandemic (and no, i dont know what product he worked on, and I am not goi…

> 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…

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