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

471–480 of 734 posts

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

#471

Post by astrange »

smartbit wrote: post #457
ineedasername wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very upfront when I schedule the interview, give them a range when we set the time and if they're still interested we proceed. It's education analytics, so there's a little bit of "doing it for the mission" that gets people who are willing to make a little less because the job really has a very direct impact on students' success and lives. My work reduces student debt and increases success rates and identifies th…

> The work environment is laid back, 40 hour weeks & rarely any expectation of going over that so there can be a very good work/life balance There are quite some countries where Jo Average would see 40h working week as monsterous. Or were 40h workweek might even be outlawed.

Isn't that just France? And French people think basically everything is monstrous and worth rioting over.

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

#472

Post by astrange »

me_me_mu_mu wrote: post #325
andrewia wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a few obvious responses to your comment. First of which is that switching jobs is not as easy as you make it sound, even in the tech industry. There's still a lot of effort that must be put into interviewing and it takes quite a few weeks unless you get lucky. It becomes even more difficult when you need arrangements due to a disability, visa sponsorship, future maternity/paternity leave, etc. Second,…

I totally get that but come on.. if you can get into FANG you literally don’t have any job security fears. Don’t mention edge cases that may affect a few people but for the vast majority? Please.. the most pampered group of workers in tech. I would understand if this was non tech, and I’m not familiar with outside of US, but this is a non issue. Btw speaking as a full time remote employee.

I think they naturally replace fear of getting fired with fear of not getting a bigger stock grant every year, and end up in the same place via hedonic treadmill.

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

#473

Post by mslate »

Simon_O_Rourke wrote: post #463

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.

I have a great deal of empathy for Bob from Oakland.

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

#474

Post by Foobar8568 »

rubidium wrote: post #430
ianai wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“directly supports the main revenue-generating operations of the organization so there is real $$$ lost by having this position empty” How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.

It’s simple. If you’re in operations it’s all about increasing operating margin (omx). The simplest way to do that is to cut op expenses until you scrape bottom and op revenue dips. Then you adjust, firefight, and find other op expenses to cut.

Or hire contractors like they do here in Europe. So you go from spending up to 150kCHF for a lambda software engineering to paying 250kCHF to a consultancy. But the company "invest". Doesn't matter if that contractor will end up working there for 4 years or more, that's call investment in the finance book or Switzerland is a at will country (but with notice period). Just madness.

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

#475

Post by Foobar8568 »

astrange wrote: post #471
smartbit wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The work environment is laid back, 40 hour weeks & rarely any expectation of going over that so there can be a very good work/life balance There are quite some countries where Jo Average would see 40h working week as monsterous. Or were 40h workweek might even be outlawed.

Isn't that just France? And French people think basically everything is monstrous and worth rioting over.

Good luck to work just 35 or 40h in France in IT.

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

#476

Post by benrbray »

atty wrote: post #194

I get people who want to work from home. I get people who want to work from the office. I get people who want to do hybrid. The one group of people I don’t get are the ones who suggest people should be forced to work from the office, and not able to decide for themselves. (Obviously it depends on the role - if you’re doing hardware design you need to go in sometimes, of course.) I see some people in the macrumors com…

> The one group of people I don’t get are the ones who suggest people should be forced to work from the office, and not able to decide for themselves.

I guess I can give a bit of perspective. I don't think people should be "forced" into 100% office work, but I can say that as a junior engineer, I am wildly more productive when I'm in the office with my co-workers compared to at home alone.

I graduated into the pandemic and my first job out of school was full-remote. My company had no idea how to effectively manage remote workers and after two years I knew barely anything about my coworkers except their names, and I could feel my career stagnating. WFH was lonely, inefficient, and since my home was my office, I had no escape from the stress of work. Whenever I was at home I felt guilty for not working.

I recently quit that job and started a new one. The first thing I asked prospective employers was whether they had office space I could work from. I'm much, much happier working from the office and benefit greatly from my other coworkers who choose to commute.

Part of the problem is that the benefits of in-office work are long-term and asymmetrical. You might not benefit from being in the office, but other people might benefit greatly from having you there. Senior engineers should consider passing down knowledge as part of their responsibilities -- there might be ways to accomplish that remotely, but a lot of that transfer happens organically when colleagues share meals, walk outside together, etc..

Being in the office also gives me a chance to interact with people at the same company who I don't directly work with -- sales people, office managers, etc.. For me, WFH takes all the enjoyment out of work, leaving only the bad stuff.

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

#477

Post by tayistay »

When the pandemic started and everyone was on lockdown, there were very few cars on the roads around SF. I remember being able to see into the distance so clearly, it was surprising. I read that 2/3 of the SF Bay Area could work remotely. In the age of climate change (not to mention air pollution) we probably should insist on, or even mandate, remote work whenever possible. Supposed productivity benefits from in person work are not as important.

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

#478

Post by hobofromabroad »

gorgoiler wrote: post #466

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 so…

It sounds more like the team is rather inexperienced for that kind of work environment.

Communication, the overarching priorities and alignment are super important. I work for a German insurance company and we rolled out crazy amounts of stuff over the last two years and started a re-org that is actually going well.

Also, emotional investment can be quite problematic. All the teams need to work on the overall goal. Having people fixated on their golden toy is a good way to crash into a hard wall.

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

#479

Post by np- »

zo1 wrote: post #456
nomdenator wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eng manager here. Honestly not everyone is sold on remote being better much less equivalent in productivity or output compared to being in an office. Remote also requires a lot of rethinking of team dynamics, work allocation and just plain old making sure stuff is done. Make no mistake, WFH may be arguably better and more pleasant from the employee perspective, but it makes projects more difficult for the rest of the…

> Eng manager here. Honestly not everyone is sold on remote being better much less equivalent in productivity or output compared to being in an office.

Ad an IC, I would have potentially believed this if the past two years where everyone was working from home wasn’t anything but unbridled success for the tech industry. Companies literally can’t hire us fast enough right now, and yet there are really still some managers out there wondering about productivity and output? How about looking at the big picture?

> But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up

Again, this is purely about controlling others. If your IC is not performant, there are ways of addressing that like adults with performance and goal reviews, improvement plans, mentoring, etc. Requiring them to come in so they have adult supervision makes me chuckle. Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?

And I’m not trying to rail on you personally, maybe I’m more triggered by my own management, but this whole post reads to me like such typical management speak of “we tried nothing and we are all out of ideas”

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

#480

Post by jiggawatts »

gorgoiler wrote: post #466

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 so…

> “bad old days of when people all had their own branches”

I’m sort-of-an-SRE at a large enterprise and I see many developers gravitate towards this pattern. There’s a Dev1 branch for the first developer and a Dev2 for the second, etc…

And as you said, a huge merge the day before production rollout.

I’m trying to steer them in the right direction but it’s hard to find a good source that covers everything.

E.g.: this this the bad way, here’s how it goes wrong, this is the good way, this is how it fixes it.

Got any good references I can use?

Post reply on HN