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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

#511

Post by jstx1 »

mjan22640 wrote: post #500
malwarebytess wrote: post #483

Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers. For some work a physical presence is required not just preferable, but for mos…

In my experience, young man at the start of their carrier are willing to go to great lengths to work from home. After they marry and get kids, they become willing to go great lengths to work from the office.

This sounds entirely backwards based on talking to many different people about it in the past couple of years.

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

#513

Post by birthday »

jstx1 wrote: post #489
malwarebytess wrote: post #483

Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers. For some work a physical presence is required not just preferable, but for mos…

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.

I think his point is that the solution to the problem is not to go back to the office, but to try develop a better social life outside of work.

It's the "root cause" fix.

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

#514

Post by closeparen »

malwarebytess wrote: post #495
jstx1 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.

I have to agree with you. It's not necessarily a bad thing. Where people get their fulfillment from is their own business, and if their needs are met -- all the better. Everyone deserves contentment and fulfillment. But, don't force me to make my life worse for that reason. You like the office? Go to the office.

My life is much worse for having 30+ Zoom meetings per week instead of the 1-2 it was before. Design discussions and collaborative problem solving are activities I used to find satisfying & be pretty efficient at. On Zoom I find them excruciating, draining, and very slow - requiring more hours for the same output, compounding the pain of sitting on Zoom, and sapping my own focus time.

Part of the job is to knock out tickets but part of the job (particularly when senior) is to help coworkers. If we lived in a fully transactional gig-worker kind of model then I would bill you 10x as much to get involved in your problem over Zoom. We don't, so that's impossible. And I realize this is silly on the grand scale of labor exploitation but I feel like by expecting me to treat remote workers the same as in-office workers, management is extracting a lot more value from me than was our deal pre-pandemic.

I get very little utility from the "flexibility" (always prioritized living close to the office, prefer the change of scenery) but a lot of disutility from remote collaboration.

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

#515

Post by jxramos »

malwarebytess wrote: post #483

Warning: Hot Take. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers. For some work a physical presence is required not just preferable, but for mos…

My friend joined Coinbase who he recommended to me. They are highly remote or very remote friendly. The CEO has a great vision too, I enjoyed some of the talks he gave eg with Gary Tan, etc.

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

#516

Post by Lio »

worik wrote: post #186
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.

Oh golly, how right you are. > How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it. I may have an answer: Because of our fetish with metrics. It is possible to measure the cost of an engineer or computer programmer. This can be assigned a cost which is arbitrarily precise. Calculating teh benefit is usually not so easy. So the decision makers (rational beings, just mislead by an intellect…

There's also a tendency for humans to over optimise the wrong things.

John Sturman has a business game to illustrate this called the Beer Game[1].

It's supposed to illustrate shocks to a supply chain with limited knowledge of how the rest of the system is behaving.

The players in charge of their part of the system try to reduce costs to get a better score but in doing so often catastrophically open themselves up to shocks in the system.

IMHO the same thing is true for managers and accountants trying to reduce costs in their development teams. If you get it wrong you can get a short term gain and long term problem that kills the company.

1. https://web.mit.edu/jsterman/www/SDG/beergame.html

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

#517

Post by GekkePrutser »

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…

So recognisable. In our office everyone is on international teams so everyone is side by side on different calls. It's a mess.

It was like this before covid but our company took advantage to reduce the number of floors and make all the office space hotdesks. So now I sit beside colleagues I don't even know and it's even harder to talk about noise.

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

#518

Post by physicsguy »

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.

37.5 is standard in UK as well.

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

#519

Post by WithinReason »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #396
WithinReason wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

0. vi vs emacs 1. case sensitivity in Nim 2. 0 vs 1 based indexing

Anybody who advocates for 1 indexing is insane

Now say this to a mathematician and see what happens

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

#520

Post by GekkePrutser »

WWLink wrote: post #423
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.

> 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. What if you're the Joe Useless on your team and you don't know it? A lot of people here seem to think they're the 10X dude but what if they're the 0.1X dude lol. What if you're really the 10X dude but your manager thinks…

I think the 0.1X guys (though I wouldn't use that term) tend to not be here as work is just work for them, not a hobby they are absorbed in at all hours.

Not saying that's healthy but I'm sure being on HN has a strong selection bias on 10X people :)

I've worked with many people with varying degrees of competence and I find that the "go out and satisfy your curiosity" is strictly an above average thing.

The average people tend to rely more on courses and certificates, anything approved by the vendor. And they tend to align with the vendor's gospel. If something is not in the training or documentation it doesn't exist. They are the kind of people that will just open a ticket when something doesn't work and go through the hoops for months :)

The really good ones don't really care about such things and just dive into a problem until they thoroughly understand it using any trip of resources necessary (ideally peer to peer info because official info, from the vendor tends to be politically/marketing biased). I would definitely put HN in the latter category.

But I don't think they are useless. The former are really good in operational roles and the latter more in design and architectural ones.

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