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

You are categorizing it way to one sided in an offensive way. "Bad home lives" can be as simple as having too much social interaction e.g. by having children at home, which can be quite distracting. And of course, a lot of people don't have a separate room set aside at home for work. Real estate in many places is prohibitively expensive. And even if there is one, with full home office, both partners might compete for that working space and on many days even need 2 office rooms.

Also, the "social interactions" at the office are usually not about replacing private social life, but well, interacting with your colleagues about work related topics which go beyond the range of scheduled meetings. There is a lot of value in meeting random people over a coffee without a set agenda. No surprise, that during the pandemic there were a lot of meetings schedule with no agenda set, just to keep conversation between people alive, the more so as they don't work directly together.

On the one side I certainly appreciated the ability to work undisturbed at home for certain tasks, on the other side, I am working in a large organization (and I don't mean by large just a large headcount but a lot of people on joint or related projects), which mostly are not software engineers (but engineers of other disciplines). A lot of that goes online too - and as our organization is spread across large distances, always has been online - but I am aware of the benefits of direct interaction. At minimum, I like to have had some direct interactions with people I am working online with.

But of course, one cannot (and should not) just turn back the clock. The pandemic happened, and a lot of people had a taste of the advantages of work from home and a lot of companies had to work hard at facilitating that, so for a huge amount of jobs this is technically possible now. Working from an office isn't the only option any more and employers should understand that. Forcing people to come back into the office is a huge warning sign. It means that there are actually no convincing reasons, or the employees wouldn't have to be pressured.

Which of course raises the questions, why did spend Apple 5 billion on that fancy new headquarter and didn't put emphasis onto making this a place people want to go to? In the contrary, it was designed with open office spaces, which especially software engineers just hate. It was unpopular even before the pandemic. Instead, they should have asked groups and single employees how an office attractive for their line of work should look. It couldn't possibly have been a problem of the budget :).

> Coworking space, cafe, personal office etc.

or you can chose to work for a company whose offices are not two hours away.

coworking, cafes, etc are not really suited to actually work, especially of your work requires some kind of concentration or secrecy (an NDA for example)

Personal office in house is the worst combination of them all IMO.

Not that I do not work from home, I did it for good part of my life, it's just not for everybody.

You have also to consider that having their parents around all day could be the worst possible way to live for teenagers, it makes more sense only when they are small kids, but in my country we have parental leaves and specific holidays to take care of that.

Exactly. I even use the same monitor and everything, but when I'm done for the day, the laptop goes in the drawer and whoever wants something from me will have to wait for the next business day.

I find the same kind of creep can happen at the office, too. Many colleagues end up leaving at 8 PM or later [0] because they have to do this one more thing or someone shows up with just a quick question to ask.

However, I realize that for some people, who have a harder time saying no for whatever reason, it's easier to have a hard, external excuse. "Sorry, I need to catch my train, so I don't have to sleep here" works less well when you're already home. But I think that in both cases it's very important to set boundaries and stick to them.

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[0] Our workdays are normally 9 AM to 6 PM.

Wouldn't want to let the t*mporary contr*ctors into our beautiful head office.

I said many, not all.

> I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.

If you all lived next door to each other, would you still do it over telegram voice? If not, why not if you can connect the same over voice chat?

My view is that something is lost on voice chat compared to being in the same room. I am part of a 10-year WhatsApp group with my university buddies too - but we were bonded with real-life interactions and experiences while being together at university. If those in-person, real-life interactions were replaced by a slack group with other people on my course, we wouldn't have built the same relationship.