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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

#661

Post by hackflip »

thefz wrote: post #595
Closi wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Warning: Hot Take. I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work…

Warning: Hot Take. Not all jobs require you to form meaningful relationships with colleagues and those relationships can be kept at a distance. I'd hate to have "friends" on the workplace.

The best friendships I've made in adulthood are mostly ex-coworkers.

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

#662

Post by nvarsj »

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…

Maybe not paint people with such broad strokes? Humans are complicated, and the reasons we have for wanting to go to the office vs WFH are varied.

For example - some people don't like work bleeding into their home life, which is a lot harder when you WFH.

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

#663

Post by MrPatan »

native_samples wrote: post #544
np- wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 manage…

If by the tech industry you're including startups, then those all firms with money due to future expectations of success, not actual success. Then you've got firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft with so much financial momentum they could lose half their employees tomorrow and their quarterly results would go massively up. The cases where WFH matters are all the firms in the middle. Non tech firms, for example. Firm…

What do you think your friends were doing in the office instead of BBQ or napping? Extra work, or a coffee with Bob from accounting?

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

#664

Post by sinsterizme »

twayt wrote: post #582
sinsterizme wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely fall into this camp. I’m introverted, so the forced social interaction at work was perfect for me and sufficient to keep me socially gratified. I’ve tried to make up for it in the pandemic by being more socially active but it hasn’t been working. I’ll definitely be looking for an in-office position soon since some companies are returning. I think my mental health will greatly recover.

Forcing yourself to get your social interaction requirements met at work isn't ideal. It is like trying to get your protein requirements met from potatoes. Yes, you can if you force yourself and try really hard. However, it is much more efficient and pain-free to get it from a protein shake. In this context, it means using the time you save with working from home and using it to meet people interested in the things y…

I don’t see what’s so bad about it. Half of my waking hours are spent working, a lot of the other half are spent eating, working out, and relaxing. Am I supposed to spend an hour a day hanging out with people after work? Not only does that sound exhausting, it doesn’t seem like enough if that’s my main social interaction. At work, there is a shared goal and a community that I can be a part of, and it’s there for me for most of my waking hours during the week.

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

#665

Post by targafarian »

nomdenator wrote: post #381
holografix wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Being able to feed off each others' expertise can be more than the sum of individuals also. Reading all the responses it seems there's advantages both to being at home or on site and the trick is to find the balance.

I have times and tasks for which I'm more productive at home, and times and/or tasks where I'm more productive at work.

Good in-person collaboration, sometimes accidentally overhearing someone else, is invaluable. At the same time, people can get off task and chit chat becomes a hindrance.

Sometimes we all know our role and what has to be done, we just have to get it done. Sometimes we don't know how to solve a problem.

Some employees don't have a good work environment at home. A Ph.D. student with a young special-needs child felt horrible ignoring his daughter while working on his dissertation at home (where his wife was caring for his daughter), bit coming into campus was far better for him, productivity-wise and psychologically.

I think the balance might be a dynamic one, in that what's best can change over time and task and stage of a task and stage of a person's career. And by employee, and by task.

Being a good manager must be immensely difficult, but also being an employee also requires adapting and compromising between all of these trade-offs.

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

#666

Post by woevdbz »

zmmmmm wrote: post #258
nextos wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think onsite working can be nice but the problem is that 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. I can't do any real work like that. Before COVID, I was going to the office to talk to people, attend meetings and do chores, whereas I did real work at home. It was unsustainable, as work ended up filling 80+ hours per week.

> 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'm with you there, it just happens not to be the same with everyone.

Some folks have very complicated home situations, living with family they don't get along with, living with roommates that are fun, loud, and work for competitors, living with boyfriend/girlfriend that they're having a falling out with, etc.

Some folks have demons of their own that they can't deal with without social pressure. People with alcohol abuse problems for example, since nobody can smell your breath on videoconference, might have trouble not day drinking when they're at home with their stash all day.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, it is a very different experience for kids coming out of college or very fresh in the industry not to have any folks they can easily turn to for advice they'd otherwise have gotten from work colleagues. Work advice, career advice, life in the city kind of advice, you name it - especially if you moved cities or countries for your career, the workplace is a really important factor in helping you get settled.

I'm not saying on balance these would tilt things in favor of working from home or the office, but I'd encourage you to ask around coworkers how they feel in order to get a sense of what other situations might be like.

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

#667

Post by maratc »

manuelabeledo wrote: post #640
maratc wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much is still being said in person or calls, because talking is much more efficient than writing, so ... no, we don't "have proper record of everything said and done."

Yet we should.

Whether we should have that record or not is completely orthogonal to the conversation about how remote workers force (or not) the others to behave in a certain way to accommodate the remoteness of these workers.

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

#668

Post by arinlen »

Closi wrote: post #643
arinlen wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues. This take makes no sense at all. If people had unfulfilling work lives they would not be threatening resignation to preserve the work life they loathe, and they would def…

Why does having a fulfilling social life mean I can’t have a fulfilling work life too? Everything is predicated on it being an either/or, but I feel lucky enough to have great relationships both in and out of work.

> Why does having a fulfilling social life mean I can’t have a fulfilling work life too?

Those who already have fulfilling social lives don't point out their shot at having a fulfilling work life as their justification to return to the office.

Also, that chance of using work as a way to fill in the void in their personal life comes at a steep expense: hours of their personal life wasted in long commutes, and constraining their choice of places to live as a tradeoff between how far they live from the office and how much they are willing to spend for a home.

> Everything is predicated on it being an either/or, but I feel lucky enough to have great relationships both in and out of work.

It is an either/or. The time, money, and energy you're forced to waste every single day just to commute to work is ripped out of your personal time.

The two hours you spend in traffic every single day are two hours you don't get to spend with your family/friends. Either you spend those hours playing with your son/daughter, or driving from the office.

How exactly is this not an either/or scenario?

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

#669

Post by atty »

benrbray wrote: post #476
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 pandem…

That sounds to me more like a team failing to adjust to a good WFH setup than anything intrinsic to the difference between WFH/office work. To be clear I’m not in an engineering role, I’m more of an applied scientist, but I started my newest job the day my company forced everyone to work from home for the pandemic, and overall my experience was very positive. Got lots of support and help, spent lots of time in slack/webex with senior members of the team, and overall had a great experience with onboarding. Only part I didn’t enjoy was IT working through all the hiccups of switching to WFH.

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

#670

Post by dunefox »

benrbray wrote: post #653
dunefox wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am wildly more productive when I'm in the office with my co-workers compared to at home alone. I get next to nothing done during a whole day in the office. Over 2 1/2 hours commute a day, and then I have to sit there with (my own) ANC headphones on because people talk all day. Then there's coordinating where and when to go eat which can take up to half an hour. People come around to talk. I'm basically at 10-20%…

That's a rough commute indeed. I do wish American cities (for instance, idk where you are) made it simpler to live close to with without sacrificing too much in other areas of life. It's one reason I now live in Tokyo. Other than the commute, I think those are all things that a cohesive team should be able to resolve. It's definitely important to set boundaries in a shared space. I don't agree that the answer is to e…

> Also, just a thought: your colleagues might find the discussions they have with you to be really valuable to their own productivity / job satisfaction.

Might be the case but when compared with a 30 second commute it's hard to care about that.

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