Apple CEO Impressed by Remote Work, Sees Permanent Changes

Money aside, that building is a marketing vehicle. It's meant to show Apple in the posh, advanced, and sustainable light it wants to be seen (whether that image is true or not is another question, but such is marketing).

It was also built to draw in new talent, but in a pandemic it's probably not the attractor they hoped it would be. I doubt Cook is losing sleep over it, but the pandemic definitely messed with his long term plans (like most everyone else, of course).

According to Wikipedia the building houses 12K employees. Also, not all 137K employees are in Cupertino.

>both articles presented the nuance

No they didn't, and that's the problem. It's not a "straw argument".

Cook, in an interview, said something that included both a pro-remote statement and a pro-office statement. The AppleInsider article included both of these statements. Bloomberg, OTOH, only included the pro-remote statement in their article.

It's lying by omission.

Being on the ground at the fruit company, this quote is representative of reality there. Remote is a dud for well over half of employees. If remote work was ever going to be a smash, it was going to be with everyone doing it simultaneously. Remote work will be chilled after this I think.

Obviously I disagree, but since you got to say your bit- I’d like to rebut.

I run an IRC network, I’ve hired people from my IRC network, you choose your own level of involvement.

(And your own level of notification. I know the default in slack and discord is aggressive and designed to push more engagement but it is configurable)

As it stands there are many people who are absolutely not “distracted” by it, most do not get notifications at all, but usually if you did get a notification it would be because someone said your name explicitly.

Most people tend to read up when they feel like it and respond when they feel like it.

I also don’t like absolutism but the OP sounds absolutely defeated and for no reason other than they seem unaware that these communities exist and in my experience have given me better experiences than in person “networking” meetings.

Unless I’m already friends, meeting people at conferences is often not as valuable as meeting them on IRC.

> Spend more time working since there is no psychological difference between relax and work time? Check.

Yes. This is unfortunately happening to me now

I hope that when governments around the world realise that WFH is going to become the norm for a large number of people they will adjust tax laws to allow write-offs where applicable.

Since April this year in the UK we can get up to £6 per week written off business expenses incurred as a result of WFH.

Of course, they may go the opposite direction to encourage people back into offices so coffee/sandwich shops etc. get more footfall.

Oh no you had to buy a chair!

I disagree with this sentiment, depending on where you live not commuting for a few weeks has already paid for all these things. And for many who haven't had to pay rent in the Bay Area for the last 6 months the gains are even more pronounced.

>Spend more time working since there is no psychological difference between relax and work time?

I agree that's an issue but can certainly be mitigated by building good habits around "work" and "not work" time.

I have empathy for your situation, but this argument ignores that I like the area where I live, too. Changing to remote work has a cost/pressure to you, but keeping the status quo has a cost/pressure to me.

Without remote work, there is significant pressure on people like me to move into the city. I live where the mortgage on my 2500 sqft home with a dedicated workspace ($850/mo) probably costs me less than your 400 sqft apartment's rent. I understand that many people who live in downtown apartments don't want to move; pre-COVID, some vacations to New York and to Chicago made me seriously consider moving somewhere downtown to enjoy the energy and opportunity provided by living downtown. But while quarantine with grocery deliveries was probably hellish for you, it was among my favorite seasons of the past few years of my life.

Without remote work, there was significant offloaded cost onto me the employee, to commute to the central workplace, not only financial but also in time. The cost of a very nice office chair is nothing compared to the cost of a driver's seat in a car, and has no comparison to the hours wasted each week on the road.

I have a physical and psychological difference because I have a home office, which I understand is a luxury that a 400 sqft studio doesn't afford. A home office is psychologically better for me than a central office, because my desk at the office was a combination space for my focus work, video/audio conference calls, eating lunch, and relaxing with coworkers.

While working remote, I spend a little more time working, and that more efficiently, but that's because I don't have to waste time on a commute and because I can maintain focus on a task without too many external interruptions when needed.

Like it or not, I think cost of living is about to experience a significant swing over the next few decades. House prices out here are (were) strongly correlated to distance to the highway and from there to the city. Apartment rents in downtown areas are (were) correlated not only to people's desire to live in the big city but also to the cost savings of not needing to own a car and proximity to high-paying jobs. Eventually, things will even out.

I get your predicament, some people like the opportunity to go into the office. Where I have problems with alot of tech companies pre-pandemic is you have a position(engineer etc) that is able to be fully remote, and you are not giving employees the choice to be remote. Forcing people to live in the most expensive area on the planet(silicon valley) for a position that can be done anywhere is inefficient(wasted time commuting) and bad for psyche/environment(stress from commuting, pollution from commuting, stress from high cost of living). The one positive thing from this pandemic is we now get a choice in where we work as tech companies CEO's have had their eyes opened due to being forced to have everyone wfh for over 6 months now.

You're ignoring that most people spend much more money on commuting, clothes for work, and lunch near work then they would spend doing a one time upgrade of their desk and probably eating lunch at home most of the time in t-shirts.

Ironically, commuting to work pushes a lot more of the costs you complain about onto the employee.

Don't worry, that "Those damn kids need to slow down!" mentality will hit you long before you realize you turned into an old fart causing traffic jams during rush hour.

I've never known anyone who got a job on my team because they had a reference, and I am generally doing the hiring. The closest is someone did an internal transfer because of a reference. Never once for an outside hire.

I've been on the hiring team for the last 15 out of that 20 years. I've literally never had someone join my team who even had a reference. This includes juniors.

I would say it tends to be the opposite.

If you're hiring a twenty-something Java developer, you're sort of hiring a commodity. Sure, you may care about schools, grades, interview, etc. but a lot of your decision is going to be based on their paper. They may not have worked anywhere, so they may not have much of a work record.

However, over time most people acquire a more unique toolbox of skills. In my case, since my first job out of grad school, I've basically been directly hired either by a referral or directly by the owner or a senior exec. My current job didn't even have a job posting for it.

Here's a fun fact the "It's not what you know, it's who you know" crowd don't understand. You earned those references based on your merit too. Nobody wants to work with a slackass.

There is a difference between being fun to work with and being entertaining. Maybe I should have worded it, “be a joy to work with.” Some people are a pleasure to work with, even if they are quiet and shy.

Apple Park cost $5 billion and took over a decade to design a build. I'd call that a lot more disruptive than experimenting with WFH.

The whole point is that it wasn't disruptive and even turned out better.

Also it's not merely an "experiment", we're talking about peoples' lives here. People aren't just fungible resources to be commanded and lorded over like chattel. Workers have been fighting for the freedom to work remotely for decades now, and it's sad that it takes a pandemic for employers to start respecting their employees enough to allow them the basic freedom of not being chained to their open office desks like zoo animals.

Are you suggesting Yahoo getting rid of WFH wasn't an effort to boost employee performance? Or just objecting to the idea that "it wasn't working" suggests absolute performance was poor? Rereading the announcement memo[0], it seems pretty clear that the change flowed from a belief that being physically present would yield better work outcomes:

"Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together."

[0] http://allthingsd.com/20130222/physically-together-heres-the...

It gets easier. I’ve been working remotely for a decade, and eventual you learn to communicate differently to mostly avoid these issues.

Maybe, I'm not completely clear on this could work.

What I imagine is that when I'm listening I need to wait the regular wait time plus network lag because the speaker may have resume speaking. The speaker needs to resume speaking before 250 + 100 has passed so that others don't start talking before the speaker resumes.

I see your point, but I personally hate the time wasted on phatic meandering like “... unless anyone disagrees”, “hmm, what if...” etc. I’d much rather people concisely said things they were quite sure of. Plus, it’s hard to disagree with people in person. I don’t have all the facts to hand, and I can’t double-check my phrasing. Text solves all of that for me.

A cyberpunk Kowloon walled city in the ring sounds cool. But consider that Cupertino has fought tooth and nail to prevent an abandoned shopping mall from being converted into legit housing. Seems unlikely that they would go for it.

I hope for this too, less in terms of politics but in terms of spreading the country's wealth more evenly from the coasts to the middle of the country. But same general idea.

Actual cities downtown were losing, but the metro areas were not. This was (mostly white) flight to suburbs, but this was still people living in urban areas rather than the country side.

Now that the suburbs are all built out and getting more expensive, I doubt the same phenomena can happen. There's a limit how far you can go to stay close to the metro area.

If they really want that, they should just get a job in Vancouver with a different employer.

Sounds like a problem for them specifically. Apple lists jobs in Vancouver.

Not sure we can make that claim yet, it's only been a few months. We still have that residual in office-culture, things might be different when the majority of the office has turned over since remote work became a thing.

Ah well remote work where everyone is co-located is very different to remote work where the people are 8 timezones away. Synchronous communication will always be hard between teams so far apart.

I'm assuming you don't work with physical devices? My company averages about 1/4 of the people in the office because it's just impossible to work on certain aspects of physical bringup entirely remote for a variety of reasons (space, tool access, multiple people working on one prototype, etc etc).

Not everyone gets to work with purely digital products.

Yes 100%. East coast - UK/Europe collaboration is much easier than West coast. Frequent meetings between Europe and SV mean someone is staying late or coming in early on a regular basis. In the worst case the transatlantic bandwidth can be 2 emails a day.

I am on the West Coast and regularly do calls with India since we added teams there. 12.5 hours difference is absolutely awful and has me wanting to quit my job or at least move to a team that isn't so far apart. The number of times I've had to wake up early or cancel dinner plans is super disruptive and has crushed my work life balance since there is no clear time when the workday starts an ends.

> From bragging about glass work to the damn chairs in the building. It was just so odd.

It's a symbolic embodiment of their products' build quality, attention to detail, design-lead ethos and green credentials.

It also provides a place for some people to work.

>even my work place shocked a lot of people with a declaration that anyone looking to continue remote work post pandemic will need VP approval for three days a week

Soemthing tells me that if your competitors start offering 3 days a week remote work and people start taking them up on that offer, your company will change their stance mighty quick.

>they themselves might be more redundant than they want to admit to.

I really expect there to be a look across all businesses at mid level management. C-suite will save themselves, but people downstream won't be able to.

I only found it odd in that everything about the office seemed incredibly unappealing to me in terms of working there. Seemed to focus on things that employees don't really care about.

Having companies brag about their offices in order to attract talent, after all employees will spend 40-80 hours a week of their life there, is not that weird to me.

Likely limitations from the city for development on that property. I worked at a place (not in California) that was limited to X number of people in their campus due to parking requirements; the city forced the company to offload employees to another location when they went way over the limit.