Hacker News Reader

Comment by nikivi | Hacker News Reader

Would be nice if most software engineering roles at Apple weren't forced to work in US. For those without degrees it's rather hard to get a US Visa.

View on HN

That would be nice, but these are ultimately US based and US lead companies. Moving work into other countries does create complications, especially with the West coast only having a workday overlap of a few hours (at best) with Europe. That really has a non-trivial impact on productivity and decision making latency.

I know several Apple employees who have been fighting to be allowed to move from Cupertino to Vancouver, without success.

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

They probably will, but they're pursing the less-disruptive option first.

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

When I last had a 'man inside', the Vancouver office was only for a specific (set of?) teams. That may have changed in the last couple of years.

It would be a benefit to have dev teams in the Toronto/NYC time zone.

We’ve worked with the Cupertino devs since the start of Apple News and there’s a bit of a disconnect there because of the time difference. Apple has had other teams here but few devs. (In Toronto anyway)

I remember when everyone said remote work as the default was impossible but then it happened and now it's as if it was the same and rational option all the time...

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.

My assumption is that many remote workers will still live within driving radius of an office and will get together semi-regularly. And that those who do not will still fly for on site meetings of some sort on a regular basis.

Kinda defeats the point of working remotely, imo. Sounds more like a WFH option twice a week type of workplace. Which isn’t really remote, IMO.

It depends. I could live anywhere I want in the US now. As it happens, I do live fairly near a couple of our offices and could (normally) go in regularly--and used to go in more. But I'm perfectly happy where I live.

But, yes, if you live in SV only because some large tech company pays you a bunch of money to live there and they want you to stay in a radius that lets you come in once or twice a week, you don't have the option of moving anywhere you want. (Though you may have the option of moving somewhere that's OK for a once-a-week drive but not daily.)

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.

In my experience, real-time collaboration between US East Coast and Europe works pretty well. One of my roles involves a lot of calls with Central Europe and sometimes I (US East Coast) am on calls a bit earlier than I'd ideally like and Europe may end up going past 5 sometimes, but it's not really a problem. Add 3 more hours to the difference and it gets harder.

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.

I’ll never do calls with India again. For some reason, the India team we had to work with refused to have a meeting at any other time than 3am west coast. Absolutely insane. Eventually, I just skipped the meetings - told them it wasn’t worth my time and to write better emails.

If you mean "most" as in more than 50% then you are probably correct, but there are a ton of Apple engineering roles across the world. When I was at Apple I worked as an engineer in two different continents and both offices were always growing. For example, I know Singapore has been growing steadily the past few years (https://www.apple.com/jobs/sg/). Where are you not seeing engineering positions?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com