Apple asks staff to return to office 3 days a week starting in early September

For those of us who have to commute, it's not exactly the norm to be saving money while commuting.

Commutes are responsible for a 10% drop in hourly wages[1], and the median commute time results in spending 10 full days commuting a year.

The average commuter in one of the largest metro areas in the country will spend over 13 full days commuting a year:

> In the area with the longest average commute (New York-Newark-Jersey City), commuters are spending an average of 13 days, 2 hours, and 26 minutes driving to and from work. That means that 14 vacation days a year are barely covering the time it takes to get to work every day. So in addition to dropping the average wage from $34.71 per hour to $30.15 per hour, in order to get 14 days of hanging with their family on a beach, New York commuters must be willing to spend nearly as much time sitting in a car.

[1] https://go.frontier.com/business/commute-calculator

I work so I can draw a salary to fund my life. That's it. I don't care about constantly climbing a ladder. I don't care about advancing my career for the sake of advancing my career. I just want to enjoy my life, and working for a living is just my means to that end. If I'm making enough to be comfortable, I don't care about chasing a promotion or getting ahead of people. I can't think of a single thing I care about less than having a competitive advantage over other people in the Game of Offices.

Being forced to spend 8 hours a day outside my home makes me actively uncomfortable. I'm autistic, partially faceblind (I used to think I can tell people's faces apart... but then a coworker will shave their head and it turns out I'm completely incapable of recognizing them... turns out I mostly just recognize hair), have difficulty looking people in the eye, and have a litany of sensory issues. Face-to-face interaction gives me zero benefit, and being able to work while wearing a rayon nightgown and rayon pajama pants means I'm actually able to focus on my work instead of focusing on how my clothes feel.

My company has a diversity and inclusion committee—I am on the diversity and inclusion committee—and there has not been a single discussion of how forcing people back to the office is actively harmful to autistic employees who can't benefit from face-to-face interaction and have sensory issues that make offices uncomfortable. It is absolutely hypocritical for companies to say they care about diversity and inclusion while shafting autistic employees like this.

When I look back on hallway conversations, I can't think of many that really mattered. Actual important decisions are typically not made by IC engineers. Relevant conversations are usually inside team structures and not spontaneous.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has the exact opposite experience with this. I can’t think and get mentally blocked when I have someone peering over my shoulder or I’m staring at their screen. I find this kind of collaboration so much easier if I’m in the comfort of my own desktop setup, sharing the screen over Teams/Skype whatever and communicating verbally over a quality headset.

There is a big different between WFH for a few months where EVERYONE else is also WFH ... and WFH for YEARS where some, or most, of the others are in office.

The latter is years upon years of feeling disconnected, left out, and sidelined. The vast majority of companies even if they allow remote are not remote first. Remote first involves actual structural and procedural changes.

Lastly, WFH for years can result in a serious mental health decline. If you think you're doing fine after 1 year, come see me after 5. You'll realize by the end of it just how important water cooler conversation is for your BRAIN. You'll recognize just how bad it can be to see (as a function of your time alive) MOSTLY just your home. It does a number on you.

This is imho the worst part of WFH. Some people come to work at 6:00 and go home at 14:00, some come at 10:00 and leave at 18:00, and some even later. If you're in an office, the latecomer can just check the early birds office, "oh, you're here, can we ..." / "he's not here anymore, this will wait 'till tomorrow". With WFH it's constant emails and work calls, and for a lot of people it's hard to separate work/home, turn the work phone off (especially in small companies, where before the plague, if someone called you in the afternoon, it usually meant something horrible has happened).

The second thing i'd miss is all the non-work activities that happen at work, from random chatter, to lunch, practical jokes, etc. Also when dealing with clients, the after-meeting-beer usually solved a lot of problems with a lot of one-on-one chats, and informal talks about rwhat the issues are,... this is hard to do on zoom/teams/..., especially if there is a higher-up present, and the engineers are afraid to honestly say what's bothering them during day-to-day work.

- I hate being distracted by hallway conversations. They're just a way to avoid work for most people.

* I often do/did paired programming, and over-the-shoulder code reviews. These are easier in person

- They are easier to do online imo. There's no need to sit next to each other.

* Having a workforce socially close improves productivity because everyone wants to step up for each other.

- My team has gotten closer to each other during the pandemic than ever before. I think your point is highly subjective.

* Being seen by my fellow employees helps keep me from becoming distracted.

- Sounds like you need to work on that. If you need other people to monitor you to make sure you're doing work...

* Working at the office helps prevent home life from being distracting during work hours.

- Again, probably something you need to work on.

* I save money by spending less on food, drinks, and electricity.

- I think most people spend the same on food and drinks, since companies do not provide it for them. Maybe they even spend less, since they have more time to cook at home. Electricity is negligible for me at least. It's way less than I spend on commuting.

* I enjoy the routine.

- I find it insane.

* I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

- I'll give you that. But for me personally this has not been a problem at all.

The wife: Does chores / cooking and baking while she is just a participant in a meeting. Go for a run before picking up the kid from daycare

Myself: I can drop the kid off at daycare, do chores around the house, do HIIT workout multiple times during the week. Try body hacking like intermittent fasting / prolonged fasting

We take naps to recharge if we are tired. We also go enjoy nature & hike practically every week which is naturally therapeutic.

Compared to commuting (car+gas) and time-to-commute opportunity costs (to use for personal house tasks, side projects, self health)? I seriously doubt it.

* I spend a lot more on gas than on the electricity delta

* I spend a lot more on food and drinks when I am in the office than at home; in the office I buy, at home is all home cooked. The food at home is also a lot healthier.

* the team I manage is spread in 2 other offices in different countries, nobody is in my country, so going to the office achieves nothing

* the extended team I work in, also spread even more, only one person in the same office as me. We already talk too much, more is not better

* spending 1-3 hours a day commuting (varies a lot if I ride the bike or drive the car, time of day and if it rains) never helped anyone

* I am not distracted by home life, I am too busy for that

* I am one of those very few people things are escalated to when the fan gets bent, so there is no much separation anyway

But I recognize there are some benefits of being in the office, even if overall for me it is not a net positive.

1) Home is not without distractions, but I think the office had more; it mostly came down to ambient noise and people always moving around in my field of view. Being alone I can focus more. Everybody is different. If you find the office better for focus (for you) I don't debate that.

2) I hate over-the-shoulder code reviews. I don't want me and my coworker's faces to be kissing distance while we both squint at a 14" laptop. I'll take a Zoom call screen sharing on my 34" ultrawide any day.

I absolutely think being there in person is a competitive advantage, especially in the ladder-climbing aspect. We don't work in a purely egalitarian system. There is a game, and you can play it or not play it, but all other things equal you'll get more monetary rewards if you play it.

And my non-Machiavellian viewpoint on it is that I like my coworkers and I think seeing them and conversing with them in person few times a week is good for my mental health. I get more face to face social interaction when I work at least part of the week in the office.

Sure, work-from-home is nice for senior folks like me who have lots of influence and have nurtured their career over several decades. We can allocate resources and people listen to us by virtue of position.

For junior folks, work from home is terrible for their career. Nothing substitutes for standing in front of a whiteboard and talking things out. You need social contacts to spread out in order to be safe when your company goes to shit. And, you probably share a house with multiple other folks and don't have much budget to buy things.

https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...

Also I find modern tools easily make up for not being in close proximity.

Best of all as an engineering lead, I am not restricted to hiring in the small pool of engineers who can travel to the physical location of an office. I can hire talent world wide

> I had a stronger work/life separation. I rarely turned on my work laptop at home.

To be fair, that's a matter of personal discipline. There is nothing to stop you closing your laptop at 5pm and leaving it until the next day to open it again.

Having gone back and forth between in-office and WFH and between IC and manager in both circumstances, I have no doubts that in-office work is more productive than WFH.

The only exceptions are when the office environment is truly terrible. WFH is more productive than being in an office full of constant distractions, or an office with broken HVAC in 90-degree heat, or an office with a bully executive who enjoyed yelling at people. In those circumstances, WFH was simply a partial band-aid over a company that didn’t care enough about employees to treat them right. Eventually the interrupters learn how to ping you on Slack 20 times a day or the office bully realizes that they can terrorize people remotely at 9PM. WFH didn’t solve any problems, it just buffered them with distance. The real solution was to switch to a company that cared.

That’s not to say that WFH can’t work. It can be made to work, but we need to be honest that it adds overhead and inefficiencies that must be compensated for. Given a choice between in-office and full remote, the same team will be more efficient in-person.

Candidly, I suspect many employees feel the same way. However, it’s becoming taboo to question the superiority or WFH in online discussions because the WFH fans are very defensive about their preference.

1) WFH

2) dedicated office

3) cubicle

4) quitting

5) open plan office

Not every employer gives you free meals, and when they do, you may not always like them and may still want to eat something else.

Commuting can many hours of your time. I have more valuable things to do with my time rather than commuting.

Some company cultures are better adapted to remote working, while others stand to benefit more from in-person, and the same thing can be said for individuals. People who thrive more in one than the other will gravitate toward companies whose remote/office emphasis matches their preference, and recruiters will start considering it, too.

We have a policy where you are free to work from home if you like given that there are no COVID cases in the city I live in however we have seen large influxes of staff returning to the office.

For me, its exactly the reasons you've called out.

At the end of the day there is no one size fits all for everyone, the same way that working in an office doesn't work for anyone. However I do believe that people should be given the option.

Competitive advantage for whom? The company?

It's gonna be hard to overcome to employee advantage of having a potentially absurd effective-hourly-rate when you combine a high salary with extremely low actual hours that only remote work can provide.

You can go from 40-60 hours (factoring in overhead like commute) to 15-20 and 2-3x your hourly rate. That's a huge efficiency gain.

This is single biggest reason I want to go back to office.

In fact it already has started to feel weird that my home is my work place as well.

Even if my work place remains fully remote I’ll find some other place to work from but never some place as shitty as WeWork. Maybe I will rent a cheaper smaller place nearby if I don’t find a sane coworking space.

Weirdly for me the food and drink is the opposite. Maybe if you're lucky enough to have an office that provides full lunch meals for you but I haven't experienced that yet.

I really enjoyed work lunches but it usually meant 4/5 days a week was going out with colleagues to local restaurants and paying restaurant food prices.

At home I can make a sandwich with stuff from my fridge without the allure of "well everyone else is going out for sushi don't you want to join?"

I've been enjoying not having to spend £4k/year on a rail season ticket. It looks like in the UK the new part-time season tickets are aimed at people commuting 2 days a week, whereas tech companies seem to be converging on 3.

Yes, we had similar results in my coven.

I think this is the only point in your list that is actually fundamental, the rest can be remediated by relatively simple lifestyle changes. If you like pair programming, then there is an almost certain probability that you'll prefer the office over remote. There is literally nothing one can do remote to replace the kind of in person interaction that pairing or over the shoulder reviews give you.

I personally paired full time for a few years and I hate it with the heat of a thousand sons. Between pair programming and getting a low paid service job, I'd take the latter. The fact that WFH lets me cut out at-work social interactions that cause me severe distress is a benefit I will never give up.

Working in the office is not a competitive advantage when your leaders are working remotely. Which is what’s often happening — I find it’s actually easier to catch up with my peers virtually since I don’t have to waste time walking to another building and standing in line for coffee. Since they’re at home too and not stuck in meetings all day, they’re answering IMs and turning what used to be a 30 minute ordeal you had to go through in order to get their attention into 5 IMs back and forth.

Just try to imagine being on the other side of this: if you wanted to work in the office and people arbitrarily said “nah”. Because that’s what I think is going to happen at a lot of companies, and it’s what many of us who prefer remote work have dealt with our whole careers. There are too many positives for companies around office leases to not have a significant portion of your workforce remote: I think the improvement in financial performance of remote companies will force the hand of even the reluctant ones.

And if people are allowed to work from home, they have an alternative that fills the loss of the private office, and they can also take upon themselves to shorten their working hours to something more "reasonable".

I saw it happen 25+ years ago when working from home wasn't a thing. I worked for a consulting company. We had about half of our workforce working at customer premises. Not low fee body rental but projects that had to be run there. Well, the people getting advances in pay and career were mostly the people working in the headquarter. Managers of successful remote teams got career advances, some key remote developer got them too (customers wanted them) but most of them were forgotten wheels of the company machine.

But I'm in no competition with colleagues so working from home is great. I won't go back unless I'll ever start starving.

I work 100% remote and recently have been mentoring a recent CS graduate and doing pair programming with him. Let me describe how we do it and then I'd like to hear how you think things are better in person.

We start a Slack voice call, these work reliably. Some coworkers told me the longest Slack call they have maintained was over 12 hours long, with people coming and going throughout the conversation.

After starting the voice call, I share my screen. I show him what I'm working on in IntelliJ and we talk about it. Then I use a new IntelliJ feature called code-with-me and send him a link, he clicks on it and and he is then able to edit any file in my IDE on his IDE on his computer. I'm still sharing my screen, but he might not look at it, after all, he can see and edit any part of the code on his own computer now. He can share his screen at any time if needed with 2 clicks.

I direct the conversation, but look for tasks I can pair off. There's a service I need an interface too, so I ask him to work on it. He starts reading documentation about it on his own computer with multiple large monitors. He then begins writing an interface to the service. I flip tabs over to the source file he's working on and can see where his cursor is and what he's typing in real time. I give advice, I just type out what I mean instead of trying to describe what I want him to do in the code with verbal words. This is all like Google Docs, we can bring in even more people and have 5 or 6 cursors all over the project just working independently. Everyone at their own desk where they're fully productive.

This is a real story. He finished the interface to the service, and it worked well. I still don't know all the details of what he wrote, I never had to be distracted by it, but his code has worked so far, so my trust was well placed. The whole experience was so smooth. We could sync up and talk about a single bit of code and then return to our own work, the context switching took literally seconds. I'd just say, "hey, look at this", he'd click a tab in his editor and then see what I was doing, we chat about it for 30 seconds, then he makes a 2nd click and is back to his own work. We pair programmed like this for about 3 hours. Sometimes we'd go 15 minutes without saying anything, but we were working towards the same goal, and interruptions to talk about the goal weren't distracting. I could never endure watching over someones shoulder for 3 hours.

We were maintaining a call / audio channel the entire time, I even muttered some things under my breath (just thinking out loud) and he was able to hear. I think it's the only time I've been happy and productive with pair programming.

I agree with a lot of your points, but not this one. Even if I were to take my lunch to work, I would still end up spending some money on coffee or snacks (because I can't always predict exactly what I will want to eat or drink during the day), and if I'm in a rush in the morning at home (e.g. slept in), I can just make lunch when I end up having the time, versus having to buy lunch in the office if I left without time to prepare some food to take.

The electricity point stands I suppose, but it's hard to quantify the difference, for me, as I moved only a few weeks before the pandemic, so don't have any pre-pandemic, work from the office data to compare with.

The £150 odd I save each month on travel costs likely more than makes up for any extra spending on leccy

That is more on you being a good steward of your money than anything else. Our development team eats out at restaurants nearly every day when we were at the office. Code together, dine together. Bad boys for life.

I can agree with all your other points, but this one simply stuck out to me. Haven't nearly all companies realized more productivity with WFH?

My social interaction has pretty much always been online since a kid and most of my long term friendships and social interaction came from in-person work. I miss the people who genuinely made my day better on a consistent basis at work, and I get almost none of that remote. Being single through COVID has been hell.

I also have zero work/life separation. I enjoy the routine, the excercise, less distractions than being at home. I feel like I could absorb more and know a lot more of what was going on.

2. I would contest that with sufficient quality screen share this simply so marginal it's dismissable

3. This makes several assumptions about personality and socialising and isn't always the case. Forcing people to see each other does not create social closeness. Sustaining good friendships over instant message is very much the norm. I think occasional in person meetings or, more deliberate collaborative effort if fully remote can create this just fine.

4. Distractions in the office, drive bys, noise of neighbours and even digital distraction vs a small degree of self discipline (using one monitor, phone on dnd can help too) ... I dont buy this at all.

5. See above - if you have children then that is understandable, however I would wager that correct work/play time separation is whats needed here.

6. I can claim some of my electricity cost as work expenses and the food on my commute and at work is incredibly overpriced. I typically prepare food at home. Being at home more i'm now not restricted to whatever carries well in a tupperware.

7. Arguing that a routine needs to be made for you instead of creating your own isnt a valid reason. Self discipline.

8. Discipline and routine also addresses the last point, but I will concede its easier to manage.

To outline the competitive advantage FOR working at home. In addition to the above I gain:

Custom desk, my high quality office chair vastly superior to corporate stock, custom office space, custom lighting temperature and air flow.

Control of noise levels

Total control of distractions

I save 4 hours a day lost to transport being forced to listen to podcasts and have more meaningful work and play time as a result.

I save substantial money on transport

No social guidelines, I can have what I want on the radio/TV if I wish.

I can wear more comfortable clothes and save money on laundering work clothes

I can exercise more freely and easily

I can work in line with the ebb and flow of my conciousness and not when someone else demands it - and am subatantially more productive.

My deliveries no longer go missing

My home is tidier

I dont have to use a disgusting corporate bathroom

I dont get sick anymore

My carbon footprint is close to zero

My mental health has improved substantially

I think that mostly covers it

For me, working from home for the past 3 years has been completely life altering.

Work is nothing more than a distraction away from what I really want to be doing with my life. Working from home lets me optimize for all the right things like being here with my kids all the time, going to the playground at lunches, making them breakfasts and lunches, and seeing them at 5:01pm. I love that I can take breaks with them rather than talk about nonsense at the water cooler.

I'd much rather not focus on optimizing for work...

Random noises and sounds takes away focus and brings me out of "the zone".

I have a separate area where I work, I don't work any place other than that.

1. The daily routine and commute helps reset your brain and get you in/out of "work mode"

2. You don't have to cannibalize your home desk to make way for your work PC, or set up a second desk for work PC

3. No deciding what to get for lunch, it's whatever is closest or catered, no wanting a coffee and finding that you need to run to the store

4. If your team isn't meeting your sprint goals, someone can look at you and verify that you are working, so they won't automatically assume that the problem is with you

I'm also annoyed by the amount of housework/cooking/preparation/cleaning I have to do when I'm at home all day, when half of that happens in the office/resturant otherwise.

* the rest of the company tends to forget you exist

* you tend to get the blame

* out of sight, out of mind

* fewer promotions

Working on a fully remote team is not the same as working on fully co-located team. Some will say it's worse but for me its better. One thing is for certain - it is different. Some things are easier and some things are harder. It's just a different point in the design space of possible ways to work.

I was getting a slew of emails related to a project and after a bit of coaching I got most of these updates to go into a teams channel, where we can call out the interested part @user, and keep things in an easier to view format when we need to catch up.

~90 minutes of commute saved each day (2 hours a day for me actually), valuing my time at $100/hr.

That comes out to roughly 5k-6k a month in savings.

For the company, probably; not for me. All the bullet point you mentioned: none of them applies to me. It’s interesting to see different points of view, though.

Too real

No self-respecting person would never publicly (and proudly no less) say they:

- Need supervision - Require frequent interactions / reassurance from colleges - struggle to maintain their personal lives - Cant form their own routines

There is mounting pressure to stop WFH and its coming entirely from those at risk of WFH, namely those who need the office as a place to be seen.

This really happens? I am too shy to join a random conversation in the hallway.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wfhjobs_wfh-workfromhome-remo...

[2] Also: "no skin in the game" / the misguided local optimization where personal responsibility is minimized at the expense of the group / intentionally stagnating instead of growing in one's career position.

Even if moon robots could do all our work for us, some people would find a way to make the rest of us submit. Nothing can replace physical proximity. Without it, you feel like a loser in your bathrobe instead of master of your universe.

Don't believe the bullshit about WFH and automation fueled idle. It's counter to human nature. We organize our workplaces, education system and society not for maximum efficiency but to satisfy the primate hierarchical social instinct.

All these things are completely gone when working from home. I can focus on my work, get the job done and have my personal life back. Once I finish work at 6 (often earlier these days), I got the entire evening to myself. I already managed to go to the gym during lunch time, or did some groceries during the day.

I hate the idea of how some companies try and position the company as your second family. “No I’m here to do what I do to find my life outside of here.”

It really depends on the work you're doing. And even for a single employee, it can change from one month to the next. But highly collaborative work can benefit from spontaneous interactions, more ambiguous work can benefit from live whiteboarding sessions, and more generally, teams can develop greater cohesion and stronger relationships through shared experience. Not every person needs this, and certainly not all the time, but to suggest that it's unimaginable that anyone could ever derive greater value (or that a collective organization could ever derive greater value) from in-person work is disappointing.

Remote work has its place. In-person work has its place. Neither is the solution 100% of the time.

Surely this must be a big part of it, but I haven't seen any good discussions about the topic. Workers are being massively inconvenienced and the environment is being put under unnecessary stress to prop up the value of now-redundant real estate.

Yeah, Apple Park did cost ~5 billion dollars, and its still less than five years old so they haven't gotten a great return on investment yet.

I'm a 100% remote work maximalist, I think in the long run physical offices for creative work will be non-existent. However, the fact is that the tools we have today are about 5-10 years behind where they need to be to be able to replace the social presence benefits of physical co-presence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_presence_theory

The people making these decisions wouldn't have jobs if the "company culture" was all remote.

Didn’t Einstein work on relatively writing papers and mailing letters to his peers?

In my experience, plenty of people enjoy working from the office. Many of us enjoy a mix of in-office and WFH.

The comments sections on these articles tend to receive a lot of projection from people who simply hate their jobs and view WFH as a partial antidote to that.

That, and a lot of comments from people who have absurdly long commute times. In the past I've had good success with mixed WFH/in-office schedules and very flexible schedules to allow people to reduce their overall commute burden. For those who can't or won't relocate closer to the office, full remote companies are always an option. For everyone else, I suspect we'll see a trend toward returning to office for the sheer efficiency and communication improvements.

That combined with the ridiculous housing costs in the bay area makes me wonder why anyone (especially more numerate people) would tolerate not working remotely.

I'm going to respond tongue-in-cheek: I also like working from office -- when it's empty or barely occupied, and I can control my whole environment and decide myself when to interrupt my work.

Getting away from a tight apartment, disturbing the routine a bit is nice.

This is especially easy in such a privileged sector as tech where pay is excellent, office life is compelling, and work is challenging and exciting.

I don't know how people survive day-to-day with a perspective like yours. I get that people can get fulfillment outside of work, but its actually possible to enjoy both.

"Work is just a pay cheque culture" is just as toxic as "hustle culture".

And Cook knows it. When he writes the above, it's just performative. The actual message is "come, or be fired".

I also am fortunate to have a strong work-life balance and try to only work 40 hours a week.

That's true, and I don't blame anyone for that. However, I don't think one should expect to enjoy all of the benefits of an extremely high performing company (i.e., RSUs of great value, high pay, prestige, etc.) if they approach work in this way.

It sounds very entitled to say "I'm just here for the paycheck" but expect all of the benefits of working at a highly productive company with none of the commitments.

The second part is the key. I think if you are a hard ware design shop, you need a certain amount of equipment in house to be productive.

While being remote might be something web development folks prefer. I can imagine there are many teams which are inconvenienced.

Even for software folks if you are dealing with something like datacenter ops, or other kinds of work that require some on the ground presence remote work is more of a problem than feasibility.

For a lot of people its easy to work from offices than home.

That might be the reason they work at all, but that's not why you work for Apple, or a similar company.

And I don't even think "people work because they need to earn money" is completely true, in the sense that most people, definitely people with relatively advanced jobs like at Apple, would prefer working to not working, even if someone gave them free money every month. People enjoy the intellectual challenge, the structure, the community etc.

It had a really healthy team culture (largely due to the efforts of a few individuals) and I quite enjoyed going to work for that reason. Hated the commute.

Now, that's "it's better for the company" rather than "it's better for you". But when that happens, it can feel pretty good. So in that sense, it can be better for employees too.

The costs for the company making the offer have already been realized over the past year. There’s high demand for that from candidates, and those companies can keep facilities overhead down while staffing up.

Once the talent poaching begins in earnest, that’s when I bet that we’ll see some of this get walked back.

Fast forward 2 years and thankfully that conversation has moved to WFH vs office work.

I already have a resignation letter written, a stash of cash set aside and earlier this year re-activated my freelancing Ltd. In the event they won't budge on my demand for 100% remote forever, I'll quit. My only compromise would be a 30% salary increase for the time wasted on commuting, or 1 on site day per month. Everything else I'm not available. Even if my next job won't be fully remote either I will at least get that 30% raise for time wasted commuting that is simply unobtainable within even 10 years in my current position (typical case of great starting salary but next to no raises if you stay).

Bay Area companies are really good stepping stones for anchoring your salary :D This was true for remote work even before the pandemic.

ty San Francisco!

I'm sure every place is different, and there are happy offices with cool people (I had no such luck), but unless you're cut out for this particular flavor of social pathology, it's living hell.

Point being that working with good people can be a healthy part of a social life, and saying the people who rely on that have personal issues seems... well, privileged.

There is value in having a team working closely with each other, and enjoying that doesn't mean you're broken.

I think there will be a bit of a pendulum swing as things open up and then a normalization somewhere in the middle.

I'm an introvert, and a "Highly Sensitive Person" and I find remote work to be really helpful for me. But as a product manager, the shift to 100% remote, especially by folks who are not accustomed to it, wreaked havoc on some of the planning/design/brainstorming work we generally do in person between each release.

I'm very happy that there's some return to normalcy. I hope the pendulum doesn't swing too far, and I hope that companies focus on working onsite when it makes sense instead of just because.

But I do think you're right about CEOs, manager types and some extroverts - some will look for any reason they can to go "back to normal".

Easy to say when you're not commuting an hour to and from work five days a week. I would bet Tim isn't too far from the Apple HQ. I say this as someone who does not like working from home but does live very close to the office.

This helps you be more cautious and careful (e.g. I'm saving your life here). Companies may get complain and let people work from home. It's a win for me and for you.

Apple employees: when Tim Cook is around, just fake a cough politely.

I'm sure they would not invest in you because you didn't understand the arguments of office vs remote work. They'd probably think you were kinda dumb if your entire knowledge of human interaction was reduced down to "randomly running into each other in the hallway".

Just prior to Covid, they decide the rent's too high there and say they're moving to an area that's supposedly central for everyone, but is a lot worse for me. (And for everyone, honestly. Traffic there was horrendous.)

Then Covid came and they dropped the plans to move, and simply closed the office.

They haven't yet decided what's happening post-Covid, but I'm worried they'll pick an awful area.

I actually do somewhat prefer working from the office... I just don't want that nasty commute. (And for me, that's anything over 15 minutes or with any amount of uncertainty.)

Why does the size of the dog matter for that?

Serious question, I never had a dog.

It's never that simple, as you had hoped.

Most people will accept it, so it's no problem to let a few rebellious apples out. But in software engineering, where there's a ton of job opportunities, the imbalance is smaller - many people can choose to leave and go work somewhere else. A company can't survive if all its employees leave, so they must make room for negotiations.

Therefore I expect that some WFH opportunities will stay - some companies will be happy to poach talented leavers.

This "experiment" wasn't one unless you expect the pandemic to rage forever (in which case, going back into the office is very risky!).

As other comments have said, a smart company will allow employees pandemic-like freedoms to work from their home or office as they desire, and let this experiment you mention actually work out.

"I like working from home when everybody is working from home"

is not the same thing as

"I like working from home when some people are working from home and some people are grabbing lunch with the boss",

and I think a lot of us are about to figure that out.

I believe Google made the 3 days in office call starting Sept first and places started following suit.

> While 20 percent of its 140,000 employees will be fully remote

Also, further down

> While Google says the majority of its employees will work from the office around three days a week, it also says it’ll make it easier for employees to switch between offices or to work fully remotely.

Meanwhile, the subtitle of OPs is:

> Employees can work remotely for up to two weeks a year

And there's nothing about full time remote. So they seem quite different.

At first I was rejoiced for working near all these interesting places. But London quickly reminded me of the cost. $600/mo commute plus almost two hours a day on train/metro (which is even more expensive if you value your time).

No thank you.

With rounds of survey, I think Apple execs must have factor that into their calculus already.

I’ve had many offers in the last couple months and only one were offering something comparable to $400k/yr.

But it would take hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars per month extra for me to even consider voluntarily going back to the office.

It's the same thing with free dinner at work - the $10-20 I'd save simply isn't worth the 2 extra hours I'd need to stay.