Apple employee group rejects planned return to the office
engadget.com
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People more-or-less occasionally like having their own place during work where they can some action (e.g. closing their door) to focus 100% without interruption.
Cost-cutting open-office plans that let management see their flock typing away destroyed this option, and covid has reminded people how valuable and productive this option is/was (for those at home with this option).
We are now in new territory, as we are experiencing the end of the first pandemic during the information age. What we decide now will resonate for many years.
Something to think about: for most millennia of human experience, where one worked and where one lived amongst the family and community were one and the same. It’s only a blip in post-industrial history have we had this situation of leaving the family (et al.) behind to pull levers and receive $coins.
If the internet lets us go back… that would be huge
Driving or even bussing down or up or across the bay to get to Apple is a huge stressor. Doing it every single day both ways easily kills 2 hours of my life.
If I stay home and work instead I am better rested, more relaxed, and consequently more productive
If you live in San Jose, getting to Apple would only be 15-20 minutes.
I once had a coworker who lived an hour and 40 minutes away, literally wasting almost 3.5 hours of their day.
- It's good for the kids: suburban schools perform better.
- It's a sacrifice: a family man is supposed to prioritize his own comfort last.
- It's accessible: we don't look at bankers or tech workers and say how great it is that they're doing so much for the families. That's just classism and privilege at work. Maybe, if we're feeling charitable, natural-born talent. But we, too, could deliver a better life to our families by driving longer hours. We just don't have the stomach for it. So we respect those who do.
Of course no one cares what it's doing to the environment. That really ought to factor in the moral calculus. But right now super-commuting is just about the most virtuous thing an American middle-class adult can do.
A family woman isnt?
"Cheap" housing is at best across the Bay. Commutes from Santa Cruz (itself small and not cheap), the East Bay, or Central Valley are not uncommon. Traffic is insane.
Mean housing price is > $1,000,000. Median gross rent $3,335/mo. Population density is 5,418/mi^2 (compare SF at ~17,000, NYC at ~27k, and Guttenberg, NJ at ~57k/mi^2).
California has had an utterly dysfunctional housing / work / transport policy for the past 50 years. Cupertino makes the state as a whole look sane.
http://www.city-data.com/city/Cupertino-California.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
Lack of housing / housing affordable at your price point (even if it's high). I don't know the peninsula, but I doubt that 15 minute drive is a 15 minute commute, due to rush hour.
I lived in Sunnyvale for a while. Hour of sitting in bumper to bumper traffic just to get to/from Mountain View on a shuttle.
(1) Ones with family who want rent/buy cheap and they'd live in east bay or somewhere much further south (e.g. Gilroy, South San Jose). Its understandable being its expensive here.
(2) Young (and/or single) 20/30 something people who either dislike living in suburban environment, or just find it "uncool", or just need better social life. They are actually spending more time in commute + spending more money in rent.
I live in San Jose, pretty close to work, but am considering going into category 2 (will use the company shuttles). But if things were perfect, I'm fine with a nice spacious suburban house and save those 3 hours.
A lot of people are married to someone who works in another part of the bay area.
A lot of people buy houses and change jobs later.
And then there are safety issues. I don't feel safe in San Jose.
property prices.
I've been hating commuting with passion for my 15+ years of work, and WFH then back to the office made it worse.
I once visited an apartment complex almost facing my workplace. Going from my bedroom to my office would be around 5 minutes.
Money was the only issue, otherwise I'd have made the move.
My own story is pretty basic. I don’t work for Apple, but the housing near my org is very expensive. Schools aren’t very good. To find the first public schools and safe neighborhood combo, that was 45 minute commute. That was years ago and jobs changed but family is still in same house.
1. Buying a house
2. Renting a better place
It was pretty close to a solid year in every 10 years because I spent as much or more time in traffic on the weekends.
But has anyone ever been on Blind?
A lot of these people are kind of awful, rich, a-holes. Now coming in the office is too much to ask?
The best part is what can Apple really do here…
I think a reasonable compromise is cut their salaries by around 20% if you optionally work remote and donate it to education in less fortunate communities in these cities.
Be interesting to see how many people show up to the office.
In all seriousness, I am just concerned for greater income equality from increased remote work.
A bit of history: actually that was the industrial revolution and until the the 1970s the open plan office was the norm even for white collar workers (the cubicle was invented in the late 60s as “liberation” from the open plan). I remember being shocked when I first saw the open plan return, back in 2000, and since the productivity of offices (for programmers) and cubes was so well documented I was sure it was simply some weird experiment.
In the end though it will be trade off between the value of the ad hoc interactions vs the cost of real estate.
The kind of close-minded people who consider their colleagues (ahem, “workers”) to be merely fungible resources will make their decision solely on the price of real estate.
Note I started my first “mostly remote, work over the net” company in 1989. It’s not a new idea either.
nowadays i just don't want to go back to the office.
As the labor market is, companies have to bend to some of labor's demands in order to attract and retain talent.
This isn't the worst state of affairs.
I don't think that companies are deliberately trying to be awful to workers. They are just using the standard American model.. "How much can we get away with?"
The country is in desperate need of widespread unionization efforts.
Companies that I’ve seen do it well have an executive level employee advocacy position. Typically in a human resource department, but less concerned about the policy and regulatory requirements and is specifically tasked to be a champion/voice for employees.
No thanks. I don’t like working with clock punchers nor do I want to get paid as poorly as programmers in Europe/Canada.
Until unions in the US stop prioritizing seniority over competence for pay, they need to stay the hell away from this industry.
I worked received great pay in the US, but made the decision to return to Australia. I have some regrets, but the lifestyle I get from not being in the Bay Area pretty much offsets any pay difference.
What I miss most is the scope and pace of the work and the incredibly intelligent people I got to work with. Thankfully I'm beginning to see the genesis of this in my local market.
If they try to make you do better/more work a nicer or a ruder way is an implementation detail. The goal is always to extract as much work as possible from you at the lowest price.
Sometimes the goals of the company converge with the goal of employees. Most of the time they exist in a state of frozen conflict. It sucks, but that's just how the employer/employee relationship must work out in general.
Where? I don’t see that in what they wrote.
A different way to read that is: people would do as told and not ask to work remotely because they could get replaced.
But that applies only if the company does not care about the employees and wants cogs instead.
Remote work is a big change.
Ergo, absent an exteral driver of change, companies will continue doing what they've always done.
If efficiency had literally anything to do with it we would have all been remote since 2005.
Companies are willing to do anything to attract skilled workers short of raising wages.
That to me seems like the main reason to hate Apple Park [1] and to prefer individual walled offices like Infinite Loop used to have:
>"Greg “Joz” Joswiak (VP of product marketing, 1986–present): They built this campus fast, and it was obviously a bright shiny object. Everybody wanted to move in. It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office." [2]
[1] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employee...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history...
Hunters and foragers went out. Working from home seems like a blip compared to that.
"A study back in the 1960s found the Bushmen have figured out a way to work only about 15 hours each week acquiring food and then another 15 to 20 hours on domestic chores. The rest of the time they could relax and focus on family, friends and hobbies."
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/10/01/5510187...
Assuming people don’t mean some dystopian 30 rows
The SW org packs people into tiny rooms with slightly more space (maybe 6'), but there is literally nowhere to go to get away from having someone breathing down your neck.
The bad experience had no separation between the engineers, kitchen or sales people. Sales tend to be extra noisy- high energy, always on the phone, etc. Kitchens are also loud for the obvious reason.
In my good experience, we had physical separation from anything not engineering. People moved and talked around you, but it wasn't obnoxious and frequently informative to overhear.
Of course, I wouldn't give up working from home for anything, so it has become a moot point.
I had no choice but to where headphones in order to drown out the conversations to focus. A year and a half ago I developed a constant Tinnitus in my left ear, and I suspect that job contributed to it.
So that's fun, and something I get to deal with for the rest of my life. Thanks open office.
Individual contributors however live at their desks and no one hesitates to interrupt them.
So having your execs in the open seems egalitarian, but it is an empty gesture.
On the other hand, I've lost count on the number of Bose/Sony noise cancelling headsets I came across in the office.
Most often, I like to have a mix of time spent interacting with coworkers and time spent working “by myself”. I like to be accessible to coworkers and have coworkers accessible to me if I need their assistance, but I don’t necessarily want their full attention all the time, right?
I kinda expect the office to be a bustling place. Not loud and shouting all the time, but just a lot of activity of people discussing things.
I saw it in my developer group, where all single people would try to go to office during covid, because it's so lonely at home.
Colleagues with small kids are unable to get any work done when there is no babysitter.
I personally have no problem working from home, but I see that's a real exception. And even I don't mind going to the office once every week, just to get the social interactions and be away from home once in a while.
So I think you are right that people who don't want to go to work at all is a real exception.
Yeah, but if they’re small enough to need a babysitter you can’t leave them home alone and go to the office either.
Speak for yourself. Give credit where credit is due to the heroic efforts of employed parents who got work done and took care of the kids.
When you have a 1-3 year old, getting work done while babysitting is just not possible. Anyone who has done that knows.
And I don't judge my colleagues who are in the same situation: they tell this themselves.
Anecdotally, a group at the company I work (pre-Covid) had the opportunity to contribute to designing their own new working space, as part of an empty floor was being retrofitted for them. The standard at our company was either individual cubicles or quads, but these folks chose open plan of (as far as I know) their own free will.
For anybody wondering, this is two teams of about 12 or so developers each, mostly relatively young.
If you're responsible for the larger organization, your pros and cons are different. The IC may not care about subtle deleterious effects of remote work on culture and collaboration but top management has to care about that very much.
Personal story: I started a new job during COVID and haven't met any of my colleagues. This started off fine because I was building out a team and connecting with stakeholders, so there was a lot of shared context being built up together and it went fine. Now, I've been asked to take on a few more teams and holly shit it's hard. I struggle to visualize who is on what team because I never see them "together" in physical space. It's also hard to become aware of people I am not working with but should be. For example, it took me a while to realize that there's a "support" team doing front-line defense for one of the teams. In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.
The point is that the employees have much simpler consideration: do I like/want to go to the office or not. If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern.
I used to think ICs should just be able to code away in a cube but lack of communication has much larger costs than being slightly less productive because someone interrupted you. Now more than ever building the _right_ thing is more important than building the _best_ thing. Maybe some people here feel they should just be able to code away because their EMs have handled the buy-in part and they just get work assigned to them but I think lower level SWEs should be a more active part of the conversation rather than a Jira ticket consumer.
I’m both a remote maximalist, and a Zoom hater.
I reconciled this by eliminating meetings. Turns out, 99% of all software can be built, managed, scaled, and sold asynchronously.
Contrast that with grad school, where every minute of my meetings with my advisors was time well spent.
After a while, you can stop informing them as they've gotten used to your absence and realised you aren't needed. Whoever remains in these meetings tend to feel even better selling each others thin air without practical participants making negative comments during those discussions.
It worked for me. Of course beware there could be retaliation on principle. If that's the case you better update your CV and start seeking another remote position anyway.
Not joining meetings should provide you with as much time saved to focus on actual work. Growing competence, and lead to higher/better throuput.
I've seen a number of people playing the "let's be heard/noisy" card. It often works for a while but not in the long term.
Time spent at "work" can be spent with a short sighted objective, or a long one.
Even if I made a mistake of interpretation and attending meetings can result in better outcomes, I would still favor mental health and maximising time spent to improving my competence, over fears to loose my job or not getting a promotion raises from the current employer.
Sitting at home never seeing, hearing, speaking, or interacting with people save for brief slack messages just doesn't seem like the best way to get recognition.
I’d think managers would see the elimination of meetings as a direct threat to their job. So I don’t have any good suggestions.
You could just try skipping them? See if you get in trouble? Push it all the way to getting a pip. That’s what I’d do lol.
Can't agree more with you.
All fine, though in practice I have found that building the "_right_" thing equates to building the vision of the loudest/senior most person in the room irrespective of merit. Until that culture changes, I am more than happy to be a Jira ticket consumer.
WTF??? My god, I cannot imagine sitting through something like that. Is it really a thing?
If I see an engineering manager and a product manager have what sounds like a rancorous conversation, that's something I am going to check in on later.
If I see someone always coming over to my team, I'm going to ask who they are because I probably need to know them.
All of this simply doesn't happen so easily in full-remote, and it has huge cumulative networking, team-building, etc effect over time. That said, I am not looking to come in to the office every day either, but I'd love to have at least occasional (weekly/monthly/whatever) in person connection to people and teams I work with.
The only person in leadership position I could ask in real life told me IC productivity might be higher than before but team & org productivity has plummeted drastically. Wondering if this is true across the industry?
Why would anyone stand up and run over to tell someone about things in person when they could send a message and notify everyone at once? Like, this just seems like you want to work "in the 90s", not work "in an office", because unless your office has like five people total in it, this doesn't seem like a realistic way people would communicate.
> But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower.
Zoom replaces in-person meetings you also might not have been in, and frankly are even less likely to have been in because you can't easily be in two meetings at once, record the meeting to attend later, or attend the meeting while in transit or doing other work (all things that are reasonable as you are there as a manager to track what is happening, not do the work: you might even be in two meetings at once! sounds crazy, but people do that in person all the time, by running back and forth between two conference rooms, only now that is trivial).
As for chat: wasn't that your fault? If you need to watch the support team interacting with the engineering efforts, make sure their chat is configured so you can see it... if the workers are colluding to create secret back channels using personal Slack accounts that management isn't aware of in order to get their work done, something much more serious has failed at your company that you should be addressing before demanding everyone congregate in an office building.
I literally did all of the things I am known for without having met any of the people I did them with, as we met online and coordinated online and achieved great things having to talk in person... or on video, or even on the phone, because it was more than sufficient to talk via IRC and e-mail.
Here's something to consider:
That sounds like a very common problem which is that many companies somehow don’t share visual representation of their organisation effectively. I routinely ask that during interviews and it’s generally a scramble to get me nothing.
Ah, this probably illustrates a lot of the disconnect. Most tech workers have relatively short futures at their companies.
It sounds like all you need is a social graph of interactions from your chat software. That could lead to micromanagement deviance, but if the graph is open to all employees, I believe it would be fair and help everyone.
That concern seems to disappear when I attend meetings seemingly all on phone and webex and that goes for at least half a day. Company never flies me to meet folks in other offices in different cities face to face.
In any case, the fact that this may make things marginally more challenging for management in the near term as we collectively adjust to this reality is, frankly, a pretty lame justification for opposing remote work categorically.
I am simply saying that the "pros" are obvious to everyone but the cons are more subtle and may not be relevant for everyone. I also think someone's ability to self assess their own productivity is suspect:one may feel productive because they coded undistributed all day - when I'm reality the most productive thing they could have done that day is perceived that two juniors were arguing over a silly point and set them straight - something they'd have done in the physical but not virtual office.
It's why I think outsourcing often doesn't work out. Outsourced workers lack an understanding of this shared context which makes for a high level of friction and impairs their ability to deliver the work as imagined by the organization.
Right now, IME we're still in the sweet spot of being able to work from this shared context, which I think means the benefits of working from the same physical space are not appreciated.
It'll be interesting to see how things play out if remote work becomes the norm. I do think remote work can be successful, if the effort is put in to make sure that collaboration etc. still occurs. However, if companies stay remote and try to run on the fumes of the previously held shared context from pre-COVID then I think it will mean disaster for them.
Strong agree here. My company has hired a bunch of new people over the course of the pandemic and the same level of acculturation into the internal culture and way of doing things is just not there for them. A fair number of our team has actually been 100% remote all along before the pandemic, but I think having a core contingent of (particularly operation and project management) people sharing space over the workday did a lot to spread that shared context around and loop the fully remote members of the team in. Over the COVID period I’ve noticed newer team members just having a lot more trouble adjusting and settling in because all that in acknowledged cultural and context dissemination wasn’t happening.
I can’t think of the last time I actually spoke to anyone on our UI/UX team because I literally have zero reason to set up a meeting with them and if there isn’t a work reason to interact it doesn’t happen anymore. For me that’s less of a deal but, for example, imagine being in the shoes of a junior business development person. For them their career progression and skill development depends on picking up a lot of the lingo and philosophy around how development works by osmosis. The absence of that is pretty fatal for cross team collaboration.
Lots of big companies are heavily silo’d in this way where everyone just does their specific job description thing, and I’ve worked in many such companies. I really didn’t like it. Those environments have always felt less dynamic and creative to me. Obviously that’s just one man’s opinion and experience, but I really don’t think I’d be as happy in a fully remote team.
This is what I really dislike about remote work. I was looking forwards to mingling with non-programmers, but when you're new to the company and working remotely that's basically impossible.
In my experience, video conferencing several times a week is enough to build shared context. Open floor plan not needed.
The neat thing about lunch is that the conversations are entirely non-directed without feeling like the time is being wasted in a meeting. Conversations can cover a specific project, when a high degree of coordination is necessary, generalized venting, when there are shared frustrations or just be about non-work topics that help a team bond and get to know each other as people rather than workers. It’s like a meeting that doesn’t feel like a meeting that can be strategic or therapeutic as needed. There’s really no way to replicate the beneficial effects of eating lunch together when workers are remote.
As a manager, this has also been one of my go-to tricks for successful cross-team projects lasting any significant amount of time. I tell one of my team members to setup a lunch with at least one member of the other team on a weekly basis and use the incentive of authorizing the company to pay for it. For ~$20/person/week, the cross-team communications issues basically disappear. It’s ridiculously cost effective and almost magical in how well it works.
For me though, I find relying heavily on asynchronous communications insufficient, and synchronous remote communications deeply frustrating (i.e., natural turn-taking cues aren't present in video calls). I end up feeling disconnected from the people I work remotely with, even though they didn't do anything wrong. I can only establish "shared context" with people who have spent enough time with me in the same space with ample frictionless face-to-face conversations.
We have shared office pods in cities where we reach critical mass, currently Boston and Miami.
The experiment right now is between companies that stick to office requirements and those that decentralize. I hired a high-level Amazon engineer because they did not want to commute back into the office. We pay good money for top talent. The best time for startups to poach high-end talent is now!
Also, in my opinion, remote work works better when team members have met in person. It's easier to pick up on certain ways that they communicate, which help understanding in online communications.
Can this happen? Sure. It is possible that remote work limits career growth. But employees should still be able to choose that.
There's a few people who have experience in successful mixed environments. I'm curious how, so I hope to hear more from them.
It's about the communication paradigm. If people consider communication to be only local, then it falls apart when people are in multiple locations (including multi site offices). However if people default to remote compatible communication, it scales really well to people working from home and multi site offices.
If all leadership is in one location, yes, it'll get one sided. If leadership are spread out, I think it works out fine.
I've spent the last decade working with large multi site companies in the "lesser" location, and was able to move up from a junior to senior/supervisor roles at each company. Obviously my anecdote doesn't scale out uniformly, but I've seen it work out fine for many employees as long as leadership was adequately spread out.
Having been on both sides of the equation at two different tech companies, this hasn’t been my experience.
You lose the geographic flexibility, but apart from that, it seems like it could potentially offer the best of both worlds?
If you're hybrid, you can't really live further away in cheaper areas, but you now have to set up office space at home for the WFH days. So it's potentially worse than fully WFH or fully on site.
You still need to maintain having a vehicle or commute.
Of course there are advantages, like spending more time with family and reduced sum commute. But it doesn't allow for people to have a meaningful change in lifestyle that they're seeking.
While I haven't done this (yet?), I've had coworkers who have, and they've successfully lived farther away in cheaper areas. :) What I've seen happen is one of two things:
(1) They live far enough away that the commute is hellacious (say, Sacramento to San Francisco, which can run 2+ hours by car each way and 3+ each way via transit), but they're willing to put up with it one or two days a week.
(2) They live far enough away that daily commutes are simply infeasible and just come in for a few days to a week every 4–8 weeks, staying in a hotel. This may or may not be paid for by the company, depending on what they've negotiated.
(N.B.: I'm aware that there are people who have done daily commutes via plane from, say, LA to SF, but that sort of thing seems to be pretty rare below the executive level.)
In this case, Apple is two days of WFH (Wednesday/Friday I believe) so your second suggestion wouldn't work (honestly some folk I've spoken to have even considered car camping). If it were contiguous blocks perhaps.
They try to find cut-rate programmers by going overseas, then try to save more money by finding the less expensive outsourcing agency. Then, instead of engaging with the problem, they hire a third party middleman who takes a big cut and has no stake in the actual outcome. This is a horrible incentive structure and usually results in poor communication.
The fact that they are from another country is irrelevant. The language skills could be very relevant, but again it is usually so poorly managed that none of the people that should be communicating directly with developers even try or are given an opportunity.
That may have been the prevailing trend, but programmers were pretty clear in pointing out how destructive for performance and focus this open office trend was. There is an avalanche of data pointing to how harmful the openoffice layout is for everything from declining morale to decreasing productivity hits to faster spread of disease and increasing worker stress levels. This clear and unambiguous data was widely disseminated in the popular press. The only reason firms ignored all the data and did this was to save on real estate costs and to mimic other firms. To anyone who bothered to spend 10 seconds googling the topic, all the research was obvious, except no one bothered to do that very basic due diligence and see if there was any data whatsoever to support the openoffice thesis.
https://www.workfront.com/blog/what-science-says-about-open-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jiawertz/2019/06/30/open-plan-w...
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-work...
Seriously.
It'll be interesting to see where we actually land in a year.
The letter specifically states that they want teams to be able to define their own remote/local needs versus being beholden to a company wide policy.
They also ask that the company track how many people reject job offers or leave due to the remote work policy so that the teams can make informed decisions.
This seems really fair. Some teams will need to be fully on site, others don't. Right now they're beholden to the new policy, whereas if these changes are accepted, they could do what's best for the team.
And of course it's not appreciated by the union, since their ability to collectively withhold labour from the company is their only real source of power. The ethics of the situation depend entirely on what's actually going on, though - there are plenty of well justified strikes, but there are also strikes where the union is overstepping its bounds. Union and corporate power remain relatively well balanced or one side gets screwed and ultimately everybody loses.
There is nothing I need in Apple Park to do my job, and all I get from my director is how pleased he is with how I’m working (“we couldn’t have done this without you”). Tomorrow, what I’ve been working on for the last 6 months or so will be in the keynote, and it’s awesome :) This is the 4th time I’ve had something in the keynote in my career, and this time it’s kind of disappointing (but totally understandable) that I won’t get to stand up with my team and take a “bow”. There’s one more, multi-year project that’s going to blow people away that I wrote the OS for, but that’s not ready yet.
I’m not returning to the office in September, I’m going to leave the company instead, after over a decade of service. I suspect I’m the kind of senior engineer employee Apple would prefer to keep, but the thought of not going back to AP is too enticing to pass up.
What changed? The number of remote opportunities?
Every little step, small in itself, that I'd compromised over the years had led me to a place I don't want to be. I work to live, not the other way around, and slowly but surely I'd been coerced into living to work. Sometimes the best way to fix something is a complete break. I think this is one of those times.
Yeah, he just has a 2T company, poor soul.
What makes you think H1B folks don't want to go to offices?
I don't think the comment you responded to was trying to communicate sympathy for him, but contrasting the sense of identification with his company that higher-ups tend to have, versus the rank and file. And emphasizing the normality of the latter.
Also, Cook doesn't own the company or even close.
Except for those of us who want to work remotely but don't want to be the squeaky wheel.
And you can voice your opinion and work for what you want without being a "sqeaky wheel" - which I take to have a negative connotation as a "complainy pants".
Sometimes you have to "bring out the big guns" and send a letter to the CEO... sometimes you just have to say "I want to continue to work remotely as has been proven to make me more productive." and be ready to find another job if the company doesn't meet your needs any more. Work is a two way street and Apple employees can probably find work elsewhere easily enough.
That's on a personal level though... this happens to be on a "union" level ("employee group"? not sure if that's a union per-se but it's more than just a single person). I think a union (or whatever this is) has the obligation to make these sorts of moves - so there is a difference there.
I skimmed the article before and just reread it - 80 people wrote the letter and 2800 joined a slack channel for it - so this does go beyond individuals into a more "our voices will be heard" direction.
Still need to stand up to be heard and you can do so without being a squeaky wheel :)
Personally, I don't think they'll find a way to make EVERYONE happy. Someone isn't going to get the option they want (100% wfh? work at a remote location because they don't like the main office? etc). There's no way they can.
BUT
The group speaking up CAN put more pressure to have options that will make more people happy. If hundreds of employees say "Look at the numbers and look at news stories talking about 40%+ of employees willing to leave a job without WFH and etc"...
If I say "I'm not open to 100% in the office" and Tim says no?
If 80 say it... if 2800 say it...
Tim can ignore 1 person. Can he ignore 80? 200? 2000?
If you aren't interested in leaving but you want better options then you have two things at odds with each other. You may be interested in staying but if staying means you work in a office you hate or have a commute you hate or whatever... then that's on YOU to decide what's more important - a job at apple or a job with WFH.
At the end of the conversation... the letter tells Tim (or whatever CEO gets a similar letter with more than a couple signatures) that he risks losing a sizable number of employees. That letter isn't from one person... it's from a large group of people.
It's up to Tim to decide if the risk of losing talent is worth sticking to the currently given options.
It's up to you and me if it's worth the lack of option you want to stay at the current job.
Like i said... I'd probably look for work if asked to be in the office 5 days a week due to my commute. I don't blame them for asking and given some thought I don't think a letter from a "union" or "employee group" in this circumstance is bad.
Although I would love to know if you're also doing work in union/labor organization either at your employer or otherwise.
From what I see of the market, its an employees market - "there are hundreds of people waiting to replace you" doesn't mean those people are good, experience or worth what they would replace. It's EXPESNIVE to replace an employee and the prospect of doing it for 80? 100? 500? employees is something that Tim (and his management) can't ignore.
I would tell my manager if it was just me - I wouldn't send a letter to Tim ("The CEO")... but this is a weird time and there are PLENTY of stories on HN or... well everywhere... about how many employees have a taste of WFH and are considering job hunting if the options aren't acceptable after COVID.
I do agree everyone is replaceable though... but the cost would be extensive if it comes down to it and THAT many people leave.
Haha, so we were in agreement the whole time. The whole idea of a tech collective goes against this being an employee's market. But perhaps we are starting to see a more concrete shift in the tech world from a white collar "you have your ticket to anywhere you want" environment to a blue collar "you better have a union/collective or you'll probably get screwed out of perks like remote work" environment.
- Emplployer: we won’t/will cease to accommodate you in this meaningful way
- Employees: we’re not being accommodated and have a reasonable expectation to be; if you don’t meet those expectations we effectively can’t work for you
- Employer: bye!
It would be cool if they just packed the whole thing with servers, kept a few conference rooms and the theatre, and called it a day; but something tells me they won't.
Also, if you significantly above average contributor you pretty much can dictate when and where you work even before the pandemic (with some common sense limits). A famous example - intel based mac were initially developed by someone working remotely.
Yup. I’ve been mostly remote most of my career for this reason. I’ve only once had to justify it beyond my contribution once (got a doctor’s note stating that the noise in an office would make me less productive, which is true). It was no surprise that I didn’t want to keep working there for other reasons not so long after.
This wasn’t meant as a comment saying I got a doctor’s note casually (not that I think you’re suggesting that interpretation, I’m just realizing it’s important to clarify). I got it because I was sincerely concerned about the cognitive impact going into the office as demanded would have on me and my work.
If you have a similar response to sensory stimulation, I highly recommend looking into it! I’m coming from the perspective of it being common with ADHD and ASD, which aren’t the only bases for it; if you mean headaches literally, do yourself a favor and talk to your doc about why sound or any other sensory issue might be affecting you that way.
If I had to guess, that sounds an awful lot like hyperacusis. Which is more common in ADHD, along with auditory processing disorder and potentially even tinnitus.
Yuck. I have a cube at my office and even though it has an open "door" space, it has high walls and just that little bit of privacy is so nice.
I think working at the office creates a sense of community and a focus on team over the individual. Which I think is the opposite of working at home; notwithstanding all the tools we have gained in the last few years that try to bridge that. As well, self-management is not the strongest skill set among young engineers, many need management, coaching, evaluation based not only on work quality but also interpersonal and team commitments.
Working at home also risks your work being considered non-core or worthy of outsourcing or automation. The risk that you won't align well with company goals and vision is real and slowly (if not almost immediately) being considered less important to the team and the company itself.
I do think there is a place for working at home where efforts to operationalize exist but most firms don't have the capability or insight to do this. I think Apple has an entrenched culture of working together in the office. And while this may have worked over the last few months (year?) I'm sure they don't see this as a long term strategy. Nor do we have an insight at the structural issues that working at home may have cost the firm over this time. (not to mention the cost of build that UFO)
My vote is go back to the office. Or resign yourself to consultant, and make the risk you are taking clearly part of your strategy to monetize your work. I think this approach to use their union (?) to push operational methods is incorrect and they are certainly pissing off people do this.
I have more energy at home. Interacting with family during lunch break is better than interacting with co-workers. Of course, this does mean I spend less time with co-workers, but they still get the majority of my waking hours, so hopefully that's enough.
I have more resources at home, I have more space at home, I have fewer distractions at home. I am more professional and focused more on the team at home, rather than focused on office politics. Collaboration tools are great, and if there were another developer like me, and we worked 30 feet apart, we would collaborate remotely with the tools rather than walking 30 feet.
I also want to know what evaluation metrics require being in an office? Any good ones? I guess working remote the only way to evaluate is to look at the work done and the quality of that work. Sounds pretty good.
What office specific metrics are there, at least in tech?
I think in the office its your exposure and image which matters more which add in to your evaluation, mostly benefiting extroverts.
For us ICs, even though we also collaborate, once you have a design etc or after task allocation, its mostly individual work and you get disrupted if you have any distractions. But its hard for management to understand this, since they view everything thru their lens.
I think in general, a lot of people are going to prefer a 3/2 hybrid of wfh for software positions.
Im personally pretty excited to go back to the office, as Ive found myself hating wfh quite a bit.
- the hot desks never had the correct dock stations for people's laptops, or "good" chairs had been stolen and left with the sketchy one with the broken wheel.
- The people you actually need to talk with will naturally come into the office on a completely different schedule, so they'll only have one overlap day with you.
- Everybody else will need to talk with them too, so it'll be impossible to get face time when you're in the office and everybody will be pissed off at each other because of all the meetings.
- All business will get done on zoom those other two days.
The consensus opinion on HN of people wanting to stay remote is not generally the most popular from what Ive found talking to "normal" people.
WeWork revival?
Now, as a software engineer with a product manager, information mostly flows one way as well, except for pings back to indicate when work is complete. On teams where software engineers are more than implementers, I can see this mattering, but a lot of us are implementers, and the advantages of quiet time to work outweigh in person time spent for the minimal decision making we do.
I could wipe out virtually every meeting I have beyond daily standup and very little would change.
It's good to share ideas but that happens anyway if the team members are comfortable with eachother.
They shipped one major hardware improvement, and that has been an architectural change that took years.
However, the problem with removing perks that employees like is you're going to lose your best people, because those can just quit and have another job next week. You'll be left with those that can't afford to quit because they won't find another job easily, which in IT means not so competent.
I remember the rumor mill when Marissa Mayer canceled work from home at Yahoo saying they're losing all their good people. Considering what's left of Yahoo it looks like the rumors were right.
In 1987 I calculated how much time I'd been sitting traffic while sitting in gridlock on the Ventura fwy and decided to start working on a way to telecommute. Learning how to code seemed to the best of the options. It took about eight years before I started a business, so around 1995. Then I moved to where I really wanted to live. Pretty much on the edge of real rural. I have neighbors not more than 10 miles away who still can't get high speed internet, and mines on the slow end of what can be called that. But it works. I'm just sending code out.
I have no idea what it's like to work at a tech company but I can tell you that for me working at home has been awesome. Not having distractions is huge. Being able to work when I'm sharp, rather that's early in the morning or late at night, is huge.
Not having to get up and tangle with cars and traffic and feeling rushed, that's really huge.
Making myself coffee and sitting down at my desk to review what I need to work on and then get started on it when I'm ready is wonderful.
I don't drive more than 1500 miles a year now unless I take a road trip, and I don't do that often. I live in a pretty sweet spot. Friends visit me and most of my family ended up moving close to me too.
The truth is working from home is really what all of you should be doing.
Tech companies should figure out how to leverage what they've learned from this pandemic. Some people can be more productive working from home. Let them.
Not having to dress up or commute, sleeping in an extra hour, taking breaks without anxiety, having access to more comfortable quieter environments l, etc all seem to fall under the comfort category.
Dealing with kids’ schedules and working out of more cost efficient and safer locations is a gain in flexibility.
I know several people who don’t really work 9-5 at all anymore. They mostly log on at 10 answer all communications and send some of their own. Do some exercise and eat around 1pm. Work another 4 hours stop to spend time with kids and family then have dinner and do another 2 hours before bed. That autonomy is nice to have.
Then i can just put everything I need to do into a list and go through it in the most efficient way for everything.
Mouse issues? Get out and buy a new one, submit the receipt to claim back money. This is likely much cheaper than the IT person's time. As a bonus you choose a mouse rather than getting corporate-issue-mouse-01.
I get that there are other issues that can come up, but in practice, I've just not seen it from the employee point of view. Maybe the IT dept has some better stats to publish.
That’s not the point. If everyone is in an office, an outage will simply affect everyone at once. If everyone is working from home, and you’re sufficiently distributed, then it’s possible that the company winds up with at least one employee out on bad internet every day.
Depending on the sort of work they do, one or the other might be preferable.
The "need" to be in the office is a fallacy if the same company is located in more than a single office.
To me remote now is one of the top things I'll be looking at when looking for a new job.
Good to see others prefer to go to an office, good for them. We need diversity.
It should come as no surprise that their leadership is requiring them to come back to the office, because without that, they cannot enforce such crazy overworking requirements.
I'm excited for companies who can use this to their advantage, and can deliver with higher productivity and better margins than the entrenched players.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/technology/google-back-to...
All of this looks like a dystopian nightmare. Glad I never worked in big tech.
Reasons pushed typically include the common 'improved collaboration', but it's tacitly understood it's all down to real estate costs. Office space is expensive in major Australian cities.
I'm with a government agency that was in the throes of moving to a hot-desking arrangement when the pandemic arrived.
On top of 'improved collaboration' there were some benefits claimed that I can't believe were made in good faith, including gems such as 'more light between desks'. It wasn't clear who thought the inter-desk spaces were too dark. (These are floors with standard, horrible, fluorescent tubes flooding every surface.)
The week that our team worked from home while our particular area was being renovated (primarily the removal of partitions to allow everyone to always have at least two faces in constant peripheral vision left and right of your monitor) was the week that a lockdown was called here, and it was months before any of us stepped back into the office.
Even now we're one or two days a week, and some are eschewing returning entirely for the time. Perversely the poor coordination of our federal administration on the vaccination front means that we're still at least 8 months away from being able to make any claims of safety via herd immunity.
I don't doubt that someone with expensive shoes is running the numbers, trying to work out the best trade-off for offloading some office space vs ensuring useful productivity & mental health for the staff vs not raising the ire of staff or unions vs attracting good candidates beyond the current situation. I don't envy them.
On the other hand, I had two years pre-pandemic being on-site with the organisation & the team -- my job would be insanely difficult if I'd come into it while everyone was remote.
I guess the claim could be made that this reflects some lack of organisational sophistication - the reliance on knowing who to talk to, rather than having documentation and systems in place to help new or existing staff navigate that, but projecting backwards I don't believe I've worked in any organisation that had/has that. I expect more organisations will, coming out of this pandemic, reconsider that problem.
Let me just say, you are all a bit naive... heh. If you have kids (and they are at home 24x7 because they are too young for vaccines) - WORKING AT HOME SUCKS BEYOND BELIEF. I would give literally anything to go back to an office and get some work done in peace and quiet. We all know housing is tight in the Bay and if you have a "normal" 4 person family in a "normal" 3 bedroom 2 bath house, that's fine unless somehow both adults have to work from home and bigger places are financially out of reach. It's beyond amazing to me that this point hasn't been raised AT ALL in this debate. I think you are all naive tech-bros :)
Or, like I previously suggested, make the commute salaried time. That should provide mostly sane incentives against wasting hours of everyone's time on the road.
I’m at a different tech company where employees penned a letter to leadership on another matter, which was picked up by news outlets.
And that group wasn’t influential at all - they just happened to be the loudest people. If anything, the news media made the issue appear to be orders of magnitude more significant than it really was. Quite frankly, most people didn’t care.
IMO there’s really no “news” here. This is clickbait. There are differences in opinions on what office vs remote work looks like in a post COVID world, and that applies to pretty much every company including my own.
The slack channel has 2800 people? How is that relevant?