Who cares about WFH when you get to live in California and work with some of the brightest minds? Only privileged person wouldn't value that.
Living in California and getting paid a high salary to work with smart people is great, but it’s not the ultimate goal for many people. Calling people who value those things differently than you privileged is unfair.
Yes they have it good, and many people would love to be on their shoes, but that doesn’t mean they need to stop advocating for themselves. I’m sure someone would love to trade places with you, and I’m guessing that doesn’t stop you from trying to improve your working conditions.
This to me is in the same vein as the "it's a privilege to work here" nonsense. I think a lot of FAANG companies and their associated fan clubs don't realize that some people genuinely don't care about working at <insert famous company here> and instead are just happy doing work they like in an environment that makes them happy. To me at least, that's far more important than having "Google Software Engineer 2012-2020" stamped on my Resume.
Just don't work at Apple.
If you value work from home, then Apple is probably not the place for you. It's well known in this industry that Apple will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure their corporate privacy and secrets. What makes anyone believe that a company like that would allow a person access to those secrets from home? I don't work for Apple, never have, but given what I've heard about them, work from home would be the last benefit I would expect from them.
"Most employees would be expected to come in on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and it would be up to them whether they work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays, Cook said."
Most != All
My guess is those that require physical access to prototypes get to come in on Wednesday and Friday too.
I care about wfh more than pretty much anything, even slightly more than compensation.
> when you get to live in California
you'd have to pay me to live in California
> work with some of the brightest minds?
couldn't care less who I work with, I just want an easy job with a good paycheck where I can work remotely until I retire early.
> Only privileged person wouldn't value that.
Not everybody likes California or cares about programming. For many of us it's just a job
They could not care less for that. It's busywork theater to show you're subservient.
> Only privileged person wouldn't value that [being in california, etc]
Privilege has nothing to do with not valuing california, bright minds, etc
Living in California today means signing up for multiple months of smoke inhalation, which is a problem that only seems to be getting worse. Not to mention that the Apple of today isn’t the Apple of 10 years ago either.
This is coming from someone who worked at Apple ~10 years ago (14 years ago to be exact), and would have agreed with your statement ~10 years ago. I recently moved away from the West Coast because I have no interest in being part of the cohort analysis on the effects of prolonged smoke exposure over multiple months per year.
Also, just to throw this out there, 10 years ago you had a high likelihood of having your own office at Apple. Now it’s an open office layout like anywhere else. Looks pretty from the outside I hear though.
Edit: One additional point I find fascinating. When referred to in the aggregate, Apple employees are the “best and the brightest.” However, when they express their opinions of what they want, they’re immediately dismissed as “privileged.” I understand that these aren’t mutually exclusive, but I am always surprised how unwilling we are to listen to these people that we in theory hold up as paragons of the industry. It’s a bizarre infantilization of people we hypothetically respect.
No thank you, I prefer working for a Silicon Valley company while still living in my home country, with a very high standard of living (given the income/expenses ratio).
This means:
- If you lose your job, all your coverage goes away at the end of the month. COBRA is completely unaffordable for most workers. You have to ask yourself: "if I end up with a three-month period of unemployment, will I be able to afford the meds I need to stay alive?"
- Just because you have coverage doesn't mean you have afforable coverage. You could be stuck with a sky-high deductible, your insurance could pay for such a low percentage of your medical costs, or your company could only pay for a tiny percentage of your premiums, and any of those mean you end up having to choose between medicine and rent.
- Just because you have coverage on paper doesn't mean your stuff is actually covered in practice. Getting medications and surgeries approved is often a colossal pain. It's not uncommon for someone to switch insurance carriers because they got a new job and immediately get told their new insurance won't cover the meds they've been on for years unless they try three other medications first and their doctor determines those other medications all don't work. This is especially dangerous because if the other meds don't work, you could die. Also, a lot of supposedly qualified doctors have no idea how to work with a large number of chronic conditions. People with autoimmune disorders often go without a diagnosis for decades because most doctors don't know what to look for. Imagine if the only doctor in your metro area that knows how to handle your chronic condition is out of your carrier's network (and remember you don't choose your carrier, your employer does). Now you're having premiums deducted from your paycheck and you have to pay out the nose to see the only doctor in town who can treat you. The best-case scenario is that the out-of-network rate is still high enough to take the edge off, but that's still going to be expensive. Worse is if you're on an HMO or EPO where out-of-network doctors aren't covered at all. Then you might as well not even have insurance! And it can get worse: many doctors only let patients self-pay if they don't have insurance at all, which means being on the wrong carrier (which, again, your company decides for you) means you're completely blocked from accessing care.
No, it doesn't.
I get the metaphor but living in California spending 12-14h/week commuting and paying 30% more for real estate does make a difference compared to living in California and spending these 40-60h/month with family or on yourself.
My colleagues’ zoom rooms are 1-click away during work hours.
The factory floor model does not apply when all you process is information. I know managers probably still want to see their workers in their seats but trust beats micromanagement.
- Gas is the most expensive in the nation, right now a gallon in my town is $4.60 for 87.
- State taxes are highest in the nation, for most professional incomes taxes are above 10%.
- Sales tax is also very high, around 9% for most purchases, some states have no sales tax.
- Food is extremely expensive, I recently traveled to Arizona and food was about 30-40% cheaper than CA.
- Professional services are also very expensive, think doctor, eye exam, etc.
- Construction costs are about 50% higher than most areas of the country.
- As for housing, I would say say CA and the bay area in particular are extremely expensive. A typical house in the bay area is around $1.4M now, in a good area look to spend $2M., An average house in California now costs $850k, the highest its ever been. Contrast that to the average cost of a house in the US as being $350k.
Hard disagree from me, it very much depends on what you value in life. While I have a lot of respect for people with that kind of technical ability and would no doubt be a better programmer for working with people like that, I find large corporate environments absolutely soul-crushing to the point I'd dread getting up in the morning and life is far too short to spend that much of it dreading something. I can't think of anything that would drive me to alcoholism and depression with more efficiency than working for a company like Apple, I'm simply not wired for the modern equivalent of the Calvinist work ethic such a job demands. I wouldn't dream of telling anybody else how to live their life but for me personally I'd infinitely rather live on the coast in rural Wales building straightforward backend stuff for the odd company than live in California and work for Apple! Some might accuse me of being unambitious, but it's more that my ambitions lie in areas other than what I'm paid for.
I love programming don't get me wrong, but I value my sanity and not hating myself even more than I value being a good programmer. If you look at something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs a job at a prestigious company might come near the top for some people, but it could well be the complete opposite for others. For some it's a vital plank of their identity, for others its simply paying the bills. Once you're making enough to fulfil your basic need to put bread on the table and a roof over your head then I don't think it's privileged to be choosy about what you want in a job.
There's a lot to unpack in this question. It's not guaranteed that FAANG = California, as campuses sprout up in cheaper places and there's an active shift among some of those companies towards hiring explicitly outside of California. California comes with its own sets of problems that you may not appreciate until you move here (huge drought, wildfire season is getting worse, climate change making heat waves more frequent, housing/commute crisis, etc). And if the "brightest minds" are the ones refusing to go back on site, then will you actually be working with the brightest minds?
We all do better when we all do better. It's hard when you have the "grass is greener" feeling, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't support each other as we strive for a more just work environment. WFH allows that. Just because you'd give your left toe to work at Apple doesn't mean you (or anybody else) should.
I'm not sure if you're fully in-the-loop about California. I've visited the state a few times, and it is absolutely miserable: everything costs 3x as much as it would elsewhere, pollution seems to be 4x worse, it's constantly hot and humid, and there's a housing crisis.
I'd probably reject a job offer from Apple solely based on how terrible the relocation would be.
Not to mention LA having slums that rival Cairo's and violent ghettos unworthy of a developed world country, or that San Francisco is increasingly a (literally) shit hole, with crappy social policies, homeless, and shit on the streets...
That's a weird flex when you have to be pretty privileged in order to have the background to even apply for a high paying FAANG job.
On the contrary, only a privileged person would specifically care about "work[ing] with some of the brightest minds". People who aren't privileged are just thankful to have a full-time job with benefits, and you can get that in any metro area with a significant population. On top of that, while California has some of the highest-living in the country, unemployment there doesn't pay any more than in any other state, which means if you lose your job you're hosed unless you're privileged enough to have a massive nest egg.
A couple more things...
- I actively do not want to live in California, and I most certainly don't want to live in that part of California. NorCal has been on my list of places I dislike so much you couldn't pay me seven figures to move there. For a while, I considered possibly moving to the LA area before it finally sank in that I'd probably hate living there almost as much as NorCal, but LA at least has the advantage of being sunny all year round with gorgeous beaches (visiting LA still on my bucket list, I just don't want to live there). The Bay Area doesn't even have that.
- My "I'd be an idiot to turn this job down" criteria involve being able to travel all the time and constantly work out of different parts of the country. This requires both a position that's 100% remote with no strings attached and a salary that's high enough to afford to be able to buy lots of plane tickets and spend weeks upon weeks living out of a hotel room. In fact, I just started such a job last week, and I intend to start flying in 2022 (I'm fully vaccinated, but the Delta variant has me nervous for now).
- I genuinely couldn't care less about "work[ing] with some of the brightest minds". I work to fund my life, and that's it, I don't want anything out of my job other than a steady paycheck and benefits. As long as my coworkers have some base level of competency and I can have enjoyable conversations with, I'm good.
Everyone has a right to make their own decisions, but calling somebody out as privileged over a legitimate health concern seems counterproductive. What does Apple or some other big company lose from having their employees work from home a bit longer? Productivity. Money. Maybe some projects run long.
What does an employee have to lose? Their health. Possibly their life. Even if you're vaccinated, you can be a carrier, you can still catch COVID--you're just not likely to have a bad case of it. That does not mean it is no longer fatal or that you can't have complications from a mild case.
The rest of what you said, I agree with. The more salient point is people who are immunocompromised and cannot get the vaccine.
I agree with you on the point of the immunocompromised and that those with weak immune responses are the most at risk.
The AARP did a pretty good write up of the efficacy of a couple of COVID vaccines and what efficacy means[1]. They cite a number of studies and conclude that:
* Breakthrough cases—infections after vaccination are possible, but rare, with multiple studies citing rate of breakthrough cases at 0.05% in a healthcare setting (high rate of risk/exposure). Small, but not astronomically so if you’re working in an open office or interacting with the general public.
* Breakthrough cases typically result in mild symptoms or asymptomatic infections.
* A weak immune response can turn you into a carrier even if you have been vaccinated.
* New COVID variants may result in a rise in breakthrough cases.
1. https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2021/...
and then
> Millions of people would give their left toe to work at a company like Apple. Me included.
and finally
> Who cares about WFH when...
So apparently you don't care about WFH. Why did you start your comment with a lie?