Internal Apple letter shows employees are still fighting to work from home | Hacker News Reader

Internal Apple letter shows employees are still fighting to work from home

vox.com

25 pointstosh13 comments

Usually Apple has been able to keep internal politics within the company - here's a few highlights from the article.

> In a new letter, some Apple employees are asking that the company allow staffers to work from home full time, with some restrictions. Apple has only agreed to let employees work from home two days a week, with limited exceptions.

> This is the second petition letter in two months from Apple employees writing about more flexible working conditions, and it’s a sign of continued rank-and-file dissent at the company.

> In June, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent a memo saying that employees needed to return to the office at least three days a week beginning in September.

> From the letter & petition: “We continue to be concerned that this one-size-fits-all solution is causing many of our colleagues to question their future at Apple,” the letter states... it is too early to force those with concerns to come back to the office.

If you value time, this work from home flexibility has been about a 10-20% raise for many knowledge workers, especially those with CA commutes.

It is fascinating see companies try to wrestle with this fact.

If it wasn’t so clear that most of the productivity gains by bringing everyone back to the office would be distributed to the 0.1%, maybe more workers could be convinced to go back (with a 20% raise?).

Also, the environment benefits the fewer miles people travel…

I don't think this is much different than other tech companies, or tech departments.

My company wants us to come back 3 days per week in September too. I know many people who would like to continue working fully remote. Most are pretty accepting of the Tue/Wed/Thu in-office schedule. The company also admits they expect higher than normal attrition due to this change.

By definition, the most valuable people are the most easily-poachable. Did the company really do the math on that one? With lots of other places offering real WFH, how do they plan to retain anyone actually worthwhile?

I don't know. They said they know more people will leave and they're fine with that. I think many of the people who will leave will actually just retire sooner than they originally planned. I know at least one person doing that. Our industry will mostly be hybrid or in-office (finance) and our region has a terrible tech job market (in my opinion, in Philly region).

Either way I guess they dont have to worry about me leaving since I'm not worthwhile.

Not surprised it's the finance industry. Finance in particular seems to be super gung-ho about getting everyone back in the office. I was switching industries this job search and I decided to steer clear of the finance industry for that reason.

Yeah. Part of it is sort of around the data that some of the people have access to. The people with financial licenses are actually required by the SEC to be in the office and have specific controls in place. They have a waiver right now due to covid. Most of them are really hoping that the SEC realizes that it's been working without major problems for over a year and makes the rules more flexible.

Ah, good to know. Hopefully the SEC does end up relaxing those rules a bit.

our company actually encouraged people not to come back. they literally said that productivity went way up during covid and work at home. I suspect they also want to close offices to get savings there.

I think my favorite framing is people have quite different preferences so it’s not clear what trends will happen long term. That’s said, even if the effects aren’t all encompassing, we could see 5x the numbers of people doing remote work and that will have big effect on the way people work.

My other thought is that this will affect people with significant commutes or housing costs the most, so this is essentially an acute urban/SV problem that we are going to hear a lot about :)

I am curious how well hybrid will work.

I went back to the office for the first time Thursday and Friday (on vacation now).

Nobody on my team is in my city since during the pandemic they hired in every city we have an office in. I suspect I won’t have people on my team in my city in the near future either.

This is the case for many other teams.

So we are all in the office part time, but still talking to each other over Meet and doing it beside each other in offices rather than at home.

> So we are all in the office part time, but still talking to each other over Meet and doing it beside each other in offices rather than at home.

After closing the offices for a year and a half, my employer opened them again a couple of weeks ago. They do have a vague policy about working from home (your direct supervisor can approve it on a case-by-case basis), and a couple of people are doing that. Everyone else is in the office now.

The experience here is just as you're saying -- everyone may as well be working from home, because there isn't really any in-person collaboration. We're still doing everything over (ugh) Zoom and other online tools. There's little difference compared to a month ago, except that most everyone is in a cube instead. One thing that is different is that overall productivity has fallen.

Even when everyone is in the same open plan office a lot of communication goes through messaging, to avoid disrupting everyone else and to avoid interrupting the person. So it's really just meetings.

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