Apple closing down internal Slack channels where employees debate remote work
cultofmac.com
cultofmac.com
Lots of people have a commute of 1+ hour, then time to walk to the office get settled etc. Same on the way home.
For the last ~16 months people everywhere have clawed back 5 or 10 or 15 hours a week. That's a huge increase in leisure time: Enough for a another hobby, additional professional development, time with family, or just relax & help avoid burn out. A huge increase in quality of life.
Where I work the message is now "Everyone is back, in the office, full-time, every day, no exceptions, full stop." No WFH was allowed pre-pandemic.
So, people quitting. Most places are at least offering some form of hybrid. But then our President/CEO just retired, and a new one starts next week. I suspect that faced with an IT department gutting itself day by day, there may be a reconsideration. I hope there is.
Some people really dislike it at work and appear to come into zoom calls from the office. Most of that group really appreciates how empty the office is though.
I also work for an employer that isn't a "tech player" and you wouldn't think we are more forward than Apple on this, but here we are.
(I’m more than full time employed and I’m being picky)
Respect all of them.
At that point, it would be them not respecting those of us who want to be remote.
Apple is disrespecting all of them
The best and brightest won't need to make the god awful commute to a shitty job, where the managers don't respect the employee's life.
I get it even just as a general response to things that have happened other places. The meta conversation is endless and stuff gets out of hand.
If I were an employer I'd be tempted to "You know what, I'm not gonna moderate or facilitate this stuff getting out of hand. We're here to work right?"
That's fine. This is the equivalent of water-cooler conversations.
Talking about work, that's fine.
It's just the nature of providing a forum/ medium so prone to problems that I would not want to do.
It reminds of the crappy jobs I'd work at where management would tell us that discussing salaries was illegal, it's not illegal.
This isn't an 1880s mining town, Apple isn't the only game in town. Workers have options and I doubt Apple employees would honestly struggle to get jobs at other more remote friendly workplaces like Crowdstrike, SalesForce, or even Facebook.
It's one thing to not allow something, it's an entirely different thing to force people to stop discussing something because a massive multinational corporation feels threatened by a few hundred employees.
It is pathetic.
That seems pretty out there.
They were aptly named company towns:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town#United_States
They have an interesting, and often sordid, history.
It's a poor look.
So you either lay down the internal law or have these indefinite squirrel conversations
It's pleasant when they all quit in "defiance". Makes it easier to get a bonus.
What a waste of money. There's no point in building a custom campus anymore if remote work is now the default preference for so many employees. If you need some office space, rent it out from some generic building downtown for the few laggards.
This is what universities do with professors at places like Columbia.
We told leadership at our inclusion meetings to transform vast areas of offices into daycares to be more inclusive, I wonder where that will go…
For example, my employer is strictly a work from office company. I disagree with that position but they were always clear about this at all times: safety permitting employees will return to the office. Never was there any confusion. You can talk about this all you want and disagree about it but the employers position is still clear and everybody knew this at all times.
It's not just Apple here, it seems like every large player is fighting this shift rather than embracing and leaning into it.
eg: a 10h weekly commute better be worth at least $75k USD
I don't think Apple et al. will have trouble finding talent, but they may have trouble attracting "the best and brightest" if they require that you go into an office.
Then again, maybe they don't want to hire people who will prioritize mental health and family over work. "Best and brightest" is often a thinly veiled way of saying "willing to over-work and sacrifice personal life for the bottom line".
They're betting on that not being the case (at least not enough to change one of their defining work-culture tenants -- face to face, in-person work is more productive and innovative). Only time will tell.
But work is not typically a democracy and there's time for consensus and if it doesn't go your way, you can leave or stay and commit.
Why does this particular problem fall in the bucket of "throw up our hands and continue doing things the old (old, old, old) fashioned way," unlike all the other problems big tech feels qualified to attempt to innovate a resolution to? Companies that at least initially thrived on rejecting the status quo and doing what was better, even if it was challenging, suddenly abdicating to a status quo that is centuries old and costs everyone huge amounts of our least renewable resource: our time.
Perhaps make it a hub for more teams, and close down rental spaces all over the bay. Make the gym and cafeteria way bigger.
Obviously this is arm chair thinking on my part, but I find it hard to believe that given enough thought they couldn’t make the numbers work out.
Same with Asana, whose founder recently announced[1] "Asana will have an office-centric synchronized hybrid environment," which is another way of saying "employees may work from home on Wednesdays only."
There is a very real possibility that allowing 100% remote work could very well prevent them from being "trailblazing engines of innovation". So many things start as adhoc idea's from a random discussion that would never have happened without being in the same location.
Work has gotten easier in this remote world as it turned my whole team into input / output engines with very little thought along the way but god it's sucked all the creativity out of our work and removed most of the critical review of any product decision.
Coming up with projects that are impactful and novel is a large part of our jobs, and creative velocity has nose-dived since everyone went remote. There's just (to me) no substitute for hallway chat, overhearing people arguing and getting involved, or coming across an interesting white boarding conversation. One person at a time talking on a scheduled webex is just not at all the same.
So it's possible, but it certainly _felt_ different than the random discussions I'd had at in-person companies.
I can't quite put my finger on it, though. With the remote startup, there was no choice...?
It's hard to have random conversations WFH when they're usually prefaced on running into someone in the hallway or saying a quick "hello" as you walk past their cubicle/office/whatever.
If people stop living and/or working local to their investments, the value plummets and the hedge no longer works.
In that sense, I'm wondering if the push to get back in the office is more about "Damnit we're locked into a 10 year lease on this space, we're sure as hell not going to let it go empty, get those workers back in these seats!"
But I've worked at a couple VC funded SV startups and it wasn't exactly unusual for our investors to show up in the office and see how things are going, get a tour, have meetings. I doubt it's a contractual obligation of any sort, but there's clearly pressure to have a staffed office both local and impressive to the investors.
This left me assuming the VCs on Sand Hill Road would hold substantial real estate in the area, both commercial and residential. You're far more willing to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at high-risk investments if you can be confident they'll be throwing most of that money at office leases in the area, and salaries spent on rents and/or inflated bubble mortgages in the area. Especially if you can be confident all your investing peers on Sand Hill are doing the same, further inflating the bubble. The businesses will probably flop, but most that money just comes back through the real estate side provided you keep it all concentrated locally.
I do see some value in having a presence in the office, at least for myself in my own position: My boss & I have to work extremely close together, and that goes more smoothly in person. But it doesn't need to be everyday, and it still works out okay with phone calls & texts & adhoc Zoom meetings.
I will say that, for myself, I understand my work behavior very well. If I could choose any style, it wouldn't be complete WFH. It would be 3 days WFH, 2 days in office. Just a quirk of my personality that I tend to be more focused in the office, and the time I spend there gives me a fairly regimented view of what I need to accomplish during WFH time.
Which is completely what you said: do what worked best for each employee.
edit: Apparently Slack does indeed facilitate end-to-end encryption using a key management service, as described by the reply to my comment below.
This is why it's surprising to read that they rely on the same 3rd party communications service many of us use daily.
When you upload all your data to someone else and hope they don't peek that doesn't apply anymore. If you have a hunch something is not right you can't do shit about it. And your vendor will keep this in mind.