Another extroverted MBA who doesn't understand why many engineers need big, unbroken chunks of silence & concentration to do great work.
I say this as someone who works from home and is a huge WFH advocate.
We need to stop assuming every role in an org revolves around “I stare at my screen for 9 hours do not interrupt me.”
Having a team that's half remote/half in-person is worse of both worlds. What typically ends up happening IME is that the in-person half typically gets way way way more visibility than those working remote. It's especially worse if the company isn't remote first at all. It's especially terrible if the team is remotely distributed as well. I left my last company because my org had a time preference for their offices in Hyderabad, which isn't bad but they kept forcing mandatory meetings at 7 or 8 am. All the US workers hated it. The idea of core hours didn't exists, you basically had to adapt to Hyderabad time or you suffered.
I have no issue with remote teams or in-person teams, but having both in the same team is the worse.
That's a management problem, not a policy problem. Sorry.
I've been seeing more and more of this rude dismissal of other comments. They're discussing the general topic at hand by offering their experience. Your snarky reply degrades the conversation significantly more than them broadening the conversation.
Less of this, please.
I'm not so sure that's a blanket statement. If teams are properly managed it works out.
And as we all know, the difference between a skilled developer and a bad one is quite massive.
I'm with the engineer on this.
Yes, you need that focus time. But running into someone on another team can be very valuable - you might learn that they're solving the same problem, you might learn that they're consuming the same API you're trying to figure out, you might learn that they're planning on working with your team in a few weeks, etc.
I would argue the benefits of having more of your state in Slack more than make up for “surprise productive watercooler meeting” thing that managers are so hot on. I think I’ve had that interaction maybe twice in 25+ years, and one of those times was just pointless gossip in the end.
Out of all the companies out there, I'd imagine Apple benefits from this the least. With all the badge-locked doors, literal curtains hiding projects from one another, and internal NDAs preventing one engineer from even disclosing what they are working on with another engineer, cross-pollination of ideas is going to be almost impossible. "Serendipitous conversations" is not something that comes to mind when one thinks about Apple's internal engineering culture.
That's a good point. I would go so far as to say that the majority of what engineers do is communicate with their future selves and other engineers, in that writing software is to use a communication medium. What code you write today will need to be read and understood later. What the code does on the computer is only a part of software.
I understand that people like work from home, but implying engineering can’t be done in an office building is overselling the issue by quite a bit.
The products you listed are hardware products (with integrated software) which are much more difficult to work on remotely, especially in a company that prioritizes secrecy as much as Apple does.
From a hardware engineering perspective, access to equipment is also important; I have a decent lab setup at home, but I've still needed to go into the office regularly to access some testing tools.
<Looks at his desk in his home office. It's full of prototype boards he's doing software for.>
Difficult?
> especially in a company that prioritizes secrecy as much as Apple does.
But that's Apple's problem, not the employees' problem.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/09/apple-park-employees-op...
I think even office areas are not equatable and greatly depends on the team.
At Apple employees in a hallway will not be allowed to talk about each other's projects at all. All the product directives are strictly top down. As an individual engineer you have zero say in the product and very little in broader engineering decisions.
And... I would say a majority of the major project setbacks / failures I've seen over my career have not been due to engineering failures, but have been due to either:
1) Misalignment or lack of agility about priorities / goals and inter-team dependencies. Situations where people and teams put their heads down and do a lot of engineering... that ends up not being the right engineering.
2) Interpersonal conflicts that simmer, escalate, and aren't defused early enough and harm collaboration.
In theory, both of these could be addressed well in fully remote environments, with careful product, product, and people management.
In practice, I have personally seen it be much easier to head these problems off in environments where people are having regular informal face-to-face and non-transactional interactions. The lunch / coffee break / hallway-chat-after-the-meeting sort of discussions. Even being in separate buildings across a large tech campus has been a barrier to this.
Again, I would be personally happy to WFH, but I do feel I've multiple times seen significant project and company-level benefits from shared workspace interaction, so there are tradeoffs.
Not sure I would call him an extrovert either.
But enough about the Wall Street Journal
Most of my success has been because I'd spoken, independently and unofficially, to people in unrelated divisions who hadn't met who _really needed to talk_. I don't expect others to take this on because they're almost definitely busier than me. And I don't necessarily like taking to people, but I'm really good at this one stupidly simple thing, and I'd rather be the one getting dragged into the meetings instead of everyone else so they can focus.
It's why corporate org charts are so bullshit to me; the real work happens when people can form their best structures, which typically takes knowing who you're working with or being known by someone who can protect that for you. For some, that's churning out work while being with their families way the fuck away from everyone else. For others, it's being wherever they can get some perspective and inspiration digging in and deciding something about the trajectory of the org they're at, usually involving people. If it works, it's valid.