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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

In other words:

We blew five billion dollars on Apple Park. its a monument and a testament to the ineffable power and glory of our babel made manifest. You will attend this church of man in blessed reverence or you will find the cold streets at your feet.

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Are people who are convinced by this logic aware that the vast majority of Apple employees don’t work in Apple Park and instead in extremely unremarkable office buildings throughout suburban Bay Area?

If you accept that there is some marginal benefit in getting employees together physically, (and as someone with a remote position, I certainly do) then I think the logic of "we already spent the money, get in here" has a degree of truth to it.

I think if you frame that as an roi, the marginal benefit as a worker would really have to outweigh the cost. If I was being scouted by a company, which I'm not, the offer would have to be extremely compelling, because it's just not in me to commute and be on time for shit.

And do they ignore the fact that many of apple’s most important employees work in physically secured labs where physical device access is a major part of their job?

Like sure GitHub can be remote top to bottom, but an insane amount of Apples workflow is prototype driven and those prototypes cannot physically leave their secure facilities. Hard to argue (from a retention standpoint) that those people need to come in full time but the Apple Music people can do whatever they want.

I'm sure at a certain stage it is prototype, in secured buildings. But I have a friend who works at Apple full time remote (for a dozen years now) who routinely gets unreleased hardware at home to work on the software changes for. They is very intentional about only revealing stuff after it is public, which I think is still technically a breach of his NDA (revealing that they'd been working on it).

This is completely off-topic, I'm just curious. Your friend's pronouns are They/his?

Their pronouns are they/their, however it's a long time friend, and a new change to me. I'm trying, but make mistakes.

You mean easy to argue? The lab workers would get no remote days per week due to their jobs. The workers who can be fully remote are being forced back.

> many of apple’s most important employees

What do you mean here, by "many", exactly? Kind of odd to argue that everyone should go to the physical office because "many" must, when, let's be honest, "many" here is probably less than 1%.

What are the percentages? Apple built Apple Park to not house the majority of employees?

> Still, Apple will continue to be based in Silicon Valley, where it has about 25,000 employees, including 12,000 employees in its loop-shaped headquarters.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-will-sp...

Would it surprise you to hear that, despite taking the mantle as the new HQ (because it’s the most impressive building) it’s just an incremental office build and people still work at one infinite loop?

Even more than that. Most of the Silicon Valley employees of Apple do not work in either the Spaceship or any of the Infinite Loop locations. There are dozens of buildings around Cupertino and Sunnyvale (many quite large) that house Apple employees. If you just drive down Deanza Blvd you will see Apple sign after Apple sign pointing out those builds (and that is just one street).

Yes, it does actually surprise me that a company would spend $5 billion for and tout the design as the second coming of office Jesus as an "incremental office build".

I indeed did not realize that Apple Park wasn't the primary office building in that area, especially because of some of the articles that came out at the time. It's why I asked the honest question I did.

I'm fully remote and love it, but let's not pretend that Apple engineers are at risk of homelessness if they decide they don't want to work at apple anymore

Actually, I'd caution you there. There's roughly 25k Apple employees in the Bay area and Apple is a top payer in terms of salary. I've been shopping for homes in the Bay since I arrived and South Bay is easily 1M+ for a very tiny home. Oakland is about 600k+ and usually both markets require cash on top to get a home. That puts average mortgages (and rent) in the 3-5k range. If the average salary is limited by the number of companies that can pay more than 3-5k per paycheck (you want rent or mortgage to be 1/3 of your paycheck for risk purposes) then yes, Apple employees, depending on when they get their place to live, could already be over leveraged and at risk.

> Apple is a top payer in terms of salary

Is it though? Citation needed.

Beside the point, if they're not it makes matters worse. Last I checked though, Apple is a top payer - just not the top payer.

Exactly. Some companies will be fully remote and some won’t. It’s easy to switch tech jobs in the Bay Area and you can pick one that suits you. Apple was always in person.

We could make a little joke about Foxconn always being an option, but the joke punchline is sold separately...

And remember Apple offices are on top of toxic waste dumps / superfund sites!

[1] https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2021/12/apple-poisoned-me-...

[2] https://disasterarea.home.blog/2019/07/12/apple-headquarters...

This is exactly the case. Its been my observation that companies with substantial (owned) brick and mortar facilities tend to be the ones promoting return to work programs now. Apple definitely falls into this group, perhaps more than any other company.

https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/google-investments-office... "Google will spend $9.5 billion on offices and data centers this year"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9764995/Facebook-de... "In addition to the housing and retail spaces, Facebook also plans to have 1.25 million square feet of new office, meeting and conference room space for the social media company."

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/this-is-the-first-look-at-... "Nvidia is preparing a new, massive building in Santa Clara, CA and this is it. Called Voyager, it will be larger than the building Nvidia just finished constructing by 250,000 square feet."

I could go on...

Keep in mind Apple just returned 27 billion to shareholders [1] because presumably there was no better use for it. I doubt the cost of a 5 billion office park is causing them to loose sleep.

[1] https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2022/04/apple-reports-second-...

I thought building Apple Park was just to keep Ives around a few more years.

That's what I thought the Apple Car project was, so he had something to design that just wasn't a rounded rect with a black mirror

> just wasn't a rounded rect with a black mirror

Are you challenging Ives to make a car that is a rounded rectangle with black mirror finish?

Happily, the streets are quite hot right now.

So? It's somebody's decision to make and making bad decisions isn't a crime. It's not even clear it's a bad decision for Apple.

Our great computers fill the hallowed halls.

It’s doubtful that a company as well-run as Apple falls for the sunk cost fallacy at this scale.

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