Apple's director of machine learning resigns due to return to office work
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These companies touting their solutions for creating a more connected world can't have it both ways. Apple was able to ship the M1 and roll out new iterations of many other offerings since the pandemic hit. They're just fine.
Apple didn't collapse since the pandemic hit, and the flexibility offered by remote work is far more valuable to lots of people than the loss of in-person collaboration opportunities. We deserve to have input into how we work best and if that means walking away from companies run by egomaniacs that need to see butts in seats, then so be it.
The logical conclusion of this line of thinking is to organize your coworkers. You have much more bargaining power about your work conditions as an organized union. The history of unionization stems primarily from workers demanding safe working environments.
...which effectively states that if a supervisor joins a union it's a no-op. The employer is not required to acknowledge their membership. In practice, unions specifically exclude managers for a bunch of obvious reasons related to their ability to bargain effectively on behalf of their members.
Your manager likely joined a union-ish entity open to supervisors. IIUC such entities are not protected by the NLRA and as such have few of the legal powers and protections that make a union a union. They’re basically affinity groups.
Managers, at least at the higher level like being discussed here, arguably do not need as many protections in order to be able to collectively bargain: Apple is likely to be much more concerned (and thus much more willing to negotiate) about 20 "Director of X" employees leaving than 20 engineers.
They all had such an adversarial relationship with work. It's always us against them mentality. They could never see anyone in management as a human. I can't imagine living like that.
As far as I can tell, the unions didn't ever solve any of their biggest gripes, took money out of their paychecks for lots of non-work related political activities, and didn't come through when they really needed to on things like pensions or healthcare.
From what I understand is this is done because it's the fairest way. Unions, like anything, can be corrupted. It would be funny if the union rep's nephew always got promotions over other people. This is an attempt to prevent that. In other words, it's the least-worst way of doing it.
>My takeaway is that she would be far more successful in a non unionized workplace because hers was definitely more beneficial for slackers.
Possibly. In my experience, it's usually in the form of a $5 Starbucks gift card every year. It really depends on the position and the company. I've seen a lot of hard ass workers get treated like shit.
personally, i think i would prefer a co-ownership (coop) scheme than union, since that adversarial relationship is basically dissolved since you are also the owner along with your co-workers... idk just a thought
This is only true if everyone has exactly the same responsibilities, hours, working conditions and pay. All differences lead to divergences of interest.
and there are many successful co-ops where people have different responsibilities, hours and pay, i don't think that is a requirement for co-ownership (though the variance is definitely less than traditional top-down orgs thats for sure)
It wouldn't happen in other countries because the US has a uniquely adversarial union structure, where Europe uses codetermination (ICs with board seats) and sectoral bargaining (don't have to convert one company at a time).
Also, the company is able to maintain very high standards for the quality and skill of the pilots. There are not “useless Joe’s”, as evidenced by the fact that the planes don’t crash.
This family member is a diehard conservative politically but openly espouses the value of the union for representing his interests against the company.
You also give away your power as an individual to those running the union.
This is also by the way the main dissenting opinion in the recent Amazon union vote. There were several people who were interviewed by the economist as voting no, who said that they'd never had a bad interaction with HR and had gotten everything that they asked for.
This is not the one-sided issue that pro-union activists act like it is, and that level of ignorance is what is holding them back.
On the other hand, if a union imposes some broad agreement on the company under threat of strikes, I can't convince my company to break that agreement on my own because I'm not more valuable than the entire rest of the company combined.
A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
Sure, but the company's interests are almost completely opposed to yours in most ways. It's _possible_ for you to be worse off in a union, but rare.
This really isn’t true. What you’re describing isn’t even a zero sum game it’s negative sum, where hurting the other party is among your goals in itself. The company is interested in using you to make money and for many purposes happy, satisfied employees who are growing in productivity are good. All of those are also things the employees usually want.
Are employee and company interests fully aligned? Absolutely not, but if your employer’s interests are almost completely opposed to yours get out.
You do know that your employment depends on the success of the business, right?
The relationship with an employee is no more adversarial than your relationship with the local grocery store when you buy a bag of potatoes.
Also, grocery stores are about a million billion gazillion times more transparent about trading with you relative to trading with other shoppers.
I'm sad that you think this, and would urge you to analyze your situation to see if it's really true. My one piece of advice is that companies seek to minimize cost centers, but invest in profit centers. Get out of the former and in to the latter.
It’s smart to move out of it, but the fact that you have to in order to progress is a clear indicator why companies will perpetually undervalue talent - even in competitive markets.
Said another way, I can go down to the union hall and pick an electrician randomly and have a great deal more confidence in that person's ability than I could choosing a random developer off of LinkedIn to write my application.
I think certifications have something to do with this, but it's also the complete lack of understanding of what makes someone a good developer by management... this is entirely the fault of management and I don't blame a developer for trying to "fake it til you make it."
Sadly, it often works.
Somewhat relevant: https://www.9news.com/article/news/investigations/denver-fir...
What do you base this on? Movies?
Telling someone to strap on a helmet isn't a threat of violence to a reasonable person. Putting a stuffed rat on a ledge near someone's bed is also not a threat of violence. If it had a noose or something, you'd have a better argument.
Here's actual violence done against picketers and looked the other way by police in Alabama:
https://www.al.com/news/2021/07/striking-miners-wife-hit-by-...
Here's a few more people running into picketers in Alabama. Apparently these are strikebreakers:
https://www.wbrc.com/2021/06/08/video-shows-trucks-hitting-w...
Here's another:
https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/crime/police-in...
And another:
https://abc7news.com/uc-union-strike-university-of-californi...
There's plenty more.
But cross a picket-line or hire on as a scab during a strike in a small town and you'd best watch your back... hence the motivation for the "wear a helmet" comment. My hometown was founded on steel and railroads and I knew of more than one person growing up that got jumped for not toeing the line and playing ball with the union.
The history of it is quite fascinating. Here's an example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-union_violence_in_the_Uni...
This guy sticks out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Haywood
It doesn't really go beyond that unless it's perceived that management are routinely violating the spirit of agreements and/or when the relationship between the union and management has already completely broken down.
What particular aspect of having a union would make that substantially more difficult in tech?
Long lasting organizations that have multiple overlapping projects with unions end up with compressed wage structures because the union campaigns for the median worker and the structure does not militate against that.
Say, I am not.
> so I can get stuff I want by negotiating individually with my employer
I cannot, see above. Does that mean I don't deserve to have the bargaining power for the best deal for myself?
> A union's interests are probably not completely aligned with mine—they're focused on protecting the majority of employees, who are probably not as valuable as me—so forming a union could very easily lead to me getting less of the things I want. For example, if a union convinced a company to pay/promote based on seniority rather than performance, that could be good for most of the people in the union but bad for me.
Well, based on the fact that I'm part of the majority i.e. not as valuable as you, it works very well for us (who are not the World's Greatest Widget Engineer).
No, I do not believe you are entitled to a wealth transfer from people who are better at your job than you are. (Or, to put it another way, you're certainly free to do a little collective bargaining if you'd like, but the World's Greatest Widget Engineer has no reason to join your union.)
What you mean is «better at negotiating than you are».
Work skill an negotiation skills don’t always coincide (in my experience they almost never do).
Even if you did promote your best engineer, that just means that a different employee at your company is now your best engineer and the same dynamics apply. (Until, of course, you promote everyone competent to management, and then your organization is doomed to slowly suffocate itself. Then it's beyond saving, union or no union.)
We're not interchangeable cogs in some manufacturing machine; we're extremely skilled experts in the biggest seller's market of our careers. Why anyone would want to unionize right now is beyond me.
How did you get so intensely in thrall of the people holding your collar?
On the basis of your logic that's a consequence of the lack of union and organised labour
There are similar splits in professional level work. There are jobs available where you ~never work six days a week and others where it’s routine. Trust me when I say no one at Nike or Booking in Shanghai is working 996.
My logic does not suggest the lack of unions and organized labor causes six day weeks. Six or seven day working weeks are the natural condition. Economic growth allows for different consumption leisure trade offs. Unions can only very indirectly effect economic growth. They matter much less than the ability to quit your job and find a new one easily. Firms desperate for workers are what make working conditions better, much more than unions.
No, this is powered by the law. If it wasn’t the evaporation of unions that we’ve seen over the last 20 years would have taken weekends with them.
A thing unions were supportive of in the past is not evidence of the value of unions now.
It’s like pointing out the importance of American troops in France because world war 2.
Those laws were a consequence of industrial action by unions. Here's a backgrounder on the progress made by unions in Australia.
<https://www.australianunions.org.au/about-unions/union-achie...>
Every year, Australian employees are entitled to 4 weeks of paid annual leave, two weeks of paid sick leave, 6 months of paid long service leave after 10 years of employment, about 10% of their salary paid into their retirement investments (superannuation).
Unions even up the negotiation power imbalance between employers and workers. Union power has been severely curtailed over the last few decades and as a consequence workers have seen stagnant wages, rising inequality of compensation and the rise of insecure work.
There's plenty of evidence to support the assertion that collective bargaining leads to better outcomes for workers. A rising tide lifts all boats.
Links chosen from a cursory web search:
<https://www.ehstoday.com/safety/article/21918297/new-study-s...>
<https://www.epi.org/blog/union-decline-rising-inequality-cha...>
You didn’t read my message, because this is what I already said. Unions helped push it into law. The unions are all but dead in the US, but weekends are still here because it is a law. What value do the unions provide now?
The reason an employee may want to join a union is because this divergence has already happened between the employee and the employer.
> You also give away your power as an individual to those running the union.
One indicator as to whether members are running the union is to see whether the strike fund is well funded.
If it is, that union is very likely to be at a minimum involving the rank and file in it's operations and negotiations.
No strike fund? Be careful. A union without a well funded strike fund basically has very little power.
As the other comment mentioned the biggest individual power you have is quitting and a union doesn't prevent that.
The company may be happy to give you a 10% raise, but they’d rather lower JU’s salary by 10%, so they won’t budge on your demands for an increase, since it’d also apply to him.
You could maybe make an argument that companies may increase wages for high performers for retention reasons, because needing to replace valuable employees is a large, if somewhat intangible cost, but that's pretty iffy. Companies are made up of and managed by humans, who are notoriously short-sighted and willing to discount potential risks when there are financial incentives to do so.
50% of the time Joe Useless makes more than you do already, because they joined later and market rate for the position shifted upward. You'll still need to fight tooth and nail, alone, individually, to reach parity, even if you're a top performer. Your manager isn't usually going to say "hmm, we're paying Joe Useless 1.2X, while we're paying Sally Superlative 1.0X--we really should pay Sally 2.0X! Your manager will be overruled by the CFO if they do suggest this anyway. Large wage increases based on expertise happen because you're able to better sell yourself to _another_ company when changing jobs.
Ultimately, I'd prefer a system where Joe Useless and I fight for equal wage increases collectively, because the balance of power is such that we're more likely to get them than each of us going it alone. Joe Useless is gonna be there anyway unless the company decides they're so useless as to fire them. So long as Joe Useless is there in the same role as I am, I don't care if they get equal pay, especially not if they're helping in the fight for increases in our equal pay.
In that case, instead of banding together with Joe Useless to strong-arm the company into setting money on fire (from management's perspective), you're better off changing companies as frequently as the market will tolerate.
I love seeing the “union fought for years, after many strikes employees ‘win’ and get a 5% wage increase over the next 4 years” news articles, but they never strike me as something that I’d want to apply to me.
Certainly my company is increasing wages for high performers. They may not be happy to do so, but they’ll do it to retain talent they desperately need.
I imagine this would be different if the sector I was in was different, but right now, for software development, it doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s too much variation in skill levels to collectively bargain for anything.
Sounds like you haven't worked for many good companies.
Then don't organize the union to work like that. A union is an agreement for the workers to pool their negotiating power, not an agreement for any particular pay structure.
Are you a member of any union? the #1 thing they do is secure a collective bargaining agreement which precisely spells out the pay structure for everyone covered.
The suggestion is that Joe and Sally must be paid the same even though Joe is "useless". That is not the case. When creating a union, you can choose a different pay structure. The Screen Actors Guild, for instance, has very wide variation in how much members are paid.
People seem to genuinely prefer letting poor people starve over accidently giving a less-poor person free food. I find it extremely frustrating.
And, yes, so many rail against something like single-payer healthcare because it would be "unfair" for them to pay for someone else's care, when they already are doing the exact same thing as part of private healthcare! Not to mention it would be cheaper, but paying $5,000 for single payer is seen as evil when people are paying $10,000 for private healthcare! (both figures are simply illustrative and not intended to be factual examples, before anyone rips my head off)
It's a big generalization to say that, because one side of an ideological divide behaves one way, the other side must, too! I think rather the Democrats (we don't really have a Liberal party) are a party that takes some tentative steps in the direction that it's better for everyone to have something, even if there are some people who don't deserve it; that is, that the malady you diagnose is a Republican, not an American, preoccupation.
Of course you can look back in history and find instances where Democrats have embraced such positions, too, and you can find plenty of odious things even in today's Democratic platform, but I think that today's Democratic party is consciously, if very slowly, trying to distance itself from exactly the mindset that you describe. But maybe I'm blinding myself to this behaviour in an attempt to justify my adherence to the lesser of two evils. Do you have examples?
I specifically am not using Republican and Democrat because the parties are not really important to the point. Libertarians and Greens also have this "imperfection is worse than nothing" mindset.
An example where Liberals needed to relax and not let perfect be the enemy of the good was the 2016 presidential election (and almost 2020 as well). The number of people who said things like, "I know Trump might win if I don't vote for Hillary, but too bad!" was so high that it actually happened.
What if you're the Joe Useless on your team and you don't know it? A lot of people here seem to think they're the 10X dude but what if they're the 0.1X dude lol. What if you're really the 10X dude but your manager thinks you're the 0.1X dude because they don't like you as a person?
Those systems have good and bad sides to them, but I do think the good outweighs the bad.
Not saying that's healthy but I'm sure being on HN has a strong selection bias on 10X people :)
I've worked with many people with varying degrees of competence and I find that the "go out and satisfy your curiosity" is strictly an above average thing.
The average people tend to rely more on courses and certificates, anything approved by the vendor. And they tend to align with the vendor's gospel. If something is not in the training or documentation it doesn't exist. They are the kind of people that will just open a ticket when something doesn't work and go through the hoops for months :)
The really good ones don't really care about such things and just dive into a problem until they thoroughly understand it using any trip of resources necessary (ideally peer to peer info because official info, from the vendor tends to be politically/marketing biased). I would definitely put HN in the latter category.
But I don't think they are useless. The former are really good in operational roles and the latter more in design and architectural ones.
The employer can’t be all that good if they’re ignoring the do-not-call registry. And I think it slightly increases the chances of bad actors ceasing cold-calling.
I absolutely understand that it's the opposite for some people.
I like working from an office and I like informal interactions with colleagues — from chatting over coffee to peeking around and seeing who is free to whiteboard a problem.
There’s hardly anyone around in the office and frankly I couldn’t care less about the free stuff. They pay me enough that I can go out and buy my own snacks.
What I want is a team to learn from and grow. Not some teachers pets that sit behind zoom calls making sure they know exactly what’s “on the test” so they make themselves look better.
I’ll never work somewhere 100% remote or where employees don’t have an expectation of at least 3 days in the office.
Mind you, being able to spend a day a week at home vs full week in the office is quite nice.
Open source work is a infinitesimally small proportion of *work*. No I don’t think it results in teams that are closer at all, I think (and can present no data either) that it’s just as likely to result in bickering and infighting. Guido leaving Python might be a good example.
So do, and I have also worked for scrappy 100% remote startups. The 100% remote startup had better team cohesion and better knowledge transfer with more opportunities to learn.
You might get those things in the office, but pre-pandemic, at least my office environment provided none of those things. Don't conflate a good team dynamic with an office environment. I used to pair program with a guy for four hours a day and I never met him until we both left the company.
I’m not sure what your role is but zoom calls really don’t mean anything as an IC. Not unless you’re responding to or handling an outage and debugging on the fly.
What you produce and how well it works is how you’re measured. Documentation and written communication is equally as important.
I find that a really sad, if not completely rational, outlook.
See I don’t want to work with someone who outputs great work only. I want to work who can share a joke, help out, bounce ideas of, experiment with new things and fail/succeed.
In other words, I like work to be joyful and productive.
This is in stark contrast to my wife, who had worked in the office before the pandemic and continued with the same philosophy during remote work. She finds my way too cold, and I find hers too wasteful. I would dread working on her pseudo-remote environment.
Reading all the responses it seems there's advantages both to being at home or on site and the trick is to find the balance.
Good in-person collaboration, sometimes accidentally overhearing someone else, is invaluable. At the same time, people can get off task and chit chat becomes a hindrance.
Sometimes we all know our role and what has to be done, we just have to get it done. Sometimes we don't know how to solve a problem.
Some employees don't have a good work environment at home. A Ph.D. student with a young special-needs child felt horrible ignoring his daughter while working on his dissertation at home (where his wife was caring for his daughter), bit coming into campus was far better for him, productivity-wise and psychologically.
I think the balance might be a dynamic one, in that what's best can change over time and task and stage of a task and stage of a person's career. And by employee, and by task.
Being a good manager must be immensely difficult, but also being an employee also requires adapting and compromising between all of these trade-offs.
There’s little camaraderie though or sense of shared ownership. interactions are more transactional, deliberate, thought out.
People maximise what’s best for their OKRs only. If this months it’s John on zoom or Jeff and if Mary was replaced with Sue, does it really matter?
There’s a reason team events and off sites etc exist. It helps people see beyond the professional façade to the human behind it.
I've been remote for 10 years and before that worked on a bunch of distributed research teams and it is perfectly possible to have a highly functioning distributed/remote team that really takes ownership. I mean look at open source projects.
Further office culture tends to favor a bunch of young people who all live in the same city and have time to go out for drinks after work etc. I'll take a bunch of crazy odd balls scattered across the globe doing their own thing any day.
This isn't hard to fix; it only requires upper management to recognise the issue. If a goal is easy to reach, it's a bad goal.
I've found a better approach is to focus on key metrics or KPIs and empower people to go after them without a heavy planing cycle. Like if your app is slow and buggy the OKR process tends to favor waterfally quarter long projects like "rewrite X in Y." A better approach is often to get good at monitoring and prioritize cycles spent on maintaining, optimizing, and refactoring existing stuff with a possible incremental rewrite.
I guess it depends on what you want out of work. If you’re the type who wants work to be _only_ work and absolutely nothing more, then I can see how the forced interaction at an office would be beneficial. Otherwise a strong culture around people and collaboration makes the office largely irrelevant. Yes, you do miss out on the random hallway interactions, but there is no perfect solution and I happily trade that for no commuting, hanging with my dog all day, mid-day naps, my own office, throwing in loads of laundry during the day, private bathroom, better coffee, etc etc etc.
My experience talking to a lot of people both for and against wfh has been that people with shitty teams hate being remote, because it's hard to do when everyone is putting in zero effort to make remote work "work." The other big group that wants wfh to end are the "my coworkers are my only friends" people. Good for them, i guess, but personally i think that's not a wise way to structure one's life. I understand why companies love it and want to foster it though.
A very small number say things like "I find it difficult to collaborate with anyone over the internet."
I don't know anyone who likes hybrid teams though.
Eventually I suspect we'll end up with a mix of remote and in-person employers, and workers who have a strong preference one way or another will just have to filter potential employers accordingly. There might be a way for larger businesses to have certain teams work remotely while others go into the office, but I suspect it would be difficult to manage.
When at all possible, they work from home.
It is funny who we know. Not at all a representative sample.
I imagine quite a lot of people who worked on M1 hardware probably still had to show up to the office. For some positions it is just required. A friend of mine who worked on hardware at Apple had to go to the office almost every day throughout the pandemic (and no, i dont know what product he worked on, and I am not going to ask given the whole thing with apple being extremely secretive). So clearly, there are certain scenarios for certain positions which might require the person to work in the office.
However, to support your point, that director of ML in the article had been working remote for the past 2 years just fine. So clearly he wasn't in the same position as my friend, and that director's position didn't really have a need for him to be in the office. Which is why imo it was silly to lose him just because of such an unnecessarily arbitrary rule.
I can't do any real work like that. Before COVID, I was going to the office to talk to people, attend meetings and do chores, whereas I did real work at home. It was unsustainable, as work ended up filling 80+ hours per week.
exactly
I'd be fine to go into the office but don't be under the illusion I'm going to accept materially worse working conditions in order to do it. I guess it isn't the same for everyone, but my home office is a very high bar to beat and it makes a real difference to my productivity and mental well being to be there.
You would think that the people in charge would see that real estate is an unnecessary expense, where applicable.
Also, I've been to a lot of meetings where we were told "there are other things people value in work besides money". Maybe being able to manage your own work environment and save gas and time fits in that slot. A content, well rested workforce would be better IMO than one that's frazzled and is getting less out of their employment than they know is possible.
I'm at the age where I see Time as more valuable than anything, really.
Some real estate is a sunk cost, and the execs doubling down on it. Apple and Google both dropped 2 or 3 billion combined on fancy new offices just before the pandemic. You can’t sell those buildings, their too big, and they’re not subdivided well enough to rent out parts of them, so everyone comes back to work
I am not personally aware but I do remember hearing they had office spaces all over the place because they don't have enough room on the main campuses for all of the employees.
Yeah we're not all amazing managers that can make it work and sometimes we do need butts in seats. But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up, some need pair programming, some get lonely, some get emotional and miss their team, some have bad home lives and office setups.
But yeah sure, blaming it all on evil companies and their supposed sunk cost fallacy investments into real estate is the easy answer, so let's do that.
Ad an IC, I would have potentially believed this if the past two years where everyone was working from home wasn’t anything but unbridled success for the tech industry. Companies literally can’t hire us fast enough right now, and yet there are really still some managers out there wondering about productivity and output? How about looking at the big picture?
> But also a lot of times, the ICs are slackers, loafing around, lying on tickets, getting bogged down and not speaking up
Again, this is purely about controlling others. If your IC is not performant, there are ways of addressing that like adults with performance and goal reviews, improvement plans, mentoring, etc. Requiring them to come in so they have adult supervision makes me chuckle. Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?
And I’m not trying to rail on you personally, maybe I’m more triggered by my own management, but this whole post reads to me like such typical management speak of “we tried nothing and we are all out of ideas”
This always been the case.
> Are managers supposed to be like daycare supervisors of children or something?
Sometimes, yes. Not every adult behaves like a responsible adult.
Then you've got firms like Apple, Google and Microsoft with so much financial momentum they could lose half their employees tomorrow and their quarterly results would go massively up.
The cases where WFH matters are all the firms in the middle. Non tech firms, for example. Firms that are mature, but which don't mint money hand over fist.
I've worked from home for years and it works fine for me, but I also have a friend who's a senior tech exec at a non-tech firm. Sometimes he invites me round for BBQs on a workday, where he is "working" but no actual work gets done. Sometimes he naps in the afternoon. My brother is a tech executive at a software firm, his work consists of a few meetings a day and the rest of the time he chills, takes care of his kid or works on side projects.
For the employee? It's great. For the employer? Yes, you can view it purely transactionally, as in "we pay you for results" but in reality contracts aren't worded that way because it's impossible to write down in an understandable and conflict-free manner. So people are always being paid for time spent, and they then don't implement their side of the contract whilst expecting the firm to do theirs. It's tough, I don't know what the answer is, but to not see the employer's side of the story isn't right.
I mean... Yes, sometimes? Coding skill and emotional intelligence don't necessarily have an embedded linear relationship :D. But more seriously, a lot of team members need anything from emotional support to soft skill coaching to nurturing and encouragement etc. But that again to me is orthogonal to the remote vs office. I can be a daycare supervisor to an adult remotely if need be :).
(other issues such as social and emotional preferences are also valid but I feel separate and may hash out either way).
And let me guess, bringing them back to the office is going to quickly turn them into happy and productive coworkers?
Some folks have very complicated home situations, living with family they don't get along with, living with roommates that are fun, loud, and work for competitors, living with boyfriend/girlfriend that they're having a falling out with, etc.
Some folks have demons of their own that they can't deal with without social pressure. People with alcohol abuse problems for example, since nobody can smell your breath on videoconference, might have trouble not day drinking when they're at home with their stash all day.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, it is a very different experience for kids coming out of college or very fresh in the industry not to have any folks they can easily turn to for advice they'd otherwise have gotten from work colleagues. Work advice, career advice, life in the city kind of advice, you name it - especially if you moved cities or countries for your career, the workplace is a really important factor in helping you get settled.
I'm not saying on balance these would tilt things in favor of working from home or the office, but I'd encourage you to ask around coworkers how they feel in order to get a sense of what other situations might be like.
It's an interesting aspect of the whole situation that many people currently are in living arrangements that they may never have planned if they thought remote working was on the cards. We definitely have to be sensitive to those that have highly adverse circumstances, especially where that translates to being yet another form of discrimination or reinforcement of privilege.
Going forward I can see this being quite transformative for society in general as people seek out living arrangements that favor WFH as it becomes normalised. I feel like housing that offers segregated spaces for work and living etc are going to be highly prioritised.
Typically the positions for which work is "just required" are lab and hardware positions. These don't tend to have the shoulder-to-shoulder squeeze of humans and desks that I always see in open-plan offices.
Any time I have worked in a lab or on electronic hardware, I have had around 10 times the amount of personal space compared to the tightly packed "collaborative" open-plan offices that consist of programmers sitting at desks with monitors with their headphones on and desperately trying to focus.
I'd be much more enthusiastic about returning to the office if I had a private office with a door, Fog Creek style.
I changed to a much better job in 2019 regarding work and salary but everyone including the VP's are in cubicles. It is really annoying when everyone around you is on a different conference call and you have to block them out while trying to have your own conference call.
I only had to deal with that for 6 months before the pandemic sent us all home for 2 years. We are supposed to be in the office 3 times a week for the last 2 months. Some days I go in and immediately get annoyed by all the people talking loudly on their own meetings. I eat lunch and I just go home and work from there.
I look around on the days we are supposed to show up and about 1/3 actually show up. They are trying to entice us back with free lunch once a week but the food isn't even good. The company is doing well but the rest of the industry is doing great too so we have a retention problem. I don't think any of the managers really want to say "You have to be in 3 days a week" because they fear it will cause more people to leave.
I would really love to have an office with a door again but working from home is the next best thing. I like having my meetings with speakers and a speakerphone rather than headphones and a mic at my mouth.
Kinda like my last girlfriend. I honestly felt if she didn't have an office to go to, and couldn't boss around someone beneath her in the organization around, gossip, and socialize; she couldn't sleep well.
Yea, if she couldn't make someone at work miserable--what's the point of it all?
She didn't even care about the money, it was an ego thing that I will never understand. That Bad Boss attitude who get things done. That, "Dam I'm good!" attitude.
This is not about her gender. I have met more than a few guys with the same flaw. I just didn't go home with them. I've had way to many bosses that loved the office "family".
I don't know how many times I heard we are a family here. Under my breath--I mutter, ya the Manson Family.
I get the social part, but why make everone miserable by dragging them into the office, especially if things get done at home?
I usually liked all by co-workers, and even enjoyed their company outside of work. I was single though.
Covid proved many positions could could be done at home.
If I had the power, I would offer financial benefits to companies that kept employees home.
Working from home, if you can do it, should be celebrated.
And I won't even get started on the rediculious commutes we did for the past 100 plus years. I've know guys who commuted 3-4 hours a day.
If global warming is a problem wouldn't those in power want us at home instead of driving. But dude--we have electric cars? Most of us won't be able to afford one for years, and even then. Most electricity is still not carbon neutral.
Depending on my mood, my response to this sort of nonsense is one of either:
"All the more reason to have as few of us as possible in the same place."
"Ah, family-- the people in your life most likely to molest you."
I'm great at parties.
Acting rudely, just because you can, is something people struggle all their lives to achieve.
I just think Darwinian tribalism is the natural status quo of human beings.
Well thought out, altruistic, social structures, are almost the exception.
I'm an engineering manager and some of my fellow managers seem to feel very strongly about wanting people to come to the office despite 2+ years of evidence that we can work remotely. It's tough because everyone is different. Some people might benefit from the ritual of coming into the office, the additional social connections, and to some degree the peer pressure. Some people are very effective working from home. Some people live close by, some people live far away.
We have a lot of space in our offices and lots of meeting rooms so no real noise issues or feeling cramped. If I had my own space with a door and a 5 minute commute then I'd probably go more often but I have neither...
Hard to say where we go from here. I do think having the team in physical proximity has advantages for collaboration. But the other pieces to take advantage of that have to be in place as well. I've done some of my best work while working physically closing with others but I've also had some of the worst distraction heavy environments where I got little done. As long as companies are just optimizing for cost per employee then maybe they should just sell their office buildings...
It was like this before covid but our company took advantage to reduce the number of floors and make all the office space hotdesks. So now I sit beside colleagues I don't even know and it's even harder to talk about noise.
The CEO and senior VP's have said that we work better when we can see each other in person. At other companies I have really enjoyed brainstorming in a conference room around a white board or solving problems together.
But after this reorg we are going to have even LESS projects together as a local team. My response to my immediate manager was "Sure but then assign people to projects from the same office." It makes no sense to say "come in to work together" and then put us on even MORE remote projects.
A few of the managers also have people working on the project in Israel and India. The managers are constantly on the phone including 7am and 9pm meetings for the foreign offices. I'm glad I don't have to do that but why tell them to come in the office? They are already disrupting their personal lives for the company with those meeting times but it does make sense to make it convenient for the people in India when there are 10 people from India and only one from the US on the call.
I'm glad they are paying us well but the logic of this is idiotic.
(Source: I worked on that project at Apple.)
I genuinely believe many people who prefer working in an office versus at home have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives. The social dynamics, competition, in physical offices fills the void in their lives. Also seems like most of the people clamoring for a return to the office are also climbers & middle managers.
For some work a physical presence is required not just preferable, but for most of a software engineer's day to day there really is no unquestionable upside.
I'll quit before I go back full time. I've never been happier or more fulfilled with my work/life balance, and I've never been more productive with my time. I'll even take a different remote position at a 20% pay cut and a reduction in equity, at least, to retain WFH. Most I'm willing to give is a day a week in office, and maybe temporarily longer in rare circumstances where the benefit in performance is clear.
You're implying that this is a bad thing and I don't get why it should be.
But I wouldn't put it that way because I don't think it makes for a productive conversation - office or remote, people like what they like and they have their reasons for it.
- In a big team if everyone is in-office and 1 person is remote, that person certainly cares about being the only remote person. Maybe some people would be okay with it, but being the only remote person has been known to be a not-so-great working arrangement even before the pandemic. So you can't say that remote people don't care where others work.
- If enough people choose remote, they're forcing everyone else to be remote too (whether they attend the office or not) because the communication model for the whole team has to be different now. <<< This is remote people modifying everyone else's behaviour to support them.
Perhaps it's likely at least some managers want more people to come to the office.
It's also likely that some people who aren't managers, regular employees, just prefer the office.
How people work is a mutual agreement, not something that's being done to one group by another.
We used to have a stand-up meeting each morning at a time "when everyopne's arrived" and we used to have a whiteboard on the wall with the most current tasks. None of this can work with even one remote worker, so it's gone to scheduled Zooms, online task managers, and endless Slack messages.
I love the fact that I can always go back to Slack and say “See? This is what we agreed upon”, instead of having to recall the specifics of a meeting where notes weren’t taken in detail.
As someone who had to train many junior employees, having a record trail is the best answer to the question “why the hell did we do this in the first place?”.
Nor do I see any increased willingness to hash out complex issues in writing. The moment things get even slightly complex in a thread, it’s “let’s hop on a call.”
If you signed to work in an office and don't like it, resign.
Nobody will cry over it, just know that you signed for something you did not like. Your fault.
Also: people working from remote do that at the expenses of others too. When I am at the office to talk with my colleagues, the one person refusing to come over forces all of us (10 or so) to turn on the video conference in some meeting room, while we could have had the same chat in the garden of the bar down the office.
But, don't force me to make my life worse for that reason. You like the office? Go to the office.
Part of the job is to knock out tickets but part of the job (particularly when senior) is to help coworkers. If we lived in a fully transactional gig-worker kind of model then I would bill you 10x as much to get involved in your problem over Zoom. We don't, so that's impossible. And I realize this is silly on the grand scale of labor exploitation but I feel like by expecting me to treat remote workers the same as in-office workers, management is extracting a lot more value from me than was our deal pre-pandemic.
I get very little utility from the "flexibility" (always prioritized living close to the office, prefer the change of scenery) but a lot of disutility from remote collaboration.
Now that everyone wants to do that, without the knowledge or the experience to do it, but only because they want to work in their pajamas (let's be honest!) I am forced to go through endless meetings where the first half is about "can you hear me?" "can you see me?" "where is X?" "coming, is in another meeting" "OK let's wait another 5 minutes then" and then half of them has an horrible voice quality, worse video, you have to repeat the same things over and over for the benefit of those not listening (let's be honest!) etc etc
it's exhausting and the fact that we aren't physically in the same room make people think two hours meetings are something normal
It's making me frankly think that all of this "freedom to work everywhere" trope has gone too far.
It's the "root cause" fix.
Offices have hierarchy, promotions, payscales, politics. Socializing in the office is a PC minefield.
My current direct manager is about my age, with kids about my kids age, he is an overall great guy. If we weren't working together I am sure we would have beers together, but in the current context I would hate to blur the work/leisure line.
The quote points at “social dynamics” and “competition” in offices, not personal relationships or even friendships. Meaning that the mere fact of being surrounded by people with relatively the same professional goals, is good enough for some craving for social interaction. There isn’t necessarily any more depth to it, and it doesn’t really solve any other pending socialising issues.
How is that not a bad thing?
It is like trying to get your protein requirements met from potatoes. Yes, you can if you force yourself and try really hard. However, it is much more efficient and pain-free to get it from a protein shake.
In this context, it means using the time you save with working from home and using it to meet people interested in the things you care about.
The reason socializing at work sucks is because it is not a very natural environment to make friends. Alliances, yes but friends are harder. Even if you make genuine friends with someone there, if you're working with them directly, their career will take precedence over you. Most people are skeptical of their coworkers and it is a constant power dynamic to prove one's competence and status.
Much easier to find true friends outside of work.
That's not healthy and it shouldn't be the basis for company policies in general.
After they marry and get kids, they become willing to go great lengths to work from the office.
Why is that a bad thing? We have a problem and this is a solution.
Saying this after many, many years of remote working, where the boundaries between work and personal life blurred so far they became practically indistinguishable. (yay 24/7 "DevOps" culture :/)
That's still an office paid by your company, with all the benefits that go to the company.
The company I work for before opening a new office for their employer has to provide:
- security
- daily cleanings
- insurances for all the people working there
- reception
- authentication and authorization (badge readers etc.)
- secure connectivity and storage
- water, beverages, sometimes a cantine if the office is big enough.
That's by contract (at least my contract).
If they are really going through the route of paying for your coworking they should sign a contract, which means a lot of bureaucracy and most of all it would force the employer to always use the same space for at least a few years.
So the better way is to ask for a pay rise to pay it by yourself.
If you can pull it out.
I find the same kind of creep can happen at the office, too. Many colleagues end up leaving at 8 PM or later [0] because they have to do this one more thing or someone shows up with just a quick question to ask.
However, I realize that for some people, who have a harder time saying no for whatever reason, it's easier to have a hard, external excuse. "Sorry, I need to catch my train, so I don't have to sleep here" works less well when you're already home. But I think that in both cases it's very important to set boundaries and stick to them.
---
[0] Our workdays are normally 9 AM to 6 PM.
Warning: Hot Take.
I have similar logic, but reach an almost opposite conclusion. I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home rather than an office have unfulfilling work lives and struggle to form meaningful friendships/relationships with colleagues.
I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.
Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.
Absolutely not true.
I've been WFH since 2008. Many followed overtime and the company went full WFH in 2015 closing our office. We have a video call 3x a week and shoot the shit learn about each others lives just the same before we talk about work. I don't feel any less connected to my coworkers than my physical friends.
I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. This obviously isn't the same since we started out as physical friends and went to chat groups after going out separate ways, but again I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.
Not only that but with all the various video games we have added random people we connected with to that group, I don't even know what their face looks like but I know just as much about them as my physical friends. They are just part of the daily discussions about sports, politics, movies/tv, whatever.
I think if you are not connecting with someone you maybe aren't trying enough because it is totally possible. What exactly can't you talk about remotely that you can in person? I've yet to find a topic myself
Speaking of coffee rooms, they have another important property: it is very nice, even healthy, to leave your desk from time to time and both take a break for your mind and your body from work. In the office you walk to the coffee room in that time and there you meet people in the same phase. They are taking a break and you don't interrupt each others work when having a chat. In a sense, online social contact can be very disruptive, as when you start an online interaction, you don't know whether your recipient is willing for an interrupition or not. Of course, there are ways to arrange that too, but things aren't just black and white and interactions are complex.
Except those whose assigned desks happen to be close to the coffee room/kitchen. That's the problem with the way offices have been designed - there is always going to be some subset that has less than ideal conditions.
The worst open office setup I saw a year before the pandemic had a conference room with no door, just a big pane of glass and a gap in the glass to enter. There were desks outside this conference room (like everywhere else on the floor) which meant whoever had to sit there was subjected to meetings and speakerphone all day long.
Lol. Of course they know what makes a good office. The execs all have nice offices.
> I also am part of a telegram group with ~10 old college buddies who live all over the country where we chat everyday and hop on voice to play video games or a monthly poker. I haven't lost touch with any of them or felt less connected/meaningful because we are now remote only.
If you all lived next door to each other, would you still do it over telegram voice? If not, why not if you can connect the same over voice chat?
My view is that something is lost on voice chat compared to being in the same room. I am part of a 10-year WhatsApp group with my university buddies too - but we were bonded with real-life interactions and experiences while being together at university. If those in-person, real-life interactions were replaced by a slack group with other people on my course, we wouldn't have built the same relationship.
While working I prefer control over interruptions and means of communication. And there are no emergencies in my line of work that require physical interruption.
1. Many people already have built good relationships with their colleagues prior to WFH and talking to them over GVC helps the relationship. You are allowed to open up more when you know no one else is around except you and the person you're talking to 1:1. You don't have to be afraid that someone outside the meeting room or cubicle is going to hear you. A lot of the day-to-day frictions are also removed from the equation. Being completely honest, things like appearance, odor, height differences, physical presence, status symbols (watches, car keys, wallet, phones) all cause insecurities in a competitive office space. I find that in a remote work setting, you can focus more on the person as an individual.
2. Working remotely offers the flexibility to work from a location that better suits your social preferences. A LOT of my friends and myself were completely and utterly miserable socially working in the Bay Area. As soon as we had the option, we moved out and have built thriving social circles. It is not always the person's fault if they struggle to form meaningful friendships. It can also be the environment and whether it is a good fit. This eases social insecurity and allows colleagues to connect more authentically.
3. Working remotely offers the flexibility to detach from work and go do other things (if you don't have meetings etc.). This allows you to interact with people outside the office more and develop more meaningful relationships over time.
Remote work isn't about being locked up in a room and only communicating through a webcam. It is primarily about removing the unnecessary overhead that we previously thought was a prerequisite of work (e.g. commuting, "fake work", watercooler conversations, stressful and contrived socializing events at work, open office plans, can't work on other things during unnecessary meetings, running into people you don't like or who distract you, sexual tension with workers of the opposite sex, being exposed to people's bad moods, dirty public restrooms, walking to meeting rooms across the building, working from a cramped cubicle with smelly people, who can type louder and faster competitions, etc. etc. etc.)
I live 10 minutes from the office and live in a town I love. This isn't luck - it's a choice I have made.
Also, please don't take this the wrong way, but some of your comments make it sound like you might be in the category of people who don't find it as easy as others to form relationships with colleagues in real life (Comments such as finding socialising events at work stressful, and about experiencing sexual tension if there is a worker of the opposite sex).
95% of people don't get that choice.
What junior engineer is going to turn down an offer from Google because the Mountain View area is a wildly expensive dump?
> What junior engineer is going to turn down an offer from Google because the Mountain View area is a wildly expensive dump?
Well in my view that actually is a choice.
They are making a choice between commuting lots and living somewhere they don’t want to in exchange for career advancement / to work for Google.
That’s not to say that they might not be happier with alternative decisions. Or maybe they decide to suck it up for a while and move where they want later down the line? But these are all choices.
Nope. Never said it is "always a choice between working from home and commuting huge distances to an office in a city you hate".
It is a counterpoint to the original comment that hypothesizes that most people who enjoy working from home do so due to some social deficit.
> people who don't find it as easy as others to form relationships with colleagues in real life
If you read my comment carefully you would notice that I mentioned I already have great relationships with my colleagues that have persisted through remote work. So not sure where that inference is coming from.
Second, I am not going to take it the wrong way, but your comment makes it seem like you have some insight into a complete stranger's life without any information to go off of. I would probably not be so overconfident in making such statements about someone else's life.
Putting that aside, your reasoning seems incomplete. Why does finding socializing events at work stressful imply someone doesn't find it easy to form relationships with colleagues in real life? Surely it depends on how the colleagues behave in those settings and the nature of those events does it not?
For example, grabbing lunch with a coworker is very different from contrived board game events where everyone is trying to compete for who the smartest person is and people make awkward comments linking their board game talents to their work competence.
> experiencing sexual tension if there is a worker of the opposite sex
I don't feel the need to debate this point at all. If you are a human with a healthy mental and hormonal profile and are around someone you find attractive, you will inevitably find yourself in a situation where you need to suppress certain feelings that may be sexual in nature in order to work with them. It can be done and is usually done without a second thought, but it takes effort and is a lot easier to do over video conferencing. It is human to have certain impulses, be it sexual, status oriented or fight/flight related when you're physically surrounded by people. They need to be dealt with effectively in order to be productive and even keeled.
I mean it was just a hunch, but looking at your comment history definitely implies it too.
For instance, while your response states that you are comfortable getting lunch your post history says this:
> Feel like a social failure during lunch and forced to sit passively as a couple douchebag workers on adderall dominate the conversation? [I] Feel like a bitch for a few hours.
Which implies the opposite.
> Attractive coworker or someone I want to impress within sight? I can’t concentrate on actual productivity and try to overcompensate by typing more and acting zoned in.
> I find that I get more emotionally jerked around working in person and can insulate myself from it working from home.
I mean all this seems to follow the same idea. It’s totally cool, each to their own and it’s fine, but to me this matches the trend that some people working from home don’t seem to have the same ease at forming relationships in work in real life.
You have no way of determining that unless you're in the same environment. For someone who's usually successful socially, it is an utter shame to have to sit through the lunch and be forced to listen to a couple of idiots hopped who can't shut up. Would you want to be in that situation?
The other two comments have no bearing whatsoever on your point. The first one describes what it is like to be distracted. Replace attractive coworker with anything else.
The second one is a natural response to the frictions present in real life.
Sounds like you're desperately trying to cast someone into a role so that you can feel better about yourself. You sound like you might have social deficits you're trying to overcome yourself based on your comments that show a lack of understanding of what socializing at work feels like for a lot of people.
So you agree that socialising at work is more difficult for some people than others...
And you agree that it's one of the reasons you work from home...
And the part of my premise that you were disagreeing with was that I said some people work from home because they struggle to create relationships while at work...
But you have stated is true for you when working in an office environment...
So... It sounds like you at least partially agree? Or is there something I am missing?
That statement paints an incomplete picture of my views. It is the combination of the person and environment. I'm sure there is variance among peoples' inherent ability to socialize at work, but in certain work environments, people who are otherwise good at socializing don't have the desire to socialize or don't find it meaningful.
> And you agree that it's one of the reasons you work from home...
Nope, I have no problem socializing at my current job. Most of my comments are about prior workplaces. I mention them because I can empathize with a lot of people who might be working in such environments. Like I mentioned, I can and do socialize with my current colleagues well remotely, which I consider to be "socializing at work" too.
> And the part of my premise that you were disagreeing with was that I said some people work from home because they struggle to create relationships while at work...
Nope, I never disagreed with that. I disagree with your characterization that that is the reason I work from home.
Well I don't think I was lucky actually - I sacrificed for it. I could be based in London and have a better salary and different opportunities.
I'm privileged in that I have skills that are in demand in several cities/towns and no dependents, but I suspect lots of people are in that place on this website, and these things are choices. Not everyone has to choose to take the biggest salary with the biggest companies somewhere they hate.
If you are a programmer in the UK for instance, the best programming jobs with the highest salaries are in London, but there are plenty of opportunities in Leeds, Manchester, Sutton Colefield, Edinburgh, Bristol, Brighton, York, Oxford, Bath... All places which are lovely to live in and will give you jobs within 10 minutes if you choose to have that life.
I infinitely prefer working at home because I hate commuting, I particularly hate open-plan offices which is all they offer us, and I like quiet when I write code.
Right now my two coworkers - both remote, one in Indonesia, I have never met either of them in person - are amongst my closest friends, but often this is not the case. I nearly always like my coworkers, but outside the work, what do we necessarily have in common? Are they going to go to noise music concerts or vegan restaurants with me?
You can learn to maintain friendships without being in the same room, and mitigate some considerable portion of your footprint on this Earth by giving up commuting.
Not all jobs require you to form meaningful relationships with colleagues and those relationships can be kept at a distance.
I'd hate to have "friends" on the workplace.
I have met people who seem to have terrible marriages and seem to spend as much time away from home as possible due to that situation. I have also met people that enjoy working on group projects and enjoy building relationships through that process.
I've worked from home for most of the past 17 years and would never go back to 100%, but I also miss making friendships at times.
Building a professional network is important, and some bonding is natural, so I don't mean to discourage them. Though I do prefer seeking most social fulfillment through other means.
I don't live in the US, and almost all of my friends I meet on my free time are not through work, but I do have colleagues who I consider friends and it makes work a lot more enjoyable. That being said, there's only very few of them who I would be likely to keep in touch with if they or I quit.
This take makes no sense at all.
If people had unfulfilling work lives they would not be threatening resignation to preserve the work life they loathe, and they would definitely not wait out for diktats to return to the office to switch jobs, specially in a supply-driven market which is today's job market.
More importantly, if people had a hard time forming meaningful friendships at the office then they would not stay remote, where it's easier to get ignored, nor would they stick around a toxic corporate environment that makes it difficult to be integrated and feel welcomed.
> I genuinely enjoy interactions with my colleagues during a work day, and wouldn't want to replace that with staring at a screen for 7.5 hours of my day or only talking to them via Slack. I have a great social group outside of work, but that doesn't diminish the value of enjoying the company of people I work with too.
Your personal anecdote is great, but ignores the fact that even in the office the majority of us are paid to stare at screens for over 7.5 hours a day, and are criticized if you spend even 0.5 of that time doing anything other than staring at the screen.
The foosball table recruiters are always boasting about is just for show, and is always unused.
> Sure, it might technically be more productive if I just locked myself in a room and worked intensely on my own for my whole career and only communicated through a webcam, but that doesn't seem particularly enjoyable to me personally.
That's precisely the point that the OP stated: people who prefer working in an office tend to have unfulfilling social lives or bad home lives.
They need the office because it's their way to fill the void in their lives and escape their personal problems.
In the office they surround themselves with people who, for the sake of keeping things professional, have no alternative to exchange pleasantries and treat them cordially, something they don't get anywhere else. Thus they waste hours per day commuting just to have a shot at those irrelevant social interactions they fail to get anywhere else.
In contrast, those who prefer to work from home do have far better and more fulfilling things to do at home. They don't need to waste precious personal time commuting, and instead spend it in more meaningful ways.
More importantly, let's not forget the age old trope of retirees finding themselves in the pit of despair because by losing their job they lost their life and reason to live.
Everything is predicated on it being an either/or, but I feel lucky enough to have great relationships both in and out of work.
Those who already have fulfilling social lives don't point out their shot at having a fulfilling work life as their justification to return to the office.
Also, that chance of using work as a way to fill in the void in their personal life comes at a steep expense: hours of their personal life wasted in long commutes, and constraining their choice of places to live as a tradeoff between how far they live from the office and how much they are willing to spend for a home.
> Everything is predicated on it being an either/or, but I feel lucky enough to have great relationships both in and out of work.
It is an either/or. The time, money, and energy you're forced to waste every single day just to commute to work is ripped out of your personal time.
The two hours you spend in traffic every single day are two hours you don't get to spend with your family/friends. Either you spend those hours playing with your son/daughter, or driving from the office.
How exactly is this not an either/or scenario?
I love a hybrid approach because I really enjoy the random conversations that crop up in the office… but my social life is so much improved outside of work in the last year or so that everything about physically being present feels tedious.
I have a coworker I call to talk shop for a few minutes and then bullshit for another 15-20 minutes almost daily when I’m wfh.
I’m very strongly considering asking my boss if my in-office/wfh ratio can switch from 3/2 to “whatever I want”
Better social life makes work feel like work. My drive to get stuff done has gone up, because I’ve gotta get out at a good time.
Huh?
Occasional all hands conferences provided some IRL a few times a year. IME these weren't strictly necessary yet did provide a chance to bond with the people on the other side of the glass.
Career wise I do think that fully remote can be a boon to shorter and less attractive coworkers, since it reduces or eliminates some of the tall+beautiful biases.
I prefer working from home for other reasons as well, but certainly avoiding the annoyance of coworkers I don’t like all that much is part of it.
This tends to be me both at work and basically in every social setting. I’ve also never really formed more than a highly casual acquaintanceship at work with usually doesn’t follow a job hop.
I prefer remote now. It lets me squeeze in a little more sleep that would otherwise be used to get ready and go to an office where I’d have to sit in the morning and listen to people around me ramble on and I just gets tiring.
At home I control everything about comfort the setting and I’m not losing much I’d gain in-office.
This is great one day every couple of weeks, but I get way more done at home and in far less time. So that I have more than enough left over to exercise and appreciate my day
My experience with programming is that if it's not happening, staring at a screen in an office won't make it happen faster. Stepping outside to go for a run, enjoying nature for a bit, picking up my kids up early so I can spend time with them (and then working at night when they're back to sleep) feels far less wasteful of the time I have on this Earth than commuting to a building where I am essentially stuck for eight hours before I can do anything else
People who fill a void through work are the unhappy ones. Even when I was in the office I made meaningful connections with Indian coworkers who I never met but spoke to almost daily for years.
Instead of talking to coworkers I get to see my 2 young kids grow up.
Whenever you're forced to do something, yes you will struggle. My colleagues are my colleagues. And if I like someone, I will bond with them and it might become a friendship regardless of whether i see them in person or not.
Still, I'm at work to work, not to make meaningful bonds. Using the word 'meaningful' in a work context makes the word almost lose its meaning and make it seem banal. Meaningful bonds happen by chance, and most people we come across with, we don't make meaningful bonds with anyway. And whether we want it or not, work environment is not the same as hobby or home or relaxation.
I have good friends, who i have meaningful bonds with, and I'm happy with that. At work, i'm getting paid to do a job, not to form meaningful bonds with people. I don't need those, because I have those already.
Maybe you enjoy interactions with colleagues, who don't enjoy interactions with you because they'd rather be home where they don't have to talk with someone they don't have or want a meaningful bond with.
And for the last point of "Sure, it might be technically more productive (...)". Companies try to make us believe it is less productive to WFH all the time. Remove that point, and there's nothing more on the table to want people at the office, than the fact that some need social interaction and to form meaningful bonds at work.
A few days/week of working at the office for people who want meaningful bond making could be arranged, and you all could connect with each other, sing kumbaya together, and make life long friendships then. Just don't force others to do the same.
Yesterday I talked to some people I used to face, ie they were taking the phone at another business years ago when I was trading with them. They are all against working from home, having continued to go to the office during the lockdowns.
The point they made was that some things really benefit from being interruptible. Some things even benefit from not being recorded. Immediacy really matters for certain things like gauging who you should approach with some deal.
What also matters is being able to weigh the mood. A lot of what we call political decisions depend on this kind of weighing of what the team wants to do, and is hard through zoom.
Finally there's the problem of juniors. In finance you'd learn stuff when there was a quiet moment and someone more experienced seemed like they had a second to explain something to you. Unscheduled but valuable training.
These folks basically took the opposite view of what you seem to have, and decided that people who like WFH are basically not productive and are just phoning it in, knowing that it has gotten harder to hire people willing to be in the office all day. It's kinda interesting the take that people on opposite ends of the spectrum have of each others motivations.
I'd like to have some professional connections that carry over from my current company.
I genuinely believe many people who prefer working at home are very young and have not developed social awareness and/or don't feel the need to separate life and work, because their life is their work and vice versa.
Most people that do not want to return to office are still in that phase of their life where they need to rebel to authority to feel alive and will end up being those "middle managers" that they critique today.
Also: WFH as the only possible option is not different from office as the only option.
I don't like going to the office when it rains, but I enjoy going out of my house when the Sun shines or meet my colleagues to have an informal chat on how to progress with some project, it makes everything smoother and a lot of the underground tensions generated by only communicating through video and voice disappear.
The truth is the majority of the workplaces are not "for coders only" and trying to find a balance with other people's needs, for example those people that have to work in presence, it's sign of and good willing and maturity.
You can decide to quit to WFH, IMO that doesn't mean you're standing up for yourself, it only means you're not willing to change your habits.
or you can chose to work for a company whose offices are not two hours away.
coworking, cafes, etc are not really suited to actually work, especially of your work requires some kind of concentration or secrecy (an NDA for example)
Personal office in house is the worst combination of them all IMO.
Not that I do not work from home, I did it for good part of my life, it's just not for everybody.
You have also to consider that having their parents around all day could be the worst possible way to live for teenagers, it makes more sense only when they are small kids, but in my country we have parental leaves and specific holidays to take care of that.
Now tell people from Mexico that they can't go to work in US because immigration laws, but Americans can go work there because they just need an internet connection and you can serve them drinks while they sit on the beach.
Any company is 1% thinking, many companies hire only local workers because it's their market.
Take into account timezones and you can't possibly work for Australians or New Zealanders while living in Europe, unless there's an office in Europe that coordinates the efforts with HQ.
I've worked for long time with US based companies from GMT+2 and it's been exhausting at times. Wouldn't do it again if I can avoid it.
Some things look better on the surface than they really are.
Spending the family income on cars and gas and paying an extra million for a house in order to make commuting even feasible is "mature".
Destroying the environment, wasting precious resources and spewing out poisonous particles that enter the lungs and bloodstream of other human beings is "mature".
And engaging in office maneuvering and chit-chatting instead of producing great value for my employer is "mature".
I'd rather be immature then.
I spend 15 minutes walking in a park.
Yes, spending hours in a car is not the best choice.
One should ask themselves why they chose to sign a contract with a company hours away by car in the first place.
If that isn't ok, why did you accept?
> instead of producing great value
I think you're giving yourself too much importance and too little to your co-workers who took a break.
That's immature, yes.
And not spending time in the same place will only reinforce the idea that someone is working to " create great value" while others are slacking at coffee machines stealing a salary and being unproductive, only that in the case of WFH it has become "they are home all day doing nothing. it's basically like being on holiday for them."
Which shouldn't be any employer concern, since they're not the ones paying their salaries (and it's probably very false)
In other words: why should WFH be considered more important than chit-chatting at work?
Aren't they two ways for people to enjoy their job more and maybe be more productive or more satisfied?
Why one should be better than the other?
Only because you personally benefit from it?
> Yes, spending hours in a car is not the best choice.
> One should ask themselves why they chose to sign a contract with a company hours away by car in the first place.
Good for you, realisticly not many people are that fortunate to find a nearby opportunity.
15 mins walk takes me nowhere, but remote work opens endless opportunities for me.
If that's true, then you can't really complain about it.
But in my opinion if people are willing to resign or accept a (rather big) paycut to work from home, they could have found a lower paid job closer to home.
In my case it wasn't luck, I moved to another city to get the job, but I chose to live at 15 minutes walking distance from the office, because commuting for hours it's not what I want.
It's all about compromises, I believe anglophones say "you can't have your cake and eat it too"
> but remote work opens endless opportunities for me.
that's true also for companies.
Why should they hire someone from US and not someone somewhere else where the pay is lower?
Good point, so far so good but we'll see as time goes.
It truly doesn’t matter. WFH can be great, working from the office can be great. Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer.
It is the same as politics. The more polarized you can make things and the more you point out the flaws of the opposing perspective, the easier it is to influence public opinion.
In situations where policy needs to be determined, the decision made will benefit one side and harm the other side. In an ideal world, companies will allow employees to do whatever they want and pay them the same as long as they are productive.
However, companies want to actively reduce chaos and this means making consistent rules for everyone and measuring how this affects productivity in aggregate. So the rules become "fully remote" or "hybrid work" instead of allowing people to do what makes them optimally productive.
> Find a company where the social and work culture fit with what you prefer.
You say this presuming that people don't care about what they are working on or the prestige of the company they are working at. A lot of people have a fairly good setup and would rather influence their own company (or by proxy the industry at large) than simply move to a different potentially suboptimal company that allows remote work.
Also, the "social interactions" at the office are usually not about replacing private social life, but well, interacting with your colleagues about work related topics which go beyond the range of scheduled meetings. There is a lot of value in meeting random people over a coffee without a set agenda. No surprise, that during the pandemic there were a lot of meetings schedule with no agenda set, just to keep conversation between people alive, the more so as they don't work directly together.
On the one side I certainly appreciated the ability to work undisturbed at home for certain tasks, on the other side, I am working in a large organization (and I don't mean by large just a large headcount but a lot of people on joint or related projects), which mostly are not software engineers (but engineers of other disciplines). A lot of that goes online too - and as our organization is spread across large distances, always has been online - but I am aware of the benefits of direct interaction. At minimum, I like to have had some direct interactions with people I am working online with.
But of course, one cannot (and should not) just turn back the clock. The pandemic happened, and a lot of people had a taste of the advantages of work from home and a lot of companies had to work hard at facilitating that, so for a huge amount of jobs this is technically possible now. Working from an office isn't the only option any more and employers should understand that. Forcing people to come back into the office is a huge warning sign. It means that there are actually no convincing reasons, or the employees wouldn't have to be pressured.
Which of course raises the questions, why did spend Apple 5 billion on that fancy new headquarter and didn't put emphasis onto making this a place people want to go to? In the contrary, it was designed with open office spaces, which especially software engineers just hate. It was unpopular even before the pandemic. Instead, they should have asked groups and single employees how an office attractive for their line of work should look. It couldn't possibly have been a problem of the budget :).
I've learnt way more reading papers and documentation than being in the same physical space as more senior colleagues. People sometimes bring this point up re: onboarding but I don't quite understand what people learn that they can't do otherwise remotely.
I believe there is value in newcomers/junior devs begin in close proximity with their more experienced coworkers because this greatly improves the chance to talk about important work-related topics. Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone.
These things happen much more rarely when they are scheduled slack calls, and people seldomly just slack to talk about random things.
...and that's precisely the reason I asked the question
> Many times in my live I have started a casual conversation with someone at work and this lead to discussion about current work-related software topics and I was able to share some opinions with someone.
This sounds like general information sharing amongst coworkers. The way you phrased the comment made it seem like there was something specific you were referring to pertaining to newcomers/junior devs.
I agree with your point that you have less airtime to share your general thoughts about interesting things in a remote setting. I do agree with your general point and have experienced that too. Just observing more certain people equivocate about a topic is inspiring and that helps to learn more.
> I've learnt way more reading papers and documentation than being in the same physical space as more senior colleagues. People sometimes bring this point up re: onboarding but I don't quite understand what people learn that they can't do otherwise remotely
It is much harder to gain tacit knowledge (The important stuff) when you're remote. I read a lot, and it's no match for picking a skilled person's brain for even just 30min-1hr.
I've found I generally have to explicitly ask if I want someone to explain what they're doing and why. There is very little 1:1 teaching/mentoring. In an office I think there is more informal mentoring.
I have the exact opposite experience. During discussions, people are less informed with facts and speak conceptually. In a book or documentation, there's both. Thus is easier to get more reliable information. It is easier to follow logical chains constructed people but the constituents of said chain could potentially be fraught with approximations, thus obfuscating the entire story.
I've discussed topics with really smart people (experts in their field) for hours with many potential ideas but no conclusion. But I only had to read documentation/code for 30min to understand exactly what the real gist of the field was about.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
> It is easier to follow logical chains constructed people but the constituents of said chain could potentially be fraught with approximations, thus obfuscating the entire story.
It's not possible to logically explain everything. Intuition is very important. Hence, the value of tacit knowledge.
I would generally much rather hear an expert talk conceptually and about their intuition than them give me a lecture on logic and facts. It's impossible to glean some things through pure logic.
For example, what is clean code?
Asking people questions and engaging in 1-1 conversations is no more difficult over Slack + voice + screen share than in person. In fact it gives you more options for how to conduct the conversation and remember the results.
It's really not hard, and some people are great at it. The problem is that people sleepwalk through their remote experience and don't spend any time thinking about how to make the small changes needed to fill the needs that in-office used to fill. For some reason, it only occurs to them to seek out information if they can walk to a person in a room rather than type in a box.
I constantly observe people excitedly blabbing in person, seemingly reaching all sorts of epiphanies, but at the end of the day, the conversation lacked specificity and no one really learned anything. It's a perfect medium for feeling like you learned something without actually doing so.
Figuring out how to make remote work produces better results when the team is willing to do it. It enhances all work, including in-person work, and there are lots of resources by now for how to do it well. But if the team is unwilling to do it, no surprise that remote doesn't work for them. They chose to make in-office the only possible way to work.
It's not an inherent thing to the environments, but a choice that particular team made.
> I constantly observe people excitedly blabbing in person, seemingly reaching all sorts of epiphanies, but at the end of the day, the conversation lacked specificity and no one really learned anything. It's a perfect medium for feeling like you learned something without actually doing so
Generally I would much prefer feeling like I've intuited something rather than coming away with specific knowledge because specific knowledge is usually easy to find elsewhere.
> It's not an inherent thing to the environments, but a choice that particular team made
I believe it is inherent to a remote environment. I also believe it can be overcome, but it's not the path of least resistance.
Offices have their pros and cons (WFH can be a horribly lonely experience for anyone who lives alone, for example). But it's removing the commuting that makes WFH such a massive win for most people. And a big win for the environment (which should be reason enough to try and keep it going)
Feels like you are mixing a lot of stuff together. My desire to interact with my collegues about our field of work has nothing to do with my social live outside of work.
It's not like I'm going to talk about new C# 11 features during our Sunday barbecue or at soccer practise. Of course I can go to a meetup or invite friends from tech to a pub, but that's not gonna replace 40 hours a week of "random interaction" with my colleagues. Maybe I'm just lucky and have great colleagues that are fun to interact with? Hard to say ...
But I am excited to be back in office on some hybrid schedule, because there was a social component to work that I very much missed. I enjoyed the work part of the work the same, but missed the occasional coffee with a coworker, full-fledged in person brainstorming session, off hand conversations about zany ideas, lunch at the cafe, etc.
It's not that my social fulfillment declined at all overall with WFH -- other social activities filled the time -- but the specific social activity of bonding in person with folks I worked with definitely decreased, and it's nice to have that come back. That's not a reason to force folks back in the office (this is at no-one's expense, as I've seen it suggested), but it's a nice benefit.
This.
I've recently switched officially to a de-facto full remote position after years of full remote due to COVID, as did most of my team, and I also see this pattern among the coworkers who decided to go to the office. The return-to-office cases boiled down to:
* Rented a tiny apartment to maximize disposable income but it's very unpleasant to live in, let alone work,
* Share a 3-bedroom flat with 3 or 4 newly-graduated and yet-to-graduate buddies,
* A young upwardly-mobile professional who wants to maximize his presence around the senior manager to fulfill his career-growth plans.
I dare say that in two dozen team members, only 5 or 6 want to return to the office, and about half of them need it because they can't afford a decent apartment.
“Hot take: people who have a different work style preference than me are inferior and damaged, and/or have motives which I despise or work a job I think is useless.”
Rethink this. These are your colleagues. Compassion for people who are different from you improves your own humanity and makes working with you more enjoyable.
For example - some people don't like work bleeding into their home life, which is a lot harder when you WFH.
I personally want to know what's going on in far-flung corners of the company, because I'm fundamentally a generalist who wants to understand the big picture. I don't just want to put in my 8 hours and clock out, although I can see why people just trying to put their kids through school might want to do that.
Personality types and home situations matter a great deal in these situations.
1) WFH is now limited to 1 day per week, and a 3 month probationary period where new hires don't even get that.
2) Salary. It's still a job seeker's market and my workplace is not keeping pace. It's spec'ed for 3 years of experience but salary is about the median for a new graduate w/o professional experience. I'm happy to train someone but if I rework the job class to allow for new grads then HR will lower the starting salary. So, I'm hoping to find someone who's a new grad but had a part time job or internship or any other non-coursework experience the could be even the least bit argued as adding up to the required experience. (the position is basically a data wrangler / sql jockey / light analysis position, but it directly supports the main revenue-generating operations of the organization so there is real $$$ lost by having this position empty. ::Grrrrr:: end rant.)
How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.
> How companies consider that a cost center is beyond me. But I’ve seen them do it.
I may have an answer: Because of our fetish with metrics. It is possible to measure the cost of an engineer or computer programmer. This can be assigned a cost which is arbitrarily precise. Calculating teh benefit is usually not so easy. So the decision makers (rational beings, just mislead by an intellectually bankrupt management philosophy) concentrate on what they can count.
This is McNamara's fallacy
John Sturman has a business game to illustrate this called the Beer Game[1].
It's supposed to illustrate shocks to a supply chain with limited knowledge of how the rest of the system is behaving.
The players in charge of their part of the system try to reduce costs to get a better score but in doing so often catastrophically open themselves up to shocks in the system.
IMHO the same thing is true for managers and accountants trying to reduce costs in their development teams. If you get it wrong you can get a short term gain and long term problem that kills the company.
She's fighting that battle now to make the chief boss understand that too, but it's a slog.
The work environment is laid back, 40 hour weeks & rarely any expectation of going over that so there can be a very good work/life balance. Benefits are pretty good too: very good retirement plan matching contributions, above average health insurance, 37 days PTO each year. So I need to find the right candidate that appreciates those things even if they could easily get 30%+ salary somewhere else. TCP where I work isn't to far off from other opportunities if the candidate considers & values those other benefits.
And again I am very upfront about that, and even explain these factors to them before interviews. I want people who know what they're signing up for, and not waste each other's time. It's a position that will give them lots of hands on experience to easily get the next step up in their career after doing this job for 3 years or so. They can grown from a basic analyst as described above into creating more sophisticated predictive modeling, bringing them up closer to my level. I view my role as managing someone as 1) to keep away from them as much as possible so they can do their work and I can do mine instead of sitting in meetings. And 2) to prepare them for their next job, their next step in their career. Because that's what a good manager does, and because by preparing them that way it means their last year working for me will be at a very high level of productivity, making my life easier as well.
But the candidate really has to be the right sort of person at the right stage in their life, someone looking for these things. And if my organization would ease up & recognize the job market requires at least a 15% increase in base salary I'd probably not have so much difficulty finding such a person.
There are quite some countries where Jo Average would see 40h working week as monsterous. Or were 40h workweek might even be outlawed.
How does the company's revenue per employee compare to the offered salary?
I'm not familiar with thinking about salaries in these terms though, how is this relevant?
I'm in Higher Ed analytics, embedded at a high level in an operational division at a university. So, maximizing revenue isn't a primary goal. It's certainly a secondary concern, some amount of "profit" is necessary to plow back into resources for students & researchers and capex, but if we're making a ton of profit it would kind of mean we're charging students more than we need to and putting a higher debt burden on them. Some schools, unfortunately, take that path but not where I work. We are honestly very focused on doing what's best for the student, even at the cost of leaving some easy money on the table.
Minimizing student debt burden is a primary target metric for the university. Of course it's much more complicated than that though, countless variables and interlocking & sometimes competing goals & requirements.
And while Higher Ed isn't perfect and could use some disruption, quality instruction doesn't have much economy of scale. Sure, a very self-motivated person can plow through self-paced college courses without a lot of handholding or overhead costs to get them through, but that's not the majority of students. For most students the ability to get quality help along the way is inversely proportional to class size and directly proportional to support resources. So, high labor costs. Though again, some amount of disruption could probably improve things. As would the realization that not everyone needs to go to a traditional 4-year college, that for many people learning a skilled trade is both a faster path to financial self-sufficiency and better suited to their interests. But that's all a bit off topic so I'll end it there.
Yes, there are variations and management can go a bit on the higher side of that number - though also note that that is revenue and doesn't take into account operational costs, taxes, and the like.
In many cases, the company just can't reasonably pay what the "market" suggests the role should get. In these cases, it is a question of trying to point out that the value that the role brings is much more than what they're paying and that the company, upon recognizing that, should offer more.
The other alternative for the company is that they aren't losing money compared to the current set of accounting books. They may be leaving money on the table that they could get from expanding, but that's a risk.
Speaking of risk, there are a lot of risky candidates out there. It is far too easy to hire a person who fails to perform at the expected level or to train the person up for a few months in the tech stack and domain only for them to leave for a different company.
As it is, an unfilled role that has what is perceived as low compensation, to the company, is the less risky than a role filled with someone who is paid more but may not be performing - or even if they are performing aren't bringing the value to the organization compared to the revenue that is needed to justify that role.
Regarding your 2nd statement: “Other companies are cutting staff”; you mean in big tech already? Who?
At one point, returning to the office wasn’t mandatory but “good for our promotions etc”.
When I’m in office few if any people actually give me marching orders… and when they do, I push back, correct them, and continue what I was doing. (We aren’t great at project management and my position luckily allows for this)
Ultimately, markets (including job market) is all about equilibrium. Either companies are going to increase the salary to come back [or reduce if you are staying back at home].
The thing which matters the most is picking up the best option for yourself. [and don't _always_ wait for your company to catch up]
I’m sure you have some nitpick but I don’t think it matters
If nothing else, cubes help with simple, human space being inadequate.
I like working remote fine I guess but all else being equal I'd consider an office for the right job.
All else isn't equal though and the reason we went remote is still in play. A company I left a few years ago went back into the office in january. My old manager who was still working there just died of covid a few weeks ago. Vaccinated, boosted etc.
The risk might be lower now but it's not gone. I never fully recovered from my first round with covid almost two years ago. I'm not looking for another go.
The balance of risk/benefit might favor companies choosing to have workers back. We really might be more productive in there, and hey probably only a handful will die. There's a little more going on than my personal choices though.
I am not. We are in trouble as a tech business and have a very large piece of tech debt that we need to get over, this year. (We also have an amazing product and smart people invested in our growth. It’s one of those good problems to have, but it’s still a problem.)
We experimented (a long time ago, before I joined) with an “open source model” of siloed teams who made internal releases to each other. This had the unfortunate side effect of hampering our release process and also, far worse, embedding a really unproductive them-vs-us culture that holds back our ability to ship on time.
On a technical level, it’s kind of like the bad old days of when people all had their own branches, and all tried to merge at once in the week of the release. If you’re familiar with this anti-pattern then we are in a similar situation but with individual repositories instead of branches.
Our team has a lot of veterans, many with the title architect, and all of whom are emotionally invested in the status quo being the right approach. There’s a lot of friction between us. Frankly this might not be the right team for me in the long run, but there are so many awesome people here as well that I want to make it work.
We objectively have a problem shipping our product, and because most of the old guard work remotely it is nigh on impossible to effectively build consensus around making any kind of big change. It is very a hard ship sail.
The saving grace? My manager and I go in three days a week. So does our VP Eng and the manager and tech lead of a couple of other important teams. We have whiteboard diagrams, 1:1 walks in the park, and chats in the kitchen. When we meet with the old guard, we sit together in a meeting room while they are on individual calls. I feel like we are getting somewhere, slowly, but an unsettling amount of time has been spent on how to effectively do staff-level persuasive tech-leadership, in the face of a highly talented but highly conservative cadre of senior engineers who keep themselves at arm’s length over Zoom.
Communication, the overarching priorities and alignment are super important. I work for a German insurance company and we rolled out crazy amounts of stuff over the last two years and started a re-org that is actually going well.
Also, emotional investment can be quite problematic. All the teams need to work on the overall goal. Having people fixated on their golden toy is a good way to crash into a hard wall.
I’m sort-of-an-SRE at a large enterprise and I see many developers gravitate towards this pattern. There’s a Dev1 branch for the first developer and a Dev2 for the second, etc…
And as you said, a huge merge the day before production rollout.
I’m trying to steer them in the right direction but it’s hard to find a good source that covers everything.
E.g.: this this the bad way, here’s how it goes wrong, this is the good way, this is how it fixes it.
Got any good references I can use?
I honestly think almost everyone should be required to code themselves, at least part time. That would clear out the parasitic office-politics talkers and bring power back where it belongs: to the people who actually know something, but don't have time for scheming because they actually work.
We hired an in-town workforce and cut the old guard out completely. Worked in person everyday until lockdown but had flexibility as well.
We were all pretty close (10ish people including execs) so remote work was fine and we shut down the office… I’m a much bigger remote work fan now because of how well it went.
The people on the same page will be on the same page whether they’re waking through the park or not. It may be time for the others to move along.
I see some people in the macrumors comments saying “good riddance” like he’s being ungrateful or something. He’s a manager who’s standing up for what he believes is best for his team, and when he was overruled he did the only thing he could do to protest - quit. Good for him, and hopefully others follow suite. And as someone who works in the same field, he is absolutely right. ML teams right now are absolutely starved for good talent. Apple should be doing everything it can to hire and retain these people, including letting them live where they want.
1. Is anyone suggesting this? Or do you mean “ones” as in companies mandating a return-to-office?
2. I mean isn’t that what work is? Being told what to do by somebody else in exchange for money and deciding if you’re going to do it or not?
3. Personally, I don’t get the people on here who pop off with “remote work is just a no-brained for everyone.”
2) Of course, but I’d hope most companies would be smart enough to be paying for productive output, not for bodily location.
3) Agreed. I personally prefer remote work, but I know many people who prefer going in - either to better structure their day, or to see others, and they should be able to do that. And I believe a competent company structure can support both of those work patterns. (At companies large enough for that sort of complexity)
I think on this point, you’re seeing companies who value control, consistency, and predictability over maximum productivity. They just think that they’d rather get less done overall and have more control over the people they hire because they know not everyone will be more productive in a remote environment. There’s nothing wrong w/ that. It’s not a decision everyone will agree w/ but that’s why resignation letters exist.
I guess I can give a bit of perspective. I don't think people should be "forced" into 100% office work, but I can say that as a junior engineer, I am wildly more productive when I'm in the office with my co-workers compared to at home alone.
I graduated into the pandemic and my first job out of school was full-remote. My company had no idea how to effectively manage remote workers and after two years I knew barely anything about my coworkers except their names, and I could feel my career stagnating. WFH was lonely, inefficient, and since my home was my office, I had no escape from the stress of work. Whenever I was at home I felt guilty for not working.
I recently quit that job and started a new one. The first thing I asked prospective employers was whether they had office space I could work from. I'm much, much happier working from the office and benefit greatly from my other coworkers who choose to commute.
Part of the problem is that the benefits of in-office work are long-term and asymmetrical. You might not benefit from being in the office, but other people might benefit greatly from having you there. Senior engineers should consider passing down knowledge as part of their responsibilities -- there might be ways to accomplish that remotely, but a lot of that transfer happens organically when colleagues share meals, walk outside together, etc..
Being in the office also gives me a chance to interact with people at the same company who I don't directly work with -- sales people, office managers, etc.. For me, WFH takes all the enjoyment out of work, leaving only the bad stuff.
I get next to nothing done during a whole day in the office. Over 2 1/2 hours commute a day, and then I have to sit there with (my own) ANC headphones on because people talk all day. Then there's coordinating where and when to go eat which can take up to half an hour. People come around to talk. I'm basically at 10-20% of productivity compared to WFH.
Other than the commute, I think those are all things that a cohesive team should be able to resolve. It's definitely important to set boundaries in a shared space. I don't agree that the answer is to entirely retreat from the office though, as much as I do understand that inclination.
Also, just a thought: your colleagues might find the discussions they have with you to be really valuable to their own productivity / job satisfaction.
Might be the case but when compared with a 30 second commute it's hard to care about that.
The team failed to adjust to WFH because intrinsically team building, knowledge sharing, mentoring, etc. is more difficult when working remotely.
(I like Schmidhuber but I'm not knowledgeable enough to really evaluate his work or claims.)
I don’t fully understand the tendency to do so, but it appears to be fairly widespread.
If a paper in any other field was cited 44k in ~8 years, it must have made life-changing discoveries. Maybe some of the early papers on COVID-19 will reach that number.
https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/301280
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/bnqm0p/d_g...
I don't get it. Things are simple. The employer sets the terms, where you work and how the work is paid. The employee either accepts the terms or walks away. Sometimes the sides engage in negotiations, where the side with more leverage receives an advantage (like a valuable hire can get a pay raise our rights to work remote in an office-first company, for example). Why make so much drama out of it? If you don't like to work in office, find a remote job, end of story.
Btw speaking as a full time remote employee.
Doing it from the office is far more difficult.
And employers can go on setting the terms of where people work; they are just going to have to do it facing the prospect they are going to lose a LOT of employees now that we've gotten the chance to work from home, made it work, and have spent considerable personal money optimizing our home offices and family lives around this WFH reality we've had.
In fact I am grateful to him for doing so because I am not in a position to do so myself but would certainly like to reap the benefits of such actions.
Collective action being used to bargain a better deal for workers is a simple enough concept.
If you don't like to work in office, find a remote job, end of story.
That's exactly what Apple's director did. He resigned to find a remote job. There is no drama in that, other than it being reported and people talking about it. Many workers (myself included) simply refuse to go back into the office. It's quickly becoming an archaic social norm that you have to have your butt in an office chair to be productive. That simply isn't true. The employer has the right to set their work terms, just as the worker has the rights to set their work terms too.
Well, lets see duckduckgo search the largest tech companies back to office dates...
> Google tells employees to return to offices in April
> Apple sets April 11 date for return to in-person work for corporate ...
> Microsoft Returning to the Office on Feb. 28 as Covid Cases Decline
I doubt they decided independently on a back to office date in the same ~1 month timeframe, remember these same folks had an anti poaching agreement and set limits on engineer salaries. They colluded to control engineers and they'll collude to force them back to the office if they feel it's best* for their industry.
Unless employees have a similar level of coordination and control, for example a cross industry union, they will continue to be pushed around. If people don't make a big deal of these moves the company can withstand the few hold outs quitting.
*I doubt best for "the industry" is best for the consumer. Best for them is probably most controllable pliable workforce.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
Given the reason for office closures was covid, I'd guess that companies in the same geographical area would make similar decisions about when it was appropriate to return to office work. It would be more surprising to me if large companies with similar decision-making throughout the pandemic, in the same geographical area, had drastically different timelines.
That's exactly what's happening (in the linked story).
I think the drama comes because there's a cost to quitting your job and finding a new one. It's annoying to say the least, and if the only reason you have to do it is because the company is making what will undoubtedly be seen in a few years as a huge, obvious, frankly stupid mistake about their remote work policy, it rises to the level of a pain in the ass worth arguing about.
The employer makes an offer. Every job should be one where all parties see it as a fair exchange of value.
For a majority in software engineering, offers are not that hard to come by. There is an onus on both employer and employee to ensure the exchange of value continues to remain fair.
Things are not simple though, because people are messy. We’re all different. We need slightly different things. We have different challenges we’re working with.
Remote work has been a dream for some, and a reality for a small group. The pandemic forced a trial under less than ideal circumstances and productivity generally didn’t suffer (sometimes it went up).
The desire to work in an office or remote is something I keep finding differs person to person. If you mandate either all remote or all in an office you’re going to annoy someone.
We’re human. We need different things.
If your employer is refusing, in this industry you have options.
“Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.”
I have a number of colleagues who have resigned because they don't want to go back to the office. Nothing about any sort of inalienable right BS. They just prefer remote work now after doing it for 2 years and they're no longer content with having to work at the office anymore. And honestly, my company is losing out far more than they are with them leaving.
https://finance.yahoo.com/m/6017a433-bf69-48cc-9aa0-70034b2e...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-exec-urs-holzle-buyin...
Honestly, I think it's a bit much to call that "endorsing slavery" since the intention isn't to say that buying and selling people is good.
The work, more than likely, gets done just the same, but it's all about appearances.
Think of the commuting costs, living near/far from the office, the different types of day care options, etc etc that have shifted in the last two years. Imagine being told you’re going to get a 10% cut in pay due to the need to go in the office? That’s what RTO probably feels like to peoples pocket books.
It's pretty frustrating.
Even if you put in 10 hours at the office it’s still 20% lost time in the commute. 20% is a lot of your “working time” to be non-productive. And that is not quality time - that is stressful time that leads to burn out over time.
A RTO concept should factor this in. RTO for many people means working more and the employer getting less of your brains best output. It is a loss/loss. Why would either side of the equation wants this?
My team is fully WFH - 700 people globally - and the only time anyone is required to come into the office is when a job task can not be done remotely.
We’ve also reduced our office footprint 70% in the process; with the savings going to a WFH monthly stipend. We also arrange two social events a month to keep the in person connections alive; with numerous smaller groups having TGIF’s or other sorts of activity clubs.
Regus membership has given all the WFH folks a place to grab an office if they need to get out of the house for whatever reason.
To get over the “are my employees slacking off?” We’ve put in a simple peer review system that is working well:
1) If you are assembling a team for a very challenging and demanding project who are your top 5 choices?
2) If you could give out a spot bonus who would you give it to and why?
3) Is there anyone you feel should be reduced from your team and why (optional)?
This was bumpy as hell to get rolling but now working well. And yes, Q2 does drive quarterly spot bonuses based on responses.
We should pretty much just replace the workplace with a water cooler called Serendipity and a lunchroom called Impromptu.
That would be the next evolution of workspaces after open plan. One giant cesspool err .. watercooler where everyone can sysnergize and regurgitate err... ideate.
I’m not an engineer who can work anywhere I want. And I’m confident that working at Apple would have an incredible positive effect on my career.
Still not worth it. I’d rather find a local job outside of tech than get back on the office space hamster wheel.
Goodfellow was hired right at the peak of ML hype, so I have to assume his salary/total compensation was extraordinarily high, so he was very expensive to keep around.
Apple would’ve made an exemption for exceptional talent. They didn’t make the exception for him.
I would for one would really appreciate it if Apple photos had a decent search function.
Maybe these don’t move the needle as much as Wall Street analysts hope but these marginal improvements add up in a highly competitive space and I can’t see a world where mobile manufacturers turn their backs on ML.
I am not a ML specialist. Watching from the sidelines.
What? Siri, text completion, all the health- and activity-tracking features of Apple Watch, computational photography, Photos app, Face ID, and many, many more depend on machine learning. And let's not forget the Neural Engine in M1.
Mmm. Don’t count on it. Apple will bend a lot for you, but stuff like office location was never very flexible even before the pandemic. If your team switched offices to an inconvenient location, tough luck. Ultimately it was on you to adapt.
If you were a top performer and threatened to quit over it… well, Apple has a deep bench.
I still think if the commute wasn't a factor then working from home wouldn't remotely be a thing. Eliminating the commute is a pretty huge benefit though (unless you happen to live really close to work, which some people do).
Apple, Google, etc are going to learn quickly and change to all remote soon too I bet. Weighing their prestige vs. the improved quality of life remote brings to most workers can not compete. Especially with company's like Air BnB which pays same very high salaries who says work anywhere in the world.
Overall a raise of 50 to 100k in salary would not get me back into any office and I live alone in a small town in south central PA. The pandemic forced me to find a new social life with new friends that Im equally enjoying as I did with friends I had at work (they are still around some socially but the connection isnt as strong).
Money can be saved on all the accomodations necessary for office workers, so it would seem like a win-win if remote work arrangements are viable for a position.
I see other jobs at amazon that are remote, but this particular department worked with hardware that they weren't interested in leaving the office. Again, I've worked remotely with similar hardware from the company that pioneered this type of hardware and have done so since 2008. We figured out security, remote testing, local development, software simulations, etc. and haven't had a single leak, hack, etc.
IMO Enough is best.
You could have potentially moved within the company if that was only decision factor.
“It’s WFH today, but that’ll probably change. And you can always take our bus from your local AWS office to the office where the rest of the team may or may not be because we don’t know what our policy will be.”
I’d expect a company of Amazon’s size and stature to have a better plan than “whatever your VP wants this week.”
Oh, that and I doubled my comp leaving ;)
I think it makes more sense to be non-committal than to make promises and then have to renege on them later. The latter makes people much more justifiably upset.
And yes, reneging on agreements is bad. Employers need to be forced to understand that humans have rights and their employees are humans. Telling someone their job is remote then changing that 3 months after they start should be illegal. Unfortunately, it’s not, so you’re SOL if you find yourself in that position.
Add in several other factors… 1. the VP and extended team I would have been working with was in Seattle and this position was in VA. 2. There’s an AWS office down the street from my house but they were 100% non-committal about the position being located there (vs the new Arlington HQ2). 3. Would have been a new team with lots of new hires, so I could have just hired them locally (if deemed necessary, though I’ve managed remotely for years now with success so seems silly to me).
That is interesting. I like that idea, in theory.
In practise I find the promise I have made to an employer to work/be available certain hours very useful. My time off is off, on is on.
If you’re considering an offer from Amazon I suggest you make it very clear from the start to your hiring manager your expectations on remote work and working hours. Theres some teams at Amazon that are taking a strong return to office stance and others like mine that allow for fully remote.
When I was there, Apple had 1 director for about 50 engineers (though certain people like Jordan Hubbard were director just because). 12,000 engineers gives us 240 directors of engineering. I'd say given the breadth of the software and hardware needed at Apple, maybe five of these are in ML.
(per this https://www.macrumors.com/2017/08/09/apple-park-employees-op...)
guessing goodfellow has specific reasons for this move (like everyone), but feels increasingly like wfh has exposed gaps in our ability to manage or even measure the productivity of knowledge workers
> And they built his team their own building, off to the side on the campus …
in the article to:
> and built them a trailer or something in the parking lot
in your comment?
No doubt there is a huge challenge for companies how to organize their work as they are reopening their offices. In general, I think they should allow for more time. No one likes to be forced back to the offices, but as more and more people return to the office, they might gain more attraction as a place to meet people again. The 3 day in-office work week might happen on its own quickly enough, forcing people might be quite counter-productive.
The big elephant in the room in the case of Apple surely is their shiny new headquarter. They spent like 5 billion on it, and from what I read it wasn't even popular before the pandemic. Because it was designed by upper management, but somehow the people who should work there were not asked. With that amount of budget, it should be possible to design offices that people desparately want to work in. Hint: open offices aren't this :p
- remote work, for jobs eligible to such model, does need a paradigm shift, it's not sustainable trying mimicking the in-office model in a "virtual" world. I see almost no discussion about that, especially in work division, outcome measuring, hw&sw vs hosted platforms etc terms. IMVHO that's a hyper central point to mainstream WFH for all eligible jobs;
- remote work administrative aspects from beyond-borders (different tax systems, rules, TZs, ...) and "global wages" vs "local wages". Again that's HYPER important because before arriving to something established and well-run on scale enough to stabilize a new model we must expect tremendous backfires in revenues terms;
- hybrid mess handling where companies have offices, with gears etc and have to move stuff back&forth AS WORKERS to handle less people, but still some, in the office and some from remote;
- where to live, considering local services since we do not eat from remote do not have "virtual remote connections" etc, and how such areas can evolve in a reasonably short and mean timeframe because if we choose to relocate we choose typically with a certain care. Personally I choose few years before covid to leave a big city for a mountain area, served enough, near enough to the "civility" etc, I'm VERY happy of the choice even if I miss a significant slice of local in-person acculturated environment for discussions, interactions, surely social life is better here, but at a low cultural level, just parties, not much real technical, political, philosophical discussions aside are possible since simply there aren't enough mass of acculturated people nearby to do them. That's another central aspect: how can our demography can evolve if we are not all together at scale like before?
- how a remote-first society can be organized, at least a general idea.
Just see sabre rattling and crushing between two party, one for one against, is spectacle, but of no help.
Do you know of another good place for that aside from HN?
Talking in person with tea or coffee, decide to go out for a common dinner it's a thing, having a call just for acculturate discussion is another... Let's say I feel a bit of lack of "groups stimulus", while I have more time to think myself, draw new ideas, potential projects etc, it's not a net loss but still a certain loss, well compensated by other aspects of the sparse life in the nature. A thing still to be considered depending of age, career, family etc at personal level and another thing to be considered in general social terms to draw a new distributed society, we still need aggregation points, only perhaps not big nor generic as cities, like small poles who will be abandoned/redone from scratch at a certain point in time, but small enough and centered enough to been able to redo and abandon them at sustainable time and costs.
So far I here exactly ZERO serious talks about a future society where WFH became mainstream for eligible jobs even on HN, just to say.
Over the short term there are arbitrage opportunities for tech workers moving out of high-cost and high-pay regions, but the equilibrium could be quite different.
While technically true, you’re overlooking the tax, legal, and other issues this causes. A non-hurdle for Google, but a huge one for smaller businesses.
It also speaks to the fact that no one is irreplaceable.
You can argument all day and night about how great WFH is, but if the management is seeing a drop in productivity, they will want you back at the office. THAT is why Apple (and others) is doing that. If you have a measurable productivity levels in your company (i.e. you're not Twitter), you should expect to be returning back to the office sooner or later because even if YOU are more productive, on average the productivity suffers with entire teams working from home.
And it just makes sense. It really does. Even if you don't want it to.
You can try to work hard and be focused, but not everyone can do that. I don't see people here talking about this often, but office isn't just a place for the employer to take advantage of you... it's a place where you're away from HOME on PURPOSE. You're supposed to get into a different head space, temporarily forget about your home life and issues and focus on work. How can you do that at home unless you have anything but a completely 100% supportive partner, no kids, no pets, no obligations or chores and an iron will? Most people don't have that... and for these people, working at the office will be more productive.
If he is indeed that important, just think how much his wasted time commuting to the office is worth and what it costs the field.
However HN's rules about tweet submissions are inconsistent and outdated.
It made me curious how to redistrict things. If those buildings turned into apartments the business would have a much better time and that area could be even more walkable
The more that stand up for this, the more businesses will consider its importance.
Full vest. Time to go.
I've had WFH people around for more than 20 years at all the places I worked over that time. Mostly they were doing their job, yet there were always limits felt to what they can do and how much they can do.
However, I still see problems that are difficult or even impossible to resolve. Even though I was able to maintain team velocity comparable to a fully in-person team there are significant downsides. First off, I have always overworked myself, but I don't think it's healthy and I discourage others from doing so. Leading a fully remote team required me to work more hours even when we were in the same time zone. Yes, you get back time from not having to commute, but on average my hours increased by more than my commute time when my teams were fully remote. I will summarize the root causes of this problem as I have been able to identify them.
First, remote meetings are dramatically less productive regardless of their length the second there are more than 3 people involved. Someone will attempt to multi-task if any topic they are not heavily involved in gets brought up. In short, getting organized and ensuring everyone involved has received and retained important information becomes far more difficult and time concuming. Anything I tell a group larger than 3 will ultimately result in my having to repeat that information for at least 1 person, and the larger the group the more times I end up repeating that information. This increases the time I spend organizing my team to keep them productive from maybe 1/6th of my time to easily half. Given that I also need to train lower level developers to become higher level developers, this tends to reduce the time I have to develop by 1/2 to 2/3rds.
Second, not having clear start and stop times makes it far more difficult for developers to manage their time effectively. I've seen senior devs that would normally have developed for 5 hours (plus meetings) and been done for the day jumpt to 10 hours and burn out. I've also seen a lot more junior devs try to work on a problem for 2-3 hours, feeling they can't interrupt seniors or mid level devs because of our online status, and then give up for the day. In either case, the odds that they quit and look for a different job shoots through the roof. This means developers that would otherwise have productive enjoyable careers are more frequently leaving the industry because they aren't in the upper 10% of people when it comes to self-management.
I'm not saying remote work is a bad thing, but it's really important we understand their are trade offs, and that these trade offs either reduce the number of people we can work with, or may require us to work more hours than are healthy.
To be completely clear, I don't advocate requiring people to come in, but when choosing an employer if everything else is equal I'm more likely to pick the company where everyone lives in the same city and we have the option to come into the office or not. I will especially choose them if I'm able to require that some people come in on certain days if I've identified them as someone that doesn't pay attention during meetings or has time management issues like overworking or giving up because they can't figure it out on their own.
1. Defending pseudoscience (as long as it’s related to nutrition and exercise)
2. Disgust with “marketing people” and anyone with an MBA
3. Hating “woke” culture
4. Justifying piracy
6. The general decline of macOS with every new release. It’ll be locked down and turned into iOS any day now, just you wait.
While the opposite, dumbing down and minimalism for it's own sake is a way more common occurrence (think: not showing MB/s when copying/downloading files, etc)
1. case sensitivity in Nim
2. 0 vs 1 based indexing
...as long as it's done from the office.
Btw that quote is describing the potential customers of Apple, not employees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sMBhDv4sik
Why does that matter? Does Apple not want the most talented, world-changing people working on their products? If your marketing sounds good for customers but dumb for employees, particularly in knowledge-driven work, then maybe your marketing is just hypocritical?
My guess is that people who work for Apple do it more because of the giant FAANG salary and the social cachet than because of the product marketing.
how so?
Jobs starter Next which was acquired by Apple in 1997, bringing Jobs back home.
Hence gp’s comment about Apple’s long history of doing this…
Why not though?
They already do. It requires SVP approval.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2011/12/14/the-real...
"If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is."
- Charles Bukowski
I've never been hungry by choice and I've always had a roof over my head, and I'm grateful for both of those things, but let's look at something I do know: "..could mean losing ... maybe even your mind"
Yeah, BTDT. A lifetime of mental health problems culminating in a complete ... I dunno, breakdown? ... where I was barely able to function for 2 years and became a risk to others (should have been hospitalised but wasn't), and another 2 years recovering. 4 years of my life wasted. Any projected glamour of mental illness is purely done by those who've never had it. Mental illness is fucking shit and has no redeeming value.
Edit: oh yes, and "Isolation is the gift" - Never is loneliness a gift, ever.
Hmm, the one redeeming value of my anxiety (and the accompanying fear of imminent death) is that it makes it much easier to contemplate things I wouldn’t otherwise contemplate.
I’d still rather do without that, but I guess it’s interesting enough I can call it redeeming?
TIA
- hn_throwaway_99
As Modest Mouse said, "God, who'd want to be / Such an asshole?"
But to live like him? No thank you
For at least parts of Apple engineering, very expensive equipment and prototypes are under lockdown and too expensive to duplicate for WFH.
(at least that's how it was during my several years there.)
An underrated ratio for measuring corporate inequality.
But the distractions are everywhere. It is hard to flow. It is hard to have a phone call with a prospect or customer. Things get moved, borrowed, lost.
But mostly I hate it because everytime I have seen open plan, the people who set it up have big offices with windows looking out at the people they screwed over and seek to ultra micro manage. (And this is exactly what happened at the company I left)
"I saw you doing that, why?"
"How come you wander around several times a day?"
"Your desk is a mess"
And so it goes. Nope. Do not have time for that. Happy to work elsewhere or make less, whatever.
Anyway, they announced, I counter announced, and then was out before the move. They lost a few people, and that company was sold a while back.
Now pretty much everyone doing that work has a new email and works mostly from home! New owners saw no need for a group office scenario and has small teams all over the place. Given the nature of the work, that makes a ton of sense.
Funny how things can work.
Having talked with the old owner after all this went down, the real reasons were to save money and manage people and their relationships. Profound lack of trust.
I understand the idea that hardware WFH is going to be a no-go, but software? We already had the revolutionary moment where the internet is everywhere.
It could be that he wasn’t doing his job well remotely and hence the push to get him in.
“If the director isn’t coming in then why should I?”
> "I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team," Goodfellow said in the email.
In my case it is hobby fun rapidly turning professional. The way to fund hobby / new work is to get your investment at home to pay for itself. Free tools and gear essentially.
Early on, as I picked up skills and scored deals on equipment, I ended up able to take side gigs and or take on special projects. Sometimes I would do these on a "keep the gear" basis. No money changes hands. Recommended.
Pros:
Picking up new skills
Research on ones interest and terms
Flex time working is possible
Reduced commute
Work when ideation is high tide, so to speak
Cons:
It can be expected to work more
Personal / company boundaries are less clear (IP and overwork)
Can be expensive
Need space
Summary:
Personally, I have always had a lab at home, and I rarely take company gear home. Sometimes I have, but I try to buy my own, or the gear from the company.
I have had to make a few career jumps and the next one has pretty much been made possible by what I had at home and what I could do with it.
Be very careful about IP. The reward for that caution can be a real opportunity for you.
It can be the place where you show young people stuff they would never see otherwise and or, until much later. This happened for me as a teen and it was a huge boost! And it was where home lab started for me. My bedroom was my shop.
Of course, you gotta sort this for your scene too. The CEO letting people take gear home is nice and maybe a non issue for people. Depends on what one is doing and or plans to do.
Overall though, I deffo recommend doing it.
I know right. I mean to be able to test his his AI algorithms, instead of just walking into the supercomputer room with a briefcase full of punchcards he would either have to make a long distance trip or else FedEx in his punchcards(and expose Apple to the risk of losing them or having them leak).
Sorry, this is 2022 and we have high speed Internet and networked computers. And we don’t have to physically load punchcard into then supercomputer.
Honestly such people are extremely rare. The quote doesn't apply to the vast majority of employees at Apple. There are always going to be other talented people willing to take their spot.
Not the same company anymore... not even close.
Jarheads are smarter than all of you? Suck it up and get it done.
A quarter century later, Apple is a very different company. As it should be.
He probably had to think differently when he got in charge of a big corporation...
Tim Cook is so wise to save Apple with this move.
People who would (or do) slack off without direct oversight think everyone is that way. They don't understand that the people in these positions are highly motivated, driven people.
These people aren't Homer Simpson.
If you wanted to hear non-BS truth from me. Otherwise, we can all continue to pretend.
Corollary: all you conformists who like rules and structure, you are the useless peasantry.
I really doubt that most people would give up a job in a satisfying office environment with people they truly enjoy working with on a product/project they are excited to work on everyday simply because of they are told they have to go in and meet those people they really groove with three times a week.
Think of that. Some people were spending 4.5 hours commuting every day. And it was ok with them.
It is possible they are avoiding something at home so this suits their lifestyles. That would be my guess.
Is it worth considering that the self-reported productivity gains which dominate these comments are not objective and are colored by employees acting in their own interest? That maybe Apple managers know what they’re doing?
It is interesting that the employees seem to realize that before technology allowed for people to work remotely, it was more an issue of individual merit that determined who had which jobs. They'd probably not admit it, but that is consistent with their claims given the circumstances.
Furthermore, it is NOT healhty to sit at home. It causes "cabin fever" and that's a well known and documented fact. It causes unhealthy habits. It IS healthy, however, to leave your home and get out into the world.
This whole issue tells me how incredibly ridiculous people have become not to realize the small businesses they are literally killing off with their "i've got to stay home" attidude. How selfish of people to not realize that businesses around workplaces depend on the commerce. So basically it's just OK to say, "hey who cares about you small business owner, I am too lazy to commute and I've made a millione excuses to need to stay home and supposedly work."
I can go into an office and get 50 times more productive things done interacting with real humans and working together. It's also fulfilling to socialize and if you are an introvert then it helps you that much more.
It's just plain sad to see so many people whining on and on when they are literally damaging themselves from isolation....and video is NOT a replacement and never will be.
Note also that the United States' productivity is going down....wonder why.