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Over the years I've had a few conversations with Apple recruiters about job opportunities at Apple. Every time, they've tried to persuade me to move to Cupertin

Over the years I've had a few conversations with Apple recruiters about job opportunities at Apple. Every time, they've tried to persuade me to move to Cupertino, because Apple doesn't do remote work. I've had to start prefacing the conversations with "I'm not moving to Cupertino. Do you still want to talk?" I get why Jobs wanted it that way: the value of hallway conversations and the ability to bounce things off other engineers is invaluable, and until recently it was difficult to make that viable with people flung off in different locations. Moreover, it's really difficult to have most of your team in one location and a few scattered people elsewhere: the people elsewhere just aren't part of the loop in the same way, and it makes things really hard for them. That said, I'd be surprised if Apple continues with a hard-line stance on that after all of this: I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. EDIT: Having read the thread on this one, I apologize for my over-generalization based on anecdote. I work for a company that pushes the ability to remote-work, and the folks I've talked with about working at Apple were all very "yeah, they don't do work-from-home". However, the plural of anecdote is not data. :)

uwuhn 7y ago
They're opening Seattle offices this year. Or at least that's the plan? It might be affected by the epidemic.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Don't they already have offices there?
- tjr225 7y ago
  Apple already has an office in downtown Seattle. I know because I've talked to a recruiter about a job there twice.
wuunderbar 7y ago
> I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. Where are we actually seeing a lot of this? Particularly for companies where they primarily sell hardware products such as Apple?
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Where are we actually seeing a lot of this? Anecdotally, yes. My company was staunchly against remote work or work-from-home of any kind. When I was hired, one of the first things they told me was, "We don't do remote. Don't ask." It's about 5,000 employees in maybe 20 cities around the country. When the virus started spreading, 95% of the workforce was working from home within eight business days. It was a massive mobilization by the IT department. Fortunately, they were already in the process of upgrading everyone's computer, so there were plenty of spares to go around.
  - nomel 7y ago
    I think his question was more "where", as in software vs hardware. As a physical product company, you would have to find a way to interact with these physical products, remotely, assuming you couldn't take them home. Apple has a software division, but that software needs to work on future/prototype hardware.
- threeseed 7y ago
  Almost all remote work is at software companies understandably. But also often it is for the lower lever, just implement this pre-designed and pre-architected feature roles. Most of the decision making and design will get done face to face at the main office. This model seems to be the standard but it's also toxic and cruel. Even the most independent person will feel isolated and segregated from their peers and the decisions that others ultimately make. If you want remote to truly work it has to be the Gitlab model. Everyone is remote, every decision is transparent and all corporate knowledge is captured in a single, collaborative handbook.
rad_gruchalski 7y ago
> That said, I'd be surprised if Apple continues with a hard-line stance on that after all of this: I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. After speaking to some recruiters recently, the feeling is that everyone will „do remote for the next 3 to 4 months, until pandemic is over” but afterwards „we are looking forward to seeing our colleagues at the offices in X”.
- holidaygoose 7y ago
  I think we also need to be open minded that maybe 'remote work for everyone' is actually less effective. And it will be hard to show evidence otherwise -- this current test case we're going through -- I doubt people are going to say "wow see, look how productive everyone was during the pandemic when they worked from home."
  - rad_gruchalski 7y ago
    Yes, I agree. I’m hiring myself and understand both sides. Some people like to work in the office, that’s fine. However, „would you like to move to the other side of the country when the pandemic is over, all 300 of our engineers are going to be there, you can do work from home once a week”?
  - castillar76 7y ago
    Oh, don't get me wrong here: for my own work, I'm 100% work-from-office. I like working in an office with a desk and a proper setup and other people around me also doing the same work. Big fan of NOT doing the "let's have everyone work remote it's AWESOMESAUCE!" thing--it's not awesomesauce for everyone, and there's a huge segment for which it's actively detrimental. I was just guessing Apple might soften their stance on it a bit, although it sounds from others like that ain't the case (which also doesn't surprise me--Apple gonna Apple).
    - Frost1x 7y ago
      I like remote work but the benefit of an office, for me, is that it draws a very clear line in the sand between personal and work time. In a field saturated with infinite work queues and constant pressure to empty those infinite queues, it provides physical bounds that are difficult to cross without being obvious. When you work remote it's assumed you have flexible hours and when people need more or less of your time, they queue it up whenever it's good for them, your freetime and personal life can take the back burner.
wayneftw 7y ago
Parts of their workforce work remotely. I know at least some of their call center staff does.
threeseed 7y ago
1. Apple HQ is in Cupertino. But there is development being done all over the world e.g. France, Israel, UK as well as all over the US e.g. Arizona, Texas and the dozens of offices around California. None of this will change. 2. Apple has always had some people working remotely but really just depended on what you were doing. You can't design an iPod remotely. But you can build software. 3. Situation is definitely different now as the quality of internet and tooling is such that remote work can be high quality and the feeling of detachment can be managed. So definitely agree that at Apple and elsewhere you will see more remote work.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Many people who could probably do their job remotely do not do their job remotely.
- mrbombastic 7y ago
  On 2. I have never worked at apple but many job postings I have seen for software engineering positions explicitly called for onsite.
  - ladberg 7y ago
    From what I understand, any Apple remote positions are employees that previously worked onsite and negotiated remote after a few years.
- philsnow 7y ago
  re point 1: I've never worked at Apple and have no idea where the 'fun' projects live, but at Google it's often said that you need to be willing to move to Mountain View for the good stuff / for career progression.
  - opportune 7y ago
    I think this is a lot less true now than it used to be, at least for L<8
microtherion 7y ago
Apple's stance was never as hard line as people make it out to be. While remote is certainly not just there for the asking, there have been remote workers in many lines of work (even hardware engineering) for years (even during Jobs' lifetime). And Apple by now has offices all over the world, so it's not like "everybody bumps into each other in Cupertino" is a universally feasible model anyway.
- Traster 7y ago
  Every company I've worked at has had people who work from home either part of full time, but it's very rare to hear about someone being hired in as a remote worker in a team that's otherwise staffed by office workers. I would say it's a much higher bar to be hired in as a remote worker vs an existing employee moving to being remote because you already whether the employee is productive, fits in the team and has the social connections to be productive.
  - freepor 7y ago
    Yep. We have these in our team too. People who came in the regular way, were absolutely top performers, and then decided to relocate. The decision to the company was let them be remote or let them go, and some were allowed to be remote and some were shown the door.
    - Bahamut 7y ago
      This comment should definitely be emphasized as the golden path to be working remote for a company like Apple. Once you prove your worth as a top performer, you might be able to flex remote working, or maybe remote working on a temporary basis, but to demand it upfront without proving yourself is not something a company like Apple bends to. I have only seen one person in my org successfully get to work remote in my org, he even got to keep his Cupertino comp for the period of time he worked remote - he had to come back to Cupertino within two years though or he would get let go. Otherwise, I have seen top performers get to work remote anywhere they wanted for a period of time as long as they got their work done (the longest I have heard of someone doing so is one month working from Asia and not in an office). I've done it myself for 3 weeks. Being a top performer is a lot of hard work though, and you do end up sacrificing work-life balance to some degree, but Apple treats their top performers very well. Edit: I take that back, I did once have a teammate in a remote office in Europe who only goes into the office there once a week. He does good work though and knows his stuff, and the more remote offices probably have a little more flexibility in some regards due to having to keep to Cupertino hours.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
I know more than a few engineers who were already working for Apple remote long before this pandemic. It is limited I guess in what teams support remote workers, but it isn’t that uncommon.
pandaman 7y ago
You are in luck, last recruiter from Apple who contacted me refused to tell where the job is located unless I've signed an NDA. They actually have sites in WA,FL and OR apart from the CA and I'd be fine with two of these states but I am not signing any NDAs for that.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  I'm surprised people are willing to sign a NDA just for the possibility of getting a job. I haven't encountered that before. (Edited for tone.)
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Every apple employee
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      No, not all of them.
  - pandaman 7y ago
    NDA for an interview is pretty normal everywhere. An NDA for a job location, on the other hand, is not something I have been offered anywhere else.
    - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
      I'm surprised. I've had 8 development jobs in the past 25 years, and in none of my job searches was I asked to sign an NDA.
      - pandaman 7y ago
        Depends on the field, I suppose. Product companies usually do this to protect plans for the new products.
      - 7y ago
Keverw 7y ago
Some companies don’t want to do remote employees due to other logistics like extra requirements to handle for legal, employment, accounting burden than dealing with a single state. So if a company in San Francisco wants to hire someone in Cincinnati, extra stuff for them to do and if you’re the only employee in that area it isn’t worth it. Pretty much a lot of requirements as a sticks and bricks business since some employment laws are based on where the worker is doing the work from. So the only option is you pack up and move across the country or more likely they’ll find someone else. Not an HR expert but a company in San Francisco reached out to me unsolicited (I guess since I put some stuff on Github and NPM) but I wanted to give it a try remotely working from home to see if I was good with their tech stack and stuff before committing to moving but was told no. And then that opens up a lot of other questions and stuff too. All this employment stuff is a mind field it seems, then if your workforce travels to a convention in a neighboring state even could open up issues. Then some states have city taxes, so I guess if your team went somewhere for a day and you still paid them, extra stuff too. Then health insurance too if your company is big enough to require it and can't be sold across state lines. So having a group plan in California is useless, so now you have to get an Ohio plan... and what address do you even use since you don't have an office and someone is working from home? As things become more remote and global, I wish the states could work together to make things simpler. Seems some states would benefit letting residents work remotely without much burden to the out of state business, as the way now it seems like they’ll lose residents who are encouraged to move elsewhere for work instead. It just sounds like a mess. My idea was if I ever got a big company and let people work from home, I'd also open up offices in a few cities across the country people could commute to or work remotely some days. Make them sorta like an office but also sorta like co-working spaces but for staff only. I guess though if you decide to contract out stuff, instead of making them an employee though not as big of a burden then. But if you deal with a business that creates an intellectual property, that could cause some problems unless contracts in place. Since contractors still own the IP, unlike a employee where the company automatically owns the IP. However I was reading something after 35 years, they can reclaim their copyright if a contractor but maybe you could have some failback licensing agreement so you could still use it but no longer have exclusive rights if that'd hold up - but this isn't something I've researched too much on personally. So contracting out tech support probably not a issue since not really creating any IP, but if creating assets like 3D models, sounds, music, etc for a game that could be a problem if planning for a long term brand around it, etc. So if that relates to your business, would want to make sure you research and get the right agreements in place before even contracting out asset creation - but personally I'd rather have an employee instead just to be certain to make sure the company owns any code, graphics, etc.
nosequel 7y ago
It isn't just you. I've talked to Apple on a few occassions and the recruiter has always been firm on the no-remote-work -for-this-team. Maybe there are some teams who allow remote, but their inflexibility on the topic has always made me look elsewhere. The same is true for Google and Facebook who are also hardliners on no remote work ( from my experiences).
- disgruntledphd2 7y ago
  From my personal experience with one of the above, you can't get hired as remote, but if you are considered a "top-perfomer" (i.e. regrettable attrition), then you can probably pull it off. Probably not worth moving to CA for though.
rrdharan 7y ago
Kind of funny in this entire thread there's no one mentioning the posting for a job in Camrose that was on Hacker News only a few days ago: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200144575/software-engineer?team=SFTWR https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200144575/software-engi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642185

uwuhn 7y ago

They're opening Seattle offices this year. Or at least that's the plan? It might be affected by the epidemic.

saagarjha 7y ago
Don't they already have offices there?
tjr225 7y ago
Apple already has an office in downtown Seattle. I know because I've talked to a recruiter about a job there twice.

wuunderbar 7y ago

> I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. Where are we actually seeing a lot of this? Particularly for companies where they primarily sell hardware products such as Apple?

reaperducer 7y ago
Where are we actually seeing a lot of this? Anecdotally, yes. My company was staunchly against remote work or work-from-home of any kind. When I was hired, one of the first things they told me was, "We don't do remote. Don't ask." It's about 5,000 employees in maybe 20 cities around the country. When the virus started spreading, 95% of the workforce was working from home within eight business days. It was a massive mobilization by the IT department. Fortunately, they were already in the process of upgrading everyone's computer, so there were plenty of spares to go around.
- nomel 7y ago
  I think his question was more "where", as in software vs hardware. As a physical product company, you would have to find a way to interact with these physical products, remotely, assuming you couldn't take them home. Apple has a software division, but that software needs to work on future/prototype hardware.
threeseed 7y ago
Almost all remote work is at software companies understandably. But also often it is for the lower lever, just implement this pre-designed and pre-architected feature roles. Most of the decision making and design will get done face to face at the main office. This model seems to be the standard but it's also toxic and cruel. Even the most independent person will feel isolated and segregated from their peers and the decisions that others ultimately make. If you want remote to truly work it has to be the Gitlab model. Everyone is remote, every decision is transparent and all corporate knowledge is captured in a single, collaborative handbook.

rad_gruchalski 7y ago

> That said, I'd be surprised if Apple continues with a hard-line stance on that after all of this: I think we're seeing that an awful lot of work that people insisted had to be local can indeed be done effectively from remote. After speaking to some recruiters recently, the feeling is that everyone will „do remote for the next 3 to 4 months, until pandemic is over” but afterwards „we are looking forward to seeing our colleagues at the offices in X”.

holidaygoose 7y ago
I think we also need to be open minded that maybe 'remote work for everyone' is actually less effective. And it will be hard to show evidence otherwise -- this current test case we're going through -- I doubt people are going to say "wow see, look how productive everyone was during the pandemic when they worked from home."
- rad_gruchalski 7y ago
  Yes, I agree. I’m hiring myself and understand both sides. Some people like to work in the office, that’s fine. However, „would you like to move to the other side of the country when the pandemic is over, all 300 of our engineers are going to be there, you can do work from home once a week”?
- castillar76 7y ago
  Oh, don't get me wrong here: for my own work, I'm 100% work-from-office. I like working in an office with a desk and a proper setup and other people around me also doing the same work. Big fan of NOT doing the "let's have everyone work remote it's AWESOMESAUCE!" thing--it's not awesomesauce for everyone, and there's a huge segment for which it's actively detrimental. I was just guessing Apple might soften their stance on it a bit, although it sounds from others like that ain't the case (which also doesn't surprise me--Apple gonna Apple).
  - Frost1x 7y ago
    I like remote work but the benefit of an office, for me, is that it draws a very clear line in the sand between personal and work time. In a field saturated with infinite work queues and constant pressure to empty those infinite queues, it provides physical bounds that are difficult to cross without being obvious. When you work remote it's assumed you have flexible hours and when people need more or less of your time, they queue it up whenever it's good for them, your freetime and personal life can take the back burner.

wayneftw 7y ago

Parts of their workforce work remotely. I know at least some of their call center staff does.

threeseed 7y ago

1. Apple HQ is in Cupertino. But there is development being done all over the world e.g. France, Israel, UK as well as all over the US e.g. Arizona, Texas and the dozens of offices around California. None of this will change. 2. Apple has always had some people working remotely but really just depended on what you were doing. You can't design an iPod remotely. But you can build software. 3. Situation is definitely different now as the quality of internet and tooling is such that remote work can be high quality and the feeling of detachment can be managed. So definitely agree that at Apple and elsewhere you will see more remote work.

saagarjha 7y ago
Many people who could probably do their job remotely do not do their job remotely.
mrbombastic 7y ago
On 2. I have never worked at apple but many job postings I have seen for software engineering positions explicitly called for onsite.
- ladberg 7y ago
  From what I understand, any Apple remote positions are employees that previously worked onsite and negotiated remote after a few years.
philsnow 7y ago
re point 1: I've never worked at Apple and have no idea where the 'fun' projects live, but at Google it's often said that you need to be willing to move to Mountain View for the good stuff / for career progression.
- opportune 7y ago
  I think this is a lot less true now than it used to be, at least for L<8

microtherion 7y ago

Apple's stance was never as hard line as people make it out to be. While remote is certainly not just there for the asking, there have been remote workers in many lines of work (even hardware engineering) for years (even during Jobs' lifetime). And Apple by now has offices all over the world, so it's not like "everybody bumps into each other in Cupertino" is a universally feasible model anyway.

Traster 7y ago
Every company I've worked at has had people who work from home either part of full time, but it's very rare to hear about someone being hired in as a remote worker in a team that's otherwise staffed by office workers. I would say it's a much higher bar to be hired in as a remote worker vs an existing employee moving to being remote because you already whether the employee is productive, fits in the team and has the social connections to be productive.
- freepor 7y ago
  Yep. We have these in our team too. People who came in the regular way, were absolutely top performers, and then decided to relocate. The decision to the company was let them be remote or let them go, and some were allowed to be remote and some were shown the door.
  - Bahamut 7y ago
    This comment should definitely be emphasized as the golden path to be working remote for a company like Apple. Once you prove your worth as a top performer, you might be able to flex remote working, or maybe remote working on a temporary basis, but to demand it upfront without proving yourself is not something a company like Apple bends to. I have only seen one person in my org successfully get to work remote in my org, he even got to keep his Cupertino comp for the period of time he worked remote - he had to come back to Cupertino within two years though or he would get let go. Otherwise, I have seen top performers get to work remote anywhere they wanted for a period of time as long as they got their work done (the longest I have heard of someone doing so is one month working from Asia and not in an office). I've done it myself for 3 weeks. Being a top performer is a lot of hard work though, and you do end up sacrificing work-life balance to some degree, but Apple treats their top performers very well. Edit: I take that back, I did once have a teammate in a remote office in Europe who only goes into the office there once a week. He does good work though and knows his stuff, and the more remote offices probably have a little more flexibility in some regards due to having to keep to Cupertino hours.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

I know more than a few engineers who were already working for Apple remote long before this pandemic. It is limited I guess in what teams support remote workers, but it isn’t that uncommon.

pandaman 7y ago

You are in luck, last recruiter from Apple who contacted me refused to tell where the job is located unless I've signed an NDA. They actually have sites in WA,FL and OR apart from the CA and I'd be fine with two of these states but I am not signing any NDAs for that.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
I'm surprised people are willing to sign a NDA just for the possibility of getting a job. I haven't encountered that before. (Edited for tone.)
- kortilla 7y ago
  Every apple employee
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    No, not all of them.
- pandaman 7y ago
  NDA for an interview is pretty normal everywhere. An NDA for a job location, on the other hand, is not something I have been offered anywhere else.
  - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
    I'm surprised. I've had 8 development jobs in the past 25 years, and in none of my job searches was I asked to sign an NDA.
    - pandaman 7y ago
      Depends on the field, I suppose. Product companies usually do this to protect plans for the new products.
    - 7y ago

Keverw 7y ago

Some companies don’t want to do remote employees due to other logistics like extra requirements to handle for legal, employment, accounting burden than dealing with a single state. So if a company in San Francisco wants to hire someone in Cincinnati, extra stuff for them to do and if you’re the only employee in that area it isn’t worth it. Pretty much a lot of requirements as a sticks and bricks business since some employment laws are based on where the worker is doing the work from. So the only option is you pack up and move across the country or more likely they’ll find someone else. Not an HR expert but a company in San Francisco reached out to me unsolicited (I guess since I put some stuff on Github and NPM) but I wanted to give it a try remotely working from home to see if I was good with their tech stack and stuff before committing to moving but was told no. And then that opens up a lot of other questions and stuff too. All this employment stuff is a mind field it seems, then if your workforce travels to a convention in a neighboring state even could open up issues. Then some states have city taxes, so I guess if your team went somewhere for a day and you still paid them, extra stuff too. Then health insurance too if your company is big enough to require it and can't be sold across state lines. So having a group plan in California is useless, so now you have to get an Ohio plan... and what address do you even use since you don't have an office and someone is working from home? As things become more remote and global, I wish the states could work together to make things simpler. Seems some states would benefit letting residents work remotely without much burden to the out of state business, as the way now it seems like they’ll lose residents who are encouraged to move elsewhere for work instead. It just sounds like a mess. My idea was if I ever got a big company and let people work from home, I'd also open up offices in a few cities across the country people could commute to or work remotely some days. Make them sorta like an office but also sorta like co-working spaces but for staff only. I guess though if you decide to contract out stuff, instead of making them an employee though not as big of a burden then. But if you deal with a business that creates an intellectual property, that could cause some problems unless contracts in place. Since contractors still own the IP, unlike a employee where the company automatically owns the IP. However I was reading something after 35 years, they can reclaim their copyright if a contractor but maybe you could have some failback licensing agreement so you could still use it but no longer have exclusive rights if that'd hold up - but this isn't something I've researched too much on personally. So contracting out tech support probably not a issue since not really creating any IP, but if creating assets like 3D models, sounds, music, etc for a game that could be a problem if planning for a long term brand around it, etc. So if that relates to your business, would want to make sure you research and get the right agreements in place before even contracting out asset creation - but personally I'd rather have an employee instead just to be certain to make sure the company owns any code, graphics, etc.

nosequel 7y ago

It isn't just you. I've talked to Apple on a few occassions and the recruiter has always been firm on the no-remote-work -for-this-team. Maybe there are some teams who allow remote, but their inflexibility on the topic has always made me look elsewhere. The same is true for Google and Facebook who are also hardliners on no remote work ( from my experiences).

disgruntledphd2 7y ago
From my personal experience with one of the above, you can't get hired as remote, but if you are considered a "top-perfomer" (i.e. regrettable attrition), then you can probably pull it off. Probably not worth moving to CA for though.

rrdharan 7y ago

Kind of funny in this entire thread there's no one mentioning the posting for a job in Camrose that was on Hacker News only a few days ago: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200144575/software-engineer?team=SFTWR https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200144575/software-engi... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642185 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22642185