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Apple employee group rejects planned return to the office

243 points by randycupertino 5y ago

Forge36 5y ago
80 people? It's a voice, but doesn't seem representative of the overall sentiment
- nvr219 5y ago
  I feel like Apple will not have a problem replacing eighty people.
  - foobar33333 5y ago
    And those 80 people will not have a problem finding a remote job. Seems like everything will work out in the end. Remote workers will find remote jobs.
    - tolbish 5y ago
      > Seems like everything will work out in the end. Except for those of us who want to work remotely but don't want to be the squeaky wheel.
      - wernercd 5y ago
        If you don't stand up for what you want, why is that anyone's fault but yours? I get not wanting to be the squeaky wheel... but in the end, it's your loss. And you can voice your opinion and work for what you want without being a "sqeaky wheel" - which I take to have a negative connotation as a "complainy pants".
        tolbish 5y ago
        There are many ways to fight this battle other than writing a letter to Tim Cook.
        wernercd 5y ago
        Absolutely. Sometimes you have to "bring out the big guns" and send a letter to the CEO... sometimes you just have to say "I want to continue to work remotely as has been proven to make me more productive." and be ready to find another job if the company doesn't meet your needs any more. Work is a two way street and Apple employees can probably find work elsewhere easily enough. That's on a personal level though... this happens to be on a "union" level ("employee group"? not sure if that's a union per-se but it's more than just a single person). I think a union (or whatever this is) has the obligation to make these sorts of moves - so there is a difference there. I skimmed the article before and just reread it - 80 people wrote the letter and 2800 joined a slack channel for it - so this does go beyond individuals into a more "our voices will be heard" direction. Still need to stand up to be heard and you can do so without being a squeaky wheel :)
        tolbish 5y ago
        Did I say that making a stand or bringing out the big guns is bad? No. I said that this specific instance (writing a letter to Tim Cook), him saying "No", and remote advocates having to find work elsewhere means that everything does not in fact work out for everyone. Especially for those of us who are not interested in leaving the company.
        wernercd 5y ago
        I didn't say a letter would make everything work out for everyone... I said you have to speak up to have the opportunity - and speaking up can be done without being a "sqeaky wheel" (AKA: complainy pants). Personally, I don't think they'll find a way to make EVERYONE happy. Someone isn't going to get the option they want (100% wfh? work at a remote location because they don't like the main office? etc). There's no way they can. BUT The group speaking up CAN put more pressure to have options that will make more people happy. If hundreds of employees say "Look at the numbers and look at news stories talking about 40%+ of employees willing to leave a job without WFH and etc"... If I say "I'm not open to 100% in the office" and Tim says no? If 80 say it... if 2800 say it... Tim can ignore 1 person. Can he ignore 80? 200? 2000? If you aren't interested in leaving but you want better options then you have two things at odds with each other. You may be interested in staying but if staying means you work in a office you hate or have a commute you hate or whatever... then that's on YOU to decide what's more important - a job at apple or a job with WFH. At the end of the conversation... the letter tells Tim (or whatever CEO gets a similar letter with more than a couple signatures) that he risks losing a sizable number of employees. That letter isn't from one person... it's from a large group of people. It's up to Tim to decide if the risk of losing talent is worth sticking to the currently given options. It's up to you and me if it's worth the lack of option you want to stay at the current job. Like i said... I'd probably look for work if asked to be in the office 5 days a week due to my commute. I don't blame them for asking and given some thought I don't think a letter from a "union" or "employee group" in this circumstance is bad.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Seems like replacing (firing) a group of employees for something so arbitrary is maybe not great for morale.
    - jdlshore 5y ago
      The implication is that they’ll quit if they don’t get to work remotely, not that they’ll be fired.
      - eyelidlessness 5y ago
        Right so the implication is that if Apple arbitrarily refuses to continue accommodating them they’re agreeing to terminate employment. This is how most employment disputes of this nature go: - Emplployer: we won’t/will cease to accommodate you in this meaningful way - Employees: we’re not being accommodated and have a reasonable expectation to be; if you don’t meet those expectations we effectively can’t work for you - Employer: bye!
- pizzetta 5y ago
  How else is the article going to create discord if they can't take a kernel of truth and extrapolate it to make it seem like something bigger?
- hourislate 5y ago
  Most are probably contractors and H1B's who have the fear of job loss hovering over their heads. Apple is Tim Cooks life and legacy, he has nothing else but that company and like all crazy fucking people in those positions probably believes it should hold the same importance to every last employee. I can understand if your twenty something full of piss and vinegar and think your going to change the world, but you have to be nuts or desperate (H1B's/Contractors excused) to give your life to a job once you have a family.
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    I’m mid-career living in the Bay Area and am eagerly looking forward to returning to the office ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - peter422 5y ago
      Yes I don’t understand how ‘going into the office’ means ‘giving your life to the company’. Frankly I find it easier to separate work and home when there is an office.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - spacedcowboy 5y ago
      I’m not. I loathe the open office at Apple Park, I dislike the commute, and I have a nice air-conditioned, insulated shed at the bottom of the garden which is great as a home office. There is nothing I need in Apple Park to do my job, and all I get from my director is how pleased he is with how I’m working (“we couldn’t have done this without you”). Tomorrow, what I’ve been working on for the last 6 months or so will be in the keynote, and it’s awesome :) This is the 4th time I’ve had something in the keynote in my career, and this time it’s kind of disappointing (but totally understandable) that I won’t get to stand up with my team and take a “bow”. There’s one more, multi-year project that’s going to blow people away that I wrote the OS for, but that’s not ready yet. I’m not returning to the office in September, I’m going to leave the company instead, after over a decade of service. I suspect I’m the kind of senior engineer employee Apple would prefer to keep, but the thought of not going back to AP is too enticing to pass up.
- goalieca 5y ago
  If FAANG goes remote, rest assured that many highly capable engineers in cheaper cities like mine are willing to work for them at a discount as we would still come out way ahead compared to local rates.
  - taneq 5y ago
    I'd imagine this is a big consideration for a lot of the people advocating a return to the office in those companies. Once fully remote work is an option (or even mostly-remote work, a 3 hour commute might be acceptable once a fortnight and if that's by plane, half the country is within range) they'll be open to far greater competition from equally talented engineers in much more reasonably priced areas.
  - px43 5y ago
    That's called being a "scab", and is generally not appreciated.
    - taneq 5y ago
      A "scab" is a worker hired to knowingly break a union strike, so unless there's a well-accepted Apple Software Engineers' Union it's not applicable here. And of course it's not appreciated by the union, since their ability to collectively withhold labour from the company is their only real source of power. The ethics of the situation depend entirely on what's actually going on, though - there are plenty of well justified strikes, but there are also strikes where the union is overstepping its bounds. Union and corporate power remain relatively well balanced or one side gets screwed and ultimately everybody loses.
    - xaduha 5y ago
      I think it's called a job market.
thebigman433 5y ago
I think we're gonna see a lot of companies move towards predominately in office work at least a few days a week, while having some specific teams working remotely full time to satisfy the people who want to do that. I think in general, a lot of people are going to prefer a 3/2 hybrid of wfh for software positions. Im personally pretty excited to go back to the office, as Ive found myself hating wfh quite a bit.
- randycupertino 5y ago
  We had hybrid and hot desking before COVID and it was a bit of a pain to deal with. - the hot desks never had the correct dock stations for people's laptops, or "good" chairs had been stolen and left with the sketchy one with the broken wheel. - The people you actually need to talk with will naturally come into the office on a completely different schedule, so they'll only have one overlap day with you. - Everybody else will need to talk with them too, so it'll be impossible to get face time when you're in the office and everybody will be pissed off at each other because of all the meetings. - All business will get done on zoom those other two days.
  - thebigman433 5y ago
    Yea Im personally not a fan of hybrid work if you have a team oriented job, but I think a lot of people will insist on it for at least a while. I think some places might make it work, but overall people will trend back towards wanting to go into the office. The consensus opinion on HN of people wanting to stay remote is not generally the most popular from what Ive found talking to "normal" people.
  - anothernewdude 5y ago
    Schedule? Why are you coming to work on a schedule that isn't "when I have meetings with people I need to see"? It's this arbitrary crap that makes good work practices go bad.
- refurb 5y ago
  I work for a small office and one idea thrown around was get rid of the office entirely. Cheaper to just rent a conference room as needed for team meetings. WeWork revival?
flowerlad 5y ago
The prevailing wisdom, previous to Covid, was that you had to be colocated in an open floor plan, sitting next to each other, and overhearing conversations, in order to facilitate collaboration. Now many companies that spearheaded this (not including Apple, apparently) are saying you don't even have to be in the same building -- or even in the same city! What a turn around! Was the open floor plan thing erroneous?
- ddingus 5y ago
  The open floor plan was cheap. Seriously.
  - nightcracker 5y ago
    It was cheap only in the "penny wise" way.
- bibabaloo 5y ago
  I think something that's not readily apparent with the success so far of remote work during COVID, is that organizations are operating on the organizational 'shared context' that was created before remote work started. It's why I think outsourcing often doesn't work out. Outsourced workers lack an understanding of this shared context which makes for a high level of friction and impairs their ability to deliver the work as imagined by the organization. Right now, IME we're still in the sweet spot of being able to work from this shared context, which I think means the benefits of working from the same physical space are not appreciated. It'll be interesting to see how things play out if remote work becomes the norm. I do think remote work can be successful, if the effort is put in to make sure that collaboration etc. still occurs. However, if companies stay remote and try to run on the fumes of the previously held shared context from pre-COVID then I think it will mean disaster for them.
  - cma 5y ago
    Maybe companies could cycle into a building every 3 years or so like cicadas.
winstonchecksin 5y ago
> While the writing group was relatively small, it reportedly began in a "remote work advocates" Slack channel with about 2,800 members. If so, it might reflect the concerns of a significant number of Apple's non-retail employees. I’m at a different tech company where employees penned a letter to leadership on another matter, which was picked up by news outlets. And that group wasn’t influential at all - they just happened to be the loudest people. If anything, the news media made the issue appear to be orders of magnitude more significant than it really was. Quite frankly, most people didn’t care. IMO there’s really no “news” here. This is clickbait. There are differences in opinions on what office vs remote work looks like in a post COVID world, and that applies to pretty much every company including my own. The slack channel has 2800 people? How is that relevant?
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
They have to realize that Apple is going to want to use that HQ sooner or later. Can see you quickly becoming a second class of employee if you tried to do full remote at Apple.
rickspencer3 5y ago
I'll be curious to see how these companies with these super expensive to build and maintain campuses are going to react. If nothing else, it seems like the sunk cost of having a multi-acre campus will force some companies to stick with the colocated in an office model.
- option 5y ago
  The “space ship” campus is not nice to work in. I was working at Apple when it was built - nobody wanted to move there (other than execs) because it was open-office plan whereas most full time employees in other campuses in Cupertino all had individual offices. Also, if you significantly above average contributor you pretty much can dictate when and where you work even before the pandemic (with some common sense limits). A famous example - intel based mac were initially developed by someone working remotely.
  - randycupertino 5y ago
    > nobody wanted to move there (other than execs) because it was open-office plan whereas most full time employees in other campuses in Cupertino all had individual offices. Yuck. I have a cube at my office and even though it has an open "door" space, it has high walls and just that little bit of privacy is so nice.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    > Also, if you significantly above average contributor you pretty much can dictate when and where you work even before the pandemic (with some common sense limits). Yup. I’ve been mostly remote most of my career for this reason. I’ve only once had to justify it beyond my contribution once (got a doctor’s note stating that the noise in an office would make me less productive, which is true). It was no surprise that I didn’t want to keep working there for other reasons not so long after.
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      The doctor's note is fucking brilliant, and probably would have saved me a few thousand headaches.
samatman 5y ago
The Apple Donut has a very slightly larger outer diameter than the Pentagon. It's the mother of all sunk costs. It would be cool if they just packed the whole thing with servers, kept a few conference rooms and the theatre, and called it a day; but something tells me they won't.
sumthinprofound 5y ago
Horribly meandering letter. I guess it makes a case, but I'm unpersuaded. Not something I would sign my name to.
discordance 5y ago
So inconsiderate of Cook… Maybe the employees would feel better about going back into the office if they had some balloon walls: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/technology/google-back-to-office-workers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/technology/google-back-to...
- illustriousbear 5y ago
  A frosted sliding door couldn't cut it? what a stupid engineering decision. All of this looks like a dystopian nightmare. Glad I never worked in big tech.
gnicholas 5y ago
Interestingly, Steve Jobs was famous for having put the bathrooms at Pixar in a central area so that employees would run into each other. https://hbr.org/2013/07/think-carefully-about-where-yo https://hbr.org/2013/07/think-carefully-about-where-yo
- illustriousbear 5y ago
  Yeah I do my most productive conversations when I'm rushing to do a big shit.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    :) It's more that employees became familiar to each other through frequent small encounters, which wouldn't have happened had each group their own common facilities. The important conversations weren't expected to happen with one party frantically holding it in.
    - illustriousbear 5y ago
      When I'm trying to take care of basic bodily functions, I don't need some exec using it as an opportunity to manipulate me into workplace / social interaction.
      - Apocryphon 5y ago
        Jobs was basically just reinventing the classic water cooler except with more tasteless and unpleasant bodily functions.
  - Raptor22 5y ago
    Sigh... I laughed hard at your comment, but it reminds me of just the sheer amount of idiotic shit management comes up with... It's like they're living in a totally different universe from the ICs.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
mensetmanusman 5y ago
As others have mentioned, I also wonder how much of this annoyance to return has to do with the failed open-office concept. People more-or-less occasionally like having their own place during work where they can some action (e.g. closing their door) to focus 100% without interruption. Cost-cutting open-office plans that let management see their flock typing away destroyed this option, and covid has reminded people how valuable and productive this option is/was (for those at home with this option). We are now in new territory, as we are experiencing the end of the first pandemic during the information age. What we decide now will resonate for many years. Something to think about: for most millennia of human experience, where one worked and where one lived amongst the family and community were one and the same. It’s only a blip in post-industrial history have we had this situation of leaving the family (et al.) behind to pull levers and receive $coins. If the internet lets us go back… that would be huge
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Everyone would be going back into the office... if there wasn't a shortage of skilled workers to fill positions. As the labor market is, companies have to bend to some of labor's demands in order to attract and retain talent. This isn't the worst state of affairs.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    You say that like the company's purpose is to be as bad to employees as possible. I get where the idea comes from, but that's not true everywhere and companies did remote work before it was forced on them. It doesn't have to be "bend to some of labor's demands", but rather "choose most effective hiring and working strategy".
    - glhaynes 5y ago
      >You say that like the company's purpose is to be as bad to employees as possible. Where? I don’t see that in what they wrote.
      - deleted 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dghughes 5y ago
Who is going to support them? People working from home (maybe not from tech org like Apple) from a non-tech organization forget that computers don't fix themselves. Their work is now totally dependent on their ISP too. An org's IT department employees can't be pulled in 100 different directions to go fix a mouse or "the Internet" every day.
- viraptor 5y ago
  Anecdata: I experienced as frequent internet outages at various offices as I did working from home. With a fallback to mobile internet, it was never a problem for people in my experience. It's actually less disruptive when one random person has issues than when the whole office goes down. Mouse issues? Get out and buy a new one, submit the receipt to claim back money. This is likely much cheaper than the IT person's time. As a bonus you choose a mouse rather than getting corporate-issue-mouse-01. I get that there are other issues that can come up, but in practice, I've just not seen it from the employee point of view. Maybe the IT dept has some better stats to publish.
  - notriddle 5y ago
    > Anecdata: I experienced as frequent internet outages at various offices as I did working from home. That’s not the point. If everyone is in an office, an outage will simply affect everyone at once. If everyone is working from home, and you’re sufficiently distributed, then it’s possible that the company winds up with at least one employee out on bad internet every day. Depending on the sort of work they do, one or the other might be preferable.
mandeepj 5y ago
Companies asking - their employees to return to office - are still in the mindset of pre-Covid time period - which does not exist now.
dagmx 5y ago
A lot of the reporting titles make this sound like the employees want across the board remote work. The letter specifically states that they want teams to be able to define their own remote/local needs versus being beholden to a company wide policy. They also ask that the company track how many people reject job offers or leave due to the remote work policy so that the teams can make informed decisions. This seems really fair. Some teams will need to be fully on site, others don't. Right now they're beholden to the new policy, whereas if these changes are accepted, they could do what's best for the team.
xyzelement 5y ago
There's no surprise that some large/small subset of employees want to be full-remote. If you're someone who hates the commute, has relocated, or just plain don't want to be around people - going back to the office feels like all downside from your perspective. If you're responsible for the larger organization, your pros and cons are different. The IC may not care about subtle deleterious effects of remote work on culture and collaboration but top management has to care about that very much. Personal story: I started a new job during COVID and haven't met any of my colleagues. This started off fine because I was building out a team and connecting with stakeholders, so there was a lot of shared context being built up together and it went fine. Now, I've been asked to take on a few more teams and holly shit it's hard. I struggle to visualize who is on what team because I never see them "together" in physical space. It's also hard to become aware of people I am not working with but should be. For example, it took me a while to realize that there's a "support" team doing front-line defense for one of the teams. In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower. The point is that the employees have much simpler consideration: do I like/want to go to the office or not. If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern.
- hzay 5y ago
  This is a really important point that's not getting voiced much here. Numerically there are more ICs in a company/forum/world, so the managerial voices don't get heard in places where the numerical advantage matters. The only person in leadership position I could ask in real life told me IC productivity might be higher than before but team & org productivity has plummeted drastically. Wondering if this is true across the industry?
  - spacedcowboy 5y ago
    That’s not what my (Apple) leadership told us. Individual and team productivity rose this year, to the extent that they started giving us a day off once per month or so. They were concerned that people were over-working, that the situation everyone was in was too stressful, and we needed “reconnect days” periodically.
uranaivetechbro 5y ago
Working from home all the time and avoiding an office is probably amazing if you are single or married without kids. Let me just say, you are all a bit naive... heh. If you have kids (and they are at home 24x7 because they are too young for vaccines) - WORKING AT HOME SUCKS BEYOND BELIEF. I would give literally anything to go back to an office and get some work done in peace and quiet. We all know housing is tight in the Bay and if you have a "normal" 4 person family in a "normal" 3 bedroom 2 bath house, that's fine unless somehow both adults have to work from home and bigger places are financially out of reach. It's beyond amazing to me that this point hasn't been raised AT ALL in this debate. I think you are all naive tech-bros :)
AngeloAnolin 5y ago
Working from home contributes to the well being of employees. While a lot may not notice it, that 1 hour (at least) daily you save (from commute / preparing) can be used for activities that can contribute to one's personal health (mental & physical). Remote work works.
- amazingman 5y ago
  Remote work is not a mental health panacea. Working from home (further) blurs the psychological distinction between being and not being “at work”. This can be surprisingly difficult for many people to notice, let alone deal with in a healthy way. How many of us have found ourselves struggling to carve out the time to shower in a given day? I’ve commiserated about that struggle with multiple coworkers over the past year. This is just scratching the surface of the surface of the difficulties of remote work.
spoonjim 5y ago
Does anyone know what remote work processes Apple has used to ship such good hardware in 2021? I feel like these employees might have a point - Apple has shipped earth shattering hardware improvements on the Macintosh in a mostly remote work environment.
- nottorp 5y ago
  ... like the ethernet port on the ... power brick? They shipped one major hardware improvement, and that has been an architectural change that took years. However, the problem with removing perks that employees like is you're going to lose your best people, because those can just quit and have another job next week. You'll be left with those that can't afford to quit because they won't find another job easily, which in IT means not so competent. I remember the rumor mill when Marissa Mayer canceled work from home at Yahoo saying they're losing all their good people. Considering what's left of Yahoo it looks like the rumors were right.
MattGaiser 5y ago
I raised this in another thread, but how much collaboration does the typical software engineer need? It obviously varies by company (Pivotal being the extreme), but in every company I have been in, there have been days where I have needed no substantial interaction with anyone else beyond maybe 5-10 Slack messages. Now, as a software engineer with a product manager, information mostly flows one way as well, except for pings back to indicate when work is complete. On teams where software engineers are more than implementers, I can see this mattering, but a lot of us are implementers, and the advantages of quiet time to work outweigh in person time spent for the minimal decision making we do. I could wipe out virtually every meeting I have beyond daily standup and very little would change.
- swiley 5y ago
  Yeah, I feel like PRs and standups and the occasional design meeting/email discussion are plenty. It's good to share ideas but that happens anyway if the team members are comfortable with eachother.
stadium 5y ago
I suspect that corporate real estate will go the way of legacy costs like pensions. I'm excited for companies who can use this to their advantage, and can deliver with higher productivity and better margins than the entrenched players.
gigatexal 5y ago
For everyone commenting on the commute being terrible: shuttles are nice but what the US and California more specifically needs is a proper mass transit system a la the EU (works really well here in Berlin) complete with trains and light rail that bypasses the congestion.
maxpert 5y ago
I have lived in Santa Clara and every day done a 1.5 to 2 hour commute one way to go to my office in SF. I know people who drive 1 - 2 hours to Apple or pay insane high rents. Then combine that with limited space on desk and insane distractions of getting pulled over by someone who was stuck on a very small configuration which he/she could have figured out at his/her own by spending 15 mins (rather than borrowing me for 5 mins and disrupting my thought process worth hours). I believe what COVID made me realize was the fact how much bullshit I was keeping up with (including social pressure stuff) to just be “good team player”. You can think of me as introvert but I am very talkative and social person.I believe 3 hours worth of commute and the ceremony stand-ups are not required when you have technology at disposal. Google, Microsoft, and Apple should be leading the charge on this technology centric culture rather than being backwards, stuck in time. If I am asked today to return back to office I would rather resign and be freelance developer than being stuck in the company policy prison again.
- ngc248 5y ago
  Most of the people in management would be extroverts so they are the ones clamouring for back to office and their work also by nature is mostly collaborative mostly talking to ppl etc. For us ICs, even though we also collaborate, once you have a design etc or after task allocation, its mostly individual work and you get disrupted if you have any distractions. But its hard for management to understand this, since they view everything thru their lens.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
I don't understand why higher-higher ups are now pushing to return to office... by limiting actual employees in the office, it gives the flexibility to outsourcing, making them save money in the short-term. It's almost like an own-goal
freddealmeida 5y ago
I'm a proponent for returning to the office. Working from home has never appealed to me from a number of perspectives (mixing work and life just seems tiring, lack of resources, serendipity, space, distractions, lack of evaluation metrics, etc). I think working at the office creates a sense of community and a focus on team over the individual. Which I think is the opposite of working at home; notwithstanding all the tools we have gained in the last few years that try to bridge that. As well, self-management is not the strongest skill set among young engineers, many need management, coaching, evaluation based not only on work quality but also interpersonal and team commitments. Working at home also risks your work being considered non-core or worthy of outsourcing or automation. The risk that you won't align well with company goals and vision is real and slowly (if not almost immediately) being considered less important to the team and the company itself. I do think there is a place for working at home where efforts to operationalize exist but most firms don't have the capability or insight to do this. I think Apple has an entrenched culture of working together in the office. And while this may have worked over the last few months (year?) I'm sure they don't see this as a long term strategy. Nor do we have an insight at the structural issues that working at home may have cost the firm over this time. (not to mention the cost of build that UFO) My vote is go back to the office. Or resign yourself to consultant, and make the risk you are taking clearly part of your strategy to monetize your work. I think this approach to use their union (?) to push operational methods is incorrect and they are certainly pissing off people do this.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > lack of evaluation metrics What office specific metrics are there, at least in tech?
  - ngc248 5y ago
    Exactly, at least in WFH, the primary thing which would be evaluated is the work done. I think in the office its your exposure and image which matters more which add in to your evaluation, mostly benefiting extroverts.
- Buttons840 5y ago
Jedd 5y ago
In Australia we tend to be 5-15 years behind most of the (dubious or otherwise) business trends from EU / US -- though every place I've worked here since the 1990's has eagerly embraced open office. Reasons pushed typically include the common 'improved collaboration', but it's tacitly understood it's all down to real estate costs. Office space is expensive in major Australian cities. I'm with a government agency that was in the throes of moving to a hot-desking arrangement when the pandemic arrived. On top of 'improved collaboration' there were some benefits claimed that I can't believe were made in good faith, including gems such as 'more light between desks'. It wasn't clear who thought the inter-desk spaces were too dark. (These are floors with standard, horrible, fluorescent tubes flooding every surface.) The week that our team worked from home while our particular area was being renovated (primarily the removal of partitions to allow everyone to always have at least two faces in constant peripheral vision left and right of your monitor) was the week that a lockdown was called here, and it was months before any of us stepped back into the office. Even now we're one or two days a week, and some are eschewing returning entirely for the time. Perversely the poor coordination of our federal administration on the vaccination front means that we're still at least 8 months away from being able to make any claims of safety via herd immunity. I don't doubt that someone with expensive shoes is running the numbers, trying to work out the best trade-off for offloading some office space vs ensuring useful productivity & mental health for the staff vs not raising the ire of staff or unions vs attracting good candidates beyond the current situation. I don't envy them. On the other hand, I had two years pre-pandemic being on-site with the organisation & the team -- my job would be insanely difficult if I'd come into it while everyone was remote. I guess the claim could be made that this reflects some lack of organisational sophistication - the reliance on knowing who to talk to, rather than having documentation and systems in place to help new or existing staff navigate that, but projecting backwards I don't believe I've worked in any organisation that had/has that. I expect more organisations will, coming out of this pandemic, reconsider that problem.
hota_mazi 5y ago
Apple is famous for requiring most of their engineers to work 60 to 90 hours a week. It should come as no surprise that their leadership is requiring them to come back to the office, because without that, they cannot enforce such crazy overworking requirements.
darthrupert 5y ago
You should unionize, then you can demand things. Like in this case, +20% salary for coming to office. Or, like I previously suggested, make the commute salaried time. That should provide mostly sane incentives against wasting hours of everyone's time on the road.
holografix 5y ago
Anecdotally it seems like a big part of the reluctance to go back to the office relates to comfort, flexibility, autonomy and the nature of knowledge work. Not having to dress up or commute, sleeping in an extra hour, taking breaks without anxiety, having access to more comfortable quieter environments l, etc all seem to fall under the comfort category. Dealing with kids’ schedules and working out of more cost efficient and safer locations is a gain in flexibility. I know several people who don’t really work 9-5 at all anymore. They mostly log on at 10 answer all communications and send some of their own. Do some exercise and eat around 1pm. Work another 4 hours stop to spend time with kids and family then have dinner and do another 2 hours before bed. That autonomy is nice to have.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  One of the great benefits of WFH has been my ability to treat my job as a series of tasks rather than a defined work period. Then i can just put everything I need to do into a list and go through it in the most efficient way for everything.
oblib 5y ago
I've been working from home programming for about 25 years now. I first heard about the concept of "telecommuting" back in the 1970s while sitting in gridlock traffic on the 405 in the Valley and decided right then I wanted to figure out how to do that. In 1987 I calculated how much time I'd been sitting traffic while sitting in gridlock on the Ventura fwy and decided to start working on a way to telecommute. Learning how to code seemed to the best of the options. It took about eight years before I started a business, so around 1995. Then I moved to where I really wanted to live. Pretty much on the edge of real rural. I have neighbors not more than 10 miles away who still can't get high speed internet, and mines on the slow end of what can be called that. But it works. I'm just sending code out. I have no idea what it's like to work at a tech company but I can tell you that for me working at home has been awesome. Not having distractions is huge. Being able to work when I'm sharp, rather that's early in the morning or late at night, is huge. Not having to get up and tangle with cars and traffic and feeling rushed, that's really huge. Making myself coffee and sitting down at my desk to review what I need to work on and then get started on it when I'm ready is wonderful. I don't drive more than 1500 miles a year now unless I take a road trip, and I don't do that often. I live in a pretty sweet spot. Friends visit me and most of my family ended up moving close to me too. The truth is working from home is really what all of you should be doing. Tech companies should figure out how to leverage what they've learned from this pandemic. Some people can be more productive working from home. Let them.
midrus 5y ago
My company is also pushing for a return to the office. I'm in no way going back. I'm ready to change jobs if necessary. To me remote now is one of the top things I'll be looking at when looking for a new job. Good to see others prefer to go to an office, good for them. We need diversity.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
> The letter also agrees that even though collaboration drives success, physical co-location is less of a contributing factor because the company is already distributed with offices worldwide. The "need" to be in the office is a fallacy if the same company is located in more than a single office.

80 people? It's a voice, but doesn't seem representative of the overall sentiment

nvr219 5y ago
I feel like Apple will not have a problem replacing eighty people.
- foobar33333 5y ago
  And those 80 people will not have a problem finding a remote job. Seems like everything will work out in the end. Remote workers will find remote jobs.
  - tolbish 5y ago
    > Seems like everything will work out in the end. Except for those of us who want to work remotely but don't want to be the squeaky wheel.
    - wernercd 5y ago
      If you don't stand up for what you want, why is that anyone's fault but yours? I get not wanting to be the squeaky wheel... but in the end, it's your loss. And you can voice your opinion and work for what you want without being a "sqeaky wheel" - which I take to have a negative connotation as a "complainy pants".
      - tolbish 5y ago
        There are many ways to fight this battle other than writing a letter to Tim Cook.
        wernercd 5y ago
        Absolutely. Sometimes you have to "bring out the big guns" and send a letter to the CEO... sometimes you just have to say "I want to continue to work remotely as has been proven to make me more productive." and be ready to find another job if the company doesn't meet your needs any more. Work is a two way street and Apple employees can probably find work elsewhere easily enough. That's on a personal level though... this happens to be on a "union" level ("employee group"? not sure if that's a union per-se but it's more than just a single person). I think a union (or whatever this is) has the obligation to make these sorts of moves - so there is a difference there. I skimmed the article before and just reread it - 80 people wrote the letter and 2800 joined a slack channel for it - so this does go beyond individuals into a more "our voices will be heard" direction. Still need to stand up to be heard and you can do so without being a squeaky wheel :)
        tolbish 5y ago
        Did I say that making a stand or bringing out the big guns is bad? No. I said that this specific instance (writing a letter to Tim Cook), him saying "No", and remote advocates having to find work elsewhere means that everything does not in fact work out for everyone. Especially for those of us who are not interested in leaving the company.
        wernercd 5y ago
        I didn't say a letter would make everything work out for everyone... I said you have to speak up to have the opportunity - and speaking up can be done without being a "sqeaky wheel" (AKA: complainy pants). Personally, I don't think they'll find a way to make EVERYONE happy. Someone isn't going to get the option they want (100% wfh? work at a remote location because they don't like the main office? etc). There's no way they can. BUT The group speaking up CAN put more pressure to have options that will make more people happy. If hundreds of employees say "Look at the numbers and look at news stories talking about 40%+ of employees willing to leave a job without WFH and etc"... If I say "I'm not open to 100% in the office" and Tim says no? If 80 say it... if 2800 say it... Tim can ignore 1 person. Can he ignore 80? 200? 2000? If you aren't interested in leaving but you want better options then you have two things at odds with each other. You may be interested in staying but if staying means you work in a office you hate or have a commute you hate or whatever... then that's on YOU to decide what's more important - a job at apple or a job with WFH. At the end of the conversation... the letter tells Tim (or whatever CEO gets a similar letter with more than a couple signatures) that he risks losing a sizable number of employees. That letter isn't from one person... it's from a large group of people. It's up to Tim to decide if the risk of losing talent is worth sticking to the currently given options. It's up to you and me if it's worth the lack of option you want to stay at the current job. Like i said... I'd probably look for work if asked to be in the office 5 days a week due to my commute. I don't blame them for asking and given some thought I don't think a letter from a "union" or "employee group" in this circumstance is bad.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Seems like replacing (firing) a group of employees for something so arbitrary is maybe not great for morale.
  - jdlshore 5y ago
    The implication is that they’ll quit if they don’t get to work remotely, not that they’ll be fired.
    - eyelidlessness 5y ago
      Right so the implication is that if Apple arbitrarily refuses to continue accommodating them they’re agreeing to terminate employment. This is how most employment disputes of this nature go: - Emplployer: we won’t/will cease to accommodate you in this meaningful way - Employees: we’re not being accommodated and have a reasonable expectation to be; if you don’t meet those expectations we effectively can’t work for you - Employer: bye!
pizzetta 5y ago
How else is the article going to create discord if they can't take a kernel of truth and extrapolate it to make it seem like something bigger?
hourislate 5y ago
Most are probably contractors and H1B's who have the fear of job loss hovering over their heads. Apple is Tim Cooks life and legacy, he has nothing else but that company and like all crazy fucking people in those positions probably believes it should hold the same importance to every last employee. I can understand if your twenty something full of piss and vinegar and think your going to change the world, but you have to be nuts or desperate (H1B's/Contractors excused) to give your life to a job once you have a family.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  I’m mid-career living in the Bay Area and am eagerly looking forward to returning to the office ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - peter422 5y ago
    Yes I don’t understand how ‘going into the office’ means ‘giving your life to the company’. Frankly I find it easier to separate work and home when there is an office.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - spacedcowboy 5y ago
    I’m not. I loathe the open office at Apple Park, I dislike the commute, and I have a nice air-conditioned, insulated shed at the bottom of the garden which is great as a home office. There is nothing I need in Apple Park to do my job, and all I get from my director is how pleased he is with how I’m working (“we couldn’t have done this without you”). Tomorrow, what I’ve been working on for the last 6 months or so will be in the keynote, and it’s awesome :) This is the 4th time I’ve had something in the keynote in my career, and this time it’s kind of disappointing (but totally understandable) that I won’t get to stand up with my team and take a “bow”. There’s one more, multi-year project that’s going to blow people away that I wrote the OS for, but that’s not ready yet. I’m not returning to the office in September, I’m going to leave the company instead, after over a decade of service. I suspect I’m the kind of senior engineer employee Apple would prefer to keep, but the thought of not going back to AP is too enticing to pass up.
goalieca 5y ago
If FAANG goes remote, rest assured that many highly capable engineers in cheaper cities like mine are willing to work for them at a discount as we would still come out way ahead compared to local rates.
- taneq 5y ago
  I'd imagine this is a big consideration for a lot of the people advocating a return to the office in those companies. Once fully remote work is an option (or even mostly-remote work, a 3 hour commute might be acceptable once a fortnight and if that's by plane, half the country is within range) they'll be open to far greater competition from equally talented engineers in much more reasonably priced areas.
- px43 5y ago
  That's called being a "scab", and is generally not appreciated.
  - taneq 5y ago
    A "scab" is a worker hired to knowingly break a union strike, so unless there's a well-accepted Apple Software Engineers' Union it's not applicable here. And of course it's not appreciated by the union, since their ability to collectively withhold labour from the company is their only real source of power. The ethics of the situation depend entirely on what's actually going on, though - there are plenty of well justified strikes, but there are also strikes where the union is overstepping its bounds. Union and corporate power remain relatively well balanced or one side gets screwed and ultimately everybody loses.
  - xaduha 5y ago
    I think it's called a job market.

I think we're gonna see a lot of companies move towards predominately in office work at least a few days a week, while having some specific teams working remotely full time to satisfy the people who want to do that. I think in general, a lot of people are going to prefer a 3/2 hybrid of wfh for software positions. Im personally pretty excited to go back to the office, as Ive found myself hating wfh quite a bit.

randycupertino 5y ago
We had hybrid and hot desking before COVID and it was a bit of a pain to deal with. - the hot desks never had the correct dock stations for people's laptops, or "good" chairs had been stolen and left with the sketchy one with the broken wheel. - The people you actually need to talk with will naturally come into the office on a completely different schedule, so they'll only have one overlap day with you. - Everybody else will need to talk with them too, so it'll be impossible to get face time when you're in the office and everybody will be pissed off at each other because of all the meetings. - All business will get done on zoom those other two days.
- thebigman433 5y ago
  Yea Im personally not a fan of hybrid work if you have a team oriented job, but I think a lot of people will insist on it for at least a while. I think some places might make it work, but overall people will trend back towards wanting to go into the office. The consensus opinion on HN of people wanting to stay remote is not generally the most popular from what Ive found talking to "normal" people.
- anothernewdude 5y ago
  Schedule? Why are you coming to work on a schedule that isn't "when I have meetings with people I need to see"? It's this arbitrary crap that makes good work practices go bad.
refurb 5y ago
I work for a small office and one idea thrown around was get rid of the office entirely. Cheaper to just rent a conference room as needed for team meetings. WeWork revival?

flowerlad 5y ago

The prevailing wisdom, previous to Covid, was that you had to be colocated in an open floor plan, sitting next to each other, and overhearing conversations, in order to facilitate collaboration. Now many companies that spearheaded this (not including Apple, apparently) are saying you don't even have to be in the same building -- or even in the same city! What a turn around! Was the open floor plan thing erroneous?

ddingus 5y ago
The open floor plan was cheap. Seriously.
- nightcracker 5y ago
  It was cheap only in the "penny wise" way.
bibabaloo 5y ago
I think something that's not readily apparent with the success so far of remote work during COVID, is that organizations are operating on the organizational 'shared context' that was created before remote work started. It's why I think outsourcing often doesn't work out. Outsourced workers lack an understanding of this shared context which makes for a high level of friction and impairs their ability to deliver the work as imagined by the organization. Right now, IME we're still in the sweet spot of being able to work from this shared context, which I think means the benefits of working from the same physical space are not appreciated. It'll be interesting to see how things play out if remote work becomes the norm. I do think remote work can be successful, if the effort is put in to make sure that collaboration etc. still occurs. However, if companies stay remote and try to run on the fumes of the previously held shared context from pre-COVID then I think it will mean disaster for them.
- cma 5y ago
  Maybe companies could cycle into a building every 3 years or so like cicadas.

winstonchecksin 5y ago

> While the writing group was relatively small, it reportedly began in a "remote work advocates" Slack channel with about 2,800 members. If so, it might reflect the concerns of a significant number of Apple's non-retail employees. I’m at a different tech company where employees penned a letter to leadership on another matter, which was picked up by news outlets. And that group wasn’t influential at all - they just happened to be the loudest people. If anything, the news media made the issue appear to be orders of magnitude more significant than it really was. Quite frankly, most people didn’t care. IMO there’s really no “news” here. This is clickbait. There are differences in opinions on what office vs remote work looks like in a post COVID world, and that applies to pretty much every company including my own. The slack channel has 2800 people? How is that relevant?

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

They have to realize that Apple is going to want to use that HQ sooner or later. Can see you quickly becoming a second class of employee if you tried to do full remote at Apple.

rickspencer3 5y ago

I'll be curious to see how these companies with these super expensive to build and maintain campuses are going to react. If nothing else, it seems like the sunk cost of having a multi-acre campus will force some companies to stick with the colocated in an office model.

option 5y ago
The “space ship” campus is not nice to work in. I was working at Apple when it was built - nobody wanted to move there (other than execs) because it was open-office plan whereas most full time employees in other campuses in Cupertino all had individual offices. Also, if you significantly above average contributor you pretty much can dictate when and where you work even before the pandemic (with some common sense limits). A famous example - intel based mac were initially developed by someone working remotely.
- randycupertino 5y ago
  > nobody wanted to move there (other than execs) because it was open-office plan whereas most full time employees in other campuses in Cupertino all had individual offices. Yuck. I have a cube at my office and even though it has an open "door" space, it has high walls and just that little bit of privacy is so nice.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  > Also, if you significantly above average contributor you pretty much can dictate when and where you work even before the pandemic (with some common sense limits). Yup. I’ve been mostly remote most of my career for this reason. I’ve only once had to justify it beyond my contribution once (got a doctor’s note stating that the noise in an office would make me less productive, which is true). It was no surprise that I didn’t want to keep working there for other reasons not so long after.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    The doctor's note is fucking brilliant, and probably would have saved me a few thousand headaches.

samatman 5y ago

The Apple Donut has a very slightly larger outer diameter than the Pentagon. It's the mother of all sunk costs. It would be cool if they just packed the whole thing with servers, kept a few conference rooms and the theatre, and called it a day; but something tells me they won't.

sumthinprofound 5y ago

Horribly meandering letter. I guess it makes a case, but I'm unpersuaded. Not something I would sign my name to.

discordance 5y ago

So inconsiderate of Cook… Maybe the employees would feel better about going back into the office if they had some balloon walls: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/technology/google-back-to-office-workers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/30/technology/google-back-to...

illustriousbear 5y ago
A frosted sliding door couldn't cut it? what a stupid engineering decision. All of this looks like a dystopian nightmare. Glad I never worked in big tech.

gnicholas 5y ago

Interestingly, Steve Jobs was famous for having put the bathrooms at Pixar in a central area so that employees would run into each other. https://hbr.org/2013/07/think-carefully-about-where-yo https://hbr.org/2013/07/think-carefully-about-where-yo

illustriousbear 5y ago
Yeah I do my most productive conversations when I'm rushing to do a big shit.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  :) It's more that employees became familiar to each other through frequent small encounters, which wouldn't have happened had each group their own common facilities. The important conversations weren't expected to happen with one party frantically holding it in.
  - illustriousbear 5y ago
    When I'm trying to take care of basic bodily functions, I don't need some exec using it as an opportunity to manipulate me into workplace / social interaction.
    - Apocryphon 5y ago
      Jobs was basically just reinventing the classic water cooler except with more tasteless and unpleasant bodily functions.
- Raptor22 5y ago
  Sigh... I laughed hard at your comment, but it reminds me of just the sheer amount of idiotic shit management comes up with... It's like they're living in a totally different universe from the ICs.
  - spoonjim 5y ago

mensetmanusman 5y ago

As others have mentioned, I also wonder how much of this annoyance to return has to do with the failed open-office concept. People more-or-less occasionally like having their own place during work where they can some action (e.g. closing their door) to focus 100% without interruption. Cost-cutting open-office plans that let management see their flock typing away destroyed this option, and covid has reminded people how valuable and productive this option is/was (for those at home with this option). We are now in new territory, as we are experiencing the end of the first pandemic during the information age. What we decide now will resonate for many years. Something to think about: for most millennia of human experience, where one worked and where one lived amongst the family and community were one and the same. It’s only a blip in post-industrial history have we had this situation of leaving the family (et al.) behind to pull levers and receive $coins. If the internet lets us go back… that would be huge

ethbr0 5y ago
Everyone would be going back into the office... if there wasn't a shortage of skilled workers to fill positions. As the labor market is, companies have to bend to some of labor's demands in order to attract and retain talent. This isn't the worst state of affairs.
- viraptor 5y ago
  You say that like the company's purpose is to be as bad to employees as possible. I get where the idea comes from, but that's not true everywhere and companies did remote work before it was forced on them. It doesn't have to be "bend to some of labor's demands", but rather "choose most effective hiring and working strategy".
  - glhaynes 5y ago
    >You say that like the company's purpose is to be as bad to employees as possible. Where? I don’t see that in what they wrote.
    - deleted 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dghughes 5y ago

Who is going to support them? People working from home (maybe not from tech org like Apple) from a non-tech organization forget that computers don't fix themselves. Their work is now totally dependent on their ISP too. An org's IT department employees can't be pulled in 100 different directions to go fix a mouse or "the Internet" every day.

viraptor 5y ago
Anecdata: I experienced as frequent internet outages at various offices as I did working from home. With a fallback to mobile internet, it was never a problem for people in my experience. It's actually less disruptive when one random person has issues than when the whole office goes down. Mouse issues? Get out and buy a new one, submit the receipt to claim back money. This is likely much cheaper than the IT person's time. As a bonus you choose a mouse rather than getting corporate-issue-mouse-01. I get that there are other issues that can come up, but in practice, I've just not seen it from the employee point of view. Maybe the IT dept has some better stats to publish.
- notriddle 5y ago
  > Anecdata: I experienced as frequent internet outages at various offices as I did working from home. That’s not the point. If everyone is in an office, an outage will simply affect everyone at once. If everyone is working from home, and you’re sufficiently distributed, then it’s possible that the company winds up with at least one employee out on bad internet every day. Depending on the sort of work they do, one or the other might be preferable.

mandeepj 5y ago

Companies asking - their employees to return to office - are still in the mindset of pre-Covid time period - which does not exist now.

dagmx 5y ago

A lot of the reporting titles make this sound like the employees want across the board remote work. The letter specifically states that they want teams to be able to define their own remote/local needs versus being beholden to a company wide policy. They also ask that the company track how many people reject job offers or leave due to the remote work policy so that the teams can make informed decisions. This seems really fair. Some teams will need to be fully on site, others don't. Right now they're beholden to the new policy, whereas if these changes are accepted, they could do what's best for the team.

xyzelement 5y ago

There's no surprise that some large/small subset of employees want to be full-remote. If you're someone who hates the commute, has relocated, or just plain don't want to be around people - going back to the office feels like all downside from your perspective. If you're responsible for the larger organization, your pros and cons are different. The IC may not care about subtle deleterious effects of remote work on culture and collaboration but top management has to care about that very much. Personal story: I started a new job during COVID and haven't met any of my colleagues. This started off fine because I was building out a team and connecting with stakeholders, so there was a lot of shared context being built up together and it went fine. Now, I've been asked to take on a few more teams and holly shit it's hard. I struggle to visualize who is on what team because I never see them "together" in physical space. It's also hard to become aware of people I am not working with but should be. For example, it took me a while to realize that there's a "support" team doing front-line defense for one of the teams. In a real office, I'd have spotted that much sooner because I'd realize that a certain someone runs over to the team whenever there's a production outage - I'd see and hear it. But now, that happens in a zoom/slack I am not in, and awareness is much lower. The point is that the employees have much simpler consideration: do I like/want to go to the office or not. If your responsibility is for the organization working well into indefinite future, you have a different and much more complicated concern.

hzay 5y ago
This is a really important point that's not getting voiced much here. Numerically there are more ICs in a company/forum/world, so the managerial voices don't get heard in places where the numerical advantage matters. The only person in leadership position I could ask in real life told me IC productivity might be higher than before but team & org productivity has plummeted drastically. Wondering if this is true across the industry?
- spacedcowboy 5y ago
  That’s not what my (Apple) leadership told us. Individual and team productivity rose this year, to the extent that they started giving us a day off once per month or so. They were concerned that people were over-working, that the situation everyone was in was too stressful, and we needed “reconnect days” periodically.

uranaivetechbro 5y ago

Working from home all the time and avoiding an office is probably amazing if you are single or married without kids. Let me just say, you are all a bit naive... heh. If you have kids (and they are at home 24x7 because they are too young for vaccines) - WORKING AT HOME SUCKS BEYOND BELIEF. I would give literally anything to go back to an office and get some work done in peace and quiet. We all know housing is tight in the Bay and if you have a "normal" 4 person family in a "normal" 3 bedroom 2 bath house, that's fine unless somehow both adults have to work from home and bigger places are financially out of reach. It's beyond amazing to me that this point hasn't been raised AT ALL in this debate. I think you are all naive tech-bros :)

AngeloAnolin 5y ago

Working from home contributes to the well being of employees. While a lot may not notice it, that 1 hour (at least) daily you save (from commute / preparing) can be used for activities that can contribute to one's personal health (mental & physical). Remote work works.

amazingman 5y ago
Remote work is not a mental health panacea. Working from home (further) blurs the psychological distinction between being and not being “at work”. This can be surprisingly difficult for many people to notice, let alone deal with in a healthy way. How many of us have found ourselves struggling to carve out the time to shower in a given day? I’ve commiserated about that struggle with multiple coworkers over the past year. This is just scratching the surface of the surface of the difficulties of remote work.

spoonjim 5y ago

Does anyone know what remote work processes Apple has used to ship such good hardware in 2021? I feel like these employees might have a point - Apple has shipped earth shattering hardware improvements on the Macintosh in a mostly remote work environment.

nottorp 5y ago
... like the ethernet port on the ... power brick? They shipped one major hardware improvement, and that has been an architectural change that took years. However, the problem with removing perks that employees like is you're going to lose your best people, because those can just quit and have another job next week. You'll be left with those that can't afford to quit because they won't find another job easily, which in IT means not so competent. I remember the rumor mill when Marissa Mayer canceled work from home at Yahoo saying they're losing all their good people. Considering what's left of Yahoo it looks like the rumors were right.

MattGaiser 5y ago

I raised this in another thread, but how much collaboration does the typical software engineer need? It obviously varies by company (Pivotal being the extreme), but in every company I have been in, there have been days where I have needed no substantial interaction with anyone else beyond maybe 5-10 Slack messages. Now, as a software engineer with a product manager, information mostly flows one way as well, except for pings back to indicate when work is complete. On teams where software engineers are more than implementers, I can see this mattering, but a lot of us are implementers, and the advantages of quiet time to work outweigh in person time spent for the minimal decision making we do. I could wipe out virtually every meeting I have beyond daily standup and very little would change.

swiley 5y ago
Yeah, I feel like PRs and standups and the occasional design meeting/email discussion are plenty. It's good to share ideas but that happens anyway if the team members are comfortable with eachother.

stadium 5y ago

I suspect that corporate real estate will go the way of legacy costs like pensions. I'm excited for companies who can use this to their advantage, and can deliver with higher productivity and better margins than the entrenched players.

gigatexal 5y ago

For everyone commenting on the commute being terrible: shuttles are nice but what the US and California more specifically needs is a proper mass transit system a la the EU (works really well here in Berlin) complete with trains and light rail that bypasses the congestion.

maxpert 5y ago

I have lived in Santa Clara and every day done a 1.5 to 2 hour commute one way to go to my office in SF. I know people who drive 1 - 2 hours to Apple or pay insane high rents. Then combine that with limited space on desk and insane distractions of getting pulled over by someone who was stuck on a very small configuration which he/she could have figured out at his/her own by spending 15 mins (rather than borrowing me for 5 mins and disrupting my thought process worth hours). I believe what COVID made me realize was the fact how much bullshit I was keeping up with (including social pressure stuff) to just be “good team player”. You can think of me as introvert but I am very talkative and social person.I believe 3 hours worth of commute and the ceremony stand-ups are not required when you have technology at disposal. Google, Microsoft, and Apple should be leading the charge on this technology centric culture rather than being backwards, stuck in time. If I am asked today to return back to office I would rather resign and be freelance developer than being stuck in the company policy prison again.

ngc248 5y ago
Most of the people in management would be extroverts so they are the ones clamouring for back to office and their work also by nature is mostly collaborative mostly talking to ppl etc. For us ICs, even though we also collaborate, once you have a design etc or after task allocation, its mostly individual work and you get disrupted if you have any distractions. But its hard for management to understand this, since they view everything thru their lens.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

I don't understand why higher-higher ups are now pushing to return to office... by limiting actual employees in the office, it gives the flexibility to outsourcing, making them save money in the short-term. It's almost like an own-goal

freddealmeida 5y ago

I'm a proponent for returning to the office. Working from home has never appealed to me from a number of perspectives (mixing work and life just seems tiring, lack of resources, serendipity, space, distractions, lack of evaluation metrics, etc). I think working at the office creates a sense of community and a focus on team over the individual. Which I think is the opposite of working at home; notwithstanding all the tools we have gained in the last few years that try to bridge that. As well, self-management is not the strongest skill set among young engineers, many need management, coaching, evaluation based not only on work quality but also interpersonal and team commitments. Working at home also risks your work being considered non-core or worthy of outsourcing or automation. The risk that you won't align well with company goals and vision is real and slowly (if not almost immediately) being considered less important to the team and the company itself. I do think there is a place for working at home where efforts to operationalize exist but most firms don't have the capability or insight to do this. I think Apple has an entrenched culture of working together in the office. And while this may have worked over the last few months (year?) I'm sure they don't see this as a long term strategy. Nor do we have an insight at the structural issues that working at home may have cost the firm over this time. (not to mention the cost of build that UFO) My vote is go back to the office. Or resign yourself to consultant, and make the risk you are taking clearly part of your strategy to monetize your work. I think this approach to use their union (?) to push operational methods is incorrect and they are certainly pissing off people do this.

MattGaiser 5y ago
> lack of evaluation metrics What office specific metrics are there, at least in tech?
- ngc248 5y ago
  Exactly, at least in WFH, the primary thing which would be evaluated is the work done. I think in the office its your exposure and image which matters more which add in to your evaluation, mostly benefiting extroverts.
Buttons840 5y ago

Jedd 5y ago

In Australia we tend to be 5-15 years behind most of the (dubious or otherwise) business trends from EU / US -- though every place I've worked here since the 1990's has eagerly embraced open office. Reasons pushed typically include the common 'improved collaboration', but it's tacitly understood it's all down to real estate costs. Office space is expensive in major Australian cities. I'm with a government agency that was in the throes of moving to a hot-desking arrangement when the pandemic arrived. On top of 'improved collaboration' there were some benefits claimed that I can't believe were made in good faith, including gems such as 'more light between desks'. It wasn't clear who thought the inter-desk spaces were too dark. (These are floors with standard, horrible, fluorescent tubes flooding every surface.) The week that our team worked from home while our particular area was being renovated (primarily the removal of partitions to allow everyone to always have at least two faces in constant peripheral vision left and right of your monitor) was the week that a lockdown was called here, and it was months before any of us stepped back into the office. Even now we're one or two days a week, and some are eschewing returning entirely for the time. Perversely the poor coordination of our federal administration on the vaccination front means that we're still at least 8 months away from being able to make any claims of safety via herd immunity. I don't doubt that someone with expensive shoes is running the numbers, trying to work out the best trade-off for offloading some office space vs ensuring useful productivity & mental health for the staff vs not raising the ire of staff or unions vs attracting good candidates beyond the current situation. I don't envy them. On the other hand, I had two years pre-pandemic being on-site with the organisation & the team -- my job would be insanely difficult if I'd come into it while everyone was remote. I guess the claim could be made that this reflects some lack of organisational sophistication - the reliance on knowing who to talk to, rather than having documentation and systems in place to help new or existing staff navigate that, but projecting backwards I don't believe I've worked in any organisation that had/has that. I expect more organisations will, coming out of this pandemic, reconsider that problem.

hota_mazi 5y ago

Apple is famous for requiring most of their engineers to work 60 to 90 hours a week. It should come as no surprise that their leadership is requiring them to come back to the office, because without that, they cannot enforce such crazy overworking requirements.

darthrupert 5y ago

You should unionize, then you can demand things. Like in this case, +20% salary for coming to office. Or, like I previously suggested, make the commute salaried time. That should provide mostly sane incentives against wasting hours of everyone's time on the road.

holografix 5y ago

Anecdotally it seems like a big part of the reluctance to go back to the office relates to comfort, flexibility, autonomy and the nature of knowledge work. Not having to dress up or commute, sleeping in an extra hour, taking breaks without anxiety, having access to more comfortable quieter environments l, etc all seem to fall under the comfort category. Dealing with kids’ schedules and working out of more cost efficient and safer locations is a gain in flexibility. I know several people who don’t really work 9-5 at all anymore. They mostly log on at 10 answer all communications and send some of their own. Do some exercise and eat around 1pm. Work another 4 hours stop to spend time with kids and family then have dinner and do another 2 hours before bed. That autonomy is nice to have.

MattGaiser 5y ago
One of the great benefits of WFH has been my ability to treat my job as a series of tasks rather than a defined work period. Then i can just put everything I need to do into a list and go through it in the most efficient way for everything.

oblib 5y ago

I've been working from home programming for about 25 years now. I first heard about the concept of "telecommuting" back in the 1970s while sitting in gridlock traffic on the 405 in the Valley and decided right then I wanted to figure out how to do that. In 1987 I calculated how much time I'd been sitting traffic while sitting in gridlock on the Ventura fwy and decided to start working on a way to telecommute. Learning how to code seemed to the best of the options. It took about eight years before I started a business, so around 1995. Then I moved to where I really wanted to live. Pretty much on the edge of real rural. I have neighbors not more than 10 miles away who still can't get high speed internet, and mines on the slow end of what can be called that. But it works. I'm just sending code out. I have no idea what it's like to work at a tech company but I can tell you that for me working at home has been awesome. Not having distractions is huge. Being able to work when I'm sharp, rather that's early in the morning or late at night, is huge. Not having to get up and tangle with cars and traffic and feeling rushed, that's really huge. Making myself coffee and sitting down at my desk to review what I need to work on and then get started on it when I'm ready is wonderful. I don't drive more than 1500 miles a year now unless I take a road trip, and I don't do that often. I live in a pretty sweet spot. Friends visit me and most of my family ended up moving close to me too. The truth is working from home is really what all of you should be doing. Tech companies should figure out how to leverage what they've learned from this pandemic. Some people can be more productive working from home. Let them.

midrus 5y ago

My company is also pushing for a return to the office. I'm in no way going back. I'm ready to change jobs if necessary. To me remote now is one of the top things I'll be looking at when looking for a new job. Good to see others prefer to go to an office, good for them. We need diversity.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

> The letter also agrees that even though collaboration drives success, physical co-location is less of a contributing factor because the company is already distributed with offices worldwide. The "need" to be in the office is a fallacy if the same company is located in more than a single office.