5 ms·

yeah google and apple also spent massive budgets on commercial real estate holdings. billions. that’s why they’re trying to prevent wfh

• colinmhayes 5y ago
  I think Google and Apple are smart enough to see past sunk cost fallacies.
  • black_13 5y ago
    Really?
  • 1270018080 5y ago
    I wonder how long Stadia will be around
• jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Well Apple engineering involves (for some divisions) access to exorbitantly expensive capitalized equipment. WFH for folks in engineering labs with millions of dollars of shared instruments doesn't make sense. That was the fundamental reality inside Apple engineering that I lived, anyway: the millions of dollars of instruments for digital design and test can't be repurchased per engineer.
  • cinquemb 5y ago
    That makes sense, but I have a hunch that the majority of people that work at Apple (at least in the US, and not say the actual manufacturing plants [thats probably outsourced to many companies in asia]) don't need to work with expensive hardware for their day to day work. The reality of the situation, globally, is that the commercial real estate market was showing signs of rolling over prior to the pandemic (as well as many other markets), and the bailoutistan operations since sept 2019 repo market intervention continue to enable a lot of the paper of CRE that has/is used as collateral (and rehypothicated many times over) to put alot of entities exposed to it on life support… However it does nothing for cashflows in the CRE that no longer exist, which is why the situation will continue to get worse with out continuously increasing the interventions in markets, and the forces that influence behavior in those markets (i.e NYT posts shilling someones cornered book to try and get peoples behaviors/preferences to change). Arguably, there has been a long shift to remote work going on since the 90's. Anecdote: My dad has been working from home not too long after P&G sold his division to HP and then to BT, and I have been for 5 years prior to march 2020 (and continue to do so today).
  • llampx 5y ago
    It's like the 2020 trope of the construction worker saying that work-from-home won't work because how can they work from home? Of course in every company there will be a subset of people who cannot do their job from home. Nobody is saying that every job can be done remotely. So it doesn't help to roll out the exceptions and say that nobody can work from home.
  • ffggvv 5y ago
    yeah except for the tens of thousands of software engineers they employee that have worked from home this entire year. iphone app devs don’t need expensive hardware
    • jjtheblunt 5y ago
      i don't know current counts but tens of thousands of software engineers sounds (maybe 100x ?) too many. there are huge numbers of hourly employees across the stores, though i don't know where they break down numbers of employees by type.
      • ffggvv 5y ago
        you think theres less than 1k SWE's ?? I know for a fact that Google Maps alone has over 1k SWE's. Chrome and android have several thousands, same with YouTube. Uber and snapchat and airbnb have thousands of SWEs. Apple has dozens of products that are comparable to the ones listed. So either each of their SWE's is worth 100x other companies or my estimate is correct.