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Tim Cook tells employees the return to offices will begin on April 11th
- dmitrygr 5y agoAn open season on Apple employees starts now. Recruiters, take notice...
- LightG 5y agoYou may be wrong. I'm staunch in favour of remote. I like it, it works. But I recognise the benefits of in-person. I would wager that what most people like me want is a bit of control of their schedule and to be able to work in a hybrid manner. The end. I know as that's what I was going to ask my boss, before he dragged us all back in to the office and stopped remote completely in Nov-21. Most of our team have left and I'm just about to leave. Hybrid is a reasonable way forward. 100% on-site isn't given everything that's happened, and those are the companies who will lose their employees.
- dymk 5y agoHybrid work solutions are good only for those who _want_ to do them. For everyone else, they're a compromise, also known as "the worst of both worlds". Telling employees that they _need_ to be in the office on days X, Y, and Z destroys most of the utility of remote working. They even chose Monday, Tuesday Thursday so people couldn't have a four day long block for working or traveling elsewhere. If Apple cared about flexibility, they'd do this, in order of "how much do they care": - Employees choose if they want to come into an office at all, figuring out their work dynamics on a per-team basis - If a number of days per week in-office is required, employees gets to choose those days - The company chooses the days the employee comes in (which is what Apple chose)
- LightG 5y agoI think someone below me said it best. You can set all the rules you like, but in the end, "cohesive teams will self organise" to make it work. We didn't have to set any guidelines, we just did what was needed. If that meant we could fly 5 days a week at home. Fine. If, when lockdown easedup, it meant choosing to come in 1 or 5 days a week, we self organise towards that. And it's fine. Our team proved we could do that over 2 years, so the sudden yank back into the office was a slap in the face, and destroyed our team. I'm still bitter about it. Just know that if that's your policy, that's what you're risking. It may not manifest as quick as it did with our team, but the internal cracks will be there that you'll need to manage, if you can at all. And I don't agree with your "worst of both worlds" wasn't our situation. We were all in agreement about things would be and it worked. In that situation, you declare that as a core part of your organisation and new employees can choose whether they want to be a part of that or not.
- mnem 5y agoI think your second paragraph there is the critical point that large companies (including the one I work at) miss or purposefully ignore: let the employee control when (and how many) days they are in. Cohesive teams will self organise something suitable for their productivity, non-cohesive teams won't get any better by frustrating x % of the members. But, fundamentally, large companies simply lack trust in their employees so do not want to allow this. Also, they have a lot of real estate costs to justify. Nothing like physical tech debt for anchoring your company in the past.
- twoheadedboy 5y agoAnyone who has moved or bought a house outside of commuting distance in the past 2 years is never going back. I know I'm not.
- p1esk 5y agoHybrid is a reasonable way forward Only if you're willing to lose a significant fraction of your employees.
- 8bitben 5y agoHard to see it going any other way given the massive real estate investments they have made.
- bch 5y agoIf "real estate" were the real reason, that'd just be an example of throwing good money after bad.
- KKKKkkkk1 5y agoPersonal investments in Bay Area housing by senior execs.
- brimble 5y agoBingo! Wanna bet upper management and board members spend some of their money buying up nearby or distant-but-commute-friendly property just before a new "campus" is announced? Not the actual land the campus will be built on, of course. That would be a conflict of interest.
- Apocryphon 5y agoThe concept of an exec being the landlord of a new grad hire or owning intern housing is truly techno-feudalism.
- heyitsanewacco 5y agoThis is exactly it. We've been spending money in our suburbs for too long and it's killing the restaurant businesses that they own. The Gov of New York has basically come out and said exactly that.
- bch 5y ago> The Gov of New York has basically come out and said exactly that. Looked it up, came up with this[0]. [0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ny-gov-kathy-hochul-says-pandemic-has-killed-the-normal-work-week/ar-AAUzK1T https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ny-gov-kathy-hochul-says-p...
- Apocryphon 5y agoApple has always been the more stringent about remote work, in terms of maintaining secrecy by keeping its workers on-premises, so this is the least surprising move.
- Teknoman117 5y agoI don't work for Apple, but it seems they've managed to get this far without any leaks so I guess whatever they did regarding their WFH policy worked out for them? I had to go into the office a few times over the pandemic to use some testing equipment, but that was 7 or 8 days in the last 2 years?
- temp_praneshp 5y agoMy friend who works at apple (hardware/wireless stuff?) has been to the office every day, except for a brief period in March-May 2020
- lanna 5y agoMakes sense when you need access to special equipment. But most of us seldom need much more than a keyboard and screen.
- xxpor 5y agoI have to imagine a lot of that has to do with the HW work they do, as a percentage of their business? Even regardless of the confidentiality aspect (and we all know how Apple feels about that), for a decent number of folks, they might need some decently expensive equipment that wouldn't make sense to buy for everyone individually. At least according to how I perceive the company, the folks coming from that side of the business really run things, and so they bring the in office culture with them even to the pure software businesses. Obviously this is a lot of speculation, but it seems like a reasonable way to explain why they are the way they are.
- silisili 5y ago
- hackerbob 5y agoDo they share HR offices too! https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/02/google-tells-employees-to-return-to-offices-in-april.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/02/google-tells-employees-to-re...
- ghaff 5y agoI certainly expect the HR heads of the big tech companies know each other and talk now and then. Even if they're not colluding in some illegal way, I'd actually be a bit surprised if they weren't discussing COVID-related matters.
- sokoloff 5y agoTo be honest, I’d be way more pissed if my HR and Facilities teams weren’t talking to their peers in the industry and sharing learning/best practices throughout all this.
- ecf 5y agoNot HR, but their finance teams got together and decided what needed to be done to protect their real estate investments.
- dnathi493 5y agoI left Apple after years of lack of any flexibility on the remote work process. They wouldn't allow transferring to any alternative office for most teams. From what I understood, VPs could protect a small minority of some of their employees if a senior leader made a case to them. Unfortunately, this just seemed to lead to the most politically connected folks going remote and directors friends and favorite hires getting the perk. At three trillion market cap, I guess they just realized it doesn't really matter if attrition shoots up and they'll always have enough people to fill the trenches. Lots and lots of people left around the same time. Having left, I forgot what it was like to be able to focus on something other than Apple. Incredibly toxic atmosphere on the inside. I work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple.
- sdoering 5y agoWow. Thanks for the insights. > work at a fast-paced startup and still work on average 10/hours a week less than at Apple. I am always floored by statements like this. I work as a principal data analyst and everything above 40 hours/week is overtime. While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows. On average I do something like 41 hours a week over the last few years. Including high profile client engagement or pitch situations. I find myself having enough time to also work on my side business and do work for animal protection charities. While still being able to work in the garden and shop to relax.
- nickff 5y ago>"While I have overtime included in my contract I still am able to reduce overtime (it is still being tracked to ensure compliance with local workers protection laws) if the project situation allows." The people talking about working long hours at Apple are getting paid commensurately. There's a reason why people work at FAANG companies despite the constant complaints.
- giantrobot 5y ago
- nostromo 5y agoMore people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. I'm happy we're returning to normalcy, but it just makes me wonder "why now?" It's like the government and big business just decided overnight to declare "mission accomplished" when nothing substantial has changed. Last summer, for example, could have been the reopening, and we'd have better data and "science" to support it.
- basisword 5y ago>> More people are dying with Covid now than were dying most of the previous two years, minus 4 peaks of various waves. You can’t just exclude the data that disproves your point. The peaks were the original variant, Alpha(?), Delta and now Omicron. Deaths in this wave are extremely lower than in any other wave due to severity, immunity and vaccinations. Hospital stays are reduced and shorter. The original point of avoiding covid en masse was to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed. Although it varies from place to place the healthcare systems in highly vaccinated countries are no longer seeing that kind of pressure even with high case numbers (still lots of pressure but not enough to risk overwhelming the system entirely).
- katabatic 5y agoDeaths are currently at around 2,000 PER DAY in the United States. That is not in any way, shape, or form "extremely lower" than earlier waves. The Omicron wave was equal to the initial wave in severity, and we're still not out of it.
- jdrc 5y agoI think the cat is out of the bag for remote work and most companies are going to have to settle differently
- Wiseacre 5y agoI recall hearing about the Slack channel Apple employees were using to push for long-term remote work. I wonder if Apple will try to retain remaining employees with a cost of living wage increase.
- BrianOnHN 5y agoLove that all the companies (see also Google, Twitter) are utilizing the WW3-panic to sweep these announcements under the rug. How thoughtful! And props to Apple for adding that Friday PR synergy to the mix! Edit: my best attempt at a good faith argument here is this: it was a move that was supposed to be in sync with Biden's SOFU comments on returning to the office, but other breaking news affected the plan.
- draw_down 5y ago
- n42 5y agoare you suggesting they wait for the conflict in Ukraine to resolve before making announcements? your comment sounds paranoid.
- BrianOnHN 5y agoWhat a straw man. And thanks for the mental eval!
- engineeringwoke 5y agoLove your attitude towards the odd comments. Keep it up dude
- thisiscorrect 5y agoIt's interesting to consider the group psychology aspect. During the 2020 summer protests, many also said that the huge crowds were not spreading covid. Maybe this is similar. When there is a larger issue people are focusing on, concerns about covid get pushed to the backburner. The real test will come when the Ukraine-Russia war subsides.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago"huge crowds were not spreading covid OUTDOORS" is the right take. Indoors is a recycled hellscape of germs. Viral load is a real thing. I went to several outdoor concerts and didn't catch covid however I'm going to continue to work remote.
- windows2020 5y agoMaybe it's me, but I have yet to experience 'innovation' result from a conversation held over coffee or a chance encounter. I've had better luck creating connections with other parts of the business and exchanging ideas over the infrequent cocktail party where it's a mission of the night. Say all you want about open floorplans and irrelevant quiet encounters. Having said that, every situation is unique.
- song 5y agoI have worked in remote companies and companies that had butt in chair requirements, so far all the remote companies have been more innovative and had more cross talk between teams than the companies that required people to be in an office all day, every day. Of course, that's just my experience but I do have a feeling that certain type of people feel that there's more innovation around coffee and chance encounter because it's a nice story to tell oneself but it doesn't really happen.
- angryasian 5y agoI'm interested in how you accomplish this. Everything has to be scheduled in a meeting these days, and meeting burn out over zoom is real. Where as in the office it was just walking around and seeing someone in an elevator, the hall, "hey lets catch up" or "you have a minute" or "lets get lunch" these types of interactions just don't happen anymore
- asd88 5y agoIn true remote companies everything happens on Slack channels and meetings are minimal. If you want to see what a team is up to, you just have to lurk their Slack channel. Basically almost everything becomes more visible because of Slack.
- angryasian 5y agoeven slack is too much these days, I'm in so many channels. theres so much noise and if you're not part of the conversation you may miss it completely depending on if people are using threads or not.
- adenozine 5y agoTasty hiring for remote firms! Flee from Apple’s iron clutches!! Mostly /s
- jimbob45 5y agoIs it /s though? This may be the only time in the next 20 years that remote-progressive companies have a unbeatable advantage over Apple and Google. If I'm a top-tier firm, I'm poaching as many Apple and Google remote employees that I can possibly take.
- danceparty 5y agoFrom the article, in office is 3 days per week - > We will then begin the hybrid pilot in full on May 23, with people coming to the office three days a week — on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday — and working flexibly on Wednesday and Friday if you wish.
- ghaff 5y agoThough personally I'm fully remote, everything I've read and seen suggests something like this is going to be extremely common. Most employees seem to want to come into an office on a semi-regular basis but not 5 days a week. And, if you're going to do that, you probably want some level of coordination whether it's at a company, facility, or team level.
- CSSer 5y agoCan confirm. We do something like this (2 days in, 3 days remote). We have one mandatory day and then each team has a designated day where their whole team is present. I never minded going into the office anyway because I live in a fairly small apartment, so it's nice to have dedicated space away from home. The only downside I've experienced so far is that the all-teams day can be very chaotic, with more disruptions than ever before because everyone tries to plan everything that is more than a little involved for that day.
- ZanyProgrammer 5y agoI'd think Tu-Wed-Thur in the office would be better, as having more time contiguous seems like it'd make more sense somehow?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sam0x17 5y agoLike I've said before, they need to justify their multi-billion dollar campus. Barring that, I think we'd be seeing quite a different situation.
- favorited 5y agoApple Park doesn't even house the majority of Apple employees in the Bay Area. They could easily keep that campus at 100% occupancy if it was just about justifying that investment.
- mrfusion 5y agoThis is a great opportunity for start ups to eat the lunch of big companies by hiring all the talent that doesn’t want to commute.
- whiddershins 5y agoThe original headline is different from this one and more nuanced.
- fartcannon 5y agoNo. I don't know how else to say this, but... No.
- givemeethekeys 5y agoThanks, Tim. I sure love inflation, don't you?
- twa999 5y agomidterms soon. new marching orders out.
- l30n4da5 5y agoBack to the office? No thank you.
- DwnVoteHoneyPot 5y agoWhy is it Mon,Tue,Thu? Weird to have flexible Wednesday in the middle. Why not Tue,Wed,Thu with Monday and Friday flexible?
- olliej 5y agoI'm so glad that Covid cares about the economy. I also hate the obsession with in office work. I know for many people there's a social aspect to being in the office, but honestly I don't consider 4 hours of commuting each day to be worth the socializing aspect of in office work.
- paulcole 5y agoI hate the obsession with remote work. I commuted 10 minutes by bike and loved it. Remote work is hell for me. I’ll never pursue work at a remote company ever. I would happily take a pay cut to work in an office again.
- Apocryphon 5y agoYou know you can still simulate that commute, right? People who miss the boundaries of the office environment away from home, the social aspects, the prospect for promotions, sure. That all makes sense. But the commute? There’s nothing stopping you from biking those ten minutes before your remote job. During the quarantine you had more time than before to bike, and probably less traffic to boot. And as an aside- did you have your own office or cubicle, or was it open layout?
- paulcole 5y agoI worked in a large open office. I also live in a tiny apartment that’s designed to be lived/slept in, not 24 hours a day in. Thanks for the tip though.
- paxys 5y agoI suspect we are going to see some turmoil in the tech hiring space with stock prices taking a beating in recent months. Large companies have gotten away with paying under market price for talent because employees have seen massive gains from stock appreciation over the last decade. If total comp starts going down year over year, suddenly the more traditional, no-frills system at places like Apple, Microsoft and Amazon isn't going to look nearly as attractive, especially compared to companies one tier below that are already offering higher comp and more flexible work options.
- birdyrooster 5y agoCan confirm, Google was really stingy with their RSUs compared to Apple, but the perks really aren't that good with the exception of the food, which, when speaking to current Googlers, they say the food quality has fallen precipitously. Google at the time I worked there seemed to lean heavily on its reputation to reduce total comp.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y agoAt least according to levels.fyi, Google is paying people at equivalent titles quite a bit more than Apple is. For example a senior engineer at Google is listed as having an average total comp of $380k, whereas at Apple it's only $310k. Now it's entirely possible that there is title inflation at Apple, so that a "senior" engineer at Apple is less senior than a senior engineer at Google. Or perhaps the samples are skewed differently per company. But when I lived in the Valley, the word on the street was that Apple paid less well than Google as a general rule. So the observed data on levels.fyi does match with whatever I heard in real life.
- thund 5y agowe need small companies to publish their compensation data on sites like levels.fyi, so people stop dreaming about big corps expecting huge salaries and rewards. There are many companies out there, with freedom to experiment fast, learn new tech, have a great work-life balance, without the huge tech debt of these corps, and they deserve a chance to have "rockstars" "ninjas" and so forth in their ranks
- sebow 5y agoIronically and funnily enough, i expect the ('Apple-made') TV Show 'Severance' to become a reality.I suspect it already is, hyperbolically speaking.
- birdyrooster 5y agoI really hope this date sticks. As a single person, along with many of my single colleagues, we don't get much social interaction and being stuck inside for the past two years has really hurt our mental health. I am all for heads of families working from home to be with their families, this is beautiful, but I can't do that.
- mangodrunk 5y agoWhy not work on having a social life outside of work? The pandemic didn't make meeting new people easy. Think if you worked remotely without covid restrictions, and with a healthy social life outside of work. Wouldn't that be good?
- birdyrooster 5y agoI have no idea what that is.
- maps7 5y agoWe're all going to back to the office ... just because some rich person said so!
- syngrog66 5y agosoftware engineers in awfully high demand so we'll see how that works out for them
- just3ws 5y agoIt will be interesting now that competitors know that all they have to do to appeal to a large segment of the workforce is simply not require a commute.
- oldstrangers 5y agoYep, freedom of movement and where (and when) I'm allowed to work is worth probably an additional $20-30k a year to me. So, startups, pay attention.
- remote_only_eng 5y ago[dead]
- nano9 5y agoIf remote really works and the market is fair, then this is a good opportunity to see evidence in its favor. Somehow, I don't think fully remote companies will find it easy, unless they have some secret formula for finding remote talent. Companies like GitLab (fully remote) continue to be outliers.
- paulcole 5y ago> If remote really works and the market is fair 2 MASSIVE “ifs” there. Remote wasn’t a choice for the vast majority of people over the past 2 years — it was thrust upon them. And despite what the pro-remote people will say, a huge number of them didn’t thrive because of it. They may have been more productive but they were also more miserable. Remote “worked” because it was the way companies stayed in business - it essentially had to work, even if it sucked for a ton of people. When remote truly becomes a choice then we’ll start to see whether it really works or not. And then there’s the old saying about markets staying irrational longer than most of us can stay solvent.
- mangodrunk 5y agoPeople and companies have thrived on remote work. People are actually able to find a much better work life balance having worked remotely. Remote worked! Businesses thrived. You might be miserable because of covid and living through a pandemic. Time is generally tough right now. I would recommend to you and others to work on your social life outside of work. The pandemic showed that a lot of people don't actually have friends and their whole life is their work. If that's what you want, then fine.
- Valakas_ 5y agoThe problem is that often what is best for employee's quality of life and mental health is not aligned with the best for the company. If there is 1% better output from a worker if they're at the office, but they suffer 50% less mental health, compared to WFH, then guess what the company is going to chose.
- anothernewdude 5y agoI'm currently making a killing as a remote contractor for several places that won't allow their own developers to work remotely. These places are just making it easy to poach their own talent.
- sunsetSamurai 5y agoA lot of people have been saying that they'd rather quit their job than go back to the office, next few months are gonna be very interesting.
- irrational 5y agoThis is me. But my boss’s boss doesn’t want to go back to the office either and every meeting she is saying that she is working to make it so we are all remote. I’m waiting to see what happens before I jump ship.
- benrbray 5y agofwiw I just quit my first full-time job out of school in part because remote work has really held back my productivity + career growth. I started in May 2020 and have only met my coworkers a handful of times, and it's depressing. Among the students and early-career tech workers I know, working-from-home is almost universally a negative rather than a positive.
- eschulz 5y agoThe main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don't want to do. -Lou Mannheim
- bduerst 5y agoWhy? Just what percentage of competitive job postings are full time remote?
- TeeMassive 5y ago"We have hundred of billions of real estate deprecating in value because they're mostly abandoned"
- indigodaddy 5y agoSo much for big orgs adopting fully remote as an option eh? I really thought that had a chance… Can anyone list some medium-to-biggish orgs with fully remote options? Is there a website somewhere that might have a list?
- ghaff 5y agoI think you'll find that it's available at most large-ish tech companies but how common it is varies a lot. At some, it will be quite normal. At others, it will be the rare person with some specific background or skills.
- bacan 5y agoGotta justify the Bilions of $$$ spent on the new campus, while trying to prevent a CMBS collapse
- speby 5y agoIt still amazes me that some of the biggest (and many might argue innovative, progressive) companies like Apple but also Google and others, still struggle with basic tenets of 'work' and its future. Remote work is here to stay (and is not new, by the way); that part of the debate is settled. What remote looks like, however, is going to be an amalgamation of opinions made between CEOs and executive leadership and their HR departments across many companies and the response people have to it thru retention, etc. Having led, grow, and work on remote and hybrid-remote teams for 12+ years now, I almost feel like I just repeat myself all the time when I say the right answer is about flexibility and choice at the team and individual levels, not at a corporate mandate level. And also, maybe it goes without saying, focus on results and outcomes rather than arguing how the sauce has to be made. People will be creative in many settings and supporting them and helping them navigate how they work best (whether that is in an office part-time, full-time, or fully remote) is going to be winning solution. Not biblical commandments like "Thou shalt be in the office 3 days a week."
- bitcuration 5y agoThis is Cook not supporting Russia sanction which pushed gas price higher and higher, by making victims of higher gas price and increasing pressure against Russia sanction from Apple employees. Which begs the question, does Cook support Ukrainian and on the side of whole world, or is he on the side of invasion? Why is he not helping the sanction, but instead ordering more gas consumption?