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Apple employees criticize work-from-home policy in open letter

• solenoidalslide 4y ago
  Perhaps the most compelling argument was that Apple was being hypocritical in the way it markets its own products. "We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely?" the letter states.
  • dominotw 4y ago
    i don't see how thats hypocritical though.
    • capableweb 4y ago
      The full quote: > We tell all of our customers how great our products are for remote work, yet, we ourselves, cannot use them to work remotely? How can we expect our customers to take that seriously? How can we understand what problems of remote work need solving in our products if we don't live it? I'd have to agree. If you're building products and market them for "remote working", then you better have figured out remote working yourself in your own environment, otherwise I won't trust that you've actually gotten it right. Of course, there is also a difference between different job functions. If you're in the hardware team, I can see how it's hard to actually collaborate remotely on a bunch of stuff. But for the pencil pushers in corporate? Definitely should have figured out how to make that work.
      • thawaya3113 4y ago
        Just because a tool is great for working remotely does not mean remote working is good. Turkey marketing its drones as great for war does not mean Turkey is being hypocritical for saying that war isn’t good.
        • capableweb 4y ago
          > Just because a tool is great for working remotely does not mean remote working is good. So lets say Apple doesn't believe "remote working" is good in general. Why would they be building tools for something they don't think is good?
          • dominotw 4y ago
            > Why would they be building tools for something they don't think is good? other than profits for shareholders?
          • thawaya3113 4y ago
            I don’t see Apple claiming remote working is not good in general. They just don’t believe remote working is good for them. And again, Turkey creating great drones does not require them to believe war is good. This is a pretty straightforward logical fallacy.
            • enumjorge 4y ago
              > Turkey creating great drones does not require them to believe war is good. I don’t think that’s the correct analogy. It’s more like Turkey creating great drones while also believing that drones are not an effective way to wage war.
              • yakkityyak 4y ago
                Isn't it $entity creates $tool. $tool is used by people for $scenario. $entity doesn't like $scenario. Apple nowhere said their products aren't good for remote work...?
          • WithinReason 4y ago
            money?
        • sofixa 4y ago
          Your Turkey allegory isn't fitting due to "si vis pacem para bellum". Turkey can say war isn't good, and one of the best ways to dissuade potential enemies is by being good at war. Nothing similar is at play with Apple.
      • jayd16 4y ago
        Tools can be ideal without the situation they call for being ideal. Apple isn't pushing for remote work, it just has a good solve for it. Its not hypocritical at all.
    • fortran77 4y ago
      There’s a big difference between what’s needed to design and build something and what’s needed to use something. I hope Tim Cook fires all these whiners.
      • capableweb 4y ago
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      • thawaya3113 4y ago
        They aren’t being fired for having different opinions. They are being fired for (a) essentially explicitly stating they are not gonna do a good job working in the way the company thinks its employees should be working (b) trying to get the company to change through “open letters” through the press. Both (a) and (b) are reasons for firing on their own. It has nothing to do with differing opinions. It’s like me telling my team that since the Product Owner did not prioritize the feature I think is critical for us to work on first, I will not really do a good job with working on the features the PO did prioritize. The company would be foolish to fire me because I said our PO sucks and makes terrible decisions. The company would not be foolish to fire me because I said that because I disagree with the PO I’m gonna do a half hearted job. Especially if the way I communicated this to the company is through a half page advert in the NYTimes.
        • UnpossibleJim 4y ago
          >>They aren’t being fired for having different opinions.<< Just to be clear, no one mentioned anything about anyone being fired in the article that I could see. There is a return to the office mandate for two days a week, so I guess if you just don't show up for work two days a week, yeah, you'll be fired but that's a different thing. In an anonymous poll given (article linked below) there were quite a few employees who stated they were going to look for remote jobs and quit. https://fortune.com/2022/05/02/apple-workers-unhappy-return-to-the-office-hybrid-work-pandemic/ https://fortune.com/2022/05/02/apple-workers-unhappy-return-...
  • sofixa 4y ago
    What products do they market for remote work? The Apple Studio Display that has an integrated camera with the quality of a late 2000s flip phone?
    • bckr 4y ago
      They have created a series of epic comedy-advertisements for their productivity suite: https://youtu.be/GC5Gmkn92Bg https://youtu.be/GC5Gmkn92Bg
• T3RMINATED 4y ago
• Cuuugi 4y ago
  and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" I mean, they're just asking you to come to the building 3 days a week.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    Please think for a second about how a WFH policy might impact some groups more than others.
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • markovbot 4y ago
      I don't think that's physically possible on HN
      • Cuuugi 4y ago
        Are you kidding me? HN is insanely liberal. There's a reason may bland take is getting downvoted, stop acting like a victim.
    • PabloRobles 4y ago
      Could you, please, give your point of view on it? This is something I never thought about.
      • TrueGeek 4y ago
        https://hbr.org/2020/06/working-from-home-while-black https://hbr.org/2020/06/working-from-home-while-black https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/10/health/remote-work-disabilities-pandemic-wellness-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/10/health/remote-work-disabiliti...
        • PabloRobles 4y ago
          Thank you for the references, this is a very interesting perspective that I personally never considered before. But still, I wondering if this should mean that WFH needs to be enforced at any company. Not every company can implement full WFH without disrupting operations, especially when working with hardware or when needing concurrent comunication between co-workers. The article about black workers, mentions discrimination based (mainly) on their appareance. Sure this cannot happen if they work behind a screen. But the same would happen if we all were blind? Shall we wear opaque glasses to end discrimination based on racial features too? We can also flip the argument. I see this as telling black people (or other groups), stay at home, and in this people will not discriminate you. Is this really what we want? We should make the world better by improving it, not downgrading it.
• tharne 4y ago
  Stop whining and vote with your feet. If you're talented enough to work for Apple, there are plenty of other wonderful companies out there that will happily let you work remotely. Not every company needs to have the exact same policies on everything.
  • napolux 4y ago
    If enough people will vote with their feet, Apple will be a full remote company by the end of the year :D
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • t-writescode 4y ago
    “The first time you have an argument with your spouse, you should get a divorce” Is what you’re saying here. They’re trying to make company changes to improve their relationship with someone they like to work for, without using the nuclear option.
    • dubya 4y ago
      I wonder how many marriages have been saved by an open letter.
      • prewett 4y ago
        The GP's metaphor of a marriage is not applicable in this case, since a marriage is a friendship/partnership, and the corporate structure is essentially a kingdom. Options are limited if the king and his advisors aren't listening, or they listened and rejected the approach for whatever their reasons are. An open letter to the king probably won't change anything, but worth a try before emigrating.
    • scarface74 4y ago
      I go to work because I like exchanging labor for money. The marriage analogy is kind of crazy. I’ve had eight jobs in my 25 years as an adult. It never took me more than two months to find a job I was happy with. It took me 15 years and one failed marriage to find a a spouse I was happy with. When I have a disagreement with my wife, we compromise as equal partners. I’m not in any way an equal partner to the CEO of a 2 trillion+ dollar company. Leaving my marriage necessitated lawyers, going to court, and giving up half of everything we accumulated together. Leaving a job required a form resignation letter with meaningless platitudes and a two week notice.
• BaseballPhysics 4y ago
  Honestly, at least Apple laid out their intentions. People can leave or stay, but the policy is clear. At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
  • 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
    If your hybrid is mandatory then you can expect to be back to full time 5 days in a years time approx.
    • BaseballPhysics 4y ago
      As a manager, these types of comments and sentiments are so incredibly frustrating for me. This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions. Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all, not the least of which because we don't want to lose ~30% of our staff. But for the suspicious, it appears to be impossible to convince them otherwise, and even the slightest hint of asking people to come to the office even just one day a month elicits exactly this kind of response. And the funny thing is, I absolutely understand the suspicion! It's just that, as a person in a leadership position, it makes me want to tear my hair out because I can shout from the rooftops that, no, we're never going to mandate a full return to office, but some folks will simply never believe it. Hence why I admire what Apple has done, here. They laid out their policy, they've demonstrated their commitment to that policy, and now they're letting the staff make their decision about how they want to react to that policy. Whether you agree with the policy or not, that's far better than ambiguity or constant flip-flopping.
      • ghaff 4y ago
        > never Leadership changes. People change their minds. Something can absolutely be a genuine intent today but that could change in a few years.
• thenoblesunfish 4y ago
  In general, glad to see people advocating for what they see as the most effective environment in which to work. Some of these points are a bit strained, though, especially the "serendipity" [1] point which they choose to lead with - one could just as easily argue that being siloed with a smaller group of people working on similar problems is good for serendipity - that's certainly the way that universities, labs, startups, etc. seem to work well. [1]: https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-work https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-w...
• post_break 4y ago
  The time theft of traffic, costs of fuel and wear and tear on your car, the cost of lunch if you don't pack a lunch. It all adds up when having to go back to the office. I hate that we had to return to the office because it was like getting a big pay cut. Even the 3 day a week thing, it's like what's the point? We can work from home obviously, what more does going in 3 times a week accomplish other than punish you, showing you how much it sucks to go to the office. All it really feels like is punishment forcing you to be under some managers thumb.
  • gedy 4y ago
    I realize this won't fly with many companies, but at a previous role I treated commute time (~1.5 hours/day) as work time. Not 8.5 hours work with commute on top of that.
  • Invictus0 4y ago
    Theft? Lol. Never get tired of hearing people making multiple 6 figures complain about their horrible life
    • turtledove 4y ago
      We're all workers, and we should be supporting one another. Everyone has different concerns, but if you have a boss you have more in common with others who have bosses. Worker solidarity raises us all up. Support workers in improving their workplaces rather than blowing them off for making slightly more.
      • seneca 4y ago
        Blindly offering solidarity with absurd claims makes everyone involved look petulant. Be careful who you cast your lot with.
        • bckr 4y ago
          This may be true, but should we all strive to appear rational at all times? Maybe the most rational thing is for workers to always stick together.
• daniel-thompson 4y ago
  > CEO Tim Cook called in-person collaboration benefits "irreplaceable" and in an email, the executive team talked about the importance of "the serendipity that comes from bumping into colleagues" during in-person work. Another extroverted MBA who doesn't understand why many engineers need big, unbroken chunks of silence & concentration to do great work.
  • arrakis2021 4y ago
    Another engineer that doesn’t understand there are more jobs in a business than engineering. I say this as someone who works from home and is a huge WFH advocate. We need to stop assuming every role in an org revolves around “I stare at my screen for 9 hours do not interrupt me.”
    • enumjorge 4y ago
      Why not allow the flexibility to let both types of people do their best work though?
      • azemetre 4y ago
        Maybe allow teams, but I don't think allowing individuals to choose isn't good. Having a team that's half remote/half in-person is worse of both worlds. What typically ends up happening IME is that the in-person half typically gets way way way more visibility than those working remote. It's especially worse if the company isn't remote first at all. It's especially terrible if the team is remotely distributed as well. I left my last company because my org had a time preference for their offices in Hyderabad, which isn't bad but they kept forcing mandatory meetings at 7 or 8 am. All the US workers hated it. The idea of core hours didn't exists, you basically had to adapt to Hyderabad time or you suffered. I have no issue with remote teams or in-person teams, but having both in the same team is the worse.
        • edmcnulty101 4y ago
          > Having a team that's half remote/half in-person is worse of both worlds I'm not so sure that's a blanket statement. If teams are properly managed it works out.
• nimbius 4y ago
  In other words: We blew five billion dollars on Apple Park. its a monument and a testament to the ineffable power and glory of our babel made manifest. You will attend this church of man in blessed reverence or you will find the cold streets at your feet.
  • kcplate 4y ago
    This is exactly the case. Its been my observation that companies with substantial (owned) brick and mortar facilities tend to be the ones promoting return to work programs now. Apple definitely falls into this group, perhaps more than any other company.
    • 3245457 4y ago
      https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/google-investments-office-workforce https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/google-investments-office... "Google will spend $9.5 billion on offices and data centers this year" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9764995/Facebook-developing-city-near-Silicon-Valley-HQ.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9764995/Facebook-de... "In addition to the housing and retail spaces, Facebook also plans to have 1.25 million square feet of new office, meeting and conference room space for the social media company." https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/this-is-the-first-look-at-nvidias-wild-new-750000-sq-ft-building/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/this-is-the-first-look-at-... "Nvidia is preparing a new, massive building in Santa Clara, CA and this is it. Called Voyager, it will be larger than the building Nvidia just finished constructing by 250,000 square feet." I could go on...
  • TigeriusKirk 4y ago
    Happily, the streets are quite hot right now.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    I thought building Apple Park was just to keep Ives around a few more years.
    • 4y ago
• chadash 4y ago
  People want to have their cake and eat it too. Silicon Valley companies pay very well because cost of living is very high in the area and they _need_ to pay well to attract talent in that area. If remote work becomes the norm, pay will start to even out across the country. If you live in a place that didn't pay well before, you'll be better off, but if you live in a high cost of work area, you'll probably be worse off. It's just an inevitable truth of how the market functions.... maybe your company says they'll keep salaries the same no matter where you work, but let's see how that plays out in ten years from now. To that end, 2 days a week in office seems like a great compromise. Personally, I wouldn't want a long commute to work, so I'd pay a lot to be near my office if I'm going in 5 days a week, but for 2 days a week, I'd have much less problem with say a 1 to 1.5 hour-each-way commute, which drastically opens up options for where I can live. And by requiring people to live in the area, these companies will still need to pay competitive salaries for that area, so this seems like a pretty good compromise.
  • turtledove 4y ago
    They pay well because demand for engineers is high. Cost of living is high because engineers have bought all the stock in the area. You've got the order backwards.
    • dhdkdbehsgsv 4y ago
      Its a cycle. It’s undeniable that Bay Area salaries are higher than elsewhere. They pay what they need to pay to get good engineers _in that location_. I’d venture to guess that Apple employees in other countries (or even other parts of the US) make less.
    • r00fus 4y ago
      You are completely missing out on the market impact of large corporate (Blackrock) and overseas investors.
    • asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
      If they find that it's hard to attract talent, they'll also pay well for remote. But if they don't, angrily worded letters are not going to be the thing that makes the difference. People are going to have to start voting with their feet before Apple will see the supposed error of their compensation formula.
• loudthing 4y ago
  Unfortunately the folks that get to make these decisions are so removed from the reality of their company's every day tasks that all they can think is "if I don't see butts in the seats I bought, then obviously no work is getting done".
  • scarface74 4y ago
    I worked for a small company in 2020 that wanted to get people back in the office by June of that year to “foster better communication” while Covid was still going strong. That next week, a recruiter from BigTech sent me a message about applying for a software engineering position. I asked them would it be permanently remote. They said “no”. I was about to end the conversation. But then we kept talking and they suggested I talk to another department that was always designed to be remote. I got a job there. There are way too many opportunities for software engineers to be begging a company to WFH.
  • randomsearch 4y ago
    The problem is, for many people and jobs that heuristic is accurate. I’ve heard of countless examples of people spending their time gaming at home instead of working. Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.
    • paxys 4y ago
      So has no work happened at Apple the last 2+ years? If a company can't evaluate an employee's performance while they are out of sight, that sounds like a management problem.
      • loudthing 4y ago
        I completely agree, specifically a middle management problem that bubbles up.
    • rsanek 4y ago
      It's so interesting to me that we still struggle to get out of the 'hours worked' mindset when considering how valuable someone is to a company. I would argue it's completely irrelevant if someone is gaming, even if it's almost all their time. The question to answer is, what value are they actually bringing to the organization? Would you rather have someone that's useless but working hard 10 hours a day over someone who's brilliant but only works 2 hours a day? I certainly wouldn't. I think competent organizations will actually do the counter and embrace trusting their employees. IME, it is basically already impossible not to -- there's just way too much work and complexity for someone to accurately know exactly what all of their reports are doing.
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• carlycue 4y ago
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  • 0daystock 4y ago
    This sounds a lot like flame-baiting. Are you expecting a constructive dialogue by leading with an accusatory generalization about a wide corpus of political ideology? Or do you wish to engage in a good faith dialogue about what "conservatives" actually want?
• thefz 4y ago
  • jjcon 4y ago
    > So, when it's useful, genders do exist and one's born into them. Interesting. At the end of the day we all ultimately know the truth even if we shy away from it to be nice… just how it goes
• micromacrofoot 4y ago
  Hopefully they're putting effort into unionizing behind the scenes, because otherwise there's 0 chance Apple is going to say "sure everyone can choose to not show up to our brand new $5bn HQ"
• dncornholio 4y ago
  Ignorant European here, I fail to see any connections.. > They said that Apple's reasons for implementing the policy don't stand up, and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce How does this even work?
  • Fomite 4y ago
    The logic behind this is that work from home allowed greater participation from not-these groups. Folks whose physical or mental health was improved in a work from home environment (I know someone with chronic migraines, for whom the typical 'Glass and steel open office' workspace is basically hell on a random draw of days). Work from home also allowed for more schedule flexibility - it's hard to run an errand, pick the kids up from school, etc. when that's a 15 minute trip, rather than having to commute back home. This burden often falls disproportionately on women, and workers with families (who are likely slightly older than those who don't). Removing the constraint of "You have to have the capital to move to SV to work here" allows hiring from a broader and more diverse pool of groups with less generational wealth, which means likely a more diverse body of job candidates. Whether you agree with this or not, there is a logic behind it. Heck, I think they actually missed a couple axes of workers Apple is going to miss out on.
    • dncornholio 4y ago
      How it makes for more white employees I fail to comprehend. Even if there was reason, remote work only hides the problem but does not solve it. You could argue letting people work from home creates only more separation of cultures.. If you want bigger cultural diversity just treat everyone equally?
      • Fomite 4y ago
        `If you want bigger cultural diversity just treat everyone equally?` As a brief thought experiment for you: - You have one pool of workers who work well in an environment with ambient noise and distractions - You have a second pool of workers who need quiet spaces to concentrate You treat them all equally by placing them in an open plan office with an excellent office-wide Spotify playlist. Do you think you'll end up with both pools being proportionally represented?
• larrysalibra 4y ago
  Apple knows what form of work is best for Apple. If it turns out they are wrong, they'll eventually suffer in the market as the result of making the wrong choice. That said, being remote or hybrid first seems like it would be a huge competitive advantage for a least some teams in Apple...like the Facetime team. I tried using their "new" like zoom Facetime meeting with a URL feature for a work-related meeting. The lack of basic functionality like a text chat to share links and other notes in shows that Apple either doesn't actually use Facetime for their own remote meetings or they have no idea how most people use these types of tools to collaborate.
  • vxNsr 4y ago
    I feel like this is true for many apple tools with robust competition. Apple’s offering always only seems to scratch the surface of what’s necessary to be competitive, plus their unique apple-y take. Which, tbf, I often find refreshing, if only it had all the other features I need too. Instead I’m often felt feeling like someone at apple said “we can do this better” but gets distracted shortly after deploying the MVP.
  • banannaise 4y ago
    This is an anti-worker move. If Apple suffers in the market as a result, their executives will be gently kicked out with substantial severance packages, and workers will be laid off en masse. That's an anti-worker result. Win-win for executives, lose-lose for workers.
• api 4y ago
  Best solution is to insist on a salary sufficient to purchase a home in the Bay Area while spending no more than 33% of your income on housing. If they want to pay that much, maybe that's not a bad deal. Otherwise it's a bad deal.
• azth 4y ago
  > and that the policy is wasteful, inflexible and will lead to a "younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" workforce. Does anyone take tossing around words like this seriously anymore? I am pro working remotely, but this is just ridiculous.
  • newsclues 4y ago
    Not without presenting any facts or sources. In this case it seems like lazy people throwing everything at the wall, including prejudice, to prevent going to work.
  • Octoth0rpe 4y ago
    Yes. I don't see how at a minimum "more able-bodied" should be controversial. Someone who requires a wheelchair has a much easier experience when WFH. "Younger" is a likely extension of that given how age affects mobility.
    • thebean11 4y ago
      People in wheelchairs leave their homes all the time. Apple has buses and offices that I'm sure are wheelchair accessible. Apple probably offers pretty good insurance to get a motorized wheelchair if needed. If someone really can't make it to the office physically, I'm sure the policies are somewhat more nuanced. I understand it may be more difficult for certain people, but I guess to me it's a non sequitur. Doing different things is varying levels of difficult for different people. Is the conclusion that nobody should ask you to do anything inconvenient?
      • Octoth0rpe 4y ago
        > I understand it may be more difficult for certain people If you can understand that, then you should understand that certain people will make rational decisions to minimize their difficulty. Remote work positions are more available now, and such people will likely naturally gravitate towards them. Consequently, non-remote positions will be disproportionally more able-bodied, which is exactly the point of the Apple employee statement.
• dainiusse 4y ago
  I think a bit differently - there are choices. If you don't like apple or it's policies - vote with your head - pick another employer.
• newsclues 4y ago
  “It will make Apple younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied” Love to see the source of data that supports every single one of these issues. I remember the Google memo from James Demore was backed by sources unlike this letter.
  • the_only_law 4y ago
    I would expect more neuro-divergent people to prefer having the option to WFH
    • newsclues 4y ago
      Depends on how you define neuro-divergent. So why do white people love the office but non whited are comfortable only at home?
      • Root_Denied 4y ago
        I suspect that the metric for more white people working there stems from the demographics of the SF Bay area where Apple is located. Whether it's correct or not is a separate question.
  • seneca 4y ago
    You won't see citations for these for the same reason the citations in Demore's memo didn't matter. Facts have no relation to articles of faith.
• dboreham 4y ago
  Remote work is an existential threat to large knowledge-work-based corporations or at least to their management hierarchies. Having spent $$ on fancy buildings that are now empty is just one aspect of this. Problem for them is: the genie is out of the bottle now. We've spent 2y proving that things are humming along just fine without everyone on a campus, commuting for 2h every day.
  • dehrmann 4y ago
    It's actually the other way, and employees should be worried. If working remotely is really just as effective, why pay a premium for Bay Area talent?
    • bckr 4y ago
      Then again, maybe that would bring the prices down in a place that you want to live anyway.
• kyleblarson 4y ago
  When people keep calling literally everything racist it begins to drown out true instances of racism.
  • zefcfd 4y ago
    it makes them feel good.
  • chrsig 4y ago
    alternative theory: the world is much more racist than you seem to think.
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• TYPE_FASTER 4y ago
  It's going to be fascinating to watch this play out over the next few years. Google will have 3.1 million sqft of space in Manhattan when it's done building out its most recent acquisition [0]. This may be an opportunity for companies who need technical teams, but aren't able to compensate at FAANG levels, to compete. [0] - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/nyregion/google-buys-building-hudson-square.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/nyregion/google-buys-buil...
  • jasonthorsness 4y ago
    I have to think real estate investments, employment laws, and other factors beyond what company leadership states openly must be involved. The employee objections here are written out clearly, but the policies from big companies that require more than 50% of time in the office seem like such a tragic compromise that I can't believe they've been fully explained. The longer companies waffle on these policies the more likely it is they will hamper recruitment and face attrition to companies with more consistent policies. In-office is much less effective when your team is distributed across multiple sites/time zones anyway which seems to be the new normal.
• kirykl 4y ago
  Find a new place to work. Support companies that trust and value their employees. I personally don't plan to commute to an open office just to use software tools designed for remote work at a desk there instead of my more comfortable, quieter one at home. If I had a private office at work then maybe I'd reconsider.
• paul7986 4y ago
  Think with Air BnB's recent promotion of work from anywhere the big tech firms are going to have to follow or lose employees. Majority of ppl do not want to work in an office after working from anywhere past two years. We want our freedom as all have shown to do our jobs successfully remotely no need to go back to an office ever! Work life is forever changed. Cities whose economies are hurting and will continue to hurt I say need to turn that commercial real estate into remote worker fully furnished and temporary apartments. Place for remote workers who can...city hop every 3 to 6 to 9 month to 12 months. I'd enjoy city hop remote working as nothing really is tying me down .. those Im dating and or in a relationship can join me or visit me and I can experience living in different cities like Chicago, Honolulu, Seattle, Miami, Austin, etc
• ineedasername 4y ago
  I should preface my comment by saying that I generally agree that full WFH is a very reasonable request, but I can only partly follow their reasoning on the diversity factor: >"... will change the makeup of our workforce [to] younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would change the workforce from what it already is unless it became more diverse during COVID as a result of flexible WFH options. I also understand their justification for how these might limit candidates except "whiter" and "neuro-normative", which their letter didn't seem to provide direct reasoning for. I suppose "whiter" might be the result of drawing more from the local population, but again they seem to be arguing that a policy that's still more flexible than pre-COVID will make things worse, which I don't follow. >*"requiring everyone to relocate to the office their team Again this shouldn't make things any worse than pre-COVID. Given that full WFH was stated as temporary then no one should need to relocate to accommodate a partial in-person requirement. Not unless they unwisely moved away during the lockdown despite things being temporary or are new hires who also failed to take the temporary status into account. To reiterate, I'm very sympathetic to their overall complaint, but it appears that they might be doing their case a disservice by implying that this will make some things worse than they already are or were before.
  • not2b 4y ago
    Yes, it was an issue before COVID, but people who are disabled, or people who have processing differences that make dealing with the distractions of an open plan office extremely difficult (that's the "neuro-normative" part), or people who have to juggle children and a job, or people who can't afford to live close enough to have a short commute, had it much better when working from home and naturally don't want to give that up. And for some people it's the other way around. I have a colleague who has two young children and a small apartment, and it was very tough for him when work from home and school from home was mandatory.
    • ineedasername 4y ago
      Thanks, that clarifies things a bit. And I can understand not wanting to give up an improvement over pre-COVID times-- I agree it shouldn't be necessary. I guess I was just confused that they seem to be implying that a partial return to in-person would make things worse than pre-covid.
• lolsal 4y ago
  Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? There is no value in body-language when communicating? I'm all for fully WFH policies, but I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience. I've been working remote for over a decade and will never work from an office again, but there are some things you just cannot replicate online or with video calls.
  • shlurpy 4y ago
    I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it.
    • lolsal 4y ago
      > I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it. I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.
      • antihero 4y ago
        Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.
        • lolsal 4y ago
          > Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net. I consider them to be worth a lot more than that!
        • r00fus 4y ago
          You are vastly underestimating the value of 3h (Bay Area average) of out of each week if one commutes 5 days a week. 3h*50wk = 150h - assuming $100 (lowball) bill rate that's $15k. A more median bill rate would likely be about $250 meaning it's probably worth $50k.
• mlboss 4y ago
  Leaving job is so easy when you are WFH. You can just grind leetcode instead of commuting. I think thats why companies are worried. Employees can easily jump companies when WFH.
• g42gregory 4y ago
  Can somebody explain what “neuro-normative” is?
  • banannaise 4y ago
    Designed for minds that are not neurodivergent. Basically, a system that directly disadvantages people who are ADHD/autistic.
  • vxNsr 4y ago
    I always thought it meant like people without Asperger’s or other mental conditions. Which is odd bec many of us are on the spectrum, so who are they saying wouldn’t be hired?
• jedberg 4y ago
  As a Cupertino resident, I'm pretty upset with their WFH policy. At the very least they should have let small teams choose their in office days. Now I need to keep track of which days of the week they have to be in the office, because traffic in Cupertino will be 2x-3x worse on the days they are in the office. Their choice of forcing everyone back on the same day is not only bad for their workers, but it's bad for all of their neighbors and the planet.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • roflchoppa 4y ago
    This work from office thing is really killing travel times in the Bay Area. 237/880 is almost back to pre-pandemic levels, the HOV lanes are making the problems worse.
    • jedberg 4y ago
      I'm willing to accept that most of that traffic is people who can't work from home. That being said, I really do miss the traffic from those first few weeks of the pandemic, when I could get from Cupertino to the airport in 12 minutes at 6pm (a drive that now takes about 25 minutes, and pre-pandemic took 45+).
    • bentcorner 4y ago
      Seattle area has the same issue. My job encouraged return to office end of March (and I suspect other employers in the area had similar timelines) and traffic has been steadily getting worse ever since.
    • jeffbee 4y ago
      Explain how the HOV lanes are making it worse?
      • jedberg 4y ago
        They converted regular lanes to HOV/express, but not enough people are carpooling.
• no_wizard 4y ago
  Even more frustrating: You can't just pick the campus you want to work from. When I worked at Apple most teams were distributed by seat availability not co-location, so you could be on the same campus or set of buildings but all work in different parts of the offices / campus so all meetings with exception of critical ones were held in a remote fashion in conference rooms anyway. So it wouldn't have mattered if I worked in Santa Clara, Apple Park, Infinite Loop, or Sacramento (yes, they have a campus there), or working from home, 80% of the time. They even had a shuttle that went from Sacramento to campuses every single day. It was so odd to me even to this day. This was a common source of frustration for employees because they couldn't just work at the office closest to them or work from home. Very few people I knew there worked directly along side their team while I was there. I'm sure this wasn't true for everyone though, however I think it was at least at the time, the majority.
  • lokar 4y ago
    At Google people routinely have VC meetings between adjacent buildings.
  • _fat_santa 4y ago
    This makes their policy even more baffling. You're basically getting the worst of both worlds, you still have the commute and all the BS around working in person, yet once you get there it's essentially remote work.
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  Apple spend a morbillion dollars on their HQ, of course they want to force their staff to be on site. I hope the staff bands together and wins.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• crypot 4y ago
  I don't see how there can be any debate around WFH. The S&P 500 had record profitability during this completely unplanned WFH experience. If WFH was so terrible for business there should be ample proof, but so far it has only be shown to be a success.
  • draw_down 4y ago
  • nerpderp82 4y ago
    Because it is about status and control. They want to see all the busy-bee activity in their expensive buildings. Workers have been asking for WFH for years, the pandemic proved it could work even for the sudden and untrained.
  • ensan 4y ago
    "The S&P 500 had record profitability during this completely unplanned WFH experience." Correlation != Causation
    • pbuzbee 4y ago
      True, but if a company wants to restrict something and cites productivity as the reason, I would hope they could provide concrete evidence. Most of the publicly stated reasons against remote work/WFH seem to be qualitative and only reflect the values of executives.
• ianbutler 4y ago
  Personally I just want companies to settle on their policies so I can prioritize finding in person work. Everyone can have their opinions and now the chips need to settle so we can pick the places that are best for us.
• thedangler 4y ago
  I work for a university and they are hellbent on bringing us back to office full time. Currently we work in office 2 days a week. My office is in a cubical, ina concrete room with no windows. Meanwhile complaining about how much space is needed and how there is no parking but wont adjust policies to let us work from home, for those who can. Makes no sense. I am a web developer / analyst and have no contact with anyone outside of my developoment team. Get this, our meetings are on zoom in the office anyways. lol
• stackedinserter 4y ago
  > It will make Apple younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied, in short They are free to leave and enrich other companies.
  • zht 4y ago
    the same can be said for people living in States or cities where they don't agree with the current administration's policies. should the response always be to leave? what about fighting to try to make the place you are currently in better?
    • stackedinserter 4y ago
      > what about fighting to try to make the place you are currently in better? Define "better"
• Grustaf 4y ago
  Most of those complaining joined Apple when it was fully on-site, and very remote hostile. Even those that joined during the closure were aware of the company's stance on remote work, so what they are asking for is a favour.
• EricE 4y ago
  Neuro normative? Good grief. They don't want to work in the office - no need to gobbledygook it up in some bizarre appeal to authority. I can say as someone who now works full time remote while also geographically isolated, it's not all a bed of roses. I do miss the serendipitous hallway conversations - some of the best directions in my career came from those spontaneous and unplanned in person interactions. I'm toward the end of my career so I now have enough contacts and informal interactions with folks where I can still force those kinds of engagements; if I need to. 10 years ago? No way would I be happy working remotely full time. You just can't get the connections and synergies unless you are in close proximity to other folks; especially those outside of your immediate work unit but still relevant to your work. A lot of these younger folks pushing for full time remote at the start of their career are putting themselves into a box I don't think they fully appreciate - and won't until it's too late. In a way I'm glad telework didn't become more accepted until later in my career - I absolutely wouldn't be where I am today if I had been full time remote - I wouldn't have had near the opportunities to connect and be noticed.
  • warning26 4y ago
    > A lot of these younger folks pushing for full time remote at the start of their career are putting themselves into a box I don't think they fully appreciate This 100%—I worked remotely for my first 5 years after graduating college, and I thought it was great until I went into a real office and found out what I was missing. I vowed to never work a remote job again (of course, the pandemic forced a quick end to that vow, hah.)
    • lghh 4y ago
      And you still have that choice both under the model that the workers here are suggesting and in the greater economy.
      • warning26 4y ago
        Problem is, when you give workers a choice to come into the office, it becomes a game theory problem that ultimately results in no one coming in. "Why come to the office if none of my team members are there?"
• BenFranklin100 4y ago
  These WFH stories seem to preferentially solicit comments from WFH employees who enjoy the flexibility to comment on HN during the workday.
  • solenoidalslide 4y ago
    I would wager Apple employees, or in-office employees in general, tend not comment on threads like these in fear of publicly disagreeing with company leadership. So maybe there is some selection bias at play.
  • BaseballPhysics 4y ago
    LOL, I feel attacked...
  • chrsig 4y ago
    do you think that people in an office _don't_ slack off and browse HN/reddit/whatever? At least at home I don't need to feel like there's someone standing over my shoulder.
• yaya69 4y ago
  become a drone from home or queen from home if you don't want to be a work from home
• zht 4y ago
  I've always heard that Apple culture is secretive to the point where multiple people working on the same product can be talking about the same thing without realizing it (since each team has different codenames for the same product). is this true?
• jakenberg 4y ago
  Apple is in a very tough spot. A $5bn headquarters sits relatively vacant with decreasing likelihood that there will be a return on investment. They ironically dug themselves into a hole by preaching how it would revolutionize the workplace while most feel this way about WFH. The paradigm shift seems obvious, especially when you account for the unrelenting rise in commercial real estate prices since Covid. Perhaps Apple cannot acknowledge the foot in their mouth because it would contribute to a systemic collapse of the commercial real estate market... crazy times.
  • Tiktaalik 4y ago
    Apple fucked themselves by embracing the status quo of silicon valley commuter car culture. It's hard not to notice that so many of the complaints around return to work from SV area posters centre around commuting woes. If SV cities were compact, walkable places where people could easily walk, bike and take transit to work returning to work wouldn't cause so much grief. People are upset at the notion of a return to an hours long commute on the highway. If their commute was a 15 minute bike ride there'd be less opposition. Apple built the wrong thing in the wrong place, and never became politically involved in trying to make life better for their employees.
    • dml2135 4y ago
      While I don't think you are completely wrong, as a New Yorker I have to say that you'll find the same conversation going on here, except about the subway. Commuting just sucks in general.
    • 0xjmp 4y ago
      I've worked remote on and off for 6 years. The first two years was pure bliss. I slowly started to realize that having no hobbies, partner, etc was not good for my mental health. It took about 6 months to fix that. That has been (in my experience) the only thing that would excite me enough to go into the office. I walked to work in Los Angeles (can you believe it?) for 2 years in-between and it was great - i loved that job. It still didn't hold a candle to WFH for me. I think many have realized this same thing in recent years: it becomes very hard to want to go back for a multitude of reasons.
• bhewes 4y ago
  Any actual metrics on employee productivity with the full remote, full office, or hybrid model? No wonder our labor productivity has been stagnate over the last decade.
• kisamoto 4y ago
  Some people like work from home, some like being in the office. Why force either? But I understand it's far easier for companies to pick one and apply (especially Apple and other large companies who have invested heavily in expensive real estate that would otherwise sit empty).
• wiradikusuma 4y ago
  All these arguments against work-from-office/hybrid, not that I disagree with, but hasn't that been the case since forever, pre-Covid? I mean, how did working people live last time? How about people whose job can't be done WFH, like a surgeon or postman? I'm almost 40, and most of my work life has been at the office (like most people who have experienced work pre-Covid). I also spent ~5 years WFH when running my small startup, although now I'm back in the corporate. In my opinion, and from asking around, what many people want is "choice". Hybrid seems to be that.
• sssilver 4y ago
  I would have run back to the office if only I was given a quiet room in there of my own, and not a public room full of distractions.
• vondur 4y ago
  The only way to get Apple to change is to have mass resignations of software developers across the company.
• jwie 4y ago
  I think a big missing dimension of the return to office campaigns of large companies is the other pressures these organizations are facing. The pressure to return to the office is not coming from management; it's coming from investors who own a bunch of commercial real estate and local political machines. There is certainly some desire for controlling the workers. But for the most part this is about access to the cash flow commuting workers generate. The Mayor of New York for instance has made many public declarations about everyone needing to get back to the office, but this is just one public example. Any city has these same pressures, they're simply more acute in NY. Unless you go back to the office you won't spend a ton of money you wouldn't need to otherwise. This is the crux of it.
• zarkov99 4y ago
  Of all the arguments against RTO the ones the signatories chose were racism, agism and sexism. Because everything, absolutely everything one does not like must somehow be linked back to white maleness. God, this stuff parodies itself.
  • chupkarkhotay 4y ago
    If you had a heart condition and you went to a doctor with chest pain, it'd be a pretty reasonable guess that the underlying cause was the heart condition.
• jnwatson 4y ago
  An important point that’s missed is that working in an office is dramatically worse now than it was when I started my career in the late 90’s. I had my own office as intern. When I needed focus time (which is a lot of time as a developer), I could close a door. Especially with Apple’s open-concept HQ, the delta between WFH and office is larger than it has to be. The market is speaking. Apple pays well below the rest of FAANG already. Because of their policy, they can only recruit from a narrow, already highly-paid pool of developers. I know an Apple manager that is leaving partly because he can’t recruit anyone to come work for him.
  • cryptonector 4y ago
    At Sun everyone had an office, either shared with at most two other people, or private. It was great.
  • bsder 4y ago
    > An important point that’s missed is that working in an office is dramatically worse now than it was when I started my career in the late 90’s. Yeah. I think this is significantly being understated. There is a VAST difference between "in person" meaning "You have your own office" and "in person" meaning "Open office plan with no dividers at all". For the first, I wouldn't have much of an issue coming in. For the second, I'd probably take up pitchforks to avoid it.
  • xiphias2 4y ago
    It was not totally missed. The fact that it's so much harder to work in open office than home was in the letter, but sure it should have expanded on it being different from 20 years earlier.
• ironman1478 4y ago
  I just got an offer from Apple in a mixed HW/SW role (a role that I am allowed to perform remotely at my current company). They are offering me more money than my current employer, but their remote work policy is awful and their general benefits are meh (not many days off) so I am declining the offer. I know Apple would be amazing to work for especially for the team I interview for, but they are shooting themselves in the foot with these policies.
• togaen 4y ago
  Spoiled brats.
• lvl102 4y ago
  Of all the places, I actually wouldn’t mind going into Apple’s (relatively) new HQ…if I lived within 30 minutes. Otherwise, it’s a complete waste of my personal time sitting in traffic and waste of gas.
• the_mar 4y ago
  In March 2020 I hated WFH, the lack of interacting with people drove me up the wall. Two years later, I onboarded many people on my team, figured out productive ways to collaborate remotely and developed very much real friendships with people I have never been in the same room with. It takes effort to ensure people have a forum to ask questions, mentor people or just hang out online. But it's not impossible.
• abridgett 4y ago
  It's particularly silly when you consider the number of offices and timezones. Not only is a large amount of interaction via video call, when on site there'll be a shortage of rooms and the sound quality is usually pretty dire.
• LightG 4y ago
  For what it's worth, I fully support the letter. It's well written and really sums up what many modern workers want. We've reached a technological tipping point when it comes to flexibility. Either embrace it or die. I've had my head in my hands watching one of our departments efforts trying to hire staff (who are forcing in-office presence), they cannot find the employees and are now offering other benefits to compensate. No dice. Not their fault, it's being forced by directors. From afar, I'm watching the slow death of the company as existing talent withiers and isn't replaced. Embrace it or die.
• Handytinge 4y ago
  > "In short, it will lead to privileges deciding who can work for Apple, not who’d be the best fit." Doesn't forcing people to work with home lead to this more? Not everyone has an available, suitable work space at home, and those who don't or who have noisy families etc (generally less white, male, etc etc) are likely to miss opportunities they could have taken in an office. Making this a social justice issue is a weird, speculative way to deal with this. Why bring gender and race into it, why not just argue the merits (which do seem to be in favour of remote work). Seems a silly letter to me.