7 ms·

Probably going to get downvoted by people but… There are a lot of people ITT scornful of Apple’s decision here, and saying that they’re only doing it for dumb r

by 542458 4y ago

Probably going to get downvoted by people but… There are a lot of people ITT scornful of Apple’s decision here, and saying that they’re only doing it for dumb reasons, I.e., to justify their office or because managers are old and out of touch. Please don’t take this as a wholehearted endorsement of Apple’s policy here, but I do sort of get it. In my experience, doing collaborative creative work is dramatically more difficult in a remote environment. In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other). I’m sure remote works well for some creative teams… but in my experience, it is much harder (I’ve spoken to peers at other companies who feel the same way). If Apple thinks that collaboration and idea creation are core to innovation, I can see why they want people back in the office. Not saying I agree with their methods though - personally I would have gone for a softer touch and a more tailored-by-team approach.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago
dmitrygr 4y ago
> In my experience, doing collaborative creative work is dramatically more difficult in a remote environment Work on improving your ability to do collaborative work remotely? It is the future
- 542458 4y ago
  I’m doing my best! I’m in a very hybrid environment right now. But even people with a lot of experience find it hard. The O’Reiley book “Discussing Design” (strong recommend, it’s a good book) is about design critique, and it spends some time on how doing critique in hybrid/remote environments is hard. Sometimes things are just… more difficult, and it’s not trivially solvable.
- sys_64738 4y ago
  Design work needs a whiteboard but no electronic tools come close.
  - asdff 4y ago
    A laptop camera angled on the whiteboard or whatever scrap of paper the person has on hand? Thats what we've used and its fine for showing drawings in zoom meetings. Making people commute to watch someone draw on a whiteboard seems wasteful.
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      I have tried whiteboard over zoom. It’s a miserable failure. There isn’t a camera, lighting setup and compression algorithm on earth that will get it right. It just looks like a grainy, pixilated poorly lit mess. And you can’t hand the market to the other people. And worse you have to schedule it in advance in 30 minute intervals. Bye bye spontaneous creativity. Bye bye innovation. Programming remote is easy. But there is vastly more to delivering a product than writing code.
  - LgWoodenBadger 4y ago
    Have you tried the virtual whiteboard in conjunction with an iPad and Apple Pencil? Or whatever the Surface equivalent is? 10000 better than a real white board
    - sys_64738 4y ago
      Nothing beats a real whiteboard for interactive discussion and synergy, IMO.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  Progress doesn't come from telling people to "get good". If remote collaboration can be comparable to in-person, we need to prove it.
  - dmitrygr 4y ago
    We have proved it. See last few years.
    - flkiwi 4y ago
      Or decades, for anyone who has worked for a company with more than one major office. The argument that you can be successful only by sharing physical space is disproven every day, and has been for a very, very long time.
    - spookthesunset 4y ago
      Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. With remote it’s as if the rest of the company doesn’t exist. You’ll never even meet anybody else using just zoom. I’m sorry but full remote is a huge bust. I get people love their lack of commute and think they are all being ultra productive but honestly they aren’t. There is way more to being a successful organization than simply optimizing for each employees productivity. Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work. The last two years were supposed to be temporary. Always remember that.
      - prmoustache 4y ago
        > Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. > [...] > Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work. How do you think companies that have team spread across different continents have been working for decades? Why do you think apps such as slack and msteams were already heavily used and popular in the workplace before covid hit?
    - 4y ago
- andrekandre 4y ago
  > Work on improving your ability to do collaborative work remotely? It is the future sounds like a business opportunity to me!
metadat 4y ago
Don't be a sucker. Lots of second rate management wants to see butts in seats. That is all.
jedberg 4y ago
As they pointed out in their open letter [0] the last time this was proposed, they don't need in person collaboration every day, or even every week. It's probably only useful about once a month if that. [0] https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-work https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-w...
hotpotamus 4y ago
I wonder how people feel about making other aspects of their lives remote. Attending remote conferences? How about remote vacations? Remote schooling for their kids?
- sylens 4y ago
  Being able to watch conference talks on a livestream without traveling to them has been one of the best parts of the pandemic for me
  - asdff 4y ago
    There have been a number of conferences I've missed this year because they returned to in person. Sorry, I'm in it for a few talks, I'm not uprooting my week to fly to Portland and hunt for accommodations. A big slap in the face when they don't even offer recorded sessions online. Like, if the conference is about sharing knowledge with the world, don't you want to let the world access that knowledge?
    - mrcartmeneses 4y ago
      A slap in the face? Do you want them to put out free content that took a lot of money to co-ordinate and produce or do you want them to spend a lot of money setting up a paywall for access that very few people will buy?
      - seydor 4y ago
        academic conferences are not like that
      - Spivak 4y ago
        All these conferences have corporate sponsors and paid-for sessions by their employees as sales and recruiting tools. The content should be freely accessible, your ticket buys you renting out the conference space and food.
asdff 4y ago
What about continuing to sketch out on paper or whiteboard and just pointing the webcam at it in the meeting? Works fine for us.
- citizenkeen 4y ago
  Then how do you hand the marker to someone else?
  - asdff 4y ago
    They start talking and their camera fills my screen.
sweetdreamerit 4y ago
You are not alone in believing creative work and collaboration are much more difficult in a remote environment. But yesterday I watched the movie "A dangerous method" about Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Well, at the time, collaboration was via paper mail. And my feeling is that they were more creative than we are. I'm not suggesting to go paper mail, but I couldn't help but observe this fact.
- 542458 4y ago
  That’s an interesting hypothesis. I could see how paper mail, by virtue of forcing you to put extreme effort into clarity and thoroughness, could spark some novel thinking. On the other hand, as much as I think I work with great people, I doubt they’re all great in the level of those three!
- afavour 4y ago
  Unfortunately I think remote work is the worst of both worlds by comparison. IMO collaborating via paper isn't about the actual medium of communication, it's time and freedom. When every reply takes at least a few days to arrive to you you've got enormous space for experimentation, even if only in your own head. Meanwhile in remote work world we're plugged into video conference meetings multiple times a day. There isn't a lot of mental space.
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    Just refuse the meetings you don't/can't attend. The meetings overloads are totally unrelated to the fact employees are working on site or remotely. It happens in both models.
    - afavour 4y ago
      > Just refuse the meetings you don't/can't attend. Very easy to say, very difficult for a great many people to do.
  - franga2000 4y ago
    You are comparing synchronous and asynchronous work, not in-person and remote. There's no reason remote work needs to involve multiple meetings a day, just like there's nothing preventing your boss from requiring multiple meetings a day when working in person. In fact, remote work is usually more asynchronous than in-person when it's a core part of how a company works. Remote-first companies might have people working in 3 timezones with 8 hours between each of them (I've been in this situation), so meetings are a pain in the ass for everyone and everything that can possibly be done via email or other tools, is.
seydor 4y ago
Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers. Trial-and-error is the least desirable way to work. Async and remote is about thinking and writing down before blurting out. To me the latter is more professional way to work, and for the same reason it's more somber.
- dont__panic 4y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I recently started at a full remote company, after working at very in-person-centric companies before. I'm astonished at home much genuine discussion takes place on slack and over email. It's so nice to have a physical, searchable record of where various engineers stand on these issues! And it's nice to be able to take my time and read through an argument, instead of making the argument orally and forgetting half of the points by the time we decide on a direction. If your company stubbornly insists on synchronous video calls for every decision, of course you'll hate remote work. But if your company embraces the async nature of remote work, I think it's possible to be much more productive.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers And remote-WFH meetings that aren't 1:1, are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep with their mics muted, until their name gets called and you see them suddenly snap back to reality because they were watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast. I know I'm guilty of that and if you say you aren't, you're lying, like saying you don't masturbate.
  - csomar 4y ago
    > And remote-WFH meetings are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep, watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast. This is a company policy problem. Remote or in-person is not going to solve that. If your employees are not being engaged in meetings, stop having them.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
Collaborative work done remotely is a skill that can be learned and improved. And yes, maybe some forms of collaborative work are inherently more difficult to do remotely. But you are ignoring the massive impacts of commuting, being stuck in crappy office buildings and forced to live in an overwhelmingly expensive and chaotic city have on performance. Having spent 17 years as a remote product manager, my anecdata is that eliminating those factors from my life led to dramatically higher performance, and more importantly, a work/life balance that didn't have me quietly resenting my state of employment for the required in-person depredations.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  It's important to note the difference between... ...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience... VS ...a 20+ year veteran with 3 kids and a house in the suburbs with a 2.5hrs of commuting per day and a job that consists entirely of conference calls, emails, and presentations. Not everyone fits in these two groups, but they are illustrative. The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute. The second group has usually already baked in their system of organization and discipline and can more easily maintain productivity at home. Another dimension is how much socialization an employee needs to do their job. Someone in HR might need considerably more face time than a programmer.
  - profwalkstr 4y ago
    > ...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience... > The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute. The young single employee will probably not afford to live in a big city and have a short commute.
    - koheripbal 4y ago
tzs 4y ago
For most of what Apple does, I'd expect that the ratio of in-person time to remote time needed is pretty low. I wonder if an approach like that used by some TV series might work? They have a writer's retreat for each season, where all the people that were going to be writing episodes, the showrunners, and I think the directors would get together for several days and pitch episode ideas to the group. They work out what episodes they were going to do, outlines of the general plot, and which writers and directors would do each episode. For a tech company maybe have a quarterly retreat that lasts a week or two. Hold it at some good vacation destination (changing each time), and for the well off tech companies maybe even pay for the employee's family to come too. Leave some gaps in the meeting schedules so that the employee will have some time to do vacation-like things with their family while at the retreat.
bloqs 4y ago
We are talking about a TECHNOLOGY COMPANY that sells the best collaborative software, hardware and philosophy the world has ever seen, and employs thousands of people who all believe in that. The fact this has not already been used as an example to champion technology to take it to new levels of collaborative effectiveness is an absolutely steaming red flag that Apple has begun "the descent".
KronisLV 4y ago
> In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other). Getting a graphics tablet has been a pretty good idea in my experience. You get all the benefits of working digitally like layers and non destructive operations (like moving stuff around), which would be a bit more cumbersome otherwise. Oh course I'd still argue that it's a bit worse for taking really quick notes, though being able to easily save a file or two and put it in Slack or some Wiki for referencing that exact thing months later is pretty cool, without the intermediate step of having to digitize some pictures and do the same work twice. I do also enjoy being able to share my screen in standup meetings and very quickly showing a few screenshots and graphs, in addition to aggregating them across years for later performance reviews. In my experience a particular pain point is the latency that you speak of, as well as people not wanting to invest about 50€ in a reasonable mic and possibly a webcam as well. It just shows when people don't care or don't know about these things, even interviews with government officials in the news for a while here looked like they're 240p or something.

by 542458 4y ago

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

dmitrygr 4y ago

> In my experience, doing collaborative creative work is dramatically more difficult in a remote environment Work on improving your ability to do collaborative work remotely? It is the future

542458 4y ago
I’m doing my best! I’m in a very hybrid environment right now. But even people with a lot of experience find it hard. The O’Reiley book “Discussing Design” (strong recommend, it’s a good book) is about design critique, and it spends some time on how doing critique in hybrid/remote environments is hard. Sometimes things are just… more difficult, and it’s not trivially solvable.
sys_64738 4y ago
Design work needs a whiteboard but no electronic tools come close.
- asdff 4y ago
  A laptop camera angled on the whiteboard or whatever scrap of paper the person has on hand? Thats what we've used and its fine for showing drawings in zoom meetings. Making people commute to watch someone draw on a whiteboard seems wasteful.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    I have tried whiteboard over zoom. It’s a miserable failure. There isn’t a camera, lighting setup and compression algorithm on earth that will get it right. It just looks like a grainy, pixilated poorly lit mess. And you can’t hand the market to the other people. And worse you have to schedule it in advance in 30 minute intervals. Bye bye spontaneous creativity. Bye bye innovation. Programming remote is easy. But there is vastly more to delivering a product than writing code.
- LgWoodenBadger 4y ago
  Have you tried the virtual whiteboard in conjunction with an iPad and Apple Pencil? Or whatever the Surface equivalent is? 10000 better than a real white board
  - sys_64738 4y ago
    Nothing beats a real whiteboard for interactive discussion and synergy, IMO.
xboxnolifes 4y ago
Progress doesn't come from telling people to "get good". If remote collaboration can be comparable to in-person, we need to prove it.
- dmitrygr 4y ago
  We have proved it. See last few years.
  - flkiwi 4y ago
    Or decades, for anyone who has worked for a company with more than one major office. The argument that you can be successful only by sharing physical space is disproven every day, and has been for a very, very long time.
  - spookthesunset 4y ago
    Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. With remote it’s as if the rest of the company doesn’t exist. You’ll never even meet anybody else using just zoom. I’m sorry but full remote is a huge bust. I get people love their lack of commute and think they are all being ultra productive but honestly they aren’t. There is way more to being a successful organization than simply optimizing for each employees productivity. Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work. The last two years were supposed to be temporary. Always remember that.
    - prmoustache 4y ago
      > Naw. Two years isn’t enough time for large organizations to fully devolve into tiny silos of people that never collaborate outside their immediate team. > [...] > Everything exists on a pendulum and it is gonna swing back in favor of real in person work. How do you think companies that have team spread across different continents have been working for decades? Why do you think apps such as slack and msteams were already heavily used and popular in the workplace before covid hit?
  - 4y ago
andrekandre 4y ago
> Work on improving your ability to do collaborative work remotely? It is the future sounds like a business opportunity to me!

metadat 4y ago

Don't be a sucker. Lots of second rate management wants to see butts in seats. That is all.

jedberg 4y ago

As they pointed out in their open letter [0] the last time this was proposed, they don't need in person collaboration every day, or even every week. It's probably only useful about once a month if that. [0] https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-work https://appletogether.org/hotnews/thoughts-on-office-bound-w...

hotpotamus 4y ago

I wonder how people feel about making other aspects of their lives remote. Attending remote conferences? How about remote vacations? Remote schooling for their kids?

sylens 4y ago
Being able to watch conference talks on a livestream without traveling to them has been one of the best parts of the pandemic for me
- asdff 4y ago
  There have been a number of conferences I've missed this year because they returned to in person. Sorry, I'm in it for a few talks, I'm not uprooting my week to fly to Portland and hunt for accommodations. A big slap in the face when they don't even offer recorded sessions online. Like, if the conference is about sharing knowledge with the world, don't you want to let the world access that knowledge?
  - mrcartmeneses 4y ago
    A slap in the face? Do you want them to put out free content that took a lot of money to co-ordinate and produce or do you want them to spend a lot of money setting up a paywall for access that very few people will buy?
    - seydor 4y ago
      academic conferences are not like that
    - Spivak 4y ago
      All these conferences have corporate sponsors and paid-for sessions by their employees as sales and recruiting tools. The content should be freely accessible, your ticket buys you renting out the conference space and food.

asdff 4y ago

What about continuing to sketch out on paper or whiteboard and just pointing the webcam at it in the meeting? Works fine for us.

citizenkeen 4y ago
Then how do you hand the marker to someone else?
- asdff 4y ago
  They start talking and their camera fills my screen.

sweetdreamerit 4y ago

You are not alone in believing creative work and collaboration are much more difficult in a remote environment. But yesterday I watched the movie "A dangerous method" about Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein. Well, at the time, collaboration was via paper mail. And my feeling is that they were more creative than we are. I'm not suggesting to go paper mail, but I couldn't help but observe this fact.

542458 4y ago
That’s an interesting hypothesis. I could see how paper mail, by virtue of forcing you to put extreme effort into clarity and thoroughness, could spark some novel thinking. On the other hand, as much as I think I work with great people, I doubt they’re all great in the level of those three!
afavour 4y ago
Unfortunately I think remote work is the worst of both worlds by comparison. IMO collaborating via paper isn't about the actual medium of communication, it's time and freedom. When every reply takes at least a few days to arrive to you you've got enormous space for experimentation, even if only in your own head. Meanwhile in remote work world we're plugged into video conference meetings multiple times a day. There isn't a lot of mental space.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  Just refuse the meetings you don't/can't attend. The meetings overloads are totally unrelated to the fact employees are working on site or remotely. It happens in both models.
  - afavour 4y ago
    > Just refuse the meetings you don't/can't attend. Very easy to say, very difficult for a great many people to do.
- franga2000 4y ago
  You are comparing synchronous and asynchronous work, not in-person and remote. There's no reason remote work needs to involve multiple meetings a day, just like there's nothing preventing your boss from requiring multiple meetings a day when working in person. In fact, remote work is usually more asynchronous than in-person when it's a core part of how a company works. Remote-first companies might have people working in 3 timezones with 8 hours between each of them (I've been in this situation), so meetings are a pain in the ass for everyone and everything that can possibly be done via email or other tools, is.

seydor 4y ago

Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers. Trial-and-error is the least desirable way to work. Async and remote is about thinking and writing down before blurting out. To me the latter is more professional way to work, and for the same reason it's more somber.

dont__panic 4y ago
Couldn't agree more. I recently started at a full remote company, after working at very in-person-centric companies before. I'm astonished at home much genuine discussion takes place on slack and over email. It's so nice to have a physical, searchable record of where various engineers stand on these issues! And it's nice to be able to take my time and read through an argument, instead of making the argument orally and forgetting half of the points by the time we decide on a direction. If your company stubbornly insists on synchronous video calls for every decision, of course you'll hate remote work. But if your company embraces the async nature of remote work, I think it's possible to be much more productive.
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>Live meetings are high-speed half-assed ideas being thrown around, and dominated by the most talkative/gregarious/attention seekers And remote-WFH meetings that aren't 1:1, are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep with their mics muted, until their name gets called and you see them suddenly snap back to reality because they were watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast. I know I'm guilty of that and if you say you aren't, you're lying, like saying you don't masturbate.
- csomar 4y ago
  > And remote-WFH meetings are usually even more half-assed as most participants aren't fully present there mentally, and just nod along half-asleep, watching an interesting YouTube clip on the other screen or reading HN/reddit, hoping to get it over with so they can get back to their work/lunch/breakfast. This is a company policy problem. Remote or in-person is not going to solve that. If your employees are not being engaged in meetings, stop having them.

wintermutestwin 4y ago

Collaborative work done remotely is a skill that can be learned and improved. And yes, maybe some forms of collaborative work are inherently more difficult to do remotely. But you are ignoring the massive impacts of commuting, being stuck in crappy office buildings and forced to live in an overwhelmingly expensive and chaotic city have on performance. Having spent 17 years as a remote product manager, my anecdata is that eliminating those factors from my life led to dramatically higher performance, and more importantly, a work/life balance that didn't have me quietly resenting my state of employment for the required in-person depredations.

koheripbal 4y ago
It's important to note the difference between... ...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience... VS ...a 20+ year veteran with 3 kids and a house in the suburbs with a 2.5hrs of commuting per day and a job that consists entirely of conference calls, emails, and presentations. Not everyone fits in these two groups, but they are illustrative. The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute. The second group has usually already baked in their system of organization and discipline and can more easily maintain productivity at home. Another dimension is how much socialization an employee needs to do their job. Someone in HR might need considerably more face time than a programmer.
- profwalkstr 4y ago
  > ...a young single employee living in the city who also dates and socializes in the city, and has a short commute to a nice office and has a social experience... > The first group of young employees NEED the socialization. It's an important part of generating company culture. It's also usually a low cost effort for them to commute. The young single employee will probably not afford to live in a big city and have a short commute.
  - koheripbal 4y ago

tzs 4y ago

For most of what Apple does, I'd expect that the ratio of in-person time to remote time needed is pretty low. I wonder if an approach like that used by some TV series might work? They have a writer's retreat for each season, where all the people that were going to be writing episodes, the showrunners, and I think the directors would get together for several days and pitch episode ideas to the group. They work out what episodes they were going to do, outlines of the general plot, and which writers and directors would do each episode. For a tech company maybe have a quarterly retreat that lasts a week or two. Hold it at some good vacation destination (changing each time), and for the well off tech companies maybe even pay for the employee's family to come too. Leave some gaps in the meeting schedules so that the employee will have some time to do vacation-like things with their family while at the retreat.

bloqs 4y ago

We are talking about a TECHNOLOGY COMPANY that sells the best collaborative software, hardware and philosophy the world has ever seen, and employs thousands of people who all believe in that. The fact this has not already been used as an example to champion technology to take it to new levels of collaborative effectiveness is an absolutely steaming red flag that Apple has begun "the descent".

KronisLV 4y ago

> In person we can quickly sketch diagrams and wireframes out on a whiteboard or paper and having a six person debate about designs is easy. Remotely, you have to deal with virtual whiteboard software (and as much as I love figjam, it can’t compare to the speed of a physical pen) and video chat (where even a tiny amount of latency results in people talking over each other). Getting a graphics tablet has been a pretty good idea in my experience. You get all the benefits of working digitally like layers and non destructive operations (like moving stuff around), which would be a bit more cumbersome otherwise. Oh course I'd still argue that it's a bit worse for taking really quick notes, though being able to easily save a file or two and put it in Slack or some Wiki for referencing that exact thing months later is pretty cool, without the intermediate step of having to digitize some pictures and do the same work twice. I do also enjoy being able to share my screen in standup meetings and very quickly showing a few screenshots and graphs, in addition to aggregating them across years for later performance reviews. In my experience a particular pain point is the latency that you speak of, as well as people not wanting to invest about 50€ in a reasonable mic and possibly a webcam as well. It just shows when people don't care or don't know about these things, even interviews with government officials in the news for a while here looked like they're 240p or something.