Apple just built the most expensive on-site campus in history prior to the pandemic. It's a 40 year old company led by 50+ year old executives who have built their entire social and family lives around their offices. Obviously they're going to force everybody back to the way it was.
This means nothing for the big shift to remote however. The economic incentives for both companies and employees are just too strong for it not to happen.
It was never going to be led by gray haired execs at legacy companies like Apple. When you're currently the most profitable company in the history of earth, you can ignore otherwise rational incentives. But the key word in that sentence was "currently."
Instead of talking about what the winners of the past are doing, we should be thinking about what the winners of the future will do.
It's important to remember, no company has stayed at the top of the S&P500 for very long.
> Apple just built the most expensive on-site campus in history prior to the pandemic. It's a 40 year old company led by 50+ year old executives who have built their entire social and family lives around their offices. Obviously they're going to force everybody back to the way it was.
Apple is also notoriously paranoid/secretive even within the company.
Apple Park is beautiful, but it's also an awful, productivity- and privacy-killing open plan office space. Give me the old-school Infinite Loop with actual walled offices, even if they're closet-sized.
Hardware engineering, especially the type Apple does, is extremely hard to do when everyone is remote at their own homes. You can have multiple offices that work on different components, but at each of those locations there needs to be a physical office where the engineers can go to.
You can make the argument that software engineering won’t suffer as much with everyone being remote, but Apple probably doesn’t want to segment their engineers and give some more perks than others.
Also, for people like myself who can only afford a tiny, messy shared 1 bedroom apartment, having an office to go to is a blessing. Even with the 40 minute commute each way, I’m still more productive in the office than I am at home.
> It's important to remember, no company has stayed at the top of the S&P500 for very long.
this has been true historically, but nothing makes it inherently so if you think in the context of a human's lifespan.
100 years ago, the world wasn't a continuously connected marked. If a company got "too large" for comfort, a government could intervene and force a split.
This is no longer a viable action, as companies cater to literally the whole world at the same time, so splitting them in one jurisdiction would just end up making that particular market less attractive to companies... effectively harming the government economically.
There is only so much you can deduct from our history considering that the base premises is so different nowadays, especially if you constrain it to the time we've got to experience this world. Microsoft and Apple at least have been around since before the 90th, so they're already 30yrs in... thats almost a full professional life of the average employee before they retire.
People like to point and laugh because Apple's obligation to shareholders constantly stands in the way of their social messaging. In one hand, they never miss an opportunity to stay current and kowtow to the current trend d'jour, and on the other they make incredibly asinine business decisions that completely undermine their rhetoric.
It seems like there are many engineers who want to work remotely full time going forward. I'm in the opposite boat. If a company doesn't have an office, I don't want to work there. I like having a place to go to that isn't my home. I like meeting and talking to employees in different parts of the business without having to setup zoom calls for that. I enjoy the social and collaborative aspects of in-person work. I do enjoy the ability to work remotely on occasion, but I want to be in the office most of the time.
People who don't like remote work are not out there making noise, because we're still living in a world where most jobs at least have the option of in-person work. But there's plenty of us who want to leave home on weekday mornings.
A big disconnect I see is that some offices and teams are much more pleasant to be around in person. There are companies that feel like prisons -- windowless open office setups with oppressive noise and distractions. There are others with a bunch of cool people who are respectfully quiet when others are working.
It can feel like an "pro-office" person is threatening to consign you to half your waking life in jail if you work in the former.
My hope for the WFH movement is that actual thought is put into office floor plans and setup. Open space offices are hopefully the first casualty of the next few years.
I'm a bit worried that things will accidentally go the other direction: if employees are partially remote it will be hard to justify giving them their own piece of the office. You'll have to lug everything with you every day and won't feel any ownership of anything there. It will feel like working out of a hotel room instead of your own domain.
Even within Apple I am sure there is huge variation in "quality-of-office". It's not like every Apple employee gets to work in the Starship, even in Cupertino. But for those that do, they probably are looking forward to returning.
> If a company doesn't have an office, I don't want to work there. I like having a place to go to that isn't my home. I like meeting and talking to employees in different parts of the business without having to setup zoom calls for that. I enjoy the social and collaborative aspects of in-person work. I do enjoy the ability to work remotely on occasion, but I want to be in the office most of the time.
I'm 100% the opposite of you. If I never stepped foot in an office, never saw a coworker in person, never had in-person social interactions for work again, for the rest of my life, I'd be one step closer to my dream life. Thankfully people like you have the vast majority of jobs available. Hopefully the rest of us will have more options moving forward.
Thanks for saying how I feel, though I respect an employee’s ability to choose whether they want remote work or not, and then to make that choice known by advocating for it or leaving for a position that offers it. There will be many more now, and many more will have flexibility.
But just as I wouldn’t impose on someone to force them to be in the office, I think some people definitely value the separation.
Same, and I think this is the majority view. The noise about WFH is a turn-off as well and I’d rather steer clear of those making it—-if it’s that big a deal to you, there’s plenty of remote work out there.
The vast, vast majority of jobs are in-office jobs. It's extremely unlikely that supply of WFH jobs exceeds demand considering it only just became a mainstream thing ~18 months ago. Perhaps in certain locations WFH is still the temporary default but in any place with eased/lifted pandemic restrictions the default is returning to in office.
Yeah, some people just love the micro-managing, busy-work, ass kissing, dragging others into pointless meetings, office politics, shows of autority, water cooler "friends", back-stabbing, etc, and those aren't as easy with WFH.
> I like meeting and talking to employees in different parts of the business without having to setup zoom calls for that. I enjoy the social and collaborative aspects of in-person work.
Whether you see these as a distraction or an asset (and more generally, whether you see work as a place to do work or a holistic pile of things) seems to be the dividing line for people.
I get it, the pandemic changed the game. I would personally not work for a company that doesn't give you the option of WFH but the FAANG companies are in a different ballgame. Millions of people would give their left toe to work at a company like Apple. Me included.
Who cares about WFH when you get to live in California and work with some of the brightest minds? Only privileged person wouldn't value that.
Living in California and getting paid a high salary to work with smart people is great, but it’s not the ultimate goal for many people. Calling people who value those things differently than you privileged is unfair.
Yes they have it good, and many people would love to be on their shoes, but that doesn’t mean they need to stop advocating for themselves. I’m sure someone would love to trade places with you, and I’m guessing that doesn’t stop you from trying to improve your working conditions.
This to me is in the same vein as the "it's a privilege to work here" nonsense. I think a lot of FAANG companies and their associated fan clubs don't realize that some people genuinely don't care about working at <insert famous company here> and instead are just happy doing work they like in an environment that makes them happy. To me at least, that's far more important than having "Google Software Engineer 2012-2020" stamped on my Resume.
I actually don't like FAANGs since I'm a fairly big privacy advocate. That said, Apple has a point here and you do as well, but these points are easily resolvable.
Just don't work at Apple.
If you value work from home, then Apple is probably not the place for you. It's well known in this industry that Apple will go to extraordinary lengths to ensure their corporate privacy and secrets. What makes anyone believe that a company like that would allow a person access to those secrets from home? I don't work for Apple, never have, but given what I've heard about them, work from home would be the last benefit I would expect from them.
Your questions don't hold up if you're allowed to have those super duper secrets for 2 days a week at home. It's not like your home office is any less safe on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
"Most employees would be expected to come in on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, and it would be up to them whether they work from home on Wednesdays and Fridays, Cook said."
Most != All
My guess is those that require physical access to prototypes get to come in on Wednesday and Friday too.
No, they want people that are competent and want to do what they're there to do. They don't want people that just want to show up and have their bills paid.
Living in California today means signing up for multiple months of smoke inhalation, which is a problem that only seems to be getting worse. Not to mention that the Apple of today isn’t the Apple of 10 years ago either.
This is coming from someone who worked at Apple ~10 years ago (14 years ago to be exact), and would have agreed with your statement ~10 years ago. I recently moved away from the West Coast because I have no interest in being part of the cohort analysis on the effects of prolonged smoke exposure over multiple months per year.
Also, just to throw this out there, 10 years ago you had a high likelihood of having your own office at Apple. Now it’s an open office layout like anywhere else. Looks pretty from the outside I hear though.
Edit: One additional point I find fascinating. When referred to in the aggregate, Apple employees are the “best and the brightest.” However, when they express their opinions of what they want, they’re immediately dismissed as “privileged.” I understand that these aren’t mutually exclusive, but I am always surprised how unwilling we are to listen to these people that we in theory hold up as paragons of the industry. It’s a bizarre infantilization of people we hypothetically respect.
As someone living outside the US (in the Americas still) with a chronic condition (that would be deemed as "preexisting condition" for insurers) I would be SCARED of living in California (more broadly the US). In addition to the high cost of living to live within a "sensible" commute distance from whatever office is assigned to me, it will cost me an arm and a leg to pay for my necessary medicine in the US, or jump through the hoops and loops of its healthcare system.
No thank you, I prefer working for a Silicon Valley company while still living in my home country, with a very high standard of living (given the income/expenses ratio).
Why does having a preexisting condition scare you from living in the US? Doesn't the ACA mean that you can't be denied coverage or charged more for it?
I'm assuming GP's preexisting condition requires frequent doctor visits and medications or other medical devices—or even occasional surgeries—that would be prohibitively expensive if you're uninsured.
This means:
- If you lose your job, all your coverage goes away at the end of the month. COBRA is completely unaffordable for most workers. You have to ask yourself: "if I end up with a three-month period of unemployment, will I be able to afford the meds I need to stay alive?"
- Just because you have coverage doesn't mean you have afforable coverage. You could be stuck with a sky-high deductible, your insurance could pay for such a low percentage of your medical costs, or your company could only pay for a tiny percentage of your premiums, and any of those mean you end up having to choose between medicine and rent.
- Just because you have coverage on paper doesn't mean your stuff is actually covered in practice. Getting medications and surgeries approved is often a colossal pain. It's not uncommon for someone to switch insurance carriers because they got a new job and immediately get told their new insurance won't cover the meds they've been on for years unless they try three other medications first and their doctor determines those other medications all don't work. This is especially dangerous because if the other meds don't work, you could die. Also, a lot of supposedly qualified doctors have no idea how to work with a large number of chronic conditions. People with autoimmune disorders often go without a diagnosis for decades because most doctors don't know what to look for. Imagine if the only doctor in your metro area that knows how to handle your chronic condition is out of your carrier's network (and remember you don't choose your carrier, your employer does). Now you're having premiums deducted from your paycheck and you have to pay out the nose to see the only doctor in town who can treat you. The best-case scenario is that the out-of-network rate is still high enough to take the edge off, but that's still going to be expensive. Worse is if you're on an HMO or EPO where out-of-network doctors aren't covered at all. Then you might as well not even have insurance! And it can get worse: many doctors only let patients self-pay if they don't have insurance at all, which means being on the wrong carrier (which, again, your company decides for you) means you're completely blocked from accessing care.
Given that removing a toe would result in life-long inability to properly run or dance or balance…
I get the metaphor but living in California spending 12-14h/week commuting and paying 30% more for real estate does make a difference compared to living in California and spending these 40-60h/month with family or on yourself.
I think it's really the cost of housing and unbearable commutes that people are more against than being in the office. If people could have short commutes and reasonable housing I don't think time in office would be fought as hard.
As one of the “people” I can say that being in the office is a significant downgrade compared to WFH. Being confined in specific place for 8 hours a day does not make sense for me.
My colleagues’ zoom rooms are 1-click away during work hours.
The factory floor model does not apply when all you process is information. I know managers probably still want to see their workers in their seats but trust beats micromanagement.
There's so many more costs than you listed as well(CA living), agree with all your points though :)
- Gas is the most expensive in the nation, right now a gallon in my town is $4.60 for 87.
- State taxes are highest in the nation, for most professional incomes taxes are above 10%.
- Sales tax is also very high, around 9% for most purchases, some states have no sales tax.
- Food is extremely expensive, I recently traveled to Arizona and food was about 30-40% cheaper than CA.
- Professional services are also very expensive, think doctor, eye exam, etc.
- Construction costs are about 50% higher than most areas of the country.
- As for housing, I would say say CA and the bay area in particular are extremely expensive. A typical house in the bay area is around $1.4M now, in a good area look to spend $2M., An average house in California now costs $850k, the highest its ever been. Contrast that to the average cost of a house in the US as being $350k.
Spending 30% more? More like 130% more, based on my very recent homebuying experience in another very nice city compared to what that experience would have been like in the Bay Area.
Depends on how much you make and cost of living is tangible while quality of life due to weather and proximity to the kind of nature SF has is intangible. Because everyone’s value of the latter is different, it will always make sense on paper to leave California and the Bay Area.
At the risk of being accused of "privilege"...California isn't exactly a utopia and there are plenty other places in the country (and world) that employ some of the brightest minds.
Hard disagree from me, it very much depends on what you value in life. While I have a lot of respect for people with that kind of technical ability and would no doubt be a better programmer for working with people like that, I find large corporate environments absolutely soul-crushing to the point I'd dread getting up in the morning and life is far too short to spend that much of it dreading something. I can't think of anything that would drive me to alcoholism and depression with more efficiency than working for a company like Apple, I'm simply not wired for the modern equivalent of the Calvinist work ethic such a job demands. I wouldn't dream of telling anybody else how to live their life but for me personally I'd infinitely rather live on the coast in rural Wales building straightforward backend stuff for the odd company than live in California and work for Apple! Some might accuse me of being unambitious, but it's more that my ambitions lie in areas other than what I'm paid for.
I love programming don't get me wrong, but I value my sanity and not hating myself even more than I value being a good programmer. If you look at something like Maslow's hierarchy of needs a job at a prestigious company might come near the top for some people, but it could well be the complete opposite for others. For some it's a vital plank of their identity, for others its simply paying the bills. Once you're making enough to fulfil your basic need to put bread on the table and a roof over your head then I don't think it's privileged to be choosy about what you want in a job.
Given that many people do not want to move to (insert non-cool city), or even move at all, WFH greatly improves the hiring chances of companies located there. There are tax and probably legal implications of remote work, but less immigrations issues, etc.
> Who cares about WFH when you get to live in California and work with some of the brightest minds?
There's a lot to unpack in this question. It's not guaranteed that FAANG = California, as campuses sprout up in cheaper places and there's an active shift among some of those companies towards hiring explicitly outside of California. California comes with its own sets of problems that you may not appreciate until you move here (huge drought, wildfire season is getting worse, climate change making heat waves more frequent, housing/commute crisis, etc). And if the "brightest minds" are the ones refusing to go back on site, then will you actually be working with the brightest minds?
We all do better when we all do better. It's hard when you have the "grass is greener" feeling, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't support each other as we strive for a more just work environment. WFH allows that. Just because you'd give your left toe to work at Apple doesn't mean you (or anybody else) should.
I'd say for me the choice about WFH is one based on several weighted variables: time to commute to office, pay, responsibility, office quality. My weights on those changed over time; for example, at some point I had kids, which meant I had to be relatively close to home within certain hours, not 1 hour away at an office. I no longer need pay that's as high, and I don't need access to the "brightest minds" as much as I used to (it helped at the time: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10720231B1/en never would have happened if I wasn't "hanging out in a microkitchen with Jeff Dean")
House prices are insane, there's a lot of people, and traffic is generally bad too. You also spend a lot of time inside, working... Otherwise it is great!
> Millions of people would give their left toe to work at a company like Apple. Me included.
I'm not sure if you're fully in-the-loop about California. I've visited the state a few times, and it is absolutely miserable: everything costs 3x as much as it would elsewhere, pollution seems to be 4x worse, it's constantly hot and humid, and there's a housing crisis.
I'd probably reject a job offer from Apple solely based on how terrible the relocation would be.
>I've visited the state a few times, and it is absolutely miserable: everything costs 3x as much as it would elsewhere, pollution seems to be 4x worse, it's constantly hot and humid, and there's a housing crisis.
Not to mention LA having slums that rival Cairo's and violent ghettos unworthy of a developed world country, or that San Francisco is increasingly a (literally) shit hole, with crappy social policies, homeless, and shit on the streets...
> Who cares about WFH when you get to live in California and work with some of the brightest minds? Only privileged person wouldn't value that.
On the contrary, only a privileged person would specifically care about "work[ing] with some of the brightest minds". People who aren't privileged are just thankful to have a full-time job with benefits, and you can get that in any metro area with a significant population. On top of that, while California has some of the highest-living in the country, unemployment there doesn't pay any more than in any other state, which means if you lose your job you're hosed unless you're privileged enough to have a massive nest egg.
A couple more things...
- I actively do not want to live in California, and I most certainly don't want to live in that part of California. NorCal has been on my list of places I dislike so much you couldn't pay me seven figures to move there. For a while, I considered possibly moving to the LA area before it finally sank in that I'd probably hate living there almost as much as NorCal, but LA at least has the advantage of being sunny all year round with gorgeous beaches (visiting LA still on my bucket list, I just don't want to live there). The Bay Area doesn't even have that.
- My "I'd be an idiot to turn this job down" criteria involve being able to travel all the time and constantly work out of different parts of the country. This requires both a position that's 100% remote with no strings attached and a salary that's high enough to afford to be able to buy lots of plane tickets and spend weeks upon weeks living out of a hotel room. In fact, I just started such a job last week, and I intend to start flying in 2022 (I'm fully vaccinated, but the Delta variant has me nervous for now).
- I genuinely couldn't care less about "work[ing] with some of the brightest minds". I work to fund my life, and that's it, I don't want anything out of my job other than a steady paycheck and benefits. As long as my coworkers have some base level of competency and I can have enjoyable conversations with, I'm good.
I get what you're saying, but it's those same bright minds who are concerned about being in an office amid a pandemic. It's a reasonable concern.
Everyone has a right to make their own decisions, but calling somebody out as privileged over a legitimate health concern seems counterproductive. What does Apple or some other big company lose from having their employees work from home a bit longer? Productivity. Money. Maybe some projects run long.
What does an employee have to lose? Their health. Possibly their life. Even if you're vaccinated, you can be a carrier, you can still catch COVID--you're just not likely to have a bad case of it. That does not mean it is no longer fatal or that you can't have complications from a mild case.
I was with you for the first half, but it is not true that there is any reasonable chance of death or significant complications after vaccination. At that point, the risk is no greater than a fire starting in your own home.
The rest of what you said, I agree with. The more salient point is people who are immunocompromised and cannot get the vaccine.
After your comment I reviewed some recent research and concluded that you are correct in there mild cases have not been shown to be fatal or otherwise result in serious complications. Thank for the correction!
I agree with you on the point of the immunocompromised and that those with weak immune responses are the most at risk.
The AARP did a pretty good write up of the efficacy of a couple of COVID vaccines and what efficacy means[1]. They cite a number of studies and conclude that:
* Breakthrough cases—infections after vaccination are possible, but rare, with multiple studies citing rate of breakthrough cases at 0.05% in a healthcare setting (high rate of risk/exposure). Small, but not astronomically so if you’re working in an open office or interacting with the general public.
* Breakthrough cases typically result in mild symptoms or asymptomatic infections.
* A weak immune response can turn you into a carrier even if you have been vaccinated.
* New COVID variants may result in a rise in breakthrough cases.
It’s a bad look when a technology company isn’t confident enough in their own technology, tools and processes to allow and encourage their employees to have more flexibility in their lives, and restrict the majority of them to live in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country. Especially for reasons that have very little actual (read: non-anecdotal and scientifically valid) evidence of being an actual benefit.
It’s a real shame. I’ve been a big fan of Apple’s products for awhile now. I did my PhD work on a 2014 MacBook Pro, and I switched from Android to iPhone around the same time, and I’ve been very happy with both. That laptop in particular has lasted me longer than any other computer I’ve used. I’d love to apply for a job there, to spend some time seeing how the sausage is made, so to speak. But I have family obligations that make it very hard for me to move.
Obviously it’s the executives’ choice, but I definitely feel like they’re really cutting down on their potential candidate pool for very little potential upside. Especially considering they tend to pay less than the other big players.
Did you ever consider why they decided to move forward with their decision? Clearly they are not complete idiots, since they did end up building the most valuable company in the world. There's gotta be something to it, don't you think? Sometimes it's helpful to give others the benefit of the doubt and at least ask yourself what kind of analyses they might have done to come to a conclusion. As you correctly state, WFH would have been actually cheaper in the short term, so what do you think could have made them go the other way?
It’s a good question - and my guess would be that the executives (rightly) think Apple has been extremely successful at executing their product roadmaps over the last 15 years or so, based on a company culture where one of the core tenants was a lot of face-to-face collaboration, and they don’t want to disrupt that machine more than Covid already has.
But I’ve been working for awhile now for a faaaar older and much larger company than Apple (in terms of employee count and revenue), that not only handled the abrupt work-from-home change last year well, but by many metrics, is actually outperforming pre-pandemic metrics in many areas. And our supply chains and manufacturing processes are significantly more complicated than Apple’s. So I’d argue that if a dinosaur of a company can manage to suddenly create a ton of remote jobs and make it work, the only reason I can think of for Apple to not make it work is that they didn’t seriously try.
Your last sentence jumps to a conclusion without a logical path to getting there. Apple likely did analysis and has reasons. Perhaps they were less effective during the pandemic due to remote. Perhaps they did surveys and a majority of the company (silent nonetheless) wants back into the offices; remember, so many folks who have kids, SOs at home, or just not enough space for an office - these folks miss offices like crazy.
There are a lot of possible reasons this choice was made. Being ignorant of the business’ needs is likely not among them.
I completely agree and respect the fact that there are many people who strongly prefer to be in an office 5 days a week. And I don’t think Apple should close their offices - far from it. Offering remote positions does not preclude in-person positions at all.
And yes, for Apple even more than most companies, we have very little idea of what happened inside the company. But if they are so inflexible that the last year ended up being a complete disaster internally, I’d think that would be a huge signal that something about the company culture is in need of a serious change anyways, wouldn’t you agree? Any company that wants to survive more than the next 20 years has to have some flexibility built into it at the foundations.
And they are being flexible :) 2 days of remote work per week is way more than the 0 that used to exist.
I think people need to remember this is going to take time to slide into, and that WFH being a default option (because many people won't change from the default, due to inertia) isn't actually great either.
This is going to take time. You can force that for yourself, by quitting, but forcing it on every company is a battle you aren't going to win. That is going to take time and concerted effort to show that WFH isn't a detriment long-term. This is especially true since the pandemic has left a lot of managers and employees basically hating WFH, because this is what they think it means.
I say this, incidentally, while having direct reports of both kinds; some who loved WFH, and some who can't wait to get back into the office. They are all incredible, and I'd like to keep them. :) Our company is luckily being flexible, and allowing folks to pick, but the default is 3 days in the office. Anything else has to be manager-approved, but shouldn't be difficult (1-2 days, vs 5 days; the latter gets you a perma-desk, the former is hoteling).
And management is terrified of this arrangement; it's going to take time.
That’s interesting. At my job I’m low enough on the totem pole that I don’t get time with executives more than like once a quarter. But from what I can tell, both the executive team and my direct supervisors, are very supportive, and in many cases excited, of offering more remote and hybrid jobs. I think the executive team sees it as a way to both make the company more flexible in general, and to make the company more attractive to potential candidates.
It would be interesting to hear from someone who works at Apple how far they went in trying to make it happen. My guess is that Apple doesn't do anything half-assed, and if there was a way to save hundreds of millions of dollars, they would have done it.
I welcome your call for non-anecdotal evidence - here's one: the vast majority of companies are returning to the office. I don't think it would be fair to call all the executives of all those companies irresponsible and negligent. Again, the cheaper thing to do would have been not to come back to the office, so the negative impact of WFH must have been substantial.
I’d argue that any data collected during the last year (including the data I presented about my current employer, of course) is not actually a very valid measurement. I fully suspect all companies (including my employer) that try to support fully remote jobs to re-assess in another 2-3 years time, when life does not have the massive confounding factor of a global pandemic. And perhaps we will find that fully remote employees or teams significantly over- or under-perform individuals who go into the office. So while we don’t really have good data on if remote work is good or bad right now (we certainly know it’s not terrible - most tech businesses thrived last year), companies that decide to not start supporting it at least partially are taking a very real loss (reduced talent pool), for a perceived benefit that may or may not actually be there, that we just can’t measure yet.
Ahh, the good old "law of value" argument [0]. Ok, I'll bite:
As an employee, I am paid based on my deliverables, which are captured in my OKRs. My OKRs say nothing about the overall productivity of the company, and instead all that matters is my specific scope of work. Within that framework, I would get more done if I didn't have to commute, so that's a vote for WFH. Also, at home I am not as accountable as at the office, so there's another vote for WFH. Finally, I have a number of errands to run, and those would be all easier when WFH, so there we go => 3:0 for WFH.
The paragraph above will tell you a lot about the fall of the Soviet Union and the majority of other communist experiments (including the one that I grew up in). Marxist thinking sounds great in theory, but to this day we haven't had a single successful outcome, and you can't really say that people haven't tried.
> Clearly they are not complete idiots, since they did end up building the most valuable company in the world.
We should add a new fallacy to the list, ad money. There are many companies get rich by playing to the powers that be. Has nothing to be smart, and a lot to be corrupt.
Money!=Morality
Money!=Intelligence
Money==Money
> There's gotta be something to it, don't you think?
By that reasoning Apple can't do wrong, they always have a hidden plan.
> WFH would have been actually cheaper in the short term, so what do you think could have made them go the other way?
It probably feels bad to have built such an astounding building only to realize that few need or want it for its intended purpose.
Along with that; less control (over leaks, for example), less reality to the feeling of being One Happy Family, or being a king, surveying their loyal subjects.
In an unbiased fashion, does anybody have any evidence that proves executives are "right" to say being managed in an office is more productive delivery wise than working from home?
Anecdotal, but managing through the pandemic has been significantly more challenging than in-office. Granted, we were working through a pandemic, so not really WFH, but it did leave a bad taste in a lot of managers’ mouths because people keep advocating for WFH, without making that distinction. So when a manager hears WFH, and this is that, there’s no way.
But distinguishing WFH from “work through pandemic” would likely be a lot more effective.
Every complaint about remote work at scale should be taken with some caution. It's possible that managing remote employees is not more difficult in itself but is more challenging right now because we evolved from a WFO (work form office) world. So you as a manager have been exposed to fewer real life examples/books/online discussions/blog articles/talks with friends and family/ about managing remote teams. Virtually every executive, manager, leader in our current world has been selected by their ability to lead people who are in office.
My opinion is that we are in a transient state. We need to come up with new processes, ala Agile but for remote teams. We need invent new forms of managements, of organizations that scale with a remote first policy.
One of the main issues is that there is no longer the opportunity to 'overhear' things. You can make arguments all day for things to be written down more, develop a culture of it, etc., but there is still a lot of value from people who are working on different things shooting the shit at lunch, because they help each other learn, it improves team morale, etc.
Also, specifically because of the pandemic, "WFH" has left a bad taste in a lot of managers' mouths, because EVERYONE HAS GOT PROBLEMS right now. That has nothing to do with WFH, but everyone is calling it WFH, so that is now what WFH means - stuck at home, no ability to go out, miserable because your kids are at home and/or your SO and/or your family, no social interaction (or minimal) with your team or anyone else, etc.
That isn't what WFH means, but that is what a lot of people now think it means.
This sounds like you haven't really investigated the issue. Apple's plan, for instance, does allow a lot of flexibility; they are making Wednesdays and Fridays work-from-home days.
That’s not the same thing as remote. I’m fully aware of their proposed hybrid work setup. But the main reasons people want remote is to
1. Freedom to choose where to live
2. Reduce/eliminate commute time
3. Avoid in person interactions due to being extremely introverted, or certain medical conditions, or just because.
The hybrid in the office 3 days a week does not fix any of those three things. You’re still forced to live near your office, you’re still forced to commute, and you’re still forced to interact in person.
1. This is not going to happen, outside of a proper full-remote position, and those are still going to be much harder to come by (though there will be more of them than now, to be sure). Most companies are still going to require you to live within the vicinity of an office, for lots of reasons; not having to manage multiple states in which they employ people, the ability to have someone come in for a meeting, etc.
2. Your commute time is reduced by not having to commute twice a week.
3. This is a question for HR, and they will likely make accommodations for whatever your needs are.
The point is that those things haven't changed; companies are likely to offer more flexibility about WFH days, but it is going to be rare, at least for the short-term, for companies to go full remote. Expecting anything else is just a setup for disappointment, imho.
Not crumbs; intentional flexibility, likely while still maintaining the in-office requirement 3 days / week and keeping people near the office because their data says it's better that way.
Also, this isn't a 'plan for the decade'; this is a 'return to work plan.' The social contract pre-pandemic was that you were in office; I don't know why anyone expected large companies, who generally change direction as quickly as an ocean liner, to suddenly embrace remote work and give up on decades of hard-learned management techniques for in-office workers. That was never going to happen instantly.
People are welcome to (and should) advocate for themselves and their needs, but to expect suddenly for the world to go full remote immediately is, frankly, misguided.
A man who has worked from home for over two decades because of these employees criticizing them for asking for the same. Gruber has been increasingly out of touch with anyone besides Apple’s marketing department lately and his stubbornness that week was the last straw for me.
Jason Snell has far more interesting and insightful takes these days anyway.
One of the things about this is that ... I don't trust my fellow employees much more than the CEO to make good choices.
The typical firebrand employees I've worked with, I want nothing to do with as far as their overall initiatives go. I might agree with them on one thing but not what to do about it and etc.
First, not everyone wants to work remotely. Some people live in situations where there are too many distractions or annoyances at home. This is especially true if they have children.
Second, For those who want to work remotely, this is a coordination problem. Nobody wants to be the first to give such an ultimatum to their manager, as they'd almost certainly be fired. Even if employees could all coordinate through some back channel, the reward for defecting is quite high. If half of your coworkers quit, you are suddenly a much more valuable member of the team. Anyone who stuck around would receive very high compensation.
> Some people live in situations where there are too many distractions or annoyances at home. This is especially true if they have children.
I would prefer to rent a WeWork like space for myself in my own town (about $200 USD a month) if I needed a "distraction free work place" rather than moving all the way to California to spend 50% of my paycheck in cost-of-living.
Well then it's a good thing it's not aimed at you. This is aimed at people that were already working on-site before the pandemic. If anything, it sounds like Apple is realizing that there is benefit to being able to work from home while also realizing that their entire history is based on people collaborating in-person. If you were worth it to them, you'd get one of those exemptions mentioned in the article.
Apple is a hardware company, and you can't WFH using giant anechoic chambers, laser cutting machines, electronics labs, and who knows what else. The products may be manufactured overseas, but there is a lot of expensive hardware needed for designing, prototyping and testing.
I get that Apple does a lot of software these days, but one of the things they are also known for is tight integration between the hardware and software, which doesn't happen without them working side by side.
There may be a significant fraction of employees that can work remotely, but it would significantly change the culture of the company to split the workforce like that.
Sure but many Apple employees don't interact with hardware at all. There's a good chance that many people who do interact with hardware only do so part of the time. Another section might work with hardware but could maybe take some of it home with them (clearly physical hardware has left Apple in the past).
Sure, the remainder have to be physically present but that is the job/career they picked and even probably enjoy. Letting everyone else WFH means those remaining on-campus employees can have better offices & live closer to work. Seems like a win-win to me.
This is Apple, anyone who resigns and leaves because they can’t work from home will be rapidly filled by someone who’s always wanted to work at Apple, and will gladly work from home.
This. People who leave Apple don't work there anymore but will have a tinge or regret. Ex-Apple folk are viewed as a blessing (must be smart) or a drag (overpaid) when reentering the job market.
I can totally see the need for Apple to get people back in the office. I mean they've lost so much money during the pandem...what's that? Billions you say? Launched a new desktop architecture you say? Good heavens.
Apple has a horde of middle managers that need to get back to looking busy. If they can't watch every employee every second of the day how can they do their unofficial (but totally official) stack ranking come review time?
There's obviously legitimate reasons to get employees back in the office. At the same time their complete intransigence when it comes to remote work is just bull headed.
Tons of work at Apple is networked by nature. There's floods of e-mail (to the point it's almost useless), Slack chats galore, and tons of communication through Radar (Apple's issue tracker). The business need for in-person interaction for most engineers is actually pretty minimal. Many have to put a lot of effort into avoiding in-person distractions. Most in-person meetings would actually be better as e-mails.
I think their position is going to lose them some good talent. While on the whole those engineers can be replaced Apple runs lean engineering teams. Losing just one can hamstring that team for months. That can often mean a feature slips to the next OS release or a half-assed version lands. So an org losing even a dozen engineers all at once could screw it over for months.
To be fair, part of their argument is that the vast majority of the work they released during the pandemic was conceived and completed before everyone was working from home. Not to mention the general sales boosts all tech companies benefitted from as people spent more time at home.
There's doesn't need to be surplus to be unable to lease. Even after Apple Park was completed and every team slated to move in had moved Apple still had all (or most) their old buildings still filled.
If they allowed remote work they could consolidate their far flung offices in Apple Park, which was the original intent of the damned building. Apple Park is like all of the form-over-function complaints about Apple crystallized into a single space.
This is what I don't get about the demand for in office. Many of us are already effectively remote anyways for our teams. Most of my team is in a city three hours away. Actually, with the latest departure, all of my team except my manager is in another city.
So I will be going into the office to be on Google Meet.
Kind of a meta comment here, but HN is way more pro-full time remote work than the people I speak to in my day to day life. I'm definitely glad that we'll have increased flexibility in the future with hybrid set-ups, but I am looking forward to getting back in the office. I would not even consider a full time remote position at this point in my life (and I've been seeing more and more recruiters reaching out with these) but I'm glad that there are increased options there for those who want them.
If I worked for Apple I'd really feel like I was missing out on one of the big perks of working there if I was fully remote (and I'm not talking about the physical office - I'm talking about being surrounded by world class talent). At the same time I can understand how limiting the insane housing prices are in the area of Apple HQ, but I'd prefer satellite offices to full time remote.
I can't help but keep thinking remote work will just lead to more wealth inequality. My dumb argument:
=> Amazon/Apple/Big-Tech petitions a city for a super center for bunch of middle-class (and upper-class) awesome jobs.
=> Construction, development, small shops, homes, form around the area.
=> Small economy/city is built. Suddenly fitness trainer "Bob" can sell $100/hr lessons, open a gym, and provide for family on unskilled labor. Etc...
=> Schools in area get better. Crime goes down.
=> And so on...
If remote becomes a thing and all these "super jobs" can be done from anywhere in the world, I just can't shake a dead-end for booming neighborhoods that aren't gigantic mansions is coming.
Surely this reduces inequality? Instead of money congregating in big cities it gets spent all over the country/world. Instead of wealthy people gentrifying certain neighbourhoods as a group and pricing everyone else out, there can be more of a mix of incomes.
That's a really great counter argument. To be honest, I don't really know and am not claiming an exact answer. I imagine it's a little bit of both.
When I was a naive kid, I moved to a highly populated city just to find work (no plan in place). I'm saying that same take-a-chance opportunity that I had, may become just that much harder for others now.
Yeah, I think this is more correct. Historically, land value has been driven upward by proximity to high-paying jobs. This is why gentrification occurs. For example, people move into the Mission District in SF because it's close SoMa where a lot of tech offices are.
That creates upward pressure on housing prices (with more demand). Landlords and developers also renovate or build new construction (e.g. Vara on 15th and Mission) that are considered "luxury", with rent prices higher than what previous residents of the neighborhood can afford. Developers generally have an incentive to build for the luxury price range, because the price of construction isn't substantially higher (and it makes the lifetime ROI of the building much higher).
This means that if more people work remotely (especially high-earners), there's a less concentrated effect on land value in specific neighborhoods. People who previously lived in neighborhoods are less likely to be priced out, which is ultimately a symptom of wealth inequality.
> it gets spent all over the country/world. Instead of wealthy people gentrifying certain neighbourhoods as a group and pricing everyone else out, there can be more of a mix of incomes.
Will folks from SF really move to the middle of Oklahoma?
If Oklahoma gets good internet I'm sure they would. I know NW Kansas has great fiber internet and the cost of living isn't bad. Not much to do out there unless you love hunting or astronomy or church though.
Oh god, they're awful. Every other year the state supreme court slaps down the state legislature for trying to go cheap on the schools, especially in western Kansas where it's most needed. It's not as bad as Oklahoma in this regard but it's still awful. It's one of the reasons why it's next to impossible to get anyone that comes out of KU or KSU or even WSU (Wichita State) to stick around if their degree is in demand. For example, aerospace engineers move out to Denver quite early since that's where all the offices seem to be (so much for Wichita being the "air capital of the world" hah).
Maybe at first, but by increasing their supply of potential employees a company could pay lower wages. Which would mean more profits for executives and share holders, and a larger gap.
Can't you apply similar arguments against pretty much any innovation? Most innovations decrease the amount of work needed to accomplish something, necessitating "fewer" jobs.
If remote work is advantageous for the majority of parties involved, I don't think we should force people into a specific geography just to allow the local Taco Bell to charge $6 for a Beefy 5-layer Burrito.
As it is, high-earners in the Bay Area are struggling very hard to try to buy a home, so I'm all for opening up the opportunities to move to some more affordable areas.
HCOL extends past housing and actually empowers your less fortunate blue-collar neighbors when things are more expensive.
If the people at the top take their money and run (rightfully so), it just is not contributing back to local economies -- those people, those schools, those kids, those families.
Rent/Housing is definitely a whole separate problem.
Well before the pandemic, I was talking to a recruiter about a position where I feel I would've been perfect, and had a great time doing some very interesting work with a pretty fun team (very distributed).
I wouldn't budge on not relocating, and so the idea kind of fizzled out. People with a remote-first mindset were more rare a few years ago. Today, you're going to miss out on a lot of ideal job candidates (and lose good talent) if you can't open up to not forcing employees to congregate around managers in-person all the time.
This is a great time to poach employees from companies unwilling to provide remote work. So many are paying great salaries for remote workers and treating them as true first class citizens.
Not necessarily. Apple's engineering team was the largest advocate for WFH, and everyone involved in digital manufacture doesn't have to worry about a thing.
The FAANG have a lot more leverage over their employees than people seem to think.
Very few if any outside of these companies pay a mid level engineer 700k (yes, this number is real, can we please stop debating this fact?). So, if all FAANG force their companies back to the office, the employees have effectively no leverage.
This is similar to how the top cos colluded to keep engineer wages low in the 2000s, except they don’t need to explicitly make such a pact.
I think from now on there will be two types of companies: remote and non remote friendly. In the same way there are different kinds of people: those who prefer an office and those who prefer to work from home.
That's perfect!! We just need to switch jobs, which isn't a difficult thing for most of us. Everyone can be happy.
Personally, I'm not going back to an office for as long as I can get a remote job.
If these employees really do think it's a decision between Apple culture and family life, I wonder what decision they will take and if it will have repercussions within Apple.
Unhappy Apple employees have the power here to attempt to change the company culture or simply accept what they have been ordered to do.
Problem is there are way too many employees to change culture. It's different when most employees want change, a la Amazon warehouse for instance. It's something else entirely when a minority of employees want a change. (And let's be frank, it's impossible when each of those unhappy employees have literally a 1000 candidates outside Apple's front door clamoring for a chance to take his/her job.)
I'd argue that companies like Apple are probably one of the places in the tech industry where the employer really has all the power. I can't really think of any skill that an employee could bring to a place like Apple that would make that person worth a culture change. Maybe some of the guys and gals in design? Probably transcendent design eyes don't come along very often. But even then, I don't know? Probably not.
Many of Apple’s employees should be millionares. If millionaires cannot live life the way they want by leaving Apple, what are they working towards? Staying at Apple despite their wishes regarding a highly impactful issue like work/life balance makes them not so bright.
Apple to itself: “ We didn't build this $5 billion UFO saucer in the middle of a residential neighborhoods, this shrine to the Ego that Was Jobs, for you to stay home! ”
They have plenty of bargaining power, by and large. They're rich, and they have resumes with an Apple job on them.
I would never say anything against unionizing, and more power to them if they wish to unionize, but I think they have plenty of power compared to the vast majority of workers.
Although worth keeping in mind that organising enough to agree on a demand is part of how unions are formed. Also sending a unified demand is part of how unions negotiate.
Apple is 100% correct in this decision to ensure their apex tech company status.
From personal experience with so called "professionals" at gov level that worked from home, they think it's a vacation not work. No observation of decorum, protocol, or consistency.
Your environment orients how you interpret and interact with the tasks at hand. If you have to pick between stirring the sauce before it burns or taking the time to type cohesive notes during a videoconference/call, your sense of urgency will have a bias towards saving the sauce. Because after all, you are home.
This is the most hamfisted nonsense I've read in a while. Just say "I like to micromanage people" and be done with it. The fact that you're worried about what/how other people are using or dealing with their time says way more about you than about working environments. Some people don't do well without working in an office, other people do quite well working outside of a traditional office setting.
Counter point from experience working with a large team (~2k ppl) that's distributed and working from home well before the pandemic: decorum, protocol and consistency also exist at home, they just required a different discipline and different skills from managers.
If anything, we all noticed that more work gets done at home, and people are more responsive than when office.
I deal with about 50:50 government and commercial employees. Big tech, start-ups, GOFOs to junior enlisted. Most government employees are paid significantly less than their commercial counterparts. They're stirring the sauce because they can't afford to have DoorDash deliver Vaso Azzurro to their door.
Start-up employees, in my experience, are more like government workers, but they are still living pretty well comparatively, and, in my sample, are significantly less likely to have kids, so the dollars go quite a bit further.
Apple just built the most expensive on-site campus in history prior to the pandemic. It's a 40 year old company led by 50+ year old executives who have built their entire social and family lives around their offices. Obviously they're going to force everybody back to the way it was.
This means nothing for the big shift to remote however. The economic incentives for both companies and employees are just too strong for it not to happen.
It was never going to be led by gray haired execs at legacy companies like Apple. When you're currently the most profitable company in the history of earth, you can ignore otherwise rational incentives. But the key word in that sentence was "currently."
Instead of talking about what the winners of the past are doing, we should be thinking about what the winners of the future will do.
It's important to remember, no company has stayed at the top of the S&P500 for very long.